Linda Maye Adams's Blog, page 59
November 14, 2017
Short Story out in a book!
My flash fiction story “The Library Patron” is out in a new anthology! This was a fun story to write. I saw a prompt that said “Neighborhood Zombie,” and the story simply happened.
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Fabula Argentea: 5th Anniversary Anthology
To celebrate the first five years of publication, we have selected stories that we feel exemplify the spirit of the magazine and the variety that it offers our readers. These thirty-four amazing stories, from both first-time and established authors, will take you on unforgettable, and sometimes unexpected, journeys to places real and imagined. They will take you to the past, the present, and the future. Some will make you laugh; some will bring tears. And some may call up memories from your own past. We hope that you will find these stories as enjoyable and memorable as we have.
Available on Amazon
Filed under: Books Tagged: Dark Fantasy, Zombies
November 13, 2017
Writing in Public, Story 6, Scene 20
20
Nikki couldn’t see the hunger. But she felt it. Cold and slimy. Thick with darkness.
It was interested in her.
She could sense its curiousity. Like she was a piece of food, and the hunger was poking around it, seeing if the food was tasty.
Her body was rigid. Sweat prickled down the hollow of her back. Her breathing stuck in her throat.
The music swirled around her, and she thought she heard a voice chiming in with the notes: I want to help.
“Here.”
And then someone was behind her, a warm presense. Hands touched her shoulders. Warm breath puffed on the back of her neck.
Randy.
She allowed the music to pull her in, and Randy came with her. The music was like an old tapestry with holes in it. The hunger snuffled along the holes, trying to find the biggest gaps.
To get through.
“Take the lead,” Randy murmured.
To do what? Fear jabbed at Nikki’s chest. She didn’t know what she was doing!
The hunger pushed at the music’s barrier again. Its strength horrified her. The music wasn’t strong enough to keep it out.
Fear rose up from her belly, coppery and bitter. She didn’t think. She just reacted.
Bouncing along in the flow of the music, she found the biggest of the holes. In her mind, it was gaping, and black. Dead.
It was from the house on the other end. It had been gutted in a remodel. Nothing left.
How could she fix this?
She felt the hunger grin. It could get through here.
It pressed against the gap. Too big. But it could work at the hole. Make it bigger.
“Spackle it,” Randy murmured. “Like mortar.”
Nikki’s mouth had gone dry. The need to hurry pressed at her.
She pictured the wall of the house with the lines of bricks, the overlapping rows providing support. Spreading the mortar in the cracks.
Randy squeezed her shoulders. She was trembling with exhaustion.
Breathe, breathe, breathe!
The world titled sideways. Nikki fell away from the music. The sidewalk bounced up to her face.
Pain.
Her chest locked up tight. For a terrifying moment, she couldn’t breathe.
Randy pulled her up into his arms, wrapping them around her.
Better. She could breathe.
The hunger had receded from the air. But its satisfaction tinged the air.
Bit by bit, she took in her surroundings again. Brian was still frozen in his truck, reaching for the passenger lock. A neighbor across the street was stuck in mid-step.
Randy? He was moving, alive, resting his chin on her shoulder. But his eyes were alarmed.
She’d been avoiding that thing in the middle of the street. Now she looked.
Her breath caught in her throat, souring. The edges of the portal had solidified.
She’d made it worse.
Filed under: Thoughts
November 12, 2017
Discoverability Adventures: Week 2
This week, I got my feet wet with something I have very mixed feelings about: Content marketing.
That’s like writing for the Huffington Post for exposure. Of course, they don’t pay the writers.
Even before the internet, fiction writers have always been told to get exposure by writing for free. At one point, I ran across numerous magazines that made it sound like they were doing a favor by publishing the writers at all, even though they wouldn’t have had any business without the same writers.
Plus the big name publishers have been trying to cut paying the writer out of the process as much as possible. The advances are getting smaller and smaller. Some publishers do a “royalty-splt” which translates out as not-much in the payment department.
One of the BookBaby panelists said to everyone, “You need to get over getting paid.”
Yeah. Right.
But I also need to get more visibility so people will discover my books.
So I’m wading in content marketing.
I’m looking at doing them from the woman veteran perspective. In all the anthology calls I’ve submitted to, I’ve often been the only woman soldier. There might be other women, but usually a daughter or a spouse of a male soldier.
I tried one site, really on a lark. It’s site that is an active publisher of military books. They had a blog up and were looking for content for it.
But.
