Samie Foster's Blog - Posts Tagged "novella"

Hi there everyone! It’s time for another round of updates. And there are actually some real updates this week. So let’s get started.

First off, I have a huge update on Once Upon a Time in Boston. It’s done. The final draft is completed. All of the editing is complete. What’s left to do is now is formatting and polishing up the cover art. Then this weird dark fantasy tale about a boy and cursed girl trying to save a wintery sad world from a race of raven monsters will arrive sometime in the near future. This project has went through so many drafts and expansions that it took very long time to get to this state. So it’s just great to get the finish line. Now I hope to get it to all of you soon.

Beyond that what is happening next? I still am revising Sam & Miguel’s Run and Palm’s Inn in the background so they can be enrolled in Kindle Unlimited. Then, I still intend the next project to be Siren on Berry Avenue. It’s a very YA urban fantasy. For me it’s the perfect project to work on after working so long on tale that has so many themes of melancholy in it. I hope when I share it with the Scribophile writing community, it will get warm reception. If it does, that will be the main project in the near future.

And the summer short story giveaways are continuing. This week, I think I’ll share a fantasy story, My Name Is. I’ll post the synopsis down below.

My name is Amber. I don't remember much else because I've been forgetting so much lately. But I do remember I am a girl and this old witch has turned me into a crow. And I know I must find a way to break this curse before I forget everything entirely.
This short story will be FREE from June 23rd to June 27th. You can claim your ebook copy at https://www.amazon.com/dp/B01KSRUTCS .

And that is what I have for this week. I hope you all have a wonderful week!

Hello there. It’s been another week and there is another round of updates, and there are a few fun ones today. So let’s get started.


First of all, Once Upon a Time in Boston is done. Finally Reggi’s and Tai’s strange dark odyssey is complete and will be out this week. It has just been uploaded to KDP and should be on the Amazon store front soon. And it’s great to put to get it out there. This tale has went through so many drafts and revisions. It has been expanded so much since the first short story draft. Now I can say it’s done officially and everyone will have a chance to read this strange dark fantasy novella on their Kindles. I really hope those who read it will enjoy the weird dark tale featuring the undead, bird monsters, an eternal winter, and a desperate attempt to fix a broken world.


Beyond that, I have made progress with my next work in progress. I am pretty much set on making The Siren on Berry Ave, my next official project. Sure. I should maybe return to a much shorter horror called Nowhere and work on that. It’s closer to done. But Once Upon a Time in Boston, takes place in a tragic and sad world. And even though it does end up having a happy ending of sorts, I spent six months working on something that dealt with heavy dark themes. So for me, I need this change of pace. Siren on Berry Ave is about a half siren moving in with her adoptive family. It has teenage drama with a side of monsters. It’s not too heavy. And just a couple days ago, I submitted my first draft to Scribophile to see what some beta readers are going to say about. I really do hope the reviews are good. It’s a very simple tale. It shouldn’t demand all the work that Boston did in the last few months. Also if you are a member of the Scribophile writing community, feel free to find my account and take a look at rough draft. Maybe you’ll like it.


And of course the summer of free book deals are still continuing. And this week, the free story is Once Upon a Time in Boston. I know it seems premature for any sort of promotion for this. But I really like the idea of getting this into a lot of hands on release week, so you all can have a chance to read it at no cost, and possibly some of you will leave some friendly reviews. I will post the synopsis below.


The world broke decades ago. An eternal winter has engulfed the Earth. The dead no longer pass on, becoming souls trapped in decaying bodies. Humanoid feathered creatures known as Ravens come to collect the souls to escort them to the mysterious council to move on to the afterlife. Many people have come to believe the Ravens are angels; doing God's work until the cosmos are fixed.

Tai is a teenager who learns this is a lie. The Ravens are doing something nefarious with the souls, and those who die are not moving on after death. Angry and frustrated with the recent loss of a loved one, Tai does something rash. He decides he will try to stop the Ravens. He will try to fix the world, and overthrow this mysterious council. But he's not doing it alone. He has found the aid of a Raven who holds a grudge against the council as well.

