A-at LAST - I'm writing in this thing again

The blog has lapsed this time for many reasons. The first, and the reason it usually lapses, it that I lead a quiet life, so there's not much obvious in it to write about. Second, we had to let our home internet service go because our budget was very tight. Frankly, we weren't making ends meet. Of course writing blog entries at work was completely out of the question, and there just wasn't enough time to go somewhere with free wi-fi to do any writing.

I got a real library job again, so finally I'm earning enough money for my disabled husband and myself to live on. We finally have internet at home and TV again. I hope we can get a landline next. I truly detest cell phones. Yes, I do have one. They're a regrettable necessity these days, but I have the kind you buy minutes and load them on the phone. I long for an unlimited phone conversation, one in which I don't have to worry about how long it's lasting.

So now that I'm getting decent money again, we're slowly getting caught up from the two years where we were desperate. We owe lots, and it'll take a while to catch up, but now we can do it. And, wonder of wonders, I'll have paid vacation leave again. Not that we can really go anywhere, but time off with money will be such a treat by itself, I don't care.

The low-paying job I had was zero stress, but the stress of not having enough money to pay the bills more than made up for that. I've been buying makeup at the dollar store and clothes from thrift shops. Mind you, I do find thrift shops fun - it's like a treasure hunt - but sometimes it would be nice to go after something specific and actually be able to go up or down a size in the same item when the first try doesn't fit. It will also be nice to replace and repair broken things - our camera, the passenger side visor in the car.

While a very low-stress job has that to recommend itself, I swear I could feel my brain deteriorating and my library skills fading away. My new job will expect more of me, but the people are good to work with and committed to being pleasant to each other. My mind has kicked back into gear for the assorted challenges of a technical library, a type I haven't worked in before.

On the writing front, the progress on Annie is going slowly but surely. When I'm done with the second draft, I have two other half-finished projects I want to complete. By the time Annie has been run through my writing group, I'll have those done and will be able to do the third and last draft with a fresh pair of eyes. I have a romantic suspense and a historical romance to finish up, then the fantasy series that has grown and evolved until at last I feel I can do it justice. I have three partial novels to choose from to start with, and won't know which one I pick until I actually pick it.

So how are these for titles? Shall I choose Danath of Klarden, The Windwalker's Tale, or Dawn of the Wolf? We shall see.

Thornyrose Books

After quite a hiatus, I'm getting the writing in gear. I have three unpublished finished novels, and I'm going ahead with self-publishing. I am an indie author. At the age of 60 I no longer have time for the slow grind of the traditional publishing process.

My romantic fantasy, Grove Secrets, will be out in both print and e-book on Amazon.com sometime next week. After 90 days as a Kindle exclusive, I'll put it on Smashwords. I am also going to check Book Bub. It looks like a decent venue for indie authors.

As Home Again, Reb Dexter's Last Concert, and Like a Single Cell have been Kindle exclusive for more than 90 days, I'll be uploading them to Smashwords soon. Smashwords, by the way, will put the books onto Barnes and Noble for me, so they'll be available as ebooks for Nook soon after.

In a month or two, I'll release For the Seven Kingdoms, a sword-and-sorcery novel that could be the first of seven in a series. I have ideas for five more. Yes, that's only six. We'll see what my odd little brain coughs up for the last one.

Plague Scars, my post-apocalyptic domestic novel, will be out later this year.

Meantime, I'm finishing my first steampunk novel with a strong romantic plot. Annie's Doomsday Engine can best be described as Mission Impossible meets The Wild Wild West (TV show, not awful movie) on the Island of Dr. Moreau. After that I have a list of six novels to finish, that are in assorted stages of near-completion. Then we shall see about continuing the ones that I'd like to be series, trilogies, or even simply two volumes. I want to write a sequel to Phoenix Hatching, and I've got a rough draft done, called Phoenix Flying. I have two more steampunk ideas that are set in the same milieu as Annie's. I've already mentioned Seven Kingdoms wants to be a series, and Grove Secrets has two sequels involving the same family that are banging around in my head. Then, at last, there are two 'learning experience' novels I wrote a long time ago that had some potential. I'm going to scrap everything but the basic idea and characters, and try at least the first one again.

And if I live long enough, I have a huge list of ideas... I wish I'd gotten my writing feet under me a long time ago, but I've always been a late bloomer.

And away we go

Having discovered CreateSpace and Amazon Kindle both have free, if rather generic, cover generators, I've got ahead and self-published some old pieces. Home Again, a romantic suspense, is now available as a print copy. Haven't done the ebook yet. Two sci fi novellas are now out at e-books. They are Like a Single Cell and Reb Dexter's Last Concert. If I can get enough short pieces together to fill up a book, I'll put them out in print. I can't decide what to do with three children's books - they're text for picture books, but I can't draw very well. Put them in with the 2 short stories?

