A.K. Ramirez's Blog

Its been a long time. I will do a proper update eventually because this year was a lot. And there is a lot to comment on. For today, I am going to give out some bullet points.

I can FINALLY announce, officially, Book Three, Implications and Regrets, will release January 18th 2025. I WILL be selling a few out of my business, so if you're local and can't wait- Come on by!

You CAN get an ARC copy right now in exchange for an honest review. Email or message me for more info!

I am officially done with events for the year. My books, on the other hand, will be at Galaxycon Columbus, and that will include books 1 - 3. The dates for that will be December 6th -8th.

Next year, my events may be a little more limited but we shall see. If I could afford to do all of them, I would spend all my time doing them. lol

I might be making a patreon to post some side stories/character short stories for people to read. and if I do, that will all go directly to the event fund. If I do, i'll also be selling some hardcover signed copies shipped directly from my house, so you might get some dog hair too.

I've gotten better at newsletters! I've sent 4? out this year! Keep your eyes open for the next one right around the new year. Hopefully Book 4 will be with the publisher and book 5 with the editor by then.

Most everything else is personal updates, and I feel like it deserves an actual blog post of its own, so keep your eye out for that!

Oh! I deleted twitter. We'll discuss more in the personal updates. But follow me on Instagram, Threads, and Facebook!

Thank you guys for all your love and support! I swear I will get better at this.

Hey everyone! Sorry I'm so bad at keeping this updated. Lots has happened, and it has been a very busy summer!

Coming up, in just under two weeks, I will be at Rose City Con in Portland, Oregon! I will be at my own booth, on the exhibitor floor.

Two weeks later and I will be in Seattle at Geek Girl Con, once again at my own booth! I will have hardcovers and paperbacks of Secrets and Photographs, some bookmarks and hopefully some special items just for these events!

The following weekend I will be back on the east coast in Richmond with the Pop-up Bookshoppe for Nightmare Weekend!

In other news- book two, Memories and Scars, will be out in just 45 days!! October 26th! You can already pre-order the hardcover and paperbacks from Barnes and Noble, and hopefully Amazon will soon follow.

If you are interested in reviewing an early copy, check this out! HERE from Booksprout.

I will be with fellow 4 Horsemen Publishing Author, Lou Kemp for a book signing out in Olympia. If you are in the area, please come out and say hi!

The event is between 2pm and 4pm

This is hopefully the first of many!

Its just been just under a week since 'Secrets & Photographs" release day - and what a ride it has been! It feels amazingly surreal to have a thing that I wrote out in the world, available for anyone to read.

I promised myself I wouldn't watch reviews or ratings, but for this first week, I've allowed myself beginning impressions. At the time this blog post was written, we are sitting at 4.63% stars out of 5 on Goodreads with 8 reviews and 4.7 out of 5 stars on Amazon with 5 reviews.

And none of this would have been possible without quite a few people in my life. There were brief mentions in my acknowledgements but I want to take a moment to give a little bit more thanks to those people.

(All of these people would rather not have me post pictures of their faces, so instead, i present to you their pets)

To the Queen of Salt Mountain...aka the best business partner a girl could ask for-

To say this book would not exist without her, is an understatement. I wanted to give up so many times. Whether it was during the writing process, when I sometimes struggled to find time or to keep going- or if it was during the querying process, where she talked me through every rejection email and convinced I had a good enough story that people would enjoy.

She has also been a huge part of the series as a whole, the first one to read every draft with the same enthusiasm each time. And even now, she still stands as my biggest fan, and is ready to sell the book directly out of our building.

There are not enough words to express how much this woman means to me. I have no idea how I would get through the day without her.

To my Girl Gang-

These girls were the best writers partners back in the day, and that hasn't changed. Marissa Ambrose would not exist without any of these ladies, who were key to her creation, growth and change from the very beginning over a DECADE ago. (not to age us or anything) While she has grown and become a very different person that the original creation, they helped create the family that has remained through all the changes.

I can't give these girls enough credit. I wouldn't be the writer I am today without any of them. All that time we all spent in rp communities, these three were the best and my favorite scene partners.

While all three of these women deserve a shoutout, a specific shoutout to my sister and bestfriend.

And finally to my family-

Without their patience and understanding, this book would never had been completed. I can't imagine how hard it can occasionally be while I drift off into my own little world to create these stories and I just want to thank them for giving me the time and space I need to make this happen. I know between writing and owning/running a business that sometimes it can be a lot. I love and appreciate you all.

I've been writing for as long as I can remember. My earliest memories are of an old typewriter my Aunt gave me and writing a story about a girl named Jessie and her horses. No idea whatever happened to the sweet awful thing that it ended up being.

I also have these (now) fond memories of middle school, jr. high, and high school- sitting in class, notebook open with pen in hand. I paid some attention to whatever lessons were going on, but I was ALWAYS writing. It actually makes me sad that I no longer have any of those notebooks - whether they were lost in my parent's divorce/move once I moved out if I burned them on a bad day or just simply threw them away.

Cause high school was a very dramatic time.

I've participated in NaNoWriMo six times over the last decade, completed it twice but had many different stories evolve from there. One of them even saw an editor through a couple of revisions and maybe one day, I'll go back and rework it a little bit and try to make something of it. That was my high fantasy, also a series fully mapped out. I have notes scattered all over the place still for this.But now I've made the leap from fantasy to mysteries- because while I'm a big Anne Bishop, Robert Jordan, and Anne Rice fan, I've always loved mysteries. I have a huge Mary Higgins Clark collection, but not nearly enough. And one of the first things I ever found myself clinging to were novels from Agatha Christie.

Something I plan on using this blog for is to give you insight into my writing, my characters, and snippets of things here and there. Not necessarily an author website but also not a blog I'm putting any extra pressure on myself to make at this point. As a small business owner of a business that has a knack for not running smoothly, the plan is not to add to the daily stressors. But the long-term goal is to be good about it. You'll just have to give me some grace and patience.

Marissa Ambrose, the protagonist of the series I've constructed in my head, has been a character I have had for 15(ish?) years now. She has grown with me, taken many ups and downs, and taken a couple of different paths. Now there is a solid plan- 4 novels currently mapped out. I'm excited to see where it leads.