Sunday, July 29, 2018

novel status, life status

Greetings! I'm nearly done with drafting my new novel, the World War II thriller. I'll be revising it in September, and then I'm not 100% sure what I'll be doing with it. My stand-alone books don't sell all that well on Amazon (and hardly ever on other platforms), so I might try marketing it directly to publishers instead. I'll cross that bridge when I come to it.

After that, I'm not sure what I'll be writing. I have a lot of ideas, so whatever appeals to me at that moment.

Otherwise, I'm busy being a new homeowner. The lawn (which, by the way, I hate with the force of a thousand suns!) takes up about four hours a week. My vegetable garden is a much happier endeavor, and I enjoy the bit of self-reliance it provides. I have enough yard that I could be quite self-reliant. I live in a country-ish area that still has regulations but allows five hens per home with sufficient space. I also have 1/3 of an acre, and you can grow a lot of fruit and vegetables on that. Were I to convert the lawn to all vegetable and fruit garden, I could survive for at least nine months of the year.

Although, with the fight I had with cabbage beetles on my bok choi, I'd have to quit eating foods in that family, for sure.

Some cheap phone/ too blurry pictures of the state of my veggie garden a week ago. Potatoes (planted late), cherry tomatoes (coming in well now), regular tomatoes (barely approaching orange), bell peppers, squash. That poor pepper plant was transplanted three times, uprooted by a raccoon and dragged 20 feet across my sister's deck, and then a big tomato plant in a cage fell over on it in a bad storm, smashing it flat to the ground, and somehow it still is making peppers.

I promise to try and be more like that pepper plant!






Sunday, July 22, 2018

My books are now for sale most places

As we say in the business, I've "gone wide," which about where my books are available to purchase--widely, at most vendors. I'm still working on Google Play but hope to be there soon.

You can find my books under this name at:

Barnes and Noble
iTunes/Apple
Kobo
Tolino
Indigo
Angus and Roberson

and even Overdrive, so you can request them through your library if it uses Overdrive. Here is a link to one that has every link in one place except for Amazon.

https://www.books2read.com/u/31xKKW

To have the right to put my books out there for more readers, I had to give up Kindle Unlimited for good, but with the problems (including quality problems) there, it's a wise move. I'm sorry if that hurts my readers.

Sunday, July 15, 2018

The Pain of Writing Violent Fiction

It is hard for me to live in a world of violence, cruelty, and grief, even if that world is only imaginary. And yet fiction is about struggle and conflict. Often the conflict escalates to violence.

Yes, a few genres, like cozy mysteries (with the murder safely off-stage) and sweet romances (with the conflict about what’s keeping the lovers apart) don’t have that level of conflict or risk or resulting pain. But the ones I read and the ones I write do.

Amazon has, over the 4+ years I have been self-publishing there, made it harder to sell books if you write two a year. You have to write five or six a year to stay visible in the charts, and that’s extremely difficult to do. Readers can read a book in a day or two and think it feels “too short,” but the 75,000 words I wrote took to provide that experience took me considerably longer than a day or two to write. After closing a book of mine, you get to hug your kid and dog and cook up a nice stir-fry. Day after day, I'm mired in my creation.

During the writing, and the editing, often without vacation time between, I’m thinking about pain and terror and loss. With post-apocalyptic fiction, I’m glancing off: “oh right, and six billion other people are dead too” but I notice it. It wears on me, which is why I don’t write only post-apocalyptic with its endless fight to just survive, which I have to feel too in order to make you the reader feel it.

Right now, I’m writing about Nazis in France in 1944 and the brave spies of the Resistance and SOE who worked against them. The research alone is horrifying. I was not even looking for horrors one day a couple weeks back (sometimes I must, but not that day) and found a list of known SS officers on Wikipedia. If they knew what atrocities each had committed, they listed it in a simple sentence.

Glancing through them (I was only hunting for a rank!) was like being smacked in the gut with a baseball bat. One Nazi concentration camp doctor who had literally hundreds of recently dead Jews (disease, overwork, shot trying to escape) available for study had 86 relatively healthy ones gassed so he could study their skeletons. And briefly, there was a museum of them. (I didn’t follow up, but I know the Nazis pretty well by now and am guessing it was to “prove” they were an “inferior race” through some nonsense about bone measurements, and the museum was provided so other Nazis could walk through the horrific display and nod about how "right" they were about that. Spoiler alert: they were wrong, dead wrong. No group of humans is inferior to some other group. Period.)

mass grave #3 at Bergen-Belsen


This research actually hurts. It hurts worse because I worry about the state of the world today. It hurts because I must think about very real dangers and terrors and possible outcomes for my characters, who I come to almost believe are real, must become them with their terror, must witness what they witness--and then describe it all. And then edit those words. And then proofread those words. Day after day after day.

I’m glad I’m writing this book, and I think it will be a page-turner and moving to read. But I’ll also be glad to see the end of it.

Sorry to complain. I know I’m not digging ditches during the hot summer for a living, that I sit in air conditioned comfort and type, but there are other strains than back strains. I’m feeling more than a bit strained right now.

Thank you for listening.

Sunday, July 8, 2018

Camp Nano

I take part in April and July in Camp Nano, a social writing event that was created by the National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo) folks. It is a chance to hang out with other writers struggling as I am, feeling the same highs of the good days when a cascade of words effortlessly flows from you (and it feels like merely through you at times), and frustrations of the days when either life intervenes and no words are possible, or the days when, despite several free hours to write, you have to squeeze each syllable out as if lancing a painful boil.

In virtual “cabins” we drop by and post, as if on any social media, and respond to other people posting. As the de facto leader of this months’ cabin, I make sure to drop by twice a day at least. (I really am not the leader in any sense but I know how to work the interface and was willing to take on the extra few hours of administrative tasks. We're equals there.)

I know writers know all this, but readers don’t, so let me describe some of what gets posted.

  • One person doubts her ability to write at all
  • Another person doubts the project she has committed to is the right project to be working on
  • Another is in love with the research but admits loves the writing less
  • To that, someone responds that they always like having written but don’t love writing
  • The next one says she loves drafting but hates rewriting
  • Someone pops in to announce that house guests have stayed two days too long and she can’t get rid of them and wants to strangle them for taking up her writing time
  • Someone writes more than that day’s goal
  • And even the people who are fighting for every word congratulate them
  • In week three, someone who has been writing effortlessly inexplicably grinds to a halt
  • Everyone sympathizes, for we have all been there.
  • Someone makes a joke about the concept of this being a summer cabin, perhaps offering to make camp stew or s’mores for everyone to cheer us up "out by the lake"
  • Two people drop out quietly, possibly because they are ashamed they aren’t meeting a goal as everyone else seems to be -- or maybe we somehow offended them, but we’ll never know
  • Someone pops in to ask a question of craft
  • Someone else asks a research question. As we’re an international cabin, sometimes we can help each other understand our language or food or other parts of our home culture.

Writing is a solitary, sometimes even lonely, occupation; as a result, I keep some social connections alive with other writers to share the joys and pains of the work.