You can grab your free Kindle copy of this dark fantasy from July 14th to July 18th. It is available at https://www.amazon.com/dp/B09947RR69.


And that is what I have this week. It was a lot more exciting than usual, and there was actually a new release this week. I hope you all enjoy the new story and have a great week!

Hey everyone! It’s another round of updates, and the news is pretty slim this week. But there are a couple fun things.


As far as updates go, I have had a little bit of time to work on revising Sam & Miguel’s Run for a Kindle Unlimited release. And I actually got it completely revised, and reworked the cover a little bit. I hope to get it all updated and shuffled over to Kindle Unlimited in the near future.


And also with a lot of my time recently, I have been playing with the idea of turning Siren on Berry Ave, into an expanded short story project. I wrote a sequel story and am toward the end of the third, but I don’t know about this expansion. Something is missing. The charm of the original story is missing as I continue to write. So I don’t know what is going to become of this experiment. After the third story, I might shelve it forever, or just take a break from it until I have a clear sense of what to do with this idea.


Beyond the summer free book giveaways are continuing. And this upcoming week, I think I will stay in the apocalypse with another short story. This week the free story will be the scifi horror Meteor City. I’ll post the synopsis below.


Decades ago, a meteor shower hit a metropolis shattering homes and lives of many. With the meteors, the storm also brought a deadly disease that tortures and mutate those infected. As it spread, the walls were put up around the city to quarantine it from the rest of the world. And as the years went on the city, now known as Meteor City, was ignored and willfully forgotten by the United States. But it somehow continued to thrive.


Jo is a photographer within the walls of Meteor City. She goes through the dirt and muck to get shots for the front page of the local paper. She specializes in shots of the most horribly mangled infected in the city. She's brash, spunky, and her luck has run out.

After cashing in on shots of an infected serial killer known as the Bloody Man, her home is broken into by a new meteorite afflicted individual. It’s a fight she barely survives, but not all in one piece as she becomes infected herself. Hoping the doctors can stop her terrible fate, her world start falling apart around her. Kidnappings are happening over the city, and she may have to risk everything to save someone she loves.

This short story will be FREE from July 21st to July 25th. Grab your free kindle copy at https://www.amazon.com/dp/B08CKB5GL7.


And that is what I have for this week. I hope you enjoy the free story and have a great week.

Hello everyone! I hope you are all doing well. It has been a little while since the last post. And I’m happy to say I made quite a lot of progress. So let’s discuss it.

The main thing is Rainy Day Hotel is done. It’s finished, polished, formatted, and I actually finished the cover art for. Well, mostly finished the cover. I still may tweak it a little bit. But it’s ready to upload to KDP and thrown out into the world. And I have been enjoying blissful feeling of being done after a year of rewrites, and chaos! But the question now is, when is it going to be released? Well….I’m trying to figure that out. In the past, I kind of just threw things out there. Then I used Twitter to push things harder, and the result has been not the greatest to okay. So I’m just taking a moment to see what I can do to promote it. Should I do a giveaway? Maybe a pre order countdown thingy? Push on multiple social media outlets instead of just one? Because let’s face it. Twitter is not nearly as useful as it should be in the marketing department. Should purchase a digital ad service? Or maybe to do physical giveaways? I think because it’s only gonna be 70ish page story, it would be relatively cheap to produce paperbacks for a giveaway. But that would require a lot of courage that I’m not sure it at the moment. And I’m toying around with the thought of making a book trailer to coincide with the release. I do have audio files from reading the story out loud in the final polishing phase. One part in particular would be perfect to coincide with some sketches and a nice guitar rift. It’s something that I can do given a bit of time. But anyway, that is what is going on. I’m just brainstorming about how to go about this release at the moment, and will have a release date news soon.

