So I thought for awhile over what topic to blog about this week. It was torn between a story about how I got into writing and asking for opinions on how to write an acknowledgments page for a book. I have been thinking all week over this but Friday at 3:38pm CST, both of those ideas went flying from my brain as I hit yet another milestone in the book process.
Now to tell you all, no I’m not published yet, the goal is by the end of the year, Lord willing. I’ve watched with great pride as a friend of mine has already gone through this process, and the excitement he had over the whole series of epic firsts in a writer’s life meant little to me as I’d never experienced it. Now I’m starting to get the excitement behind all of his accomplishments in a way I couldn’t before. Not to say I didn’t feel excitement, or that I didn’t burst into tears with pride over the receipt of his first book, signed, in my possession. But as anyone will tell you, there is nothing like doing it yourself, and instead of being on the outside looking in, they are YOUR firsts.
I will also tell you that this last week has been plagued with a lot of personal battles that have led me to be very quiet. Fact is, I’m a very blunt person, and my mouth has been known to get me into more trouble than I can ever possibly tell you. Just about the time that I was about to curl up in the fetal position and call it a week, bury my head in a bottle of UV Blue, the highlight of my week arrived and more than made up for all the trivial battles previous encountered.
What I speak of is the first sketch of the cover art for my book. *squeal*
Yes you can say it, total dork right here. Fact is, I don’t care. I had worried for sometime about hurting someone’s feelings if I didn’t like their art but the more I think about it, this book, more than any others I may ever write, is my soul. This book is the first of many I’m sure, but it is something I have held near and dear to me for a good chunk of my adult life. The characters and everything about it are so important to me. It’s why when I decided to write the book, I made a clear decision that I don’t care who reads it, if anyone likes it, just to get it published, and it had to be the first because nothing else would be quite as fitting, for me personally.
I’ve had a couple people who have said that they would do the cover art, but no one has gotten back to me with any sketches or anything. Then Mike recommended Alissa Rindels, the artist who had done the cover for his book. I had loved Mike’s cover, but didn’t think that it was what I was looking for, but I emailed Alissa anyway. I told her a rundown of what I wanted and so on, and the waiting began. I’d looked through her gallery and yes, she is talented, but I was still hesitant.
Here’s the thing, I didn’t think anyone would ever be able to put down on paper, without physically taking a photo of the actors in my head, that would do justice to what I had in mind. This book is epic to me in so many ways, the cover would have to be just as big.
So when I opened the attachment to the email, seeing the sketch, I expected to feel disconnection from it, because I’d already made up my mind I was most likely going to be let down.
Boy was I wrong.
I promptly burst into tears and about squealed with delight. Now mind you, a rough sketch, freestyled by hand on a piece of paper with a pencil is in no way the cover, it’s a very generic form of what the actual cover will be. Something that incomplete still made my heart race, so I can only imagine what will happen when I finally get to see the finished product.
Here I am, two days later, and I’m still busting into a cheesy ass grin just thinking about it. So yes, that is my blog topic. As always, I’m curious your take on things. What are some milestones in the writing/publishing process that have been the biggest to you?
Alissa Rindels can be reached at her website...
Dire Atrium
Sunday, June 13, 2010
Tuesday, June 8, 2010
Excerpt - Address In The Stars
The night offers little solitude from her thoughts, just as she had originally expected. She turns in the bed, pulling away from Brody’s hold and grins softly against his arm as he mumbles and rolls away from her. Wrapping his oversized dress shirt around her naked form she inhales against the collar and quietly leaves the bedroom, closing the door behind her.
Walking quietly through his house, not snooping, just taking it all in, all that is the essence of Brody Davitovitch. She smiles softly to herself as she scoops her purse up off the couch where it had been tossed and walks from the front hall to the small office he’d shown her on the grand tour of his less than modest house. Pulling the small cord on the lamp on the desk, light covers the desk and she sits in his overstuffed leather chair, still grinning. She pulls out the leather bound journal from her purse, dropping the bag to the floor and grabs a pen from the holder, flipping open to the first blank page in the back.