My life's work doesn't look like much so far, but there's more to come. I've thrown out a lot of old crap that wasn't salvageable, and lost some pieces to assorted accidents, corrupted floppies, and dead computers. After NaNoWriMo, I've learned how to rough-draft a lot faster than I used to. Hopefully I'll be able to finish all the partial books, fragments, and ideas I've got. Whoops, sorry Sandy, there's a 'got.' You can take the girl out of Kansas, but the speech patterns are going to stick no matter what.

I want to earn enough to afford Digital Donna's magnificent work for the rest of the Phoenix trilogy. And I'd like to have it also for the Seven Kingdoms  and Grove Witches series. The first book in each series is ready to publish, and I've rough-drafted the second of the Phoenix books. I'll be rough-drafting the third one this November (NaNoWriMo).

And soon: Plague Scars.

First Day of NaNoWriMo summer camp

Today I kicked butt. My daily goal is 1,667 words to reach 50K by the end of the month.

I wrote 4,505 words. Dayum.

A fellow-crazy writer friend came over, and we drank wine, ate pizza, and wrote for 3 solid hours. I had gotten some licks in earlier but she's so fast she nearly wrote the same number of words, in what amounts to half the time. I had written for a few hours earlier & had 2K words when we started.

Now, of course, my eyes have had enough computer screen and are refusing to focus. Have to stop and rest them.

Work, jobs, and time

Finally got a second part-time job. 28 hours per week, 3 days of split-shift. So now I'm not working full-time even between the two of them, but I'm working six days a week. No wonder I've skipped church 2 Sundays in a row - just too tired to get up one more day. It's rather a dull job so far, and the pay is low, but I think we can get by on it. The biggest blessing is my supervisor. She's terrific, and easy to work with. That alone can make or break working conditions.

I've been formatting the rest of my finished books for e-book processing, and have begun formatting the two published so far for print on demand. The latter is harder, but I'm getting the hang of it. I hope they look good when finished. I can order the cover for one immediately, thanks to an uncle who gave me the money because he really wants a print copy. The other covers will have to wait until my pay catches up with our bills. I had planned originally to have all five out this year, at least as e-books. It doesn't look like I'm going to make it. I haven't yet made back what I spent on the covers, and the artist was very reasonable. On Amazon, I activated the "look inside" feature, and now you can read the beginnings of both books. Maybe it'll increase sales. I've got a business card now too, with the websites to order my books from.

Plus, it's only a couple months now until Christmas. I've got to knit like a madwoman to get all the presents I'd planned finished. Spare time is hard to come by. Spare time without cats on my lap is even harder, and I love the cats too much to shoo them off. So far I've knitted a stuffed animal, 5 scarves, and 1 hat. I did a vest but wound up giving it for her birthday, so I've got to knit something else for Christmas. 5 more hats, some Barbie clothes, and a lace shawl are the remainder. Since I can't surprise my husband with anything knitted, he might get a box of yarn, a pattern, and a promise! Plus, for after Christmas, I want to knit two shells for myself, and finish some socks and a vest I started ages ago. They can wait.

I feel close to back to normal, though my taste and my appetite have changed drastically. My mouth is incredibly sensitive to heat, cold, and Mexican spices. Some foods I've always loved just don't taste good now. I drink a lot of milk, as it helps me swallow better than water. My weight is hovering around 170, and I'm in a size 16, and so far - 3 months now - I haven't gained any back. Dieting never worked that well. Of course now eating's more of a chore than a pleasure. Even when I'm enjoying something, I can barely eat half, even though I'm still hungry.

My husband is still in a lot of pain and can barely do anything. I'm so worried about him. He's lost so much strength and range of motion in his arms, and since he's in a wheelchair both are vital. But now that I'm employed again, maybe we've turned a corner.

Writing poetry

            Posting that old poem, it occurred to me that I haven’t any new ones. I started writing poetry in high school, as most teens with a literary bent and a lot of excess angst do. I wrote them through college and into my early thirties. The 1980s, when I couldn’t seem to get a novel going, spawned a lot of poetry – some of it meant to be song lyrics. Then, somewhere in the late 1980s, the poetry urge completely dried up. I have no idea why.

            Of the several notebooks filled with poems, I have forty-six I’m not ashamed of. I think I’ll post them one by one on this blog, as poetry doesn’t sell. Only one has ever been published, in an anthology called Light Year back in the 1980s, and I didn’t get paid for it. Had to buy the book. Oh, well, at the time it was worth it to me.

