Coupon!

You can get The Gates of Nottingham on Smashwords for $.99 with coupon code EN97F until February 26. Read it, like it, recomend it! Or, you know, read it, hate it, and keep quiet. *grin*

Book Suggestions?

I've got this Kindle with nothing on it. I need suggestions as to how to fill it. I know most of you have published or will publish soon and I've bought a few of your books, but some of you I had a hard time finding. So, if you have a novel out on ebook (or even print), let me know what it is and I will buy it. Then we can chat about that too. Have you read and enjoyed any books like this lately?

*Cozy mysteries (where the heroines aren't too "cutely" neurotic and man-hating)
*Historical Fiction (literary, action, romantic, heck, I even count Michael Crichton's Timeline)
*Love Stories (by which I mean a book with an actual attempt at a plot and not just sex every 10 pages)
*Thrillers (although, I go a little light. by which I mean, I don't want to read super graphic descriptions of rape or child abuse)

Thanks!

New Layout and New Kindle

*I’ve got a new look! If you’re reading this, you’ve most likely already noticed. I decided that I hated the old look. I often like something, settle on it, then come to hate it. For example, my current purse was a K-Mart $2.49 special that I thought I loved. It is hideously ugly in a special 1970’s way. I’ll keep it until it falls apart because I hate buying purses and it is convenient. The moral of the story is that I am often aesthetically blind. So, tell me what you think. Any suggestions? I would like to continue to tweak things, but I do like this template much better.

*I just got a Kindle Touch for my birthday. Yes, I used to decry the loss of paper books for future generations and the state literature would come to with the advent of ebooks, but… I’m over it. The Kindle is awesome. Who doesn’t want a device that can hold 3,000 books and all of their music? This will at least solve the problem of the paperbacks over-flowing my room. I think my favorite part is that I can get all of the classics for free. I love classic novels. I started in on Austen and Dickens in the fifth grade. I used to read Persuasion whenever I got sick, until my sister accidentally destroyed my copy. I also want to read all of The Scarlet Pimpernel books. I’ve read five I think, but I’m pretty sure they are all free on blio. Points to people who can find the Scarlet Pimpernel references I always put in my novels. They are easy to miss.

Getting used to the Kindle does take time. It’s a little awkward to hold at first, and there is a delay in getting to the next page. I’m still adjusting, but I have so much I want to download to it. I’m excited that this gives me a better way to support indie authors than trying to scrape together fourteen dollar for a paperback and knowing they will get something like 2% out of that.

To those of you who hopped on the Kindle wagon before me: should I get a cover and wall charger? I can’t decide if I need them or not.  

Published

It’s been a little hectic in my writer’s brain lately. I had a massive crisis of confidence which put me on hold for a while. Then there was Christmas and I got two different colds. So, nothing much has been happening. However, as a result of my massive freak-out, I did re-write the ending of The Gates of Nottingham. This cut 20 pages from the book, which is good because it was too long anyway.

Long story short, last night I uploaded to Smashwords. I made up my mind that I’m at a fish or cut bait place right now. Either I should quit talking about publishing and decide that I’m a horrible writer or I should just do it and see what happens. I need to trust my own opinions, and my opinion is that this is a good book. Is it absolutely the best book ever? No. I worked very hard on it though, and it is better than probably 80% of the professionally published slush I read on a daily basis. Of course everyone will have different tastes. Some people will love it and some people will hate it. Some people will be in between. I need to get it out there for my own sake, though.

I would do things differently now, but I think that, in a way, our writing is a time capsule. I was in a different place in my life when I wrote The Gates of Nottingham. My feelings were different and so was my writing style. I am a hyper-critical person and if I don’t just say enough is enough, this will never happen for me.

So it’s out there now. It is available on Smashwords here and has already had 10 samples downloaded since last night which is exciting. It is still sitting in the vetting process, so it isn’t available through any of Smashword’s distributers yet, but in a month’s time it ought to be available from Sony, Apple, Barnes and Noble, etc. I just finished uploading to Kindle and that should take 2-3 days before I get the green light. Then it will be available on Amazon.

At the moment, I am struggling to figure out what to do for a PDF for the CreateSpace version. I really don’t want to buy Adobe, but I’m not finding a way out of it.   

Enjoy Life

I’m young. There’s no getting around that. Sometimes it’s awesome, but sometimes it really isn’t. I started writing The Gates of Nottingham when I was 16. I was homeschooling at the time, living in the middle of nowhere, and friendless. It was a decision that I made out of the blue and it occupied me quite nicely.

Now, I’m 20 and I’ve written two novels and a half dozen screenplays. There is a real divide in the people who think this is great and the people who tell me how lame I am and it has mostly got to do with their age. I see this sharp divide despite the fact that I rarely even tell people I’m writer. A few of the people whom I work with and have worked with for seven months now know nothing about it.

