Zara Keane

Craggy Point — Scene of Fiona and Gavin's first kiss in eight years.

Love and Shenanigans has been out in the wild since last Saturday. It’s up on all the major vendors—Amazon, Apple, Barnes & Noble, Kobo, All Romance Ebooks, Google Play. Alas, for reasons known only to Barnes & Noble, it’s still missing its book description on their site. I’ve been told it might take another few days to appear.

I can’t decide if the transition from unpublished to published is exciting or terrifying. I’m guessing it’s a mix of both. I was felled by a chest infection right around hitting PUBLISH, so I haven’t been as active on social media as I might have been. (Although, TBH, I’m not convinced that tweeting buy links to books ten times a day is the way to go. I’ve unfollowed people who do that, especially if that's the only content on their Twitter stream. Promo links don’t bother me at all if the person is otherwise active and interactive.)

In the meantime, I’m hard at work on the third draft of Love and Leprechauns, the third Ballybeg story and the second full-length novel in the series. I say “third draft” but this isn’t entirely accurate. Long story short, I’ve been working on the Ballybeg series on and off since I started writing with a view to publication (NaNoWriMo 2009). By the time I decided to indie publish Love and Shenanigans, I had five finished manuscripts set in Ballybeg. One is unlikely to ever see the light of day—trust me, this is a very good thing—and three will be out this year.

When I wrote the first draft of Love and Shenanigans, I wasn’t planning to write a series. But a couple of secondary characters demanded to have their stories told, so I wrote a sequel. When I wrote a third book set in Ballybeg, I realized that I needed to write a couple more stories in the series before releasing that particular book.

The thing with writing a series set in the same place with recurring characters is that each story I write adds to my knowledge of the town and the people. Suddenly, I know when Event X happened and what effect it would have had on Person A, B, or C. This is why I swear by the writing program Scrivener and another program named Aeon Timeline. (No, I’m not an affiliate of either program, just a very happy customer. :D) I’ve created a Ballybeg series bible in Scrivener and a timeline for each character and event using Aeon. The more I write, the more I need to add to the series bible, but it’s helping me to stay on track.

I was one of those readers who always wondered WTH an author forgot a character’s eye color from one book to the next, or screwed up the story chronology. When I read their series back-to-back, I found such inconsistencies irritating. Now that I’m writing one myself, I realize how easy it is to make a mistake like that and how much of a challenge it is to keep all the details consistent throughout a single book, never mind a series. A book that takes a reader a few hours to read often took a few months to write. When those months become years, it’s all too easy to forget a detail from an earlier story. This is absolutely not an excuse for an author to make continuity errors, just me acknowledging that they’re a wee bit harder to avoid than I’d anticipated. :D

When I send Love and Leprechauns to my editor, it’s on to the rewrites for Love and Blarney (L&B is due to be released in August/September). So it’s all go chez Keane, but I’m having a blast working on the stories.

I was going to take down the downloadable samples of the first 25% of Love and Shenanigans after a few days, but they’re proving popular so they’ll stay put for a while. If haven’t tried the sample yet, here are the clickable downloads for the epub, mobi/Kindle, and pdf files. Happy reading!