            So what makes a person a poet, as opposed to a prose writer? A lot of people are both, but I’ve always been rather single-minded as far as the creative impulse. I’ve noticed that when I’m writing a lot, I stop knitting, and when I’m knitting a lot, I seem to nearly stop writing. I have never figured out what it was about that particular decade that inspired the type of writing I did then. It was a hard decade. I was working at a well-paying job that I absolutely hated. My father died in 1983, which plunged my dysthymic self deep into the dark flood. In 1984 I got laid off from that job (thank God), and never have earned that much money again, though the stress wasn’t worth it. When you burst into tears every time the alarm goes off and it takes you five minutes to unclench your jaws in the morning, you need a different job, no matter how good the money is. To illustrate the sort of people I worked with, here’s the primo example. My father wasted away from cancer in the first half of 1983, dying the Thursday after Father’s Day. I had been telling people at work who asked how he was that he wasn’t going to recover. When he died I called in to tell them I wouldn’t be in for a week. The person who answered the phone, who I had considered a friend, said, “Oh, he really died? We thought you were just saying that.” 

            I wrote the poem February Midnight at a midnight in February, into a small tape recorder I kept by the bed then. In the morning when I transcribed it, I didn’t change a single word. I still think it’s my best poem. The little tape recorder helped with a lot of inspiration, because by the time I found the light, a pencil, and my glasses, I lost the thought, even when all that was on the nightstand. Just picking up the recorder in the dark and hitting the On button was a lot faster. I’ll post that poem tomorrow.

Little by little

Well, I've priced local editing services - yikes! Luckily I've got a network of local writers who also do editing, and one will give my stuff a look-see for free. I'll take advantage of that while I can. Phoenix Hatching is now in her hands. I've polished it to my best ability. Basically I just wanted a fresh pair of eyes to go over it and catch anything I missed. You can't proof your own work, you think it says what you wanted it to say. She can also check for any plot inconsistencies and other problems. While she's doing that, I'm checking into options for cover art. Here's an advantage over traditional publishing: you get to pick your cover art. You don't have to have Generic Chick in short top, tramp stamp, and sword. You can actually have someone who looks like the character.

After my editor's done, and I have the cover art chosen, then Phoenix Hatching will come out on Kindle. It's science fiction, set on Earth about 1000 years after the human race has become extinct. From underground labs, a race of beings called Mutas are beginning their own civilization. One of these is a 17-year old girl named Hallia. Abused by her own people, she exiles herself and is rescued by a scouting party from another group. As they travel across the deserted country, Hallia develops from a waif into a warrior. And she'll be needed once the group returns to its home.

Here goes nothing

I have been trying to sell a novel since I was twenty. I'm now 54, and my file of rejection slips is over an inch thick. I think I'll burn them. Of course, it's entirely possible that my writing just isn't good enough. I think it's just bad luck and the increasing shrinking of the publishing world.

I was going to self-publish with my income tax refund, but thanks to my husband, all that money just vanished. I'm not sure what happened to it, but I sure didn't see any.

I have 5 finished novels, and am rough-drafting a sixth. I guess I'll attempt to write synopses and get them in the mail again, though I just don't think it's going to help. And it takes half a year to hear back! What's up with that? Do all the publishers think writers are immortal? Geez.

The first entry: August 24, 2007

My two favorite things in the world are cats and books, not necessarily in that order. I've been trying to get a book published for decades - not the same one, a lot of different ones. Either I've had wretched luck, or I'm a real slow learner, or I'm just a crappy writer. Pick one. At any rate, I'll keep trying. What else am I going to do? If I just let all these people and stories sit in my brain I'll go nuts.

Currently I'm struggling through the first draft of a romantic suspense novel, called Against Her Will. It's going fairly well. I have a finished fantasy, called For the Seven Kingdoms (though I really don't like the title). I'm running through my writing group. I've finished several novels, but as soon as I get them done I'm convinced they're no good. I think I've just gotten too many rejection letters. Now I can't bring myself to send them out.

I tend to read several books at once. I just finished First Warning by Anne McCaffery and Elizabeth Scarborough. Before that, Blue Dahlia, Black Rose, and Red Lily by Nora Roberts. Right now I'm reading Wyrd Sisters by my favorite author, Terry Pratchet - that book lives in my purse. On the dining room table is Affaire Royale by Nora Roberts.

Quote for the day:

A writer is like a bean plant – he has his little day, and then gets stringy.
E.B. White