Sarah Wynde's Blog, page 29

Winhall Brook Camping Area, Ball Mountain Lake

I headed out on Tuesday morning with last hugs all around — the hugs that said, “I am a world adventurer venturing forth on a daring and risky excursion that will last for months,” instead of what would have been far more accurate casual waves of “See you in a couple weeks/months.” I wasn’t sure how far I was going or where I would spend the night, but I needed to dump the tanks, after having spent most of a month sitting still in PA, and I wanted to spend at least a night in New Hampshire on my way to Maine and a meet up of fellow Travato owners.

Along the way, it started to storm. So many beautiful days in PA, and once I’m on the road, rain? Really? But I stopped at a rest stop and waited it out, because why not? As a result, I didn’t make it all the way to New Hampshire, but I decided that was fine, because instead, I stopped at an Army Corp of Engineers campground in the Green Mountain National Forest of Vermont.

Now that I’ve (almost) been to every state, I’ve been contemplating other travel goals and one of them might be to visit all the national forests. I’m not going to try to get to all the national parks; there are too many of them, and they’re too crowded. But I like the idea of visiting all the national forests, as much because I’ve never heard of lots of them, so it would be adventuring in the unknown a lot of the time. I had heard of the Green Mountain National Forest, though, and it was just as lovely as expected. Also very green.

The campground had a spot available in the hook-ups section, which I took because I needed water, so it was a good opportunity to fill up my water tanks. It was a great deal, too — dry camping (ie camping without electricity or water) was $20/night and with hook-ups, it was $26. Getting to fill my tank and charge my computer for $6 felt like a bargain. If I ever go back there, though, I will definitely aim to dry camp, because the campsites with electricity were a little more parking lot than I like. A nice parking lot, on grass, with trees, but sites close together. I spent the late afternoon listening to kids running around playing and my neighbors chatting. Perfectly nice, but all things being equal, one of the quiet spots overlooking the river in the much more secluded dry camping section would have been more my speed.

[image error]Serenity’s campsite: lovely for $26, but those neighbors are pretty close.



[image error]The view from the back of one of the dry camping sites.

I didn’t use any of the facilities except the dump station, so I can’t provide a shower report, but it was a beautiful place. No internet, though, so I couldn’t research my next day’s travels. Oops.

The next morning I headed out early. I knew I was going to spend the night in New Hampshire, but I didn’t know where. Instead of picking a destination for the night, though, I let S’s voice (imagined, in my head, not her real voice) influence my destination. New Hampshire has exactly one site listed in the National Parks passport, the Saint-Gaudens National Historic Site. I had no idea what it was, knew absolutely nothing about it, but off I went.

Departure imminent

I think I’ve probably written about this before, but traveling in a camper van is adventurous; sitting still in a camper van is just living in a car. Tomorrow I leave for New Hampshire, then Maine and Massachusetts, and I am so looking forward to being back on the road again. I’ve had a lovely visit with family, but the annoyances of life in a van start to add up the longer I sit still.

However, this was sitting still for a very good reason: yesterday evening R & M arrived, on their way south from a summer spent working as a camp counselors in Vermont. We had sous vide flank steak, potatoes, and summer salads with sweet corn, tomatoes, avocado and pickled onion for dinner pretty much the second they got here, which I mention mostly so I remember that sous vide flank steak was pretty good. I’m not sure it was so much better than regular marinated flank steak that it’s worth the effort, but I think if I ever make it again, I will up the sous vide time to four or five hours and see if that makes it incredible. It might! But I was delighted to discover that R had picked up his own sous vide cooker at a garage sale in Vermont. I like seeing my cooking influence spread, I guess.

Blueberry season is definitely over, which makes me a little sad. It was impossible to pick it all, so we turned it over to the birds. It’s amazing to come back to the bushes and discover that all the berries that were left have disappeared but it’s nice to know that the birds feasted. And the end of blueberry season means that apple season has begun. Not today, but when I come back in a few weeks, I look forward to a plethora of delicious, crispness.

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Meanwhile, today I have R & M to play with. I believe we’re going to try to fix a tail light on M’s car; do a little shopping; and go out to lunch. And I would rather be doing all of that than writing a blog post, so off I go. Enjoy your Mondays!

Best of July 2019

For a moment, when I thought about writing this post, I thought, “Oh, no, I haven’t taken a single picture in July.”

Duh. Totally wrong. I took many, many pictures, because the best part of July was spending time with the Best Brother Ever’s puppy.

