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Archive for April, 2012

I realized that I completely forgot my Wednesday check in last week. I posted something else on that day instead of my check in. Oh well, a missed check in every once in awhile won’t kill me.

I only managed to write 1538 words last week. That is NOT acceptable to me! There were a number of factors involved in my lack of productivity. One of them was a migraine that lasted off and on for two days. The off and on was because of taking medicine, then it wearing off. I also have a “bladder irritation”, which I’ve had before. So having those both at the same time, I was torn between taking medicine for one or the other, since neither medicine would work for both, and I shouldn’t take them together. So I decided to take care of both problems with a couple of doses of hydrocodone. LOL. It at least allowed me to get through a function at church Saturday afternoon and a birthday part Saturday night without moaning in pain. Okay, enough about that stuff! Maybe I sort of had excuses for lack of productivity with the health issues and having my son, his girlfriend, and her baby come to visit one night. Come on, who can write when there’s a baby to enjoy? Such a darling little one year old. 🙂

I’m going to have to buckle down and do what I’m supposed to this week. I need to set aside time for my WIP, time for formatting two books for print, and time for exercise. Wednesday and Thursday are both tied up with church classes until at least 8:00 PM. It’s hard to come in and make myself work on days when stuff is going on that late after I’ve worked all day. Maybe on those two nights, I can have abbreviated schedules where I work on each thing for half the time. That’s better than not doing it at all, right?

Are any of the rest of you struggling with juggling writing with other things? (Hey, did you see how I had rhyming words in that sentence???)

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Is there any doubt this man is a wonderful storyteller? I’m on disk 10 of a 25 disk set, and I’m going to have to recheck it out because there’s no way I can listen to something this long in three weeks just driving in my car. I find myself itching to hurry and get into my car at the end of the day so I can listen. Same thing in the mornings. This is one time I’m glad it takes me about 25 minutes to get to work!

When I first heard about this book, I thought “Okay, he’s going to try to stop Kennedy from getting shot. Interesting, I guess.” But I should have known this book was about so much more. The main character actually does more than that. I don’t know if the attempt to save Kennedy will be at the very end or if it will be sooner. Of course, I don’t know yet if he’s successful. But this book is not just about that. It’s about PEOPLE, just like Stephen King’s books always are. No matter how much STUFF happens in King’s books, they are always character driven in my opinion. You always get down into the heart and soul of King’s main characters. In this particular book, the MC goes through things that change him, but he does things he has to do. He’s a stronger man than he thought he could be. I LOVE this character, Jake Epping. I want so much for him to succeed because he goes through so much to get there. I don’t want to do any spoilers, so I can’t say too much more. I can say there’s kind of a butterfly effect going on in the book. VERY interesting.

One thing that I find amusing is how King can get by with things that everyone always tells authors NOT to do. I think the biggest thing is this. We are always told not to write anything that doesn’t “further the plot”. And yet, King does it all the time. And he makes it INTERESTING. He can throw things in a story that doesn’t really have to be there, but he puts it in there because he wants to. He can write about what people are eating and how good it tastes, but I get my hands smacked for it. Personally, when I read a book, I like to hear little side things that don’t necessarily matter to the plot but are interesting. So when Stephen King does it, I love it. And he gets by with it and people love him anyway. Because no matter what rules he might break (and I think he’s earned the right to break them by now), he’s still a great storyteller. And that’s what it all boils down to. Can you tell a good story? Do people want to hurry up and finish what they’re doing so they can get back to your book? That’s what it’s all about. That’s what it means to be a writer.

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I’ve been meaning to post about this for awhile, but I just keep forgetting. A few weeks back, Jimmy Thomas launched a new site for authors, cover artists, publishers, editors, readers, etc. to connect on a site dedicated to the romance novel industry. I was one of those who got to try it out ahead of time before its official launch, and I think it’s a great site. Jimmy is a professional with great business sense, and it shows. In other words, he’s not just a pretty face. (Although his face AND body are swoon worthy.) Jimmy has been on my last four covers (the Libby Fox novellas and the Libby Fox trilogy). My cover artist has been using his site Romance Novel Covers for the cover art. His new site is Romance Novel Center. One exciting thing about this site is that he’s eventually going to let us sell our ebooks directly from the site. I CAN’T WAIT for that to happen. Anyway, thank you, Jimmy for developing this site. I love it!

These are all Jimmy

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The Gnome has finally been released on Smashwords, Barnes & Noble, and Amazon. Yay!

One of my older books, Starfane, has had a sudden increase in sales. Not a huge increase, but enough to make me wonder what’s going on. I have never understood why certain books sell at certain times. Marketing would be so much easier, wouldn’t it.

Now it’s time to buckle down and work on my WIP that I stopped working on to publish The Gnome. Also, I’ve been abandoning my exercise routine, but I want to get that back on track this week.

How about the rest of you?

