Archive for March, 2011

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Publishing Isn’t For Sissies: Indie Update–Read THIS!

Thursday, March 31st, 2011

It’s been a crazy few weeks in Indie publishing, so it’s time for a new PIFS Read THIS! How does a writer find your place in the midst of such rapid change? How does this affect readers, both now and down the road? Good news: the hardworking, talented author will still published, the reader will have great stories to read, and the publishing industry will continue, regardless of which book format prevails. More questionable news:no one really knows anything for sure right now, except that traditional publishers are behind the curve, still, and the top authors who are more savvy and willing to tolerate change for the chance to reach more readers and build more successful careers are leading the way.

My Reality Check post from two weeks ago is the top PIFS post so far. Agent Michelle Grajkowski will be back TOMORROW, to share more of her perspective, from an industry insider’s viewpoint.

In the mean time you might be asking, what do authors think? Well, here’s an author-driven Indie update, with links for you to follow to info and discussions from the last few weeks:

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Barry Eisler and Joe Konrath discuss Barry walking away from a $500k book contract to self publish.

In the Self Publishing Review, Eisler crunches numbers and breaks out why he can make more money digitally releasing his next book himself.

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Two-time RITA and best-selling romance author Connie Brockway’s made a similar decision–publishing future sequels to a best-selling series herself, after turning down her latest publishing contract offer.

Does this mean all authors are set? (more…)

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Posted in Publishing Isn't for Sissies | 2 Comments »

How We Write Wednesdays: Draft Done? The REAL Work begins!

Wednesday, March 30th, 2011

Rewwriting time! Jenni  and I have been taking planning for two months now on HoWW. How to craft characters . And let’s not forget plot, because Jenni gets cranky when we do, and you won’t like her when she’s cranky. Now, it’s time to rewrite, because as David Kaplan says in A Creative Approach to Writing and Rewriting Fiction, “The purpose of writing a story is to rewrite it.”

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Yep, that’s right. No book’s done with just a single draft in your pocket. Not even two drafts, if you aks me. You’re not done, just because you have your first thoughts down on paper (or in the computer). Once you’ve got that good stuff behind you, it’s time to make it even better!

Feeling a little cranky yourself yet?

Yeah, this motivational post is going to be a little heavier on the tough love than most.

Finishing  your first draft (and we’ll talk drafting in May), is just the beginning. It’s merely the end of your planning. For those of you who don’t outline your plot and character ahead of time (I’m shaking my head now. Can you hear the tense spots in my neck popping while I do it?), the draft is your only planning. But for even those of us who put serious thought into what we’re going to write before we actually do, we still don’t know for SURE what’s going to happen until that magical creative thing that is putting words onto paper happens, and the story itself takes over.

I’m a firm believer in the creative flow of drafting. The power of discovery. The synergy of planning and experience and momentum combining to create something magical. BUT… That something magical, that completed draft, is only the beginning. It’s not everything it could be. It’s not ready to leave your mind and your heart behind. It’s not all it can be. Which means, it’s time for the REAL work to begin…

Kaplan tells us that ”You need three things to be a good fiction writer…talent…a knowledge of craft…and just as necessary, a devotion to revision, to the merciless re-working of your writing until it is the best it can be.” And he (and Jenni and I) aren’t talking about looking for typos or grammar errors or tweaking your prose so it pops just so, though all that’s important eventually.

What I teach to craft students is re-writing, not copy editing or proof reading. Deconstructing what you’ve done. Figuring out why it works and why it doesn’t. Asking yourself questions like: (more…)

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Posted in How We Write | 8 Comments »

The Psychic Realm: Trending Topics

Tuesday, March 29th, 2011

I blog weekly about the Dream Theories behind my Secret Legacy and the rest of my paranormal fantasies. And about the Psychic Realm I’ve created for my characters’ world. When you  need another boost of psychic, paranormal, fantasy fun, check out my Psychic Realm Daily! Another paper that pulls articles and links and so forth from my social media feeds.

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Link to the paper and it’s stories here.I started building the content, because I wanted to keep up with trending topics in psychic phenomenon. Now, you can too ;o)

To subscribe to it or any of the other digital papers I’ll regularly feature (click back to yesterday’s post to peak at my Sci-Fi/Fantasy Daily),  navigate to each of the papers’ Headlines page and click the Subscribe button.

Then navigate around the paper using the top menu and let me know what you think!

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Sci-Fi/Fantasy Daily

Monday, March 28th, 2011

I’m heads-down into promotion planning for Secret Legacy, and I’m psyched (no pun intended) about the cool opportunities out there to plug into social media and viral marketing. Including eNewsletters like my Sci-Fi/Fantasy Daily.

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It’s one of the ways I’m networking on Twitter and Facebook, by releasing daily glimpses of cool sci-fi/fantasy, psychic and paranormal articles and links shared by others in obsessed with the same topics. The format is fun and easy to read, very much like an digital newspaper. Well, actually, that’s exactly what these cool things are ;o)

I’ll be sharing them here throughout the next week or two, so you can hook up with the ones you like.

