Marsha Altman's Blog, page 2
June 20, 2014
Upcoming Titles
The copy-editing is done for Book 9, and I'm busy implementing the various fixes. On average, my manuscripts go through at least three rounds of editing, one with a paid professional copy-editor, to get it up to the shape you see it in. Yes, there are still typos. I just try to keep them to a minimal.
From here it goes to layout, where I get the eBook file ready and lay out the .pdf version for the print book. Both jobs are a little tedious, but I'm used to them. I also have to write the description on the back cover (that doesn't spontaneously appear on the back of books), any other inside material, and decide on a cover image with my graphic designer, which always takes way longer than we both think it should.
Estimated publication date for Book, tentatively titled The Tribulations of George Wickham the Younger, is mid-July, which means the earliest you could actually get a paper copy in the mail is late July/East August. Book 10's roll out will hopefully be December.
In the meantime you can buy and read my thriller novella, the Redundant Man, here.
Updates on the Facebook Group Page!
May 6, 2014
Radio Silence
I apologized for my delayed post, but things have been pretty crazy for me. Book 9, tentatively titled, "The Trials of George Wickham the Younger," is on schedule for a July release. It is currently in copyediting. As usual, you can find active discussions and me being generally more responsive on the Facebook Group Page, where we currently have a contest open to submit a cover picture for book 9 and get your name in the book. So check it out!
March 17, 2014
February Contest Winners
I'm running a little behind, but the paperback contest winner is: SQ!
The eCopy winner is: Everyone else!
Video answers to your questions will be up as soon as possible.
The eCopy winner is: Everyone else!
Video answers to your questions will be up as soon as possible.
February 20, 2014
I Write (Other Things)
First, go enter this contest. Seriously. Why haven't you done it yet, just for the amusement of having me try to act on camera? Just for that?
I do other writing. Sci-fi/fantasy is my first love, though I've been recently getting into horror. Today I got my author copies of King David and the Spiders from Mars, which contains a short story I wrote under my real name!
It's a short story (about 13,000 words if I remember correctly) concerning a rabbi who runs into ancient creatures who secretly rule an evil town in Massachusetts. It's heavily based on H.P. Lovecraft's Shadow over Innsmouth, which is one of my favorite Lovecraft stories. Since it had a Jewish spin, it qualified for the anthology.
If you'd like to read the story itself and not the whole book, feel free to email me and I'll just send you a copy, as I retained the rights. It is a sci-fi/horror story, and you'll get more out of it if you're familiar with Lovecraft's work, but you're welcome to it.
I wasn't totally silly in my author bio. Not as silly as I could have been.
But I'm still proud of it!
You can buy the book here.
I do other writing. Sci-fi/fantasy is my first love, though I've been recently getting into horror. Today I got my author copies of King David and the Spiders from Mars, which contains a short story I wrote under my real name!
It's a short story (about 13,000 words if I remember correctly) concerning a rabbi who runs into ancient creatures who secretly rule an evil town in Massachusetts. It's heavily based on H.P. Lovecraft's Shadow over Innsmouth, which is one of my favorite Lovecraft stories. Since it had a Jewish spin, it qualified for the anthology.
If you'd like to read the story itself and not the whole book, feel free to email me and I'll just send you a copy, as I retained the rights. It is a sci-fi/horror story, and you'll get more out of it if you're familiar with Lovecraft's work, but you're welcome to it.
I wasn't totally silly in my author bio. Not as silly as I could have been.
But I'm still proud of it!
You can buy the book here.
February 9, 2014
New Contest! New Giveaways!
It seems that getting a copy of Book 8 was a pretty popular contest, so I'll be repeating it with eBooks.