That part of the site hadn’t been updated in almost a year. The rest of the site was current, so it made me wonder if the veterans simply weren’t submitting stories. Writing is challenging to learn to do well for publication. Writing about military experiences is another story entirely, especially if they’re painful.
So we shall see what they say.
A second one was just an opportunity that landed in my lap, from a class I took about 6 years back. They have a new session coming in January and were looking for blog posts to promote.
For a third, I’m following the blog and monitoring what they publish to see if I can do something for them. It’s a site that publishes all things about the military.
I’m also gathering sites that might be possibilities and just thinking about what I can do. Not all of them are good fits. I want to make sure my time is being well used.
If any of these get in, I’ll post the links here.
Meanwhile, here’s an interesting site (aside from the annoying pop up) that I ran across that talks about content marketing and has some interesting ideas. Hmm. Slide share. Could I do something there?
I also emailed my local library. They had a WWI exhibit of women veterans that was pretty awesome, so I told them I was a Desert Storm vet and asked if they wanted a Q&A session on “What was it like?” Or a writing session on how to write military characters if you’ve never been in them military.
Filed under: Blogging, Social Media Tagged: Content Marketing', Discoverability, World War I
November 11, 2017
The Voice of Women Veterans
The Washington Post published the Five Myths about Female Veterans today, and unfortunately, all of the are true.
When I came home from Desert Storm, I was hungry for something that explained how I was feeling. China Beach had just been cancelled and gone into reruns. I devoured it.
I also read and reread A Piece of My Heart, which is a book of stories of women veterans from the Vietnam War. It was just about the time when the Vietnam vets started telling their stories, so there were a lot of books coming out. I read all of them, because, other than Pieces of My Heart, there wasn’t anything representing the voice of the women.
I even went to the Veterans of Foreign Wars down in Tacoma, Washington. I walked in and there was a bar with a bunch of old men sitting at it. I might as well have been asking directions.
That’s still a mixed bag for the women. Some have great success at their local organizations. Others come in and are told to apply for the Women’s Auxiliary.
I’m also on a Facebook page for Desert Storm Combat Women. Many of them report going to the Veteran’s Administration, and their civilian male spouse is addressed as if he is the veteran. Or they have to prove they are a veteran while the male veteran standing next to them does not.
We have a local grocery store in Washington, DC that gives veteran parking. For the overseas people, it’s not a disabled slot or has any legal requirements; it’s merely something that a store does as courtesy, like the slots for pregnant women. Two women have come out to find nasty grams on their windshields. I park there myself, so I’m expecting one day for someone to do the same to me.
There’ll be an article in the Washington Post on something like PTSD, disabilities, or problems with the VA, and the reporter gravitates to all the men, unless it’s about a woman’s issue.
As a writer, I’ve submitted to a lot of veteran anthology calls. I was often the only woman veteran. Usually they got a wife or daughter talking about a family member, but even there wasn’t many women’s voices represented.
Obviously, the women need to speak up more, but at the same time, it gets old hearing the same stories again and again.
Just remember that there were 40,000 women in Desert Storm.
Desert Storm war veteran Linda Maye Adams shows the diversity of what war is like for the women who deploy in this collection of short stories and poetry. The stories run from “First Night,” and “Between Black and White,” because war seldom ends when the war does. The poems include
“A Woman Goes to War,” “Once Upon a Time,” “Only Questions,” “Little One,” “The Lonely Sounds of War,” “No Safe Places,” “Just Like Me,” and “That Wish.”
On August 2, 1990, Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait. Within twenty-four hours, he controlled the entire country. Five days later, the United States was deploying soldiers and had named the military operation Desert Shield.
This would be the largest deployment of women at the time. Over 40,000 women went to war. It was so new that people questioned whether women should be there, and what would happen to the families they left behind.
Linda Maye Adams was one of those soldiers. Soldier, Storyteller is a rare inside look at war from a woman’s perspective.
Her memoir answers the question: “What was it like?”
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Even as we celebrate the return of our military from wars in the Middle East, we are becoming increasingly aware of the struggles that await veterans on the home front. Red, White, and True offers readers a collection of voices that reflect the experiences of those touched by war-from the children of veterans who encounter them in their fathers’ recollections of past wars to the young men and women who fought in the deserts of Iraq and Afghanistan.
The diversity of perspectives collected in this volume validates the experiences of our veterans and their families, describing their shared struggles and triumphs while honoring the fact that each person’s military experience is different.
