There's a Platypus Controlling Me...To Finish My To Do List

I looked for a picture of a finish line, light at the end of the tunnel, but at the end, I just needed to go with my heart. Without further adieu, there's a platypus controlling me....


Elizabeth, why are you still trying to publish your book in the middle of a move?
There's a platypus controlling me.


Elizabeth, why are you going to push through this last round of edits, look one last time for typos and then let the story go out into the world?
There's a platypus controlling me. He's underneath the table.


There are 10 days until my publication date. Yes, it IS self-imposed, but that doesn't make it any less of a deadline. In fact, the book WILL come out before that (Ssshhhhh! We're just going to celebrate the release on 9/22/11) so that when release day comes, all of the sites are propagated with the book.

• I have 8 more chapters of edits to make. The edits are done, just need to be keyed in. By THURSDAY!
• I will send my manuscript to the printer one last time. Then read it twice for typos. 
• Monday I will finalize the ebook formatting.
• Tuesday and Wednesday I will upload. 
• THURSDAY-SUNDAY = PARTY with my best friend Kari Watford and unpack my household goods.

Here, there is no platypus controlling me! I'm being this cool all by myself!




"CANCELLED" arriving SEPTEMBER 2011. A robotics engineer asks his business partner to marry him, but a previous one-night stand is having his baby.

It's Going to Be Okay

First, a HUGE congratulations to my friend Tonya Kappes, author of Carpe Bead'em and The Ladybug Jinx. She is celebrating 1,000 sales today in only 9 weeks. She is part of the amazing writing community at The Writer's Guide to E-Publishing, a site I highly recommend for the latest scoops in the indie world and great old-fashioned camaraderie! (If I type 'the' in my address bar, that's the site that comes up, I go so often!)

In other news, it was a meh kinda week for the writing ego of moi. I keep freaking myself out because I am NOT like other writers in style and tone. For example, I read a tip lately that only "new writers" describe what a character is eating. You know, what's wrong with a little realism? Especially when you use it for characterization. In Chapter 2 (old Chapter 3) my MC is eating a pre-fixe lunch of a terrine with lemony asparagus followed by a salad. His stepmother's boyfriend (who MC did NOT know existed, let alone was tagging along on their Christmas trip to Paris) is eating the same thing. Although the terrine is a soft, meat-loaf consistency, the boyfriend is using the American convention of smashing every bite with the side of his fork, leaving his knife perfectly pristine on the table next to his plate. And he's talking with his mouth full! And you know what? I'm keeping it! 

It gets so confusing. It's a conversation at a lunch table in a swanky 4-star Parisian hotel. How could I not comment on the food? Here's the truth, people eat, sleep, talk, and have sex. Somewhere in there they also work. What's wrong with a little realism to balance the fantasy of a love story? My characters eat: different foods and in different ways. My female lead skips lunch by eating a granola bar when she's stressed and my MC calls her out on it. One of the scenes in Confessions of a Shopaholic that sticks with me most is Becky trying to cook a curry. I can't cook a curry. I don't even know really that I like curries. But I enjoyed the comedy of everyday life. When I read Sophie Kinsella's book, Confessions of a Shopaholic, I loved it so much BECAUSE it was unlike any other book I had read up to that point. 

This morning I read Konrath's piece about authorial intent. Just be deliberate, he says, and too bad for the people who don't like it. Alright. I agree. 

With that, I am going to work on polishing my new Chapter 1 (original Chapter 1 was cut entirely into the deleted scenes bin) which is my old Chapter 2 and have it up on my reader site for Sample Sunday. I also need to get the back cover copy to my awesome cover artist. I was stressing over that, but my paperback will never be sold in stores, so really, what does it matter what the back of the printed book says? For that matter, I am going to heavily subsidize my printed book pricing to promote my ebook, so maybe I will just break the mold entirely. Why not make my back cover of the book a letter to my readers, thanking them for buying this book, a nice picture of me, and encouraging them to email me for a free copy of the ebook? My business is best in electronic media. The more people I can convince to read my books in electronic formats, the better off my business and the businesses of my colleagues will be. 

Wow, I feel like a major DUH!!!! is coming on. Off to work on new and improved back cover copy. 

"CANCELLED" arriving SEPTEMBER 2011. A robotics engineer asks his business partner to marry him, but a previous one-night stand is having his baby.

#ROW80 #6 Chug-a-chug-a-choo-choo!

