Category Archives: Humor

April 8, 2013 · 5:14 pm

I-5 or The Handbasket to Hell

Today I am back home, doing massive amounts of laundry and also doing revisions on Huw the Bard. For the last week I have been trundling up and down the I-5 corridor in Western Washington like an elderly gypsy in a 2009 Subaru Forester. Or, as I like to think of the old family wagon, the Handbasket to Hell.

Anyone who regularly has to drive this particular stretch of highway knows what I am talking about.

The traveling population in Western Washington numbers about 5,229,486 people, and they are ALL eventually funneled onto the 6 to 8 lanes of I-5. Except for I-405, that 30 mile long stretch of misery that bypasses Seattle east of Lake Washington, this is it, folks. Unlike civilized places like the Midwest or Florida, you get only ONE major highway serving five-and-a-quarter million people out here in the urban-wilds.

Basically the legislature in Washington State is too dysfunctional to even begin contemplating fixing a toilet, much less our traffic troubles. The feds also feel that under normal circumstances conestogas and Sasquatches require very little in the way of freeway access, so there you are.

Oh, the Agony.

Olympia, Tacoma, and Seattle each have public transportation systems in place, and you can make it on public transport if you work at it, although it becomes a looooooooong journey with many tricky connections. This is the least expensive option and if you have all day and little cash, it’s doable.

There is also the time honored Greyhound Bus for those brave souls who don’t mind the smell of a rolling Porta Potty AND who enjoy the thrill of being stranded in the worst, sleaziest sections of strange cities.

But there is no light-rail connecting Olympia to Everett. Believe me, if there were I would take it! I could ride Amtrak, but that is $24.00 each way, rather expensive for an underfunded book-monger like myself to consider. And then I’d still have to find a transit bus to Snohomish. I could use my daughter’s car once I got to Snohomish, so it may become an option.

At certain rare, beautiful times (after 8 pm or before 5 am) my journey to Seattle will take 1 hour, exactly as it should. However, most of the time the traffic is such that I allow 2 hours to Seattle and 3 to Snohomish. As I inch along in the bumper-to-bumper traffic, I feel that if the car is rolling forward, even if it is only going 20 mph, I must be making progress!

While I am away from home, every coffee bar or cafeteria where I see the words ‘free wifi’ becomes my office! Grandma pops open the hand-bag, hauls out the little Acer and voila! Grandma is back in business. Not only that, but Grandma can write a book while helping Luke Skywalker and Darth Vader team up with Batman and the Green Lantern for a little kick-ball, pausing only to walk to the Pilchuck Drive In for a snack of those lovely morsels of greasy, salty goodness that we call fries (that’s ‘chips’ to you in the UK.)

Yes, I am that kind of grandma. (Here kid, eat yer spuds. They’ll make ya into a superhero.)

I have begun fleshing out Billy Ninefingers, and holy krraapp, once again I’ve fallen in love with my characters. I just LOVE the Rowdies and the snarky merriment Billy seems to generate.

Irene Luvaul and I have just finished the first draft of ‘Mountains of the Moon’, with me writing and Irene reading and removing ‘thats’ and ‘which'(s) right and left, along with de-comma-tizing frantically, and directing me to “Show not tell!” The woman is a saint, to want to do this on such a raw manuscript. She began work on the beginning chapters before I had even finished the story, but that gave me the impetus to just get it done.

As I mentioned before, Irene and I are embarking on the third edit of Huw the Bard, preparatory to sending him to Carlie Cullen.

By trial and error, I have discovered that I need two sets of editorial eyes on my wretched work – and when Carlie has made her trip though and I have fixed her findings to her satisfaction, my sister, Sherrie DeGraw, and several others will beta-read it, checking to see that it is ready for publication.

All this while, Carlie and Irene are writing their own wonderful works, and Sherrie is painting her little heart out.

When you are an indie author, if you want your work to be enjoyable, you must have a thick hide and the ability to work with others even if they are telling you things you don’t want to hear. Believe me, there is no agony like the agony of a bad review, other than that of having your heart ripped from your chest.

Write the story the way it falls out of your head. Rewrite the story until you are satisfied with it. Find an editor who is HAPPY to work with you, and TAKE THEIR ADVICE by sucking it up and making the revisions they have requested. Go through the MS at least 3 times with them, or even 4. Then find another editor, a ‘Line-editor” and go through the same process. Have the book beta-read by people who read in your genre.

Spend the time that it takes to make your book reader-ready and you will have a product you can be proud of.

Even if you’ve written it while riding in a handbasket to hell.

4 Comments

Filed under Battles, Books, Fantasy, Humor, Uncategorized, writer, writing

Tagged as adventure, Art, battles, fantasy, fiction, humor, Sasquatch, Why are we in this handbasket and where are we going, writing

April 5, 2013 · 8:32 pm

The Wheels on the Bus

Ah spring! Once again I am traveling the grand Highways of Life, surfing the net from hospital cafeterias and meeting some of the nicest, most caring people in the world.