Well I’ve done it now. Brody is… WOWZA. Mama you should have warned me even when I was little to be careful with men like him. He’s got the fame, the fortune, the charm and I can almost hear my heart breaking into a million pieces already. What the hell he sees in dowdy old me is anyone’s guess, but I’m not gonna sit here and knock it too much.
He took me to Casa Dorsia for dinner tonight. I know this is California and it is expected or something, but the waiting list for that place is two months in advance. I don’t like LA that much though. I prefer being on set in Camden out in the middle of nowhere away from people. How’s that for introverted? HAHA!
He’s just so full of life Mama, I know I’m falling already. I can almost hear the lecture, so I will close this entry for now, also would like to write another scene for the episode I’m working on, deadlines are a bitch when you can’t focus! Love you Mama… miss you.
Jess
She finds a blank legal pad on the far side of his desk and starts to scribble notes and outlines for the scenes in an upcoming episode of the show, the deadline for first draft was in a week and she’d barely started. She finally yawns four pages later and decides that’s enough for the night.
Tearing off the pages she’d written on, she puts the pad and the pen back in its spot and stands grabbing her purse, looking up she jumps as she sees Brody appear out of the darkened hall.
“I’m sorry I didn’t mean to startle you,” he said with a chuckle, coming and kissing the side of her face, his arms wrapping around her waist. She holds on to him, the familiar rush of butterflies rushing through her stomach makes her grin as she squeezes her arms tighter, his lips starting to wander down the side of her neck. The grin on her face turns into a chuckle and her eyes open, glancing against the rows of books on the wall behind him before looking at his icy blue eyes. Something had caught her attention though and she stiffens as her eyes fall back to the shelf behind him, her mouth opening in shock as she pushes past him.
“Jess?” he asks and watches her walk to the shelf, her hand rising, slender fingers touching the spine of a very worn leather book and he feels his heart start to race in his chest.
Sliding her fingers up the spine she grips it and pulls it from its resting place on the shelf. Almost as if she’s afraid, she undoes the clasp on the front and flips open the cover to reveal her penmanship that lined the inside cover with random quotes and tears fill her eyes. Emotion chokes her, embarrassment, anger and hurt written in her dark brown eyes as she turns to face him.
“Jess please, I can explain,” he said quickly inching forward towards her and she backed up shaking her head.
“For five years I thought the record of my life, the biggest pieces of my history in the written word, were lost forever. How in the hell did you get this?” She questioned, her body starting to tremble as she remembered all the sketches, pictures and information that the journal contained. “Better yet, how long have you known who I was?”
“Only a few weeks,” he started. “I found that in a cab I got into at LAX and there was no information on who to send it to. Something wouldn’t let me throw it away and then a few weeks ago, in the lake, I saw your necklace and it’s the same as the drawing on page thirty-seven and I ju-.”
“Stop. Page thirty-seven?” she asked in shock, her breathing coming in pants as she thought she was going to throw up. “Not only did you read it, you’ve read it enough to know the page numbers?”
Brody looked at the floor and she felt like her world had been tipped upside down. She grabbed her purse, holding both of her belongings close to her as she moved past him and headed back to the bedroom. Pulling on her pants she buttoned them, trying to fight the onslaught of hysterical sobs that she knew were coming.
“Jess, please. I know it’s private, but I didn’t know it was you.”
“But you have known for a month Brody. For a month! When I finally confided in you tonight about my mother, about the journals I keep, how silly and childish I feel at times for writing letters to a woman that has been dead for near twenty years, you already knew. How do you expect me to take that?” Her lower lip started to tremble as the tears started to spill. “How do you ever expect me to recover knowing that some of my most private thoughts, things no man should ever know, you know with enough detail to tell me what page they’re on?”
