OMG I got selected!

Yup I am now the proud owner of the December Goodreads Fantasy book of the month!  That is just mind blowing.  Endings deserves the readers and I am glad it got picked but I will admit I am a tad scared.  After all I wrote it a while ago and I am sure it has issues in the grammar department.  I just hope the story telling overwhelms the bad bits.  It is a dark story, what with starting with rape and torture and destruction but there is love and redemption in it as well.  and of course the lead into the sequel Revenge.  If I don’t get ripped to pieces it should be interesting.

Christmas Snow has found a path away from the really sad ending I was worried about.  Still will be close though.  We will see how this goes.  Looks like it will be a longer Harry story though.  If it gets as long as I think I might just combine the Guardian tales with five stories instead of six.  I am sure there are those who would rather read them in a paperback instead of the sbook versions that I have been doing.

I am slowly gathering fans of my poetry too it seems.  When I commented on one poetry group that I will probably only post poems every few weeks he got upset.  Whoa for my short and not at all rhyming poetry?  Cool.  You never know do you?

I went and fixed both Distance and Shadows for Smashwords.  Okay as much as I hate doing their fixes this time Shadows really did need it.  I could not believe the amount of errors that file had!  I fixed all the typos and formatting issues, removed the bolding that snuck in and then put in the right headers.  Here is hoping it gets approved.  Distance, well I fixed the spacing and again the bolding.  Wish I knew where that was coming up in my files.  I will just have to make sure they are not there on the next tale I put up there.

well time to go back to writing and hoping to get lots of it done.

Finishing work and starting new

Well I got When Shadows Rise up on Smashwords.  It is of course going to be free and it has had 25 downloads over night so that is a good thing.  It is actually quite a big story.  Over 300 pages that I wish I could have reworked to do as an actual totally original novel but well htat is okay right?  It is up, people who would not normally read fan fiction are reading it and that makes me happy.  If they like it they may just go ahead and read the other stuff.

I finished writing up a quick like Christmas story for the SS Wordsmyth collection my writers group is doing and sent it off.  Just a shorty short that is pretty much like a sequel to the Halloween story I did for the collection that was done.  Having fun writing a science fictiony little flash fiction series.  I just might do one for New Years next.  We will see.

Now I am sitting down and working on another Harry story.  For some reason my friend the Guardian just wants another story told.  I am not sure once this is done if I will release it separately or if I will just put it in the collection of Guardian tales I have planned on releasing all together.  Who knows?

Traveler is currently taking a break for editing.  After all ti will give me a chance to come up with where to take it next.  I have gotten Edana past the release of her fire nature.  I think I need to go into just what the two ancients had been doing between getting cursed and the blade being broken.  That should take up some space right?

I need to work on a cover for Nightmares soon.  One more read through on that and i think it will be ready to publish next month.  And then of course i need to do a cover for Revenge and get that ready for publication in January.  And then well I can work on that poetry book.  Maybe.  Who knows right?  So much to do.  And the hardest part is deciding just how many stories are needed in a collection.  I have some tales for Echoes of Elder Times and Worlds apart but I am holding them for now.  We will see what happens.  First I need to see some sales somewhere.

Right now I have 3 sales on Amazon and 1 on Kobo.  I really hope things pick up soon.  Okay back to work.

Thank the gods for slushies

Okay so decided to do the shopping early in the am since I walk over and back.  Heat is supposed to be awful today and I figured go out and back before it gets bad.  yeah right.  Didn’t work out that way.  It is a very good thing I was only getting veggies today.  Anything frozen would have been soup by the time I got it home.

All I can say is I am glad the gas station at the corner does very cheap slushies.  Made the walk back a bit more bearable and  I don’t feel like passing out.  Heat is not my friend.

Okay back to writing.  One bridging scene completed, now to fill in the next section.  Gregory has been infected by the werewolf virus, which Jessica will have to find a way to stop in its tracks.  Can’t have one of the chosen three going to the dark side now can we?

