Lise McClendon's Blog, page 30

Virtual Launch Party — Thursday April 7

It's HOT!

That flaming volcano cocktail looks good, doesn't it? Maybe a blood orange margarita? Champagne? Side of chocolate? Unfortunately you're on your own about the booze. But come to the chat and hang with some really fun writers and readers! We're gathering on Thursday evening, April 7, at 9 pm EASTERN (that's 8 CENTRAL, 7 MOUNTAIN, 6 PACIFIC, Arizona — you're on your own.) Thalia Press is celebrating the launch of all our books as electronic books, and well, just about anything else we can think of…. spring flowers, tweety birds, crime fiction, and flaming cocktails!

Join us: Thalia Press Virtual Launch Party

See you there!

Stressed for time? Try a short story.

I confess. Long-form fiction, the novel as it's called, is my preference. But every so often I get a smaller, that is shorter, idea. And a short story is born. This happened with the short story INDIAN SUMMER that has just been published in the anthology called DEADLY BY THE DOZEN.

now available for Kindle, Nook, & Smashwords

INDIAN SUMMER is set in Montana on the dry, high plains where the wind is your most constant companion. This setting, brutal, lonely, maddening at times, is a catalyst to the story of a ranchwoman at the end of her rope. If I tell you much more, this post will be the short story! So I'll let it go at that, a crime story at the edge of winter, deep in the Montana countryside.

I'm excited to be part of my first e-book anthology, edited by Mark Terry. E-books are just made for short story anthologies, in my opinion. (Be on the look-out for the very first e-anthology from Thalia Press later this year!) Download the entire anthology, twelve stories (of course!), for only $2.99. Then read them on your Kindle, Nook, or any e-reader that reads Smashwords. The cool thing is, you don't have to like all the stories. Check out the ones by Keith Snyder, Mary Reed & Eric Mayer, and Simon Wood. Try out stories by an exciting crop of new writers. Move on if they don't click with you. Hey, it's only $2.99! Less than any print magazine on the newsstands.

Enjoy!

For Kindle: link here!  For Nook: link here!  For Smashwords: [oops, coming soon!]

E-book alErt!

At long last all four Alix Thorssen mysteries are out in two electronic formats: Amazon Kindle and Barnes & Noble's Nook. For Blue Wolf, the fourth in the series set in Jackson Hole, this is its first appearance in the virtual book world. With a cool new cover!

Blue Wolf now out for Kindle & Nook

Blue Wolf is a hot slice of eco-fiction wrapped up in an art auction in Jackson Hole. One of the gray wolves reintroduced in Yellowstone National Park has migrated south to Grand Teton National Park. Private ranches dot the park and competing environmental and land use issues abound. Throw in Alix Thorssen who thinks she saw a wolf once years before, and an eccentric artist eager to settle an old score, and there is a potent mix for the outing of old secrets as well as mayhem around the killing of the new wolf. As always Alix juggles her gallery, her art, her boyfriend, and the quirky residents of Jackson Hole, with humor, curiosity, and many cups of coffee.

The reviewer for the San Diego UNION-TRIBUNE had this to say about Blue Wolf: "A few writers are gifted with a feel for place that transforms locale from mere background into a vital element of the story itself, as important as the human characters who inhabit it… (for instance) Tony Hillerman and James Lee Burke. To their number add Lise McClendon, who has taken the small resort town of Jackson Hole and the Wyoming wilderness that surrounds it, and made it her own.  McClendon weaves a persuasive story, as haunting as the landscape it occupies and blessedly free of manufactured melodrama. In Alix, she gives us a heroine both captivating and credible."

Thinking Roots — one amazing Nebraska novel

Nebraska isn't always a literary star. Not because there aren't fabulous people there, readers, writers, and all. But the last Nebraska novel I can think of is Boys Don't Cry, based on real happenings in a small town, none of them very pretty. So it was with some anticipation, and trepidation, that I picked up The Echo-maker by Richard Powers.

The big "National Book Award Winner" sticker on the paperback's cover did help! And Nebraskans can be proud of their portrayal in this novel. The author is not from the state as far as I can tell but he has a winner. The setting is Kearney, during and around the sandhill crane migration which has made this mid-point USA town a magnet for bird lovers.

Many of my loved ones are from Kearney, including my husband and my inlaws. My best bud Susan went to college there, not to mention the whole Adams clan. One of my favorite English professors taught at Kearney State, before it was renamed University of Nebraska-Kearney. I am from Lincoln, down the interstate a ways. But in some ways this place, Kearney, along the wide, flat Platte River, personifies prairie life in Nebraska: not too big, not too small, pretty flat, pretty isolated, but pretty in its way.

The Echo-maker is an engrossing look at the nature of relationships and identity. A young man rolls his truck one winter night during the crane migration. He recovers from his brain injury in all but one way: he no longer recognizes his family. Since his older sister is really the only family he has left, it is her burden to bear. There is more, the way the instincts of the brain work, in humans and birds, the peculiar nature of the outside expert, the hope and despair of growing up.

I'd love to read more great novels set in Nebraska. Send 'em on!