“Well I would think it would make you realize how much I’ve been taken with you without even having met you, kind of like flattery,” he said with a shrug and she slapped him.
“Stay away from me Brody,” she said through clenched teeth and left, slamming the door behind her.
Tuesday, June 1, 2010
Ramblings - Information Overload
As a writer I have found it a bit daunting to make the big step from aspiring writer to published author because of the amount of choices on advice that is available. I pride myself on being able to keep my cool in a crisis, to be able to handle chaos elegantly without fail, however, even I will admit to feeling overwhelmed by the amount of critiques and opinions available online. While I have found some information to be invaluable, some of the others I’ve heard are about as useful as boobs on a man.
Now before you commence with the reading you’re probably wondering where I have any right to decide what is useful and what isn’t, aren’t you? Point taken. I don’t. This is a blog filled with my own thoughts because of countless headaches on the subject. If you would like the abridged version please read it here:
Abridged Version
For those of you that want to see a ramble session… read on:
ADVICE #1 : Market, Market, Market!
“You should be marketing from every platform available. If there are free or minimal fee websites you should be signing up and running a page for your writing on all of them.
There is a lot of truth to marketing as much as you can, but like just about everything in the world, would you rather have a ton of lackluster things, or a few phenomenal things? I tried to heed this advice because I didn’t realize the different between useful and useless advice, I assumed that even bad advice is still advice. So set yourself up on a platform that you’re comfortable with and that you can get some good feedback from. Twitter, Blogger, Smashwords, and Bookbuzzr have been my favorite sites since starting to market my work and myself as a writer. In the world of e-publishing it’s very easy to get started and get your name out there. Yes I do have a Facebook fanpage, but it gets A LOT less traffic than I do on blogger or Twitter, and the ‘fans’ I have there, save for one person, are all people I know, are related to or work with.
ADVICE #2 : Follow Everyone You Can on Twitter
“If you start following everyone you can possibly follow on Twitter, people will start following you then they will all see what you Tweet and that is how you get known.”
Um no.
My advice for this is, yes, if someone starts following you, and you’ve realized it’s not a bot of some sort, you can follow them. I have two twitter accounts, one is my personal filled with my famous people that the fangirl in me loves to follow (Vampire Diaries, Supernatural and True Blood are my obsessions), as well as friends and family. I have another that is for me as an author that is filled with people that are either fellow writers, people who have heard of me and have started following me, and multiple resources, BubbleCow, Bookbuzzr etc, etc. Granted I don’t have near the followers that some other, more well-known writers do, but there are some that follow me, that I will not follow unless I see a need for. Is this mean? Maybe. But seriously, why as a writer do I need to follow a site that gives daily horoscopes or dating advice and so on? I do however, follow the research and testing rules (comes from working in an IT related field). I will look through their tweets, see if I find anything of interest, and then follow them. If within a week or two, they are simply taking up space on my feed list, they are unfollowed.
This leads me to number three…
ADVICE #3 : Be Nice To Everyone
“No matter if you think she is a rude person, talk to her kindly and answer any thing she asks cordially and friendly.”
Again, very good advice, especially when marketing yourself as a product, but who really wants a phony car salesman in their lives? Not me. I would rather you be brutally honest and up front and follow the old adage if you must, the one our mothers droned into our heads that if you don’t have anything nice to say, don’t say anything at all. I have found that some of the authors I have met, on Twitter especially, are great to follow and to keep an eye on. You know why? Because they are themselves, they are honest, most of them are strikingly hilarious and they offer a lot of insight without even realizing they are.
ADVICE #4 : Post Blogs Daily
“The more you blog or post things, the more likely you are to get people to notice you. Even if it’s crap, doesn’t matter. You should be posting something in your online blog daily, and you should retweet anything and everything on Twitter.”
Can someone spell Overkill?
