Aug 20, 2006 | Uncategorized
We've already had this discussion here, but since it's an ongoing topic of concern to writers it's no surprise to run into it again. Alison Kent discusses new versus used books here.
No author would ever expect a reader to go hungry or be unable to put gas in her car or run short on day care dollars in order to buy new books. Not at all. That’s just not practical, and we authors living contract to contract are nothing if not frugally practical ourselves. As Vanessa Jaye says in the post I’m about to link to, a reader’s budget concerns will always trump an author’s need for earnings – as well it should! (And no one here is telling anyone else what to do. This is about consumer education, and consumers understand this.)
Aug 19, 2006 | Uncategorized |
I just found out that I'm going to be signing my story in STRONG CURRENTS 2 at Bestsellers Books and Music in downtown Honolulu on October 4th! I'm looking forward to it. Bestsellers is located on Bishop Street, in the financial district, and is very popular with the local crowd. The manager read the book and said he loved it. 🙂 Yippee!
Aug 16, 2006 | Uncategorized |
The rumored demise of the Harlequin Bombshell line is official. I'm afraid I contributed to the demise. 🙁 I read a couple of Bombshells and I liked them, but I kept forgetting to look for them because of the shelving. They should never have been treated like a category line, IMO! Some readers looking for romance were bound to get pissed off when they picked up a Bombshell because it was right next to a Blaze or an Intimate Moments.
In fact, that's pretty much how I read my first Bombshell. I knew it was going to have a kickass heroine, but I didn't realize the romance would be practically non-existent. I was disappointed about that, but still intrigued enough to think the line had a lot of potential. And let's face it, any line of books that promotes women as kickass movers and shakers in control of their own destinies is a GOOD THING. But I think Harl. failed in their marketing, quite honestly, and that's a disappointment.
Women, especially younger women, need to know that women can be bigger than life and more than the typical. Not that romance writers don't write wonderful women — they do — but sometimes it's good to see women acting in new and exciting ways. I think this is the biggest reason I'm disappointed in the line folding, and why I blame myself for not supporting it more actively.
Interestingly, and changing the subject a bit (found via Alison Kent) is this post by Bombshell author Stephanie Feagan, which has nothing to do with the line folding and everything to do with writing. Awesome, awesome advice!
These days, it’s just not good enough to finish a book, even if it’s good. It has to be AMAZING. Good won’t cut it. Read a lot, and be inspired – but write, every business day of the week – at least four hours a day – hopefully more. Treat this like a job, like it MEANS something, and put out a lot of work – a lot of material you can send, as soon as something comes back. Research the agents – find five you think would be a good fit for YOUR work, who are reputable, and query the hell out of them. Send proposals, not query letters. If they reject you, send something else – and keep sending something else until they like what you send. Once a project has made the rounds, retire it and send new material. If you write slow – that’s bullshit. Anyone can write fast – it’s a matter of practice, and trust me, if you make yourself write four hours, at least, every single day, you’ll write a LOT faster. If you don’t write for a month, then sit down and expect it to flow out of you, it won’t.
PBW also has some excellent advice here. How can you argue with this?
Every time being a writer is tough for you, it's teaching you something. It's testing you, too. This gig is a marathon, not a 100 yard dash. As you jog down the writing career road, you'll notice a lot of abandoned partial manuscripts tossed in the ditches. Those were written by everyone for whom the job got too difficult. They packed it in and went home to watch TV.
And, still on the same topic, I've seen lots of posts about the Nora Roberts interview in the August RWR. Man, it was FABULOUS, which is why everyone is talking about it. Nora tells it like it is, from committing yourself to the process because writing is a job to telling people not to bother you during working hours and being firm about it.
I've had people think, of course, that because I'm not going to a job every day I have plenty of time to do things. “Oh, ask Lynn — she doesn't work.” I don't have much problem saying no these days, though I have in the past gotten dragged into doing stuff because I felt like I could handle it in addition to my writing. I'm learning to say no more frequently, and I don't feel very guilty about it either.
On that note, I suppose I should go wrestle my manuscripts and see which one kicks me into gear. 🙂
Update: The Nora Roberts interview in the RWR is not online, of course, but here's a recent interview that is. It's not quite the same as the article directed toward writers, but Nora talks about her work ethic to this writer too. She's so inspirational! I was telling someone recently, can't remember who, how Nora came to a booksigning with some other authors in the mall I worked in. I'd just started to write romance, and I had no idea who these ladies were. This was in the early 90s, in MD, so Nora wasn't the powerhouse she is now. And I was too scared to talk to any of them. Dummy. 🙂
Aug 16, 2006 | Uncategorized |
I am a bad, bad webmistress. I realized that I haven't updated my website in about 6 months (until now, of course, though it's not quite finished). Sometimes I ask myself why I got the darn thing in the first place. Mostly, it was because I wanted to learn how to build a website. I like the one I did, but it's not perfect. In fact, I've already pretty much decided that unless I learn Dreamweaver, I'm getting a web designer when I sell a book. Because let's face it, there's a big difference between a professional site and one you threw together yourself, unless you happen to know a lot about HTML and all that. Which I don't, even though I change this blog a zillion times. 🙂
Do you have a website? Do you think it's necessary for writers these days? Can you jump the gun too much or is it a good idea to learn about maintaining a site before you sell that first book? Pros? Cons? I'm interested!
Aug 15, 2006 | Uncategorized |
I've been rereading two of my novels and trying to decide how to proceed. One clearly has very little happening. Oh, I thought it had plenty happening when I was writing it, but I can now see it ain't so. Heroine runs away from glam life, takes a wrong turn, and ends up in a tiny town on Maryland's Eastern Shore. Hero is a navy guy on leave. Hero has plenty of internal conflict to carry him along, and enough external as well. Heroine has, well, not much other than her desire to escape her old life for a while. Oh jeez. Cue a cabin romance, and the sparks fly.