Once that little interlude is done comes the next nasty thing to happen to Jessica.  I am soooo mean to my female leads.  First the poor girl gets used as bait and a playtoy by the villainess and her demonic sidekick, next she is going to be dragged underground and have the color scared right out of her hair.  I’m so very very mean.  But because of these trials she does learn to be much more kickass.  She will never be the fighter that say my Loralil Greyfox character is but she will learn how to defend herself and better yet to stay out of harms way.  What good is a healer who keeps getting captured after all?

Lets see how much work I can get done with the sleepover twins.  Being a nice mommy I let one of my little ones friends stay over last night.  Means they are bouncing around wanting to do stuff and to EAT lots.  Pancakes at 7am, slushies a 9am,  and I am sure they will want a snack in another hour.  Lets see what I can get done between then and now.

 

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.

Sales and downloads

I am not sure which I should be happier about.  The fact that my stuff is getting downloaded and very occasionally reviewed or the fact the very very nice people have bought and paid for my work.  I was surprised to see Knight Protector finally sold a copy.  Makes me do the silly hamster dance of course.  After all the whole point of putting my work on a for sale site is to see sales.  Yeah I may have only sold under a handful of stuff so far but it is a start.

The weird one is that Gates, the kindle copy, also sold a copy or so but I can’t see how many because while it is a kindle copy it isn’t one I posted up, the publisher did.  So I don’t know if it was one copy or more.  Need to get my publisher to let me have some type of report.

Now I need to figure out how to get Endings on the radar of readers.  It isn’t on Amazon so I don’t have the same boards to play with.  I don’t see discussion boards on Kobo so far.  I know I could have put it on Amazon and will probably put it up there in the fall but I wanted to have it in other places so it didn’t seem I was flooding amazon with my work.
Here is the link to the Kobo

http://www.kobobooks.com/ebook/Endings/book-lrkvXtsAfk-dzKRK3uBuJA/page1.html?s=jdovH3-ThEWCGwpdIicxTw&r=2

I worked so long on this book that I hope the readers from over on fictionpress will look for it.  I guess maybe if I go over to fictionpress and put in the link it would work.  After all there are still the in process Loralil stories over there.

Now yesterday a friend of mine has convinced me to pull down from the various places I have erotica up and to bundle them into a book (or four) and post them.  After all erotica is selling like hotcakes thanks to the Fifty Shades book.  I hate to jump on a bandwagon but well…we need the money.
And well I can write pretty much any type.  Okay yeah I havent done cowboy stories…I should with my step dad finally cracking open books and reading them fast.  And for anyone who knows him this is a milestone.  The man NEVER read when I was young.  He hated reading and now thanks to old age…and yes 73 qualifies and his medical condition he has discovered a love of books!

Well I need to work and work and work.  So much editing to do on those stories and then covers and deciding where I can post these for sale.  The erotica actually worries me more than my fantasies have.  Erotica can be done so badly and I don’t want to turn off possible buyers of my nonerotic stories.  Because those are my hearts children and I love them like I love my body’s children.

 

Well I figured it out…or Loralil will be going live on Kobo soon!

Yeah finally figured out why the chapters weren’t showing on the table of contents part of the epub form.  You have to put your chapter headings as get this…HEADINGS…okay so that was an easy fix.  Now no guarantee that Loralil will actually sell…yeah I know I have a few people out there who love her.  Very few but we have to let our children fly free…right?  It has been way too many years since I started her tales.  They are longer than my usual stuff.  Heck most of the stuff on Amazon runs the gambit of 6 pages to 30…Loralil’s first book is 86 pages..now what that translates to in Kobo I don’t know yet but I will soon.  They say 24 to 48 hours.  Here is hoping.  And if she does well then Revenge can go up for sale too.  That one is longer.  At 111 pages in doc form she is longer.  Still not a Stephen King but we all know I can’t write stuff that long now can I?
I am feeling like I should push harder, do more.  I put Ice up for free till Friday…not that Amazon has it showing yet.  I got Loralil up, wrote up some more of Harry’s third story and now…it is HOT…yeah I know but sometimes I can’t breath when it is hot.   I have seven days on my person schedule to finish up A Watery Grave and then I can start the cover and trailer.  Oh heck I should probably do a trailer for Loralil…now that will be hard to do.  The art that would fit her I just cant do myself.  Well I guess we will see right?

