Sometimes you need someone else to help you find your way.Maria's life was torn apart when she was fifteen, and for seven years she's kept her terrible secret hidden from the world. Now, in her final semester of college, she still struggles against paralyzing fear just trying to speak up in class, and the terror and helplessness linger on in her nightmares.
Across campus, Owen sees his scars in the mirror every morning while he gets ready for class. They remind him of the broken home he left behind, the father he hates and fears, and the little sister he couldn't protect. Now, in his final semester of college, he's scared that he may have to return to the hell he called home after staying away for almost five years.
When Owen becomes a teaching assistant for one of Maria's classes, they find themselves irresistibly drawn to each other. As the two learn each other's secrets and grow closer, they realize that although they may be lost, they're not alone anymore.
This new adult contemporary romance is recommended for ages 17+ due to heavy subject matter.
Released: March 25th 2013
Purchase: Amazon
I would like to thank Nadia for Coming out and doing a guest post on this little old blog. My very first guest blog... so exciting. And if you haven't picked up lost and read it... do it now.... this book had me in tears most of the time but it was amazing!!!!
About the Author
Nadia Simonenko is a scientist and author currently living in Indianapolis with her husband, two cats and a dog. When she isn’t writing, she develops new oncolytic compounds and dreams about someday getting to take a vacation.
Official links: nadiaromance.com | twit
That’s it for tonight! Thanks for having me, Bethany and thanks to the rest of you for reading my wandering pile of blabble about being an author. J
Ten
Things I Wish I’d Known About Being an Author…
#1 – Writing
is hard work. No duh, right? Seems like such a no-brainer now that I’ve
done it a few times, but when I first started a few years ago, I was like “Oh
hey, I’ll write a book. How hard can it
be?” Really, really freakin’ hard. Which leads me into number two…
#2 – Ergonomics
are really important. Yeah, I rolled
my eyes too. I had double tendonitis for
four months after the publication of Lost. Why?
Because I was a moron and typed and edited the vast majority of the book
on a tiny laptop sitting on my lap with my feet up on the sofa. I also refused to stop writing when my wrists
started hurting, because I’d set myself a release deadline and I had no
intention of missing it. One release
date isn’t worth the nearly four months of lost writing time, I’ll tell you
that. Nor the pain. Tendonitis really, really hurts when both
your day job and night job involve a lot of wrist movements. I now type on a regular desk with an ergo
keyboard, use a proper mouse with wrist-rest, and purchased voice recognition
software for my planning work so that I can save my hands for the nitty-gritty
stuff. (They’re still not all the way
better.)
#3 – Your job
is more than just writing. I’m a
self-published author, which means that I have no support network unless I make
it for myself. This means doing your own
marketing work as necessary, designing your own covers or finding cover
designers, doing self-editing or finding editors, so on and so forth. I work with a wonderful group of romance
authors, and we all share editing duties and critical reads of each other’s
manuscripts to try to get around the editing woes, but there’s still a ton of
non-writing related work that can’t be helped.
#4 – You will
write to an audience or you will die alone and in pain. Well, that might be a little bit of
overkill. Maybe. What I mean is this: If you can’t tell someone exactly who your
target audience is for your book, in very clear, concise terms, your book is
almost certainly going to fail. (You
still might not succeed even if you can name your audience, but at least you
aren’t guaranteed to fail.) If you don’t
know who your audience is, you either (a) don’t have one, or (b) have no
guarantee that what you’ve written will resonate with anyone or even meet their
expectations. As soon as you think of an
idea and decide you like it enough to write about it, before you even begin
fleshing it out, you should be figuring out who wants to read that idea. High school through college girls? Elderly mystery readers in the vein of Agatha
Christie? That sort of thing.
#5 – You have
to edit your own book, but you cannot edit your own book. Seriously. It’s impossible. You are too close to the subject matter. You will miss all sorts of things. I’m not
even talking about grammar here; I’m talking about the plot itself. You’re going to miss stilted dialogue, excessive
word choices, plot decisions that make sense in your head but not to readers,
etc etc. You need to edit your book to
make it as good as you can get it and then you need to throw it at fresh eyes
who know next to nothing about your manuscript—ideally people with an axe to
grind over something you did who will take great pleasure in humiliating
you. If you missed Mother’s Day this
year, now might be the time to recruit her as an editor! J
#6 – Your
first negative review always hurts. The
second one probably will as well.
Let’s face it… your book is kind of your baby, and you just threw it
into the public eye. There’s nothing I
can say like “deal with it,” or “it gets better” or anything like that to make
you feel better about it. It’ll
hurt. You’ll eventually learn how to mentally
filter out useless reviews and focus on the helpful ones, and then you can
learn from them and keep improving your writing.
#7 – In the vein of negative reviews hurting, someone always hates your book. Look at some of the most popular books of
the last decade. There isn’t a damned
one of them without one-star reviews.
Just accept it. You can’t please
everyone, so just do your best to please most of your audience, and learn from
the experience.
#8 – Add two
weeks to any deadline you set. You
suck at setting deadlines—you just don’t know it yet. To quote the inimitable Douglas Adams, “I
love deadlines. I like the whooshing sound they make as they fly
by.” I certainly hope to have Found
published by July 1st. I have
lingering tendonitis, just started a move to Pennsylvania, have a husband who
misses me since I’ve been hiding in the manuscript for months, really ought to
go for a jog eventually or at least walk the dog, and still work a damned day
job. Hitting that deadline is about as
likely as finding a winning lottery ticket in my underwear drawer. That’s why I made it the 15th. J
#9 – Butt-In-Seat-Time
is the secret to finishing everything. You
will never finish a book if you keep making excuses. The scene will not write itself while you
vacuum the carpet. Even scrubbing
toilets will occasionally seem preferable to finishing that stupid chapter that
you just can’t seem to…. aargh! You know
the feeling. Look… it sucks, but you
have to write that chapter. You either
need to write it or you need to revisit the plot and find a different
direction. Either one of these requires
that you work on the book, though, which means get your butt in that chair and work until you’ve made it past the
problem.
#10 – Take
any opportunity you can to plug a book!
I mean, let’s just say you randomly had the opportunity to post about
your writing career on a wonderful lady’s blog—let’s call her Bethany, just for
kicks. Well, what better chance to get
some free advertising out of it than to clog up her blog with things about your
new book Found coming out in July and concluding the Lost & Found
series? I mean, it’s a really great book
and you know all the readers are going to love it, so you should really take
the opportunity to tell them about it if you ever get the chance. (Love you, Bethany! Please don’t hurt me!) (Psst… buy my books,
everyone!)
That’s it for tonight! Thanks for having me, Bethany and thanks to the rest of you for reading my wandering pile of blabble about being an author. J
-Nadia
