Cabin Fever

I am not even sure when I will be able to post this blog—that’s how bad the weather has been.

People are fond of saying that the summers are warmer, and that the years are heating up until the point that the polar ice caps will melt and we will all need snorkels.  I can’t find any evidence of such an occurrence. This is undoubtedly the worst winter I can remember in the past twenty years.  In the winters of 1993 and 1994 I can remember missing plenty of school due to the snow.  Even the interstates were shut down due to the inclement weather and poor conditions.  While we have yet to experience (thankfully) the two-foot blizzards of snow of my childhood, this winter has been interminable.  It got an early start, snowing before Thanksgiving and seldom letting up since.  Christmas was thankfully free of anything heavier than a dusting.  Then the Arctic air swept down from above and put us in an icebox.  For most of January it has been the same pattern: cold, snow, brutal cold, snow, more brutal cold, more snow.  I have never been so eager for warm weather in my entire life.  It is difficult in these conditions to find the motivation to do anything.  Lately I have been trying to keep busy but there are only so many episodes of Dallas you can watch and only so many pages of a book to read before your eyes get tired.  Whatever else has come to pass due to the cold weather, one truth remains:  I picked the absolute right time to grow a beard.

We Need a Resolution

As I have stated in the past, I don't make New Year's Resolutions.  I also don't set overarching goals for myself.  I tend to focus on short-term goals:  I want to write an entire book in one month, I want to apply for six jobs next time I'm online, etcetera.  There would be no point in setting a goal such as, "I want to travel to Europe by this summer," because I would never be able to earn that amount of money.  At any rate, I am continuing to work toward my goal of self-improvement for 2014.
1) I haven't given up on the beard, which is an accomplishment in itself.  For someone who never leaves the house without a razor first touching their face, this is a big step.  But heaven help me if the hairs start to come in grey...
2) I purchased several reference books, and though they would not come under the general heading of "self-help", I'm going to pretend that's what they are.
3) I'm trying to cut soda from my diet by tapering off.  I may need to keep it around just in case of emergency, because trying to remove the Pepsi drip from your veins after twenty-plus years is not easy.  I'm not so much concerned about the health drawbacks as I am the empty calories.  Perhaps one a day, counteracted by lots of water, is the way to go.  To be continued...
4) I've got to get back to editing the novel I wrote in November.  I actually haven't done anything to it since Christmastime, so I'm anxious/nervous about checking back in.

The End

This has been a year of incredible highs and even lower lows.  My sixth novel did gangbusters--at least on the scale that I use--and my seventh novel found a publishing home.  Since then, however, things have not been so great.  I wrote four more novels over that time period, which have received varying levels of interest.  The latest one has yet to sell a single copy.  With the end of the year, however, and the beginning of a new one, I am always looking for means of self-improvement.  Lately I have been going through the process of updating and re-pricing my paperback novels, to provide a more professional, uniform appearance.  So far, so good.  I also started growing a beard, which anyone who knows me well will find completely bizarre and out of character.  But it's a new year, and possibly a new me, so we'll see how it works out.  I don't make resolutions, nor do I set impossible goals for myself.  However, I hope to improve this blog as the months pass.  I'm trying, anyway. 

Dark Horse

Way back in July-August of this year, I tried my hand at writing a romance novel with elements of mystery and suspense thrown in.  The book was written in a little under thirty days, but in spite that short timeline, the story was the result of a great deal of thought, effort, and writing.  Thus far no publisher has been interested, however, and therefore I have put together the book for sale on my own.  I recently learned how to “style” a document—a debt of gratitude is owed to the Smashwords Style Guide—and it was much easier to put together the book after going through this process.  For the first time, one of my print novels looks like the genuine article.  I wish I had known earlier how easy the process truly was.  I have already reworked the interior of one novel, and am considering doing the rest.  It is a simple cut-and-paste job; the most difficult part is redoing the interiors on CreateSpace.  Anyway, for readers who might be interested, I am including links to the e-book and paperback versions of Dark Horse at the close of this blog.

Dark Horse

 

Round About Way

In the past I have complained about being rejected from both jobs and publishers and receiving either a form letter response, or none at all.  I will never do that again.

As an author, I have to say that the previous month has been by turns rewarding and draining.  I wrote an entire novel for NaNoWriMo that I am extremely proud of, but I have also received too many publishing rejections to count.  Most of them were innocuous enough, and I quickly moved on.  However, I am prone to pinning my hopes on a certain thing:  a job that I really want, a vacation that I want to be amazing, or a book that I really feel needs to reach a wider audience.  As such, I had entirely too much emotion invested in a novel that received a crushing rejection.  This rejection did not come in the form of a brief missive, however.  It was a lengthy, detailed email of several paragraphs, spelling out in comprehensive terms why this book was not only unacceptable for their line but also focusing on flaws in my story and its execution.  I will be honest and tell you that I did not read the entire email.  The breadth and scale of the rejection was more than I could take, and I decided to move onto the very next thing:  an email from a friend, letting me know that she was enjoying another of my novels, and that I was a very good writer.  It’s funny and interesting in hindsight that these two messages were received in the same batch.  It was almost as though some power greater than me knew that I needed encouragement and positive feedback in the wake of something negative and discouraging.  At any rate, I am editing two novels and readying another for publication, so hopefully my audience will stick by me—and hopefully I will be able to stand by my writing.

In Too Deep

I have embarked upon every author’s favorite task—editing.  Insert sarcasm here, please.  So far I have uncovered one continuity error that I knew was there during the entire writing process but didn’t bother to fix.  It has now been altered.  I found the usual amount of typos, but also a first for myself:  places where the word is so far off the mark that I have no clue what I originally intended to write.  Anyway, in those cases I had to look at the context of either the sentence or the passage and hope for the best.  I’ve never written anything—yet—that turned my stomach afterward and required a complete deletion, but I have to say that I really like the chemistry between the characters in this novel.  It’s fun to watch their story unfold yet again.

NaNoWriMo, Week Four

At Day 21 of this month, after a writing marathon that spanned the better part of twenty-four hours, I completed my novel at 72, 406 words—far past the NaNoWriMo challenge of 50,000 words.  This amount of writing marks a personal best for me.  I had previously written a 70,000 word novel in thirty days—the book which provided the seed for this most recent one—but I blew through all of my expectations for NaNoWriMo.  I hadn’t written in close to three months prior to beginning this novel, and I had an irrational fear that I wouldn’t even remember how to form a sentence, much less an entire book.  Throughout the course of the project, I pushed myself to write past my limits, to think critically about my characters and further explore what went on inside their heads, what made them tick, and what they were afraid of.  In the course of this, I think I discovered something about myself:  for as long as I enjoy writing, I will do it, regardless of the number of readers I reach.  Writing is a task that fosters creativity, personal growth, and introspection, three things I need in my life.