Abigail Carter's Blog, page 5

A Father’s Day Round-Up

Photo borrowed from A Raja’s Life and Stories (http://arajaslife.typepad.com/)

I know how difficult Father’s Day is for the newly widowed. It’s another reminder of what is missing. The kids’ class-made Father’s Day cards and presents must find new recipients. Widowed moms try to make the best of the day, pat themselves wearily on the back for trying to be good dads and just get through it. Widowed dads might get lopsided pancakes in bed, a homemade card and a tie and try to not miss sharing those secret smiles with their wives.

I thought it might be interesting to go back through my old posts and see how I dealt with Father’s Day over the years. OK, ready for the ride down memory lane?

2008 – The Father’s Day Dilemma, where I advise another widow on how one might deal with Father’s Day as a widowed mom.

2009 – A Father’s Legacy, where Carter buys a Father’s Day card for his friend’s two dads.

2010 - Every Day is Father’s Day for a Mom Who is Also a Dad, an essay I wrote for HelloGrief.com on how I got through Father’s Day over the years.

2011 – Perspective, an essay I wrote about my own dad teaching me how to draw perspective.

2012 – Happy Father’s Day, Mom, more on how we muddle through the day, teenaged angst, and a lone call up from the basement of “Happy Father’s Day, Mom!”

2013 – Chasing Mavericks. Not exactly specifically about Father’s Day, but a clear example of being a mother and a father rolled into one.

This Father’s Day will likely go by without much of a blink from me or my kids. I’ll do my traditional call to my own Dad who will do his traditional grumble about Father’s Day being a Hallmark invention and that will be about it. Perhaps I’ll again get a “Happy Father’s Day, Mom” called up from the basement and I’ll laugh. If I play my cards right, I will be on Vashon with Jim doing Father-y things like repairing the path to the beach and life will be good.

For all those of you who are struggling through another “Hallmark” moment, take heart. It gets better. In the meantime, go have a G&T and put your feet up. You deserve it.

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10 Things a Traditionally Published Author Should Know About Self-Publishing (That I Didn’t)

Imaged borrowed from Ilovetypography.com

Talking to a writer friend of mine about my experience self publishing, she suggested I write a blog about what I wished I knew going into it. Since my first book was traditionally published, I may have been a little naive when it came to self publishing. It seemed like a good choice. My own agent had no interest in my novel and I wasn’t getting anywhere with other agents. I was lured by the promise of “70% royalties” and “full control” over my book. It seemed like a no-brainer. Here’s what I wish I knew BEFORE I self published (not that knowing it would have changed my path, but I would have had a more realistic idea of what to expect):

 

1. Self Publishing Takes Longer Than You Think

I formatted my ebook myself. I used to be a desktop publisher (back in the days when such a thing existed), so it was something I felt comfortable doing, and in fact, love doing. I have even been doing formatting the books of a few author friends. I wrote the book using Scrivener which has a “compile” feature that allows you to set up and compile your book into an ebook or a print book. Kinda handy. I compiled over and over, probably 50 times before I got the book looking the way I wanted it. It was a learning curve. Next time it will probably take me less time, but even if you have someone doing this for you, you will likely get the book back not looking quite like you wanted it. Ebooks are funny things and text appears in ways than you don’t expect. Be prepared for a cover design to also take longer than you expect. Depending on how well you were able to articulate your design idea to the designer, you may go through a few iterations before you are happy with a cover design.

 

2. Self Publishing Happens Fast

Of course, once you have the files ready, publishing takes no time at all. I wanted to experiment a little with KDP ( (I used Amazon’s KDP to publish my ebook) before I published and then all of a sudden with one click of a submit button, I was published and not at all prepared.

 

3. A Self Publishing Plan is a really good idea BEFORE you publish

Because publishing happens with the click of a button, you have to be disciplined to not “impulse publish” like I did. I would have done well to follow the advice of my Writer.ly co-founder, Kelsye and have a plan. View her webinar on 10 things you should do BEFORE publishing.

