Released! April 2016
Rhiannon and her Hive have mastered space travel. Sort of. At least, they’re better at it. They’ve outsmarted kidnappers, survived severe oxygen deprivation, and heisted back their own ship engine from would-be thieves.
Since joining up, they’ve traveled farther and farther away from their home planet. But out on Yin He Garden Station (in Chinese-owned territory), home catches up.
When Alan’s former research advisor makes an offer that’ll let them return to Dyfed as respected members of society, Rhiannon knows she must accept. But home isn’t exactly as she left it, and a hostile space fleet stands between her aging ship and her new/old life. Should she charge towards the fleet, or scurry back into international space as fast as her craft can go?
Discover the Hive Queen Saga’s thrilling conclusion!
Have a FAQ about book making –
When will this book be available?
Hah! The ebook is available now. Start reading it from Amazon.com. Or maybe you prefer Smashwords? The trade paperback ought to be available in June. **fingers crossed**
Why did this book take so much loooonger than the last one?
After finishing a first draft, I do a significant amount of editing. With this book being almost twice as long as the previous ones, that took a lot more time. Completed edits include comments from beta readers as well as two rounds from my professional editor, Cat Rambo. (Wordcount-wise, this ended up being a complete wash for this book. I traded 12,000 words from the first draft for 12,000 new ones. The book is much better for the trade.)
After that came a line editing round. After which, my amazing copyeditor (and contemporary YA novelist) Rachel Lynn Solomon hunted out grammar issues, typos, and inconsistencies (like how I spell grey the British way, but this book comes out in American English).
That’s your editing. Who makes the actual books?
I make the ebooks myself. Ebooks are really just HTML in pretty little ePub containers. (That’s why sometimes when you get one emailed to you, Microsoft products show it as a zip instead of an ePub file.) I use the program Sigil to make my life a little easier.
When it comes to the trade paperbacks, sometimes I do them myself in Word. This is a lot of work because Word is not meant for such formatting, but I get a sense of closure on a book by working on this step. Of course, sometimes I don’t do it myself, in which case I’ve lately enjoyed the services of Stacy Booth who does her magic in InDesign.