Another New Beginning

“The beginning is the most important part of the work.” – Plato

With a third of the year behind us, I thought it would be good to take a look back at the literary resolutions I made at the beginning of the year to see how I’m doing so far.

Here are the literary goals I noted for the year in the January newsletter:

1. Successfully launch AMULET (Book 1 of the Heart's True Desire series) with The Wild Rose Press. Check! AMULET was published on April 3, 2024, though we have yet to see how “successful” the launch was!
2. Sign a contract with The Wild Rose Press for TIMELESS (Book 2 of the Heart's True Desire series). Check! I’m excited to announce that I signed a second contract with The Wild Rose Press on April 29^th—almost a year to the day after signing my first contract with them—to publish the second book in the Heart’s True Desire series, which is called TIMELESS. More to come on Timeless soon!
3. Finish writing and editing UNHOLY (Book 3 of the Heart's True Desire series). Almost check! Just this past weekend, I finished proofreading the third book in the Heart’s True Desire series, which has a vampire as the hero. I will not be sending it to my editor at The Wild Rose Press anytime soon, but having started writing this book in 2018, it was a wonderful feeling to get to “The End” over five years later. I had taken a break from writing Unholy to work on my Ancient Rome series, Soothsayer’s Path, the first three books of which I ended up publishing before going back to the series I’m working on now—go figure!
4. Finish writing GUARDIAN (Book 4 of the Soothsayer's Path series). No check for me here, and this is not likely to happen in 2024 (although it will happen, I promise). Why, you ask? Because I have other plans….

Instead of going back to Ancient Rome and working on Guardian, I have decided to embark on a new adventure—a YA (Young Adult) romance about two seniors in high school. It will be clean and sweet, but full of feeling and romance. My goal with this book is to market it as The Love Hypothesis meets The Summer I Turned Pretty, and I would like to try my hand (again) at getting a literary agent to represent me for this book.

Considering I have not even come up with a title yet, I have a lot of work to do before I think about querying an agent…

And so, I find myself at the beginning again—a blank page with a blinking cursor, waiting for me to type the first word. Plato is right, the beginning is the most important part of the work, and this holds especially true for a story. The first few sentences have to suck in a reader and hold them in rapt attention for the rest of the book. It is a daunting task to craft the perfect start to a story that’s only a half-formed thought. But the beginning is also full of promise and hope and possibility. The words are literally not yet written, the path not yet set.

I don’t really know where this new beginning will lead me. But I can’t wait to find out.

- Kathryn Amurra
https://www.kathrynamurra.com