So for now, let me know what you think of my Sci-fi/Fantasy Daily.

Enjoy!

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Posted in The Psychic Realm | 1 Comment »

I Hear The Craziest Things: Apple wants to help you help them…

Sunday, March 27th, 2011

I’m typing on my new iPad. Call me a happy girl ;0)

But you know me well enough now. You’re expecting that’s not the end of this Sunday story. How much fun would that be, right?

There we are at the Apple Genius Bar, while this great kid, Adam, is showing me the standard bells and whistles of my new toy–which will replace my laptop for most travel and work I do away from home from now on.

He’s confident and in his element, as a genius should be, thinking I’m cute for saying I’m a GA Tech grad and know computers (at least IBM hardware and operating systems). He’s digging that I’m an author and asking me about what I write while he puts my new toy through it’s paces.

But here’s the thing, I say, pulling out my laptop. I need to pull MS Word documents from this to the iPad for travel, work on them while I’m gone, then port them back.

His cheerful enthusiasm dims just a little, (more…)

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Dream Theory: Interpreting dream time travel…

Friday, March 25th, 2011

It’s easy to forget our feelings. In fact, many of us prefer it. Except… Our dreams tend to take their own path when we sleep, and often they time travel–as my psychic twins experience all over again in Secret Legacy. Things that we’ve forgotten we’ve thought or felt in the past come back to us in our dreams. Something in life turns our mind back, and our sleeping world follows. There’s something we haven’t dealt with, something we must feel from that time.

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In Dark Legacy, yesterday dreams were how one twin (the psychotic one ;o) finds her sister again and begs for her help. You know, while she’s trying to kill her and everyone she feels has abandoned her to her terrifying gifts and the government scientists experimenting on them. In Book 2,  Secret Legacy, now that Sarah Temple’s free of her mad scientists and her mind is healing (or so she thinks), dreams from the past come for her again–only this time under someone else’s control. Discovering who’s using a secret child to send Sarah to the brink of madness once more becomes an odyssey in facing the past and the emotions and the near childhood breakdown she’s forgotten all these years is the only way she’ll save herself and her twin, the child whose amazing mind is being weaponized, and every dreamer that could become the next dream target.

Lucky for us, others aren’t driving what we remember in dreams (at least, most of the time they’re not). Unlucky for us, we don’t have a brotherhood of watchers helping us decode the symbols and images, the clues, our sleeping minds leave to help us figure out what we need to deal with so we can see more clearly how our past is forming our future.

Our dreams are, more often than not, showing us what’s happening in our subconscious  minds when we’re awake. (more…)

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Posted in Dream Theories, The Psychic Realm | 7 Comments »

Publishing Isn’t for Sissies: Build Your Community

Thursday, March 24th, 2011

I’m guest blogging today with Kelly L. Stone: When Hard Work Meets Reality…Which Yellow Brick Road Will You Choose? I loved hearing her speak recently, I love what she has to say about authors, and she’s just finishing up a 90-day writing challenge. So when she said, come on over, I couldn’t resist.

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The kind of community she’s building is an amazing things. She’s building the same type of support network we enjoy here, so head over and take a peak. I’m sharing a bit more of my journey this last year, and I’m encouraging her followers to find their unique path to staying motivated and determined and positive about their creativity.

In the ever-changing flux of our publishing industry, when we’re not analyzing and debating which way things are spinning, we have to daily plug into fresh inspiration. We must take care of our own. But even more, we cannot lose sight of the fact that the writing is the one thing that we alone control. Amidst all the change and the uncertainty and the trends and the latest surprises, we create, or we no longer have a job.

Join me at Kelly’s and share how you stay plugged into your muse.

Then come back to PIFS  next week, when Michelle Grajkowski of 3 Seas Literary joins us to give an agent’s inside perspective of the digital publishing wave and where it’s taking us and our stories, both now and into the future!

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Posted in Publishing Isn't for Sissies | No Comments »

How We Write: Our Secret–Plot, Revise, Plot, Revise…

Wednesday, March 23rd, 2011

The REAL secret to writing best selling novels… That’s what Jenni and I are talking about on How We Write. And what we’re saying is, THERE IS NO SHORT CUT. Eh-hem. Sorry, didn’t realize I was yelling.You might have noticed by now that this sort of thing torks me a bit. Folks who give/sell sure-fired advice, keys to the kingdom, THE WAY to your published Eden. They don’t often work. They tend to demotivate over time, not lead us closer to our overall objective–success.

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Too often once you follow these ten easy steps, you realize there’s nothing of substance on the other side. And the guru you’ve gotten the list from has mysteriously moved on to giving advice like “how to be the most popular tweeter on the planet,” and you begin to realize that this person’s objective is to give advice. Because THAT’S what he/she thinks will make them a best selling author. God forbid that the person giving advice about writing personally follow through on any of what he/she’s saying and get back to writing novels themselves.