"I think I can. I think I can. I think I can."


Okay' here's the recap:


I took Sunday and Monday OFF. Yep. I needed a break from work. And my husband suddenly started pitching in around the house. The man mowed the lawn, cleaned up our bedroom, tidied our bathroom, and made our kitchen sparkle. 


On Tuesday, wife guilt put housework first. I managed to wash and fold three loads of laundry, scrubbed our bathroom and the other upstairs bathroom clean, and kept the kitchen sparkling. Today, I am meeting a friend from out of town and we are hitting the local water park with my daughter. 


However, I am okay. My #ROW80 goals are not daily goals but destinations. I like spontaneity too much for daily word count goals, but I might try a weekly total for Round 4. 

• I began learning how to format my word doc for ebook conversion. 
• I am up to Chapter 4 glance editing, and middle of Chapter 3 for in-depth, over haul revising. I need to be up to Chapter 10 by NEXT Wednesday.
• I am doing very well at balancing my writing work with real-life. This post is a case in point. I made sure to make time for it this morning even though I have a jam-packed day ahead of me. 

I wrote down all of my deadlines in my planner yesterday and felt a little daunted. The path from today to publishing at the end of September is a very steep climb. I felt overwhelmed. However, I simply put down my planner and worked on housework a bit, thinking. Yes, it is still a great deal of work to get done. However, as long as I keep plugging away at it, it will get done. It' the whole "I think I can, I think I can." Staying positive is very important, as negative thoughts are crippling. 


I can't worry about pre-readers until I get my second draft polished. I am VERY afraid of reader reception. I am VERY afraid my writing is horrible, and I will be the last to know. However, I suspect every author feels that way, and if they don't, they probably shouldn't be writing anymore. I don't mean it paralyzes every writer, it shouldn't. But we should all care about he quality of our writing, to a degree, even if you've been validated by millions of sales. 


So I'm also working hard to not let those fears build up in my head. I hope to publish Chapter 2 (my new Chapter 1) as a #SampleSunday this week, and we'll see what happens. 


"CANCELLED" arriving SEPTEMBER 2011. A robotics engineer asks his business partner to marry him, but a previous one-night stand is having his baby.

Confession...I Almost Quit

When I started this blog, it was to help other people serious about publishing their own writing. I figured while I don't have experience, as a newbie, if I chronicled my mistakes, it might help others.


Here's one of my biggest mistakes: My book COULD be releasing this month. I was originally due to finish my rough draft May 31, 2011. I didn't finish until July 13. 43 days late. Thank goodness my publishing contract doesn't have a penalty clause. But maybe it should? Hmmmm, I'll file that away for later.


What caused the 43 day delay? Doubt. Lots of it. Writing is work. I enjoy my work a great deal, but it is work. My eyes become strained, my fingers swell, my neck aches. In the last 3 days, I've written 18,000 words. 23% of my novel. That figure right there shows I *have* the ability to produce. I am not one of those writers paralyzed by a blank screen. Far from it. and if you sat next to me in a public place, I'd also talk your ear off. I bet the two are connected.


Here's the scary thing. I #wordmongering on Twitter which is writing for 30 minutes, off for 30 minutes. I average 750-1000 words per session. Once I outline. Outlining takes 2-3 weeks. That means for 80,000 words, I really only need 80 hours (30 minutes writing, 30 minutes off which is important. I don't produce as well writing straight through. Writing for one full hour, I end up with only about 1200-1500 words). Hypothetically, I could rough draft a novel in three months (I don't have the luxury of writing 40 hours per week, really only about 10). My first novel I rough drafted in 4 months. So not too bad.


AND I ALMOST QUIT.


The major hurdles for me were 30,000 and 60,000 words. 


At 30,000.


My 30,000 word mark was a hodge-podge of scenes and then about 6 sequential chapters. I was shocked that as I wrote, even the planned scene changed. I had to reconcile as a writer how much I want to stick to my outline vs. let organic win out. In the end, both had to compromise. My outline was overhauled twice. Once here, and again at 60,000. A handful of times the characters were doing something weird, and it got boring to me. Those moments were scrapped as it's great they lived their lives, but too boring to be included in THIS story. I saved some bits, either for future novels or outtakes. 


