Archive for the ‘writing’ Tag
Second in a Series of Firsts–My First Second Book in a Series
Filed under: Uncategorized | Tags: business, promo, publishing, writing, Wylde Hare Press
Leave a comment The Nobinata Gambit is officially out among the virtual bookshelves, which marks another turning point for me; it’s the first story I’ve written about a character that had already appeared in a story, making it the second book in a series. What’s the name of the series? Beats me. It all started with a novella called “Finding the Briar Rose” which is a Sleeping Beauty retelling that I’m going to rewrite and publish as a freebie next year (early next year, I hope), because I like the characters and they should live somewhere besides my dead-manuscript file. The first published story in the series is The Valmont Contingency.
The Nobinata Gambit is the story of Shak and “Lilo” (her real name is Yuki) after the end of Valmont; they save the emperor of the Empire of Nippon and Allied Cultures from an assassination attempt by one of his distant cousins, with assorted tragedies, murders and goings on, a love story, and more sequel bait thrown in because life never lets you do one thing at a time.
The universe for this series is the area of space colonized by humans after Earth’s magnetic field fails–it doesn’t actually FAIL fail, but it flops poles (again, it’s done it before), so it effectively fails for a few thousand years. Geologically, that’s an eyeblink, but for humans it’s a real problem since the magnetic field keeps out lethal high-energy particles from the Solar wind. Privately, I’m calling these books the Diaspora series. Let me know if that works and I’ll put it on the books I control.
My next title will be Getting Lucky, also the second in a series (my second second book, so to speak); it’s the story of Sasha from Open Mike at Club Bebop and the personage he finds lurking in the sealed archive he’s searching for more information on that tantalizing piece of video Colonel Singh turned up in Bebop. Yes, Sasha is smitten by someone as sneaky as he is, and…Martians, although not live ones. I know, right? More on that when it gets beaten into shape.
However, The Nobinata Gambit has an excellent cover, created by the talented and beautiful Kim Killion of Hot Damn Designs (The Killion Group):
In case you were wondering, you can
buy it here:Sorry, Apple readers, I can’t figure out how to get a direct link to the book in iTunes.
If you know, leave a comment with directions.
On the Idea of Being My Own Publisher
Filed under: Uncategorized | Tags: publishing, rejection, writers life, writing
Comments (1) In 1983, I became the features editor of my college newspaper, and shortly thereafter learned phototypesetting, a skill that would fund my last three years of college. This will become relevant in a bit.
In 1995, my husband started a small business to electronically file medical claims with insurance companies. Setting it up, filing the taxes, and eventually going through bankruptcy taught me how to run a business (we only ever had one client, and he had a heart attack several weeks before Blue Cross/Blue Shield came out with their own DIY software, but I digress).
In 1996, I became a technical writer after teaching myself HTML from a “for the Compleat Idiot” book (My Eureka moment: “It’s just typesetting codes!” Told you it would become relevant).
Off and on between 1997 and 2006 (and every few months in my current job) I worked in corporate marketing, branding, new product introduction, that sort of thing.
In short, it appears my background has given me a semi-unique skill set that will allow me to easily become my own publisher. Thus, I am filing an Assumed Business Name (Idaho’s version of a DBA — we can never do anything normally) with the Secretary of State’s office next month…Wylde Hare Press will be born.
Why? Carina Press just rejected the best thing I have ever written, “The Nobinata Gambit.” I submitted the second manuscript to them reluctantly; Carina is an imprint of Harlequin, which is a corporate master of ensuring rights are never returned to writers. I reasoned that I might as well have the entire diaspora series with them, in spite of poor sales for the first title.
The sales of the first book in the series, to put it politely, stank on ice, in spite of the book finalling in the EPIC awards. Furthermore, the sales price was cut to $2.99, which means that I received about 60 cents for each sale at Amazon, Nook and Kobo.
By way of comparison, my Samhain Publishing title earns $1.65 per sale at third party retailers, and sells more copies per month (as in 6 copies vs 4) in spite of being three years older. So much for the mighty Harlequin marketing machine, LOL. They work great for some people — I have several friends who published well with the company — just not for me.
I will not start on my editor (who was essentially the reason I sat on the manuscript for nine months after completing it). Lovely woman, but we had different visions for the story in “The Valmont Contingency.” Since I’ve been an editor probably longer than she’s been alive — I first held the job title at the tender age of fourteen — I think mine was better. She would probably disagree.
During the 3.5 months I was waiting for Carina to decide, I developed an idea for a lead-in novella to the diaspora series that will make Carina’s “ownership” of the first full-length book irrelevant; I can have my “permafree” (that’s a technical term) novella, the first book at $2.99, and then…whatever I want, since I’m the owner of my new publisher.
