Another announcement

There have been so many wonderful things happening in my life, and the lives of my loved ones that I can hardly keep them all straight!

My next announcement, after my dad and Colleen's mission call, and our family's upcoming wedding, is about a project I've been working on for a while, now, that I have just started speaking up about.

I wrote a novel.

A young adult science fiction novel that is 317 pages long.

And back in July, after I'd finished writing it, I entered Returning the Golden-Eyed Girl into a manuscript competition where it landed in the top 75 out of 2,000 entries!

The concept for Returning the Golden-Eyed Girl originally came to me in a dream, and though I had Charlotte, who was about six months old at the time, I decided to turn it into a book. "How hard can it be to write a book, anyway?" I thought to my naive self. "I have the idea. What more do I need?"

So. Much. More.

Returning the Golden-Eyed Girl is the first book of a planned trilogy about the floating city of Ixus, and seventeen-year-old Amelia Pritchett who finds herself stranded there. No one on the surface below has heard from Ixus in over thirty years, but upon arriving there, Amelia finds that she holds a truth that threatens to destroy the city's secrets.


After placing in the top 75, I've been instructed to set up a pre-order campaign in order to crowdfund the publishing of my book through the publishing company Inkshares. If I can generate enough interest, and meet Inkshares' pre-order goal of 750 copies, they'll publish my book! I've included a few excerpts on my campaign page here so you can preview the story and my writing for yourself if you're curious. And if you're feeling generous, you can pre-order straight from that page, by clicking the green pre-order button on the top right of the screen.

This is all incredibly new to me, this world of writing communities and publishing companies, but I'm trying to muddle through the best I can. I'm not exactly sure why I kept my book a secret for so long, perhaps I didn't want to constantly be asked how soon I'd been finished with it... but here I am! Finished with it! Book #2 is proving to be harder, since now I have to connect all of my lines between characters that I established in the first book, but it's coming along... slowly. But I've been almost constantly surprised at how much I love writing, and I've marveled at how it took me so long to figure that out.

Tomorrow the competition will announce their top 50, so I, too will announce whether I made it or not. In the meantime, I've delved back into the Facebook world in order to network and spread the word about my book and its campaign, so send me a friend request at S.G. Meine if you're on there. I'm going to do my best to market as much as I can, but I need the help of my lovely family and followers to get the word out there, too.

So, my campaign has successfully been launched, go ahead and take a peek if you have the time. And I'd love some feedback if any of you have any!

Thank you all, I love each one of you so, so much!