At 60,000 


I sat at 60,000 words for almost a month. Well, it took me a month to move from 55,000 to break 60,000. I learned I hate writing between the second crisis to the final crisis. Maybe one day I will pioneer a story structure that skips that. Then 2,000 years from now the writing books will say "Up until the early twenty-first century, the classical three-act story structure reigned as king from the days of Ancient Greece. All of this changed with the West Wham-Bam-Thank-You-Ma'am story structure that truncated the rising action between the second and third crisis, keeping the reader on the edge of his or her proverbial seat...."


Then the story about SPAM on Amazon's KDP broke and every Tom, Dick, Harry, and Sally Sue with a blog remotely relating to writing was 100% against self-published material. I mean nastily against. The Cliff's Notes version is that we were out to destroy the world and every cute little kitten. But mostly just destroy the world. 


I was upset. I was angry. I ranted. Then I got over it. 


When you have a goal, anything really, you just don't have time for the naysayers. You don't. You don't have time to correct their misinformed opinions, you don't have time to worry if they're right. Who cares if they are? Destroy the world hmmm? Well, I always wanted to be a dictator, that's why I had kids...... 


I'd share the words of genius comic Kat Williams, but it just wouldn't be appropriate. But basically, it is a hater's job to hate. That's what they do. My job is to do what I need to do to make my living in this world (which for the record, I'd rather NOT destroy).


READY FOR THE AD NAUSEUM ADVICE?


Here's what it took for me to finish my first draft. It's not easy. It sounds easy, but it's not. It sucks. And when I say it sucks, I mean remember those days where you hate your job, hate your boss, hate your life, everything goes wrong and you want to stick your head in a microwave? It's worse than that. Because right here is where it all rests on you, baby. There is no boss to gripe about, there is no co-worker you can blame the missed deadline on.


You have to sit your butt in a chair and say "I'm going to finish you." And type. And after you eat, sleep, or use the restroom, you sit back down in the chair as say "I'm really going to finish you!" And type. Over and over and over again. When you get to the point of it's either me or you (you being the manuscript), it physically hurts. I typed until my fingers swelled. My eyes closed two nights in a row with an eye-strain twitch. 18,000 words in 3 days. That's what it took for me to kill that story. 


It really came down to me or my manuscript. If I didn't finish, I would be embarrassed not just to myself, but to all of the friends and family I told I was writing a book. Most importantly, I'd look foolish in front of my husband. The man who graciously enough understood when the laundry wasn't done, or dinner was phoned in. If I ever make any kind of decent money on this, I'm taking him to Italy. :) 


In my head swirled a million and one questions about my ability, my motivation, even my prioritization! Was this just going to be another "big idea" I have that I just can't seem to finish? Was this going to be another time my perfectionism got the better of me? No. It wasn't. 


And after i got my butt in the seat, here's the last important part... I gave myself permission to suck, and got it done. And looking back, I know I'm a stronger writer because of it.


"CANCELLED" arriving SEPTEMBER 2011. A robotics engineer asks his business partner to marry him, but a previous one-night stand is having his baby.

Watch Out Wednesday! Writing Goals and Life

"All I'd say is though my choo-choo jumped the track, I'd give me life to bring him back..."
- Musical Chicago, We Both Reached for the Gun


I get derailed. We all do. we're chugging along and then BAM! one little switch isn't thrown the right way and our train is off the tracks.


I missed my manuscript deadline of May. It put me in a funk. I got over it. I picked up my train and shoved it back on that track. Other times, I don't derail; I just have to stop in my tracks. I have a 2-year-old. She needs Mommy at least twenty or more times a day, right now. Not in a second once I save my work (autosave is my friend), but as soon as she reaches on her tiptoes and pulls a knife off the counter, or climbs on the couch, or bumps her head. She's 3 feet tall without the maturity that comes with that height (she was 23 inches when she was born). She just turned 2 last week.


I've adapted. My train is like those rollercoasters that shoot you off at 60 m.p.h from the get go. I can go full speed, come to a complete stop, and pick right back up. Before you say "Wow, wish I could do that" there are tradeoffs. I can't do long, uninterrupted sessions. I go nuts. I get stuck. I need the chaos to jam it out. I also hesitate to get on the rollercoaster, because once I'm on, I'm on. Whoosh! That isn't always a good thing, depending on the timing.


This week was my first week really getting back into writing/keeping my house. It's Wednesday, and so far I am proud of my Sunday, Monday, and Tuesday. But there is still much to do, as always.

