Musing about Writing

I’ve concluded that my writing is not commercially feasible (traditional publishing) because it’s too short for fantasy. At 70,000 words on average, it’s not long enough for agents to be interested in it. It would be short enough for romance, but my writing is really fantasy (or to be more accurate, magical realism is more likely) which is not written short. However, I write tightly and don’t need all those words.

If I’m not selling in indie (self-published) markets, it’s because I can’t get enough traction with marketing. I have tried several things, and none of them seem to work. I feel like, if I wrote romantasy (heavy on traditional romance, lots of spice) I’d have a better chance, but I don’t feel moved to write about those things. I have a niche, but I can’t seem to get introduced to those people.

The saying “Do what you love, the rest will follow”? It does not seem true in my personal situation. I write because I’m possessed with ideas, and what possesses me is shorter novels. People have told me I’m a good writer. I think I’m a good writer.

I’m just trying to convince myself to keep writing, even though I don’t have a readership. It’s a hard sell, because I don’t do things just for myself; rather, I look at what they produce and whether they’re useful. Right now I am starting a garden; I don’t grow the seedlings for their own sakes. I grow them because they’ll give me food someday. My books will never give me food, and I have to figure out whether that’s okay.

Good News on the Writing Front

I will release Reclaiming the Balance on January 1, 2025 as I had hoped. My sensitivity reader came through and I fixed all issues (mostly proofreading!) The book is now in the hands of KDP (Amazon’s self-publishing arm) and ready to release.

Reclaiming the Balance is in the Hidden in Plain Sight series, book 3. Janice Wilkens escapes from an abusive, non-human Archetype boyfriend. She takes refuge at Barn Swallows’ Dance, a haven for those who don’t fit ordinary reality. Amarel Stein, an androgynous half-human Nephilim, challenges her about her own Nephilim son. They plot to rescue her son from the boyfriend’s clutches and fight prejudice against the Nephilim at Barn Swallows’ Dance. Their success depends on their working together and giving up their preconceived notions of reality.

I don’t know if it’s clear from the description, but it’s contemporary romantasy, closed-door (not spicy), and very much a story for this time.

A Good Day and a Shameless Plug

I finally got 1200 words on the work-in-progress written today at home. It doesn’t hurt that l got a venti flat white Door Dashed in the morning. I also listened to good writing music. The most important thing is that I had an idea of what needed to happen in the story.

I should point out that I am self-published and relatively unknown. The big thing for me is the writing; although I really want people to read my writing, I have not mastered marketing the books.

If you want to read some, there’s the fluffy Christmas romances and the more serious fantasy stories. And all of them can be found Right Here.

Writing about Writing about Writing

Sometimes I write about writing. I don’t do this nearly as often as I should, because I don’t have meta-thoughts about writing that often.

I could write about exposition, for example. What wisdom do I have about exposition? Only the big one: Show, don’t tell. And the not so big one: Conversations can be a form of exposition if you’re not writing things like “Did you hear about Betty? She ran off with the milkman last week.”

I could write about writing characters. Where do my characters come from? They come from an amalgam of people and stories I have known. Then I “interrogate” the character to see if they feel consistent in who they are. I have conversations with the characters, I put them in situations. I talk to my husband about characters — for example, “Would they talk back to the police?” Gideon would; he tends to be human and somewhat anti-authoritarian. Most of my Archetypes and Nephilim would never talk back lest they be discovered. They’re not quite immortal, after all, and they would alarm the authorities. Luke would talk around the cops, though. He’s a lawyer, after all.

I could write about publishing. There are many steps to publishing yourself; some of them go surprisingly smoothly, like most of the process on Kindle Direct Publishing (KDP for those in the know). Others become a great source of frustration, like putting my book cover up on KDP.

I could write about hitting it big as a writer. No, I can’t, because I have not hit it big. Nor is it likely that I will, but that’s okay. I have a story to write, and it nags me at night. My characters (Sage Bertinelli and Forrest Gray at the moment) demand to be written.

I need to write more about writing, because there are so many topics … thank you, Hannah, for obliquely suggesting this!

Christmas in … May?

It’s already time for me to start planning my next Kringle novel. Why? It’s only May!

The Kringle novel I write for this year will be for Winter 2025, so it’s even more ahead of time. A year and a half for a novel?

The ideas start in May so I have a while to play around with them in my head while I work on other things. Plots often come up on car rides with my husband, and there are more of those in the summer season (which, in my academic calendar, starts about May 1).

There are so many tropes to play with in romance — two of my Kringle books so far have mystery elements, two are enemies to lovers, a couple are friends to lovers, one involves second love, but no boy next door, snowed in at an inn, billionaire, bad boy or mafia yet. (I don’t foresee doing the latter three, to be honest. I like cinnamon roll guys myself.)

Friday, on one of those car rides, we decided that the next novel would be another second love with a touch of snowed in at an inn, where a divorced woman goes for a lone Christmas retreat at a great lodge, only to meet a local bar owner who hasn’t met the right woman in town.

The actual writing doesn’t happen till the Christmas season, November 1st-to be exact. That’s the season for NaNoWriMo, National Novel Writing Month. I won’t get it done then, but I will be well on my way. The benefit of this schedule is that I’m in the mood for Christmas, surrounded by the trappings of Christmas and immersed in Christmas carols, while I’m writing.

January through May is when I’m reworking the story, editing and refining. That needs to be done by October 1, which is publishing time. The cover gets finalized by the end of summer, and August is when I’m doing the mechanics of getting the novel uploaded onto the Kindle Direct Publishing site.

