Michelle Proulx's Blog, page 21

Happy New Year!

Okay, okay, I’m a little late to the party — six days late, to be exact. But I’m here now, so Happy New Year, my lovely blogging friends!

Like all bloggers, one of my resolutions this year is to blog more — specifically, I intend to read other people’s blogs more, and try to update my own blog a few times a week. I’ve been doing fairly well with my ‘eat healthy’ resolution thus far, so hopefully I can carry that success over into the blogosphere.

A quick review of 2013 (only the good things)

Published my first novel! And it actually has good reviews!
Published my first short story!
Got my first fan art and fan fiction!
Became VP of the London Writers’ Society!
Didn’t screw up being VP of the London Writers’ Society!
Got a raise!
Finally moved out of my mother’s apartment! (well, sort of — actually, she moved out and transferred the lease to me)
Got a car! (again, mother’s doing — she gave me her old car and bought a new one)
Got asked to be a bridesmaid at my best friend’s wedding!
Learned how to walk in nature for more than half an hour without having a nervous breakdown over bugs being freakin’ everywhere!

I’m sure more awesome stuff happened, but those are the ones I can remember off the top of my head. I haven’t had my morning tea yet (one of my 2014 resolutions is to drink more tea), so my brain isn’t working at 100% capacity yet.

Looking ahead to 2014

My re-write of Chasing Nonconformity, the sequel to Imminent Danger, is going slower than I would like … but it is progressing, so I’m cautiously hopeful about getting it done in the next month or so. I finished revising chapter 14 last night (out of 48), so I still have a ways to go, but several of the upcoming chapters don’t need to be changed at all, so that should make life easier. My announced plan last year of a January 2014 release date for Chasing Nonconformity was wildly optimistic, and definitely won’t be happening. Maybe I can still swing a spring 2014 release? We’ll see. Fingers crossed!

Other than that, I have a few other things coming up. My best friend’s wedding is in August, so lots to do to help her prepare for that. I believe we will be getting together once a month to watch Disney movies and make invitations and place settings and whatnot. And then there’s our possible move to Nova Scotia, which may or may not be happening after the wedding. My brother is graduating this spring, which I’m super proud of him for accomplishing … my mother bought a new house, which she’ll be renovating over the next two years or so … I may or may not be publishing another short story, assuming I ever get it back from the depths of my mother’s unread inbox …

 

So a big thank you to everyone who followed my ramblings in 2013! I’ll try to do better at following your own adventures this upcoming year … promise! Happy New Year to all!

 

Unrelated media of the day

Source: http://imgur.com/gallery/E1UDmGR

Legends of Windemere: Allure of the Gypsies has arrived!

Happy Saturday, everyone! For today’s post, I’m psyched to share with you some self-publishing news from the blogger we all know and love — Mister Charles E. Yallowitz, author of the Legends of Windemere series! The big news today is that …

Legends of Windemere: Allure of the Gypsies has arrived!!!

Well, technically it arrived a few weeks ago. But it’s still new and exciting! So …

Buy it Here!

Book Blurb:

The epic adventures of Luke Callindor and Nyx continue after their journey down the L’Dandrin River in Legends of Windemere: Prodigy of Rainbow Tower.

Reeling from his failures in their previous adventure, Luke leads his surviving friends to his hometown.  With his mind frayed and his confidence fractured, Luke must face the family and fiancée he left behind.  It is a brief homecoming when the vampire Kalam attacks the village, forcing Luke and Nyx to break into his lair for the key to resurrecting a fallen warrior.  It is a quest that will force both young heroes to reach new heights of strength and power that they never knew they had.

Can Luke and Nyx escape the lair of Kalam?  And, what role will the orphaned gypsy Sari play in their looming destiny?

*     *     *

Wondering what you’re in for? Check out the praise earned by the first two installments of this high fantasy series.

