PRESS RELEASE!!!!

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE:

CONTACT: Christina Wible
Website URL: www.christinawible.com

SECOND NOVEL BY LOCAL AUTHOR RELEASED

Clinton, NJ, August 1, 2011-- IN SEASON, the latest novel by Christina Wible, has been released in paperback. It is available on Amazon.com, through Chris’ website and directly from the author to friends who want a signed copy. The release of IN SEASON kicks off a three-month-long promotional tour that will include book signings and readings. 

IN SEASON is about love, horse breeding, and petty thievery… though not necessarily in that order. It takes place in the exclusive world of New Jersey horse breeding—a world about which Wible, a long-time rider, owner, and lover of Morgan horses, offers a rare insider’s peek.

Exclusive it may be, but caring for elite Standardbred horses still involves plenty of mud, sweat, and determination. Fortunately, Wible’s main character, FE Booker, is used to mud and sweat, and has determination to spare. Sure, she has a habit of keeping people at arm’s length, especially her aunt, who is both her bookkeeper and the only family FE has left, and her new vet, whom she initially mistakes for an effete New York model.

“I’ve lived in New Jersey almost my entire life, and still this book offered a completely new perspective on all those sprawling, beautiful horse farms I pass every day on my way to work. Non-Jerseyans who think all we are is a backdrop for The Sopranos will be amazed,” says Wible’s editor, Alexa Offenhauer.

IN SEASON also offers trademark Wible facets such as strong female characters, troubled relationships, dry humor, and even a touch of slapstick. Readers of romance, epic dramas, comedic women’s literature, and even Westerns will be drawn to this book, which incorporates elements of many genres and is, above all, about how one independent woman learns how to live and love within a community that supports her more than she could ever have imagined.

ABOUT

Christina Wible is a long-time horse lover and former Morgan Horse owner who lives and writes in Hunterdon County, New Jersey. She recently took the plunge and quit her day job, and is now a full-time writer. She embraces the freedom and control of self-publication, and is already in the editing stages on her third novel, REMARKABLE LIKENESS.

For more information, contact Christina Wible at the above website.

Wack-a-mole

I have to quote one of my favorite authors from her FB page today.  Laurie R. King says: “After playing whack-a-mole with plot for the past few weeks--every time I fix one plot problem, another two or three pop up--I think I've flattened the thing into submission. A delusion, no doubt, but momentarily comforting.”

Oh do I know that feeling.  Laurie writes mysteries and they are absolutely the worst for plot thread interactions.  You’ve just got your hero in the right place at the right time and you realize that he was supposed to be in London two hours before and the Concorde doesn’t fly anymore.

The book I’m currently writing (tentatively titled Remarkable Likeness) has a twist that has me going back all the time to see if I’ve telegraphed too much or too little.  I have so many notes in my RL notebook I can’t find anything anymore and last week I found a character who had three different names and they weren’t supposed to sport any aliases.  Whack a Mole.

If you have a chance read one of Laurie’s books as part of your summer reading.  I recommend her Mary Russell series if you want great mysteries in a series (hint: Sherlock Holmes finds a late-life partner in crime) the first of the series being The Beekeepers Apprentice.  For more serious, but still woman-friendly reading, I would recommend Folly, a psychological thriller. 

Of course in a month you will be able to read my latest, In Season, on the lighter reading side.

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.

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 14^th.

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.

Book Promotion --- as it really is.

Oh man, does it ever feel this way sometimes.

The Onion on book promotion.

Excuse the typos, I'm observing...

Long time no post. I have been doing extensive research for Loft. Since I’ve never written anything with more than just a passing reference to an historical event I have been working my way through all the book information I can find on clothing of the early 20th century and the Triangle Waist fire. It’s interesting but I have to say that I’m doing it more to absorb the atmosphere than anything else.
As a side burp and to counteract the boredom brought on by too much time with head stuck in book, I have also been doing some opera research which left me open to a two day vacation in NYC to see an opera and just to soak up the City’s atmosphere (and alright, if you must, to feed the howling beast of obsession).
Thirty six hours of observation (20 straight of which I was awake) and application of several Buddhist principals that I have been reading about lately have left me with tons and tons of new material. Since Loft is already over 100,000 words that’s a problem not an asset.
So…the off the topic observation is that opera singers approach acting in a totally different way than those who work in the musical theater (not a new observation, ask Paulo Szot) and that that is eminently visible when an opera singer who has taken a side trip to musical theater returns to the opera stage.
At Carmen last night most of the singers were quite decent opera singers and all of them (except Szot) went exactly where the music was taking them, giving us no more nor no less than the music demanded and at times falling into either stand and deliver or melodrama. (Here I must note that it has always been my contention that if you took Carmen and just transported it to the musical theater without a complete book rewrite it would never, ever make it past the first week-the book would be laughed out of the theater.) But the fact that they stayed within those that operatic stereotype made me yawn. Since I am quite familiar with all the music of Carmen, I knew exactly what to expect of each singer and was given just that. Boring.
Szot, with his hard-earned musical theater experience, was in another opera entirely than the rest of the cast. Whenever he showed up there was finally someone on stage who was inhabiting the role. Yes, the other singers were emoting the music but he was inhabiting the role. I wish to high heavens that the rest of the opera world would catch up in the acting category, stop wrestling with the music so much and wrestle with character.
Until that time I guess I will just have to pray that integration of music with acting is something that the opera world will discover for themselves someday by using some power of observation that they have lost along the way.
So all of the slogging around in the City-of-yellow-and black-snow made me realize that A) you only love the place you’re not (personal observation and B) collecting data for books is much more fun if you are not sitting in a library and reading but spending your time just paying attention to that which is around you.

