Happy Civic holiday or what the heck is this?

After two years in Canada you think I would be used to the holidays but well?  Today is a civic holiday called Civic holiday.  Basically it is a day off for those who work in offices I think.  I know my hubby has to work today as do his friends, so is it really a holiday?  I don’t know.

Well the free promo of One More All Hallows Eve did really well.  One day promo had 173 downloads and one review.  That story now has five total reviews, all four and five stars.  The new one wanted more Harry…which of course is what the other free promo was.  Hope Everlasting is the second story in the Guardians of the Gate City series and it isn’t dong too bad either.  So far 92 downloads and I gave it a full week so by the end of the week I expect to see more downloads and hopefully a review or three.

I decided that August is going to be my free month for sure.  Obviously had Hallows up and have Hope up but next week I plan on putting Partings up for two more days, then well have Sacrifice up for three days and finally that attempt at breaking into a different genre with Distance (my erotica) going up for free the 20th through the 24th.  Here is hoping it will get some notice and maybe some actual sales.

Been working on the Chaos war like a good doobie.  This is definitely going to be a longer tale.  The first part is all ready past 30 pages in word.  Now I found out that the page length in word does not translate to an exact amount of pages on Kindle.  8 pages at 14 point font is 14 pages on the kindle.

I usually type at 10 point and then adjust when I go to publish.  I do want to finish this story.  I started it back at the turn of the century!  Yeah that was a while ago.  Not the longest it has taken me to write a story, we know that but it needs to get written.  After all I have so many other stories to write, publish and sell.  Well hopefully sell.

I love the encouragement I get over on the amazon MOA discussions.  The men and women over there are really a great resource for an indie writer.  Most of us have been writing for a long time but actually putting those stories up for sale?  It is harder than people think.  In this world of instant gratification it is still hard to wait to see a sale come in. With Amazon you get a nice little report you can pull up any time to see how the downloads are going.  Yes they are slow but it has been only been since April right?

My traditional published book, Gates, I sent an email to my publisher to find out how I could get a report to see how well my efforts were working.  Well you don’t get to find out for a YEAR.  Yes I said a YEAR!  Okay I wont get upset.  After all Gates is just one of the books I put out.  People have bought it yes.  After all it has a ranking in both ebook and paperback.  So I just have to be nice and patient.  I will just focus on writing and promoting and hoping I actually sell enough to pay one bill sometime this year.

Okay I should probably type up my notes on Chaos from last night and then figure out how to get the next important scene set up.  When writing a short you can really just dump the reader right into the scene but a longer story needs set up and that takes time.  I don’t think I will ever write something over 200 pages but you never know.

free downloads, new words and heat with humidity

Yup another Sunday and it is still humid as heck.  I was hoping to wake up to a nice cool morning that would help me feel up and ready to write.  Nope, hot, humid, sticky…just plain icky..but I wont let it stop me!  I must write after all.

Now per the part of the title about freebies.  I decided that Hope Everlasting has been overlooked.  So it is up for free for the next five days.  And in case anyone didn’t get a chance to read One More All Hallows Eve it is free today.  So two of the Guardians of the Gate City tales for free.  It is a good thing.  Once I get some photos of Sandy Pond I can put together the cover and trailer for A Watery Grave.  Three tales in the same world.  This is a good thing.

My book trailers have started having some notice.  Which is nice.  After all I made those to help entice people to try reading my tales.  I know I had one sale because of the trailer for Ice.  With the heat people are enjoying the images of snow and ice for sure.

Chaos war is moving along.  Not as fast as some can write but we know I write in my own weird way.  Spent the part of the night that my brain would not shut down trying out different ways to have Jessica separate from the guys long enough for the Vamps to grab her.   Not sure I am going to find a way that will not involve magic of some type.  The guys are more than hyper vigilant at this moment.  I only have the few months between Greg getting cursed and the next section of the book to get her taken down under again.  It will wok out.  I am glad I kept Master Tachi around as a ghost though.  Need a wise old man in this story.  Gives me a place to add in little things that the Warrior should know but doesn’t.

