Caroline Gerardo's Blog, page 49

Ghosts

Ghost Images Copyright Caroline Gerardo 2011

Infirmary Cots Ellis Island
Doors opening and closing in the night. A dream strangles me in down.June fog and gloom so deep,I can not see across the canyon.A horn moans warning the night fishermen.Get up and keep the noise company with my fingers typing.

Thriller Lake

Photograph Central Park Scary Wisteria Framing the Lake 2011copyright Caroline Gerardo

Eleven days until my deadline, the novel is shaping up.
How many violent scenes, beats and situations can I leave in the story?
Will my reader get tired on the thriller roller coaster?

I looked online statistics and my novella Greed has past 10000 sales. 10011 exactly as of yesterday.
I have not been checking and was shocked to find it in the top 100. This brings with it some negative things that I mentioned to a couple other writers. I found my books on torrent sites, and lending sites when I never agreed to lending. I also found a couple negative reviews by persons posting under alias names.These things are completed for the purpose of only money. This should not surprise me, this is a business.

My answer is complex:
I want to warn anyone who signs up for a torrent site or a free book lending site. There is nothing in life for free, the owners of these websites are making money off my work but ALSO your personal information. When you enter your email, your address, your credit card all this is farmed and worth a great deal of money. Information on what you buy is sold to third parties. The persons touching your privacy may be organized crime.

Most authors never make a living from their hard work. It takes a year for me to write a book at the minimum. If anyone needs to read my work for free, please contact me and I will find a way.

Meanwhile back to work writing.

Thriller Two Buy This Book

I am anticipating my trip to New York July 6 - 9 to participate in Thriller Fest.
International Thriller Writers published it's second book of short stories by other members.
A few highlights alphabetically:
Kathleen Antrim -Through a Veil Darkly (excellent!)
Gary Braver Ghost Writer ( I love this story. I was a ghostwriter for others before publishing under my maiden name in 2009. )
Blake Crouch Remaking this is the author of killers, Serial Uncut and Run. If you haven't read his work you are missing out.
Jeffrey Deaver- The Weapon a very scary story about torture. I loved his book, Carte Blanche.

Worth the money. Buy the book

Novel Draft #2 Seeing Light

[image error] photos: copyright Caroline GerardoI am heading out of the writing tunnel. This book is a battle. Sanity, death, quest for family, quest for true love all smothered in drug stealing, bum fights and crime not cheerful thoughts to grip me. A reader will pick it up and finish the novel in what five or six hours? The endurance of a year loving this guy, Seth, a character is not daunting. I have sent him off to be read. It is not a graduation ceremony in June. I will complete two more edits. I am mentally toying with changing the first chapter to first person. The narrator able to distinguish some of what happened, but she will have a flawed lack of reliability as she was not there every step of the story. Even when we are in real life a participant can we recall or comprehend what happened in the souls of men?

[image error] This photograph, recalls Van Gogh painting Branches of an Almond, is from a cemetery in Savannah. The light is hot through the tree. The flowering magnolia, not almond but the crazy color is there. Now your perception of the image, the emotion when your eyes go back, will read the words and the picture with new clarity.

Mothering a Bad Hero

When Mom Was My Age
Link for Interview By my Daughter about when I was nineteen. Please go read it, I love Jane Friedman's project about motherhood, how we see those we love and collaborative writing.


Savannah copyright Caroline Gerardo 2011
This is just a short post about writing. I am plugging along editing. If you emailed
or called I will get back to you, soon.
I have two weeks left of writing for my deadline. I handed over a
copy to my second favorite reader. I will keep working through the last five
chapters. I thought about asking my old reader to have a look, but he has
been so distantly cold and out of my life it could only have a bad outcome.
I have chopped out beats and scenes that didn't move. I am on the last
legs of my novel marathon, this part I just breathe.

The story has a great
deal of mental mahem.
My hero is a psycho.
Can a thriller have a bad hero?

I guess I'm his Mommy, being the author I still love him.
That is creepy.
Laughing-- back to work.