 

4. Publishing the book in ebook format is not enough

I went into this whole self publishing thing a little hesitantly. Even the day before I impulsively published, I sent the book to agents. I figured that if I just self published the ebook, I’d be simply testing the waters a little. I’d get a few reviews and see if there might be any interest in the book. What I’m quickly realizing is that my sales campaign would have been a whole lot stronger if I had published the paperback and the ebook simultaneously.

 

5. There is still a significant bias against self publishing and some of it is self-imposed

Now that I have to produce a paperback lickety split, I need some decent reviews to add to the back cover. I am friends with a lot of traditionally published authors, so I figured I’d have no problems getting a review. When each one turned me down (kindly), I put myself in their shoes for a minute. Is there any benefit for a traditionally published author to write a blurb about a self published book? Not really. In fact, it could be a little detrimental to the traditionally published author who needs to remain loyal to their publisher. Loyalty in publishing is a hot topic right now, and I could probably write an entire post just about that, but you get the idea.

 

6. Self Publishing your book is the EASY part

Once your book is published you need to let people know, and for me, this is the hard part. Through my association with Writer.ly, I have been inundated with information about how to market my book, but when it came down to doing it, I was overwhelmed. For my traditionally published books, I had so much done for me – entering the book into contests, getting the book into bookstores, setting up launch parties and readings. I’ve already written a little about this, so I won’t bore you with the details here. As Guy Kawasaki says in his book, you really do have to become an entrepreneur. And even though I am one (with Writer.ly), selling your own creative output is harder than it seems because it feels like you are bragging or pushing your work down people’s throats. It’s a hard nugget to swallow for us introverts.

 

7. Marketing your book takes a long time

I thought that I would put my book out on KDP, do a few KDP Select “Free” days (where you agree not to sell your book on any platform other than KDP for 90 days in exchange for the privilege of having 5 Free days on Amazon) and have thousands of downloads which then leads to hundreds of reviews. But I’m finding that it’s a slow build, and that every action you take to market your book builds up to the next. I’ve now had several free days and have tried different things for each one. The first two had abysmal results (90 or so downloads), but then I lucked out with the last one and had 5000 downloads. This got my book ranking higher in at Amazon which then led to it be seen by more people searching for books (in this case searching for FREE Kindle books). I hope the next (and last) round of my free days will yield even more downloads. After that, I will move on and try uploading it to different platforms. I plan on using IngramSpark.

 

8. Giving away books as many books as possible is a GOOD thing

I knew this going in, but still it seems counter-intuitive. To be honest, I’m not in the writing game to become a best seller. I’m in it to write and to impart ideas that I think are interesting or important or helpful. So giving away my book is easy and I love doing it, but I didn’t ever equate FREE books with SALES. My next point will illustrate why this is so.

 

9. Reviews are the gold of the publishing world

The reason you want to give away so many free books is that when you do, a handful of those readers will review and rate your book on Amazon or Goodreads. And reviews are the currency you need to qualify for some of the most successful marketing platforms out there. They change constantly, but for the moment, the killer app in this realm is BookBub. If you can get your book included in a BookBub email, you will have thousands of downloads. Which is what leads to “buzz” about your book. The buzz is the magical elixir when it comes to self publishing. You want people talking about your book so that word-of-mouth can take over and those giveaways become real sales.

 

10. You probably won’t get rich self publishing

We all have those secret notions that our book will somehow get all kinds of the aforementioned “buzz” and become an instant bestseller (making us millions in the process, because we made the smart move to self publish, thereby receiving huge royalties), but the reality is that few books ever manage to hit that nirvana. Perhaps you will achieve this if you write genre fiction, write it as a series and write it quickly, but most of us slog away at our books and write in unmarketable genres.

In the end, we are doing what we love (hopefully) and no matter how we publish, sometimes success is measured not in buzz and dollars, but in the joy we get from telling our stories.