How to enter:
(1) Leave a comment on this blog post asking me a question. You can ask me any question you want. I literally mean anything. Of course if it's deeply personal (like where I live, what hours I am generally out, and where my jewelry is) I might not answer it, but it can be any question about my books, my other writing, my general career, and my general interests. You can ask what kind of toothpaste I use (Don't ask that. It's Crest Regular Paste. You already know the answer). There are only three
exceptions to the rule:
- You cannot ask what inspired me to write these books (I've answered that too many times)
- You cannot ask what I find so intriguing about [insert Pride and Prejudice character here]
- You cannot repeat a question someone has already asked.
(2) Leave some valid way to reach you and say if you have a US postal address. If you fail to do this, you will not win. I might answer the question but I will not give you a prize.
Winning Conditions:
eBook: If you successfully follow the instructions above, congratulations - you've won! I will email you asking what eBook format you want it sent in.
Paperback: One person with a US postal address will be selected at random from the pool of entries. I cannot send the book abroad because it is seriously expensive to do. If you cannot get my book abroad and you want it, you can buy it directly for me and pay for shipping, and I will send it.
The contest is open until March 1st! So get those questions in!
How to enter:
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(1) Leave a comment on this blog post asking me a question. You can ask me any question you want. I literally mean anything. Of course if it's deeply personal (like where I live, what hours I am generally out, and where my jewelry is) I might not answer it, but it can be any question about my books, my other writing, my general career, and my general interests. You can ask what kind of toothpaste I use (Don't ask that. It's Crest Regular Paste. You already know the answer). There are only threeexceptions to the rule:
- You cannot ask what inspired me to write these books (I've answered that too many times)
- You cannot ask what I find so intriguing about [insert Pride and Prejudice character here]
- You cannot repeat a question someone has already asked.
(2) Leave some valid way to reach you and say if you have a US postal address. If you fail to do this, you will not win. I might answer the question but I will not give you a prize.
Winning Conditions:
eBook: If you successfully follow the instructions above, congratulations - you've won! I will email you asking what eBook format you want it sent in.
Paperback: One person with a US postal address will be selected at random from the pool of entries. I cannot send the book abroad because it is seriously expensive to do. If you cannot get my book abroad and you want it, you can buy it directly for me and pay for shipping, and I will send it.
The contest is open until March 1st! So get those questions in!
January 20, 2014
Contest Winners
The winners of the Book 8 contest are Michelle Woods and Mary Anne. Please check your emails for a message from me to claim your prize!
And yes, there were two winners. There were so many entries that I decided to pony up a second copy.
Watch this blog for upcoming eBook giveaways!
And yes, there were two winners. There were so many entries that I decided to pony up a second copy.
Watch this blog for upcoming eBook giveaways!
January 15, 2014
Habitual Writers
First off, this is your last chance to enter the contest to win a paperback copy of Book 8! Go here to sign up and do it before January 20th!
Second, the offer to get a goodie in the mail if you post a review on Amazon is still open, and will continue to be open. So send me an email with your snail mail address if you posted a review, no matter what you said in the review, or how long or short it was, and I will send you some Asian charm and maybe a bookmark.
Third, if you are in New York City on February 9th, there is a Book 8 launch party at Madras Mahal, a kosher Indian restaurant in Manhattan. I am doing it there because (a) it is fairly inexpensive (b) I want to eat there in general. So the Facebook group page and RSVP if you are interested. Bring a book if you want it signed, or tell me if you want a free copy of any of the books I wrote as Marsha Warner, because I have about 25 of each lying around my apartment and I need to get rid of them.
Authorial Intent
Writers have ticks. Hopefully not literal ticks. Check your legs after you come inside from playing in the woods, guys! No, the kind of ticks we don't see but show up in our writing. Because so many people have looked at my work, I've become aware of some of mine, though there's very little I can do to stop them. For example, I have a tendency to think faster than I write, so I'll put in a word that is supposed to appear in a sentence later and it won't get flagged because it's spelled correctly, and Brandy will have to call me up and say, "When you wrote soup, you meant boat, right?" I am also partial to characters meandering about, something my friend Alex picked up on my very first novel, The Adventures of Joey, which I wrote when I was in third grade and my handwriting was arguably slightly better than it is now. I'm more interested in characters than the arc of a plot, which is a problem for me, and I'm given to slow starts.
