Miles to Go Before I Sleep

With all due respect to Robert Frost, I have a ton of writing to do on A Twist of Love before the weekend.

I hope everyone has a pleasant, quiet weekend. Enjoy the lovely summer weather while it lasts!

Car Rides, Breakfast, and Proofing

DH has the week off, but there's really no where to go or nothing he can without endangering lives, both others and his own. So far, he's managed to leave me to my work, which involves finishing A Twist of Love and a shit-ton of proofing.

Yesterday, we had to run a couple of errands, mailing GK's city tax return and pick up DH's drugs from the pharmacy. We also picked up a pizza on the way home because one of our menu delivery services never arrived.

Bella was quite put out that she had been left at home, but it was too hot for her to stay in the car during the errand running. Dogs love rides, and she is no exception.

DH had to go back to the pharmacy this morning because one of his prescriptions didn't arrive until this morning. So I offered to buy breakfast if we could take Bella for a ride. The gal at the Starbucks drive-thru even gave Bella her own little cup of whipped cream, which Bella LOVED! But she still expected me to share my bacon, egg, and gouda sandwich because, well, BACON!

So, we're back home. DH is loading the dishwasher. Bella's found a relatively cool place for a nap. And I need to get some words in before proofing a few more chapters of a paperback.

I think I can handle more days like this even if I have to wear a facemask.

Coronavirus Pandemic Day 138 - Americans Think They're Invulerable

We're seeing the fallout of the Fourth of July partying in our county. One of the prime culprits was a party at the local Amvet post. 200 people, inside, no masks.

*facepalm*

And as I typed the above paragraph, my father-in-law called DH. A COVID-19 case was documented at my father-in-law's assisted living facility. There goes the guys' carefully planned visit for this week.

So many people still believe this pandemic is a hoax. Or they do until someone they love catches it. Or they catch it themselves.

I have fucking cancer, and I still wouldn't wish COVID-19 on my worst enemy. I've seen friends who've survived it (via video calls). It ain't pretty in it's so-called flu form. Now, imagine if you or a loved ends up with holes in your lungs or blood clots that can and will cause heart attacks and strokes.

Yesterday, a good friend volunteered to go down to Texas with me to see GK. She's one of the smartest people I know, and I get that she's going stir crazy, but I'm not heading to Texas any time soon. Besides, GK's base is on lockdown. We couldn't see him if we wanted to, and I don't relish being shot by an MP while trying to enter the base in the middle of a lockdown. That's not even getting into the hotspot hell Texas is right now.

No one is invulnerable to this virus, people! We're probably going to top 150K dead by the end of the day. Yes, it sucks. It sucks for everyone. But it'll suck a lot worse if you don't use preventative measures.

So I'm sticking with my plan, hiding in my apartment, and doing the same writing and editing I've been doing for the last five months.

Y'all take care y'hear!

I Love the 90's!

When the Mamas and the Papas and the Beach Boys have babies...

Brain Power!

I overslept today. The alarm played P!nk's "Raise Your Glass". I turned it off and rolled on my back, contemplating everything I needed to do today and...

Next thing I know it's 11 a.m.

Oops!

However, sleep is a necessary component of keeping your brain strong, especially when you've been doing a lot of editing lately.

Another component is eating right, which DH and I have tried really hard to do since January. He's lost some pounds. I did, too!

Until the pandemic. All my old bad habits regarding stress eating came right back, and I put all the weight back on. ARGH!

But one of the things I'm learning over the pandemic is how to properly cook seafood. It's brain food, right?

I can roast catfish, bluegills, and bass over an open fire, but I had a tendency to overcook seafood on an indoor stove. I've tried salmon, scallops, and tilapia so far, and everything's turned out pretty good.

Living on a farm as a kid, I was so used to cooking the shit out of everything, especially pork. If you were in 4-H, you learned about all the potential parasites in your animal. And even though Dad helped with the medicines and our pigs were pretty darn healthy, the worm thing kind of sticks in your head.

And the real trick in cooking scallops is three minutes per side, else you end up eating hockey pucks.

Unfortunately, the scallops I was looking forward to for tonight's dinner will not arrive today. So I'm cooking with what I have in the refrigerator: bruchetta chicken, roasted asparagus, and bacon mashed potatoes. Those should get me through the editing I need to finish today!

Sales! I've Got Sales!