[image error]Best Brother Ever’s first dog says, “Seriously, it’s time to save me from this little pest.”

Also, of course, BBE’s kids. Well, and him. And his wife, aka Best SIL Ever. But mostly the puppy.

Three Years

New Year’s Eve is usually the time when people look back and reflect on their past year, look forward and contemplate their next year. But three years ago today, I signed the paperwork, closing on the sale of my house, and drove off into the sunset.

If I was going to do this post justice, I’d add up the numbers: how many campgrounds, how many states, how many miles. But I’m honestly just not inspired to do that much work. Sometimes it’s fun to go through my calendar and make lists, but this past month has been filled with that kind of chore, so I’m not going to bother.

That’s a little ironic because I’ve actually been thinking about this post for months. What have I learned in three years of living in a van? What has 50,000 miles of driving taught me? But there are so many answers. Mostly that water is precious and that I really don’t like driving very much. I still miss my house sometimes, although not nearly as much as I miss Bartleby, and I still worry about the future more than I should.

Before I decided that I wasn’t going to make lists, I opened up my photos app to look at pictures. I was thinking that this past year wasn’t as busy as the previous two, that I did more adventuring in my first couple years of camping. Um, no. Not at all. Last summer was upstate New York and Vermont, followed by a delightful couple of months in Canada, then down through Maine and Massachusetts. Florida, then cross-country through Texas and New Mexico to California, and from California, a road trip to Oregon and Idaho, then north to Washington, and cross-country again. Lots of people, lots of places.

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But not enough sunsets. That is, of course, not literally true — we all have exactly the same number of sunsets, after all. But not enough appreciating of sunsets. When I consider the past year, especially in contrast to the previous couple, the real thing that strikes me is that I’m spending way too much time worrying about what comes next and not enough appreciating where I am.

So! Goal for year 4: more sunset pictures.

Thanks!

Thanks to everyone who shared their auto-buy authors with me! I have to admit, I don’t think I discovered the magical author whose name is going to open a world of new readers to me via $10 worth of advertising, but I did find lots of people who I might be interested in reading, so that’s a nice thing. Although maybe not a good thing for my writing career purposes. Too much reading generally translates to not enough writing.

My current experiment is with voice recognition software. I was hoping that I could pick up the pace of my writing by eliminating a step between my brain and the end product. There are authors who swear by voice recognition, and claim that it makes their writing much faster. They can produce more because they’re talking to their computer instead of typing.

Ha.

An actual paragraph via voice recognition:

I was also hoping to work on my mailing list today Area reasonably stupid however answered me not want productive. When I was working on a precarious magic I stop looking at the computer in the end result with a couple paragraphs but I could not fight her at all. I had no idea what I was trying say. A triumph of technology.

And I think it’s really funny that the last line actually worked. Irony! So far I’ve tried the voice recognition in four different apps and they all seem to have their own unique quirks, but even if practice does make perfect, I don’t think voice recognition is going to be any kind of panacea of writing productivity for me. Oh, well.

I moved over to the garden house yesterday, and last night I got to have the windows open while I went to sleep. It’s been weeks since I was able to do that, and it was so lovely. Firefly season is mostly over, but there were still a few isolated sparks in the darkness and the sky was clear enough to see stars. It reminded me of all the great reasons to live in a van. In four days, it will be three years since I left my house. I feel like I ought to do a year-in-review post — how many places did I go? Cross-country both ways means that there were a lot of states involved. But I think I’ll save that post for Monday.

Meanwhile — again in the not-writing category — I’ve been playing some more with the fun ad-creation tool I discovered, www.bookbrush.com. My latest:

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I made up a logo for myself a couple weeks ago when I was working on a mailing list email and needed something to put in the “logo” spot, but I actually quite like it. I honestly don’t think having a pretty Facebook cover on my almost non-existent business page is going to sell any books, but it still makes me smile so that counts for something.

And now, back to Fen. I got stuck on something silly — the word to describe an angry cat’s tail — so I started writing a blog post instead, but I am determined that today will be a day of many words, even if that means it turns into an evening or night of many words. But a snippet for the fun of it (with the usual caveats of draft, might not make it into the real book, la-di-dah, whatever)…

Fen glanced at him just as the kitten shimmered into view on his shoulder. 