Recently I've been doing research on two books that are a series and part of the Amazon Kindle Worlds program, Amazon's premiere site for published fan fiction. They have certain properties and you can write fan fiction about those properties and they will sell it as an eBook. My agent recommended it to me as a source of easy publication and I picked a series that looked like it would be relatively easy to write for, Blake Crouch's Wayward Pines series. In the last few weeks I've been re-reading both books, underlining every important character, place name, location, and important statistic, then recording them all in a handy word file. (Somewhere towards the end of my series, I finally learned to start keeping track of characters, but mostly because I was spurned on by Brandy) What I've discovered is ticks Crouch probably isn't aware of - his partiality to M and B names (out of about 30 characters there are 7 M-names), his inconsistencies with the date of certain events (they alternately take place in August or October, depending on the scene), and various minor mistakes in the timeline, mostly due to him not going back to book 1 a lot when he was writing book 2. Also, almost every store exists on "the corner of Main and [Some Avenue]." I'm not actually bashing the author here - these are very easily mistakes to make when you're caught up in the suspense of writing a thriller and trying to keep the reader on the edge of their seats. These decisions don't seem like a big deal at the time. If anything, you're trying to minimize these decisions and get back to describing the various guns the protagonist uses, a common thriller trope. Are there 800 or 600 people in Wayward Pines? You're writing something and you spit out a number that sounds good, then you move on to get the next scene done and maybe you completely forget you used that number. When it comes up later, you've forgotten it or you don't want to look it up because editing sucks. That's what copyeditors are supposed to be for, but publishers today are cutting way back on copyediting.
Yes, I actually wrote this book.I was once at a panel at Worldcon and an author (I think it was Richard Sawyer) was lamenting that some fan had written him to say he'd changed the color of a character's eyes, describing them as blue in one chapter and green in a much later chapter. "Is this really important? Seriously," he said, which I thought was reasonable. Of course, I write in historical fiction, where I get hit for much worse things than that, or I used to in the first couple books before people either gave up on the series or decided to just go with the flow. (Also my research got better) But when you're writing fanfic for pay, it's actually very important that you have all these things right about the original content, so it's frustrating when there's mistakes. I remember when I was writing the second Greek book (Best Frenemies) I was called out because I'd mentioned that someone's bedspread was a floral print, which it wasn't, and I had to go rewatch two episodes and figured out that they'd actually changed the sets around between seasons of the show even though only 8 hours had passed in the narrative (the new season picked up the morning after the finale of the previous season), but clearly no one told the set designer that this was important and she changed the comforter and sheets of said person's bed. I corrected my mistake and moved along, but man, what a crazy contract job that was. If you ever think that those crummy tie-in books to TV shows and movies are not written by authors who work hard for their paycheck, you're wrong. The books may not be classics of literature but hey, we do what we're paid to do, and we're given very little time to do it (I turned over the second book in 3 weeks). If offered, I would take one of these contract jobs again. I hated doing it, but the money was good, and I'm a working writer. I have to be realistic.
Second, the offer to get a goodie in the mail if you post a review on Amazon is still open, and will continue to be open. So send me an email with your snail mail address if you posted a review, no matter what you said in the review, or how long or short it was, and I will send you some Asian charm and maybe a bookmark.
Third, if you are in New York City on February 9th, there is a Book 8 launch party at Madras Mahal, a kosher Indian restaurant in Manhattan. I am doing it there because (a) it is fairly inexpensive (b) I want to eat there in general. So the Facebook group page and RSVP if you are interested. Bring a book if you want it signed, or tell me if you want a free copy of any of the books I wrote as Marsha Warner, because I have about 25 of each lying around my apartment and I need to get rid of them.
