Gail Daley's Blog, page 7

Sleepover

When I was about six my best friend Sally lived across the street from me. Every other Friday night we would sleep over at each others houses, stay up late, eat popcorn and watch Friday Night Fright Theater on the local TV.

One Friday it was my turn to stay at Sally’s house. After setting us up with popcorn, her parents retired for the evening. Her oldest brother Mike was out on a date, and her other brother Jim was holed up in his room doing whatever it is 10-year-old boys do when their baby sister and her friend have comandeered the livingroom.

We sat on the couch, eating popcorn, occassionally dropping it on the floor for the two dogs (hers and mine) who had joined us. Vincent Price was staring in House of Wax that night in his customary scarey role. When the movie was over Sally and I held our usual argument over who had to cross the livingroom and turn off the light and the TV, which Sally won by virtue of it being her house.

Due to the argument we hadn’t noticed Jim sneaking in to hide behind the couch. I went across the room turned off the TV and hit the light switch by the kitchen. As I was crossing the dark livingroom to Sally’s bedroom, Jim jumped out, yelling “boo!”and grabbed me.

Sally screamed, sure that Vincent Price had come out of the TV to get me. However, I had recognized Jim’s voice and furiously kicked him in the shins, following it up with several more as he retreated.

He yelled in pain and jumped back, knocking over his mother’s prize glass vase which hit the floor with a resounding crash. The dogs, thinking this was a new game, joined in barking joyously and dashing around the room. Sally continued to scream.

Sally’s Dad, thinking his home was being invaded dashed into the room to protect us. He was followed by Sally’s mother who sensibly turned on the lights, revealing her husband clad only in his tidy whities and waving his service pistol, the broken vase, Jim and I still fighting, Sally and the dogs vying for noise value, and Sally’s older brother attempting to sneak in past curfew.

All’s well that ends well however. After a closed door interview with his oldest son, Sally’s father went back to bed. Her mother fed us warm milk to settle us down and barred us from watching any more Friday Night Theater. Jim had to clean up the broken vase and pay for it out of his allowance.

Work Journal 2019 June 6

Today I took a break from writing and I worked on 2 small landscapes for the Mini show. They still need some work, but they are too damp at the moment for me to fuss with. (Yes, Acrylics CAN be too wet!) it will take another two or three days for the surface to be hard enough that I can paint over it. I think I still need a little work on the palm trees on one of them, and on the old pier on the other…I notice my shore line is running uphill on the one I’m titling Bayou Pier as well, so that will need work also

Work Journal June 6/19

Got two more chapters of Magi Storm done. I actually split the scenes into 3 separate chapters. Otherwise I would have ended up with a 50 or 60 page chapter and I feel that is too long for the e-book format…

Still Debating whether or not to divide my focus by trying to edit the first Draft of Uncharted Trails. I will probably wait until I hit a plot blocker on Magi Storm to do this…

Work Journal 2019 05/31

2019 5/31 Working on book 2 of my Magi series. I’m struggling with writing the next chapter. The villain of the story is a female mage with spellbinding abilities. She is an agent for a foreign government and was sent to Askela to help prepare that country for invasion from hers. Logan, the hero has been sent to Wyvern Towers to try and coax a powerful Mage to return and support the new ruler. It’s complicated because Faye, my bad girl, has used her considerable physical charms to develop a relationship with the Mage (Magnus) and she tries to keep him from returning by making him think she and Logan are lovers so that he won’t be willing to do anything Logan suggests. (Yes, I know soaps plot, right?) but I just love taking plot lines from other genres and giving them a fresh look by plopping them down in another genre.

2019 Work Journal -5/12/19

Spent most of the weekend getting in sync with Catrin, one of my MCs in my new book Magi Storm, no 2 in the Rulari Magi Series.

Actually wasn’t as hard to get in touch with Catrin as it was to get into the head of Juliette, the MC in Uncharted Trails, no 6 in the Handfasting series. (Right now the rough draft of that one is sitting in a binder on my desk while I let it rest). I have discovered that it’s best to step away from the roughs after I think I’ve finished a book for long enough for the material to seem fresh when I re-read it. I catch more mistakes and omissions that way.

MONTANA HORSEMAN (Double Day Western/Book One) (Hardcover)

Book 1 of the Baynes Clan

By John S McCord

DEALING WITH NEGATIVE OR MALICIOUS POSTINGS

What response do you make when some person posts a negative opinion of you or your work on your website or a social network site? Here are some tips on what you can do about this without starting a major public feud and  turn a negative reaction into a positive action.

Congratulations. You now have a brand new web-site (or blog site). You have spent hours designing it and putting into it everything you think will help you make it popular. Whether you created this site in the hopes of developing an audience for your writing, selling your art, promoting a non-profit organization, business or for some other reason. Your new site is precious to you and you need to share it with the world at large. There are many ways to do this, beginning with sending e-mails to friends and family, advertising on Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, Google AdWords, etc.

Most of these sites have suggestions as to how to reach other members to tell them about your new site. After you have followed instructions from these sites to publicize your work,  in a couple of days when you call up your site to see if anyone has actually looked at it, and among the positive comments posted, you discover that someone has written something ugly either about the site, your work or you and posted it on yoursite. This is a little like having someone kick your baby and you are justifiably offended. The question is what do you do now?