As I’ve written before, two of my children suffer from Adult Onset of Epilepsy. Most of my time has lately been divided between Seattle and Snohomish, trying to help them cope and then returning to my home south of Olympia.

I spend a LOT of time on the road. I take my husbands car for these long trips, as my 1999 Suzuki Swift (known locally as ‘the Grape’ because of its grapey-blue color) is not that good on the freeway. It’s so small that it gets blown around a lot by semi-trucks and mini-vans.

This time the ‘e’ word has struck my oldest daughter . Her seizures manifest themselves differently than her brother’s. Dan goes from being just fine to Tonic Clonic without warning. His are currently being managed well with proper meds.

Leah has only had one Tonic Clonic event and that was in 2000, but she has once again begun having episodes where she ‘just goes away’ for 3 or 4 minutes. She has no memory of these mini events. They are Complex Partial Seizures, and are quite random in the way they strike her.

They share the same father, and there are indications that this may be something that his family has dealt with in the past on his mother’s side. The problem is, they emigrated to the US from Norway in the 1920s, and all the ones who would know anything are dead.

Chances are they would not have been willing to discuss it, were they still alive. The stigma of epilepsy was, at one time, enough to keep members of an epileptic’s family locked in a code of silence. In the public mind, epilepsy was intricately bound up in a knot with mental illness and mental retardation. From the 1920’s through the 1990’s, just having a family member with one of these conditions was enough to prevent you from getting a white-collar job, no matter what your education and qualifications. It is only in the last decade that the public has begun to be educated in regard to ALL of these conditions.

In many ways, we are still fighting these sorts of battles, breaking down the stigmas attached to these illnesses and conditions. It is illegal to discriminate against a person in hiring just because they disclose that they have an illness or disorder, but who knows what will affect the person’s chances at a job interview?

Fortunately my children are employed well. Dan is a software engineer and Leah is a hair stylist, and owns her own business. Dan’s employer is absolutely awesome. He’s been there 10 years and is very happy. His employer has many employee-support programs, and they treat their employees like family.

And so, the saga continues. The vegan hits the road, wondering if she will be forced to starve or if there will be food she can eat there, wondering how her kids are holding up under the pressure of dealing with new meds and medical bills.

Yet, no matter what, they always seem to manage, and yes, sometimes they need my help with logistics or hospital stuff, but most of the time they just handle what life throws at them.

And this makes me rather productive–I have finished writing the first draft of Mountains of the Moon, and am doing revisions. It has an ending and everything.

I have 48,000 words written on Billy Ninefingers. I have the beginning, and I have the end, he just needs the middle filled out!

I am also doing a complete rewrite of my Galahad tale.

So the wheels on the bus go round and round and I keep rolling down the highway, but I say to heck with reality, I’m an author. Escape is my middle name!

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Filed under Battles, Epilepsy, Fantasy, Humor, Literature, writer, writing

April 1, 2013 · 9:40 pm

Prompts, Me, and The Garmin Lady

This week I will be on the road again. It is spring break for the schools there and so I will head north to Snohomish to stay with The Boy for a few days while my daughter, Leah, is working.

I love Snohomish. It’s full of little secondhand shops and antique stores. And just like in Olympia, the vegan can eat really well in that town.

Also, it is paradise for those of us who LOVE small, independently owned bookstores.

Apparently there is a lot of road construction between my house and my destination. But don’t worry! I have our trusty GPS device, complete with The Garmin Lady to guide me around the back-ups and traffic jams.

Yes, The Garmin Lady is better than your mother-in-law at giving orders and (unlike me) she always points the correct direction when she says “Turn Left .”

(Oops! I meant the OTHER left, dear. Sorry.)

Gosh, I’m helpful.

My dear friends Carlie Cullen and Donna L. Sadd are doing another month of blogging to writing prompts and today’s prompt was the arrow you see to right. I’m not good at writing to prompts, but that arrow perfectly defines my poor hubby’s sense of direction, although he would deny it if asked! Therefore, in the interest of not publicly mocking my spouse I will not be blogging on it.

But I did get him the Garmin originally so that he would listen to directions from someone, anyone.

Unfortunately, you need to update the maps regularly and while my hubby makes his living as an IT man, he’s not really into it at home, so little things like that tend to languish unless they update automatically.

One of the first things we found out was that if you have the Garmin set on “Pedestrian” mode, it will tell you how far an how fast you have walked. This has been really helpful for my hubby who regularly takes long walks on his lunch break. It’s amazing how far he can walk in an hour.

HOWEVER, there is a down side to this. IF you forget to switch it back to driving mode, and you decide to make a random trip down Interstate 5 from Olympia, Washington to, oh, let’s say McMinnville, Oregon, you may have a random encounter with The Garmin Lady that goes like this:

Garmin Lady: “Exit Freeway at next exit.”

Me and Greg: “What? No way, we aren’t even in Chehalis yet!”

Garmin Lady “Recalculating. Take Next Exit, to the right.”

Me and Greg: “There’s something wrong with this thing. We’re passing Longview. We’re nowhere near McMinnville yet. We’re still in Washington, so what she wants us to do, I can’t imagine.”

