Guest Post: Sarah Gilman

I'm so excited to welcome another Entangled Publishing author to my blog today! Sarah and I will be attending the RWA conference together on September 24th! I'm so excited to meet her and spend the day together. At the end of the conference, we'll be signing our books from 4:30-5:30 if anyone wants to come!

Here's her new book:



She has a great guest post written for today:

Tick tock, tick tock…

A huge thank you to Aubrie for hosting today! Aubrie and I each have a first book in a new series available from Entangled Publishing. Speaking of writing a series…

Writing can be a full-time job…with relentless overtime. Some authors work full-time jobs other than writing. Some have part-time jobs. Some get to stay home, but that doesn’t necessarily mean they have more time to write. Regardless of individual circumstances, writers write. We write a lot.

I can be impatient. When I fall in love with a new story or characters, I can’t wait to get the project drafted and revised so I can share it. But no matter how many hours a writer has in a day to commit to a project, a novel does not get written overnight. My debut novel, Out in Blue, took me a year from rough beginnings to the draft I submitted. I learned a lot from critique readers about craft, so rewriting took up the bulk of that time.

The second novel in my Return to Sanctuary series is nearly ready to submit to Entangled, and I started it in the beginning of March, six months ago. While I’m making much better time than I did with Out in Blue, it doesn’t feel that way. During the development of Out in Blue, I only had to answer to myself and my critique readers. Now, I have readers who enjoyed the first book and, of course, the publisher waiting on this manuscript. I have an unprecedented case of nerves that have me writing, deleting, writing, deleting, deleting, deleting…

But I’m getting there. :)

I never imagined that as I writer I would have to deal with stage fright! Writers, how long does it take you to write a submission-ready, novel-length work? Readers, how much (or how little) time do you like to see between books in a series?

Thanks for stopping by today, Sarah!
Everyone can buy her book here.

Here's my review:
Out in Blue
By Sarah Gilman

An intriguing new world of angel and demon mythology…

Ginger’s life changes the day she overhears a poacher boast of pursing an archangel in Vermont. She’s the adopted daughter of a demon, the guardians of archangels, and she knows how rare and pure they are. She rushes to warn him, placing herself in great danger. Her actions make her and the archangel, Wren, runaways, and they seek shelter in a place called the Sanctuary.

Wren has lived a cursed life. His parents were murdered by a guardian betrayer, and he’s fled from safe houses to barns, to abandoned buildings his whole life. Lark, the guardian that killed his parents is after him, and has sworn to kill any family Wren produces. For this reason, Wren can never fall in love. But he’s drawn to Ginger, the woman who’s risked everything to save him. He knows being with her could lead to her death.

Out in Blue is a fantastic paranormal romance, and much more. This book puts a face to the harm caused by poachers, and it hits home when the slaughtered innocents resemble humans. The people who buy the archangels feathers are enablers, giving the poachers reason to murder. The same is going on today with elephants, and as a society we must stop it.

The romance between Wren and Ginger simmers nicely into a fiery flame, and I love the way Wren is described: so masculine and exotic. Their pasts explain so much of the reasons why they are drawn to one another, and their romance delves deeper than mere attraction, although the physical magnetism is definitely there. They are truly made for one another, and that fact makes the romance delicious. I ate it up.

Continuous action kept me on the edge of my seat, making it hard to put down with the end of each chapter. The world that Gilman creates is a well thought out and fully realized mythology, complex and enthralling with twist and turns throughout.