Stalking Sapphire Audio Book

Hello Clarice,

Just found out STALKING SAPPHIRE will be an audio book as well! Very excited about this!
The narrator, Elizabeth Morton, started recording yesterday and I can't wait to hear it. I don't have any details regarding the release date, price, etc., but I'll make sure to share the minute I do.

The best part about this is that Stalking Sapphire will become available to people who couldn't get it before. So for those who don't have an iPad, Kindle, Sony, Nook, Kobo--like my dad--because they are either too expensive or not available in your country, this is a great option!

Right now, the Silencing Sapphire manuscript is undergoing a massive clean before it goes off to my lovely agent. This is all part of the previously mentioned Step 4 of my writing process and it's where I try to find all the errors, typos, grammatical disasters, and misused words.
The only way I can describe it is to sit armed with a magnifying glass and a scrubby on a floor which looks clean but is actually hiding mounds of miniscule dirt molecules. The only thing you can do is to examine the floor inch by inch with your magnifying glass and hope you catch the little suckers.

Now, for me, there tends to be a lot of adverbs and grammatical errors. Though I can't use it as an excuse, the fact is, I am Swedish. But I also went into this knowing my nationality is a moot point. To the literary world you can be from Mars for all they care, they just want the English language to read like...well English; a very reasonable demand.

Though I have improved over the past six years and though I try to hide my Swedish-isms the best I can, the first 19 years of my life inevitably leaks into the writing. On a good note, all those Swedish-isms have helped me find ways to make some of the manuscript cleaning less like pulling teeth and more like going in for an annual check up. It is fun? No, but at least you get to save your teeth and use them for much more necessary thing like chewing, smiling, and--most importantly--that thing people do when they fold their lip into their gums and look like Hannibal Lecter from Silence of the Lambs. It cracks me up.

To all writers, European, American, or Martian,
(Everyone else: look away, it's about to get bo-ho-ring. Author-nerdiness at its best.)

To find and eliminate unnecessary adverbs, you can put -ly- in your document search and catch a lot of them in less time than it would take you to read through all 70 000 - 100 000 words. This can shave off a lot on your word count and help quicken the pace. Same goes for he said, she said, which we sometimes use even though it's already understood by action or order.
For me, I know which words I tend to misuse or overuse and have made a list of them. For instance, for some reason I type defiantly instead of definitely--combing two of my issues--and I usually catch it in the adverb search as well. I put all the other misused/overused words in the doc search and it allows me to catch and correct them in one quick sweep.

It is now time for me to go reheat my instant coffee (yuck, but convenient) and dig back into Silencing Sapphire, magnifying glass in hand.   

Xoxo,
Mia