Also posted at the Facebook group, I made myself this cute progress chart to keep track of where I am in all my various projects for current pen names. I’m working on Metal Gladiator this week and next!
Progress meter!
Author: Layla Lawlor
Updates, updates
It looks like I last posted to this blog in Jan. 2020. Well. This has been a couple of years, hasn’t it?
I’ve got the site spiffed up and all the new stuff added, primarily:
- Thorn & Rose – free for download and also $0.99 on Amazon
- Metal Gladiator up for preorder!
- New Shifter Agents story – Jewel Bright
- New cover and edits for Merry & Bright (free on Bookfunnel, also now on Amazon)
The FAQ has also been updated to answer a question I’ve had a few times:
Q. Are you done with Shifter Agents?
No! I plan more books in the series. I was going to take a brief pause, write Warriors of Galatea, and then go back to it, but … *waves hands at the State of the World* It has taken me WAY longer than I planned, but I still have at least 3 more Shifter Agents books planned, including at least one more at the Seattle bureau and a possible Shifter Agents Arizona spinoff. After Metal Gladiator (coming in 2022), I plan to switch back to Shifter Agents again.
So that’s where we are! I didn’t plan on a 2-year hiatus, but life does happen, and I really appreciate everyone’s patience! Metal Gladiator will wrap up Warriors of Galatea for now, and then I’ll get back to the series that has always been my starting point and heart.
Oh, and it looks like WordPress has polls now, so let’s try one, just for fun!
2020 Vision
Here we are in 2020, and I have done a much-needed cleanup of my books page, making it cleaner and easier to read. Other than that, it’s going to be a busy year, and I’ll have more information on upcoming projects for you soonish!
The picture accompanying this post was taken a few days ago of the Alaska Range on my drive into town (we’re out on the highway in Alaska north of Fairbanks). It’s been cold here, -30F or so. Staying warm and preparing for a new writing year – that’s life these days, and it’s a good one.
2018 Icefall Studio ornament auctions
I have a small art business, Icefall Studio, and make hand-painted Christmas ornaments. Normally they’re only available from me at local shows, but this week is Trim Your Tree, my annual online sale/auction with Ellen Million Graphics!
We run this event through Facebook, but this year I’m making this post available so people can participate without needing a Facebook account. If you are on Facebook, it’d be preferred if you bid/buy at the Facebook Trim Your Tree event to keep it in one place, however!
To bid or buy – leave a comment on this post saying what you want. You can bid/buy as many auctions as you like, as long as you are prepared to pay for them if you win them. If you bid here, I will update the Facebook posts for you.
This post only shows my auctions, not Ellen’s! Ellen has many more ornaments available. To see all of them, go to the Facebook event.
Here is a direct link to my auction album on Facebook.
Click on each item to see pictures. It will take you to Facebook, but you should be able to see the pictures without being logged in; there is a pop-up asking you to log in, but just click “not now” to make it get out of your way. Please let me know if this doesn’t work and I will provide alternate pictures!
- Aurora Ornaments (Blue) – Buy It Now! $8ea/$20 for 3 (5 sets available; Buy It Now only on these items)
- Medium Blue Cabins – Buy It Now! $8ea/$20 for 3 (2 sets available; Buy It Now only on these items) – 40% off show price!
- Sunset Trees
– Singles – Buy It Now! $10 15% off show price! /bidding starts at $8
– Set of 3 – Buy It Now! $25 (available only ’til bidding on the individual ornaments begins) - Orcas (killer whales)
– Singles – Buy It Now! $10 30% off show price! /bidding starts at $8
– Set of 2 – Buy It Now! $18 (available only ’til bidding on the individual ornaments begins) - Butterflies (1 large, 1 small)
– Single – large: Buy It Now! $12 20% off show price! /bidding starts at $10
– Single – small: Buy It Now! $7/bidding starts at $5
– Set of 2 – Buy It Now! $15 (available only ’til bidding on the individual ornaments begins) - Salmon
– Singles – Buy It Now! $10 /bidding starts at $8
– Set of 2 – Buy It Now! $18 (available only ’til bidding on the individual ornaments begins) - Snowy Mountain
– 1 available (green), but I will paint more for this event only, for the Buy It Now! price; please BUY IT NOW! and specify if you want green, red, purple, aqua, or deep blue, and how many.