The theory is great, but a little excessive. And then the question gets raised, if you spend all your time blogging and tweeting, when are you writing? Because while I’m sure this is something we would all love to become rich and famous from, most of us have other jobs outside of this. Free time to write is fleeting, so do you want to be spending it on blogging and retweeting or would you rather be working on your WIP, the real reason why you’re here? Or you could simply be like me and not feel that anyone in their right mind would want to read my ramblings on a daily basis, and that even a weekly basis is pushing it.
If you have read this far, I commend you. Here is a fun statistic for your efforts… Did you realize that most of the How-To books that have been published on how to get published are written by authors that have only been published once or not even at all outside of their How-To book? I wouldn’t take advice from Dr. Phil and he has a PhD and years of experience, and yet I’m going to listen to people who’ve never tried to get published in the realm we’re trying to get published in? Um no, I don’t think so.
The saying that comes to mind is one my Mama used to say all the time in reference to a relative. “Take everything she says with a grain of salt.” The same is true in this world. Whatever advice you get, don’t be gullible enough to believe every single word of it.
What I have found to be invaluable have been from random people as well as close friends, and that is the following:
DON’T listen to premade lists of what subject, genre, type, font, book cover etc., you should be writing or using. Write what you feel and what you connect with.
DO get a professional editor to go over your manuscript before you publish or submit to an agent. Beta readers are great for this if you’re on a budget, but some may be less likely to offer constructive criticism because they don’t want to hurt anyone’s feelings.
DON’T let anyone convince you you have to have an agent or publishing company to get published.
DO decide up front what your goals are for your work and if they are reasonable.
DON’T get offended by bad reviews of your work. First reaction for me is to get pissed and go off on the person. Sit back, calm down. Take what they say with a grain of salt but try to find what they’re saying constructive and see if it bears any weight on your work and if improvement could be made.
DO have a support network outside of friends and family that consists of other writers/authors. Because when the going gets tough, they will be the ones that truly understand what you’re going through.
At the end of the day though, you could think about it and believe that knowledge is power. It is a saying I don’t agree with fully because I have an uncle that has a lot of knowledge in bullshit, doesn’t mean he’s powerful.
Truth be told I have no more room than anyone else to tell you what to do and how to do it. Fact is, it took a very dear friend asking me what I wanted to accomplish with my writing to get my act in gear. Did I want to be famous or did I want to be published? Once I had that goal set, the rest has been fairly easy to latch onto.
So if you’re a writer or an author, what has been the best and the worst advice given to you about writing and getting published?
Now before you commence with the reading you’re probably wondering where I have any right to decide what is useful and what isn’t, aren’t you? Point taken. I don’t. This is a blog filled with my own thoughts because of countless headaches on the subject. If you would like the abridged version please read it here:
Abridged Version
For those of you that want to see a ramble session… read on:
ADVICE #1 : Market, Market, Market!
“You should be marketing from every platform available. If there are free or minimal fee websites you should be signing up and running a page for your writing on all of them.
There is a lot of truth to marketing as much as you can, but like just about everything in the world, would you rather have a ton of lackluster things, or a few phenomenal things? I tried to heed this advice because I didn’t realize the different between useful and useless advice, I assumed that even bad advice is still advice. So set yourself up on a platform that you’re comfortable with and that you can get some good feedback from. Twitter, Blogger, Smashwords, and Bookbuzzr have been my favorite sites since starting to market my work and myself as a writer. In the world of e-publishing it’s very easy to get started and get your name out there. Yes I do have a Facebook fanpage, but it gets A LOT less traffic than I do on blogger or Twitter, and the ‘fans’ I have there, save for one person, are all people I know, are related to or work with.
ADVICE #2 : Follow Everyone You Can on Twitter
“If you start following everyone you can possibly follow on Twitter, people will start following you then they will all see what you Tweet and that is how you get known.”
Um no.