Garmin Lady “Recalculating. Make U-Turn at next police turnout and then exit freeway, to the right.”

Us: “What?!? That’s just plain crazy, not to mention illegal! Turn that damned thing off! It’s broken!”

SO, if I am going to rely on this miracle of modern technology to guide me around any traffic jams, this three-hour road trip could really be an adventure. I could end up in Mukilteo, or Woodinville. Heck, I could end up back in Seattle if I really piss The Garmin Lady off!

7 Comments

Filed under Adventure, Battles, Fantasy, Humor, Literature, Uncategorized, Vegan, writer, writing

Tagged as #AprilPrompts, adventure, battles, Blogging Challenge, humor, The Garmin Lady, vegan lifestyle, writing

March 28, 2013 · 7:31 pm

The End is Nigh

I should be in a party mood, but I’m not.

I’m now writing the final chapter of Mountains of the Moon. The final battle is over, the aftermath is a memory. Now all I have left to write is the ending. Party On!!!

Good grief, this is difficult.

Do I just say “And they lived happily ever after?”

No–this is Neveyah…happily for a few years is about it…but they do get home, at least some of them, right? Soooo….

How freaking boring is that? Now what?

Lets see…maybe a bit of a fight…no I’m trying to end this and that’s just asking for 10,000 more words…but what if they just happened to…no.

No. No. No.

Just END the bloody book! They went home! They were happy! End of book! How the hell hard is that?

*Author makes rude noise at computer screen and takes a teensy coffee break. Characters languish in limbo for two hours.*

Okay, where was I? Right, the best part of the story is over, and there’s nothing left to talk about, but I have to gracefully end this ordeal. This sucks honking wongas….

Did you know that you can go out to YouTube and there is a channel with more than 80 videos of Ritchie Blackmore’s Rainbow? Oohh… Stargazer…my favorite!

So, do they come home in coffins or what? WHAAAT!!! Help me Obi Wan Kenobi! You’re my only hope!

Obi Wan.

Ooohh, that reminds me! I just got an old version of Lego’s Star Wars for the PS3 for the grandkids.

Heh heh.

*Keys rapidly* “And they all lived happily ever after.”

Gotta go now.

Luuuuuke, I am your Grandma….

7 Comments

Filed under Adventure, Battles, Fantasy, Final Fantasy, Humor, Uncategorized, writing

Tagged as adventure, fantasy, humor, knights, Legos, magic, PS3, Ritchie Blackmore, Star Wars, writing

March 25, 2013 · 7:43 pm

Trains That go Bump in the Night

Life is a rolling train wreck sometimes.

I think I write for the same reasons that I read.

I’m an escape artist.

I have two adult children with epilepsy, and they frequently face challenges that would daunt the average person. They didn’t ask for it–they just have it.

Oddly enough, although the ‘e’ word still rears it’s ugly head and we sometime spend long hours in hospitals, epilepsy is the least of the worries. When you throw into the mix several other loved ones who are dealing with varying stages of meth addiction, your family will occasionally have a train wreck.

When the addict went to jail I felt joy–joy that he was out of the gutter and in a dry place where they feed him and supply him with his insulin, and his violent, hateful self was locked away from me.

I’m a rotten sister.

I’m no longer buying into the insidious guilt trip that the addicts are SO good at pushing on us. I no longer allow him to bleed me dry of money and in November of 2012 I called BS on his protestations of innocence. His attempts to make the rest of us feel guilty because we never devolved into gutter-dwelling crack-hos no longer have the desired effect on me. I told him that I would purchase his insulin, but that was all I would buy. I do love the wonderful boy he used to be before meth destroyed him, and I don’t want him to die. So that day in November, I paid for his insulin at the pharmacy. His nasty attitude was such that I felt he could pick it up himself.

That didn’t play to his plans at all. He couldn’t wheedle cigarettes or any other outlays of cash from me. I was sent a text message that referred to me in the most vile of terms. He hasn’t called me since. According to the local grapevine, he has cut me off–I am no longer a member of his family.

Neither is his son, for the same reasons.

When he was released from jail last week, phone calls from him to others in the family demonstrated that it’s business as usual for him. I feared that the threats and cajolery, lies and promises would begin again, but so far he hasn’t called me. Every member of the family who remains in communication with this creature of the night is poisoned by his touch. You never know what phone call to answer and what to ignore, because once he figures out that you won’t answer when your caller ID says he is calling, he uses other people’s phones.

Let the celebrations begin! Since he cut me off, I have not had to pay for his insulin, which is not cheap. Where he is getting it, I don’t know. He is still alive, and I haven’t bought him any since November.

Thus it is that I immerse myself in fantasy worlds and my husband spends his free time gardening. We are united in our efforts to avoid dealing with the addicts.

Addicts have NO gratitude. Don’t expect it, they don’t have it. All they have is a bottomless need and a burning envy. The addict desires to own your possessions but not to enjoy them the way you enjoy them. They will use them and give them away in exchange for drugs or position within their clan of using ‘friends’. The user feels completely separate from his family. The user will hate you for not being a fellow user, but though they despise you, they will use you until you are an empty husk.