I've been rotating through each series and putting the first volume's ebook on sale. Hero De Facto is currently $0.99 and will be through Friday, July 24th.

A Question of Balance will go on sale for $0.99 on Friday.

In the meantime, I'm working on A Twist of Love which will be out August 14th. Some of you will love it. Some of you will hate it. And me. But I hope you'll trust me on Anthea's journey.

Also, I want to say a big thank you to everyone who picked up a copy of Snowfall and have already preordered Murder Most Fowl and The Sweetest Poison. It's fun writing Grandma Thalia's adventures, too!

Coronavirus Pandemic Day 131 - Sticking to a Schedule

While working from home for the last eight years, I already had a problem with the days being indistinguishable. I mean other than DH working a traditional job and having the weekends off. But the effect seems to be amplified with so much shut down or limited because of the coronavirus.

Even worse, DH was literally ordered to take some vacation time by not just his boss, but some other upper managers and executives at his company. I'm kind of glad because he's had a major case of the doldrums.

But by the same token, DH has been lecturing me about MY stress levels and taking the weekends off.

I admit I was very stressed since my return flight from Vegas right at the start of the pandemic. But things have eased a bit by sticking to a schedule. Getting up at a consistent time for the most part (gabbing on the phone until four in the morning did not help over the weekend). Setting how many words per day I need to reach thanks to the tools at Camp NaNoWriMo. Leaving the afternoons for editing. And taking breaks to watch Scorpion, Supernatural, and The Big Bang Theory.

I need some comfort watching right now, and it definitely helps.

Now, I need to finish A Twist of Love so I can read the latest volume of the Dresden Files, Peace Talks. DH finished it yesterday, and he was giggling a lot over the weekend.

I Love the 90's!

Before there was Queen Bey...

What To Include and What Not To

The COVID-19 pandemic is still raging across the United States, and the subject of whether to include it in our stories is raging across the internet.

The problem is we don't know how this will all shake out.

Take 9/11 for example. It took a little while for everything to shake out into the new normal. DH and I used to book last minute airline tickets, pack our overnight bags, and fly anywhere in the U.S. at a moment's notice. Five years later, things like taking off our shoes and no liquids in our bags had become normalized.

However, we only lost 2% of the people in those terrorist attacks than we've lost to COVID-19. And the numbers of dead are still rising (even if our president is deliberately hiding the numbers).

There's the safety gyrations we have to perform to limit our exposure to the virus. Masks. Soap. Hand sanitizer. Gloves. PPE.

We haven't been able to sit at a coffee shops for four months. We may never be able to meet at coffee shops again. Or until a vaccine is developed. We don't know.

I think that's why my fantasy books have been selling for the last four months. Things have been difficult for all of us, and we want to escape into different worlds, even for just a moment.

But when writing contemporary stories? It's difficult because we don't know what the new normal will be on the other side of the pandemic.

So, what am I doing?

I've been writing alternate fantasy worlds, of course. Alter Ego is writing some historical erotica for the rest of the year. Doing so keeps my mind off of now. Off the illogic of dinners at a fancy restaurant or going to a movie.

And if nothing else, writing in fictional worlds helps clear some mind space to deal with the real world.

Release Day!

"Snowfall" started life as my 2018 submission to Sword & Sorceress. I'd just found out I had breast cancer, and I really couldn't think of anything . So I went back to the Justice universe and wrote a little story about Thalia, Anthea's maternal grandmother.

The editor Elisabeth Waters ultimately rejected it. There were a lot of good stories submitted that year. I highly recommend you read Sword & Sorceress 33.

So I planned to publish the story here on my website in November of 2018. Except Ms. Waters e-mailed me and asked if the story was still available. She wanted to reconsider it for Sword & Sorceress 34, which would be the last volume in the long running series. Ultimately, she rejected it again.

I'm finally to the place where I can officially publish this story. It's live on Amazon, and I'll post additional links on The Justice Thalia Stories tab when they're active.

It'll remain at $0.99 until August 15th.

I hope you all like this little look at a character who has influenced quite a bit of the plot of the Justice series. The next Justice book A Twist of Love will be coming to you next month.

Amazon, all countries

Coronavirus Pandemic Day 124 - The Loss of the Bookstores

We're four months into a global pandemic. I could talk about Americans not taking adequate precautions. I could talk about how our general practioner's attitude has changed as more friends and acquaintances die around us. I live in a red state, and even our governor has taken this very seriously from the beginning.