In answering this I’m going to make a couple of assumptions: 1) you haven’t done anything to the negative poster to make them want to embarrass you by publicly posting ugly comments to your site, and 2) this isn’t someone you know well because obviously if you were well acquainted with them you wouldn’t have sent an invitation in the first place.  If you are like me your first impulse would be to slap back at this person. This is entirely a normal reaction and it is a perfectly understandable, human impulse to strike out at what injures us. However, I urge you not to give in to this impulse. If you start an insult slinging match by posting a nasty response to the negative comment on your site it will only increase the adverse impression of your site with potential customers and visitors that this person has created. It also will make you look unprofessional and probably detract from your sites message which should be about the work or ideas you have presented there.

You cantake positive action when this happens, but first you need to make sure it doesn’t happen again. Your first action should be to find out a little about who this person is and how they came to visit your site. When you do find out this information I advise you to resist the itch to retaliate by posting something ugly in return on theirsite. I understand you would like them to know how you felt but this will only escalate matters, so don’t do it! Once you know who they are, simply remove the comment from your site and if the site offers this feature, arrange to moderate any future comments posted. If the person posted the comment using Facebook or Twitter, you may need to change those settings also to require comments to have your approval before being posted.

You should realize that if this person received an invitation to view your site the invitation may have come from you, especially if you were innocently following suggestions to increase your circle of influence put out by LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook or Google. All of these sites encourage members to make new connections by checking out other members who are interested in the same things, belong to the same groups, follow the same companies, etc. and send out invitations to connect. These suggestions are not necessarily bad; in fact you may make some valuable acquaintances and good friends by using them. Please be aware however that the old adage about kissing frogs also applies; you may also have unintentionally reached out to some people who practice behavior my mother used to call “rude, crude, and socially unacceptable”. You won’t be able to screen these folks out ahead of time because this kind of character reference does notget posted on their self-created profiles! Hateful people exist and they just love to spread their discord and repulsive behavior onto others. The positive thing you can do I mentioned? Sometimes it helps to visualize yourself blowing a big, noisy, fat raspberry at this person, and then start a “Do Not Send” list and check it before you send out invitations to view your work. Good luck!

Gail

Night Flyers

I like to keep a running Journal with each painting, allowing me to think back to what was happening in my life at that time, and what led me to paint a particular piece.

Many years ago when my son wanted me to paint dragons, he decided that these creatures were too unconventional to really be dragons. Instead, they looked more like creatures out of someone’s nightmares. The Painting was re-christened “Night Flyers”.

The Night Flyers bring terror and exaltation to those who dare ride them. Done in dark tones, this painting conveys power, just on the edge of being dangerous. A herd of winged, sinister horse-like creatures is flying through a cosmic dust cloud. There is a sense that these are not domesticated animals to be trifled with; they are not tame.

Art Prints & decor items are available by clicking below:

  https://fineartamerica.com/featured/night-flyers-gail-daley.html

Art / Writing Journal

May 12, 2019– Spent most of the weekend getting in sync with Catrin, one of my MCs in my new book Magi Storm, no 2 in the Rulari Magi Series.

Actually it wasn’t as hard to get in touch with Catrin as it was to get into the head of Juliette, the MC in Uncharted Trails, no 6 in the Handfasting series. Right now the rough draft of that one is sitting in a binder on my desk while I let it rest. I have discovered that it’s best to step away from the rough draft, for a few weeks after I think I’ve finished a book. This gives time for the material to seem fresh when I re-read it. I catch more mistakes and omissions that way.

Doing workups for the cover next. That always helps.

An Indie Writer’s View of Amazon’s New Print Platform

First off, this is an opinion editorial. It is strictly based on my own experiences with the new KDP platform. If you have a different opinion and experience, please feel free to express it. Maybe Amazon will finally pay attention to what we say if enough of us say it.

I’ve come to the conclusion that whoever designed Amazons new print program is either a complete idiot, or the program for switching previous customers of Create Space into Amazon’s print format is flawed. At first everythng looked alright; my books seemed to make the transistion easily, the price was right, etc.

Then I decided to update them with new covers and re-edit them because I had noticed a few typos and awkward sentances. Wow. When I tried to upload the edited manuscripts Amazon not only didn’t honor the ISBN Create Space had assigned my print books, it wanted new ones! That’s when the realtrouble began. I kept gettin error messages back saying the ISBN used 1) was already assigned to another book, or 2) it wasn’t the right ISBN.

They were correct of course; because of the difficulty I had uploading the newly edited manuscripts, there aremultiple ISBNs assigned the books! Unable to decipher Amazon’s cryptic answers to my questions, I eventually listed all of the ISBNs assigned in the front of the books, hoping this would correct the issue.

This did correct the issues with my distribution site D2D, who, thank God, now has a print platform, which I can assure you is muchmore user friendly than anything available on Amazon’s KDP. It’s too bad that when they ate Create Space, Amazon didn’t also incorporate their user friendly program for setting up books. Instead Amazon replaced it with an extremely awkward system for creating covers which has only generic stuff (making any cover created on it look exactly like everyone elses), and in some cases, the same, because different writers chose the same cover from the few available!