The DBA name is one my husband, Spooky Man, has been throwing around for years in other contexts. And since I like rabbits and the whole idea of doing my own publishing really is kind of a wild hair, well, there you go. Synchronicity happens.
Spooky Man would dearly love its corporate symbol to be a white rabbit silhouette on a background of a starry sky (a wild hare where the sun doesn’t shine–he is a diabolical punster), but I would prefer to keep it mostly tasteful. Mostly.
I’m starting with a novella that I wrote in 2011, which is going to be the start of a series of six interlocking stories that will divide nicely into two novel-length anthologies. The first one is titled “Open Mike at Club Bebop” which is a jazz club in Luna City, on Earth’s moon. I haven’t figured out yet if this world is a precursor to the Human Diaspora universe or the Dozen Worlds universe, but it’s set during the era of our first settlements off of our homeworld.
With a bit of luck and quite a bit of elbow grease, “The Nobinata Gambit” will be ready and published by the end of September.
The follow-on to “Blade’s Edge,” which is tentatively titled “Becoming Unique,” (it’s how Talyn learns to use her powers for good rather than eeeevvviiilllll) is on track to publish about six months after, in March of 2015, and the two friends of Bebop should be finished in time to fill in the months between.
And so it goes, on to a brave new world in this case. Wish me luck.
So, I Wrote A Book in About Two Weeks
This is me sticking my head up, well, from writing most of a book in two weeks. I discovered something about myself this month. Several things, actually. This post is primarily for writers, so if you don’t care about the novelist’s process, check back in a few days for updated pet pictures.
In the meantime, here’s some stuff I learned:
1. If I can get characters and plot really nailed down, I can write forty thousand words in two weeks. Now, I’ve never written more than 25K words in a month before, so this was a revelation.
Unfortunately, it took me fourteen months to get to that point. Next step is to figure out how to speed up *that* process.
2. I have a hybrid plotting process. I start out by writing with no concrete plan, but maybe a vague idea of the major plot points. Then when I get 30-50 pages, I can’t go any farther without knowing what happens, which is when I start to plot in earnest.
Now, that first 30-50 pages isn’t necessarily all the first part of the book; it might be all the really pivotal scenes from beginning to end. Or it could be one or two of them.
The first kiss, the turning point where the hero(es) figure out the big conflict is inevitable and decide how to handle it, the closing scene–any or all of them could be in there. After that I have to figure out the holes and fill them.
For this last book, I ended up making a list of scenes, then color coding them: pink for the heroine’s character arc, blue for the hero’s character arc, green for the relationship arc, black for external plot, and yellow highlighting for scenes that hadn’t had a version written yet.
From June 1 to June 26, I added more than 43,000 words to this manuscript, cutting about two thousand (that I counted). The next step is to send it out to critique partners and beta readers and see if what I wrote actually makes sense.
And then I send it to my editor with fingers crossed, LOL.
At Last, Something to Say
Have you ever had one of those periods where you just have nothing to say? I’ve had six weeks of it.
Went to a kick-ass hands-on workshop on self-publishing, taught by Boise mystery and SF writer Ken McConnell — no comment, everyone knows Ken has mad skillz
Sent a novella out for critique with plans to self-publish it — no comment since I haven’t really heard much back yet.
Stock market hits record highs — no comment.
Stock market tanks 200+ points in a day — no comment.
Bombs at the Boston Marathon — no comment (really, what can you say other than “Oh my god, so horrible, so horrible” and everyone else is saying that).
West, Texas, fertilizer plant explosion — no comment (see Boston Marathon, above).
Linked In e-mail that a friend has endorsed me for my knowledge of Unix — wait, what? I don’t know anything about Unix. Okay, I can spell it and name the most popular distributions (Red Hat and Ubuntu), but I can’t install it or use a command line at all. The only command I know is SUDO, which is very dangerous in the hands of a Unix-ignorant person such as myself. What in the wide-open world is going on over at Linked In?
Oh. I had something to say about that. I guess I’m out of my no-opinion slump.
Now that the election is over, I can say it
“Well-paying jobs” must be stricken from American English. It is a phrase that makes no grammatical sense whatsoever.
“Paying” is a gerund, a linguistic sleight of hand that turns a noun (or an adjective) into a verb. The problem with this? Um, pay is a verb. Paying is also considered the present tense of the verb “to pay,” but only in specific cases, and it usually requires a helper verb (He *is* paying the rent vs He pays the rent.).
