Thirteen Names I’ve Acquired

In 50 years, I’ve been called a lot of things, some of which I can’t share.
1. Terry
2. Therese
3. Mary
4. Ciar
5. Noodle head
6. Terrydactyl (my father’s nickname for me, my favorite)
7. Dactyl
8. Love
9. BB (after the Blonde Bombshell)–don’t ask
10. Bubbles (after I swallowed soap and blew bubbles out of my nose)
11. Moogly
12. Dude
13. Mary Therese (that one drills horror into my heart, the voice of my mother and various nuns telling me that I’ve done something wrong).

Good News Tuesday!

Post it all! A successful barbecue, a new dress, a book contract! Anything goes.

In a Word

Stolen from Jaci Burton, who pinched it herself. Feel free to add yours here or steal. One word answers only!

1. WHERE IS YOUR CELL PHONE?: purse
2. RELATIONSHIP?: solid
3. YOUR HAIR?: short
4. WORK?: tomorrow
5. YOUR SISTER?: none
6. YOUR FAVORITE THING?: Moose
7. YOUR DREAM LAST NIGHT?: long
8. YOUR FAVORITE DRINK?: coffee
9. YOUR DREAM CAR?: Jag
10. THE ROOM YOU’RE IN?: den
11. YOUR SHOES?: None
12. YOUR FEARS?: dying
13. WHAT DO YOU WANT TO BE IN 10 YEARS?: writer
14. WHO DID YOU HANG OUT WITH THIS WEEKEND?: Moose
15. WHAT ARE YOU NOT GOOD AT?: relaxing
16. MUFFIN?: bleck
17. ONE OF YOUR WISH LIST ITEMS?: house
18. WHERE YOU GREW UP? Baltimore
19. LAST THING YOU DID?: cereal
20. WHAT ARE YOU WEARING?: shorts
21. WHAT AREN’T YOU WEARING?: gown
22. YOUR PET?: cat
23. YOUR COMPUTER?: dude
24. YOUR LIFE?: changing
25. YOUR MOOD?: curious
26. MISSING?: Mom
27. WHAT ARE YOU THINKING ABOUT RIGHT NOW?: family
28. YOUR CAR?: Saturn
29. YOUR KITCHEN?: spotless
30. YOUR SUMMER?: starting
31. YOUR FAVORITE COLOR?: sage
32. LAST TIME YOU LAUGHED?: Moose
33. LAST TIME YOU CRIED?: dunno
34. SCHOOL?: lots
35. LOVE?: Moose

Musings on Epublishing–How to Catch Sound with a Butterfly Net

You’d be hardpressed to visit a romance blog these days without some mention of epublishing. While the angles are different, some common themes have emerged. Is epublishing “real” publishing (of course). Is the quality worse than what I’ll simply lump together at New York publishing (sometimes yes, sometimes no). What are the benefits of epublishing (pushing boundaries comes up a lot)? Financially, a few folks say they make more money at it than with their new print careers.

While I haven’t been at it as long as some, I think one problem is that this is a quickly changing marketplace. I worked at a large print publisher (nonfiction) as it took a huge hit from the Internet (free information) revolution. While companies tried to adjust, everyone ran around like headless chickens.

Romance writers are in different stages, have different goals, and different abilities–the range is huge, right? So advice for one doesn’t necessarily apply to everyone. I’ve been trying to pull out the nuggets that may help me. I’m employed with a day job, don’t write the super hot stuff, and am trying to sort out the NY vs. epubbing thing.

Of course, the decision will be made for me if I don’t write a book that catches the eye of a NY house or agent. It seems to be getting harder to figure out what that book might be. So, you write from your heart, do the best you can, and keep growing.

Then, the epubbing as a career question. It seems to work well for some. I will add that it seems to work very well for those who write the hot stuff. The really hot stuff. Pushing boundaries.

So those of us who write explicit yet perhaps not boundary-pushing romance are left wondering…a lot of things. Epubbing gives you an amazing ability to cross genres, which is a huge help to para/fantasy/contemporary/whatever folks like myself. Epublishing editors get this genre crossing well, the readers seem to get it well. They seem to love it, in fact.

What do you think? Where do you belong? Why? And will the picture be the same in a few years, or months, or even weeks?

The Start of Summer

Ah, summer at the Jersey Shore. We probably won’t fight the traffic, but I do like this holiday. Alas, I often forget why we have it, so in a very pedantic mood (how unusual), I give you:

The first national celebration of the holiday was held at Arlington National Cemetery on May 30, 1868. Approximately 5,000 people gathered around the veranda at Arlington Mansion, and after listening to speeches the visitors, including children from the Soldiers’ and Sailors’ Orphans Home, walked through the cemetery placing flowers on the graves of Union and Confederate soldiers.

