.

June 29, 2011

The pitfalls of Cover design.

The pitfalls of Cover design.

Cover design for me is coming parallel with block design and I haven’t given enough attention to Lex who is designing the cover.  I think she is trying to see if I am awake.
A great design arrived this morning with the following back text.  I honestly wish I could actually use it.  Hmmm.  I just might.

FE Booker is a cool lady who you will enjoy reading about.  She’s very, very cool and funny and also snarky.  She has horses, and she does things with them.  Then she falls for a hot guy who happens to be her vet.  Then some tack gets stolen and, unrelatedly, she breaks her ankle.  She’s pretty pissed about that, but thinks turn out alright in the end.
This is obviously not real copy.  “But maybe there will be a quote here, or something about a liverwurst stealing dawg.”

Christina Wible has been writing books since she could spell but this is the second that is being published.  She wishes she could say that she had only researched on paper the parts of this book that involve horse semen.
Please buy her book, as she has quit her job and is now broke.

June 22, 2011

The unbearable lightness of unemployment

Permit me today a digression into the life of a soon to be full time writer. Today I quit my day job.  Well, I mentally quit a while back, but today I walked up to my boss and handed in my resignation.
Don’t get me wrong, I liked my day job and most of the people I worked with.
But it was interfering with the time I wanted to spend writing.  I had, by saying I had too much to do at work, a built-in excuse for not writing.  I’m shedding that excuse and paring my life down to the bare bones of simply being able to put fingers to keyboard whenever the spirit moves me.  And whenever the plumber is not unclogging the sink.
Easy for you to say.
Well, it wasn’t easy.  Having a day by day job allows you a little socialization that you don’t always get sitting at home at the keyboard and talking to the statue of Buddha on the floor next to you.
The gift it does give is freedom.  Freedom from intraoffice politics that sap my strength.  Freedom from having to be in bed by 11PM if I want to get up and go to work at 5AM even if my inner muses are all night owls. Freedom to really understand what drives me to scribble in the dead of night.
The drawbacks are obvious.  I’m going to be poor and in debt.  I’ve reworked my budget innumerable times.  I’m already poor and in debt.  I’m just going to be poorer and more in debt.
But I have dreamed, since I started writing when I was 14, of being free to do this.
As so many pundits have said “life is a journey”  I’ve stopped living it one stupid day at a time, resentful of every time I got in the car and slogged to work. I am now going to inhale it in big gulps grateful for every single one of those breaths. 
Or at least I think I will .  After July 14th.

June 11, 2011

I've been Kindleblogged

I've been Kindleblogged! (Apologies to those I'm FB spamming but I'm excited!) I've blogged in the past about the difficulties establishing a following when you are a self-published author. Kindle Author provides some outside exposure for those publishing on the Kindle platform. And, as a self-published author there is no reason you shouldn't publish on Kindle!

Click here to see my interview.

Sometimes ADD is a good thing!

Recently I was asked (as a facebook question) “What is your ideal writing environment?” and I responded thusly:  My ideal would be to sit here at home at a desk I already have set up and type away. My muse hates my desk. Lately the only place that I can write is at my desk at work which means stolen moments and a lot of incomprehensible prose.”

Actually I CAN write anywhere.  Because I am ADD (but not ADHD) I used to find it pure torture to sit in a classroom and listen to a professor.  In my later days of degree collecting I spent four years in a school where classes were given in the evening (very convenient for those of us who were working full time) and once a week.  The latter meant that I would spend three hours a night in the same professor’s class and do this three times over each week. 

As you can imagine, with ADD I should have been climbing up the walls.  And I would have been if it had not been for the fact that I was ambidextrous.  I would sit at my (smallish) student desk with two pads of yellow legal paper and two pens.  With my left hand I would write novels.  With my right hand I would take notes. 

Now I’m not going to tell you I was so good as to be able to do those two tasks simultaneously, but I used up a lot of yellow legal pads.

Only one novel remains from those days.  The rest of the stuff was unmitigated blather.  BUT, I did find out that you can write anywhere and everywhere.  I can sit down in a library, I can write waiting for my oil change, I can type reports at work and write novels split screen.

So when someone tells me that they have to be in complete silence and have all the stuff on their desks aligned I laugh.  I tell them that they should become ADD.