 

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The 9/11 Gift Store

9/11 Memorial Museum. For New York Post. credit: Sue Edelman

I woke up to this story this morning and couldn’t help feeling a little sick to my stomach. I think until now it was possible to convince myself that no one would be profiting from the 9/11 Memorial Museum, but of course who was I kidding? This is America, land of consumerism and greed. Even a repository for remains of the dead is fair game. How many other people’s cemeteries have gift stores?

You can bet the 9/11 gift store doesn’t carry my book, or any other book by a 9/11 family member. How about something that tells the real story of what happened and it’s aftermath, words filled with the emotion, blood, sweat and tears of our upside-down lives.  But no, instead people will buy their FDNY Pandora charms and think they are taking home a piece of history.

Remember, “Never Forget.”

Perhaps we could take some cues from the Pearl Harbor memorial gift store. It’s mostly a book store and proceeds go towards outreach programs. Let’s give people a chance to learn about the impact of that terrible day rather than have them take home a meaningless bauble or t-shirt. A gift shop could be a perfect way to make a meaningful difference and give further understanding to people of what they have just seen in the museum.

God, my black humor is getting the best of me… Here’s a t-shirt idea for families:

“My loved one died on 9/11 and all I got from the 9/11 Museum was this lousy t-shirt.”

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The Oak Table

For Mother’s Day, I thought I would post this excerpt of “The House and I,” a memoir I’m writing about owning the home of the late “Mrs. Piggle Wiggle” author Betty MacDonald on Vashon Island, WA.

 

The kitchen on Vashon

The Vashon house came equipped with two built-in bunk beds, a questionable queen sized bed in the guest house, two 60s era egg-shaped wicker chairs and a bejeweled thrift store painting that I requested from the previous owners, two more conventional wicker chairs, a grey piano with two candle holders attached and metal piano seat, and the requisite old-house cupboard full of half-empty cans of paint and stain (despite the fact that there are almost no painted surfaces in or around the house).

A kitchen table and chairs seemed the first order of business and they were the one thing I was happy to move from Seattle to Vashon as the white painted oak table and orange plastic chairs didn’t really suit the Seattle house. Only two years before, in a fit of questionable decorating projects, I spray-painted the beautiful oak table white. It was now stained with various colors of Sharpie, marred with scratches and unidentified blobs of crusty stuff that even a knife couldn’t scrape off. A white table would most certainly be out of place in the pine-paneled, terra cotta tiled kitchen of the Vashon house, which is how I found myself sitting on a tarp of newspapers on the dining room floor one Saturday morning, yellow rubber gloves up to my elbows, covered in orange smelling goo, stripping the round oak table and cursing myself. I scraped paint out of the claws of the lion-footed pedestal and apologized to the body-less lion whose feet I had cruelly defaced. As the oakiness of the table re-emerged, I remembered the day Arron bought the table at an auction. It happened to be the same June day that Olivia and I came home from a south Boston hospital twenty-four hours after her birth. Earlier in the day, before picking us up at the hospital, Arron found the table (precisely matching the description of a table I mentioned in passing I had always wanted) at an auction house and twenty minutes after we arrived home, insisted that we go and bid on it. He rushed me out of the house, certain the table would be gone before we got there and I frantically tried to pack the diaper bag and figure out how to put the baby car seat back into the car. I could already feel the tell-tale prickling that told me I was perilously close to yet another fumbled attempt at breast feeding the baby. By the time we walked into the auction house, the table was on the block and the auctioneer’s gavel hitting the lectern as he yelled “Sold for five hundred dollars!” Arron threw up his hand and called “Five twenty five!” Everyone turned to look at us. I can only imagine how crazed we must have looked. The auctioneer looked dumbfounded, but recovered quickly. “Can I hear five fifty?” He was met with silence. I looked at Arron as he broke into a wide grin when the auctioneer clapped his gavel down declaring, “Sold for five twenty-five!” Olivia squawked and I hurried to the car, where I sat awkwardly in the front seat holding Olivia like a football under my arm and trying to hide us under my t-shirt while Arron and the auctioneer slid the table into the back of the SUV.