Its green eyes were glowing with a hard, red, extremely creepy light. It wasn’t the weird but natural glow of light reflecting off an animal’s eyes at night. It wasn’t even a normal, if authoritarian, stop-light red. This red was the deep, rich shade of fresh blood. 

It screamed “Danger” like no color Fen had ever seen before. 

“Oh, shit.” Fen barely had time to breath the words and take a nervous step backward before Ghost launched off of Luke’s shoulder. 

Auto-Buy Authors

I wrote a blog post last week and didn’t post it, because it was sad, and also because it stopped being true. I spent much of a day saying good-bye to Zelda, torn between rushing her to a strange vet and letting nature take its course, eventually deciding through many tears that the most loving thing to do was to just be with her, letting her know how much I loved her.

Nature decided that it was a bad day, but not the last bad day. A couple days later she ate a little chicken and by yesterday she was walking again. Not with any speed, and I’m still pretty sure that the baddest of bad days is coming soon… but it’s not going to be today, and that’s sufficient unto the day.

Meanwhile, I am puppy-sitting and working my way through that scary to-do list. I made definite progress — I think I’ve whittled it down to about twenty items, but of course, the twenty items left are some of the worst and scariest. One of them is so tiny — fix the Subscribe button on the sign-up widget — but the fact is, I have absolutely no idea how to do that and am probably going to easily spend a full day working on it, feeling frustrated and annoyed the whole time.

Is that a good use of my time? Obviously not. Does anyone really care if the subscribe button doesn’t look like a button? Well, I do, so yeah, probably there are some other obsessive people who would be bothered as well. Mostly, though, I think it feels like a symptom of my life being outside my control. So many things I can’t fix, can’t make better, but here’s a thing I could/should be able to fix. I wonder if I could convince myself that leaving it alone would be a signal of acceptance? And signal is not the word I want, but I can’t find the right one.

Speaking of things I can’t control, I’ve been experimenting with ads this weekend. I’d really like to get book sales back to where they were before I tried putting Ghosts into Kindle Unlimited. I was never earning enough money to live on, but I was steadily managing to push off the day when I’d have to start filling out job applications. That day is now zooming toward me. Is it ironic or just sad that one of the big reasons I’ve been avoiding a 9-5 is my reluctance to leave Zelda alone all day?

Anyway, ads. I had fun making them, but so far, they’ve been a pointless waste of money. My clickthrough rate is 0.13%, which is roughly equivalent to 0.

[image error]The long blurb



[image error]The simple blurb



[image error]The fancy ad

I might do better with more comparable authors — the authors I chose were almost at random, just people I liked, with audiences sizable enough to give me a big, reasonably inexpensive pool. (Robin McKinley, Sarina Bowen, Ilona Andrews.) So here’s a question for you: who are your auto-buy authors? Oh, and comments on the ads also welcome. Feel free to make suggestions!

Defying expectations

If you read my last two posts, you might reasonably expect today’s post to include the new cover for A Gift of Time. Alas, I don’t have it yet. I do, however, have the new cover for A Gift of Grace, which feels like an appropriate substitute.

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I didn’t ask the designer to add freckles to Grace, but we did get all fancy with both models’ clothing. Any second now they’ll be running into a bear. And I really like their expressions.

Alas, responding to comments on the last post reminded me that the point of new covers was to expand my audience and appeal to the many, many, many book-buying romance readers in the world, and those expressions are probably all wrong for that audience. I should have made him half-naked and had both of them looking sultry. Covers like that might not have been to my personal taste (or yours!), but the point of a cover is to appeal to a specific audience and I’m not my own audience. Or at least I am my own audience, but I’m not the part of my audience that can buy enough books to let me go on eating and paying vet bills.

Oh, well. I still like their expressions.

I’ve been working on lots of marketing type things. Some of it is very fun. Much of it is not. But on the fun side has been trying out keywords to include on my book listings. “Ghost romance paranormal suspense mystery” should be a terrible set — according to Kindle Rocket, there are 6046 books found with that search. But, at least yesterday, A Gift of Ghosts was at the very top of that list, which means it’s a terrible set for some other 6000 books, but not a terrible set for my book. That was fun to discover.

Speaking of Amazon, today is Amazon Prime Day and I had $10 of Amazon money from spending $10 at Whole Foods, plus the $5 Prime Day deal on printed books, so I spent a very pleasant 45 minutes looking at all the items on my wish list and deciding what not to buy. But I finally went for Salt Fire Acid Heat, a cookbook I’ve been debating forever. I’m probably not going to carry it around in the van with me, but I’m at my brother’s so I can store it with my Christmas ornaments and scrapbooks when I drive away. And I’m excited to read it.