There’s no real reason to create a gerund from a verb, unless you are among those who believe that extra syllables make a word more important (utilize and use don’t actually mean the same thing, for example, although many people use them interchangeably; these are normally the people who opt for the longer word).
So, now that the proverbial “they” have made a verb out of…a verb, these folks then proceed to turn it into a compound adjective by applying the adverb “well” with a hyphen — when they actually remember the hyphen, but that’s a different issue.
The net result is a construction that sounds off when spoken and looks off when written. Why? Because of the double-sex-change of the verb to try to make it sound present-tense (a verb thing) when acting as an adjective (which, like the honey badger, don’t care). See? This is why it makes no sense.
What is a “well-paying job” anyway? Logically, it’s a job that pays well. I would consider a person who has a job that pays well to be well paid, wouldn’t you?
Oh look, there’s the construction the media and politicians should have been using for the last two years: “well-paid jobs.”
That’s definitely it, because “well-paid jobs” doesn’t make my inner grammarian cringe. There, I said it. And I have no regrets.
Books by Friends — Amazon Recommends Tyrmia
Filed under: Uncategorized | Tags: digital publishing, Geekery, promo, publishing, writing
Comments (1) Look what I found in my inbox this morning:
Tyrmia is a stand-alone novel set in the Starstrikers universe created by Ken McConnell. I’ve known Ken for several years, and I’m delighted that the gigantic bookstore has taken notice of his independent efforts.
I’m not saying the book is perfect — no book is, and this one has its share of typos — but I think Ken is a gifted storyteller. Copy editors are easy to find; really good storytellers…not so much.
Go, Ken!
When Instalust Isn’t Really Instalust
Filed under: Uncategorized | Tags: plotting, promo, Valmont Contingency, writing
Leave a comment I have seen a review of The Valmont Contingency accusing me of Instalust and lazy writing.
This is hilarious, because I have difficulty getting my characters to get to the lust portion of the program in the compressed time schedule I’m allowed by The Main Story Question. They’re always, “Yeah, but the zombies…!”
As a result, I made danged sure both Hero and Heroine had plenty (and I mean PLENTY) of motivation before they ever did anything about it.
Please note that the reviewer is absolutely entitled to her opinion, because it’s her opinion (could have been his opinion, but this particular reviewer was female). The book, as an artifact, has to sink or swim on its own merits. Period.
But this is my website/blog, so I’m going to explain things because I can. So there.
Garrick, Our Hero, has been primed by two years of Kardashian-level tabloid coverage of Tasha with wardrobe and makeup worthy of a Playboy shoot.
Combine that with his engineer-personality compulsion to “fix this” and her damsel-in-distress circumstances when they first meet in person, followed soon after by the realization that she has saved his life. “The poor bastard never had a chance” was how Spooky Man (my spousal unit) described it.
Tasha, Our Heroine, is in an extremely vulnerable state of mind when confronted by the first adult male in her life — ever — who actually seems to 1. see her as a human being, 2. care about her well-being (as opposed to her utility to him), 3. give credence to her intelligence, and, for the win, 4. need her help to stay alive.
Oh, and did I mention he’s three generations from a complete designer makeover to the family’s genes, so he’s pretty much physically perfect?
Like the panty-and-tank-top clad heroine who goes after the spooky noise in the slasher movie, my heroines have to have a lot of motivation to do something really dangerous, like fall in love.
Read the book with my list and see if I haven’t included all the necessary and proper motivation for “instalust.” (See, this is a subtle advertisement, because you have to buy the book to read it.)
And that’s all I’m going to say about that, LOL.
Valmont Contingency Giveaway Results
All six commenters get a free copy of The Valmont Contingency. I’ll contact you (probably on Friday; the day job is being complicated this week) to work out the details.
Thanks, everyone!
The Valmont Contingency Released Today
Filed under: Uncategorized | Tags: novel, release, Valmont Contingency, writing
Comments (10) I’m so excited that I finished editing the API docs for the day job and posted them early so I could lurk on the Carina Press website. VC is the first book listed under New Releases:
I now, officially, have a backlist. In celebration, how about a contest of sorts? Leave a comment and I’ll pick someone randomly for a free copy of The Valmont Contingency.
I’m even taking a break from The Nobinata Gambit (the next book in the series) for the day.
— Val
Valmont Contingency Excerpt–First Kiss
Filed under: Uncategorized | Tags: excerpt, release, Valmont Contingency, writing
Leave a comment Garrick gave up. She was scared and frustrated, and he didn’t want an implosion. He’d already been through one of those and, honestly, didn’t care to repeat the experience.
