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A Gift of Time on Amazon

A Gift of Time on Amazon

Ta-da!

It’ll be free on Saturday, December 21st and Sunday, December 22nd. If you’re happy to contribute to my coffee fund, I am, of course, delighted if you buy it. (Not to mention that purchases help way more for the Amazon algorithms that let other people see it.) But if you can’t afford it, I’m totally sympathetic to that, too. Pick it up on Saturday.

And please tell your friends! (If, you know, they might like a fast-paced, quirky, romantic ghost story.)

(x-posted on The Write Push. Which *is* lazy of me, but yeah, so it goes. It’s been a long week.)

A Gift of Time

Natalya Latimer’s ability to see the future has been as much curse as gift. Knowing that she would someday find his dead body destroyed her relationship with her best friend and lover. But when it finally happens, nothing turns out the way she expected it to and suddenly she’s flying blind, with no gift to tell her where she’s going.

And done.

I went on an editing binge. Completely stiff from not moving for hours in a row, hungry, cranky, voice worn out from reading aloud.

But I clicked the Amazon publish button twenty minutes ago.

(Cross-posting at The Write Push)

Editing, editing, more editing

I am completely hyphen incompetent. I never knew that before. And I long to hyphenate hyphen-incompetent. Doesn’t it look better that way? Isn’t it easier to read and understand?

“Trying to” — why do all my characters try to do things? Can’t they sometimes just DO the thing? And speaking of that, what is my obsession with the word “just”? Do I really need to use it five times a chapter?

Editing is… ongoing. All of my quotation marks, both single and double, point in the right directions. My em dashes are actual em dashes and not double hyphens. Only one of my characters ever uses a dry voice and only one ever has a wry smile.

But I am only on the 5th chapter and my frustration level is rising. Lots of people liked the story, I remind myself. But when I edit, every perfectionist instinct I have kicks into over-drive. Gah. Should overdrive be hyphenated? Over-drive, overdrive… if this was a book, I’d spend at least a couple minutes looking it up and reading definitions. Fortunately, it’s a blog post. But I did backtrack there to delete “just” as in “just a blog post.”

My wrists are tired. I’m usually good about taking breaks, because I’ve seen people with bad carpal tunnel syndrome and no, thank you, not interested in doing that to myself. But it’s been a long couple of days. And as soon as my iPad gets enough charge that I can keep reading, I’ll get back to it.

It’s so close that I can taste it. The day I post Time on Amazon, I’m getting sushi for dinner. I don’t care that I can’t afford it. I’m doing it anyway. Meanwhile, I had no idea that “anymore” was a colloquialism. Live and learn.

The UK

Are you reading from the UK? If yes, I have to tell you that I love you.

I’ve been adding my book numbers up, because I have to fill out these tedious and crazy financial aid forms in order to get the darling boy into college. (While I do question whether this is a worthwhile endeavor, still, it’s the endeavor that I am trapped into doing by virtue of our joint middle-class upbringing which strongly implies that college is the be-all and end-all of teenage success. Even though I have to wonder whether maybe it’s more like selling him into indentured servitude and perhaps armed resistance would be a better path. Still, I fill out the forms, which brings us back to… yes, reading from the UK…)

Anyway, if you’re reading from the UK, I know something about you.

I know that if you read Ghosts, you then went on to read Thought. And you then went on to read the Spirits of Christmas. And yay, you! Thank you so much!! You are wonderful and you make me happy.

I suppose that there exists some possibility that some UK readers started with Thought or Spirits, so maybe I’m projecting too much onto the numbers. But basically, to the best of my ability to judge, every UK reader who buys Ghosts then buys Thoughts and Spirits as well, and something about that… well, it makes my toes curl with delight. If you’re reading this and you’re from the UK–well, actually, even if you’re not–leave me a note with your email and I’ll make sure you know when A Gift of Time will be free to download. I do, of course, greatly appreciate the cups of coffee that buyers give me, but I’d also really, really like to be able to say thank you by giving you the next book for free.

