Florence Witkop's Blog, page 65

Just saw a news item. This January has o

Just saw a news item. This January has officially been the coldest in the USA in a century. I thought it was cold, but I still like winter. I like the white of it, the snow piled in sculpted waves everywhere and hanging on tree branches. But to be completely honest, one of the things I like most about it is the fact that I don’t have to go out into that cold, white world. I curl up in my warm house and look outside and think to myself that it’s awesome and beautiful. then I pull a quilt a little closer around my shoulders and take a little snooze. Life in the winter is wonderful.

Got so caught up with having company tha

Got so caught up with having company that I almost forgot to post. Good company does that.

it’s like writing. When things are going right, time passes unnoticed and hours can be gone with no idea where they went. Other times, when the story comes hard, minutes can seem like hours. The odd thing, though, is that the result is often the same. I’ve written stories that readers have said were among the best I’ve ever written that were pulled from some place inside of me one word at a time with great effort. I was sure those stories would be terrible, but they weren’t. Other times, I’ve written a first draft in no time that ended up being the final version and they were good too.

I won’t mention those other stories, the ones that were truly bad. And I didn’t know they were bad until someone else told me.

I guess the moral of this post is that we writers need readers for a lot more than just reading our stories. We need them to vet our work, to tell us when we’re getting it right and when we aren’t.

Now if I could just know ahead of time which it would be before I sit down to write!

I sometimes enjoy illness. Not the terri

I sometimes enjoy illness. Not the terrible kind where I’d like to crawl into a hole and pull the hole in after me. Neither do I enjoy the kind where I have to drag myself across the room for a drink of water. But I find that the kind of illness where I wrap myself in a dozen or so blankets and lay against a couple of pillows in an over-sized easy chair while I eat ice cream and drink pop without a single twinge of guilt can be wonderful.

I also find such times good for the soul and the creative side of me. No worries, no pressure of any kind because, after all, I’m sick and can’t be expected to accomplish my normal day’s quota of work.

So I lay back, close my eyes, and dream of white dire-wolves, far-flung galaxies and whatever magical creatures might be lurking in the forest beyond my window. I’ll not open my eyes because if I do, they’ll disappear. And I’ll continue to dream until the illness has run it’s course and I once again return to the real world. But I’ll return a slightly different person for having had those lovely dreams.

Because sometimes a cold can be like meditation without the mantra.

I’ve decided that this is the winter of

I’ve decided that this is the winter of roller coaster weather. Warm to the point of thaw, then ridiculously cold. Then back to warm again. And somewhere along the way the snow has come. Not a lot at any one time, but it’s beginning to add up.

I’ve been blowing the driveway clean because lately I’ve been the only reasonably healthy person in our small household. And after a couple of times I went to the nearest hardware store and purchased one of those cute little plastic cabs that go over snowblowers to keep the snow from blowing in the face of the operator. Me. I’ve had it with ice-covered cheeks. No, after this I’m going to enjoy the process. Okay,. I enjoy the process even without the cab but that protection will make it even better. Because I do like winter but I also like comfort. Which is already creating problems with my future novel Polar Vortexk that’ll take place in a future ice age. I insist that my characters be comfortable in that cold weather. At least the major ones. Antifreeze in their veins? Built-in hand warmers? I don’t know just what yet, but there will be something.

Spirit Legend

Legends are fascinating. Most have a connection to reality, however tenuous. Some connections aren’t tenuous at all. Some legends are true. The three books of the ‘Legends’ trilogy are about those legends.

Legend says a spirit lives in the lake in the center of a tract of wilderness purchased by Macallister Outdoors. While Charlie, forester or Macallister Outdoors, and Ian Macallister, are checking out the new property… and incidentally the legend… a horrific storm destroys the forest and the beaver dam that created the lake.  Ian decides to stay in order to repair the dam. After all, it might be home to a spirit. Might be. Then night falls and lights appear over the water  and Ian and Charlie must face the fact that the legend was right and the spirit is real and might just blame them for the destruction of the lake it calls home.  But they soon learn that they can’t go home because the storm has destroyed the forest, their transportation and the trails they must follow to return to civilization. And they must come to terms with a spirit that wants to communicate with them.

I wrote this story because I love the north woods.  I love the wilderness in general and I’m glad I’ve been privileged to live in one of the forested regions of the USA.  Often, on walks through the woods, I’ve run across ponds or small lakes that are jewels in the forest.  They are the places photographers visit in the autumn to create greeting cards showing a pond surrounded by beautiful trees.  And I’ve always thought that such ponds or tiny lakes could well be home to unknown spirits.  So now you know the inspiration for Spirit Legend.

The inspiration for the storm that isolated the characters in the wilderness and destroyed the lake the spirit lived in was the July 4, 1999 storm that was the largest blow-down ever recorded in North America.  It devastated much of northern Minnesota. It only lasted about 20 minutes but the winds were in excess of 90 miles per hour.  It’s effects will be felt for a lifetime.  We were sitting in the kitchen that day when we saw dark clouds approaching.  As they grew nearer, it looked as if the earth itself was being lifted into the sky.  We ran for the basement.  Though we were fine, the wilderness was changed dramatically.  Our daughter, who was on a train shortly after the storm, told of looking out the train window for hours at a time and seeing trees that had been flattened by the storm.I cannot even imagine how many miles of forest were destroyed.  Even now, years later, we occasionally still see remnants of that storm.