Princess of Quite a Lot by Mary Englebreit

Princess of Quite a Lot by Mary Engelbreit

I am in so many ways a princess of quite a lot, in a completely Mary Engelbreit way! Having a train wreck in the family really helps to underscore what is true and positive, what is real and important. It underscores the love that binds us and also breaks us.

I am grateful for the fact that my home is a calm, pleasant little castle; 1100 square feet of modest suburban serenity. My husband and I worked hard for this tiny bungalow, and we are a bit house-proud in that we maintain it well. I am grateful that my children have good, happy lives. I am grateful for my beautiful grandchildren.

Even when the sound of grinding metal alerts me to the fact that another train has gone bump in the night, I am grateful for the truth of my real treasure–love. Yes, it is a deadly weapon and can be used against me, and it has been used to cut my heart out, but nonetheless I am grateful for it.

I am not alone in living with the wreckage of this devastating, evil drug. Nearly every family in my county has been touched by it. The schools are filled with children whose lives are forever tagged with the label ‘children of meth’. Society looks down on them and turns away, fearing their misery is contagious. At Christmas, polite society buys a teddy bear or a Christmas basket for the annual “Toys for Tots” campaign, but what about the rest of the year? The problem is so huge, so overwhelming that the Washington State Department of Social and Health Services can’t even begin to cope with it.

It falls back on the rest of us to do what we can for the affected children in our own family, and hope for the best when it comes to society at large.

Gratitude is my wealth.

Living in my fantasy world of make-believe is my refuge, and writing about it is my liberation. Real life I take one day at a time, and I remain grateful.

9 Comments

Filed under Battles, Books, Epilepsy, Humor, Literature, writer, writing

Tagged as battles, family, humor, literature, living with epilepsy, meth addiction, writing

March 22, 2013 · 5:46 pm

Branding yourself day 5 – Goodreads and All Points Beyond

One thing most authors do first is go out to http://www.goodreads.com and make a profile for themselves there, because all the online writing groups say you have to do that. And everyone told you to get a blog, so you did these two things and still, nothing happened. So why did I leave these two important detail to the last day of my series?

Tools. You needed the tools to make these two venues as professional as is possible.

In the course of this week you have gathered together an arsenal of tools with which to make the best Goodreads profile you can. You are tweeting. You have your Author Photo. You have your Author Bio. You have links to your about.me profile, you are LinkedIn and made a book trailer. You opened a Pinterest account and you posted a poem to Wattpad. You just googled yourself, and you are still not on page one . Have patience! This is where we pull all these disparate threads together in ONE important, cohesive place:

Goodreads.

Open your Goodreads author profile. If you haven’t already made one, do it now!

1. Go to your Author Dashboard. If you never took the tutorial on how to effectively use Goodreads, do it now. It’s there for a reason.

2. Now look at your Bio – is it the concise, professional bio that you have used on ALL your other sites? This consistency is very important, although I am not sure why. When it comes to the internet, consistency is magic, and I’ve never really understood magic. It works, so just do it.

3. Does your blog link back to your profile page? I have the RSS feed for my book review blog, Best In Fantasy, link back there because Goodreads is a club for people who are passionate about books. This means my review blog updates there every time I make a new post, and I try to crank out at least one book review a week. The link to the blog you’re reading now, Life in the Realm of Fantasy is in my Bio.

4. Are all the books you have written, or been a contributor to listed correctly?

5. Have you read and reviewed any books on Amazon or Barnes&Noble? Re-post those reviews on Goodreads. Reading and reviewing is what Goodreads is all about, so if you haven’t read anything lately, take the time to write a paragraph about Pride and Prejudice or whatever books you have read in the past that inspired you to write, and post it. Be serious, because these reviews are part of what builds your profile stats.

When you are a member of Goodreads you will be invited to join many reading groups and you can get involved in a lot of discussions. This can be very good, OR it can be very bad. Tread these waters carefully! I have seen several authors raked over the coals in a sort of feeding frenzy when they were frank in their opinion of a poorly written book by a Goodreads author with many loyal friends. This is why I stay out of many discussions. The reviews I post on Goodreads are of the books I reviewed on my book review blog.

There will be people who tell you that Goodreads is a waste of time, haunted by professional trolls and wannabes. There is some truth to this assertion, but it is true only BECAUSE so many people use it. My Goodreads profile is the first thing that comes up when my name is Googled, so I can assure you I am very careful about what discussions I get involved with there.

I believe you do yourself a great disservice if you fall into the habit of harshly criticizing others in public forums. Ask yourself what you want agents and editors to see when they Google your author name, and make sure your behavior in public reflects that.

As a reader, I go to Goodreads to find great books written by indie authors, and I am rarely disappointed.

As you can see, my rating is quite average, and not really outstanding, but it is the FIRST link that appears on the Google search. This is where people will click first to see who I am when I submit a query to agent. This is why you must make sure it is as professional as you can make it.