And speaking of next books–I’ve had ten beta reads now, not counting the first few on fictionpress. I think we’re pretty close to good to go. I’m guessing that by 12/15, A Gift of Time will be available at Amazon. Major revisions to a couple of chapters (10, in particular), a ton of tweaks here and there–I’m hoping it’s much more obvious exactly why Natalya has been holding a grudge all this years without turning Colin into an ass–and many, many minor edits. But most of the feedback has been solid on the fact that it’s a fun read, and in the end, that’s what counts.

I haven’t quite figured out what my release strategy ought to be. I suspect I’m basically an indie failure if I say, well, I’m going to post it and not worry about all that marketing crap. But that’s probably what I’ll do. I can always worry about all that marketing crap on the next book. (Grace! And who knew that in her head Grace is sarcastic and bitchy? Sweet as southern pecan pie on the surface, but underneath, she’s a cynic.)

Seattle Days

First day home after ten days in Seattle. I have both back doors wide open and from where I’m sitting, I can see two dogs lying in the sun. Oops, one noticed me, and decided to wander my way. Small break for dog petting…

It is good, good, good to be home. I need to unpack, I need to vacuum, I need to do laundry and I need to go grocery shopping, but for the moment, all I want to do is enjoy the humidity and the sounds of the outside world. 67% humidity and 78 degrees (or 26 Celsius), so it feels positively tropical.

Seattle is a dark city in the winter. I never thought much about latitude & longitude, but Florida is far enough south that the days are reasonably long even in the darkest part of the year. Seattle got dark before 5PM and stayed dark after 7AM. But the darkness made the holiday lights around Ballard sparkle all the brighter: they were so much prettier and more festive than the same lights here.

As most vacations are wont to be, it was both good and bad. The good I’d like to remember: waking up with Pam and Samara and Charlie for half an hour of giggling before getting out of bed; making books and stories with Samara and Jill; decorating the Christmas tree and discovering that some of the ornaments were made by preschooler R; listening to R and P watch The Walking Dead; going thrift store shopping with R; fun with cooking and grocery shopping, including the days spent cooking Thanksgiving dinner; talking to strangers in airports. The bad I’m just going to forget.

I’ve finished the first round of edits on A Gift of Time. Today’s goal: to tackle Chapter 10. Or, alternatively, to call it a recovery day, do some useful house stuff, and spend a lot of time snuggling with my dogs. It’s almost 11 and I could already really use a nap.

Trauma

Took my dog to the vet today, for the third time in four weeks. (This is Zelda, the angel dog, not Bartleby, the stray from July.)

She got the most traumatizing compliment ever. The vet said, “Even for her breed, this is a tough little dog.” The tech murmured something and the vet added, “This must be agonizing.”

Agonizing.

The word “agonizing” was used in relation to my angel.

I want to burrow under the covers with her for the next decade. Wake us up when they’ve figured out how to heal everything and give dogs eternal life, k?

And if I owe you an email (I know I owe several), tomorrow will, I hope, be the day.

(Chronic ear infection & a pus-filled ear, not–fingers crossed–anything life-threatening. Just, you know, agonizing. But she didn’t even whimper, just stared into my eyes and shook.)

First Time reviews

As an editor, I worked on somewhere between one and two hundred books. I cared about all of them. Some of them I loved. Some not so much. But I did my best to make them all as good as they could be, and then I let go.

Insecure authors, though, drove me around the bend. While I soothed them with reassuring words and compliments, inwardly I was usually thinking, “It’s a book, not a baby! Get over it!” Now I know, though, that editors are like day care workers or teachers. And authors are parents.

I’ve spent so much time on A Gift of Time. It’s not just a baby, it’s a really difficult baby. A pregnancy that involved pain and endless vomit and back-aches. Colic and allergies and ear infections. If it was a kid, it would have sensory integration disorder and temper tantrums and nightmares. Really, this baby — this baby was a pain in the ass.

I got my first feedback from readers on the end product last night. (Well, not the end product, but the current draft.) I cried. They weren’t tears of relief, exactly, but… maybe tears of gratitude? These were from reviewers on fictionpress, so not people I know, not people who are invested in not depressing me.

Two quotes:

“I know you struggled, at times, with this one, but in the end it was very well done. It is, by turns, funny, thought provoking, and suspenseful all while remaining true to character and story. I love intelligently written books, and this is one. I hope its fate is not USB purgatory, it completes the trilogy and is still a great stand alone read.”

