Tag Archives: fiction

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

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.

1 Comment

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 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.

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

Tagged as adventure, fantasy, fiction, humor, twitter, writing

March 12, 2013 · 3:35 am

Body and Mind

Art Glenberg, physicist speaks on Smart Planet about how the body affects the mind and the way we view the world around us.

“Over the last decade researchers have produced striking evidence that the body, and its relationship to the environment, is completely intertwined in the thinking process. For instance, simply sitting in a wobbly chair makes us judge others’ relationships to be unstable. Wearing a white lab coat, thought to be a doctor’s coat, helps our concentration and focus. Literally washing our hands rids us of guilty feelings.

So seemingly inconsequential events have a huge influence over our emotions, thoughts, and decisions. And this, scientists say, is because our abstract knowledge comes not from some disembodied reasoning within the brain but rather from our concrete experiences interacting with the world from the moment we are born. The very structure of reason itself comes from our visual and motor systems.”

I find his observations to be so true! When I am in my office I get more actual writing done than if I am on the sofa with my laptop, with the same music and the same quiet.

I am a physical creature, formed by my environment.

I also follow TED . One of the most moving TED talks I’ve watched recently was by Shane Koyczan on being bullied, and how the opinion of other people shapes a person’s view of self. He also affirms the right of every person to be who they are and to be proud of being that person, no matter how different they are. I highly recommend you watch this talk–you will shed tears and be proud of who you are.

I am an emotional creature, formed by the casual taunts and the negative opinions of family and, sometimes, friends.

Through these two different venues, a vision of myself forms. There is the view of myself – the young adult in a shaky chair, seeing the world as being unsteady. Is it me, or is it the world? Hiding in books, finding secret refuge in filling notebook after notebook with writing fantasy tales but too embarrassed to tell anyone, because there was no way I could ever be a writer. Girls in the data entry pool should stick to what they know–key those numbers girl, they pay your rent.

Also there is the view of myself through the eyes of my parents–a too big, rather clumsy girl who spent twelve years in the public school system staring out the window, avoiding conflict and flying under the radar.

A girl who didn’t know who she was, or what she wanted to be. The girl who never quite measured up.

And yet, 59 years on, I am a different person. When the ground shifts today, I know that either the chair is wobbly or we are having another earthquake. I am comfortable with either event and will work around it.

I am still lacking in grace, but now I know what I want to be when I grow up. I’m doing it and I’m taking no prisoners. Sure, I get knocked down once in while, by a sucky review or by the sheer amount of work that one must do get your work out there when you’re an indie writer.

But now when those things loom large I pick myself off the floor and ask, “Was that another earthquake, or is my chair just shaky?”

3 Comments

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

Tagged as adventure, battles, fantasy, fiction, humor, writing

March 7, 2013 · 2:14 am

Sitting in a Starbucks

Today I am in Seattle, sitting in a busy Starbucks, working on my book. It ‘s kind of cool, blogging and working on my book on the ground floor of an office building that houses Amazon.

There is something about this rainy city that I love. It fires up my creative mind. Plus, I lived in Seattle until I was 9, and to me it has always been home.

The book is rolling along well–so well that I begrudge the time it takes to blog! The characters are occupying most of the space in my mind–to the point that I can hardly carry on a conversation without sounding like an idiot.

Designing melèes with strange creatures and putting my characters through hell and yet still finding something humorous in their situations–I’ve never had a job more rewarding. (Although, I admit it’s financially rather UNrewarding.) Still, maybe the next book will be the one!

I’m sitting here in a Starbucks, in Seattle, watching the rain and the people and loving my job. I don’t care if I’m not a bestseller and I don’t really care if I ever am. I’ve finished writing four (count them –> FOUR!) books and can all those nay-sayers say they have done that? So I’m not published by one of the Big Six. And so my books aren’t on the hot one hundred yet! I’m an indie and I do the best I can, which is all one can ask of themselves.

I am sitting in a Starbucks living my dream, writing a book. It doesn’t get much better than that!

My advice is this–do what you love, and do it to the best of your ability. Life is too short to spend most of it waiting for the right time to happen, or for someone to give you permission to live.

Find your “Starbucks” and make your life happen!

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

Tagged as adventure, Art, battles, fantasy, fiction, humor, literature, magic, vegan lifestyle, writing

February 28, 2013 · 10:12 pm

The ‘e’ word, part 2

MSClipArt MP900390083.JPG RF PD Epilepsy.

My oldest daughter had a grand mal seizure when she was 26 years old, and has not had any issues since. She also deals with obsessive compulsive disorder, and is doing well because she is on a good treatment regimen for her conditions. she is a beautiful, happy woman of 39, with a 6-year old child (The Boy who frequently appears in this column.) Early on, Daughter 1 decided to face her problem and deal with it appropriately. The Boy will be her only child, as she had to go off her meds for that year in order to have a healthy child, and she isn’t going to chance that again.

