E.D. Martin's Blog, page 42

Announcing the 2014 Reader of the Year Contest!

Four years ago, I started writing The Lone Wolf. I intended to stop with just that novel, but I’ve amassed quite a collection since then: nearly two dozen short stories published both independently and in various journals and sites, and a couple more novels in the works.

All this wouldn’t have been possible without readers. I’m grateful to everyone who’s read my stories, given me feedback (both in the beta stages and with reviews), and supported me as a writer.

As thanks, I’m announcing the 2014 Reader of the Year Contest! Basically, just read my stuff, write a review, and win prizes. It doesn’t get any easier than that.

Thanks again for all you do!

Weekend Writing Warriors 2/16/14 #WeWriWa

Continuing with the love theme for February, and picking up where we left off last week, today’s excerpt is from “The Kindness of Strangers,” a short story I wrote for The Indiana Horror Anthology 2011.

In this story, Laura left her friend’s party after seeing her ex with another girl. It started raining as she was walking down the road, and Alec offered her a ride, and a chance to vent.  Last week he gave her a powder that would ensure no one bothered her ex again.

Alec gripped her wrist and said, “Give him the powder.”

Laura nodded.

Alec let go of her. She massaged her burning skin, and when she looked up, Alec and the car were gone; just Laura, standing on the edge of the road.

She turned, walked with deliberate steps back to the farmhouse. Inside the crowd had disappeared, only her friend Megan left sprawled on the couch.

“Laura, where have you been all night?” Megan asked as she sprung up from the couch.

Laura paused and said in a flat voice, “I’m going to get Sam back.”

Post a link to your eight sentences blog entry, or join the fun at the Weekend Writing Warriors website.

I may be feeling a little overwhelmed

At my university, you don’t have to pay extra for any credits beyond 9 semester hours. Free classes, right? So, in the spirit of insanity, I’m taking 5 classes this semester (although one’s about to end and another start, so it’s just 4 at the same time).

And then I got a full-time job (which I love; although it’s in a field that makes my soul kind of heart I get to play in databases all day) that has mandatory overtime half the year.

And I have family obligations.

Oh, and writing – I’ve decided to go through my publisher, Evolved, for the short story collection I’ve been trying to release for the past year, and it should be released this summer. And I’m trying to finish polishing my next novel, A Handful of Wishes, which will hopefully be released in December.

A fellow grad student tonight, in a similar overload position, described herself tonight as “whelmed,” to which I responded:

How do you keep from being overwhelmed?

Weekend Writing Warriors 2/9/14 #WeWriWa

Continuing with the love theme for February, and picking up where we left off last week, today’s excerpt is from “The Kindness of Strangers,” a short story I wrote for The Indiana Horror Anthology 2011.

In this story, Laura left her friend’s party after seeing her ex with another girl. It started raining as she was walking down the road, and Alec offered her a ride, and a chance to vent.

“If you can’t have him, no one should, right?”

“Exactly,” Laura agreed, still lost in Alec’s eyes.

 

“I have just what you need,” he said as he opened the glove box and pulled out a small paper packet. “Put this powder in his drink, and no one will ever bother him again.”

 

“It won’t hurt him, will it?”

 

Alec turned to her, stared into her eyes. Why had she thought his were black? His irises were yellow; a wolf’s eyes.

Post a link to your eight sentences blog entry, or join the fun at the Weekend Writing Warriors website.

Why did I write a book while you didn’t?

Last week in one of my classes, we watched a TED talk by Bryan Stevenson. Take a few minutes to watch it too:

So, I’m going to assume you didn’t watch. In his talk, Stevenson tells a story about his grandmother. When he was little, she took him aside and told him he was special and would do great things, he should never drink alcohol, and he couldn’t tell anyone about this talk because she was only telling this to him out of the myriad grandkids. Skip ahead to high school, and he was out in the woods with his brother and sister, who were drinking beer. Pressured to have some, he kept declining until his brother asked him if this was about that talk their grandma had with him, and everyone else in the family. To this day, Stevenson has never drunk alcohol.

The psychologist in me immediately wondered, you have two boys, both given the same talk. It inspires one of them but not the other. Why?

The same question applies to other fields. Upon hearing about bad stuff in the world, why do some people try to change it while others ignore it and go about their lives? Why do some people write that book, while others merely add it to their bucket list and go about their lives? What motivates the first group, the doers, and sets them apart?

Are you a doer or a dreamer/status quo-er? If it’s the latter, what’s stopping you from being a doer?

Weekend Writing Warriors 2/2/14 #WeWriWa

It’s apparently February. Already. How is it already February??

Okay, enough of that. Since February is the month of love, today’s excerpt is from “The Kindness of Strangers,” a short story I wrote for The Indiana Horror Anthology 2011. It features one of my few recurring characters, a guy named Alec who makes a brief uncredited cameo in “Tim and Sara” as well as several as-yet unpublished stories.

In this story, Laura left her friend’s party after seeing her ex with another girl. It started raining as she was walking down the road, and Alec offered her a ride.

Laura couldn’t tear her gaze away from Alec’s. She’d never seen eyes like his before, two black holes sucking her in. “He broke up with me, said I was too unstable for a relationship.”