Beyond that, I still need to decide what to work on next. I actually been busy with life, Rainy Day Hotel, and sick lately so it’s taking a longer than I wished. But the other night I printed out some rough drafts of a trio of stories. They include the science fiction Grey Matter, the dark fantasy Witches in the Castle (Working title for now), and the horror fantasy The Curse of Kiera White. As I go through them, I will make my final decision about what I will focus on next. I am dying to get something else closer to publication.

And that’s all I got for now. Sure it this might be a more dull update than usual, but I am quite happy that with the progress that is being made. And when I do finally release Rainy Day Hotel, I hope that some of you will give it a chance and enjoy it. I did work really hard on this.

Hey all. I wanted to share another one of these update blogs, or newsletters, or whatever the heck you want to call them to let you all know what is going on. I think it’s been three weeks (or month maybe) since the last one so I wanted to share what’s going on. So what has been going on?

Well…. I have a confession to make. I’ve been distracted. After finishing the final draft of Rainy Day Hotel I just didn’t want to do anything with it for a while. I just wanted to enjoy the bliss of being done. And in that break I joined a local writing group at a book themed cafe which is incredibly lovely. And then in those sessions and during writing at home I returned to something I started around last September. It’s a wintery mountaintop horror, dark fantasy. I am making so much progress on it, and I am just reminded how storytelling is so much fun after crawling out of the sea of editing, beta readers, formatting, proofreading and blah blah blah. I’m having a really good time writing it, and I am looking forward to the day that I can share it with you in the future. But that is miles away.

What about now? I am shifting focus back to Rainy Day Hotel, and I am sure you want to know what is going on with that. So this is the tentative plan. I’m shooting for a March release. I’m gonna do a social media push with a free book giveaway during the first week, so that it can get some real reviews and get it in the hands of a lot of people at first. So there will be a press release and notes on Substack about t beforehand. I’ll release a newsletter on Goodreads. Threads and Twitter writing communities are going to hit with a bunch of ads. There will be an announcement on Scribophile. And quite possibly I may try to boost it with Freebooksy. I have looked into Amazon Ads, and the general feedback I heard is they aren’t as good as they appear to be. Booktasters seem good, but a tad shady. I would like to do more research before doing anything with them. And maybe Bookstagram.

Here me out. This is my Instagram, or Bookstagram as writers call it, idea I get my account going. I am constantly posting nature and hiking photos from my outdoorsy trips on Twitter and Threads already. So I’m thinking about making a paperback of my shorts, or longer projects (Or hardbacks of those said stories. Might hold up better in backpacks now that I think about it) and setting them up in really pretty places and taking a snapshot to promote my stuff. I don’t know how long it would take to a get physical copy made and delivered. It has been a long time since I used Print On Demand. But if it can be done in a timely nature, then I may do that as part of a promotion gig as well for Rainy Day Hotel. It’s just an idea. I’m not sure if it the idea will work overall, but it’s worth a try. And starting with almost no followers with Rainy Day Hotel? Why not give it a try? If nothing else, it might be a fun way to start a Bookstagram account and get a following.

Also, I am working on some other things sporadically. I am editing some rough drafts of some other stories, trying to figure out what I want to add to the editing block next and put on the route to publication. I’m also revising an older horror book called Hollows. I’m just smoothing it out of any mistakes I may have overlooked because I didn’t know about ProWritingAid at the time of the release. It’s never too late to go back and revise your work. I have a become so thorough in my editing process in the years since, that it is worth the effort to do so.

Also, one other thing. My book covers, especially on my older shorts, are quite shabby. So I really wanna redo some of those. Especially now that I have a professional art tablet. It all should be so much easier now.

But that is what’s going on. Like always, it is constant chaos. But things are getting done. Maybe it’s all done in a scattershot, almost seemingly nonsensical fashion. But a book is coming out. Writing is happening. New projects are on the way. I will have more news for you in future posts.

Hello everyone! I hope all is going well. Things are going on well my end. Finally got Rainy Day Hotel out. I just submitted the final version of the hardback version to go live on Amazon, and am looking forward to getting clean copies for some marketing ideas. Also, there’s this certain wintery mountain top horror story that I have been writing for the last three months or so that I finished! I finish the first draft the other night. So everything moving forward is brand new. And what is new stuff? Well, some of it is giveaways.