• I am 4 chapters away from completing my manuscript. That's 12 #wordmongering sessions.
• My author photos are done!
• My cover is nearing completion.
• My reader website is coming together, slowly. But that's okay.
• I need to punch up my first two chapters so I can post them as samples.
• I joined A Round of Words in 80 Days starting July 4, that will help me get my second book done while I'm editing/promoting CANCELLED.
• I need to make a goal for those 80 days, which is harder than you think. Something I can measure and check in on Sunday and Wednesday on status.
• I need to make some stickers/badges. I've done well in #wordmongering and pictures are pretty.

"CANCELLED" arriving SEPTEMBER 2011. A robotics engineer asks his business partner to marry him, but a previous one-night stand is having his baby.

Take That Tuesday! Writing, Cleaning, and Thankful

It is inherent in the human condition that we complain. No one can be Little Miss Sunshine all of the time. I don't know why it is easier to count up our miseries rather than count up our blessings (not necessarily religiously provided, just good things in general). 



I am a very big culprit of this myself. I am SO very lucky. My husband makes enough that I get to stay home with my daughter and stepson when he's here for school. I HATE housecleaning, I mean hate it. I have a completely irrational attitude that I am above it. Yep. I'm vain like that. I have a college degree, why should *I* clean toilets? Of course, I can't throw it on my husband with that argument. Man has a Master's. Damn. I never thought of it that way...


Nevermind. The point is I hate to clean, but I do it. I am trying to get better at cleaning, I have a list of items that must be done daily vs. weekly. And today's experiment involves #wordmongering. 


Today, I will #wordmonger for the 30 minutes, and then do a cleaning task(s) in the other 30 minutes of the hour. I know, great idea, huh?


9:00-9:30 #wordmongering           9:30-10 Start laundry, load dishwasher
10-10:30 #wordmongering            10:30-11 Swap laundry, sweep kitchen, bedroom
11:00-11:30 #wordmongering        11:30-12 Lunch, put daughter down for nap, fold 1 load
Break
1:00-1:30 #wordmongering            1:30-2:00 Fold next load of laundry
2-2:30   #wordmongering               2:30-3:00 Tidy up living room (my table), start pasta salad


If the list is accomplished, I should have about 5,000 words to show for it, a cleaner house, and I get to play an hour of Rune Factory :)


"CANCELLED" arriving SEPTEMBER 2011. A robotics engineer asks his business partner to marry him, but a previous one-night stand is having his baby.

Underestimating the Hard Work It Takes to Write a Book

Yep, I'm a member of that club. There are parts of my manuscript that are brilliant. I don't even recognize my own writing! But other parts are making me cringe. Today, it's my transitions. 


My beginning and ending are super strong. My middle sags. It's choppy. I don't know what I'm going to do. Where I'm struggling is figuring out how to traverse 9 months of time without having to go "April" "May" etc.


Today is one of those days I just don't feel like I have enough time to be a writer, Mom, and wife. 


So here's the deal. It's hard to write a book. It is. Plan on hours and hours of agony, frustration, neck pain, eye strain, insecurity, anxiety, jubilation, and mental/physical fatigue. I think what's frustrating me the most right now is some of the recent rumblings about don't publish your first book, have a bunch of books ready before you publish, etc. You know, it's hard enough to find the confidence to even try and publish one book. Maybe these authors with an amazing backlist FORGET their feelings and worries when they were hammering out that first manuscript. 


But I won't throw in the towel. There are some awesome elements of CANCELLED, and it deserves its day in the sun. I don't care if it's not the next Great American Novel. I mean really, what in the hell does that phrase even mean? I hated about 80% of anything on the canon list I had to read for school, so yes, I can safely say, I'm not aiming to be considered great literature. Great literature is boring. You have to write papers about (I know, I did). 


My book is just a fun story, created to give those of us who prefer to not fight our families over the remote control an escape and juicy romantic story. My reader should smile, laugh, get angry, and at the end, want another story of mine to kill a few more hours. 


There, now I feel better. Thanks for reading and listening. :) Time to refuel and get back in there.


"CANCELLED" arriving September 2011. A robotics engineer asks his business partner to marry him, but a previous one-night stand is having his baby.

In re: J.T. O'Connell Maybe the Anti-Goal?

J.T. O'Connell

I am a big goal maker. I like to write them down. I would honestly say I meet about 60% of my goals if I considered all aspects of my life. Cleaning the house. Working out. Reading my Bible. And so on.