Review Excerpts for Legends of Windemere: Beginning of a Hero:

“I greatly enjoyed the vivid characters, the gripping plot, and the refreshingly unique writing style (present tense). ” – kdillmanjones

“This is a sophisticated and delightful read. I recommend this book to lovers of Fantasy or to General Fiction readers. The story is compelling enough to entertain a wide audience.” – John Howell

“One of the things that won me over was the bouts of humor. Especially in the beginning. “This is not possible! I am a Paladin!” I thought I was going to die with delight.” – C.N. Faust

Review Excerpts for Legends of Windemere: Prodigy of Rainbow Tower:

“Something I find unique about this fantasy novel that I don’t often find in others, is that the hero, Luke Callindor is rather of the unlucky variety. He does not get everything he asks for, he stumbles, falls, gets knocked down (literally)and taught lessons as he goes. This is helping him to grow into the hero that was promised in the first book.” – Ionia Martin

“Nyx is such a strong personality. I thoroughly enjoyed getting to know her and more of the other characters, new and already known, with the rich tapestry of Windemere unfolding in between intense actions scenes and moments of kindness and budding friendships.” – Danielle Taylor

“Almost like the Harry Potter series. The books start out so young and innocent, but by the last book – watch out!”  –  Momto4Booklover

*     *     *

Author Biography:

Charles Yallowitz was born and raised on Long Island, NY, but he has spent most of his life wandering his own imagination in a blissful haze. Occasionally, he would return from this world for the necessities such as food, showers, and Saturday morning cartoons. One day he returned from his imagination and decided he would share his stories with the world. After his wife decided that she was tired of hearing the same stories repeatedly, she convinced him that it would make more sense to follow his dream of being a fantasy author. So, locked within the house under orders to shut up and get to work, Charles brings you Legends of Windemere. He looks forward to sharing all of his stories with you and his wife is happy he finally has someone else to play with.

Contact:

Blog-  www.legendsofwindemere.com

Twitter-  @cyallowitz

Facebook- https://www.facebook.com/CharlesYallowitz

*     *     *

To celebrate the debut of Legends of Windemere: Allure of the Gypsies, Mr. Yallowitz is also holding a Goodreads Giveaway! The prize is a paperback copy of ALL THREE LEGENDS OF WINDEMERE NOVELS.  Winners will be picked at the end of December.

Guest Post: Do Not Despair — the Digital Age is Here!

Today’s guest post comes to us from Tom Dale, a writer over at sainsburysebooks.co.uk, who was kind enough to offer some insights on the current state of digital self-publishing. Read on!

*    *    *

Do not despair; the digital age is here!

The digital age has changed the world. It has transformed the way we do almost everything, from the minute to the massive. There are valid arguments claiming that technology has enhanced our lives and those that say it has detracted from it. Personally I sit somewhere between these two camps, but on the whole I believe it has made life better and broadened possibilities for many people on the planet. The greatest achievement of the technological age, I would argue, is the enhancement of global interconnectedness. That may sound a little wordy but think about it for a second; in that second you thought about it millions of people communicated with millions more people.

This greater connectivity has one key benefit for authors the world over; self publishing can be done by anyone and distributed globally in an instant. Not only that but your content will sit alongside works which have had thousands of pounds thrown at them for publication, with no distinguishable difference. When Amazon’s Kindle Direct Publishing, a tool for authors to self-publish their books to Amazon’s Kindle store, was launched alongside its famous e-reader, the Kindle, vast new possibilities were created for authors without the resources or support to get their work published. This format has been reproduced by many other eBook publishers such as Apples iBook or Barnes and Noble’s Nook publishing services.

Gordon Willoughby, Director of Kindle EU, has had to say of these platforms: “[It] enables ‘ordinary’ Kindle authors to compete on a level playing field with the giants of the literary world and we’re so excited to see it succeeding for both readers and authors.” Mr Willoughby’s words ring true in light of the thousands of success stories that have come out of eBook self publication.

Despite some controversy around Amazon’s publication service and rumours of excessive ‘delivery charges’ added onto Amazon’s fee for eBook sales, the KDP tool is an invaluable one for aspiring authors. If you are sitting on your first book – receiving rejection letters from traditional print publishers – do not be disheartened; it has been hailed as a cure for the depression of rejection from publishers. The tales of self-publishing success often tell of multiple rejections, only to receive multiple offers once a name was made on the eBook market.