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NOW–you noticed that number three on the above list mentions BLOGs. In fact, every venue for you to publicize your author name offers you the opportunity to POST THE LINKS TO YOUR BLOG(S). If no one knows your blog is out there, how can they find it to read it? Flog your blog all over the internet through the free, easy to use venues we have discussed this week! (This is not Spank the Monkey. That is something entirely different!)

If you have wondered why the blog that you never wanted but were pushed into starting has never done well, it may be that you haven’t promoted it. Every venue that we have discussed this week gives you an opportunity to show the world that you take your craft as an author seriously.

You do this by writing.

Update your blog once a week, three times a week, or daily–it’s up to you, but be disciplined and somewhat regular. Normally I update this blog every other day, although this week I updated every day. I spend about twenty minutes to half an hour writing it. It is usually stream of consciousness, unless I have some particular topic that I want to speak on.

Your blog is the place where you showcase your published work and offer buy links in the sidebars. You can discuss the weather, the cat (I love indie author J.D.Hughes‘ posts on William the Cat.)

It’s through making use of the most cost-effective venues out there —>Twitter, Facebook, Wattpad, LinkedIn, About.me, Goodreads and your personal blog that you build your brand, your author name. It did involve some effort on my part for the first week or so when I was getting these venues up and running, but now they really maintain themselves. All I do is write, blog and periodically check twitter. I am not even a fanatic about twitter–I use a free program called Hootsuite to schedule tweets for the week ahead, spending maybe 10 minutes on Sunday morning, and then I simply respond to tweets that interest me or thank people when they mention me.

I can’t say that I have made huge sales or become a best seller, because that hasn’t happened. I’ve only been officially doing this for 2 years, and I’ve made all sorts of newbie mistakes in the process. But the point is, I keep at it, and I keep my professional profile updated. If you want an agent or publisher to take you seriously in this new world you must take your own career seriously by presenting your name and your work in the best light possible.

In the new world of publishing, the internet (Google and other search engines) is your ‘Store Window.’ Your books are your ‘display’ in that store. Your name is the ‘brand’ that prospective searchers see. Am I branded like ‘Nike’ yet? No, but the late Robert Jordan is, and he mastered the internet thing in the mid 1990’s when his Wheel of Time series first went viral. By using the tools that are available to us we can achieve the best results possible.

One never knows what will convince a prospective reader to try your book, so offer them every opportunity that you can.

Thank you for sticking with me through this whole week of my take on marketing your name. Now go out there and build your brand, one brick at a time.

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Filed under Adventure, Books, Fantasy, Humor, Literature, writer, writing

Tagged as battles, fiction, Flogging your blog, Goodreads, humor, literature, magic, Nike, twitter, writing

March 21, 2013 · 5:33 pm

Branding Yourself day 4 – Pinterest, Wattpad, YouTube, Oh, My!

This is where things get a bit sticky. Pinterest. Wattpad. YouTube. Oh, My!

What the heck? By now you’re feeling like Dorothy in the Wizard of Oz.

Well, today we are going to talk about ways to get the work you have sitting on your desk OUT and into the hands of prospective readers. One of the most surprising and random of these venues is Pinterest! And yet, it has been incredibly useful in attracting readers to this blog. And, lets be real, NOTHING is easier than setting up a Pinterest account and getting started there.

What is this Pinterest thing I keep talking about? It’s like a scrap-booking site for things you find on the web. You ‘PIN’ things you come across on the web and then your followers can repin them if they are as pleased with it as you are.

According to Wikipedia, the Fount of All Knowledge: Pinterest is a pinboard-style photo sharing website that allows users to create and manage theme-based image collections such as events, interests, hobbies, and more. Users can browse other pinboards for inspiration, ‘re-pin’ images to their own pinboards, or ‘like’ photos. The site was founded by Ben Silbermann (of West Des Moines, Iowa), Paul Sciarra, and Evan Sharp, the site is managed by Cold Brew Labs and funded by a small group of entrepreneurs and inventors.

SO what does this have to do with your career as an author? I don’t know, exactly. But it works! I think the value is in the connections you make through pinning an re-pinning things that interest you. These things represent your interests, i.e. motorcycles, collecting silver tea-strainers, BOOKS, anything!

I have two boards: Writers’ Paradise and Vegan and Loving It (Mostly). AT the top of the page, you will see my bio, and the link to one of my books. I need to change that so that the link comes back to this blog. You only get 160 characters to write your bio with, so use them wisely.

Quote from Pinterest’s help page: A pin starts with an image or video you add to Pinterest. You can add a pin from a website using the Pin It bookmarklet or upload an image right from your computer. Any pin on Pinterest can be repinned, and all pins link back to their source.