What J.T. O'Connell was talking about, making that goal that sounds easy but ends up hard and stops us in our tracks, I think that has a value to it. Ladies and gentlemen, I present the ANTI-GOAL

I realized I make these, subconsciously. Take O'Connell's situation. He made a goal about reading, it was too strenuous, he rejected it to work on writing. Hmmmm. Interesting.

At the beginning of the year I made three categories of goals. Write a novel before the end of the year. Stick to my house cleaning schedule 80% of the weekly scheduled tasks (HA!). Work out 3 times a week for two weeks to work up to 5 times a week alternating cardio and strength training (I currently work in 2-3 cardio workouts, roughly 1 strength training session per week).

Now the year is almost half way over. In rejecting my harder, not so fun goals (cleaning, working out) I have actually accelerated on my writing goal. My book isn't coming out in December, but August. That's a 33% acceleration on one project. Imagine going to your boss with that number? "Uh, yes sir, I will be finished in two-thirds of the time you gave me for the assignment." Now, looking at my house cleaning goal, I'm so fired. Working out? Let's just say my manager would probably be counseling me.

So here's the supposition: Create ANTI-GOALS to accelerate other goals. Make slightly outrageous goals, ones you *really* don't want to do. Make them undesirable in comparison to the goals you really must get done, and ta da, you're coming in 33% before deadline.

Anyone else have thoughts?


"CANCELLED" arriving Late Summer 2011. A robotics engineer asks his business partner to marry him, but a previous one-night stand is having his baby.

Self-Published Author: Deadlines, Making a Living, 10-year plan

Going to be close on deadline, but I can do it! Tuesday at midnight is the deadline for my first manuscript. I'm currently sitting at 48,000 words. I have about 20,000 more to go. Then let it simmer, and work on outlining second book.


Which brings me to one of my favorite activities: GENRE SNOOPING. That's right. What are people in my genre writing? What are they pricing it at? What does it read like? I've mentioned Lucy Kevin before in regards to her ebook pricing strategy, and was surprised to realize why I couldn't find a ton of information about her. She doesn't exist. Okay, she does, but her main writing name is Bella Andre. No, I'm not unmasking a superhero, she plainly lists her pseudonyms on her main site. 


Bella Andre is an indie publishing goddess! She has over 16 titles and even better, she's like me! Let's write those modern, contemporary stories about love in the real world! Melodrama? Yuck. Weak females? Double yuck. Super strong females the male must "tame?" Super double yuck. June looks like it's going to be me devouring her entire Lucy Kevin line. It might be the first series I can put in my section of books I have personally read and like for my readers waiting in between my novels (check out my Catering to the Readers post)


So there is hope for my writing style. +1. I next played with the real numbers posted by one of the wonderful brains behind The Writer's Guide to Epublishing, D.D. Scott, and also by YA author Megg Jensen, writer of Anathema. At $2.99, Megg saw sales in the range of 50-150 books per month. D.D. Scott's $2.99 offerings, with a $.99 intro (Bootscootin' Blahniks) sees monthly sales between 200-290 books per month.


Why would I forecast my own writing? After all I have 0 data for my own books. True, but I can set goals. I know I will sell at $2.99 for a royalty of roughly $2.00, to make the math easy and to account for slight variations in royalty calculations between Amazon, Nook, and Smashwords. I currently have a publication schedule of two novels per calendar year. This year is only one, but it's my first year. I have Book #2 of the Red Ink Collection, PAST DUE, slated for March 2012, and Book #3 SERVED which is a sequel to CANCELLED slated for August 2012. 


If I average 100 books per month, per title (yes, some months might see CANCELLED sell 150, but PAST DUE only 57, and vice-versa. Calculations are based on an average, so I can even have good and bad months and not panic, Hitchhiker's style). In 2012, I will make $5,400 on my three novels. That meets my second goal of writing when I began my fiction career: Make $5,000 in one calendar year from my fiction writing. 


What if I do better than that? What if my numbers are higher, say 150 books per novel per month on average for the year? That's $8,100 in 2012. 


The highest I hoped for was to average 200 books per title per month. Again, we're talking averages, so having a few outlier months that are awesome would be enough to pull the average up. This is like big dreaming. That would be a nice $10,800 for 2012. Or 5,400 books sold in the year.