Leila Levinson’s powerful essay recounts her father’s experience freeing a POW camp during World War II. Pulitzer Prize-winning author Tracy Kidder provides a chilling account of being a new second lieutenant in Vietnam. Army combat veteran Brooke King recounts the anguish of raising her young children by day while trying to distinguish between her horrific memories of IED explosions in Baghdad and terrifying dreams by night.
These individual stories of pain and struggle, along with twenty-nine others, illustrate the inescapable damage that war rends in the fabric of society and celebrate our dauntless attempts to repair these holes with compassion and courage.
Filed under: Military Tagged: Desert Storm, Veterans of Foreign Wars, Washington State, Women Veterans
November 10, 2017
Adventures Around The Web November 4-10, 2017
It was unnaturally warm in Philadelphia last week. For Veteran’s Day, we’re getting cold and blustery. Down into the 20s. The fall colors are finally coming in, but largely pretty washed out. Not the vibrant ones that are so pretty.
10 Ways Posture Affects Productivity (and How to Improve Both)
Writing can be pretty sedentary, so it’s important to not park in the chair for hours on end and never get up and move around.
From pom-poms to combat boots: Miller joined Army in high school
Ah ha! A story about a woman Desert Storm veteran. But scroll all the way to the bottom for a slideshow about more women veterans.
Got this one from the BookBay conference. You can plug in another writer’s site and see what kind of traffic they’re getting.
Also from the conference, if you want to try dictating stories. Being handy too if you wanted to give your hands a break.
Daylight Saving: The Movie Trailer
This is hilarious! Last year, I showed up at the farmer’s market an hour too early. This year, I worried about missing my train (which showed up late). From Piper Bayard.
Filed under: Entertainment, History, Military, technology, Videos, Writing Tagged: Analytics, BookBay, Daylight Saving, Desert Storm, Ergnomics, Speech recognition, Websites
November 8, 2017
Writing in Pubic Story #6, Scene 18
18
Randy took off at a run, headed back to the Chandler house.
Fear pounded in his throat and face and chest. It pushed at him from behind and came at him from all around.
The day had grown distressingly dark. He could still see the sun through the trees, but it seemed dimmer.
He ran past neighbors coming out of their house, shadows in their eyes.
Was it his imagination, or did they all seem to moving unnaturally slowly?
Up ahead, the sight of a big portal sitting in the street made him gasp.
It looked wrong. Inside out. And why were all the houses feeding into it?
None of the other six worked any more. Too many rennovations.
The music notes wrapped around him, asking, pleading.
What did they want? The music was part of the portal.
He looked around, casting about for an idea. Any idea.
Cold chilled him. His neighbors had come out of their houses to see the portal. They were motionless.
One man had his foot in the air, about to take a step. Another was in the middle of a run.
It was eeriely quiet, except for the music. No lawn mowers. No cars driving. No children’s voices.
It was like the world had stopped.
Why was he able to move?
Then he caught a flash of movement up ahead. Nikki.
Relief flooded through him.
Lights sparked around her. Yellow, with bits of black and red.
She needed help.
Filed under: Thoughts
November 7, 2017
Writing in Public, Story 6, Scene 17
17
It was like time had gone into slow motion. Brian reached across the front seat. His fingers fumbled at the lock.
He might have said something.
Shimmering light drew Nikki’s gaze. Like a rainbow that had been scrunched.
Light shot from her house, and the other six houses, seven beams that intersected in the middle of the street.
Where they intersected, an irregular shape formed. It glowed yellow, but red and black floated in it. She could see the street through it.
And something else.
Foulness rose in her throat.
Another…something was coming visible inside the shape.
She stared. Tried to make sense of it. Failed.
It was silver. Geometric shapes. Like a child had stacked blocks in a messy pile.
Music thundered in her ears.
It wandered, as if the player, was trying to figure out what he was playing. But there was desperation to it as well.
This wasn’t supposed to be.
Nikki didn’t know how she knew that, but she knew it as surely as she knew the fingers on her hand.
The music tugged her along.
Chaos was around her. Notes crashing into each other. Others broken. Damaged.
She felt the neglect of the houses…it was a sharp pinprick of pain in her throat. A parade of owners. Some respectful, some not caring, some angry.
The music stuttered.
Something reached for her.
Hunger.
Filed under: Thoughts
November 6, 2017
The Search for Discoverability
I attended the Bookbaby conference last weekend. It was a marketing conference, from a company that does a lot of marketing. I expected a lot of selling of the services and books, like a lot of those one day training workshops.
What I got was a big goal that I’ve been looking around for: Discoverability.