The important thing here is the part about ALL pins linking back to their source. My Pinterest boards are located at: http://pinterest.com/cjjasp/

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Now we are going out to something called Wattpad: FROM WIKIPEDIA:

Wattpad describes itself as “the best place to discover and share stories.” It’s a YouTube for electronic text stories. The content includes work by undiscovered and published writers. Delivery emphasizes the mobile phone platform, using the free Freda ebook reader.[1] According to Wattpad founder and CEO Ivan Yuen, “marketers can currently upload material for reading by mobile users at no charge”.[2]

About nine in 10 users are readers rather than writers. Around four in ten users are U.S. based; traffic also comes from the U.K., Canada, the Philippines, Australia, and more. Approximately 75 percent of users access the site through their mobile device. ^[1]

The most popular genres on Wattpad.com and the Wattpad mobile app include Romance, Paranormal, and Fan Fiction. The site is also home to Poetry, Humor, Science Fiction, Thriller, and others.

Get a Wattpad account and start posting short stories and poems that reflect your best work. I now have three short stories out there, and plan to post one a month for this next year. I have a bunch hanging around that just need a bit of polishing. I may serialize a novel there.

The first thing to know is that your User Name should be your Author Name with no spaces, as ALL your work is published on Wattpad under that name. Mine is ConnieJJasperson. This is a GREAT venue to develop a fan base. Indie Author Shaun Allan published his book, Sin, one chapter at a time on Wattpad and in the space of one month he had over 289,000 reads!

Sin

Thriller #9 / Paranormal #22

24 parts / 127 pages, updated Feb 15, 2013 PG-13

Dead, dead, dead. Say it enough times and it becomes just another word. What would you do? Could you kill a killer? Does the death of one appease the deaths of a hundred? What about that hundred against a thousand? What if you had no choice? M… read more

289,069 reads

647

Do I have to say any more? I didn’t think so.

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You Tube – why would I even mention this? Well, you may not have noticed this, but I have several ‘book trailers’ in the sidebar of my blog. These are short, 60 second or so, commercials for my books; teasers. if you will. The purpose is to give prospective readers an idea of what to expect if they buy one of my books. The links to them go in your sidebar on you blog, on your Goodreads Profile, and your Amazon Author Page. I have no data available to say if they work or not as far as generating sales go, but they may. A person who is interested enough to click on this link is wondering about your book and if you have that one little foot in the door, why not take advantage of it?

Book Trailers aren’t a requirement, but they are fun to make, and they cost me nothing. I get the music for free from my daughter, Meg Clear who is a fabulous musician, or from Free Music For Videos which I make a voluntary donation to for the use of their music. Donations are not required, but I like to support the artists. (See their link in my side-bar to make your own donation.)

Many people say trailers do no good, but when fans of Meg Clear Google her, what comes up as the number one listing on page one of her Google profile? The very first trailer for The Last Good Knight that I made when I was with my former publisher. That version of the book is unavailable now, because it has been completely re edited and redone under Myrddin Publishing Group. But the title of MY book and MY author name are out there under HER page, and we BOTH benefit from this. As someone once said, all publicity is good publicity, and while I don’t believe that to be true in all cases, I will take the advertisement and be grateful.

I make my trailers using Windows Live Movie Maker, and using Free Public Domain images, and Royalty Free Music and Free and Royalty Free Images from Dreamstime.com. Dreamstime is inexpensive, which is the keyword for me, and you have a great record of the legal work for your own files.

It does take some time and research to locate images and music that 1. reflect what you want to say about your book and 2. Are LEGALLY available for your use (and I suggest you keep a file for each trailer with both digital and hard copies all the legal use provisions for each image and song used).

Make a short script using the blurb from the back of your book, keep it down to 30 or 60 seconds and voila! You’re a producer!

If you don’t want to deal with Windows Live Movie Maker (which is a hinky program at best,) a GREAT site for doing thisfor free or very cheaply is called ANIMOTO. Many authors go to this site for affordable trailers for their websites.

So–that’s it for today. Tomorrow we will take on GOODREADS. Your Goodreads profile is the cornerstone of your brand and, outside of blogging regularly, building that profile is the single most important thing the indie author can do for themselves.

6 Comments

Filed under Books, Fantasy, Humor, Literature, writer, writing

Tagged as Amazon.com, blogging, books, fantasy, fiction, humor, literature, Pinterest, Social Media, Wattpad, writing

March 20, 2013 · 5:28 pm

Are We There Yet Papa Smurf?

We’re on day three of this epic road-trip to fame and already I’m hearing little voices saying, “Are we there yet Papa Smurf?” The answer is “Not yet, Writer Smurf.” We still have a few more places to visit and blanks to fill in.

Today we are signing up for both LinkedIn and About.Me. These are two resources you may never really use on a daily or even monthly basis, but as we saw yesterday, my LinkedIn profile shows up on the first page when my author name is googled.

Go to http://www.LinkIn.com. Register your author name and begin building your professional profile.Yes, I know you aren’t looking for a job, but agents and editors that you submit your manuscripts to will be looking at YOU. It is also a great venue for making connections with others who work in your industry–authors, editors, agents, and publishers.

If you want, you can also make a profile for your real name and use it to build your professional resume in whatever field you currently work in, i.e. biochemistry, web-design, etc.

Your Author Profile will include:

1. Your current publisher if you have one. If not with a publisher, simply put Author and Blogger

2. Your background in the industry – any work you have had published and who with, also any other relevant information. Mine looked a bit thin at first, as I had no experience. Actually, it looked naked.