Nope, I'm going to talk about brick and mortar (AKA b&m) bookstores. You know, those stand alone buildings that back in the day sold nothing but books?

They were already in trouble before big, bad Amazon came along. I know. I worked at a Waldenbooks (they were own by Borders Group, Inc.) for a couple of Christmases near the turn of the century. Our inventory and ordering computers were barely a step above the Apple IIE's I learned on in high school.

Amazon's Kindle came out in 2010. Borders collapsed in 2011. And it looked as if Barnes & Noble would follow suit after their attempts to promote a competing device, the Nook, failed abysmally.

Over the last few years, B&N juggled executives, thinking that would help. In the meantime, independent bookstores made a comeback as specialty shops. In both case, the b&m stores sold more than just books and most went online to sell around the world. Heck, I was excited to see my paperback sales take off!

Then the coronavirus exploded.

Pretty much everything that was non-essential shut down around the world for a time. Including bookstores. Even Amazon put a priority on health and safety goods and food deliveries over physical entertainment items and toys.

Indie publishing saw a drop in sales for a few weeks as college kids fled the universities, parents attempted to juggle their kids' education with working from home, and our elderly had to be treated like prisoners for their own protection.

Then e-book sales started up again because there's only so many times you can watch Tiger King on Netflix.

I should say most genres saw the uptick. A large chunk of the post-apoc subgenre stayed in a slump because, well, we were fucking living it.

Even audio books saw an uptick. People listened to them as they planted gardens and worked on the house repairs they'd put off because now they had the time.

But paperbacks took a dive while the bookstores remained closed.

With reopening plans, bookstore owners struggled to figuring out the best practices to keep employees and shoppers safe. You can wash a tomato someone else may have sneezed on, but you can't wash a paperback.

Well, technically, you can, but it ruins the book.

And now that stores are reopened, most folks with any sense don't go out unless they absolutely have to. Especially, those of us in the high risk category, which ironically are the groups most likely to have the time and disposable income to buy and read paperbacks.

So what's going to happen to bookstores in the long run? No one knows, and anyone who says they do is lying their asses off.

We are still in the first wave of this blasted disease. Cases are spiking across the U.S. As of this writing, 137,000+ are dead, and that number will grow through the rest of July. Businesses are failing left and right. By the time it's over, we are going to have a very different world.

Books will be a part of the new world, but the method in which we purchase and consume them may be very, very different.

I Love the 90's!

Something sweet from a time when it was crazy.

Creating Through the Pandemic

Person of many talents Toderick Hall rewrote his hit dance club song "Nails, Hair, Hips, Heels" for his brand-new Quarantine Queen EP. He also managed to create a clever and fun video with his dancers and friends who filmed while stuck at home.

So all you complainers out there? Get to work!

Looking Outside Your Own Industry for Ideas

I often run marketing ideas past DH. Yeah, I know he doesn't work in the publishing industry. That's exactly why I talk to him about this stuff.

Writers are often locked in an echo chamber, where marketing that's trending is pushed without any regard to whether it works or not. Often, my first about a method is what's the ROI (AKA return on investment). I have yet to hear a real answer.

At least, I'm asking the questions. A lot of writers don't.

The old ways of advertising, such as book review blogs, 99-cent sales, and simply announcing you have a new book out doesn't work like it used to.

I've been examining online advertising. The following is me thinking out what I'll do in the future.

If I run Amazon ads, I'm  merely giving more revenue to the company beyond what I pay them to host my wares. How does that help me especially when I have to jump through targeting hoops? I look at the folks who target my books, and I often wonder what they are thinking. Especially when their books aren't remotely similar to mine. Then, there's the issue of randomly turning your ads on and off.

Then, there's Facebook. I'm on there in a limited fashion. DH set up a fan page off his account around ten years ago. I admit I'm not real happy with FB's recent actions, including selling personal data of users, not upholding its own rules equitably, and it's promotion of white nationalists. Furthermore, it will also randomly turn ads on or off without notice to the advertiser.

Which brings me to BookBub ads. The ads are on the e-mails BookBub sends out daily so they seem to be a little easier to target for a specific subgenre. Readers sign up for the daily e-mails so I would have a willing and more receptive audience. Plus, I haven't heard any complaints about BookBub trying to snatch additional revenue by turning on an ad without authorization.