Click here to buy from Amazon  

Click here to buy from Smashwords

_____________________________

I copied and posted my post about self-p

I copied and posted my post about self-pubbers needing a website that will be their ‘brand’ and that will help publicize their books to some groups I belong to. Don’t know what kind of response I’ll get. Possibly none. But I’ll have done a little bit to help turn the current confusion that is self-publishing into some sort of order. Given someone an idea, maybe got someone else started on doing something even if it’s not what I was thinking. Because there are always many, many ways of doing something and my way isn’t necessarily the best.

Some semi-famous writer once said that f

Some semi-famous writer once said that first you write the book, then you publish it, then you publicize it. I think that’s right. I’ve now written a few books, I’ve published them, and now I’m involved in publishing them even as I work on the next novel. It’s that part about doing all that as I work on the next novel that’s totally unexpected.

Because I didn’t think it would work that way. I thought I’d write a book, publish it, publicize it and then I’d go to work on the next novel without referring back to the previous ones. Hah!

I now know that writing and publishing independently is a never-ending process. The more books I write and publish, the more publicizing I do and that includes each and every book and short story of mine.

So here’s to the previous stories and books. The Eye of the Universe. Spirit Legend. Why Birds Fly. Down From the Mountain, The River Boy, When Dreams Do Come True. Wolf Legend. Write Like A Pro, The Goldfish Pone, Wanted Sharpshooter. And all those hundreds of previous stories I sold the rights to that I don’t have to publicize at all! You can find some of them in the re-published ‘Trues.’

And here’s to the next book. Earth Legend. May you get just as much TLC as my other babies. Maybe more because I’m learning.

Another blizzard came through the area.

Another blizzard came through the area. Lots of snow and even more wind. We don’t get it bad here in the trees because they block the worst of the wind. When we lived on the shore of a lake we had both the blizzard and the non-blizzard. We could stand on the shore of that frozen lake and watch the wind whip the snow horizontally across the world until it was packed hard. Then we could trek a few yards into the forest and the wind stopped and the snow fell gently and piled up as soft as feathers. Now, in a clearing, we experience both.

Maybe that’s why I want to write,The Polar Vortex, a novel set in a future ice age. Because snow and ice and cold in all their varieties are fascinating and are characters every bit as much as people are.

I’d like to continue from yesterday. Ok

I’d like to continue from yesterday. Okay, I’m back on that soapbox but I promise I’ll be as brief as possible and won’t go on and on until I kill this blog completely. But one of the reasons I’m a writer is because what I have to say becomes more clear as time passes. I’d make a terrible politician or anyone who has to think on their feet because I’d put my foot in my mouth on a regular basis. But give me time to consider whatever I’m thinking about and I come to some kind of sense. Which is what happened after yesterday’s post. Sooooo … I’ll now say what I was trying to say yesterday and didn’t say very well.

I want to talk about brands.

Brands are important. They are easily recognizable and they make a promise that whatever is associated with that particular brand will meet certain criteria. Nike promises good footwear and they deliver good footwear. Dorchester Publishing promises good reads and they deliver good reads. And so on. You get the idea.

What I was trying to say yesterday in my clumsy, meandering way is that self-pubbers need a brand that can be attached to those self-pubbed books that can and do both promise and deliver a good read by an independent, self-publishing author. And the best place to find that brand is on a website devoted just to it. Nike has a website. Dorchester Publishing has one. Why not a website for self-pubbers whose works meet the criteria of being both well edited and of providing a good read?

Okay, I’m hopping down from that soapbox because, much as I’d like to be the person to make it happen, I’m not right. I’m shortly going to get some help to get those cute buttons on my website so people can actually like my stuff. And maybe in the process I’ll get it linked to all the places it should be linked to but isn’t because I don’t know how to do it.

The sad truth is that I’m a technological klutz but I believe that there’s someone out there who has the ability to do this and I hope they get busy. I’ll help. I expect a lot of other people will too.

I started to reply to the Story Reading

I started to reply to the Story Reading Ape’s comment to my last post, then I decided it warrants a deeper explanation. So I’m devoting this post to the question of why I believe a separate site to sell self-published works is a good idea even though most such books are sold through Amazon, Barnes and Noble, etc.

Because self-pubbers need publicity similar to what the large publishing houses provide for their books. Large publishers not only promote the individual books they are publishing, they also advertise their own website as a place readers can go to find good reads.

Amazon, etc, does provide a place where the author can place purchased ads. And yes, they advertise the site itself. Everyone knows Amazon exists, most people have heard of Barnes and Noble and so on. But few people know what books are to be found on those sites beyond the best-sellers that are published by large paper and/or electronic publishers who have spent mega dollars promoting their own books. And that’s money spent on promotion beyond the actual publishing on Amazon or some other electronic platform.

Self-pubbers can’t compete with those advertising mega bucks but they can get together and create a website that’s similar to those large publisher’s websites and they can use every free means possible to advertise that site’s existence.

The fact that every book found on that site will have been vetted so as to meet editorial standards and to be classified by genre, length, and whatever other criteria seems practical can be similar to the promise of the large publishers that every book they publish will have been vetted by editors and checked for typos, etc. the result can be that someone who wants to buy a good book can go directly to the self-pubbers site and browse through the stacks, secure in the knowledge that all books there would have met whatever criteria the self-pubbers have created… and hopefully whatever book they buy will be worth the purchase price.

Whew!!! That’s all for now, guess I’ll jump off my soapbox.

But I do believe this is the direction that self-pubbers must go in order for their books to be found among the huge influx of good and bad literature that’s flooding the electronic book world. I also believe it will happen because surely I’m not the only author to be thinking this way.