Mellowing...

One of the steps in writing a book is finishing the first draft and then letting it mellow for awhile.  They Might Be Angels has been mellowing for a week now and I understand fully this step.  It's beginning to stink and I'm beginning to panic.  (Just as a side note I see it as a bad omen when I'm even confused about the name of the book -- see above -- the actual name could also be There Might Be Angels)

Announcing...

I've been more than relatively silent lately but I'm just about finished with the book I started only 70 days ago.  It's gone through several working titles by now, Adelaide Wasserstein Brocklehurst, The Bishop of Who, but finally last night someone, I think was the character Paul, woke me up with They Might be Angels and that is IT.  Thanks Paul.

Thank you, Barbara

I simply cannot wait to start writing about Bishop Adelaide Wasserstein Brocklehurst.  Though you didn't know it, you inspired me today, Barbara, and Adelaide started talking to me.

Sometimes ya gotta show your face...

For those folks, you know who you are, who are not on FB...you wanted a pic from the signing.

Is she really as crazy as she seems?

Since I'm in the throes of finishing a book I seem not to be blog original these days and only able to post quotes but this one, from Sam Lipsyte is so attuned to the life of the writer that I couldn't resist:


"One of my big revelations," Lipsyte says, "was that nobody cares whether you write your novel or not.  They want you to be happy.  Your parents want you to have health insurance.  Your friends want you to be a good friend.  But everybody's thinking about their own problems and nobody wakes up in the morning thinking 'Boy, I sure hope Sam finishes that chapter and gets one step closer to his dream of being a working writer.' Nobody does that.  If you want to write, it has to come from you.  If you don't want to write, that's great.  Go do something else.  That was a very liberating moment for me"  (March/April 2010 Poets and Writers, pg 56).


Writing is a very lonely job.  You have to be willing to just forget about support and do it.  Once the meet and greets for the last book are done, you have to get right back to that big phosporescent eye that sits on your desk and go on to the next world you are about to create.  You have no mini-skirted cheerleaders yelling "Go Chrissie" in your ear.  Even your friends don't really understand that when you are talking to them your characters are wandering around in your head talking to you.  They think you a bit strange, but if you're lucky, they still have breakfast with you on Saturday morning.


All that said, you write because you have to, because the state of "not-writing" is worse hell than the state of writing.

I guess the answer to my question is yes.

The best advice is short and to the point

I've heard a lot of writing advice but absolutely the best I've heard comes today in the form of a Gotham Gram...an email from the great writing school that I highly recommend

Gotham Writers

Neil Gaiman has become so popular he is often considered the “rock star” of the literary world. He trades mostly in science fiction and fantasy in a variety of forms—novels, children’s books, graphic novels, comic books, and film. Among his trend-setting works: Coraline, The Graveyard Book and The Sandman series. He takes readers, of all ages, to the very edge of imagination.

8 Good Writing Practices

1. Write.
2. Put one word after another. Find the right word, put it down.
3. Finish what you're writing. Whatever you have to do to finish it, finish it.
4. Put it aside. Read it pretending you’ve never read it before. Show it to friends whose opinion you respect and who like the kind of thing that this is.
5. Remember: when people tell you something’s wrong or doesn’t work for them, they are almost always right. When they tell you exactly what they think is wrong and how to fix it, they are almost always wrong.
6. Fix it. Remember that, sooner or later, before it ever reaches perfection, you will have to let it go and move on and start to write the next thing. Perfection is like chasing the horizon. Keep moving.
7. Laugh at your own jokes.
8. The main rule of writing is that if you do it with enough assurance and confidence, you’re allowed to do whatever you like. (That may be a rule for life as well as for writing. But it’s definitely true for writing.) So write your story as it needs to be written. Write it honestly, and tell it as best you can. I'm not sure that there are any other rules. Not ones that matter.

From an article in The Guardian

It finally got to me and I've snapped. I think,

Write, write all morning.  Try to figure out what I need to bring with me to my book signing tomorrow.  Pick out a dress.  I need to relax.  Went down to B and N just to smell books.  I wonder if they have my book for order.  Look it up on a self-service terminal.  They do!  Then proceed to every self-service terminal in the store looking up my book and leaving it up on the screen.  Escaped without detection.