But something else is coming back.

Free!

Even DH's company provided free services to old and new clients for one day last month. The free offer was limited in scope and duration, but it sponsored some good will among their clients.

Which brings me to something I used to do--offer free books.

I didn't do it all the time, but enough I earned some loyalty from readers. Unfortunately, that loyalty dissipated in the chaos my real life became over the last few years.

But I talked it out with DH last night, and I plan on including some old and new ideas over the next few months. We'll see what happens, and I will report my findings here.

Coronavirus Pandemic Day 117 - Staying Safe While Learning

Most writing conferences and classes have gone virtual during the current pandemic if they haven't been cancelled outright. If you're having a hard time working on your wip, maybe now's the time to join with some fellow writers or take a class in order to get your mind off the news.

1) Camp NaNoWriMo

July is the second camp of the year from the people who bring you National Novel Writing Month. If you don't know anybody to join up with, my old RWA chapter Northwest Houston is holding a virtual write-in in relations to Camp NaNo. The cost is $10 for non-members, but they are a sweet, encouraging group of people, especially if you're a newbie.

2) RWA Conference

Whereas, most of the individual RWA chapters are pretty awesome and inclusive, the national organization is still trying to get its shit together. It may a good thing this year's conference is on Zoom. I mention it because I got some good advice and information from its panels back in the day, and it's one of the few national writing organizations that allows non-members to attend for a higher fee than members.

3) NINC Conference

The Novelists, Inc., Conference is a popular one among published authors of all genres. As of this writing, it is still scheduled to start September 23, 2020, in St. Pete Beach, Florida. However, the NINC will be issuing a statement next week on whether the conference will continue given the current COVID-19 spike in the state. It may be cancelled or have fewer speakers due to the travel restrictions between the U.S. and Europe.

4) WMG Publishing

With the record spikes of COVID-19 across the south, Dean Wesley Smith and Kristine Kathryn Rusch are offering half-price classes, lectures, and subscriptions for the third time this year. The sale ends tomorrow night, Tuesday, July 7th. I've taken a few over the last couple years and found them valuable. Just a warning: most of them come with homework that makes you exercise your writing muscles!


At the rate things are going, those of us in the U.S. may find ourselves stuck at home for the rest of the year for safety's sake regardless of what our government says.

Hang in there! Write, study, watch Hamilton for the umpteenth time. Do whatever you have to in order to stay sane during this pandemic.

We really are in this together.

I Love the 90's!

Sir Mix-A-Lot's ode to ladies' behinds still tickles me!

Reality Check on Covers

I'm seeing this among newbies. Again. The subject seems to come up every two years.

If you use a PUBLIC STOCK PHOTO SITE to purchase  files for your cover, you have no right to stop other cover artists or authors from using a particular photo.

Exclusive rights to a photo are expensive. If you want an exclusive photo to use for you cover, you're going to pay out the nose.

Unless you're the photographer. Even then, you'll need permission if the subject of the photo is a person.

So, that means if you purchased the standard license, a non-exclusive licensing right from most of these stock sites, like ShutterStock, DepositPhoto, Adobe Stock, etc., you cannot stop someone else from using that photo if they buy the same standard license.

That also means you cannot harass other cover designers and authors. You're not going to succeed in shutting down everyone. And frankly, it makes you look like an uneducated idiot.

If you don't understand the different licensing rights, you probably shouldn't be submitting to publishers or publishing yourselves. You really need to learn the various licensing rights, or you may find yourself in a lot of legal trouble.

And no writer has time for that shit.

Halfway Through the Year

July 1st. We're roughly halfway through 2020. Everything started shiny and bright on New Year's Day. Now I look around and see chaos, fear, and hate.

And I'm less than halfway through my output for the year. I'm focusing on the fact I'm only 83K behind on my target for new words. Given the circumstances, it could be, and probably should have been, much worse.

I'm not going to let all the chaos get me down. I'm doing my best to write things that are humorous and where the good guys win in the end.

I need that positivity. I'm sure a lot of other people do to.

To that end, I've been putting my first in series books on sale for $0.99. One each month.

This month is Hero De Facto, the first in the 888-555-HERO series.

Next month will be A Question of Balance (Justice #1).

Hang in there. Wear your masks and social distance. Stay safe. I want us all to make it to 2021!