I am so pleased to announce that Soprano Trouble will be released on February 3, 2017!

I will give you so many more details about where you can get it, but for now will you ooo and ahh with me over the cover?

I can’t wait for you to read this story!

My, this website is dusty and neglected! If the internet could transmit smells from this site to your nose, I’m sure you would have turned away at the smell of mildew. That’s what happens when you let something sit for too long, right? Maybe I’m thinking of laundry.

I want to clue you into something: I have no idea what I’m doing. I mean, I’ve heard podcasts and read blogs about what a new author should be doing, but it’s all so overwhelming. My writing energies have been put into creating new content, which I find leaves me very little to give to things like blog posts. Or even Facebook status updates. Apparently I’m a one-track writer. That’s probably not good in this world where anonymity is my enemy. I think my New Year’s resolution will be to figure out how to have several writing projects going at the same time. You know, diversify.

But I wanted to tell you something, and that is that my writing projects have not been in vain. I started this website to let you know that my dream of becoming a published author is becoming a reality, and that was initiated by the contract for my middle-grade book Soprano Trouble. I have no updates on that book (and trust me, you’ll have them when I do!) but I do have a pretty major update in general:

Soprano Trouble will be the first book in a four book series. 

For real. I’ve submitted and received contracts for the other three books in that series. I have not one but FOUR book contracts.

This has been a weird thing for me. The first book contract was so exciting because it was so new. The second one was fun too, because I was able to do it again! And three and four were equally exciting for me, but I began to feel like it was old news. I’m a pretty terrible celebrator anyway, so I wasn’t sure if getting a third and fourth contract warranted the kind of excitement that the first one did. Did people really care? I mean, I know they did, but did they really?

The self-doubt is strong over here.

Anyway, I just wanted to tell you that. I call the series The Choir Girls, and there are four books: Soprano Trouble, Alto Secrets, Harmony Blues and Solo Disaster. And I think they’ll all be out sometime in 2017. I promise to give you specifics when I have them

And now onto my next project.

Perhaps a more seasoned author would have told you exactly what she was doing in the first post. Clearly that’s not how I roll.

I wrote a story for 9-12 year old girls. Yes, of course boys can read it too, but I’m just being realistic; I know they won’t want to. That’s okay. I have no delusions that this story will appeal to every single human on the planet. The working title is Soprano Trouble, and it follows 7th grader Summer McKidd and her friends through an incident at their fall choir concert that sets Summer on a path that will force her to make some decisions about friends.

Here’s my big confession for the day: I loved The Babysitter’s Club series as a kid. My parents enrolled me in some type of book club when I was in third or fourth grade, and I got three books every month. I read those book over and over and over. They are dog eared and water damaged (from reading them in the bathtub) and yes, I still have them. I believe I have close to 100. (Maybe not. I have a lot. I’ve loaned them out at the moment, so I can’t go verify.) But those books are what sparked the dream of writing in my heart. I’m an introvert who loves being home, and I know there are others out there like me. We all just want to read.

I’m all grown up now, and while I do like to read grown up stuff, when I think of writing I think of stories for kids who like to read chapter books. When I was 14, my beloved English teacher told my parents to force me to stop reading The Babysitter’s Club. So they forbid me for a summer. That might have been the summer I discovered The Christy Miller Series. That series was very formative in how I saw friendships, boy/girl relationships, and my relationship with the Lord. While I happen to think that series is timeless, I know that girls these days might not be so thrilled to read something their mothers loved. So I want to create something new for them.

I want to write stories that moms won’t be afraid to give to their daughters. I want to write stories that model what life can look like for normal people, rather than what it looks like according to Hollywood. Mostly, though, I want to write characters that girls think of as their friends. And maybe when they’re in college and chatting about books they love with their friends, someone will tell them, “stop talking about those characters like they’re real!” (That may or may not have happened to me.)

And if middle-grade/young adult fiction isn’t your bag, don’t worry. I have some other ideas up my sleeve that I would love to explore someday. Who knows?

This is my dream. Now you know. Thanks for reading. 🙂

This is the day I will point back to.

Not as the launching of a dream; that happened a long time ago. Maybe the fall of 2010, when I actually wrote the story. Or even March of this year, when I finally took my story to a writer’s conference and heard the tiniest bit of encouragement about it, which gave me enough fuel in the tank to actually try and send it out into the world.

This day, May 26, 2016, is the day my dream became validated. I just sent in a signed publishing agreement for my story to be published with TouchPoint Press. PUBLISHED. With cover art and “by Victoria Kimble” and page numbers and a copyright date. Of course I’ve had strong encouragement along the way, but there is something special about the affirmation from someone who doesn’t know and love you. It’s like the final “let it be so” needed to be purposeful in this harsh career path.

I’ve been participating in The Creative Way: A Course in Transformational Fiction by Ted Dekker, and one of the thousand takeaways I’ve come away with is start before you’re ready. This was in the module about marketing and getting your work out there. I like to do things the right way; but there are some things that just need to be done so you can learn whether or not that was a good way to do it. My exhibit A is this website. You who see this now see the raw, unfinished newborn. You who see it later will hopefully be looking at something polished and professional. Just know that I didn’t start out that way. But the point is to just start.

So I start. On this day, May 26, 2016. I am a writer. Not an aspiring one, an actual one.

What will you start today?