Adult Onset of Epilepsy with no discernible physical cause is more common than I once thought, though it is still rather rare. It is hard to find information on it. Many adult seizures are caused by tumors, alcohol and drug abuse, or aneurysms, and frequently these can be cured.

However, many times there is NO PHYSICAL CAUSE that is discernible via MRI or EEG. This is the case in two of my children.

My son, who shares the same father with Daughter 1, always showed the same intensity of thought and purpose, combined with obsessing that his father and his sister had. He recognized early on that his OCD was crippling him, and sought treatment for it.

He will be 35 in a month, and has only had his seizure disorder for 18 months. He had trouble accepting it, refusing to believe it could occur again, since his sister had only had the one seizure that we knew of. Then, when he was forced to see that he had “a problem with seizures” he believed he could cure it with the proper diet, and exercise. When that notion was proven wrong, he at last went on the meds that his doctors prescribed, and he went 10 months with no seizures.

Because he is an analytical man, he wanted to see if the meds were working, and went off them for 5 days, and had 3 grand mal seizures and at least 1 minor seizure in 2 days. Fortunately, he was in the hospital, and they were able to get him on a good regimen for his meds.

Now he has faced the reality that he has epilepsy for no apparent reason, and there is no way to cure it. To my everlasting relief, he is making good decisions and going forward with life, instead of letting his epilepsy rule him.

On occasion, a physical cause can be found for the random seizures that characterize this disorder, but frequently no cause can be found. In my children’s case, no root cause can be found, but their father’s side of the family has had some history with random aneurysms and other odd occurrences, such as clinical Obsessive Compulsive Disorder. Medication treats the symptoms, but also frequently has other effect that are not so desirable.

Thus, the dilemma that all people who must take these medicines face.

As an author, I have the perfect positive escape for the stressful things in my life. I write, I play games, I read books, and I reorganize my spoon collection–I stay busy. My chosen career is one I can carry with me, so when a family member is having a crisis, I can pack up the laptop and go to the rescue for however long it takes to help them work through the problem.

For a Vegan, this is an adventure, indeed! I have found ways to travel and dine on the road without having to go hungry.

My advice to those living with epilepsy still stands. Take the poison, and live the life you are given to its fullest. Deal with the problems when they arise and put them behind you. Happiness is a state of mind that must be cultivated.

Many people spend hours thinking about where they went wrong, and reinforcing the negative thoughts. This makes them negative, unhappy people!

To be happy, one must deliberately cultivate the positive things that are ALSO happening in their life, and give them more importance than the negative. Make your face smile, even when you aren’t being watched and you might be surprised at how much better you feel!

We all have random bad things that pop in and out of our lives. We live in a sometimes hard world, but we have this wonderful, glorious opportunity to see the real beauty of the world around us.

Grab it, and don’t let go!

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Filed under Battles, Epilepsy, Humor, Literature, Vegan, writing

Tagged as battles, fiction, humor, living with epilepsy, vegan lifestyle, writing

February 19, 2013 · 2:57 am

The Crazy Things

My good friend, indie author Stephen Swartz, had a blog post today about creativity, music and productivity. I love his blog, DeConstruction of the Sekuatean Empire, and find his dry sense of humor to be rather invigorating. He has been extremely prolific lately in getting the work out of his head and onto the paper, and I am quite impressed with his output! I’ve been more easily distracted lately by the shiny things in life.

Anyway, he was talking about the types of music that forms the soundtrack to his writing. As Stephen is also an accomplished musician, music is very important to him, and he is like me in that the right background music can improve the flow of ideas.

Now, everyone knows Grandma loves Heavy Metal, but let’s be real–Rammstein and Rainbow aren’t really conducive to a meditative state, so they are mostly for editing. And while I love John Adorney, I have a problem with some new-age music, in that it puts my brain to sleep. So I have certain playlists I pull out when its time to write. Sibelius, Mozart, Karl Orff – these great composers of classical music provide the soundtrack to Mountains of the Moon, now that we are approaching the end of the story.

In the beginning, when I first started writing Mountains of the Moon, the music that inspired me was Robert Plant’s Band of Joy album, along with Steve Martin’s ‘The Crow”. Butch Baldassari and David Schnaufer’s album, ‘Appalachian Mandolin and Dulcimer’ also figured prominently in my playlist at that time.

I know.

From Banjos and Dulcimers, to Cellos and Violins, to Stratocasters and Korg Keyboards. Throw in the occasional big choral piece like Carmina Burana and there you have the entire repertoire.

I find that at each stage in my work, a different sort of music is required. Once the structure of the story is laid out and the actual writing begins, I need light-hearted fare, sort of like the salad course at a fine restaurant. You can’t get much lighter than Steve Martin’s incredible work. Here is the link to the YouTube video of Steve Martin, Bela Fleck, and Tony Trischka playing The Crow.