My advice for this is, yes, if someone starts following you, and you’ve realized it’s not a bot of some sort, you can follow them. I have two twitter accounts, one is my personal filled with my famous people that the fangirl in me loves to follow (Vampire Diaries, Supernatural and True Blood are my obsessions), as well as friends and family. I have another that is for me as an author that is filled with people that are either fellow writers, people who have heard of me and have started following me, and multiple resources, BubbleCow, Bookbuzzr etc, etc. Granted I don’t have near the followers that some other, more well-known writers do, but there are some that follow me, that I will not follow unless I see a need for. Is this mean? Maybe. But seriously, why as a writer do I need to follow a site that gives daily horoscopes or dating advice and so on? I do however, follow the research and testing rules (comes from working in an IT related field). I will look through their tweets, see if I find anything of interest, and then follow them. If within a week or two, they are simply taking up space on my feed list, they are unfollowed.
This leads me to number three…
ADVICE #3 : Be Nice To Everyone
“No matter if you think she is a rude person, talk to her kindly and answer any thing she asks cordially and friendly.”
Again, very good advice, especially when marketing yourself as a product, but who really wants a phony car salesman in their lives? Not me. I would rather you be brutally honest and up front and follow the old adage if you must, the one our mothers droned into our heads that if you don’t have anything nice to say, don’t say anything at all. I have found that some of the authors I have met, on Twitter especially, are great to follow and to keep an eye on. You know why? Because they are themselves, they are honest, most of them are strikingly hilarious and they offer a lot of insight without even realizing they are.
ADVICE #4 : Post Blogs Daily
“The more you blog or post things, the more likely you are to get people to notice you. Even if it’s crap, doesn’t matter. You should be posting something in your online blog daily, and you should retweet anything and everything on Twitter.”
Can someone spell Overkill?
The theory is great, but a little excessive. And then the question gets raised, if you spend all your time blogging and tweeting, when are you writing? Because while I’m sure this is something we would all love to become rich and famous from, most of us have other jobs outside of this. Free time to write is fleeting, so do you want to be spending it on blogging and retweeting or would you rather be working on your WIP, the real reason why you’re here? Or you could simply be like me and not feel that anyone in their right mind would want to read my ramblings on a daily basis, and that even a weekly basis is pushing it.
If you have read this far, I commend you. Here is a fun statistic for your efforts… Did you realize that most of the How-To books that have been published on how to get published are written by authors that have only been published once or not even at all outside of their How-To book? I wouldn’t take advice from Dr. Phil and he has a PhD and years of experience, and yet I’m going to listen to people who’ve never tried to get published in the realm we’re trying to get published in? Um no, I don’t think so.
The saying that comes to mind is one my Mama used to say all the time in reference to a relative. “Take everything she says with a grain of salt.” The same is true in this world. Whatever advice you get, don’t be gullible enough to believe every single word of it.
What I have found to be invaluable have been from random people as well as close friends, and that is the following:
DON’T listen to premade lists of what subject, genre, type, font, book cover etc., you should be writing or using. Write what you feel and what you connect with.
DO get a professional editor to go over your manuscript before you publish or submit to an agent. Beta readers are great for this if you’re on a budget, but some may be less likely to offer constructive criticism because they don’t want to hurt anyone’s feelings.
DON’T let anyone convince you you have to have an agent or publishing company to get published.
DO decide up front what your goals are for your work and if they are reasonable.
DON’T get offended by bad reviews of your work. First reaction for me is to get pissed and go off on the person. Sit back, calm down. Take what they say with a grain of salt but try to find what they’re saying constructive and see if it bears any weight on your work and if improvement could be made.
DO have a support network outside of friends and family that consists of other writers/authors. Because when the going gets tough, they will be the ones that truly understand what you’re going through.
At the end of the day though, you could think about it and believe that knowledge is power. It is a saying I don’t agree with fully because I have an uncle that has a lot of knowledge in bullshit, doesn’t mean he’s powerful.
Truth be told I have no more room than anyone else to tell you what to do and how to do it. Fact is, it took a very dear friend asking me what I wanted to accomplish with my writing to get my act in gear. Did I want to be famous or did I want to be published? Once I had that goal set, the rest has been fairly easy to latch onto.