I shook my head remembering how chaotic buying the table had been. “We’ve been through a lot, haven’t we Mr. Lion?” I said aloud. When I finished scraping, I wiped away all the goo and then polished the table with oil until it shone in the sunlight.

During their first visit to Seattle to visit us, My father and step-mother Sheilagh helped me disassemble the now denuded table, put it into my car and reassemble it again in the Vashon kitchen where my lion finally seemed to breathe a sigh of relief. The orange plastic chairs, (another of my questionable decor choices) were placed around it and suddenly the hub of the house came alive.

 

Happy Mother’s Day to all you awesome mothers and fathers being mothers out there!

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The House and I

It’s official. I am writing another memoir. This one will revolve around the home I own on Vashon, once the home of famous 40s author Betty MacDonald, who wrote “The Egg and I” and the “Mrs. Piggle Wiggle” series of books. I plan to call the book “The House and I.”

Vashon house 2014. This is the addition that Betty built onto the house. The original part of the house is hidden behind it.

Vashon house 1938. The structure in front was the original kitchen but was moved to make room for the addition and is now the guest house.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

I hope it will be a little bit memoir, and a little bit biography of Betty, since there seems to be very little published about her, which is a shame. She was such a great writer of humor, her words and phrases are brilliant and although she insisted she didn’t write what we would now call memoir, her stories are very myopic and revealing, more for what she doesn’t say than for what she does. None of her books mention her divorce from her first husband, but after her experience at the chicken farm near Port Townsend described in the “The Egg and I,” she took her toddler daughters, Anne and Joan and left her first husband Robert Heskett after four years of marriage to move back home with her mother in Seattle. While in Seattle, she tried to get a job, or rather a series of jobs which she later chronicled in “Anybody Can Do Anything,” her book about trying to find work in Seattle during the Depression. She was then forced to leave her children (now around 9 and 1o years old) with her mother for almost a year while she was treated at Firland Sanitorium (in her book “The Plague and I” she called it The Pines) for tuberculosis. Later, she met Don MacDonald and in 1942 they married. Together with Anne and Joan (now 14 and 15) Don and Betty moved to Vashon, where she eventually left her job with the government to write her first book, “The Egg and I.”

The living room as it looks today. The flowered couch in the picture to the right is in approx the same location as the sand colored couch in this picture.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

I have been doing some research on Betty by going to the Vashon/Maury Island Heritage Museum where there are two big binders of letters, photos, book covers and such. I sat in the back room of the museum surrounded by shelves of books, the binders open with me snapping photos of the pages with my iPhone. Gee, remember when we used to photocopy stuff? There were so many letters, written by Betty or by people writing to her. I particularly liked this one that she wrote to Bert Lippincott (the original owner of J.B. Lippincott Publishing Company, the publisher of her books, but who had obviously retired from the company) because it mentions how she is beginning to write “Onions in the Stew,” her book about Vashon and the house.

 

So many fun aspects of the house, Betty and Vashon to explore. Thus begins the journey!

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Lessons About Loss From a Mudslide

Jim does Bobcat

I hate to file my nails and so I turned on the TV to distract myself from the task, watched a surfing competition and got sucked in. I tried to figure out what enabled one surfer to win over another, since it wasn’t entirely obvious to me. The surfers were so graceful, skidding along the top edges of waves, in “full rail carves” I learned they were called, before twisting their boards in complete 180 turns, seemingly oblivious to the powerful force of nature just under their slivers of fiberglass and resin.