ROW80 Writing Goals

 

Jane Brucker, 2011 reading at her Art Opening photograph by Caroline Gerardo copyright 2011

Portrait # 2 Caroline Gerardo

 

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Caroline Gerardo Being a Writer

books [image error]
Caroline Gerardo
photograph by Blair Barbeau copyright  2011

I need a black and white photograph for the Thriller Fest catalogue. I just signed up. I fussed over this weekend. Daughter says I need to look tougher. I was thinking the turtle neck beatnik look. She says NO smiling Mom. I think I have settled on this image.
All these silly decisions can make a person wake up thinking.
Learning curve for an author: it is not just about writing a great book.
1. Edit like a demon - use words as clean as arrows or ones with secret sauce. Writing is not just a process it is an art. (background ballet dancers, symphony and  Musée d'Orsay )
2.know formatting for epub, pdf, word, HTML, paperback sizing. I love Garamond and some formats don't - why? Know why. Understand everything about publishing.
3. Learn to produce and worst of all edit a video trailer ( I wake up hearing the word string) Perhaps my next thriller is about an author killing a video editing program/softwear.
4. Social networking: finding your posse. They call it platform I think of it as posse. Manage the time reading all the fabulous things the posse is doing .I find myself lured by the siren song of now twenty one books on my nightstand that I am dying to read. I think there is some procrastination self-sabatoge in the pile of books. Share with anyone all the great opportunities in the world today. We live in such an amazing moment in time.
5. Memorize new poetry to keep word choices with a sound and a fury ( thank you William F.)
6. Keep taking photographs for blogging and visual cues for the writing. I am playing with the idea of using the thousands of pictures I have in a online reading version.
7. Promptly answer emails and incoming requests This task surprises me. I am hearing from strangers who now are friends.
8. Ask for opportunities for reviews, ask people to listen to me read, ask for people to buy my books
as I write this please link on the Smashwords site and order a FREE BOOK or go buy one at AMAZON .
9. Exercise, keep up the day job, feed and water the children -garden and pets.
10. Pray, be thankful, and tell everyone how dear they are to me. Show my joy and love to them. Write some more.
If you are attending Thriller Fest email or tweet me I plan to have fun.

Portraits Caroline Gerardo 1

 

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Sharks Are Friends Ban Shark Fin Soup

Indie Writing ChallengeDispel a stereotype is my challenge from Jen O.
 I am experimenting with interactive links.Please provide input about the interactive aspect. Readers please provide comments. I will include and change the text this next week.
I am looking for you story changes, ideas, responses.
Should AB 376 be thrown out of California?
Is it prejudicial against Asian culture to ban shark fin soup?
Everything you say I intend to incorporate in the body of the text. ***

Sharks actually save lives. Sharks provide oxygen.

Sharks are an apex predator. They are a necessary balance in the universe. There are about sixty shark attacks on humans worldwide on humans. Sharks need a new Public Relations Representative. Over fishing and shark finning have placed many shark species on endangered lists. We will miss the mighty shark. http://bit.ly/dycB0S



The brutal practice of shark finning is a multibillion-dollar industry. While the shark is living, the fins are sliced off. The anglers throw the body back into the sea to drown. The process is wasteful and cruel.
http://dsc.discovery.com/sharks/shark-finning.html


Shark fin soup is a delicacy in Asian restaurants sold for up to three hundred and fifty dollars a bowl. The fin provides no flavor to the broth. Chicken and pork stock reduce to provide the taste in the dish. Believers think the fin provides mythical powers of strength and an aphrodisiac.

http://www.greenmuze.com/animals/wild/2100-shark-fin-soup-facts.html



Seventy percent of the world's oxygen comes from phytoplankton if we kill off sharks we will reduce the air we breathe. Sharks feed on many of these plankton-eating fish. Sharks keep the ocean in balance and provide the world's oxygen supply.
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0921800901002737



The ecosystem of the Atlantic Ocean is off balance. The disappearance of species of sharks is one cause. This demonstrates why we must conserve remaining shark species. Sea scallops disappeared from the lack of large predatory sharks in the coastal waters of the Atlantic. During the past thirty years, an explosion in the number of ray, skate and small shark species that they prey on, devastated organisms at the bottom of the food chain.

"Large sharks have been functionally eliminated from the east coast of the US, meaning that they can no longer perform their ecosystem role as top predators," said Julia Baum a fisheries biologist at Dalhousie University in Halifax, Canada and co-author of the study.

"With fewer sharks around, the species they prey upon - like cownose rays - have increased in numbers, and in turn, hordes of cownose rays dining on bay scallops have wiped the scallops out."

Several of the larger shark species in the northwest Atlantic are verging on extinction, according to Baum and colleagues who analysed a dozen surveys dating from 1970 up to 2005."



http://cmsdata.iucn.org/downloads/ssg_pelagic_report_final.pdf

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