Extra, Extra! Read all about it!

I’ve decided that pretty much my mum is always right. *sigh* As if she wasn’t always right before! She’s going to be intolerable now.

I told her I might want to do an ad in a Vietnamese newspaper for Butterfly Swords. She told me to forget the ad. Just send a copy of the book to them. So I did and the editor passed it down to one of the journalists who read it and then called me for an interview.

I thought it was just going to be an online feature, but yesterday I received a package in the mail which contained this:

I was more than a bit flabbergasted because that’s the entire front page of the English language insert of Nguoi Viet, the largest Vietnamese newspaper. THE ENTIRE PAGE.

Butterfly Swords takes up almost a fourth of the layout and the picture of me hugging my book is huge too. I’m completely dumbfounded. I must send a big ol’ thank you note tomorrow once the room stops spinning.

My nefarious plan

Okay, not that nefarious. I had reached the point where I thought no agent would ever take a chance on my book so I started entering a slew of contests to try to get in front of editors.

I just saw on the ChapterLink loop that Butterfly Swords finaled in the Chicago-North RWA’s Fire & Ice contest. I entered in four chapter contests this year and finaled in three, one of them being a double final. Fire and Ice is the last one I entered so no more of these little highs. My contest days may be done. Oh no, scary thought!

Would my nefarious plan have worked out? I’ll never know.