Susan Buffum's Blog: Welcome to My World, page 24

Proof Copy Arrived Today

The printed proof copy of Talon: The Familiarity of it All arrived in the mail today. There is always such joy in opening a package and seeing your book in print for the first time, taking it out, holding it in your hands and flipping through the pages...and, with the eye of a critic, already spotting little things you want to change and fix before you let it go out into the vast world to entertain readers.

I need to track down my blue pen and get to work, but in the meantime, I finished editing, proofreading, and doing the final review of the fourth book in the series today, at breakfast and then this evening after dinner.

There will be one more book in the series featuring Dr. Giles Talon and Bryce Briscoe's son, Cayle. In a perfect world maybe his story should have come next but I'm not one to stifle my muse just because stories come an out of sequence order.

The first three books in the series need to be read in order, but books four and five can be read independently and in whatever order the reader wants.

So sayeth the author...

Preparing for Local Arts & Cultural Event

I haven't posted much lately as I've been busy editing and proofreading two new novels, working on a third novel and preparing for a public appearance in my own community at an all day event on April 30th at the Westfield Women's Club. I'll basically be doing a meet & greet the author, promoting and selling several of my books and answering questions about the world of self publishing from a completely do-it-yourself aspect. (I have been talking to a consultant from Archway, a division of Simon & Schuster about self publishing the novel I'm working on currently that's not quite ready but am on the fence as to whether or not I'll go with them or someone else. It's the marketing aspect that I'm still not very good at, and self promotion.)

After this event is over I have a few more giveaways planned for goodreads readers. I just need to stay focused on this first of its kind Articulture event here in Westfield before I can concentrate on anything else. (I still work full time as a medical secretary...so my plate is full at the moment! Not enough time to do everything I want to do!)

New Character Voices

I am in the middle of the final editing and proofreading of book 4 in the Talon series- tying up loose ends as book 3 & 4 have been kicking around partially written in the dining room for about two years...and suddenly new characters started vying for attention in my head last night wanting their story to be told. I'm hashing it out with them as I type because I still have two other partially written novels that really need my attention...it's amazing to me that I ever get anything done with so much going on in my head!

Resignation Submitted

The Officers and Board of Director of the Massachusetts State Button Society held a conference call tonight. I announced that I was stepping down as editor after 10 years of producing a 32-44 page annual magazine. I work full time and want to dedicate my free time to my own writing projects now. Well, you could have heard a pin drop- and then suddenly Betty suggested that totally we do away with the Bulletin altogether since we have a facebook page and a website where we can post photos and articles. Print Bulletins are becoming more obsolete now- a sad state of affairs but we are a more media driven society these days. (Let's hope printed books never stop being produced because that would be the end of the civilized world!)

I managed to feel guilty about resigning as editor for all of four minutes until the Board decided to just produce a print membership list with a meeting schedule including directions to the two venues we use, and the current Officers and Directors even though that info is on facebook and the web.

It was fun. It was a challenge and I always gave it 125%, except for this year due to major life events that set me back emotionally...but looking through the 32-pages I did manage to produce I realize that it's still an eye catching, vibrant, informative magazine, one I can be proud of.

Thus, I leave my legacy behind in these ten magazines that I put together from bits and pieces, submitted articles and articles I wrote as needed to fill space, and some that Kelly wrote, first as a junior collector and then as an adult collector. It was a wonderful experience. I learned a lot about page layouts, design, copy editing, photo editing and soliciting advertisers as well as designing ads.

Now, from December through March, I can concentrate on my own projects more and not stress about this annual Bulletin project.

Found in a Notebook

The silver stars shine
in the dark pools of your eyes;
I see a gilded moon
suspended from a lock of your hair-
The lambent light casts
half your face in shadow,
Bathes the other half in
pale moon glow-
You are a being from a distant world
who has come only to kiss me;
And I surrender to the
alien sensation of cool lips against mine.
This kiss is like a cold drink
washing down a desert throat.
I am at the oasis;
oddly shivering,
oddly scorched.

Comma Trauma & Kelly

Kelly (my daughter) is proofreading and editing the third book in the Talon series today...and as usual she is hammering me on my use of commas, or lack thereof.

Sigh.

I'm not complaining. I know I'm lucky to have her because I tend to put a comma in when I'm pausing in my thoughts, or forget to put one in because I don't want to slow down and have to think about punctuation...I'm more interested in just getting the story written, just letting it roll. Thanking my lucky stars that I have her as my sentence sweeper to come in and clean everything up when I'm done- sort of like that person following behind a tickertape parade, or a confetti fest....making it all neat and tidy.

She's also my reader emotion meter- I can tell when a story or book is right when she's laughing out loud one minute, grabbing for the tissue box the next- and then, when she's done reading, giving me a wordless hug that only she and I know the meaning of.