3. Fill out the history with as much or as little information as you wish. This is a PROFESSIONAL site, for connecting prospective employers with prospective employees, so keep it simple and to some degree, corporate. If you haven’t already done it, now is the time to make your 250 word Author Bio.

4. upload your Author Picture so that people have some idea of who you are. (NOT the one of you wearing nothing but balloons and a smile at the office Christmas party.)

This blog, Life in the Realm of Fantasy, is linked to my profile there and updates automatically. You will be surprised at how many people you know are out there on LinkedIn. This is how my LinkedIn Profile looks:

It always surprises me when I get a message that someone has looked at my profile there, although WHY it surprises me, I don’t know. LinkedIn is something I signed up for randomly when I first started this crazy career path. I didn’t have a clue about what it was good for or why I should do it, but look at how it has paid off in terms of visibility.

>>><<<

The Next Stop is About.me

1. Go to http://www.about.me. If the Google page comes up, click on the link that says “http://www.about.me your personal homepage”

2. You will want to copy and paste your author bio that you made for LinkedIn

3. Upload your author photo

4. Add links to your blogs, fb author page and books

5. Sign up for the free about.me email address where you can receive your professional email.

6. Put the link to your about.me page in your Email Signature so that it automatically goes out on both your personal AND professional email. This is how MY outgoing email signature looks:

Connie Johnson-Jasperson

http://about.me/conniejjasperson.com

https://conniejjasperson.wordpress.com

–

My About.Me link in my email signature sends those who may wonder who the heck I think I am a clear message–that I THINK I’m an author! It is a single page with everything prospective agents, editors and fans need to know.

–

In just the same way as Twitter and Facebook, you can play around with this page until it looks the way you want it to look. Don’t freak out if you make mistakes. Right now my About.Me link takes the viewer to the first version of my profile instead of the newer version I have shown here. I have a request in to support to help me get it figured out, and soon it will be the way I want it to be.

Just like my little about me profile mix-up you might sort of mess things up a bit as you begin this process, but everything can be straightened out and EVERYONE who is involved in these sites is very supportive of those like me who are complete newbies at this whole internet thingy.

As you gain experience with these media platforms your profiles will grow and become more professional and will represent you in the light that you want your work to be seen in.

And – I am always available here to commiserate when the going gets bumpy!

4 Comments

Filed under Adventure, Books, Fantasy, Humor, Literature, Uncategorized, writing

Tagged as About.me, adventure, Are We There Yet Papa Smurf, fantasy, humor, LinkedIn, literature, writing

March 19, 2013 · 4:58 pm

The Author With the Tolstoy Tattoo

Today’s post will continue the discussion on building your brand through social Media, and today we’re taking on Facebook.

I can hear you screaming, “What brand? I don’t have a brand! Keep that hot iron away from me!” (Cue the theme music from “Rawhide”)

Well, I’m not asking you to be The Author with the Tolstoy Tattoo or anything, unless dead Russian authors really ring your bells. While that would garner attention at the family picnic or the opening night mixer at the writers’ convention, it’s not really a useful tool for getting your name out there.

What you want to do is Brand Yourself through social media.

You will probably write many books, so your book titles can’t be your brand, even if you are writing an epic fantasy series. Neither my Tower of Bones series nor my Billy’s Revenge series can be my brand, because using their titles doesn’t focus the attention into one cohesive spot well enough.

So what IS your brand? I sat in on a webinar on marketing that was made available to me by the Pacific Northwest Writers Association this last weekend. While I didn’t learn anything I didn’t already know about marketing in general, this is what the presenter said, and it made sense to me:

Your Author Name is your Brand, so you must:

1. Market the underlying theme that links your books–your AUTHOR NAME

2. Communicate that brand though social media

3. Blog, and communicate—write what you know or what you want to read and post it regularly

Yesterday you opened a twitter account. Today you are going to make a Facebook Author Page. If you look at my Google page from yesterday, the first 5 things come up in this order:

1> My GoodReads profile (That will be our 5^th and final workshop)

2> My Amazon Author Page (Once we have all of these media pulled together and you have your book published you will put together an Amazon Author Page with links to all your media.)

3> This blog, Life in the Realm of Fantasy (See? Regular blogging does pay off.)

4> My Facebook Author Page

5> My LinkedIn page

SO – today we are going to get ourselves out there on Facebook. First, you must go to www.facebook.com and open a personal account if you don’t already have one. You don’t have to use it, but you can’t get a professional page without one. YOU REALLY DON’T WANT TO SPAM YOUR PERSONAL FB FRIENDS ABOUT YOUR BOOK—it’s rude and ruins folks’ cute kitty picture moments.

Once you have that taken care of, you go to the ‘create pages’ page, https://www.facebook.com/pages/create.php . There are 6 squares representing the various sectors of professional pages. You want to click on ‘public figure’.

Click here ↑ and a new menu will open up. You will select ‘Author’. Fill in your Pen Name exactly as you want it to be. Place a check in the little box that says you agree to Facebook’s terms and click the ‘get started’ button.