Authorial Intent
Writers have ticks. Hopefully not literal ticks. Check your legs after you come inside from playing in the woods, guys! No, the kind of ticks we don't see but show up in our writing. Because so many people have looked at my work, I've become aware of some of mine, though there's very little I can do to stop them. For example, I have a tendency to think faster than I write, so I'll put in a word that is supposed to appear in a sentence later and it won't get flagged because it's spelled correctly, and Brandy will have to call me up and say, "When you wrote soup, you meant boat, right?" I am also partial to characters meandering about, something my friend Alex picked up on my very first novel, The Adventures of Joey, which I wrote when I was in third grade and my handwriting was arguably slightly better than it is now. I'm more interested in characters than the arc of a plot, which is a problem for me, and I'm given to slow starts.
Recently I've been doing research on two books that are a series and part of the Amazon Kindle Worlds program, Amazon's premiere site for published fan fiction. They have certain properties and you can write fan fiction about those properties and they will sell it as an eBook. My agent recommended it to me as a source of easy publication and I picked a series that looked like it would be relatively easy to write for, Blake Crouch's Wayward Pines series. In the last few weeks I've been re-reading both books, underlining every important character, place name, location, and important statistic, then recording them all in a handy word file. (Somewhere towards the end of my series, I finally learned to start keeping track of characters, but mostly because I was spurned on by Brandy) What I've discovered is ticks Crouch probably isn't aware of - his partiality to M and B names (out of about 30 characters there are 7 M-names), his inconsistencies with the date of certain events (they alternately take place in August or October, depending on the scene), and various minor mistakes in the timeline, mostly due to him not going back to book 1 a lot when he was writing book 2. Also, almost every store exists on "the corner of Main and [Some Avenue]." I'm not actually bashing the author here - these are very easily mistakes to make when you're caught up in the suspense of writing a thriller and trying to keep the reader on the edge of their seats. These decisions don't seem like a big deal at the time. If anything, you're trying to minimize these decisions and get back to describing the various guns the protagonist uses, a common thriller trope. Are there 800 or 600 people in Wayward Pines? You're writing something and you spit out a number that sounds good, then you move on to get the next scene done and maybe you completely forget you used that number. When it comes up later, you've forgotten it or you don't want to look it up because editing sucks. That's what copyeditors are supposed to be for, but publishers today are cutting way back on copyediting.
Yes, I actually wrote this book.I was once at a panel at Worldcon and an author (I think it was Richard Sawyer) was lamenting that some fan had written him to say he'd changed the color of a character's eyes, describing them as blue in one chapter and green in a much later chapter. "Is this really important? Seriously," he said, which I thought was reasonable. Of course, I write in historical fiction, where I get hit for much worse things than that, or I used to in the first couple books before people either gave up on the series or decided to just go with the flow. (Also my research got better) But when you're writing fanfic for pay, it's actually very important that you have all these things right about the original content, so it's frustrating when there's mistakes. I remember when I was writing the second Greek book (Best Frenemies) I was called out because I'd mentioned that someone's bedspread was a floral print, which it wasn't, and I had to go rewatch two episodes and figured out that they'd actually changed the sets around between seasons of the show even though only 8 hours had passed in the narrative (the new season picked up the morning after the finale of the previous season), but clearly no one told the set designer that this was important and she changed the comforter and sheets of said person's bed. I corrected my mistake and moved along, but man, what a crazy contract job that was. If you ever think that those crummy tie-in books to TV shows and movies are not written by authors who work hard for their paycheck, you're wrong. The books may not be classics of literature but hey, we do what we're paid to do, and we're given very little time to do it (I turned over the second book in 3 weeks). If offered, I would take one of these contract jobs again. I hated doing it, but the money was good, and I'm a working writer. I have to be realistic.
January 6, 2014
Win a Paperback Copy of Book 8!
A tengu.This will make moresense when you read the bookContest! Win a paperback copy of The Chrysanthemum and the Rose by entering before January 20th.