– Buy It Now! $10 20% off show price! /bidding starts at $8 - Autumn Leaves
– Medium-sized blue ball – Buy It Now! $10/bidding starts at $8
– Large white ball – Buy It Now! $10 20% off show price! /bidding starts at $8 - Mini Cabins
– Singles – Buy It Now! $7/bidding starts at $5
– Set of 3 – Buy It Now! $15 (available only ’til bidding on the individual ornaments begins)
– I will paint more for this event only, for the Buy It Now! price on individual ornaments or sets; please BUY IT NOW! and specify colors – silver, gold, and red available. First come, first served – my stock of these small shatterproof balls are extremely limited.
IMPORTANT: all of these except the mini balls are glass balls, not shatterproof. (Ellen’s ornaments are mostly shatterproof. Please see Ellen’s auctions if you need shatterproof ornaments.) They will be carefully packed and shipped. We have never had breakage in shipping, but if any of your ornaments breaks, you will get a refund or replacement (if available) at no cost.
Combine shipping on multiple orders! My and Ellen’s ornaments can be combined for this.
Questions? Please ask!
Happy bidding!
SCB regional bureaus
Here is a quick-and-dirty map I put together for my own reference of where the different Shifter Crimes Bureau field offices and (approximate) jurisdictions are. I am not sure why I used the Cancer zodiac symbol to represent them. I was trying to find a star in my wingdings font, but I found that and I just liked it? 
Anyway, there are five regional offices. We will get our first look at the Southwest bureau in the tiger shifter book I’m currently working on (it’s in an old military base near Tucson, out in the desert). There is also a Midwest office, an East Coast one, and one that handles the South.
The boundaries are REALLY vague right now and I’m not at all sure about where exactly they go. One thing I did realize while I was making this map is that the Seattle office should probably cover Alaska and Hawai’i too, so maybe I’ll send them to Hawai’i sometime soon. 
🌴
Progress report: Jan 2017
It’s 2017! Where did my word count go??
As you may have noticed, I haven’t had a book out since May. That is, shall we say, not how I planned things. The Noah book has been a really slow one to write, plus it’s turning out to be one of the long ones (I’m optimistically aiming for 120K now, about the same length as Guard Wolf; this is up from an original estimate of 60K).
During the times I’m stuck on Tiger, I’ve been working on side projects. The result is that I’m now hip-deep in half-finished novels and short stories in the Shifter Agents universe. If all goes well, 2017 should be a bonanza. It’s just a matter of finishing things.
Besides Noah’s book, the other projects I’m currently working on are:
- A spinoff series involving the Valeria from Dragon’s Luck (this one is really more urban fantasy and will probably be four books long).
- Another spinoff series that is going to be a series of stand-alone novellas about human men and shifter ladies – the first one involves a curvy shifter bartender and a guy who hunts rogue shifters for a living (sort of a shifter bounty hunter) who shows up in her town looking for a shifter criminal. The idea is that these will be shorter, fairly quick to write, and can come out in between the longer books.
- A short-ish casefile story set between Dragon’s Luck and Tiger, along the lines of Chasing Bigfoot.
- A side story tentatively titled Risk Factor, set during Tiger and involving some of the other agents, which is basically a subplot I couldn’t squeeze into the main book (I mean, it’s already going to be at least 120K words; it didn’t need to be 150K instead).
In addition to that, I’ve tentatively plotted the Shifter Agents series out until book 8 or 9. So, uh, lots more books coming! I just have to write them!