There are a plethora of alternatives to Amazon’s KDP and I would suggest maximising your potential sales by exploring all these other avenues to ensure maximum reach. However, despite the controversy around the two royalty levels that Amazon offers, you should not exclude yourself from that market. Consider that people who own Kindles are unlikely to use other eBook purchasing services (although from I what I hear competitors such as Sainsburys’s eBooks are beginning to challenge this) and that just under half the e-reader market share is held by the Kindle, it would make no business sense to back out of such a vast market on principle or otherwise.

Kathryn Stockett, author of the bestselling novel The Help, who was famously rejected dozens of times before getting her work published, has been quoted telling fellow authors: “What if I had given up at 15? Or 40? Or even 60?” And how many did stop at 40, or 50, or 60? It takes an incredibly strong person to still believe in your work after so much rejection but it would seem that this rejection has no bearing on the merit of your work.

So, in short, this new age of self-publication bypasses the depressing, even soul-destroying, world in which the fickle choice of another affects your very existence as an author. The global connectivity that has been gifted to us by the digital age has brought with it other gifts. The ability to jump straight from author to published author in a matter of hours and to see one’s work sat on the shelves, albeit digital ones, of a global bookstore alongside the best bestsellers and the most successful storytellers work. It gifts new self-confidence to demoralised authors and a road to success to those who had never broached the barrier of the ominous publisher.

Long live digital!

 

Tom Erik Dale is a freelance journalist, writer, and lover of all things literary. He has long been an enthusiastic reader of both fiction and non-fiction, and is a keen believer in the digital reader revolution.

 

Unrelated media of the day:

Source: http://imgur.com/gallery/ZtIPea5

Last call for alcohol! (And by alcohol, I mean my Goodreads Giveaway)

Hey guys! Just a quick post to remind everyone that my Goodreads Giveaway for Imminent Danger And How to Fly Straight into It closes tonight! As of this writing, there are 6 hours left on the clock, so hop over and get yourself entered ASAP!

Here’s the blurb (for anyone who hasn’t heard me prattle on about the book a million times before):

A fun, flirty, fast-paced YA sci-fi/romance novel of cosmic proportions!

High school junior Eris Miller thinks she’s having a bad day when her roommate’s boyfriend catches her stepping out of the shower wearing nothing but a towel. Then she gets abducted by scaly six-armed aliens with a strange fondness for the color blue, and her day suddenly gets a whole lot worse.

Trapped on a spaceship bound for the slave markets of Sirius B, Eris fears she’ll never see her home again. But then fate whisks her away from her reptilian captors and into the arms of Varrin, a fast-talking space pirate who promises to deliver her safely back to Earth. He claims to have her best interests at heart, but Eris soon discovers that her charming rescuer has a hidden agenda.

As they race across the galaxy, outrunning a villainous figure from Varrin’s past, Eris begins to realize that their relationship is putting her planet, her life, and her heart in imminent danger. She knows that trusting Varrin could prove deadly … but what other choice does she have?

 

Unrelated media of the day:

 

Chasing Nonconformity is finally taking shape!

As you may know, I’ve been working on the sequel to Imminent Danger for a while now. I believe I started it back in … 2010? Possibly earlier. Anyway, it’s been quite the laborious process. I’ve never written a sequel before, so there was a lot of stumbling and self-doubt and re-writing (the current version is almost indistinguishable from the original draft) and … yeah. You get the picture!

Anyway, I’m pleased to announce that things are finally taking shape with the sequel. I’ve settled on how I want events to happen, I figured out Varrin’s motivation (he had one before, but it was kind of a stupid motivation, so that’s changed), and I flexed my mediocre organizational muscles and did up a chapter-by-chapter breakdown of what the heck is going on in the story. I even made a timeline!

Guys, I’m so psyched right now. You know that point where everything just starts to come together, and you kind of sit back and go: “Wow. This feels amazing. And I can’t believe it took so freaking long to get to this point.” And then you ask yourself if all the hours of writing and re-writing and agonizing and plotting and arguing with your brother who absolutely refuses to entertain the possibility that maybe characters don’t have to make logical decisions all the time were worth it. The answer is yes — yes, it was worth it!