I'd suffer comma trauma any day because she uplifts me every day.

Thank you, Kelly Buffum!

Talon Book 4 Written

I've spent the past few nights burning the midnight oil. This morning I wrapped up book 4 in the Talon Series.

Kelly has been rereading books 1 & 2 in the series. She plowed through a huge section of book 2 last night. When she held the book up to show me how much she'd read while I was sitting across from her working on book 4 the subtitle caught me eye- TRILOGY!

Uh-oh.

So today I had to go into CreateSpace and change the subtitles on the book covers for 1 & 2 to read first and second in the Talon SERIES, since there is now a third AND a fourth book written in that series.

Lesson learned- I should not be so short-sighted and self limiting.

Off to work- no more whole days off on Wednesdays, back to a half day, but still managed to get stuff done this morning before work.

Talon Book Four Rediscovered

My former little Dell netbook workhorse on which I did an awful lot of writing is running slower and slower these days, so late one night I got my husband out of bed to come and copy all the files onto a flash drive before the netbook crashed (shades of my former Dell laptop-oh the horror of that!)- so he gamely spent forty minutes doing that- bless his grumpy heart.

This weekend I was feeling sluggish and bored after cleaning out my bookcases and filling 10 cartons for the library book sale- didn't know what to do with myself so I dug through some of the binders in the dining room and found the abandoned fourth book in the Talon series (not labeled as a Talon book, but it is). So I sat in my cat with the cat on my shoulder and read it, editing it along the way on Saturday. On Sunday I did all the edits and then continued writing. I wrote until 11:30PM last night and wrote some more while eating breakfast before going out to face the snow.

This book is set 22 years into the future as one Talon is about to graduate from college, and the family readies to move to Maine (if you've read either of the two published books you'll understand why they have to move every twenty years or so)...

Needless to say, I am now motivated to complete this novel...not like I don't already have four in the queue awaiting my attention, including book 3 in the Talon series which actually just needs it's final review process completed. Sometimes I am such a lily pad jumper when it comes to projects! But, the good news is that I do eventually get the novels written! :)

As an aside- my husband is a fan of Tiny House. I keep telling him that I need a tiny house in the back yard where I can go and write without distraction (he has to have the TV on constantly which drives me crazy! I like peace and quiet so I can think! We're total opposites,,,)

Thanks for stopping by to visit my world...I'm going back to book 4, I swear!

Short Stories v. Novels

People tell me that they can't put my novels down once they start reading them. But something that is becoming more obvious is that people also want my short stories to keep going and not end. Well, they're short stories, not novels. My short stories give the reader a glimpse into the lives of the characters- a crystalized moment, maybe, or a brief period of time in which they might be meeting for the first time and falling in love, or meeting again and realizing that they have already been in love right along...or whatever.

My best friend complained to me when she read my proof copy of Cupid's Darts (the one with the red cover that looked like Christmas! It's not pink.) She'd read three stories at that time and told me that she didn't want them to end, she wanted more. So, I told her to pick her favorite story in the book and let me know which one it was and I would write her an entire novel using those characters so she'd have their whole story. So far she hasn't give me the title of her favorite yet- her life is kind of crazy right now, so I'm still waiting.

Meanwhile, I'm thinking that maybe I shouldn't call them short stories...maybe there's a better word for what I write? Vignettes? Voyeuristic peeks into these characters lives? I don't exactly know.

If anyone has read my short stories and wants to suggest which one they'd like to see developed into a full length novel please feel free to send me a message and I will be happy to add it to my project list.

My novel Life Skills actually did develop from a series of short stories- enough of them featuring these characters to fill an entire two inch binder! They had a story to tell but it was just not happening in a short story format- but I kept writing about them anyway because they had a story to tell. I let them grow and develop and lay out their individual stories throughout this series of ten or more short stories. Finally, when November's NaNoWriMo rolled around last year, Lissa and Remy were fully developed and ready to tell their story- which turned out to be a 384 page novel. Go figure! I really never saw that coming!

I used to think I didn't have novels in me...but I've discovered that I actually do.

A novel based on Tangerine Twist has already been started. In Love Me Knots, the characters in the story Not Always Black and White actually have their own novel published- The Subtlety of Light and Shadow. The two published novels in the Talon (grim reaper) series actually started out as a series of four Halloween short stories I wrote for my daughter when she was in college. Then the first book based on those stories got written in novel format in the third person, not once but twice before it was written for the third and final time in the first person. (Book three is nearly done. I was doing a final edit of it tonight.)

So-pick a favorite short story and let me know what it is. I'll happily develop an entire novel based on that story,

Writing is...

Writing is like staging a production- building sets, directing a cast, telling a story and making it all come alive in the theater of the reader's mind.