What is it?
- it's a book
- it's big
- it's thick
- it's 748 pages
- it will be signed by the author
I'm not giving too many of these away - and by that I mean any - because they're expensive to obtain and ship, so this is your chance!
How to Enter:
(1) Have a US postal address.
(2) Leave your name and CONTACT INFORMATION in a comment to this post.
How Not to Enter:
(1) Do nothing.
(2) Reply to this post without entering your contact email and assume that because you are signed into blogger I magically know your email address.
(3) Be a member of my family with more disposable income then me. Don't be a cheapskate.
Want an eBook? That contest is coming soon!
December 20, 2013
Publication!
The Chrysanthemum and the Rose (Book 8) is now available!Buy it in paperback or on Kindle
Buy it on the Nook
Buy it on other eReader devices
From the back cover:
There is peace in Derbyshire as a new generation of the Darcy family begins, but the younger Mr. and Mrs. Darcy set their sights far away, to Japan, an island nation closed off to all but a few foreigners. There they will travel to find Georgiana Darcy’s elusive former teacher, the wandering thief Mugin, so that she can finally complete her training before settling down to married life in the English countryside.
But getting into Japan, a country hostile to Westerners and controlled by the Tokugawa shogun, won’t be easy, and finding Mu Gin will be even harder. Is the young couple up to the challenge?
In Altman’s eighth novel, we travel far abroad to the dangerous world of 19th-Century Asia, where political tensions are high and danger is very real.
Review Policy:
If you have reviewed most or all of my past books on Amazon, you are eligible to receive a paperback copy for review.
If you have reviewed at least one of my other books on Amazon, you are eligible to receive ab eBook copy on any format for review.
If you post a review of your own volition and give me a US postal address, I will send you a little Asian good luck charm thingy.
If any of these apply to you, contact me.
Contests:
There will be some contests. I will be giving away only one copy of the paperback (it is expensive to buy and ship because it is so large) so you should look for that. I will also be giving away prizes and numerous eBook copies, so stay tuned!
Otherwise, happy reading!
December 15, 2013
I don't know what to write in people's books
I don't even know how to use this type of penYesterday I was asked to autograph a book I have a short story published in (it's coming out officially later - I'll post about that then) and I wrote, "Keep on truckin'!" Because seriously, I have no idea what to write in these things. I'm not famous enough to write nothing except my name if the person is standing in front of me. Famous authors either only put their name in or only put their name and the person's name in. I'm supposed to come up with something.For book 1 I pretty much universally wrote, "Thanks for reading. I hope you enjoy the book" or something to that effect, even though some of them were not going to read the book because they were friends or family members. I actually personalized one a little too much to give to one of Grandma's friends and my mom ended up cutting something I said (about loaning a car to someone?) right out of the page, leaving a little cut at the bottom. Then for a little while I tried, "It is a universal truth that a good author must be in want of a loyal reader" which ended up being way too long for my awful handwriting.
I'm just going to think out loud in this post about possible things to put in the book:
"Thanks for reading!"
"Keep on truckin'" (not valid if person is a trucker)
"If someone steals this book, may they be punched to death by wolves" (I actually put this in one of the books I assigned for Brandy but I misspelled wolves, which is why I need Brandy to edit everything I write in the first place)
"There's a spider on your back."
"[Insert witty comment here]"
"Thx! My handwriting is terrible."
"[Insert personal, moving comment here]"
"Catchphrase!"
"Welcome to Night Vale" (I love this show)
In other news, Book 8 is now available for Kindle and for all other eBook formats. It will be available in print when we finally get Createspace to not mess up the cover alignment, which will hopefully be this week. Then I'll do the "it's officially published" post and start doing some contests. One of them will be to win a paperback copy of the book, which is very heavy and expensive and therefore will only be open to US residents or people with a US mailing address. You probably want to enter that one.