I was so focused on the surfers doing their “rail carves” (the commentator seemed to enjoy just saying it in his best “hang 10″ California-boy voice), that I barely noticed the ticker tape line of text along the bottom of the screen. At first I just saw “mudslide” and had to wait for the line to repeat before I learned there had been a massive mudslide in Oso. I didn’t know where that was exactly, but I knew it was in the vicinity of Seattle. “18 people missing.” The surfing competition ended with a handsome Brazilian boy being sprayed with Champagne and cute blonde Australian girl winning on her home turf.

Jim and I headed to Vashon where only a week before, we’d had our own mudslide. A Bobcat was rented and Jim looked cute with his tongue sticking out with the effort of the Bobcat as it made its way through a three-foot high pile of muck that had dumped itself into the middle of the driveway. We bonded with the neighbors, repairing a strained relationship, over shovelfuls of muck. The sun  shone and the whole experience turned into an adventure.

Arriving a week later, subsequent rains washed the remnants of muck from the road, but the rootball of the huge tree that slid down the hill seemed more ominous this time, so close to the wall that kept it from careening down the hill, where it could easily take out my kitchen or the house next door. We carefully compared its position using photographs that I took the week before. “Nope, it hasn’t moved at all,” Jim declared and I breathed a sigh of relief. A disaster averted. How lucky.

Upon our return to Seattle on Sunday night, the news from Oso was far more grave. 14 people confirmed dead, 172 missing. That night in bed, I tossed around thinking about how they only found one or two people alive, how the sounds of possible survivors stopped, how their family members must feel as they waited, filed missing person reports, hoped for air pockets and miracles. I realized how closely I empathized, because I suddenly understood how similar the circumstances of this slide were to the days after 9/11 – The difficulty of rescue, the lack of survivors, traumatized first responders, dogs walking the piles of mud trying to avoid stepping on sharp debris, American flags poked haphazardly into masses of cement-colored ruins.

I suspect Jim will be signing up for a deployment to Oso with his Fire Department (he now has Bobcat experience) and I will be left to churn through these unnamable emotions, old and rusty feeling and to pour obsessively over the sad details. The possibility of Jim helping, has me wondering if I should help too. My experience from those early post-apocalyptic days may be of use to families blundering through their own harrowing days. What would I tell them? Your lives have changed forever; the first two years are the toughest; magical things will happen that you can’t possibly imagine; you won’t believe how much strength you have; a day will come when it won’t hurt anymore; another day will come when some catastrophe will make you remember all over again; the most cathartic thing you can do to heal is help others, in whatever form that might come.

We are constantly reminded of the powerful forces over which we have no control. I suppose the trick is riding the waves for as long as possible, as gracefully as possible before we tumble into the surf.

Photo from Komonews.com

 

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How Conversations with a Psychic Shaped My Novel

Remember the Moon began from a seed of an idea I had about a dead man’s conversation with his alive wife through a psychic. I thought it would be funny to have the psychic talking in cryptic symbols – roses, rings, colors that are meant to contain profound messages to us living, while the dead husband is up there pulling out his (proverbial) hair because all he wants is for the psychic to speak clearly so he can tell his wife something important, like to buy Apple stock. Instead the wife gets “did your husband like apples?” and the wife exclaims “Yes, they were his favorite fruit!” and is deliriously happy.

Not that I wanted to make fun of psychics, just that in all my experience of trying to speak to Arron through one, I always thought he would be frustrated at the lack of complexity and detail that was being conveyed. He was a man who thrived on words and loved twisting them into knots, saying them backwards, reading mirrored words as easily and as quickly as most people read the regular way.

In writing Remember The Moon, I more or less commandeered Lisa Fox, the-psychic-who-found-me-in-a-coffee-shop, for many hours, asking Arron questions to which I got some interesting answers, many of which have been reprised in the book. My notes from Lisa’s sessions are copious. I typed as she spoke. Discussions included the levels of “awareness” in the afterlife, a soul’s purpose, what Arron’s job was in the afterlife, the idea that everything in life has a consequence in the afterlife, what happens to “bad” souls, among a host of other things. It was an amazing experience for both Lisa and I.