Now here is where the math gets interesting. Once I have more titles, assuming I can keep the average up (which it looks like is possible given D.D. Scott's numbers on her older titles, remember just average, not every book must sell the average number each month), in 2013 I would have 5 novels (no idea what book 4 and 5 are, but I have ideas that could flesh out, too far in advance to think concretely that far. Maybe PAST DUE gets a sequel, maybe it doesn't.) Average of 100 books per month per title (5) = $10,200 for the year. Average of 150 books per month per title = $15,300. Average of 200 books per month per title = $20,400. 


That's moving from intern to entry level hire.


I continued my two books per year production schedule up to 9 novels, or 2015, which is where I think a little burn out might occur. Then I stepped down to 1 novel per year. I calculated out for the next ten years because that is the length of my husband's naval career at the moment. Here's where I'm looking at this as a career path:


2021, ten years in the game. I'm 39 years old. 15 novels in the game. 
100 books average per month per title = 17,800 books $35,600.
150 books average per month per title = 26,700 books $53,400.
200 books average per month per title = 35,600 books $71,200.


Over my ten year career:
At 100 books avg. I would have sold 114,000 books, made $228,000.
At 150 books avg. I would have sold 170,900 books made $341,800.
At 200 books avg. I would have sold 228,000 books and made $456,000


What's The Point? My writing, while keeping me sane, doesn't come without trade-offs. For every 30 minutes of wordmongering, that's 30 minutes I'm not hanging with my family or doing something else. Some things, my writing is way more productive over, like over me playing video games. Other things, like playing with my daughter or playing a family game I wouldn't necessarily put my writing down as more important in comparison. For the record, doing laundry does not override writing time. :)


I've been writing for 4 years (non-fiction articles). I took off considerable time when I became pregnant and had my daughter. About 14 months of maternity leave :) I made $4,000 my first year writing, $2,000 my second (I became pregnant that year after struggling for over a year with fertility issues), and $1100 my third (didn't start writing again until daughter was 6 months old). Last year I claimed a $500 profit, because as she learned to walk, I got busy. Very busy. Now that she's almost 2, there is more time she is independent. 


I have to look at the monetary value of my writing and decide if it matches up with the qualitative value of my life. Does the money I make for the hours I work add to my family's well-being by giving us money to take vacations, by keeping Mommy from feeling restless/worthless, by growing a retirement fund for me to perhaps lessen the financial burden later? I think it does. 


Why forecast 10 years? In ten years, my daughter will be 12. With 15 novels, I could easily take a long hiatus and still see some money come in. There's no telling what life will be like between now and then, or even after that date. I do know most likely my husband will be leaving the Navy and that will be a big transition. That extra money will probably come in handy in reducing the stress between military and civilian job. 


10 years is also a good length of time to plan a career path. No one goes from grunt to manager level in one year. It's important as indie writers we seriously sit down and look at expectations. We're not all going to be Amanda Hocking, J.A. Konrath, and Dean Wesley Smith. In fact, this year, I'm the equivalent of the girl getting the coffee. I'm writing my first novel, and politely talking to those ahead of me already published. Next year, I'll be the new girl in the cubicle farthest from a window, only part-time until a full-time position opens up. :)


But, we're in a growing industry. Who knows? Maybe I sell an average of 300 novels per title in 2012, breaking my highest expectations. Maybe I go from intern to full-time employee, with benefits. It's entirely possible with the double digit growth in ebooks. Of course, that also means more competition. So maybe I won't break an average of 75 books per month per title and spend more time in the windowless corner, still being asked to make the coffee once in awhile. 


I urge all of you to sit down and crunch some numbers. Have a goal. Have a realistic goal (100 books per month), a fantastic goal (150 books per month), and a super-awesome screaming from the top of the mountain goal (200 books per month). Reassess every year. 


For now, my 10 year plan is going in the front of my writing notebook (a three-ring binder with sheet protectors for my goals, current project, and next project). I will see it everyday. And work towards it every time I jump in my role as a writer and publisher.




"CANCELLED" arriving Late Summer 2011. A robotics engineer asks his business partner to marry him, but a previous one-night stand is having his baby.

Reading About Craft, Trying to Write

I've had a very bad case of the insecurities lately. I keep reading about self-publishing and how it's all crap and slowly that mentality started to freak me out. What if I'm writing crap? what if everyone hates my book? What if no one buys it? 