The End of the Januaries

I confess. I am one of those people who hate January. So today, its very last day, I am celebrating. I survived January and all I got was this damn cold. In reality January in Montana in 2011 was pretty mild. It started out fairly normal, days in the teens and 20s and lows overnight around zero. But then it got warm. And despite myself and my fears about global warming, I rejoiced. Highs in the 40s? Mark me down as "Like"! Now it's cold again, we're finally getting that arctic blast we get every year, but we've made it all the way to February so no worries. Spring is just around the corner.

My novel continues apace. Second winter now and not quite done. I've got over 80,000 words though and am closing in on the end. The end of a novel is important. The beginning is somewhat freer, when you can throw all sorts of plots and subplots at the characters and you don't have to completely make sense. But at this stage reason is important. The various threads must be tied up. The major plot must rock. And its ramifications must vibrate through everything.

This book could be a series. I feel it. I've written mostly stand-alones the last few years. But this one has a great young policewoman who could be a series character. I like her. So that figures in how I end the book as well. I need to pull out all the stops on the ending but also leave a few things for future books. I'm hoping to be done before Left Coast Crime in Santa Fe at the end of March so I better get cracking.

Janus is the god of past and future, forward and backward, the two faces. I choose forward. The publishing biz being what it is that may be crazy. But I have a choice and I choose the future. What will it be? I can't wait. What does yours hold?

January levity

My first little xtranormal cartoon… to start your new year off with a laugh. (Thanks to Jeff and Steve for telling me about this fun site — hey, make your own little movie! Go ahead.)

World's Greatest Surgeon

 

all the best

Blackbird Fly in Nook format

First time in an electronic format besides Amazon… you can now get Blackbird Fly for Barnes & Noble's e-reader, the Nook. Wouldn't that lavender field look great on the new color Nook? Only $3.99 (for the book!).

You can also download a sample of the book. Try it! Click on the book cover.

Perfection in Fiction? I don't think so.

Michael Cunningham, author of "The Hours," one of my favorite novels, has written an essay in the New York Times about writing and reading. All novelists must read! Here's the link: Found In Translation. It's a truthful, heartfelt look inside the author's intentions and disappointments.

I often say that I'm into completion, not perfection. Especially in writing. Perfection will kill you. Because it does not exist and the sooner that is understood, the sooner sanity will rule. However I also often wish I was more into perfection; I could surely be a better writer. I know I can write, well, if not a perfect novel, one that is closer to perfect. One that fulfills that dream inside my head of what this story is really about. But this line from Michael Cunningham made me feel better about myself: "A novel, any novel, if it's any good, is not only a slightly disappointing translation of the novelist's grandest intentions, it is also the most finished draft he could come up with before he collapsed from exhaustion."

It wasn't exhaustion because I was only halfway through my new novel but I stopped writing for the summer. No doubt a horrible mistake. Now I have to get going again, get that story back in my head. But I did it, I was busy, I moved and am still unpacking stuff that I now sincerely regret ever seeing in a store, let alone buying and bringing home and moving from home to home over the years. My new study is painted a luscious apricot color and the desk is almost clear enough to use. A couple weeks ago I was visiting my mother and telling her what my new book is about. And lo and behold, in telling her I figured out what it's really about! So sometimes the break is a good thing. Now to figure out how to write the perfect novel. The first ever. Sigh. Or just the very best translation of the movies in my head. Now that's a little more sane.

The Brave New E-World

As an author I'm very interested in the publishing world, of course. And that means electronic books these days. There was a recent discussion in New York that seemed to get to the heart of the matter for authors, that is, how will royalties work. Or how they might work in various models. If you're as confused as I am about the "agency model" this is a pretty good summary from Publisher's Weekly. To make it even more concise (for you authors) here's the nugget: "a publisher, on a title with a $26 list price, makes roughly $5.10 on the hardcover while the author makes $3.90. On the e-book sold through the wholesale model, the publisher brings in $9.25 while the author gets $3.25. On the e-book sold through the agency model, the publisher gets $6.38 and the author gets $2.28." You can see why publishers like the wholesale model. The prices of these e-books isn't mentioned but I assume these are new bestsellers since most newish—but not new bestelling — e-books sell for $9.99 at Amazon anyway.

Another interesting essay about another discussion in NYC featured agent Simon Lipskar and other angry souls. It features in a fabulous new blog I just found called FutureBooks out of the UK: We'll All Lose Money Then We'll Learn. I like the way Lipskar stands up for authors, as well he should. Especially when Kindle Content director David Naggar had the audacity to exclaim that "there's never been a better time to be an author." Except of course if you're trying to make a living at your writing. And the ground under your feet feels like quicksand sometimes.

Most of this brave new world is still being formed by god's hands, or God Bezos's hands, or God Jobs's hands. Apple for their ipad is trying to get lower prices for ebooks. Some publishers acquiesced, some didn't. It makes little difference to me at this point since my e-books are reprints of out-of-print books and I can sell them for whatever I want because I own the rights to them. Only one of my NYC publishers published one of my novels as an e-book: Sweet and Lowdown which is now almost impossible to find and only came out as a Palm Reader E-book. I have now published myself through Amazon three of my Alix Thorssen novels and am working on Blue Wolf and One O'Clock Jump (from the Dorie Lennox series.) And the new one, Blackbird Fly. Most of these are $2.99 and less. It's great to have them available digitally, if only for the Kindle at the mo, but the money stream is more like a Chinese water torture. Still, it is the future. And I'm hanging onto the tiger's tail.