Patti O'Shea's Blog, page 196

The Fall Sleepies

It happens every fall. I call it the Fall Sleepies because once it hits, all I want to do is sleep. And after taking an informal poll at work, it seems a lot of people are experiencing this right now.

It's really not fun. I'm ready to go to bed at 7pm, and if by some miracle I actually go to sleep at that time, I still wake up tired the next morning. It always lasts two or three weeks, but while I'm in this mode, nothing gets accomplished. Cleaning house? Nope. I have mail stacked up on my center island and I try not to do that. Updating the website? No, don't feel like doing that. Answering email? Even that is too much work.

If it were up to me, I'd hibernate until this passed. No work, no writing, no internet--nothing but sleep and veg out, sleep and veg out. Of course, it's not possible. I do have the day job, writing, parents, etc that need my attention. What I do when I hit this stretch is go into triage state and handle what can't wait. Everything else sits.

Of course, when the Fall Sleepies pass sometime in the next week or two, I will be hopelessly behind and exhaust myself trying to get caught up, but there's nothing I can do about that. When this hits, it hits hard and there is no surmounting it.

Also, I'll be part of the Raven Scavenger Hunt starting in October! More info coming soon.

[image error]

Fame

Sometimes lyrics to music gets me thinking. The latest instance of this happened as I was listening to The Pussycat Dolls song, When I Grow Up. One of the lines of the song is: We all wanna be famous. That made me ask, does everyone want to be famous?

My first round of thinking was personal. Do I want to be famous? It's kind of a complicated question or at least a layered one. No, I don't want to be famous, but I'd like my stories/books to be hugely popular and read by millions. Does that...

Electronic Hell

This past five weeks have been hell on my electronics/computers. It seems like if something can go wrong, it has. I'm not used to this!

It started with my iMac crashing in mid-August. The night before it was fine, but I went in the next morning--coffee cup in my hand--and it was sitting there, doing nothing. Googling turned up a variety of solutions, none of which worked. My last-ditch attempt was erasing the hard drive and reinstalling the Operating System (OS). If this didn't work, it was go...

The Post I Wrote While Exhausted

It always interests me how different writers are from each other on process and how they get their information. Some see their stories unfold like movies in front of them. Some outline and know everything that's going to happen before they write it. I'm not sure it's possible to find two writers with an identical process no matter how hard you look.

For me, I don't have my stories unfold like movies. I might get snapshots of a scene, but nothing more than that. I hear my characters. I hear the...

Getting To Know Her

I really like this heroine I'm working with now. Earlier, when I was getting information flowing in, most of it came to the hero and she only shared a very little bit with me. Him I knew really, really well, but her? Not so much.

But now that I'm writing the story and it opens with my heroine, I'm getting to know her better. And I like her. A lot. Maybe because she knows the hero so well and is willing to live with his quirks, for lack of a better word. She understands him, takes him in stride...

New Covers!

I mentioned earlier that I was going to get the two short stories I wrote for the Mammoth Books collections out in ebook format. I have the electronic rights to those stories, so I decided to get covers made and take the plunge. Well, my covers turned out utterly awesome and I have to share here even though I haven't finished writing the book description blurbs yet or even started formatting.

First up is the cover for The Troll Bridge. This is a time travel where the heroine, Lia...

The Art of Cover Copy

When someone picks up a book in the bookstore and turns it over to read the back cover to find out what the book is about, they're looking at something that probably took hours to write. Producing good back cover copy requires a lot of skill. Basically, the writer has two paragraphs to tell what the story is about and to make it interesting to the reader. Most authors don't write this themselves.

I have several theories for this. One is that authors are too close to their work to pull out the ...

Bloglines

Just a quick FYI. Bloglines is shutting down Oct 1st. If you're like me, and don't pay attention, this will be a surprise to you. It was to me. If you use Bloglines, you'll need to transfer your feeds to some other RSS reader.

Picture Perfect

Recently, I spent some time going through my files for published books. Not the WordPerfect files where I did my writing, but my image files. It was really interesting to go back and see how many pictures were filed for which books.

For Ravyn's Flight, I discovered three pictures--one of the hero and two of the heroine. It was one apiece for The Power of Two. I had more pictures for Through a Crimson Veil. Tons of the heroine and dozens of the hero and a handful of Venice Beach, where a couple...

Brave New World

Y'all know I wrote two short stories for Mammoth Books. I only contracted for non-exclusive print rights and have my electronic rights. I've decided to take the leap and self-publish the E version myself.

I'm having covers created as we speak. I'm writing the "back cover" copy that describes the book right now, too. This is forcing me to flex writing muscles that have mostly been unused since my college days when I was an advertising copywriting major. When I have these two things finished, I'...