“quite possibly one of the best stories I have ever read, published or otherwise. Thought-provoking, with a well-rounded plot and amazing details. As a frequent silent reader of this site, I’m very glad you made your characters mature, reasonable people with good sense and practicality. Plus, I love the interwoven supernatural and realistic themes.”

Like I said, I cried. I don’t even have words to express how comforted I was. And really, how very grateful I am to those two strangers who took the time to tell me that my efforts were worth something to them.

The incredibly difficult baby might, after all, grow up to be a charming, delightful adult.

Beta readers?

It’s been weeks since I blogged here, but I’ve been blogging every day over at the writing blog I mentioned early in October. I like blogging every day, as it turns out. I’m not sure I should be doing it here, because, wow, spoilers galore when I write about writing, but it has felt healthy for me to post about my successes and failures over there.

And — the news! — I have finally finished the first draft of A Gift of Time. To be absolutely honest, it might suck. After seventeen months, I am apparently way too close to it to tell. So I might never publish it. But I’m looking for a few beta readers who are willing and able to be honest with me.

I’m not going to sell a bad book. Not, obviously, bad in the sense of poorly edited or sloppy, I would never do that. But books can be bad in other ways — flat, lifeless, awkward, unappealing characters, weakly plotted, etc, etc, etc. Writing groups will say, Oh, fix it in editing. And I’m a fan of editing. But I also think that as a writer, I learn more from writing new material than I do from interminable revisions on old material and this book has had a lot of revisions already. I’d rather move on and write something new than spend the next year revising this one.

So I need a few honest readers who will tell me what they think of it. And frankly, they might be the only people who get to see this story. If you would like to be one of them, either leave a comment (with your email address, obviously) or send me an email. I’ll send you a file, in the format of your choice — Word, epub, or Mobi.

Grammarly

I use Grammarly’s plagiarism checker because it provides me links to such entertaining reading material.

So I got an email from Grammarly a while back asking if I’d be interested in writing a sponsored post in exchange for a $10 Amazon gift card. I can’t say that I’ve ever considered the question of whether I’d write a sponsored post and I suspect that this will be the first and last I ever write. But I kind of wanted to try Grammarly out and they were also going to give me a two week free trial, so I figured, sure, might as well.

The very pleasant guy from Grammarly told me to write the first half of the above line, following it with a reason of my own. Preferably a catchy reason. (I don’t think he said that, exactly, but they do give their favorite reason of the month a $100 gift card. Mine will not be their favorite reason.)

I, of course, had to therefore try the plagiarism checker out. So I ran the first chapter — yes, one chapter, only 5000 words or so — through it. I’ll let the results speak for themselves.

Flagged as needing citation:

at the nape of his neck, longer than

should be cited to http://www.fanfiction.net/s/6318423/2... (A how to train your dragon fan fiction)

taste and smell of him filling her senses,

should be cited to http://www.amazon.com/Tipping-Point-e...
and she helped him to his feet

should be cited to http://bewilderingstories.com/issue29...

her. She put a hand up to stop him

http://www.fanfiction.net/s/4720045/3... (An iCarly fanfic)

What’s the last thing you remember?” she asked.

http://www.fanfiction.net/s/7831202/1... (Vampire Diaries)

take a look. I got out of the car and

http://forum.finsandfur.net/index.php...

was nowhere to be seen. “That wasn’t a

http://www.fanfiction.net/s/5268840/5... (Transformers/Beast Wars)

was many things but a cook was not one of them.

http://www.fanfiction.net/s/9227896/1... (Yu-gi-oh)

but the dark circles under her eyes were

http://bestlaidplans.homestead.com/Ch...

I can help with that. Let’s get you

http://www.fanfiction.net/s/6495996/1... (Harry Potter + WWW Raw crossover)

“I found you unconscious by the side of the road”

http://www.fanfiction.net/s/7438431/1... (bleach)

you think I’m going to let a kid

http://www.fanfiction.net/s/5509148/1... (Glee)

We should probably take her to a hospital

http://www.fanfiction.net/s/8946233/1... (Cartoons > Regular Show)

A heart attack happens when the blood supply to your heart

http://www.urmc.rochester.edu/cardiol...…

I feel as if there’s amazing potential for a game here. Like some kind of reverse Mad Libs, where you take the common phrases and write a completely different short story with them. I’m also impressed by my own apparent plagiaristic diversity — Yu-Gi-Oh and Glee, Transformers, and iCarly? Wow, what a wide range of taste I have.