I exaggerate. There’s some great advice out there, and you should soak it all in. But always remember that this is work. This isn’t a race. And you can’t force your way into being “successful” at it by following a set of rules that promises to be the answer to all your problems.

We’re not selling quick and easy in HoWW. We’re talking about our processes (because Jenni’s is different than mine), and how you need to discover your own. We spent a month exploring what character means to a real, in-progress novel. March has been about plotting and structure, and Jenni wraps up the discussion by touching once more on narrative structure, and going just a little deeper than before. But she’s also ranting, like me ;o) Because the point we try to make in each post is that narrative structure and conflict lock and character plotting and so forth are just frameworks in which your story needs to work. They’re NOT your story, and too many people will tell you differently, and that gets us cranky.

Your story is what happens on the page and in the reader’s mind, once the list of things that makes a good story, mechanically, are taken care of. (more…)

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Posted in How We Write | 5 Comments »

Waterfall Challenge: Stonewall Falls

Tuesday, March 22nd, 2011

Stonewall Falls is a shy, flickering interior cascade I almost didn’t achieve. Almost… Some miracles take their time unfolding. They hide. They challenge the determined heart. Everything that could stop you bars your path, while magic lies just beyond your grasp.

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“…a very easy cascade for waterfall watchers to visit while in Clayton…” says Boyd of Stonewall Falls (p. 107).

Difficulty of hike?

Easy.

Stream flow?

Medium.

Rating?

Good.

“Why not tack it onto the end of my hiking day,” I say to myself as I read.

Then again, the printed guide I’m using is a decade old, and even then it was a reprint.

If you’re local to the area and have a four wheel drive truck, I’m sure you could persuade yourself that this is an easy-to-get-to destination. Actually, this day I’m not sure at all. The park service has let things go a bit. Mostly, I suspect, because, as Boyd says, the area is a mecca for “campers and mountain bikers…” Not the pickiest lot, when it comes to the upkeep of their outdoor pleasures.

You get the idea. The dirt path I’m driving comes equipped with pot holes the size of the front of my car. Steep uphills and drops greet me, where rain and run off have made things steeper and more nerve-wracking. Nifty, not-so-little turns lead to near-blind hazards. Maybe this destination and I aren’t meant to be? (more…)

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Revising a Year: Rachel Zoe and Absolute Clarity

Monday, March 21st, 2011

What does it mean to be a working artist? What does it take to succeed? How do you distinguish yourself above all others who do what you do every day? Writers write for the same reason they breath (we have to, or we won’t survive). But some make it to “another level” and others don’t. Why?

We’re taking a break today from our regular blog rotation to dip our toes back into Revising a Year.I don’t post to this category as much, because it’s a more personal journey, I think. And because I’m working each day on looking forward more than back, and revisions always insist on looking back. It just so happens that this morning is one of those mornings that things were piling up and I was losing my cool and needed a break, so I tracked down a Hollywood Reporter article I’d been meaning to read about a celebrity I’m fascinated (okay, obsessed) with–celebrity stylist Rachel Zoe.

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Poke fun if you must, but she’s created an empire where others have sunk, she’s at the top of her game professionally, and, having a baby at near-40, her life is changing at the zenith of her career… Oh, and I LOVE shoes and clothes and fashion talk of all kinds, so she’s on my radar, and by association, yours.

Rachel Zoe is the fashion styling equivalent to a top, #1 NYT Best Selling Fiction author. Everyone’s watching her, many want to be her, her faithful can’t wait to see what she comes up with next so they can indulge, but no one’s really sure how she got to be where she is in her career.

I’m not saying that’s the type of success I aspire to (I’m more concerned with finding balance these days and slowly building to a place where I can enjoy everything about my life, including publishing my novels, while not sacrificing any of the things that are important to me). It’s clear from watching RZ’s reality show how much she’s had to give up to attain the “freakish” success that she has. But… (say what you will about the frivolousness of her occupation, if you’re so inclined to negative speak the fashion industry that inspires so many, like me ;o) this woman’s business savvy is part of what’s gotten her to the extreme side of “making it” that few will ever reach.

I’m ready to add whatever wisdom I can from her journey to mine as I revise. I thought perhaps you might be, too, whatever your 2011 goals might be.

I’d give you a link to the article, but adding it to my blog means The Hollywood Reporter takes over my site…Really? So just google and you’ll find your way over.

Meanwhile, here are some excerpts and my thoughts (using a few “zoe-isms” along the way to keep things fun):

“The secret to Rachel’s success is the absolute clarity of her taste and her uncynical passion for fashion,” Harper’s Bazaar editor in chief Glenda Bailey says… Yes, it’s a bit too catchy a quote, but reread it and really think about the terms clarity, taste and passion. (more…)

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Posted in Anna's "Soul of the Matter" | 4 Comments »

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