I'd rather stick pins in my eyes....

Isn't it amazing how having one thing you absolutely do not want to do (but in reality should do) helps you get other things done?  (and no its not a colonoscopy and no I'm not telling you what it is).  

I've had this thing in my mind that I feel I absolutely must do.  Only I don't wanna.  Suddenly, I'm terribly productive writing a book that I absolutely hated working on. Suddenly I've been walking around to bookstores copies of my book in hand saying "please stock my book."  So obviously I absolutely hate working on the book and I absolutely hate peddling  my published book  less than I absolutely hate getting around to doing the thing I hate most.  There's a moral in there somewhere.

Self-publishing interview

Alexa Offenhauer is publishing on her blog, Looseleaf Writing  a (2 post) series of interviews with me about self-publishing.  Drop by and read her really interesting (not just my stuff) blog about the editing business.

Er that's Episcopal Priest, not Episcopalian Priest...picky, picky, picky

full ForeWord Review HERE

7/21/2010 Edit

Well that link seems to have disappeared so here is the review in full:


ForeWord Clarion Review

FICTION

In Between Goodbyes

Christina Wible

CreateSpace

978-1-4414-1832-6

Three Stars (out of Five)

Strong characters carrying heavy psychological baggage feature in this insider’s look at life in New York’s theater district. A touch of mystery makes In Between Goodbyes a fascinating contemporary romantic tale.

Christina Wible’s debut follows the life of Hope Moran, who ekes out a living as a Broadway dresser. A dresser, in theater terms, is one who babysits and coddles and, yes, even dresses a theater actor when a wardrobe change is required. She also moonlights as an Episcopalian priest, filling in for various churches and doing good deeds, particularly among the homeless. One afternoon, she turns to life saving by pushing celebrity thespian Ian Pfeiffer out of the path of a kidnapper’s bullet. His family is not so fortunate; they die in a fiery car crash.

The show must go on. Hope, hired for her expertise in dressing and spiritual counseling, keeps Ian performing. Their close association turns to friendship, punctuated by a brief sexual encounter. As a result of some convenient plot manipulation, Ian heads to Central America to shoot a movie while Hope gestates, delivering a daughter with the help of a circle of women friends. The sense of community and friendship among the theater crowd rings true and adds another layer of enjoyment for the reader. The slightly prosaic mystery concerning the kidnapper offers a little suspense. A niggling problem—Ian’s lack of interest in sex—hovers in the background to be hurriedly resolved as the book ends.

The story of Hope and Ian’s relationship follows an all too familiar pattern: Ian doesn’t know he’s a father, and Hope works hard to keep father and daughter from meeting. Their lives diverge and years later converge again, resulting in a bittersweet ending.

It is the details concerning theater life that save this book from mediocrity. “Amy made her opening speech, and Ian clenched and unclenched his fists,” Wible writes. “He leaned back, and she put her hand squarely in the middle of his back. He leaned harder against the hand and then propelled himself out onto the stage for his entrance. The applause was deafening, and she could see both Amy and Ian struggle to stay in the moment.”

Overall, the writing flows well, but there are a few problems, including clumps of information, poor transitions from scene to scene, and a tendency to tell rather than show. For example, Wible writes, “Hope had last worked with Amy on some children’s musical where Amy was some over-costumed singing animal. She remembered the costume with a skirt so big it wouldn’t fit through the dressing room door, forcing Amy to make up in the dressing room and then costume in the wings.”

Tighter writing, a good editing, and better use of fiction writing techniques would greatly improve this novel. Nevertheless, In Between Goodbyes will be enjoyed by readers who like a good-hearted heroine, a worthy man who stays true to his love, and the smell of greasepaint.

Dawn Goldsmith

Networking

I guess because most of my life I worked for the same company I never saw the value of networking.  Now, suddenly, I'm trying to sell books and it is all in the network.  Some of the results:  a friend offering to show my next book to her agent, a bookstore in Washington listing my book on the strength of a purchased commercial review, getting networked to Indie bookstores because I publicized my signing at the bookstore in Clinton.  

The world gets smaller as you network.

Announcement

Local book signing!

I am excited to announce that I will be signing In Between Goodbyes at the Clinton Book Shop on Saturday June 12, 2010 from 1PM to 3PM. 

This is exciting in two ways, the store has just moved down the street from where they used to be into the historic Grandin Library and I love the new store.  (If you follow the directions to the store on the site it is to their old store on 36 Main Street so facing that store, turn left and walk down a full block - crossing Leigh St. - and you will find the new store at 12 Main on the same side of the street.)

Additionally, for those of you who are members of the PHS Class of 64, I will be donating a portion of the proceeds to the class scholarship fund.

Clinton is a fun town.  Come out for the day.  Bring the kids or the grandkids and go to the Museum or the Art Museum and have lunch or dinner in one of the myriad of restaurants.  

Hope to see you all there!