But are they real sparks, or contrived ones by yours truly? I think the potential is there, I truly do, but I have to admit that I forced it. Not only that, I fell back on the first thing that came to mind when I wanted to introduce day-to-day conflict. Yes, the dreaded ex-girlfriend. OMG, what was I thinking?
On the other hand, I have a soft spot for this story. I conceived it in Germany. And I wrote the ending scene, which is very rare for me, after only about 30 pages. The final scene takes place in Hawaii. The spooky thing is that I had no earthly idea I'd ever live in Hawaii when I wrote it. I just saw the scene, clear as day, and wrote it. And I've never wavered from it either.
But how to fix a book like this? Clearly, it needs to be ripped apart and rewritten. I'm just not sure I have the vision for it yet.
The other book I'm looking at is my contest finalist, Seducing Evangeline. Yes, with an editor request in the wings, yours truly hit the brick wall of fear and procrastination. Some of it was brought on by the thesis, of course. But not all of it. I kind of feel like Jennifer Apodaca over at Murder She Writes, though I can't really compare not revising and finishing a book to her dilemma. It feels the same to me, but of course I can admit that hers is bigger and more interesting. Turning down a chance to appear in an anthology with a NYT bestseller? But, her reasons are understandable, and it all works out for her in the end.
I could wish for such a choice myself, but it's obvious I'm not ready for that kind of challenge just yet. It is my intention to be ready, though, and every day is a day I need to work toward my goals.
I read a quote recently in one of hubby's resume books: “People who wait for all conditions to be perfect before acting, never act.”
Yikes.
(Yes, I changed the blog again. I was tired of looking at the dropped Gs hanging there in the header. No doubt, I'll change it again and again. It's the Virgo in me, and also, sadly, a hint of my character when it comes to my fiction. Never happy. Never.)
Aug 10, 2006 | Uncategorized |
I'm sitting here at sort of loose ends, thinking about my stories in progress and hoping the thesis doesn't come back with big changes. Finishing that thesis freed me in so many ways and yet, here I sit, staring at the screen, tinkering with a novel I finished two years ago but never finished revising, and thinking about other stories I want to write. And it hits me that I've been tinkering, in one way or another, for years now. I finished the first novel, I sent it into the world, I got the rejections and the requests for more work. And of course I froze, life events taking me off in different directions than I'd anticipated.
But now I can't seem to ever let myself get to the stage of being satisfied with the work so that I'm forced to actually contemplate the submission process again. So long as I don't submit, by golly, I can't fail. Right?
Huh. Allison Brennan talked about that very thing over at Murder She Writes recently. (Yes, I'm late in reading it since it was posted last week, but good discussions are never stale.)
For thirtysome years, I wrote stories I never finished. I could argue that it was because I was young, immature, irresponsible, unmotivated, busy, yada yada, but those are all excuses. The truth is, fear kept me from getting to the end. If I finished a book, I would have to send it out, try to get published, and what if it was total dreck? (It was.)
Once I got over THAT fear–fear of rejection or fear that I couldn’t write myself out of a paper bag–other fears crept in. What if I entered a bunch of contests and never finaled? Well, I DID final . . . but I never came in first. What if I never sold? I did. What if I got published, but the books were a total failure? Well, my books did pretty good. What if my next book isn’t as good as the last? THE KILL hit #21 on the NYT expanded list . . . what if I never get that high again?
The difference between success and failure is not whether you hit lists or don’t hit lists; it’s not whether you sell or don’t sell. It’s whether you keep going . . . or
give up.
I have a billion and one ideas. And I'm positive none of them are ever good enough. I sometimes write ten pages, then go away to think about it, and never get back to the story. I have half a dozen files like this. And that's not even counting the short stories I get part way through before losing focus.
Obviously, I do finish some of what I write. I have 4 complete novels and one novella under my belt. I have published two short stories and quite a few articles. I can get the task done.
But part of my problem is knowing which direction to go in. I have two literary novels in progress, several romance ideas (as well as a few in various stages of progress), a couple of erotica ideas, and no idea which I should be pursuing.
And don't even get me started on the path to publishing I should take. Sometimes, I think I should explore the e-publishers, especially the RWA-approved ones, for a way to get started. But e-publishing still seems to have a whiff of non-respectability in some circles. I HAVE read some good e-books, books that you wonder why NY didn't buy them and authors so fabulous you can't believe they don't have a print contract yet. And then I've read some sample chapters that fall anywhere between boring to utter dreck. It's true that some (by no means all) e-pubs aren't known for their quality.
And yet writers have been picked up from e-pubs when NY came searching. And working with an e-publisher gives you some experience and a track record of some kind. Someone, and I forget who, in the NY world actually expressed that this could be a plus to them.
I get frozen when I start to consider the possibilities. Try to target category and build up from there? Bust out the gate with a big single title and try to sell that? Write those literary novels and go that route? Or head for the e-pubs and go from there?
Naturally, none of this means I'd get picked up anywhere, so please don't assume I'm saying it would be easy to do any of these things. It wouldn't be, of course. Some paths appear easier than others, it's true, but that doesn't make it so.
Of course I have an idea of how I'd like it to work for me. It involves print, a multi-book deal, and a medium range advance. But I know this may not be the case, and that's where I start to choke. Work on this idea or that idea? Target this market or that market?
Sheesh, it never ends, does it? Most importantly, and I do know this, is to write and finish books and then submit them. The best battle plan in the world won't work if you don't have the soldiers to back it up.
What about you? Do you have a plan? Are you where you want to be? Do you change the plan from time to time?
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