Change of Plans

Due to life, The View from the Balcony has been put on hold, possibly indefinitely. I may release it in a different form in the future. For anyone who had pre-ordered the book, your orders will be cancelled. I’m bummed I had to pull back on this book, but ultimately, I think it’s for the best.

Not surprisingly, I already have an idea for my next book, which I’m looking forward to getting started on. This one will go in another direction, but will likely also be music related.

To my readers, thank you for your continued support and enthusiasm.

Pre-order The View from the Balcony

18739628_1382186798527372_6376661922400150828_n Pre-order The View from the Balcony

My next book in The Fandom Collection is now available for pre-order! The pre-order link is currently live on Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Apple, and Kobo with more retailers to come.

The book will be released Tuesday, July 25!

Why pre-order? By pre-ordering, you get The View from the Balcony for the low price of $0.99. The book will then be automatically delivered to your device on July 25. After release day, the price will go up to my normal novel price of $3.99.

So what’s this book all about anyway?

Think Shopaholic for the concert-aholics and lovers of live music.

It’s been 10 years since Rachel has camped out on sidewalk, vying for Front Row. Time has turned her into a grown woman with a little coffee addiction and a lot to lose.

What would you do if all your favorite bands were touring at once? What if you had a mortgage payment and daycare bills to consider?

Pre-order on Amazon
Pre-order everywhere else

Preview of The View from the Balcony

Here’s the first page of my (unfinished, not final) upcoming novel, The View from the Balcony, which will be the fourth book in The Fandom Collection. In this book, we meet Rachel again ten years after Front Row. She’s grown up with a husband, daughter, and career, but she hasn’t outgrown her love of music and going to concerts.


I should’ve known when my day began with wet sheets that this was not going to go as planned. I had trained for this. I was ready. I had been buying tickets for years. This was the rush. How fast could I order the best seats possible? My fingers shook as I navigated to the page for the event in question—a blast-from-the-past boyband reunion show that my friends and I couldn’t miss. I cut this too close. Usually I tried to be ready at least five minutes in advance, but my daughter, Cora, had wet her bed again, and I couldn’t just leave her in soaked clothes.

“Cora! Are you kidding me right now? Aren’t you potty trained yet?” I was pissed, no pun intended; and in retrospect, it wasn’t one of my finer parenting moments.

Her little face with her flushed squishy cheeks and giant dark brown eyes that matched her father’s begged my forgiveness. I melted into submission.

“Sweetie, I’m sorry for yelling.” I tugged a new pair of Dora the Explorer undies onto her and gave her a squeeze. “Want me to make you some pink milk instead of white milk this morning?”

She clasped her hands and danced in place, the curls of her fine, light brown hair billowing around her shoulders.

After serving the strawberry milk and glancing nervously at the clock on the oven, I leapt back onto the couch and manned my station. The staccato tapping of my fingers on the computer keys were as practiced as my favorite musicians on their instrument of choice. My fingers flew across the keyboard as I logged onto the website, back to my scheduled task of the day. I had two minutes to go before these concert tickets went on sale.

I hadn’t worked out the logistics with my husband yet, but he’d be fine with it. The tickets weren’t that expensive. Just over a hundred for the best seats.

Camp NaNoWriMo 2017 and Scribophile

For those of you who don’t know, Camp NaNoWriMo is the summer-camp–themed version of NaNoWriMo. Instead of writing 50,000 words in a month, you can set your own goals. Much like summer camp, writers are broken up into cabins of up to 12 people. You can either be assigned a cabin randomly, or you can start one with friends.

This year, one of my cabin mates set a goal in minutes instead of words. Intrigued, I went to check it out and noticed that you can now choose whether to set your goal in words, hours, minutes, lines, or pages. “Winning” Camp has always been a challenge for me—meaning, I’ve never hit my goals in April or July when I participated—so I thought maybe setting my goal differently might help.

Since I’m working on revisions of my next Fandom novel (which, not surprisingly, I wrote during NaNoWriMo this past November), I decided to go with pages. My draft is sitting at 181 pages right now, so I set my goal to 180 pages. It’ll be interesting to see how that affects my motivation this month. It’s currently April 4, and I’m sitting at 0 pages. Time to get going…

Another resource I’m using to help this draft along is the website Scribophile. Feel free to add me if you’re on there too! On Scribophile, you can post your work chapter by chapter and get feedback as you’re going along. Of course, I’ll still use my beta readers/editors once I’m done, especially for the overall story arc, but it’s nice to get additional outside feedback as well. Not only that, but I can stretch my editorial muscles by leaving feedback for other writers, too. It’s pretty fun.

In my next post, I’ll share a preview of my work in progress, The View from the Balcony.

Win 1 of 5 signed copies of Flowerantha!

Goodreads Book Giveaway

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Flowerantha

by Bek Castro

Giveaway ends April 13, 2017.

See the giveaway details
at Goodreads.

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