This will take you to a place where you will fill in the blanks and soon you will have your professional fb page up and running. You can use your personal page to invite your friends to ‘like’ your page once, that is not considered too rude.

My author page on Facebook is https://www.facebook.com/cjjasperson and I’ve fixed it up to represent me as a writer. Everyone has a different style, this is mine.

You’re telling me it’s just like twitter—you don’t have anything to say. I am telling you that it IS EXACTLY like twitter.

You have plenty to say! You’re an author, you spew words out the ends of your fingers. Keep both your tweets and your Facebook posts light, and keep them short. This is where you let your prospective fans know what is going on with your work. On Facebook, occasionally post about things you are doing, such as word-count on a current project, the projected date of publication for the new novel, these sorts of things.

I linked this blog to something called Networked Blogs which is a Facebook app, and my blog posts automatically post to my professional page so that the content there regularly updates itself and my page doesn’t stagnate. That link is http://www.networkedblogs.com/syndication and it is a really good resource.

Now that you have your Facebook page, it’s time to get your Linked In account up and running and also your about.me account. We will be discussing these two wonderful resources tomorrow!

6 Comments

Filed under Books, Fantasy, Humor, Literature, Uncategorized, writing

Tagged as Do you like my Tolstoy Tattoo, Facebook, fiction, humor, Rawhide Theme Song, twitter, writing

March 18, 2013 · 8:00 pm

I Tweet, therefore I Am

Today’s post begins a 5 part series on social media.

People have this idea that writing books is some sort of higher calling, that authors do some miraculous thing with words and bucks come rolling in.

‘Taint so, sadly. Books don’t sell themselves, no matter how great the cover is.

Even for those authors lucky enough to have a large, powerhouse company get behind their book, the actual work of getting their author name out there is a job they will have to do for themselves. This is why, frequently, we see books by successful indies being snapped up by the likes of Doubleday (Fifty Shades of Grey) and Little, Brown and Company (Twilight). The work has already been done – the book is deemed as having been edited properly, and the author has carved out the niche for their book. For the big publisher it’s a perfect deal.

I think there may be a trend there.

We know we have written the best book we are able. We’ve had it professionally edited, and we have commissioned a great cover. But our book has sold only 7 copies, and we don’t have any more friends we can coerce. No one knows our book is out there. No one knows we exist!

As you can see, my author name comes up on the first 10 pages of google. So, what do we do to make our author name come up on the first page of the google search engine?

That’s easy. First, for one week we spend one hour a day laying the groundwork for advancing our career through the various different social media that are proven to benefit authors. After that, all we need to do is spend 5 minutes a day tweeting, and perhaps 15 minutes checking our various other social media venues. Also, authors need to blog. That can take as long or as short a time as you want it to.

What? Yes, I said we had to ‘work’ at it.

Not only do we need to find time to write and get the book prepped for publication, we must use the readily available tools of social media to get our name out there. Fortunately, there is a huge community of indie authors out there on the internet, and they are wonderful at sharing what works and what doesn’t work with us newer authors.

The first thing they tell us is to make a Twitter account. It is free, and not really too difficult. You begin with a blank slate, and they give you an ‘egg’ for a picture.

Choose your Twitter Handle (name) Wisely! I went with @cjjasp because you only get 149 characters per tweet, including spaces. Your handle takes up valuable real estate in your tweets, so make it reflect your author name and try to keep it short.

Don’t go with the ‘egg’ – upload a picture of your book, your dog or whatever, but ditch the ‘egg’ as it screams ‘NEWBIE’ when your tweets show up.

Twitter will give you the option of linking your blog or home-page to your twitter profile. If you don’t have one of these, don’t worry. By the end of this series you will have all those blanks filled in, and your twitter profile will direct people to your books.

Next, ‘follow’ some of your favorite celebrities. They probably won’t follow you back, but celebs tweet all the time, and they often have funny things to say. Especially @GeorgeTakai – he’s frequently hilarious.

Now follow some authors that you may know of. They will have followers that READ BOOKS. Follow some of their followers. Follow a few people every day at first, while you are getting the hang of it. THEN – once you have an understanding of how Twitter works you can get down to the real business of growing your followers. When a new person follows me I follow them back, unless they are a ‘bot’ and those are fairly obvious. They are usually spammers and the like. If you get a creepy suspicious feeling from looking at their profile, don’t follow them.

Do something called RE TWEETING. When one of my followers tweets something that catches my eye I retweet it to all of my followers. It is a courtesy, but that is what social media is all about–courtesy and scratching each others backs.

As a side note – Don’t EVER click on these links that have been going around twitter for years, that go something like this: “I saw this video of you” or “3 people unfollowed you” or “People are saying bad things about you.” DON”T click on them no matter which trusted follower has sent them to you. THESE ARE VIRUSES, and soon your account will be hacked and you will be spreading this virus like poor Typhoid Mary.

At the end of your first week of building your social media platform you will have links to Twitter, LinkedIn, About.Me, WattPad, Pinterest, and of course, FaceBook.

Tomorrow, we will talk FaceBook.