Indie April is coming up, and I hoping to do a giveaway away a different novella every week. I say hoping, because I am going hiking in the woods and mountains on an weeklong outdoorsy vacation. But first three weeks. Those are happening for sure.

And the first one up is obviously Rainy Day Hotel. I really wanna get this in the hands of people. And if people get a chance to check it out, hopefully I’ll get some reviews. I worked so hard on this. I really want people to read it.

The scifi horror thriller novella will be free from April 3rd to April 7th. You can grab your copy @ https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0CXSH9FC2

And in case you forgot what it is about. I’ll post the synopsis down below.

Life is simple on Imber. There may be months of acid rain, but in the research base nicked named by the crew as Rainy Day Hotel, it’s pretty easygoing. At their own pace, they collect samples, do lab work, compile the results and wait for their employer to pick them up in a few months. But things turn sideways for the crew when a couple members run into alien life on what they thought was a desolate planet. And the worst part of it is, it followed them. The base is locked down, as the creatures dwell outside their doorstep. But all is not well as they wait it out. The crew that returned is injured and sick. A parasite was brought inside with them. So with monsters outside and a contagion inside, they must find a way to survive.

And that’s what I got for this week. I hope you take a chance on my novella. And have a lovely week.

Hello everyone! I’m back with another blog all about my writings and fun stuff like giveaways. So what’s been going on since the last blog, which was a week ago? And the answer is not a lot.

I actually had an awful virus over the past week. So I couldn’t do much of anything. But in my windows of feeling not quite so dead, I did dust off an old notebook and started writing a story. It has a young woman who inherits an estate from billionaire grandfather she never knew she had, a djinn, and it might be a murder mystery of some sort. It is a fun project so far. I hoping it will turn out to be something nice that I can publish and share with all of you in the future.

And then there is another thing that happened. This last week was the first Indie April give away. I gave away the kindle version of Rainy Day Hotel. And for this giveaway I used the powers of Twitter, Threads, Goodreads, and Substack combined to push this. And despite the terrible launch of this book, it did pretty well. For the first time, one of my works landed on an Amazon top ten list. It ranked number 7 in pulp thrillers, and that is amazing for me. None of my stuff ever ranked that high on Amazon. I also got a four-star review, which I am happy with. And I hope there are more positive reviews to come. Did I giveaway hundreds? No. But a modest number of people now have or will at some point read the story. And I call that a success. It went very well.

But what is next? Well this week, it the giveaway switching from scifi horror, to horror dark fantasy, featuring the walking dead, monstrous birds being worshipped as angels, an eternal winter, and teen who’s trying to set the world right again It’s called Once Upon a Time in Boston, and it will be free from April 10th to April 14th.

The world broke decades ago. An eternal winter has engulfed the Earth. The dead no longer pass on, becoming souls trapped in decaying bodies. Humanoid feathered creatures known as Ravens come to collect the souls to escort them to the mysterious council to move on to the afterlife. Many people have come to believe the Ravens are angels; doing God’s work until the cosmos are fixed.

Tai is a teenager who learns this is a lie. The Ravens are doing something nefarious with the souls, and those who die are not moving on after death. Angry and frustrated with the recent loss of a loved one, Tai does something rash. He decides he will try to stop the Ravens. He will try to fix the world and overthrow this mysterious council. But he’s not doing it alone. He has found the aid of a Raven who holds a grudge against the council as well.

Grab free ebook copy @ https://www.amazon.com/dp/B09947RR69

And that’s all I really got for this week. Just another giveaway. Will this go as well as Rainy Day Hotel? Will another one of my novellas end up on a top ten list again? Who knows? Let’s just see what happens. I will be blogging again soon.

P.S. Thank you to any all of you who gave my work a chance last week. You have no idea how much I really do appreciate it!