That's it! My blog tour finished yesterday! It's been a wonderful experience, with lots of awesome reviews for Darkhaven and so many kind, helpful and all-round lovely bloggers willing to let me appear on their sites.

The first week of my blog tour is now over, so I thought I'd take a look back at some of the highlights.

I can hardly believe this has come round already, but here it is: the first day of the Darkhaven blog tour! Woo hoo!

Darkhaven is currently live to reviewers! I am so nervous right now. Some people are reviewing it for my blog tour and so I won't get to find out what they thought for a month or so. Others don't have a fixed date and so might post a review ANY TIME AT ALL. It's a fascinating combination of imminent and long-term fear. In fact, I had a very vivid dream last night in which I received the longest and most detailed one-star review ever. So, yeah. It's on my mind a little bit.

Thus, although this was going to be an 'adventures in publishing' post, I feel it may be a good time to talk about my general approach to reviews. Lots of blogs have a review policy, so as a new author, here's my reviewee policy.

Things are getting real, folks. Friday was Darkhaven's official cover reveal day! I'm sure anyone who reads my blog has already seen the cover (I have posted/linked to it approximately 1000000 times on Facebook and Twitter, after all) but just in case you unaccountably tuned all that out, here it is again!

A short one this week, and mainly to say that I'm not going to be able to post much in the way of blog content over the next couple of months. This is partly because it's now less than three months until Darkhaven's release (!) and so I'm busy with editing, writing guest posts, answering interview questions, etcetera. And also partly because if I have any wonderful ideas for new blog posts, I'm going to have to keep them for the blog tour or I'll run out of stuff to talk about. However, the upcoming weeks are full of people clamouring to be exiled to the Barren Islands – sometimes two a week – so it's not as if I'm turning the lights out or anything.

Back in the distant past, when I was a teenager starting to (attempt to) write fantasy novels, I assumed that finishing a book would be the hard part. After that, I'd simply find a publisher and my work would be done.

Even setting aside the idiocy of 'simply find a publisher', it turns out I was wrong.

This is one of an occasional series of posts in which I squee about my childhood dream coming true. Feel free to skip past it if you hate that kind of thing. Conversely, if you're curious, you can read vol. 1 here and vol. 2 here.

As you may already be aware, I've been tracking each stage in my publishing journey with the fervid enthusiasm of a starving literary wolf scenting a book-flavoured deer. And I hit another of those milestone moments the other day, because I received cover art.

Not only that, I received choices.

It's February, and that means love is in the air. To celebrate, several Harper Voyager authors have set up dating profiles for the characters in their books. Suggest a match and you could win a prize!

I was tagged to do this by Sam Dogra, an awesome author and brilliant artist who also happens to be a medical genius (go check out her blog). She got the questions here. And I've taken it one step further again, reframed the whole thing as an interview, and cut the list of questions by half (because I like to keep my blog posts on the short side). So now you know the history, I give you …

The Uncommon Character Interview

starring Ayla Nightshade, primary protagonist of Darkhaven.*