Other things are happening at the same time, of course. Teaching college from August – May, writing on other books and publishing them. I tend to keep busy, and I think it’s a blessing that I cannot be idle for too long. And that I love to write, and that there’s a Starbucks nearby.

My next Kringle-related activity is to go one more round through the 2024 novel, Kringle Through the Snow, which I actually wrote in January of this year because I thought I would never write another Kringle novel. But I can’t quit, because it’s now one of my Christmas rituals.

So Merry Christmas in May, and watch for Kringle Through the Snow on October 1!

Summer ends here

The week has gotten away from me, but at least I have been busy while I’ve been gone:

I’ve finished out my summer internship class
I’ve finished up laying my fall courses (except one, which is largely out of my control)
I’ve re-edited Reclaiming the Balance in case I get the courage to publish it
I’ve started editing a reader magnet of short stories in the Archetype universe
I’ve been working with my niece Rachel (a talented artist) to design the cover for Apocalypse, and a rework of Gaia’s Hands. The cover for Apocalypse is so good it makes me happy cry.

And there’s one more day until the beginning of semester meetings. Summer is over, and it was one of the most productive summers I’ve had in a while.

Self-publishing Another Book?

Nothing for the summertime

With me publishing Christmas romances, I have nothing to attract people in the off-season (that being from January-October). I’m still dreaming about being professionally published, but I do have a fantasy romance/romantic fantasy book I could get going pretty quickly The name is Gaia’s Hands, and it’s a prequel to a three-book (or more) series I have already written.

Working with a talented artist

If I publish this on Amazon, I have to come up with a cover. Because this is a fantasy, my idea of the cover was impressionistic, and the elements it needed to have were fire, apples, and protagonists in shadow.

Luckily I have a talented artist close by — my niece Rachel. She has her own style and usually draws very goth-esque designs, but I saw one of her pictures that cemented the deal in its similarity to what I was looking for.

The picture is going to be different than most romance novel covers, although I think it’s fitting for fantasy.

I’ll show you when it’s done.

The novel blurb: First glance

Jeanne Beaumont, a plant scientist, feels uneasy about the growth rate of the vine in the corner of her research greenhouse. And then Josh, fifteen years younger, comes into her life with his mysticism and his obvious feelings for her.

Josh Young, English instructor, devotes himself to his writing, his aikido, and his practice of Shinto. And, when he sees Jeanne Beaumont in a vision standing naked in a voluptuous garden, he devotes himself to her as well, even though he feels he’s too young.

Jeanne and Josh discover Jeanne’s powers even as a malevolent force threatens her career and Jeanne’s misgivings about her age tear them apart. But the project of her lifetime throws them into the final confrontation with her shadowy adversary.

Everything, Anything, or Nothing?

My horoscope says my brain is worth of chatter. It is, if what you mean by chatter is “I really should doing this/that/the other thing” instead of coming up with any sort of new story ideas. And to some extent it’s right, given that I have an important assignment to grade, two interns to visit and two classes to prep for tomorrow. I will be busy today.

But I will manage some time for — what? I have to come up with an idea for Camp NaNo in April. Camp NaNo is like the training wheels version of NaNoWriMo — you can set a minimum of 10k words for a goal, there’s a lot more acceptance of doing something other than a novel during this time — it’s overall just a good warmup to a major project.

I have some back projects I could work on, if I can get engaged in them again. The main one is Gods’ Seeds, which deals not with gods per se, but the immortal Archetypes who have held societies’ cultural memories. The death of these memories will kill the people they represent. And now, as their leaders want to give cultural memory back to humans, a civil war between Archetype factions threatens widespread extinction across the Earth. One woman, one who touches mortality and the deity of the Archetypes, must realize her role and stop the immortals from fighting.

The other one would be fascinating, if I could spend six months in Krakow. This is not going to happen.

Part of my lack of ideas is this frustration with the idea of traditional publishing. I am beginning to consider self-publishing the rest of my catalog — fantasy and romantic fantasy, even as I struggle with the whole “your stuff will be considered better if you go through the gatekeepers.” It’s a big issue in the publishing industry, because self-publishing is confused with vanity publishing. But many famous authors started with self-publishing. I don’t think I will be famous, but I don’t want these books languishing in my computer files.

Or I could resubmit one of my works to another set of agents (or the same set of agents). That will take some work.

I don’t know what to do right now. Everything, anything, or nothing?

Deep Breath

This whole publishing thing is unnerving me.

I’m currently in the stage where I have ARC reviewers with a review copy in their hands and they’ll come back and review for me on Amazon. I’m petrified. Of course, I want honest reviews, but I want honest GOOD reviews. Don’t we all?

I’m trying to figure out what to do for a virtual book-signing party. Especially the book signing.

I find myself getting weepy and on edge. I have been blessed with what is in effect a four-day weekend so my weepiness doesn’t get in the way of my job.

Damn it, this is supposed to be fun!

So, let me remember that. This is supposed to be fun. This is an accomplishment I didn’t think would happen — both in terms of being published at all and in terms of making self-publishing work.

Deep breath.

Panic time on the publishing front

So it’s Tuesday morning and I’m having misgivings about publishing. I don’t know if I’m doing it right because I’m not putting up advance reader copies (unless you’d like to read and review), I don’t know if it’s any good because it’s not as complex or serious as other things I write, I just don’t know …

But here I am, on the verge of submitting my materials to Kindle Direct Publishing. The cover I made myself, the layouts I’ve worked on, the words that hopefully are important.

What do I do? I’m panicking!