So if you’re a writer or an author, what has been the best and the worst advice given to you about writing and getting published?
Information Overload (Abridged Version)
As a writer I have found it a bit daunting to make the big step from aspiring writer to published author because of the amount of choices on advice that is available. I pride myself on being able to keep my cool in a crisis, to be able to handle chaos elegantly without fail, however, even I will admit to feeling overwhelmed by the amount of critiques and opinions available online. While I have found some information to be invaluable, some of the others I’ve heard are about as useful as boobs on a man.
Now before you commence with the reading you’re probably wondering where I have any right to decide what is useful and what isn’t, aren’t you? Point taken. I don’t. This is a blog filled with my own thoughts because of countless headaches on the subject.
What I have found to be invaluable have been from random people as well as close friends, and that is the following:
DON’T listen to premade lists of what subject, genre, type, font, book cover etc., you should be writing or using. Write what you feel and what you connect with.
DO get a professional editor to go over your manuscript before you publish or submit to an agent. Beta readers are great for this if you’re on a budget, but some may be less likely to offer constructive criticism because they don’t want to hurt anyone’s feelings.
DON’Tlet anyone convince you you have to have an agent or publishing company to get published.
DO decide up front what your goals are for your work and if they are reasonable.
DON’T get offended by bad reviews of your work. First reaction for me is to get pissed and go off on the person. Sit back, calm down. Take what they say with a grain of salt but try to find what they’re saying constructive and see if it bears any weight on your work and if improvement could be made.
DO have a support network outside of friends and family that consists of other writers/authors. Because when the going gets tough, they will be the ones that truly understand what you’re going through.
At the end of the day though, you could think about it and believe that knowledge is power. It is a saying I don’t agree with fully because I have an uncle that has a lot of knowledge in bullshit, doesn’t mean he’s powerful.
Truth be told I have no more room than anyone else to tell you what to do and how to do it. Fact is, it took a very dear friend asking me what I wanted to accomplish with my writing to get my act in gear. Did I want to be famous or did I want to be published? Once I had that goal set, the rest has been fairly easy to latch onto.
So if you’re a writer or an author, what has been the best and the worst advice given to you about writing and getting published?
Now before you commence with the reading you’re probably wondering where I have any right to decide what is useful and what isn’t, aren’t you? Point taken. I don’t. This is a blog filled with my own thoughts because of countless headaches on the subject.
What I have found to be invaluable have been from random people as well as close friends, and that is the following:
DON’T listen to premade lists of what subject, genre, type, font, book cover etc., you should be writing or using. Write what you feel and what you connect with.
DO get a professional editor to go over your manuscript before you publish or submit to an agent. Beta readers are great for this if you’re on a budget, but some may be less likely to offer constructive criticism because they don’t want to hurt anyone’s feelings.
DON’Tlet anyone convince you you have to have an agent or publishing company to get published.
DO decide up front what your goals are for your work and if they are reasonable.
DON’T get offended by bad reviews of your work. First reaction for me is to get pissed and go off on the person. Sit back, calm down. Take what they say with a grain of salt but try to find what they’re saying constructive and see if it bears any weight on your work and if improvement could be made.
DO have a support network outside of friends and family that consists of other writers/authors. Because when the going gets tough, they will be the ones that truly understand what you’re going through.
At the end of the day though, you could think about it and believe that knowledge is power. It is a saying I don’t agree with fully because I have an uncle that has a lot of knowledge in bullshit, doesn’t mean he’s powerful.
Truth be told I have no more room than anyone else to tell you what to do and how to do it. Fact is, it took a very dear friend asking me what I wanted to accomplish with my writing to get my act in gear. Did I want to be famous or did I want to be published? Once I had that goal set, the rest has been fairly easy to latch onto.
So if you’re a writer or an author, what has been the best and the worst advice given to you about writing and getting published?
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