The kids were part of one or two of the sessions one of which made its way into the chapter in the book, “Haircut,” much of which is really more memoir than fiction.

Many of the thoughts and ideas about the afterlife that I riff on in the book were mashed from a variety of other sources as well: psychics Sylvia Brown and James Van Praag, Journey of Souls, Many Lives, Many Masters, Entangled Minds, among many others.

But a curious thing happened as I wrote the book: my fascination with psychics wore off. I’m not sure why exactly. Perhaps in writing that scene with the husband and wife trying to communicate through the psychic I saw comedy where I had not seen it before. Or maybe I saw my own desperation during that time, a time when I was so longing for a magical connection with Arron, I see now it was like grasping a blade of grass in an effort to keep from falling.

And yet, in it’s own magical way, that blade of grass did keep me from falling. It gave me hope that connection and communication with the dead might be possible, that magic was possible, that really, anything was possible.

And magic did happen and continues to happen. Remember The Moon is proof of that.

 

 

 

 

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Navigating the Book Promotion Jungle

I never really appreciated the book review, until I “impulsively published” my novel, Remember the Moon last week. I had no idea how difficult the elusive book review was to acquire. They are like the Holy Grail of the book world. I followed all the proper steps, that as a Writer.ly co-founder I have now heard and had drilled into my small brain over and over:

I have a pretty good platform:

√ Author website with both my books prominently on display and for sale
√ Twitter account (3600+ followers)
√ Author Facebook page
√ Pinterest, Google+ pages
√ Mailing list (250+)
√ Author pages on Goodreads, LibraryThing, Shelfari, and Amazon
√ A member of the Amazon Affiliate program
√ Incorporated an “end of book request” where I listed all my links and contact info about my other book. Here’s a list of things to include at the back of your book.


I asked for beta readers. 34 people signed up and got the beta version of the book. 17 actually provided me with feedback that was incredibly valuable and I put their names into the acknowledgements of the final version.
I paid for two professional developmental edits, one copyedit, two blurb writers and a cover design.
I formatted and reformatted the book myself (I used to do this sort of thing in a past life) until it was perfect.
OK. I got a little impulsive and just popped it up there using Amazon KDP .
I sent free versions to all my Beta readers and all the others on my mailing list, asking everyone to post amazon reviews.

I figured I was in good shape. Not that Oprah would be calling me the next day or anything, but I felt fairly confident that since the beta readers had already read the book, there would be little to hold them back from posting a review on Amazon the moment they got the email from me announcing my new arrival.

Guess what? Nothing happened. Oh sure, I got lots of congrats from friends and family on Facebook, but then, the dreaded… chirp! Nothing.

I asked for reviews on Facebook and I got one posted on Amazon. I was so grateful, I gushed my thanks on Facebook. “Sure!” she said. “I can’t wait to read it!”

A week and a stomach flu later, I posted another “gentle” (I hope) plea on Facebook for a review. I got one beta reader who obliged and I was oh, so happy.

Not all is lost though. I have sold 27 copies. 27! I’m not sure what I was expecting, but hey 27 actual people plunking down money is pretty sweet.

And now, here is what I have done since:

Signed up for KDP Select so I could set up to 5 days of my book for free. I set a free date (I will leave that as a surprise and will announce it here on the day, so stay tuned).
Connected my LibraryThing account with my author status and set up a free ebook giveaway (view my giveaway  here by scrolling down the page). Learn how here .
Posted to a group on Goodreads asking for a review. Two people accepted and I sent them free versions. (No reviews so far).
Signed up for a blog tour (relatively inexpensive at $80.00). Will begin in April.
Contacted all of the original bloggers on my tour for Alchemy and sent them free versions of the new book (one response).
Tweeted a few of my statistics so far, both lamenting and happy. Amazing how that got retweeted. There is sympathy out there!
Signed up for K-Boards author page
Signed up to be a KB Featured book.
Bought a Fiverr Twitter campaign for $5.
Followed tips from this awesome site .
Joined (free version) of Author Marketing Club (Be careful, they will push hard for you to buy a Premium membership) and used their free eBook Submission Tool to submit my KDP Free day to a dozen different sites who will hopefully post it on the special day.
Signed up for StoryCartel.com  and set up a promotion to give away three $10 Amazon gift cards to people who review the book. I already have 23 people’s emails which I was able to download into Excel.
Because AWP is next week, I had printed 100 Enthrill eBook Cards that I can sell or give away. They have a scratch code on the back that gives people a code for them to download the book in whatever format they like.