Now the Warrior’s back story is starting to fill in.  When I made up Jeffery I hadn’t thought about just what he was.  He was a construct.  Now he is getting history, a vague one thanks to all the magic wrapped around him but one none the less.  Poor guy wants to remember but he can’t.  Between destiny and Avendale’s messing with his head it will take a lot for him to remember who he was before Avendale found him and used him.

Okay time to dig out stuff for the coming yard sale and to fill in missing parts, maybe even make a trailer for Endings..and if I can do something not porny for Distance…we will see.

Endings are us…or justa few more pages

Yup got through the battle now to wrap up the story and start the final edits.  I know a lot of writers do all the writing and then edit but I tend to edit every time I open up the file.  Yeah I do miss a thing here or there but I find if I over edit I screw something up and then it is annoying.  Staying in the right tense and person is what i do when I write my way.  too many cooks really do spoil the soup in my way of writing.

I put Sacrifice up for free for today and tomorrow and before I even let people know there were some downloads.  That is nice.  Hopefully I will get some reviews.  Seems like these free downloads get me about 150 downloads on average, which is pretty good.  Yeah I am still struggling on the actual paid for downloads but they will come.  After all gotta get my name out there right?

It is too bad in a way that I can’t do a free download on Knight Protector, Endings and Gates but those are real books.  Getting them read is what I am hoping for.  Knight Protector has been downloaded at least once as has Gates.  Yeah I don’t make a ton of money but a reader is a reader.

I put up the trailer for Sacrifice which I will add under the other page of my blogs.  I like the way it came out, definitely more a teaser than anything else, which is what you want right?  It is hard to not give anything away when you do shorts but i think I pulled it off.

Now I have figured out the first batch of erotica that I will release for publication.  Playing with a title, something like “Distance doesn’t matter” though that doesn’t sound quite right.  Guess I will have to play with it more.  I will have to do little bits to connect the stories of Anne and Charlie to each other and well edit them so they are less porny and more erotica.

But that will have to wait till after I finish the writing and editing of A Watery Grave.  Nice to have Harry’s third story almost finished.  It does pick up nicely after Hope Everlasting, okay a few months after but that is how these things work.  Get that finished up, do up a cover and a trailer and post it up..hopefully by the middle of this week…or beginning of next week.  I hope I am not flooding the market with stuff really.

I could so easily put up the two other Death Walks Through stories and then the six Echoes of Elder Times and five more Worlds Apart, never mind the second of the Saga of Loralil Greyfox books.  I have a lot finished and ready to go…well story wise.  They all need covers and trailers but what can I say right?

Okay back to work.

Time to buckle down

Well Harry is getting ready for the battle.  Just need to get him in the water.  Yeah I plan on writing a lot today.  Hopefully finish up A Watery Grave and then edit edit edit again.  Luckily I tend to re-read and edit each time I open the file to work on it.  It lets me know where a sentence needs to be changed.

And the files came down for the erotic stories so I can work on those.  Getting them up to snuff wont be too hard.  Just have to change some of the wording, make them literary worth reading.  It will take some work and then I have to group them into five different collections.  Yeah I know that this is a bit of jumping on a bandwagon but I need the exposure…oh the awful pun there.  Covers will be tricky.  What can I put on the cover that wont be tacky really?  I am getting a bit knocked about on the Sacrifice cover and I understand why.  It doesn’t come across at all in the little postage stamp sized image that Amazon uses in the listing pages.  So I have to do something but I don’t want to lose the eyes.  They are important to the story after all.

Now I will probably put Sacrifice up for a free day, yes only one, just to get people to read and hopefully do a review on it.  Another of my shorty shorts but a good one I think.  Hope will go up free on the day I post up A Watery Grave.  Again just a single day this time.  I don’t want to just have free downloads.  I know plugging away and putting up as much as I can will someday actually get my work noticed, so I will keep doing it.