 

“That hardly seems fair.”

 

Laura found herself pouring out the story: her devotion to Sam, their unexpected break-up, her attempts to get back together, his refusal to have anything to do with her, her anger at seeing him with other girls. “He’s doing it on purpose, in front of me, just to rub my nose in the fact that I can’t have him,” she concluded.

 

“And that makes you angry, right, because you deserve him and no one else does?” Alec’s eyes gleamed.

Post a link to your eight sentences blog entry, or join the fun at the Weekend Writing Warriors website. And come back next week, because Alec has a plan for Laura.

Moving my blog – please update your links!

If you’ve been following my blog for awhile, you may have noticed that I like to change my website theme. A lot. One of the things that entails is making sure my blog matches my website. And that was just getting too difficult with Blogger. I’m a decent enough coder, but I was way over my head.

So I’ve moved my blog to WordPress. All the posts are still readable, and any links to http://blog.edmartinwriter.com should automatically move to http://www.edmartinwriter.com/blog.

So please, update your links and continue to follow my blog! I really appreciate all the support and feedback I’ve gotten over the past couple years!

Weekend Writing Warriors 1/26/14 #WeWriWa

Today’s excerpt comes from a story I wrote awhile back, “Of Gods and Floods,” that’s included in my short story collection Us, Together. The story is about two kids living in southern Illinois and Missouri when a massive flood hits.

“Ritchie,” Granddaddy would say to me every year, “who created the world?”

“God did, Granddaddy.”

 

“And who floods it?”

 

“Well, my teacher said it ain’t nobody’s fault, just the snow melting up in Minnesota with no other place to go.”

 

“Your teacher’s an idjit.” He paused, sucked on his teeth, then said, “Mother Nature floods us in Cairo, and you know why?”

 

Of course I knew why, but I didn’t want to ruin his story, so I said, “No, why?”

 

“Cuz no matter if’n it be a woman on Earth or a woman in Heaven, she gonna do what she can to make her man look a fool!”

Read the rest of the story in the collection, just $.99 at Amazon, then post a link to your eight sentences blog entry, or join the fun at the Weekend Writing Warriors website.

2013 Book Round Up

One of my goals for 2013 was to read 100 books. While I didn’t quite make it (72), that’s still pretty impressive. Here’s a breakdown of what I read:

11 were either kids or young adult; the rest were adult.
9 were nonfiction and the rest were fiction.
20 were single short stories (yes, I realize it’s cheating to include those), and 12 were short story anthologies.
I know the authors of 27 of the books; 8 of them are also with my publisher, Evolved.
Only 16 were books that randomly caught my eye on a library shelf or website; the rest were either recommended or written by someone I know.
17 were by Lindsay Buroker.

Best books I read in 2012:

Lindsay Buroker’s Emperor’s Edge series (7 books, plus some short stories): A steampunk/fantasy series about assassins and intrigue that’s really just a lot of fun. Plus the first one is free.
Butter by Erin Jade Lange (who’s originally from my hometown, but I don’t know her): a YA book about an obese kid who gains popularity when he announces his plans to kill himself live on the internet
Strange Pilgrims: a book of short stories by Gabriel Garcia Marquez

If you challenged yourself to read a set number of books in 2013, how did you end up doing?  What were your favorites?  Anything you particularly disliked?

Resolutions: 2013 review and 2014 goals

2013

Last year, I set some goals for myself.

Publish my novel, The Lone Wolf.

Yes! It was just released by Evolved Publishing in December. As of right now, it has a 4.6 star rating on Amazon, from 5 reviews. And a reader told me it made her cry. So, score.
Average a short story acceptance each month, with the majority of them in paying markets.

No. I had one acceptance this year, probably because I crapped out on submissions after about March.
Put out a short story collection.

Yes! I released Us, Together: A Short Story Collection in June. It’s 6 stories about the problems teenagers face, from relationships and unplanned pregnancy, to absent parents and poverty, loosely based on stories and students I encountered while teaching at-risk kids.
Get another novel ready to query.

Kind of. Evolved is scheduled to publish A Handful of Wishes in December 2014, which means I should probably get it all shined up soon.
Read 100 books this year.

No. I read 72, which isn’t bad considering I was also working and going to grad school and writing and wasting a ton of time on the internet.
Kayak the entire length of the Hennepin Canal.

No. The closest I came was looking at kayaks at Scheels.

2014

Finish my third novel, tentatively titled On the Other Side, which will be a steampunk political thriller because, well, why not.
Write and submit at least one new short story every month.
Get a short story collection ready for publication (not including The Futility of Loving a Soldier, which will be out this summer from Evolved). Maybe the stories about India I wrote on my trip?
Self-publish at least two long short stories. I have half a dozen in the works; it’s just a matter of finishing them.
Read 100 books.
Learn a new language – either Spanish, Tamil, Arabic, or Icelandic – to the point I can carry on a basic conversation in it.

Ideally, I’ll have something new coming out every 3-4 months, in addition to more published short stories which will later be compiled into a collection. I think this is doable, but it’ll require massively-focused time management skills that I seem to be lacking.

What are your goals for 2013?