And on that front, here’s how all of those are currently looking, thanks to some handy little word-count status meters from Writertopia.
Shifter Agents #4 – Noah & Peri’s book
Valeria spin-off series – Book 1
Shifter lady/bounty hunter novella
Casefile story – post-Dragon’s Luck
“Risk Factor” (Tiger deleted subplot)
Final word counts are, of course, tentative. Whatever finishes first will be published first! Right now I expect it’s probably going to be the bartender/bounty hunter one followed by Tiger. The Valeria spinoff will definitely not be first, because Tiger sets up a couple of necessary plot things for it.
Free Christmas story: Merry and Bright
Right-click/command-click and “Save As” to download any of the following formats:
Kindle • Epub • PDF
This short story is also on Smashwords for free.
If you encounter problems with any of these files, please email me.
Merry and Bright
A Shifter Agents Christmas story
This takes place after Guard Wolf and before Dragon’s Luck.
“Hey man, you gotta help me.”
Avery Hollen blinked at the computer screen sliding in and out of focus in front of him, and turned his bleary, sleep-deprived gaze on the rangy figure that had leaned a hip on the corner of his desk. Jack Ross was wearing his usual beat-up leather jacket and jeans, but under the jacket he had on a festive sweater with snowflakes on it. He also had a plastic holly sprig pinned to his collar and was holding a steaming mug shaped like the lower half of Santa: belt, boots, and red-clad buttocks. His wire-frame glasses gave him a deceptively mild demeanor; right now, with the sweater and the mug, he looked like an unusually ripped professor at a faculty holiday party.
As Avery stared at him blankly, Jack frowned. “Are you awake?”
“I’m totally awake; why wouldn’t I be?” Avery tried to push himself upright in his chair, rather than slumping over his keyboard.
“Because,” Jack said, leaning around to see the screen, “you just typed a whole row of the letter D.”
New cover for Dragon’s Luck
Oh noooo, I forgot to announce this on the blog, just on Facebook! Dragon’s Luck has been redesigned with a new, extra-shiny cover, this one featuring a dragon so it looks more like other books in the series. This is not a new book, just a rebranding of an earlier one:
The next book in the series, the tiger book, is still being written and will be released in early 2017. So sorry for all the delays! But I have a special holiday present coming up for you in the next blog post … wait for it … 😀
Shifter jack’o’lantern is a GO!
Happy Halloween!
I posted this in stages to Facebook while I was working on it, so now I’m collecting it at the blog. 😀
I’m currently writing book 4 of Shifter Agents, Noah’s book, and he’s a tiger, so I thought it would be appropriate to do a tiger jack’o’lantern this year. Now, I should preface all of this by saying that I haven’t carved a pumpkin in years, and I’ve NEVER tried to do one of the fancy designs … so, not gonna lie, when I first started posting photos of the process to Facebook, I figured the last picture was going to be a dismally hacked pumpkin with candle light winking out of all the accidental holes.
But it actually came out pretty good! It would’ve been a disaster if I’d stuck to my original plan, which was to carve it with a knife. Luckily we have some woodworking gouges left over from a printmaking class I took in college (a certain number of … decades … ago) and those turned out to be the perfect tools for the job!
So, without further ado … let’s have a look.
This is going to go great, right?? I have no idea what I’m doing, hahaha oh nooooo.
Announcing Dragon’s Luck, Shifter Agents #3!
Okay, so technically it came out last week – I updated everywhere but here, but I forgot to add it to the website!
Dragon’s Luck is the third book in the Shifter Agents series. No knowledge of the previous books is needed to read this one.
Gecko shifter and infiltration expert Jen Cho teams up with sexy dragon-shifter gambler “Lucky” Lucado to win a high-stakes poker game. Now they’re trapped on a cruise ship full of mobsters, mysterious enemy agents, and evil dragons, and it’ll take all their wits and luck to get out of this alive!
Lauren Esker 