I want to write full time, but people have to find my books. So far…well, I’d like to do better. So I thought it would be fun and interesting to write about what I’m going to do here.
Social Media for Writers
When I first started playing around with social media, it was about collecting numbers. Somehow, if you got XXXX followers, you would have publishing success. And everyone had their personal preferences:
Get on everything and start posting on all of them
Twitter is it! Start Tweeting
Facebook is the way to go!
Most of them ended up with the same problem. No writing at all.
I was in a blog writing class–now seems like ages ago, but probably 2010. We all got our tag lines (another area I will be playing with a later date) and blogged three times a week.
Soon, the other writers were dropping off their blogs because they were spending all their time laboriously writing and revising and revising their blog posts. No work on the writing project.
I also had a hard time with the personal side of social media. It was partially because of the military, because there’s a lot of emphasis on not giving out personal information. We saw some of the early signs of that during Desert Storm, where we were told not to mention troop numbers to anyone.
Meanwhile, the Tacoma Morning News Tribune was counting how many soldiers in an individual unit was leaving and was publishing it!
The other part was that I’m an INTP on the Myers-Brigg scale, and I think that plays into it. Twitter, the social media highly recommended in the blog class, was like having a lot of details thrown at me. I started out overwhelmed with Twitter and struggled a lot with it.
Anyway …
One of the panels suggested something different.
Sign up for ALL the social media.
But pick which ones to use that will work for your readers.
The reasons to sign up for all of them?
If you start writing in a new genre/category, you already have the social media account. For example, Pinterest is the place to go for YA.
Google ranking. It just gets your name out there in more places. The important part here is the the profiles all have to be as complete as possible. Writers tend to leave off a lot of information, like the bio.
And the slides showed a list of all the social media accounts. Yikes! It was a lot.
But it also sense. Sometimes you have to do work up front so you don’t have as much later on (a lesson I’m getting at work now and suffering the pain for not doing that).
Linda’s Goal:
Check on and update all my existing accounts first:
Asian Efficiency Dojo
Google+
YouTube
Website
Linked In
Rabbit Bundle
Amazon
Smashwords
Draft to Digital
It’s shocking writing these down, because it’s just the ones I’m on. I haven’t even touched the ones I’m not on. It’s amazing how many of these are out there.
So I had to first update my bio, since I found that just about every social media I’m on had a different bio and different photo. Some had my old website address and others were missing my middle name…arrgh! This definitely needed some attention.
For the writers here, if you want to try the same thing, let me know what you find.
Meanwhile, I’ll be posting up my next installment of Broken Notes soon.
Filed under: Social Media Tagged: Amazon, Draft to Digital, Facebook, Google, LinkedIn, Pinterest, Smashwords, Twitter, youtube
November 3, 2017
Adventures Around the Web Oct 28-Nov 3, 2017
I seem to have a writing with depth theme going on here. Depth is one of those very advanced writing skills that’s incredibly hard to understand. And the scary part is that it sounds simple to do, and it isn’t. It took me three years to understand how to do it.
Clearing the Lens (Writing with Depth)
The title of the article is pretty poor, but it’s an article on writing with depth with some great examples. It focuses mainly on the five senses, which I’ve seen many people write about–and it’s still an incredibly hard skill to master.
Describing Characters of Color While Writing
I think today’s political culture has made it hard for writers. We’re both encouraged to included diverse characters (always a good idea because it makes for better stories), but at the same time, describing diverse characters can turn into a minefield. The examples here are surprisingly simple.
8 Things Writers Forget When Writing Fight Scenes
When I was first on the writing message boards, I saw a lot of writers do an action scene in a very short paragraph. They thought it had to move fast, so they kept it short and disappointing. Fight scenes aren’t about being fast, fast, fast, but about the excitement, and the danger. You don’t get that without #3 on this list.
Filed under: Writing Tagged: description, Fight Scenes, Five Senses
October 31, 2017
Halloween Adventures
I’ve been working on a short story for an anthology call that’s closing tomorrow, but I had time for a quick walk around the neighborhood to have a look at the Halloween decorations. These are some of the pretty cool ones. Enjoy!
This is a ghost over a garden entrance. It’ll be pretty spooky at night with all the shadows from the garden.
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I found Stonehenge! It’s down the street!
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Heeelllppp meee!
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Clearly waiting for public transportation.
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Only in Washington DC… Note the bottles of booze (which I did not see when I took the picture).
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Filed under: Culture, Photos, Thoughts Tagged: Fright night, Ghosts, Halloween, Scary, Skeletons, Stonehenge