Time to work.   Just how bad should I have the Mari-morgens injure Harry?  He will get hurt, can’t help it when he has to fight them in their element but how bad?

working up to the climax

Okay got Harry back to the Pond now the fun begins.  Got to bind and/or banish those Mari-morgens and they aren’t gonna be happy to see that happen.  Mixing catholism and wicca can be fun.  After all there are priests who understand that other ways of worshiping is not heresy and that one view just wont stop all the dangers.  So a little mixing and a lot of magic coming into this scene..I think.  While this started a darker tale than Hope Everlasting I think we will get out of it with less casualties.  So far no main characters are biting the big one.  They might be owie when I am done but well that happens in good old magic battles with beasties dire.  Back to the writing.  Might actually finish this today if I don’t get interrupted.

Bright sun shiny morning there is work to be done

Well this morning I went to the “other” Amazon sites to try and find places to flog my work.  Yeah I know but it has to be done.  Managed to find discussions on the French, British and German sites.  They had ones listed in good old english so it helped.  But When i tried on the Italian and the one for Spain…I don’t think they do discussions the same way.  They didn’t have any listed!  Now that was different.  I expected to have to go through a long list in the language but there were none?

Okay so it was expecting too much.  Heck I have surfed through the sites over in China and Japan, you know to see if I was listed over there.  As far as I can tell no but then it isn’t like they w9ould be interested in short stories in english right?  Course I tried to search discussions over at the Canada site since I am officially living here.  Zippo…now that just isnt right.  They make Canadians buy kindle stories from the US and discuss on the US site.  Now we know I am a born US cit but I live here now and I would like my new country men to have a chance to read and comment too.  Oh well.

Yesterday got Harry through the first battle with the Mari-morgens.  Went abut how I wanted it too but now he has ten hours to come up with a way to bind them or destroy them.  Which way to go which way to go?  I will work it out, after all I want to get this finished up in time to post on Lammas.  See how many of you know what that day is.  I need to get the story written and edited, then do a cover and a trailer.  I think I can pull it off.  If I do I will put Hope Everlasting up for a day on the free list as lead in.

And speaking of freebies Paritngs is moving along.  Looks like I might have 150 or more downloads by this evening.  Got the first review up.  Now I have had a couple people comment they loved it on the boards but they didn’t post the reviews darn it all on the page.  But it is nice that the reviews I have showing on my stories are all four and five stars and nice comments.  Makes me proud.  Now if I can just get comments (and readers) for Gates, Knight Protector and Hope.

Debating putting up Ice this weekend.  I have a trailer, a cover and of course the story all finished and ready to go but should I?  Oh yeah coolness someone over and Youtube sent me a comment about Ice..yeah a silly one but I wasn’t expecting a comment from the Youtube world so it was nice.

Still waiting on the Kobo people to explain why Endings isn’t showing the table of content on the left side of the file.  The layout is fine but hat little thing would probably throw off readers and I don’t want Loralil getting dissed for formating issues.
Okay time to get back to plotting out A Watery Grave and getting the kid moving so we can get groceries before the heat settles in.

 

Hotter than heck

Yeah it really is.  I think I am going to have to take the writing into the basement if I plan on getting anything done.  I did make another poem video which is posted on my other page.  Now I could probably make a few more but I just want to sit back and snooze.  So humid all you want to do is ignore the world.

I made sure to do my baking early this morning.  While I love cooking for my family baking is just not meant to be done when it is hot and humid.  So brownies made by 9am…and they stuck to the darn pan!  Not something I have had an issue with in ages.  Gotta go back and figured out what was the problem there.

Well as for actual writing.  Moving harry through this tale is a bit slow.  He is currently face to face with the Mari-morgens.  Now Mari-morgens for those of you who don’t know are a version of a welsh water fae.  They like there Irish Pooka cousins like to drown people.  The two I have in the tale are sisters and not happy ones.  Yeah I reuse legends and faerie stories but I change them up a bit.  So they may seem like the legends but they aren’t really.  Sorta like the troll cousins in Hope Everlasting.  Now if you read that story you would find the trolls, the spider demon, the crow shapeshifters and even my version of the Japanese Kappa.  Just so much fun.

