Rebecca Goings

Well, I Finished RIDE THE LIGHTNING!

November29

Yup, at 29,119 words, RIDE THE LIGHTNING is finished. Not only is it finished, but the blurb is written, the synopsis is done, and I submitted it to Carina Press! If you haven’t heard of them, they are the eBook arm of Harlequin Enterprises. However, they’re their own publishing house. So, you won’t be able to find eBooks there from Silhouette Desire, let’s say. They’ve got their own thing going on.

Anyway, I decided to give them a try. They’re brand new, opening spring of ‘10, and I thought well, maybe now’s the time to get in good with them and expand my audience, not to mention my resume. Who knows how many westerns they do or do not have, right? RIGHT? Heh.

Okay, okay, so you’ve pulled my arm, here’s the blurb for RtL:

Rumors of a ghost cowboy didn’t stop Jillian Brady from buying a rundown ranch in Cold Creek, Texas. When a mysterious horseman appears in a flash of lightning, she thinks it’s the locals playing a prank. But once she confronts him, she soon finds out the chilling truth.

Mitchell Crenshaw is a ghost. He was murdered during a thunderstorm in eighteen seventy-seven, and has been riding the lightning ever since. Yet every time the storm moves on, he’s pulled back to the day of his death, forced to relive it again and again.

Before long, their friendship turns into a desperate love, and Jillian is determined to help him. He brings her to the past, but no matter how he tries to change his fate, he cannot escape death.

Unless Jillian can intercede and save Mitch’s life, he’ll be doomed to ride the lightning forever…

~*~*~

Sucky thing is…after I submitted this book, I realized the formatting was a tad janky. I don’t know what happened. I wrote the book in Mac Pages, then had to convert it to a .doc so I could open MS Word for the Mac and convert it into a .rtf file. If I convert a file from Pages directly to a .rtf, the formatting is WAY off. I didn’t write the book in Word, because I didn’t have Word for the Mac until about a week ago. So, I had to do the round-a-bout convert then convert again wanky wankness.

Fortunately, the “janky” formatting isn’t as horrible as it could have been. The final sentence on each of the 15 chapters is centered on the page.

Seriously? What a random problem, eh? Only thing I could think of is when I do my page breaks, I do it on the same line as the last sentence. Therefore, I’ll be going down to the next blank line for the page break to the next chapter in future books.

Let’s just hope the Powers That Be at Carina Press will judge the story by the story and not by my ghetto way of getting the dang file into .rtf. (Seriously, what’s with the .rtf, ppl? Doesn’t ANY ONE ELSE ON THE PLANET have a Mac? I can’t be the only person who has these ginormo problems getting Mac Pages to read .rtf. My edits on HEAVEN SENT were more like SENT FROM HELL. lol **Good news, tho, Leanne, I’ve got MS Word for the Mac now!!!**)

Let’s hope that solves my problems…

Okay, in other news….

Champagne Books has offered me a contract for MARK OF THE B*E*A*S*T*!!! Once the ink has dried on that contract, it shall be slated for a SEPTEMBER 2010 release. WOOOHOOO! I’m so excited for it, you don’t even know! I know, it’s 10 months, folks, but who knows, by then I should have a LOT more good news to share (I’m hoping) followed by a bunch of other release dates **crossing fingers**