Rev it up

Cover, Loose Dogs by Kirsten MortensenSome of you know that I have had, for some time, another novel in the works.

The title is Loose Dogs. The protag is an animal control officer. And I finished writing it in 2004.

Except that I didn’t.

2004 was an eternity ago in publishing history. The launch of the Kindle was still three years away. There was no such thing as an “indie writer.” Self-publishing was a euphemism for vanity publishing, and vanity publishing was the crazy aunt in the attic. She’s there, everybody knows she’s there, you feel sorry for her, you sure as hell don’t want to be her. Continue reading

Are you afraid?

weird cloudsMany years ago, a very wise person who was listening to me talk about some problem I was wrestling stopped me and said, “Why are you holding your breath?”

I’ll never forget that question. It was a pivot point in my life — one of those moments which mark the end of one thing and the beginning of something else. I had, before that day, believed that I was a brave person. But the moment I stopped holding my breath, feelings I’d been pushing down for years suddenly rose up in all their demonic magnificence.

I was terrified. I was a quivering coward. Those “brave” acts of mine — the time I’d quit college, the leaps I’d made into relationships — they were covers, they were things I’d done not because I was brave but in order to hide my fear from myself.

I’ve had throughout my life what I refer to as moments of bravado — a sudden urge to push myself beyond my fear in some big way.

That’s from a lovely and insightful essay on fear (and also btw on love) by Jana Richman in the New York Times.

I would add this: fear is a function of the physical body, in many ways. Many of us tend to live so much in our heads that we forget this. It’s important to pay attention to the body, and to calm it the way you would a child or a pet. It helps . . .

Loose dogs . . .

Loose dogs don’t follow rules. They aren’t predictable. They don’t keep to the sidewalks or respect property boundaries. They don’t come when called.

Loose dogs are elusive things.

— Paige Newbury

Announcing: my e-newsletter :-)

I’ve been meaning to do this for a long time.

Now here it is: an easy way for you to stay in touch.

Be the first to know when I’m running promotions or have a new book or story out.

I’ll also be asking for your help from time to time. I sometimes need beta readers, for example, or feedback on covers.

My promise: the newsletter will be short, sweet, and easy to delete :-)

Thanks for signing up!


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#Amediting

garter snakes

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 . . .

mama did NOT say there’d be days like this. exactly. lol

So I’m giving away five copies of Can Job, print edition, on Goodreads.

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!

UPDATE: contest over but you can purchase a copy of Can Job here.

UPDATE #2: Can Job got a new cover :)

The overnight success of two successful indie authors

Well, isn’t this something. Their “overnight success” is only “overnight” to those of us who haven’t slogged alongside them for the past decade or two.

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 the elephant

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

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?