I have been debating a lot about posting up A Bargain with fur.  That story is based on a filk song that I had on a cassette from way back when.  So offically that is a song fic.  Now I could just post it up on a place like GoodReads or Wattpad.  Either of those have a place for no cost stories.  So it might be worth it.  But of course like Loralil and my Suteko fanfiction it needs a good cover and even a little book trailer to move it along with the audience.  So we will see once my honey gets Adobe up and running.  Here is hoping it will be ready for me to go hog wild with covers tomorrow.  We can hope.  It is currently the cover issue holding me back from putting up more work.

And speaking of putting up work I am now signed up to publish over on Kobo.  While my Knight Protector story is up there that is taken from the Smashwords page.  This would allow me to put something directly over on Kobo.  This could be good if it is like Amazon.  It does ask for how I want to be paid so I think it is like Kindle publishing.  We will see of course.

I just worry that once I get this stuff up I will find that no one really wants to pay for my words.  I write stuff that does intrigue people but getting them to pay for it now that is the issue.  I don’t want to be the next Stephen King or Sherrilyn Kenyon but I would like to be able to contribute to the household budget this way.  We will see.  After all I have only been online in the publishing world for two months right?  Takes longer than that for most authors.  So we will see.

Okay I need something cold.  It is soooo hot.  Enjoy the day folks!

Finished writing one on to the next

Okay while I am done the main writing part of Hope Everlasting, yes I do need to do some editing.  That is expected.  But I have decided for a few days to step away from Harry and friends and go back to a much older story.  Oh my was I surprised to get an email begging me to go back to Battle of the Star Beast.  Now that story was one of the ones I lost when I went through the computer crashes years back.  I had forgotten I had posted it up on one of the fiction sites.  Lets not say which one.  So I went and got my files from over there and since they were in htm I had to copy and paste it into a doc file.

Yeah it has been a LONG time since I wrote this one.  Okay  the story is a good one, a mix of Lord of the Rings style fantasy and Star Wars style science fiction.  Yeah I wanted to do an epic and I always wanted to see a cross of science fiction and fantasy with the whole other planes etc.  But oh my this story needs some work.  Parts are good and worth working on.  Parts are written really well, other parts you can tell I wrote over a decade ago.

I’m not sure just how much more work I will do on this right now.  There are forty odd pages to go through right now.  Fragments of sentences, descriptions that need to be reworked and pacing that needs fixing but I can do it.  Once I get through that I should be able to dredge out of my memory exactly where I planned on bringing this story.

When I came up with it I had planned on a three book arc.  Full books, not my usual short stories to novella length.  And who knows it might happen.  I will toss between this and other things of course.  After all I have things like Whether to Save Face or Family, an urban fantasy, Death Walks through, the collection of shorts with Death in them.  And a bunch of other things.  Hell I have the third in the Saga of Loralil Greyfox books in process too.  And that is just the bigger files.  All of you know I have up to 150 odd stories in the works.  Just settling on one to work is the hard part.

Well back to editing Star Beast.  Seeing what is worth keeping and what needs rewriting.  Then I may just take a few hours off to watch a movie and do some Minecrafting.  If my head doesn’t decide I need to just close my eyes for a few hours.

Okay those of you who want to read the old old old copy of this it is over on literotica.com  Yeah I said an erotica site.  After all there is erotic elements to this story that make it not reading material for the younger set.  But here you go the link:

http://www.literotica.com/s/battle-of-the-star-beast-ch-01

There are other stories over there.  Some complete, some not.  Some really not bad…others well…lets just say they are a bit more like porn.  As I have said before I can write anything.  I don’t say it is good but I have done children stories to erotica.  Something for everyone.  enjoy.