And who knew that such a thing as Harry Potter and World-Wide-Wrestling crossovers even existed, much less that they had cornered the market on the use of the sentence, “I can help with that. Let’s get you”. I so want to know how that author finished the sentence. Let’s get you to the wrestling arena? The Gryffindor common room? Like, is it magical wrestling or is it wrestling at Hogwarts?

Anyway, I said I’d write a post and I did. It took me a surprisingly long time because I had to cut-and-paste all those phrases and citations one at a time, so I do feel like I’ve fulfilled my end of the deal. But I probably won’t submit it to get my gift card because…eh. It feels like I’m being mean. But it was so ridiculous that I had to share. Vampire Diaries and How to Train Your Dragon? Really?? It made me laugh. I’m willing to bet there are hundreds, if not thousands of stories and books in the world that include the sentence, “What’s the last thing you remember?” But, no, a Vampire Diaries fanfic gets the credit.

Postscript: You know, it did occur to me belatedly that if I was still in school, that level of citation checking would have rocked. If I was writing an academic paper, I would have loved it. It even gives you the citations in proper format — multiple types of format, depending on what you need — so you could just cut-and-paste the citations into your bibliography. Doing citations for academic papers is a pain, and I can imagine that having Grammarly as a backup to double-check that you cited everything would be seriously handy. If I hadn’t lost my hard drive, I’d run one of my papers through it and see how closely their citations matched the real papers that I used. Maybe I’ll see if I can find a backup.

Postscript 2: And yeah, no. I tried it with an academic paper and it was just as ridiculous. For example, half the titles of publications in my references got flagged as plagiarism with instructions to cite to the NCBI. That doesn’t even make sense. It’s like saying please credit the library for the books held within it. Not a useful tool!

Epcot’s Food and Wine Festival

Yesterday, C and I went to the Epcot Food and Wine Festival. Yay!

I missed R, of course. For years, he and I went together. We ate escargot and bison and he tried everything with an enthusiasm that made me quietly hum with pride and delight in him. I think, in fact, that somewhere on youtube there’s a little movie I made a few years ago of us at the Food & Wine Festival.

But missing R was not meant to be the point of this post! C and I had a good time. It was ridiculously, uncomfortably hot–sweat dripping down my back and down the back of my legs kind of hot–so we went into all the little shops between food stands. It was fun to browse in the stores and see all the jewelry and glass and perfume from around the world. For obvious reasons (ie, total lack of interest from the boy), R and I never spent much time doing that.

And our food choices were spectacular. We ate at Scotland: Seared Scottish Salmon with Cauliflower Puree, Watercress and Malt Vinaigrette and Vegetarian Haggis. Also Canada: Seared Rainbow Trout with Bacon, Frisee and Maple Minus 8 Vinaigrette and Wild Mushroom Beef Filet Mignon with Truffle Butter Sauce. Also New Zealand: Gratinated Green Lip Mussels with Garlic and Herbs, Lamb Meatball with Spicy Tomato Chutney, and Venison Sausage with Pickled Mushrooms, Baby Arugula and Black Currant Reduction. (If you’ve never been to the Food & Wine Festival, these are all tapas-sized portions, about $5 each and consisting of six or seven bites of food, not a full-fledged meal.)

My favorite was definitely the salmon from Scotland. It was delicious. Least favorite, the vegetarian haggis also from Scotland. It was not delicious, at least not to me. C liked it, though, so it wasn’t wasted. The beef from Canada was good, although really heavy on the mushrooms this year (and I’m not a mushroom fan). The rainbow trout was pretty yummy, but I probably wouldn’t bother to have it again. The mussels were remarkably good, better than I expected, because the garlic butter on them was yum. The lamb meatball — honestly, it tasted just like a meatball sandwich with tomato sauce. Nothing wrong with it, but eh. And I liked the venison sausage, but not the pickled mushrooms, while C thought that it wasn’t particularly appealing. Overall, though, it all added up to a really good meal and a remarkably nice afternoon.