DIARy of a fic fiend | official blog of kilby blades

I wouldn't have even entered the IPPY Awards if it hadn't been for my friend, Liz. She is my beta reader, turned get-off-your-ass-and-come-to-RWA-nationals, turned mentor-of-all-things-author-world, turned friend. When I met Liz about a year and a half ago, she gave Snapdragon a look before I published it. At the time, she herself had just won a Bronze IPPY in the Romance category for her wonderful second chances novel, Caught Up in Raine, and had some very nice-looking pictures of her floating around from the awards gala. It was Liz who inspired me to even take the step of entering awards.…

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Believe it or not, this story starts with me waking up to an e-mail messsage in Bolivia. For those of you who have never been to La Paz, the elevation is around 12,000 feet and my altitude sickness medicine made it so that I was getting only about four hours per night of sleep. So, for one, I was cranky. Add to that the fact that I hadn't seen my family for going on a week. Unable to sleep at the early hour of 5AM (2AM, my local time) I was figuring this wouldn't be my best day. Until it was. My friend-who-happens-to-be-a-writing-coach, Beth Barany, had forwarded me an e-mail…

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More great news about "Snapdragon"! This week, it was named a Finalist in the 2017 Foreword Indies Awards in the Erotica (Adult Fiction) category. This feels particularly special, since the very first book I published, in 2012, a non-fiction book under my real name also won the Foreword Indies prize in its category. As most folks know, Kilby Blades is a pen name, since I write the steamy stuff :) Indie publishing isn't easy. There are a ton of wonderful indie books out there (most of the indie romance I read, for me, surpasses the bestsellers). I can't tell you how gratified I am to receive the validation that a book that started as drabble a few years before I made a serious tackle to write it received such recognition…

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BookLife and Publishers Weekly announced the titles advancing to the quarterfinals of the 2017 BookLife Prize. My debut novel, "Snapdragon" is one of the seventy-nine chosen works. The mission of the BookLife Prize is to discover, cultivate, support, and celebrate great works of unpublished or self-published writing by independent authors. The Prize also aims to provide feedback to authors about their work, provide a Critic’s Report which may assist finalists in the marketing of their fiction, and provide financial support via a cash prize to the grand-prize winner.

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BookLife and Publishers Weekly announced the titles advancing to the quarterfinals of the 2017 BookLife Prize. My debut novel, "Snapdragon" is one of the seventy-nine chosen works. The mission of the BookLife Prize is to discover, cultivate, support, and celebrate great works of unpublished or self-published writing by independent authors. The Prize also aims to provide feedback to authors about their work, provide a Critic’s Report which may assist finalists in the marketing of their fiction, and provide financial support via a cash prize to the grand-prize winner.

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