I’m suspecting that this week isn’t going to be a terribly productive week for me, though. I’m dog-sitting, so I’ll have three dogs to take care of, and the puppy is energetic and always trying to convince the two older dogs to play. This does not go over well with the two older dogs, so dog-sitting the puppy is a lot more like dog-sitting a toddler than it is house-sitting. But it should be fun, even if it means that I don’t finish all the many miscellaneous things that I’m working on.

To-do list

I created a To-Do list this morning with well over 80 items on it. Not a single one of those items was “create a to-do list”.

Also, not a single one of those items was “spend twenty minutes browsing to-do list apps on the app store, hoping to find one that’s better than plain text before giving up in frustration.” If you’ve got a recommendation for a to-do list app, I’d love to hear about it in the comments.

Actually, my to-do list is kind of a work of art. But it does not include “write a blog post,” so I’m going to make this quick.

Pennsylvania continues to be lovely but I am spending far too much time sitting on the guest bed banging away on my computer. I’m taking advantage of the internet to try to get lots of internet-related business tasks done — updating my mailing list software, setting up an automation sequence, working on the websites, that kind of thing. I’d rather be outside playing with my niece and the dogs, but honestly, it’s about time I took the work side of life a little more seriously.

Speaking of which… a more serious cover.

[image error]Guys in stock photos never shave.

Cover reveal for a familiar book

As of today, I have written approximately 762,000 words of fiction. That sounds like a lot unless you know that my goal in October of 2011 — before I even finished writing A Gift of Ghosts — was to write a million words, then decide if I wanted to be a writer. Having written approximately 200,000 words of fanfiction in the preceding twelve months, it didn’t seem unrealistic.

Oh, well.

As I said several months ago, I don’t need to finish those words to know that I’m going to be a writer.

But I’m not just a writer: I’m also a publisher.

And one of the best parts of being a publisher is getting to look at the covers of your books and say, “Hmm, I think I’m ready for something new.” I tried updating the typography on the Tassamara series, thinking that would satisfy me, but it didn’t, so last month, I hired Kelley York of Sleepy Fox Studio and described my dream cover of A Gift of Ghosts to her.

Without further ado, my ‘something new’.

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What do you think? Does it match your ideas of the characters? Would it be your dream cover? I haven’t updated the book yet, because I’m waiting until I have new covers for all the books in the series, but I couldn’t wait to share it!

Scribbles and blueberries

[image error]This morning’s harvest of blueberries.

I arrived at my brother’s house a week ago. Since then, I have picked a great many blueberries. Nowhere close to picking them all, though! We could easily spend three or four times as long and still come nowhere close. The blueberries are prolific this year. Also delicious. Even some of the bushes I haven’t liked in past years — too bland or too small — are good this summer. Maybe it’s because of all the rain? And my favorite bush, which in years past has only had scattered handfuls of berries, has hundreds of them this year. It’s blueberry heaven.

Every time we go pick, though, usually reasonably early in the morning, I both enjoy myself and am incredibly thankful that my life doesn’t actually require me to pick berries for a living. It’s a peaceful, pleasantly monotonous chore for about twenty minutes. And then I start to get hot and sweaty and the mosquitoes begin to attack or I put my knee down on a thistle or my hand into a spiderweb and I’m really grateful that I can stop whenever I want to. We walk away with our full tubs of berries and leave plenty on the bushes for the birds or for the next day’s picking.

Ironically, I woke up this morning with stiff neck and shoulder muscles that had nothing to do with berries. I’ve been spending a lot of time on my computer: working on a marketing plan, a mailing list strategy, some website updates, edits to A Lonely Magic, and words on its sequel. The last has been the least successful of those endeavors, but I spent hours on my laptop yesterday, trying to get back into the swing of it.

Along the way, I updated the Scribbles page with a couple of my favorite fanfiction stories, some unfinished stories that I like, and a scene that I cut from A Gift of Time long ago. It felt like a very productive day at the time, but this morning it felt like I’d been doing heavy labor. But having real internet feels like such a luxury — I want to take advantage of it while I can. One of the unfinished stories is so tempting, too — it’s always the way of the words: the story I’m writing feels like work, the story I’m not writing feels like temptation. (I was going to tell you which one, but I will wait and see if anyone wants to guess first.