No, these are not rattlesnakes. They are garter snakes. But you get the idea.

Dream a couple  nights ago.

Rattlesnake infestation.

But I was handling it, in typical “made sense at the time” dream logic: I was picking them up (no, not with my hands! with a stick!) and . . . putting them into books.

Large, thick books, they were, with the pages partially scooped out in the middle. Plenty heavy enough to contain a rattlesnake.

And as it happens, I’m editing Loose Dog — and one of the things I’m doing is fleshing out a couple of the characters a bit more.

Which means I’m making them more human.

Which means I’m showing a bit more of how slithery they can be.

Get into the book, you slithery character, you ;-)

Incidentally, I’m also working on the plotting.

I can show that here without the use of random nature photos, because I use stickies to help me visualize the relationship between plots and subplots.

Here’s what the book looked like a couple weeks ago.

I’d front-loaded the backstory about my protag’s relationship with her ex-fiance (blue stickies on the left). Decided that didn’t work — gave away too much too early.

Another weakness in the plot was that too much of my main counterplot (protag breaks up a dog fighting ring) was clumped at the end (orange stickies on the far right).

Here’s how it looks now.

So.

More slither.

Plot a bit more mixed up.

Progress, I think . . .

And I’ve been monitoring how my giveaway has compared to the others by watching it in the site’s “Most Requested” list.

I check again this morning — and this is what I found. Totally cracked me up :-)

Hiya, neighbors!

(P.S. Click here if you want to enter!)

I planned to stop after the first 5 chapters, but couldn’t put it down!

THAT’S the kind of thing that makes this writer VERY very happy :-)

From a Guardian story on Amanda Hocking — who btw is now 27 years old:

[B]y the end of high school she estimates she had written 50 short stories and started countless novels. The first that she actually completed, Dreams I Can’t Remember, was written when she was 17. She was very excited by the accomplishment, and printed it out for friends and family, as well as sending it to several publishers.

“I got rejection letters back from all of them. I don’t blame them – it wasn’t very good,” Hocking says.

Hocking went on to develop an intimate relationship with rejection letters. She has somewhere in her new house a shoebox full of them.

Yet she would not give up. She wrote unpublished book after unpublished book. “Sometimes I’d say: ‘I’m done, I’m never going to write another book,’ but then a couple of months later I’d have another idea and I’d start again. This time it was bound to work.”

And here’s Mr. Konrath himself, he-who-has-made-$3500-per-DAY this January via Kindle sales. He starts with stuff like this:

I wrote 9 novels and collected over 500 rejections during a 10 year period before I made a dime in this business. I sold my tenth novel in a three book deal for $110,000 back in 2002.

My publisher refused to tour me for my first book. They also refused to let me do any official book signings because they would have had to pay coop. So I began doing bookstore drop-ins and handselling my books. I’d stay anywhere from four to eight hours in bookstores. Have you ever sold one hundred $25 hardcovers in one place? I have. It’s hell.

And sums up the whole thing a bit later with this:

I got my first rejection letter in 1988. I’ve worked hard for 24 years, waiting for this kind of success.

I’ve got two novels pubbed and am working now to finalize a third. And it seems sometimes like it’s taking a long time for my books to get any traction. I sometimes start to feel a bit discouraged.

So finding those two stories this morning came at a good time.

I’m going to keep pushing . . .

Rolling a baby elephant might not be so hard...

You’ve heard this, I’m sure.

Q. What’s the best way to eat an elephant?

A. One bite at a time.

And that’s great advice — if the analogy happens to fit your problem. Say you want to clean out your attic. Or ride your bike from Key West to Anchorage. Or . . . write a book.

But what if what you’re trying to do is completely different?

What if you’re not trying to eat an elephant — you’re trying to roll him?

Now we’re talking about overcoming inertia.

Marketing your book is an example. You can write a book one word at a time. But marketing it — successfully marketing it — requires something different.

You need a lever.

You need a way to exert an extraordinary amount of force — when the only thing you have to work with is your own weight, your own two hands.

The question is: how do you get it started?

Where’s that lever?

I love the concept. It’s a first person novel, narrated by a woman who is an animal control officer.

And she’s got problems.

Man problems, for starters. Her ex-fiance has shown back up in her life. And here, she thought she was completely over him.

Before you know it, she also ends up with dog problems — particularly when she stumbles on evidence of a dog fighting ring that is out of her official jurisdiction but very much on her conscience.

I first drafted Loose Dog several years ago. Shopped it to exactly one agent, who requested a full, but eventually passed on it.

I should probably have kept pushing, but instead I set it aside and wrote Libby, and a bit after that Can Job.

And you know what? That was the right decision. Because what that one agent told me is that Loose Dog was well-written but needed work on pacing. So I focused on improving my plotting, and as you can see from my Amazon reviews, plotting is one of the things readers like about my novels.

So now I’m back to Loose Dog, and my first New Year’s resolution for 2012 is to tweak it until I absolutely love it.

Get ready, world :-)

Here are mine :-)

A Classic

Portrait of a Lady. One of the great things about my Kindle is that there are so many free classics. This book, considered by some to be Henry James’ masterpiece, is definitely “slow hand lit.” James takes his time; the book’s pleasures are subtle ones meant to be lingered over, not swallowed in chunks. Definitely worth reading if you’re inclined to literary fare.

An Indie

As an indie author myself, I’m meeting other indies on a daily basis. There’s no way I could read all of the new books I’m finding out about as a result, but I am trying to at least sample and if something grabs me, read on. The Movie by Bosley Gravel is one that did. Said it before and will say it again, Bos is a writer to watch.

Where have you been all my life

This one sort of falls into the indie author category as well. Julie Harris is a midlister who has started bringing titles out as ebooks. I read An Absence of Angels and really enjoyed it. It’s historical fiction, great story telling, memorable characters.

And one print book

My dad lent me this one. Gregory Orr spent part of his childhood in Germantown, New York, where my father also grew up. The Blessing is his memoir. It opens on the day that Orr accidentally shot and killed his younger brother, but this is not a maudlin book. It’s a beautifully realized meditation on pain, grace, and art.

A porcupine ate this sign.

So we indie authors lob tons of marketing advice at each other.

Let me know when someone answers the most important question of all:

Why is it harder to market yourself than somebody else?

Actually, now that I think about it . . . this may be just a variation on that other perplexing paradox: in general, it’s easier to solve other peoples’ problems than your own.

Ever notice that? You can tell when someone else’s relationship is a disaster waiting to happen. You know when somebody else should quit his/her soul-crushing job. It’s easy to tell when someone else’s self-destructive habits are out of control.

Meanwhile, someone dares to offer you some extremely good and  timely advice . . .

“Maybe you should dump the jerk” or

“Why don’t you just quit?” or

“Ya know, there are other foods besides Ben & Jerry’s Chunky Monkey”

. . . and you bristle and snarl like a porcupine with PMS.

I can’t!

But how will I pay the bills?

Are you saying . . . I’m FAT?

Why would anyone want to buy my camel?

Anyway. Those of you who noticed that my Can Job book description was pretty fugly: no worries. Because if you’d mentioned it, I wouldn’t have been able to fix it anyway.

But you were right. It was too much information, and not enough tease. I see that now.

So here’s the rev. Let’s see if it helps sells books . . .

They’re launching a product that will save the company.

At the biggest trade show in the universe.

Their careers are at stake.

Heck, the future of the entire CITY is at stake.

Then they discover that the product doesn’t actually exist . . .

And it looks beautiful, don’t you think?

Only $9.99! :-)