During the both the initial imagining of a tale when I am world building, and also in the editing process, I need to keep on my toes. I find that Joe Bonamassa’s channel on You Tube is conducive to that.

So is this lovely YouTube channel I found with 87 (!!!) tracks for Rainbow. (I guess you know now what I listen to quite often when I am in need of inspiration.) I love YouTube!

So often random inspiration comes from my grandchildren, from my friends, and from the world in general. It never emerges out of my head the way it goes in. It always amazes me, how in the long run it’s the crazy things that spark my creativity, but the music always sustains and nurtures it.

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

Tagged as fantasy, fiction, humor, literature, Mozart, vegan lifestyle, writing

February 15, 2013 · 11:18 pm

The Sedative Box

Alas, I find that the week spent with my grandson didn’t advance my manuscript any further. I didn’t even get any book reviews done this week, although I did find Nemo.

And Waldo.

And the last shred of patience I ever had.

The Boy is six, and is off-the-chart-smart, requiring no entertaining on my part what-so-ever. He is a real firecracker, and just listening to him as he is playing is a hoot. Batman and Darth Vader teamed up with The Green Lantern to kill Smeagol, thus saving Bilbo from a dreadful death.

I’ve mentioned before that The Boy is a sponge and literally soaks up everything he sees and hears. This child repeats EVERYTHING he hears or even thinks he has heard. He is VERY verbal with a huge vocabulary (of which he knows the meaning and proper use of every word), extremely sassy, and regularly loses his precious, carefully monitored television privileges, which he is deeply remorseful for, but not enough to remember to curb his lip when talking back to Mama (She Who Controls The TV.) Curbing his commentary is both time-consuming and all-important, as it has led to some trouble in social situations.

For the most part, Grandma’s role when babysitting is to gently but firmly remind The Boy that we show respect to everyone when we speak to them, and when he responds with verbal abuse, I respond by parking him in the corner for some quiet time. Grandma sets the timer on the stove for five minutes and we both rest our ears. When the timer goes off, we hug and make up our quarrel, OR he goes back to the corner to reflect on where he miscalculated and went wrong for just a while longer.

Oddly enough, The Boy doesn’t like tofu in his stirfry. Go Figure! And Grandma doesn’t do mac and cheese–what a tragedy! We did find something he would eat, and we agreed to disagree.

I have ten grandchildren and one great-grandchild. The Boy is the only one of my grandchildren that requires special handling, although the others are just as talented and amazing as he is. Unlike the others, this child can’t be left to his own devices, or mayhem WILL ensue. Because he requires more intense handling, I’ve had a lot of individual time with him that I’ve not had with the others.

I can honestly say he is not my favorite grandchild, because they are ALL so awesome and so individual that I could never have a favorite. They range in age from 23 years on down to to 5 months and fall into 3 batches. The great-granddaughter is 4 years old and is amazing to me–we’ve developed a special friendship bonding in Grandma’s kitchen.

In the first batch, the oldest is attending college full-time and raising her child as a single mother and doing exceedingly well at both jobs. She inspires me to do better at my own work. The next oldest is my ‘Fairy Goth-Daughter’, an artist and musician, who hooked me up with Rammstein and Appocalyptica. The third oldest is 20, an actress, and has found work in HBO documentaries and even a straight-to-video movie. She is also managing a fast-food restaurant to pay her bills, since acting pays as well as authoring does! (insert ‘lol’ here.)

The next age group ranges from 14 to 6 and their interests are still varying. Two want to write, one loves to draw and he is awesome at drawing any sort of car you would want. The other three don’t have any particular area of focus yet, but I see glimmers of artistic and musical ability in them all.

The littlest, at 5 months, is really into the cat and his dog. He tries to sing when you sing with him, which I find quite entertaining–it keeps grandma busy and out of trouble for hours.

But what I love about The Boy is his imagination. He let’s his imagination fly freely, and I can see the seeds that, with good direction, will grow into a filmmaker or author or scientist there. The Boy thinks WAY outside the box because it hasn’t occurred to him yet that there is a box!

It ‘s my job, as The Grandma, to see that they ALL realize there are NO BOUNDARIES to what they can do or be. Success isn’t measured in how many toys and possessions you gain. It’s measured in your happiness quotient.

Are you happy? When you get home from earning your daily bread do you look forward to a chance to spend an hour or two at your real work? My happiness quotient is very high, and always has been, even when I was working as a hotel maid. Happiness is a state of mind you must deliberately cultivate.

When you get home, why not simply forget to turn on the TV? (Or as I like to think of it, the sedative-box.) What has it ever done for you besides offering mindnumbingly similar programs interspersed with commercials designed to make you feel you aren’t complete without the product they are hawking. Bored and discontent is not how I want to live, so I find myself reading and pursuing other hobbies in the evening.

Today, I am also looking up. Two asteroids, one imploding over Russia and one doing a close fly-by is quite enough entertainment for one day! For all my friends in Russia, I hope you were not affected by the event this morning!