And then a whole new range of things open up for me once I reach 10 reviews on Amazon, all of which have much greater reach than any of the above.

Sign up for BookBlast
BooklistOnline
Getting listed on BookBub
And on eReaderNewsToday.com

Good lord, and that is just the start!

I may throw my hat into the ring and sign up for the CreateSpace 2014 Amazon Breakthrough Novel Award Contest. Ya, know they only get like 10,000 entries or so. Should be as easy as promoting a book!

For those interested, here are my actual costs on the book (so far)

1st Dev edit
$500.00


2nd Dev edit
$750.00


Cover design
$300.00


Copyedit
$650.00


Blurbs (x2)
$50.00


b2b marketing
$20.00


K-boards marketing
$15.00


Promotion cards
$200.00


Fivrr twitter promo
$5.00


Blog Tour
$80.00










Total

$2,570.00

And profit so far… drum roll… $75.41!

Yup, only $2,494.59 to go till I break even.

Good luck in the jungle!

 

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Finding Your Valentine’s Day Whimsy

The Goodwill find

I was going for a tenderloin thinking of the dinner I made at Christmas – a beef tenderloin stuffed with a lobster tail complete with a delicious Bernaise sauce, but QFC tenderloin seemed to leave a lot to be desired, plus I had done that already. I drifted over to the fish display and contemplated the crabs, bound in rubber bands and stacked like dominoes. Seeing their undersides wasn’t appetizing.

I was grocery store drifting, in that vague limbo that happens when you are trying to shop and decide what to make for dinner at the same time. You wander the aisles hoping for inspiration to strike. Usually it doesn’t and you wind up coming home with a weird combination of things, none of which amount to a full menu.

As I stood next to the fancy cheeses, I spotted a box from another era. Fondue cheese. I smiled remembering all the times I’ve had fondue, which amounts to maybe four. Well, if you don’t count all the Raclette I ate while on a ski-trip in Austria with my grandparents, but I digress.

My sister is a big fan of fondue. I think I may have even given her a fondue pot when she got married, or for Christmas, or somewhere in there. She does fondue in lavish style with heaps of bread and potatoes and whatever else you dip into fondue. It is really more of a treasure hunt as you fish dropped bits of bread or potato out of the cheese. But always good times.

To be honest, as I stood there in the grocery store smiling at the cheese, I couldn’t remember what else you dip into fondue. Gerkins? Yes. Another item to add to the grocery list in my head.

Of course the fact that I didn’t actually own a fondue pot didn’t seem like a problem. Now I was plotting a route from the grocery store to Goodwill, where I pictured a row of discarded, barely-used, cherry red fondue pots.

I bought the cheese. And potatoes. And gerkins. It is Valentine’s Day, after all. Anything is possible on Valentine’s Day. Which is how I wound up at Goodwill at 1:30pm on a Friday afternoon when I’m sure I could have been writing my next book, or doing something far more useful than tracking down an old fondue pot. In the land of lost pots and lids, I picked up two contraptions that looked like they might pass for fondue pots. Shiny stainless steel things, a far cry from the circa 1977-era, red potbelly with a wooden handle I had pictured in my mind. But no bother. When you do fondue on a whim, you can’t be too choosy. Next was a hunt for fondue forks. Again, I pictured the wooden handled kind, with coloured ends so each person could differentiate their fork from everyone else’s. But none were to be found. Instead, I wandered the rows of castaway cutlery and found an attachment to my electric mixer that would replace one that had broken.