Although the gathering at Arlington Cemetery may have been the first formal recognition of Memorial Day, records show that southern women already had adopted the practice of decorating the graves of war dead by 1865. In April 1866, the women’s memorial association in Columbus, Mississippi, decorated the graves of Union and Confederate soldiers there. After learning of their tribute, Horace Greeley, publisher of the New York Tribune, printed an editorial praising the event, and soon the practice of placing flowers on soldiers’ graves became popular throughout the recently reunited nation. Other towns, notably Waterloo, New York, and Boalsburg, Pennsylvania, also lay claim to being the first to celebrate Memorial Day; in fact Boalsburg bases its claim on an October 1864 observance.

Memorial Day observances have undergone many changes over the years. Initially May 30th was known as Decoration Day and recognition was limited to those who died during the Civil War. By the end of the 19th century, the name had changed to Memorial Day, and ceremonies marking the solemn event were held across the country. After World War I, Memorial Day was expanded to honor all those who had died in America’s wars. Finally, in 1971 the federal government changed the observance from May 30th to the last Monday in May to create a three-day weekend. Several states still continue to celebrate Memorial Day on May 30th.

Before EPublishing, Before FanFic, In the Beginning…

There was Mark Twain. And it was good. And God looked down on the Earth and said “Let there be books.” And He left Mark Twain in charge of writing all the good ones.

There’s all this jazz about whether epubbed writers can call themselves writers. I think it’s all about self-perception. Are you a writer when you get paid for it? When you put pen to paper? When you call yourself one? Are you a musician if you play a guitar in your bedroom (only). Or if you’ve had one gig at which you made $20? Or do you have to be Eric Clapton?

Who knows. Who cares. You’ll never get respect from everyone, so give it to yourself. Write to your heart’s content. Write what you like. Or write for the “market” of your choice, if that works for you.

But by all means, DO NOT skip the following. Mark Twain is my muse.

“I conceive that the right way to write a story for boys is to write so that it will not only interest boys but strongly interest any man who has ever been a boy. That immensely enlarges the audience.”

“Experience of life (not of books) is the only capital usable in such a book as you have attempted; one can make no judicious use of this capital while it is new.”

“Well, my book is written–let it go. But if it were only to write over again there wouldn’t be so many things left out. They burn in me; and they keep multiplying; but now they can’t ever be said. And besides, they would require a library–and a pen warmed up in hell.”

“I wrote the rest of The Innocents Abroad in sixty days and I could have added a fortnight’s labor with the pen and gotten along without the letters altogether. I was very young in those days, exceedingly young, marvelously young, younger than I am now, younger than I shall ever be again, by hundreds of years. I worked every night from eleven or twelve until broad daylight in the morning, and as I did 200,000 words in the sixty days, the average was more than 3,000 words a day- nothing for Sir Walter Scott, nothing for Louis Stevenson, nothing for plenty of other people, but quite handsome for me. In 1897, when we were living in Tedworth Square, London, and I was writing the book called Following the Equator, my average was 1,800 words a day; here in Florence (1904) my average seems to be 1,400 words per sitting of four or five hours.”

“You need not expect to get your book right the first time. Go to work and revamp or rewrite it. God only exhibits his thunder and lightning at intervals, and so they always command attention. These are God’s adjectives. You thunder and lightning too much; the reader ceases to get under the bed, by and by.”

“The time to begin writing an article is when you have finished it to your satisfaction. By that time you begin to clearly and logically perceive what it is that you really want to say.”

“To get the right word in the right place is a rare achievement. To condense the diffused light of a page of thought into the luminous flash of a single sentence, is worthy to rank as a prize composition just by itself…Anybody can have ideas–the difficulty is to express them without squandering a quire of paper on an idea that ought to be reduced to one glittering paragraph.”

“Let us guess that whenever we read a sentence & like it, we unconsciously store it away in our model-chamber; & it goes, with the myriad of its fellows, to the building, brick by brick, of the eventual edifice which we call our style.”

“I notice that you use plain, simple language, short words and brief sentences. That is the way to write English – it is the modern way and the best way. Stick to it; don’t let fluff and flowers and verbosity creep in. When you catch an adjective, kill it. No, I don’t mean utterly, but kill most of them – then the rest will be valuable. They weaken when they are close together. They give strength when they are wide apart. An adjective habit, or a wordy, diffuse, flowery habit, once fastened upon a person, is as hard to get rid of as any other vice.”

I’m Hopeless

If someone would have told me three or four years ago that I’d have a Myspace page, a blog, a website, a loop, and be surfing for my own reviews, I would have told them to take some meds, but not Cymbalta, because that makes you hear demons. (Seriously, folks, watch out for that one.)