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The Gnome is finally available on Smashwords. The Gnome

Writing and editing this book has been a long and trying process. It was out of my normal genre, but I did it anyway. LOL. One of the things I worried about the most was how I would do on the action scenes. And the funny thing is, one of my beta readers said those were the parts she thought I excelled in. Go figure. I’m still really worried about how this book will be received. My two “author” beta readers both said they were always waiting to see what would happen next, so hopefully I can keep at least some people entertained. An “avid reader” beta reader really liked it, too. My other beta reader…I’m not too sure about. She really doesn’t like horror at all, but agreed to read this one since she’s read the rest of my books. She’s still waiting on the Christian romance I’m going to publish under a different name. That’s the kind of thing she likes. 🙂

Anyway, I’ve already revealed the cover, so I won’t put a huge picture in this post. Hopefully, Amazon will have it on their site tomorrow (they’re a lot faster than they used to be), and who knows about B & N. Now, it’s on to writing more on my WIP!

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Yesterday, I spent my lunch hour here at work editing The Gnome. I did this because I knew I wasn’t going to get to do it last night. Because I went to get an iPad! I’m so excited! I have the brand new one with the awesome graphics. I’ve never seen such a crystal clear display. I’ve already downloaded Words with Friends and a Bible app. Oh, and I loaded the iBook app and downloaded samples of my books to check the formatting. They looked great!

Here was one of my biggest concerns. I really wanted to be able to write on the iPad, too, so I could take it instead of my computer when I went out of town. But I didn’t know if I could export from the iPad to a Word document on my PC. I LOVE YouTube! I found a tutorial that showed that I could do just that. So I figure what I’ll do is export to a word document, fix any formatting problems, then copy/paste into my current WIP. What do you guys think? Do any of you work on the iPad sometimes, then on a PC sometimes? This process is probably easier if you have a Mac instead of a PC. 🙂

I hope to finish edits on The Gnome tonight or tomorrow night.

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Okay, here it is. LOL. A few of you wanted to see the cover now instead of waiting for the release. The cover was designed by my lovely cover artist Anya Kelleye

Soon to be released!

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As much as I would love to get more words written on my WIP, I realize that I need to finish my edits on The Gnome. I added another beta reader for this story, and she’s pretty tough. LOL. She makes some very valid points, though, so I’m trying to edit based on comments from two different beta readers. I’m just going chapter by chapter, first working on one beta’s suggestions, then going back and working on the other one. These two betas are authors. The other two were readers. I love getting four different points of view from four very different people. Neither of the two authors are commenting and suggesting about the same passages. So I really am getting totally different perspectives. I love it. 🙂

Anyway, my whole point is that I need to finish The Gnome before I can get as serious as I like about the other work. So I’m going to devote my writing time tonight on edits. I want to get this thing published this week if possible. I was really worried about this story since it was my first step into horror, although it’s not hard core horror by any means. But I’ve gotten favorable comments from beta readers, so I know that at least it’s not horrible. LOL I was waffling today about whether to go ahead and do a cover reveal or wait until it’s published. What do you all think? Should I go ahead and reveal the cover? And I also wanted to know if any of you have had to lay your WIP aside to finish edits on something else. Feedback, please!

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I think things at work have finally slowed down for me, so I’m not quite as tired every day. I plan to start getting back to more blog reading and commenting this afternoon.

I don’t know how many of you read my post about time vs. word count, so I’ll go over it quickly again here, since many ROW80ers don’t read blogs except for check ins on the linky tools. I’ve found that I need to change from word count goals to time goals. This came about because I sat in front of the computer the other day and couldn’t do anything but write a few words then change them around. I ended up with somewhere between 250-300 words that day instead of my 700+.So I decided I would start making myself sit down for at least 45 minutes a day and write…or at least try. I’m going to sit there no matter what happens. That time will be my writing time. I started that yesterday. I ended up writing for an hour and 15 minutes and wrote 1577 words (yeah, I know I’m not supposed to worry about word count, LOL). I think this method is going to work for me this round. I’ll do my 45 minutes whether I’m on a roll or whether I feel like I’m being imprisoned and tortured. 🙂

So how about the rest of you? Have you had to make any adjustments for this round? How did things go last week?

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In order to keep my sanity, I’m going to have to change my way of thinking about writing goals. This is why.

This new story that I was so enthusiastic about was going well, my word counts were above my goal every day that I wrote on the book. But I was skipping days because I WAS LAZY AND COMPUTER GAMES WERE CALLING MY NAME. It’s time to buckle down. I sat down one evening to write my 700 words…and they wouldn’t come. I wrote maybe three paragraphs, and I had to keep changing words around (which I almost never have to do), and I got frustrated that I couldn’t get my 700 words. But I did sit in front of the computer long enough to have done that if I hadn’t had such a hard time writing that night. So I’m going to switch my goals. I’m going to make myself sit down at the computer 45 minutes a day. If I write 500 words, 700 words, or 1000 words, I’m going to write SOMETHING. And if I get frustrated and can’t even manage more than 200 words, I still have to sit there in front of the computer until the time is up. It’s a matter of discipline to make yourself sit and write for a certain period of time. It’s not so much discipline, but inspiration (or lack thereof) when you’re shooting for a certain word count. Does that make sense?

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