Then I began reading On Writing by Stephen King. Phew! All of this is totally normal. And I don't suck. I didn't really get these fears with my non-fiction writing because I started that with 0 expectations. I wrote, it sold. Each random transaction was regular confirmation that I AM a writer and one that makes money doing so.


Writing fiction is a completely different beast. I don't get regular confirmation that my writing is good. I think it's good. I enjoy reading it, even over and over again. I have the first 9 chapters written, and most of the end of the story. I just need to fill in the gaps, about 12 more chapters worth. I have 15 days to do it. I made a pot of coffee for tonight, and will try to get as much as I can done.


I can see the finish line. It's taunting me. Today in church, one bible passage stuck out to me from my New Living Translation: Galatians 6:4 Pay careful attention to your own work, for then you will get the satisfaction of a job well-done, and you won't need to compare yourself to anyone else. Even if you aren't of the Christian faith, it's sage advice. I need to worry about my own project and seeing it through to the end. Who cares if my book isn't as good as other chick-lit/romance writers? They aren't me. And maybe my different style and voice in writing will catch an audience who loves a good love story, but nothing too sappy. 


Grooveshark on. Writer open. Time to get busy.


"Disengaged" arriving Late Summer 2011. A robotics engineer asks his business partner to marry him, but a previous one-night stand is having his baby.

Day 19 : How to Overcome Distractions from Writing

I believe it's called getting back in the saddle? Because I definitely feel as if I fell off the writing horse! For the last two weeks, I have managed to eek out only half-ish of Chapter 8. First, I was in Virginia the last week of April, and between running around for social obligations, and visiting with family, my novel was on the back burner. I also wasn't getting great sleep since I was sharing a queen sized bed with my toddler who managed to push me to the very edge every night!

This past week, replacing my car took up so much time. Between test driving, then buying a Dodge Journey (only to take it right back the following day due to mechanical issues) I am now the proud and super thankful owner of a fully loaded 2010 Honda Pilot (Touring). People have told me before they love their car. Previously driving a 1999 Honda Accord that had seen many better days, I always rolled my eyes, if only internally, at the idea of becoming enamored with an inanimate object. But I LOVE my Pilot! Though, I can argue my car is not 100% inanimate -- I can give it voice commands and it responds back! 


So back to my novel. I am so behind. And the longer and longer it goes on, the easier and easier it is not to write. This changes today. I will write this morning as much as I can. And this afternoon. This evening, my husband has softball, so writing might prove more difficult. Even right now will be difficult as my 2-year-old is climbing on me, trying to give me kisses. 


"Disengaged" arriving Late Summer 2011. A robotics engineer asks his business partner to marry him, but a previous one-night stand is having his baby.

Day 17: Book Cover Artist, Title Change, and Vacation

I am on vacation for the week in Virginia, visiting my family with my 2-year-old daughter. It's been a nice respite from home.


BIG NEWS: I have a cover artist! Suddenly, my release date just got a great deal closer! My cover artist is the wonderfully talented Melissa Oyler. We have some very exciting ideas cooking up between us, so stay tuned!


The title changed because Melissa kept calling my book "Cancelled." Man, that was a lot cooler than "Imperfect Timing." After a brainstorm session and an impromptu poll, "Disengaged" won as the new title. It might seem odd, but picture it with a cancelled wedding invitation on the cover and you'll get the joke.


I am home in South Carolina now. Writing has not been going to plan as I thought it would in Virginia and today. I spent most of today unpacking and getting the house/family ready for Monday. But! I planned out my weekly schedule for the next three weeks as follows:

1. 1 hour of house work every morning. (Get it out of the way)
2. MWF 30 min of cardio at home, extra 1.5 hours to write.
3. Tues Thursday 2 hours at YMCA (weights, travel time)
4. Lunch/Eat/Put my little monster down for a nap
5. 12-2 More writing
6. Outside play with kids (oldest starts standardized testing next week, we're pretty much done with 5th grade)
7. Dinner prep, clean kitchen

So I have 12 hours of scheduled writing. I am not scheduling writing hours in the evening/weekends so I can use that time to make up writing time I miss (I have to go grocery shopping and errand running sometime). 


Goals for the week: Get 12 hours of writing in. Get cover information to Melissa so she can start her magic. 


"Disengaged" arriving Fall 2011. Johnathan Michaels, a robotics engineer, jeopardizes his engagement with his business partner when a previous one-night stand surfaces, carrying his child.