I am lucky in that I appear to be in my thirties, so I get away with more as far as strangers are concerned at writers conferences and other places. A thirty-something writing a book? Good for you. A 20 year old writing a book? Don’t you have better things to do with your time?

The thing is, though, it’s my time. I can do whatever I want with it as long as it isn’t illegal. I don’t criticize other young people for dating, drinking, partying, playing video games, dancing, knitting, or whatever else they do. In fact, I could do all of those things and still write if I wanted. So, I don’t really understand the flack I get. We should all enjoy our lives and this is how I enjoy mine.

However you choose to enjoy your life, I’m happy for you too. Life is too short for us all to waste it trying to be “cool” 100% of the time.

Formatting Headaches

If you’ve been reading my Twitter account, you’ll know that I had a sudden freak-out based on the idea that I MUST get published before I turn 21. So, I have been busy formatting and re-formatting. My brain hurts and I think my eyes might start bleeding soon. However, I have the CreateSpace file all set up! I really should plug Edwin Scroggins’ How To Publish Your Book using Microsoft Word 2010 here, because I used it step by step (with some alterations, because I must have things my way, after all). The instructions were very clear and the book was more than worth what it costs. It is available on Amazon.

CreateSpace is running their review on my files right now. It should take forty-eight hours and after that I can order a proof copy. I’m so excited that I’m making my friends and family nuts. I know we are in the era of the e-book, but to see it in print still feels like the ultimate fantasy. It’s silly and out-of-date, I know, but I can’t help it.

Now, for the horrible, icky, bad news: I have to re-format it twice more. I didn’t realize that CreateSpace (an Amazon company, as I’m sure you all know) does not work with Kindle (also an Amazon company, of course). So… time to do more formatting! I ended up using a CreateSpace template for my book cover, which does me no good for the e-book. This means I have been searching high and low for e-book cover templates and using all of my bandwidth to download GIMP. I don’t ownPphotoshop. So, now I have not only the task of creating the e-book cover (which is a total mystery to me at the moment and a little more than my tired brain can comprehend), I also have the task of making it as close to the print version as possible. Of course, I could always create my own and then edit my CreateSpace file, but I’m a little bit in love with the cover I made off of their template and I know for sure it will print correctly.

So, Kindle is the first goal. But wait, there’s more! Smashwords is the other e-book store I want to get my book on. Does it use the same format as Kindle? Of course not. I’m going to run out of aspirin soon. Not only that, but I was just going through my bank accounts and I am broke from buying ISBN’s, a fictitious business name, stock photos, and all of the other fun things needed to make this happen. So, as I sit and do math for my margins and try to figure out how to format an e-book cover for free, I will probably be eating Top Raman. A writer’s life is so romantic.

After I post this, I’m basically taking the day off. That is to say, I’m working my day job, but I’m not looking at my files one more time. I’ve been working on the novel for seven hours every morning, then going for an eight hour day at my retail job, coming home and working on my social networking goals, sleeping five hours, and starting all over. I’m a little worn out at the moment.

Wow, I just got really whiney. The point to all of this is that I’m getting close, and my brain is producing adrenaline like crazy because I am so happy. I think I might flip when I get my proof copy. I’ll let you know. In the meantime, any tips or clues as to this e-book cover nightmare of mine? I feel like I’m just missing some good advice. I’m pretty confident I can get all of this done before my goal date, because I can be a real go-getter if I want to be.

Music and Writing

I don’t know how common this is with writers, but sometimes when I write I get really obsessed with music. Really obsessed. When I wrote the first draft of the final battle sequence in The Gates of Nottingham, I listened to Lux Aterna, from the soundtrack of Requiem for a Dream on repeat for hours until I was finished. I listened to The Pet Shop Boys for two weeks while I wrote a hundred page section of So Many Secrets. I’m not even going to tell you about how my ears bled from listening to Shout, by Tears for Fear. Most of the time, the music I get obsessed with and that I later associate with certain parts of my books has absolutely nothing to do with the story or the characters. It is a completely random association.

Right now I am binging on three of Adele’s songs (she’s amazing, by the way; believe the hype), along with Sam Cooke, Nat King Cole, and the Mamas and the Papas.  I suppose that the base of it is the mood that the music creates. When I wrote the Northman screenplay, I listened to Sweet Dream by Beyonce. Normally, there is no way I will listen to hip hop, but it was the perfect mix of romantic lyrics and a choppy, almost violent beat.

Am I the only one who does this? Do any of you get completely obsessed with strange songs like this? Seriously, I need to know if I’m a freak.