I cannot seem to keep up. How the hell do these people do it? Friggen superwomen! I popped in at Angie James’ blog as I often do and read via a link a recap of last week’s Triskelion thingie, well more about the subsequent “are ebook writers actually writers” follow-up thingie. (Yes, they are, but I’m not sure about this whole writing ebooks to get ready for NY thing and I’m not brave enough to talk about it.)

How do these things get going and take on a life of their own? Maybe I move in small circles.

Anywho, from there, I was led to another spot that reminded me that Nora has a book coming out, which reminded me of her comments on Smart Bitches, which made me stop there. Then I remembered that I don’t want to stop there anymore because they made me mad (boohoo) and so I stopped at Triskelion to see if I could find Gail’s address. I can almost remember it, but it’s probably changed. Then I realized I wouldn’t quite know what to say, so I clicked on my Amazon sales, which is a very depressing OCD thing to do.

From there, seriously weighing the whole Cymbalta side effects again, I scurried over to Romance Divas because there’s usually someone who needs a “rah” or an “I’m sorry,” and I usually get a smile or feel connected. I saw a note there that said Samhain authors are chatting somewhere today, and so I f’d that up AGAIN because I didn’t log on until an hour ago.

In desperation to feel in control (don’t ask me why this might help), I went to Myspace and checked compulsively to see if I have more “friends.” You know, the other authors who are pushing their books and not interested in yours? Yes, a few more of them. Good. Feeling a little better for no good reason, I open my email and YAY, I really like the new cover for Key West Magic, another great job by Anne Cain! Woohoo. Then I realized that my manuscript for Key West Magic is open on my computer, and I’ve only reworked about a page of it. That was an hour ago. WTF?????? Full circle back to Gail, who edited the original, and the whole train of thought kinda starts over.

I haven’t bothered to go to my own Yahoo loop, because I can’t think of anything to say today. Now it’s time to cook dinner, and I got a page reworked.

Please, I’m Hopeless. I need a keeper.

Thought for women

Have you ever read poems, or quotes, and they pass by you like flies or mosquitoes, and you swat them away in recognition that they may apply to some, but they aren’t for you? And then, years later, you see them anew. Why? Because you’re ready. One such poem, as I steel myself for the big 5-0, suddenly hit me in the gut today. What are you waiting for? How about you, friend who is even younger than me? Why not get a head start?

WARNING
: : By Jenny Joseph

: : When I am an old woman I shall wear purple
: : With a red hat which doesn’t go and doesn’t suit me.
: : And I shall spend my pension on brandy and summer gloves
: : And satin sandals, and say we’ve no money for butter.
: : I shall sit down on the pavement when I’m tired
: : And gobble up samples in shops and press alarm bells
: : And run my stick along the public railings
: : And make up for the sobriety of my youth.
: : I shall go out in my slippers in the rain
: : And pick the flowers in other people’s gardens . . .

: : But maybe I ought to practice a little now?
: : So people who know me are not too shocked and surprised
: : When suddenly I am old, and start to wear purple.

Good New Monday!

Please do share you good news! Plant any flowers? Finish a book? Let us know!

Sunday Musings–The Demise of Helpful Snark

It’s my writing day, and whoa, already 2pm. I like to get things going on Sundays with a good cuppa, maybe a cookie (seriously), and newly manicured nails. I have the coffee.

I’m been lightening up on my surfing recently, and I noted this morning with dismay that Ms. Snark, the literary agent, is abandoning her blog. Killer Yap will evidently screen all calls. This was one snark spot that I found funny, helpful, helpful, and helpful. Now we’re left with self-serving spots that claim to be snarkilicious, but are merely the romance writing community equivalent of “Entertainment Tonight.” Jerking off one’s ego in public. If you disagree with them, you’re not cool.

What am I going to do with this extra time, now that I’ve sworn off personal review sites (except for the ever classy Laurie Damron–see her link to the right somewhere)? Write, read, watch House MD reruns, get even geekier over Ghost Hunters’ return with new episodes.

Got me thinking about what would happen if your book was never, ever, reviewed anywhere. I think I’d like to try it on my next one and see if it makes any difference at all? Readers say they don’t care about reviews. I’m still not convinced. Hey, I pick books based on the cover, so what do I know?

I’ve actually met some cool folks on Myspace! I didn’t think it was possible. Aspiring and published writers, readers, musicians, even corresponded with one of my favs! I’m always late to the party.

I’ve been playing a game with the ladies at my local bookstore. I take the two copies of Lords of Ch’i off the romance shelf and stick them in the fantasy section (where in my opinion it belongs). I come back the next weekend, and they are shelved perfectly back in the romance section. They know I’m doing this–the manager waves and smirks when I enter the store (a really nice lady who asked me to do another signing). I hope she’s still working there when I write a book that must be shelved under fantasy. (Currently in the slushpile with an agent, but hey, one can dream.)

How are you today?