Ruth Nestvold's Blog, page 51

New draft of Chameleon in a Mirror finished! (And various other writing news)

Chameleon in a Mirror, my literary time travel fantasy to the era of Aphra Behn, is now done in the new version, coming in at 110,000 words. This is not DONE done, just a completed draft. I still need to do a revision pass, taking notes on motives, plot threads, and characters in Scrivener as I go. I’m hoping that will help me make the plot more cohesive before I send it to my critique partner.

I continue to track hours and activities, but I don’t know yet if it’s making me more productive, a...

New Facebook author page, time-tracking, and another freebie (Shadow of Stone)

I’ve been putting this off for a while, but now I’ve finally gone ahead and set up a Facebook page specifically for the author me. If anyone is inclined to like it, that would help me a lot for promo opportunities through Facebook. Thanks!

Also, please note that Shadow of Stone is free today and tomorrow. So if you missed it during the last free run, please be my guest and grab yourself a copy!

In writing news: I was inspired by a blog post from the lovely and talented Gene Lempp a couple of d...

Author spotlight with me on OWW, the usefulness of writing workshops, and another ebook up

In the last post, I forgot to mention (because I forgot about it in the first place *g*), that the October newsletter of the Online Writing Workshop did their spotlight with yours truly. You can read it here.

I was a member of OWW for many years, and I’m sure I learned at least as much in that workshop as I did at Clarion West. My most successful short stories (in terms of award nominations), Looking Through Lace and Mars: A Traveler’s Guide, both went though OWW. Although I have to admit, th...

An interview, some words, and more goal sorting

Yesterday, Randomize Me posted an interview with me, revolving around my (at the time of the interview) most recent publication, Beyond the Waters of the World. Check it out!

Since my last post, I’ve gotten about 2,000 more words done on Chameleon in the Mirror. That’s not quite where I would have wanted to be, but on the other hand, I spent most of my writing time today reading up on pre-Arthurian legends, taking notes, and deciding on the project I’ll tackle for NaNoWriMo this year. I’m sh...

Sorting out my goals

Like usual, I have lists and lists of things to do scattered all over my desk; now is my quarterly opportunity to compile all those lists and figure out what I really have to do.

1) Since I am still not done with Chameleon in a Mirror, getting that in shape to send to my critique partner is a top priority. Part of the problem is that it’s longer than expected. I now have over 100,000 words of Time Travel, with three chapters left to go. I’m hoping I can finish that before flying to the States...

Over 2,000 sales (and other self-pub news)

Sometime the end of last month, I passed the 2,000 sales mark for my ebooks. Even though I knew I was getting close, I don’t know exactly when I hit the second thousand, since I wasn’t adding up totals daily. It might be slow progress, but it’s still progress. It took me about five months to make the first thousand, and less than four months for the second thousand. While I am uploading new ebooks on a fairly regular basis, which of course helps with the increased sales, those four months als...

Author feature of me on the Kindle Boards blog today: From traditional publishing to indie

The Kindle Boards blog has a very nice profile of me today, “From traditional publishing to indie.”

Harvey from the Kindle Boards also sent me the code for a nifty badge:

Also a reminder that the Codex Writers Ebook Promo is going on today and tomorrow! Twelve books by eight great up-and-coming speculative fiction writers. Check it out!

Codex Writers Ebook Bash, Sept. 26-27!

Just a reminder that my writer’s group, Codex, is having it’s first free ebook promo tomorrow and the day after, Sept. 26-27. We have sixteen books by eight different neo-pro, multi-published authors to choose from, so it’s definitely worth checking out! Here’s a list of the books on Amazon.

A detailed listing of the titles that will be free:

Yseult: A Tale of Love in the Age of King Arthur

For the price of a truce, Yseult is sent to a world where magic is dying – to marry the father of the man...

Laid low by a virus

The best laid plans and all that … not that I can claim anything of the sort for my plans in the first place. And I knew weeks ago that I wasn’t going to finish Chameleon in a Mirror when I had originally intended. But this week, I ended up in bed with a fever, probably as a result of grandmother duties. I’m confronted with a lot more bugs these days than I was a couple of years ago.

So anyway, on to the accounting. CIAM is now at 90,000 words. I still intend to finish this draft by the end o...

By Popular Demand: Pantsers, Plotters, and — Puzzlers!

Over on Karen Huber’s blog a few days back, I mentioned a term I snapped up somewhere, an alternative to the two writing poles of plotters and pantsers — the puzzler. Several people in the comments were quite enthusiastic about the term, so I figure it just might deserve a blog post of it’s own, rather than a mention hidden in some comments somewhere.

I always knew I was more of a plotter than a pantser. Some of my writer friends can take a couple of prompts and immediately start writing a st...