But when I turned for a final look at the dilapidated pots and pans, I spotted it – the fondue pot of my dreams, in it’s original 70s packaging with it’s tell-tale red potbellied-ness calling me. I broke the two pieces of masking tape holding the lid down on the box, and snuck a peak. Each piece was still in it’s original cellophane. This fondue pot had never been used! It was not red, but an olive green, but I didn’t care. It was mine.

Cupid was having his way with me today.

After I arrived home, Jim and I went in search of the holy grail – Sterno, a name-brand blast from the past. Where does one buy Sterno anymore? Or fondue forks for that matter?

A quick trip to the turn-back-time hardware store had me following its elderly proprietor into the deepest darkest edge of the store and there backed into a corner were two containers of Sterno. “Which size do you want?” he asked. I took the 3-pack of little tins that would clearly fit under the fondue pot.

But alas, when I asked about the fondue forks he said, “haven’t had those since the 70s.”

This particular neighborhood in Seattle is handy in that it has both a turn-back-time hardware store AND a trendy kitchen store, the neighborhood version of Williams Sonoma. Read: not cheap. “Should we take a look?” I asked Jim, who was appeasing all my whims today, on account of Valentine’s Day. “It’s like your birthday, whatever you like.”

After a quick dig behind another display, the kitchen store lady presented us with fondue forks and we were both surprised that they didn’t seem to have a Madison Park surcharge added to their price.

I’m not sure what all this says about Valentine’s Day, other than a whim has led us on an adventure. Which if you apply it to life or love, is really what love and life are all about. OK, I’m stretching the metaphor a bit, but hey, it’s Valentine’s Day. I can do whatever I like!

May you find your whimsy on this Valentine’s Day and may it lead you on a happy adventure.

The post Finding Your Valentine’s Day Whimsy appeared first on Abigail Carter.

Oops, I published my book today on Amazon!

On Tuesday, I was emailing agent queries, still uncertain if I should hold tight and try publishing my book traditionally. My current agent turned down the book because she doesn’t believe in psychics. Or that was the excuse anyway. Maybe it sucks. Hopefully it doesn’t. Judging from some of the comments I’ve already had, it doesn’t totally suck and people seemed to like it! They really liked it!

Ok, back to Tuesday. Emailing agents and I thought why am I doing this? I co-founded a start-up that bases it’s business on self publishing (Writer.ly), so perhaps I should walk the walk.

Yesterday, I worked at compiling my book using Scrivener  (awesome program for writers). That said, compiling to an eBook on Scrivener takes a certain talent and a deep knowledge and understanding of the Compile menu. I recompiled over and over and over until I got it just right. I even created drop caps (those large first letters that begin each chapter in many books) using a free trial of Sketch where I created the letters in 64 point type and exported them as little PDF files and imported them into Scrivener.  I spent WAY too many years in the desktop publishing world.

Finally, last night, I downloaded it to my Kindle to see how it looked, and Voila! I had it just the way I wanted it. And so I went to Amazon’s KDP  and through a few very easy steps, it was done. It takes up to 48 hours to process, but by 9:00am this morning, I was live!

Holy cow! I am not at all ready. I threw a post on Facebook and then got to work on a couple of MailChimp emails to make the initial announcement. And now here I am here, writing a post that I’ve published a book!

I’ve added all the info about the book in the area to the right, so check it out.

And if you read it and can remember, I would love you forever if you could write an Amazon review for me. Those are like gold and I didn’t do a very good job of asking for them for Alchemy, so I thought I try doing a better job this time.

Thanks to all who’ve supported me through this process. It’s been a crazy ride!

The post Oops, I published my book today on Amazon! appeared first on Abigail Carter.