 

Monday morning

Well another week is starting.  My honey is up and out the door to work, my nine year old is still asleep and the news is on.  Sometimes I do wonder why I watch the news.  Of course today they are still focused on that horrible shooting.  The one that brings tears to all our eyes.  How could anyone shoot a pregnant woman and her six year old child.  How could he shoot a toddler.  I write stories were the evil villains do horrible things but they are stories, not reality.  I am sure he will use an insanity defense and claim that Batman gave him the idea.  But we all know deep inside that no comic book, no book or movie or tv show or song can make you do anything.  Using that as a defense is just wrong and should make the police and jury sit up and take notice.  You can’t use a story told me to do it as a defense.  IT IS FICTION.
Okay long enough rant.  My emotions are a bit wonky today.  The weekend news of my brother in law passing has made me more worried about my own side of the family.  My parents are getting up there, my brother is older than my brother in law was and I have nieces and nephew scattered all over.  Never mind my overworked eldest daughter and my middle daughter.  So many people to touch base with to make sure they are okay.  While modern ways of communicating are great and what keeps me attached to the world, they don’t always work.  When you want to hug your kids and parents but they are all in another country it can hurt in ways that too many know.

Okay I do have to work on the next Harry story.  He is currently meeting with Father John at the rectory and I am not sure where this scene is going.  One of my problems is I plan on one thing and the characters decide to do something else.  I set a goal for myself of getting this one done by the end of the month and I will do it if I have to cram it all in on the 30th.

I am currently debating putting up Which is the Sacrifice.  It is another shorty short that doesn’t quite fit a category.  Yeah it is definitely a fantastic fiction but is is a end of the world/beginning of the next, fantasy,or something else.  What I need is a genre faerie who can tell me this story is officially this type and you should tag it this way.   The cover, which I posted yesterday, didn’t come out too bad.  Not sure if it conveighs what I want but well it is for a shorty short.  Started gathering the images for the trailer so when I get them together I can put the trailer out.

With the estimated heat and humidity feeling like 40 something Celsius (90-100 for the rest of us) I will be having trouble doing much this afternoon.  I find that breathing is no fun when your chest feels like it has a wet blanket pressing you down.  The basement will be my friend for sure.

Whoa this is a long blog today.  Guess I needed to purge.  Well I am going to wait through this afternoon on the Kobo Writing life guys.  If they don’t respond then i will just have to decide if I am still going to post Loralil over there for sale.  I would like to have it out for sale and let her story maybe generate some fans…at least some readers and who knows some sales?  Yeah I need some sales.  Not just one per story but a hundred would be nice.  They say you can’t claim to be an author unless you can pay a bill with a royalty check.  And well I haven’t gotten a royalty check yet, so guess I am just a story teller with weird stories to tell right?

Back to wrestling Harry through his next scene.

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.

 

Kobo, Loralil and early mornings

Well it is before 6am here.  The air is cool and comfy for a bit and no one is up yet.  Yesterday I got the cover for Endings, book one of the Loralil Greyfox saga finished.  That is I got the set up done and my sweet loving hubby did all the cool flares and stuff.  Love having an artist and talented husband.  Took me FOREVER to get what I did done.  Then I went over to Kobo Writing life and tried to get it posted.  I say try because each time I uploaded the file and viewed it in the epub format they want it was messed up.  Only chapter five shows in the table of content and the page breaks got erased or moved.  Argghhhed…drove me nuts.  I will try again today.

Also worked on the book trailer for Partings.  That took a few tries to get it to work right.  Something about Picasa had it taking the final caption and just flashing it instead of showing it.  Annoying but well I expected trouble.

The cover for Partings, while not as fancy as Endings was special for me.  After all that is my daughter on the cover.  I liked it and so did she.  Then I did a quick cover for Sins of the Father.  Nothing really fancy and put it up along with the story over on GoodReads.  Now that is a freebie since it is fanfiction and not original work.

Partings went live for the free download last night and so far one person in Great Britain downloaded it.  That was not expected.  Usually they are one of the last to do that.  So I can’t complain.  I just hope that the US readers and others kick in quick.  It is a shortie short but a fun one.

Okay time to wake the hubby.  And for me to get to work on files.

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!