Ripping damn, he wanted to help her. “Would you feel better if you slapped me?”
She huffed. “You haven’t done anything to warrant it.” Then she frowned. “Lately.”
“Fine,” he agreed. “I’ll do something tacky and rude, you can slap me for it, and then we’ll move on.” Without waiting for a response he dragged her against him and sank his fingers into her hair, using the silky mass to pull her head back.
“What—ow!”
He covered her mouth with his, swallowing whatever else she was going to say.
Her entire body went stiff and he congratulated himself on a job well done. In another second or two she would shove, he would let go and brace for impact. Any second now. Any…
She melted.
The stiffness turned into soft curves, her palms slid up his chest and her lips parted. Her tongue flicked out to touch the inside of his lower lip and the really weird thing happened. The top of his head blew off, taking most of his brain with it. Rational thought was a dim memory and all those “baser” instincts it overruled were now in control. The drive to breathe, to eat.
She moaned quietly, deep in her throat.
The drive to mate.
He had both hands on her backside, pulling her hips tight against his to ease some of the throbbing while she pushed her fingers into his hair. She wrapped one of her legs around his, her bare toes rubbing the back of his calf.
“Rick?”
Somehow she’d said his name even while he was trying to lick her tonsils. Her voice was deeper than he would have expected, not as breathy, more…male. Male?
“Captain, this is the bridge. We have a Reich distress call originating in Republic space.”
Ripping hell on a platter. It was Shak, not Tasha. Brain matter reappeared and told him in no uncertain terms exactly how stupid he was, even when everything between his ears was functional. On the other hand, disengaging from that full-body kiss was quite possibly the most physically demanding thing he’d ever done—enough to make him pant from exertion. Exertion. It had to be exertion, because the alternative was a direct violation of half a dozen military rules that he had insisted go into the navy contract.
Tasha mewled in protest, a noise he hoped the comm hadn’t picked up as he tried to control his breathing enough to talk.
“Captain here. What’s the nature of the emergency?”
There was a tangible pause, almost as if Shak was trying to figure out what was going on. Garrick wished him luck. “Engine trouble,” was the eventual response. “Intercept or transmit to Glitzer?”
Well, that would explain what a Reich ship was doing this far over the border. They could have been drifting for a sepcyke. And Direwolf had the ability to help with that kind of emergency. A heavy sigh pushed its way out of his lungs.
“Intercept.” As if he had any choice. And it would keep him far away from Tasha. Direwolf was a tiny ecosystem in the middle of space and he was in control of it. She was dependent on the ship for the oxygen, pressure and heat that kept humans alive in space. She had to be able to trust him not to take advantage of that dependence.
“Bridge out.” Which meant he had five minutes to finish whatever was going on in here before Misha would expect him to show in the ready room.
Garrick glanced down into enormous indigo eyes that were just a little dazed-looking. His ears felt warm. “You were supposed to slap me, remember?”
She blinked at him a couple of times. “Your name is Rick?”
“Yeah.” He started, gently, to pry her off. “That’s me.” Buddha on a stick. He’d been trying to lick her tonsils and she hadn’t known his name. He was a lower life-form than slime mold.
“Oh.” She seemed to realize she still had limbs wrapped around him and let go. She stepped back and looked at the floor, the bulkhead, anywhere but him. “So you’re going to board another ship?”
“It’s my job.” And taking advantage of attractive women who were completely dependent on him was emphatically not part of that particular job. Even if it felt extraordinarily good.
“What if some of them need medical treatment?” She actually tried to dig a toe into the flooring, which looked adorable if almost painfully cliché.
“I’ll burn that bridge when I get to it.” He pulled her chin up with a knuckle. “Look, you’re still short of sleep. Twelve hours over six cykes isn’t enough. Nap. If I need you, I’ll call you. I promise.”
Oh god, she was biting her lower lip. Then she nodded. “I’ll try to nap.”
He needed to get away from her for a moment or he was going to dive back into her body, and the guilt from doing it once was bad enough. His ears felt like they might be considering spontaneous combustion.
“You want me to tell Shak he’s getting a new roommate?”
She looked confused. “Who is Shak?”
“Second-shift commander. The guy on the comm just now.”
She blinked several times in succession. Either she was batting her eyes at him, or she was trying not to cry. “No.”
He didn’t have time for this right now, no matter how vulnerable and appealing she was at the moment. Especially given how vulnerable she was at the moment. “Then we’ll talk about the rest of it when I get back, all right?”
She nodded again, somber.
He felt like enviro sludge, but he nodded back. “In the meantime, I have an engine to fix.”