There’s still a heckuva long way to go before Chasing Nonconformity is ready for publication (obviously!). Part of my plan calls for new scenes, which need to be written. And then other scenes have been completely flipped around to be from a different character’s POV, or the same events happen but in a different location, etc. It’s going to be an epic re-write, that’s for sure. But now I have my lovely, color-coded chapter breakdown to guide me, so I’m confident it will turn out more or less the way I envisioned it.

So for anyone wondering how work on Chasing Nonconformity is progressing — there’s your update! I’m going to be working on it a lot over Christmas (hopefully I’ll finish the re-write!), and after that the basic process will be:

Run the draft past my mother
Wait two months for her to actually read it
Get it back — cringe at the red-coated pages — revise
Run the draft past my brother
Wait three days for him to read it and return it with a brilliant and in-depth analysis something along the lines of: “It’s fine”
Correct the inevitable logical errors he points out
Run the draft past my alpha readers (“alpha” makes them sound like a wolf pack — Arooooo!)
Make corrections
Run the draft past my beta readers (I might ask some of you awesome WordPress peeps for help with that, so stay tuned!)
Make corrections
Run the draft past my mother
Go through the entire book with her page by pain-staking page, tightening up my inevitably sloppy writing and probably chopping off about 10k from the final word count
Run the book past a copy-editor
PUBLISH!!!!!!!!

Realistically I see this book being published no sooner than Fall 2014. Cease your tears, my friends! The novel-writing process is not for the weak-hearted. We must stand together or we will surely perish!

Right. Thanks for reading! Remember to enter my Goodreads Giveaway for a signed copy of Imminent Danger And How to Fly Straight into It!

 

Unrelated media

Note: Cleverbot’s responses are in blue.

Source: http://imgur.com/gallery/SwjJi

 

Fact: women are more successful self-published authors

Reblogged from Belinda Williams:

According to the recent Taleist survey of self-published writers, women authors are more successful than men.

Does this fact surprise you? It surprised me - not because I lack faith in my female counterparts (far from it), but because when you compare it to the traditional book publishing industry, it's the men who dominate.

A good example of the situation women face in the traditional publishing world is documented by 

Read more… 588 more words

Interesting post about why women are doing so well at self-publishing. Hint: apparently we should be spending our time writing, not marketing!

Give the gift of reading this Christmas …

… by buying a copy of my debut novel, Imminent Danger And How to Fly Straight into It!

That’s right, folks, it’s shameless self-promotion time! For all my lovely readers who haven’t yet read my book, why not give it a shot this Christmas? Or if you have read it and loved it, how about grabbing up a copy for your friends, daughters, sons, nieces, nephews, alpacas, rutabagas … whomever in your life you think might enjoy a little science fiction fun!

Click the gigantic book cover in the sidebar to get links to all the various online retailers that carry the book. Or just click here to go straight to Amazon.com.

Now, sadly I can’t actually offer any discounts, because iUniverse controls the pricing, not me. I know, I know, I’m working on it! In the meantime, while I can’t offer a price drop on book, I can offer a signed copy (sort of) if you buy a softcover or hardcover. Basically, I’m using this newfangled contraption called a “bookplate” (also known as a “sticker”). The idea here is that you buy the book, you send me an email letting me know you want a signed bookplate (along with your mailing address), and then I send you a bookplate free of charge, along with some Imminent Danger swag (bookmarks, stickers, personal thank you note for supporting me, etc.) Here’s a picture of a hastily done up bookplate that I totally didn’t just make five seconds ago:

I promise I’ll get a better gold marker so it isn’t all fuzzy looking. And if you want me to address the bookplate to a certain individual, or write a custom message or whatever, just let me know.

Anyway, that’s my shameless self-promotion for the Christmas season! If you’ve got a spare minute, please consider spreading the word about this whole “bookplate” thing … or just about my book and how awesome it is in general. And if you already bought a copy and want a bookplate, shoot a message/email my way and I’ll hook you up!

Unrelated media of the day:

As always, I can’t remember if I’ve already shared this or not, but either way, enjoy!

Source: http://imgur.com/gallery/7FNBr

Be careful how you advertise your book …

I was browsing the “Once Upon a Time” sub-reddit yesterday, and …

Okay, I should probably explain that, because I know a lot of people have no idea what the heck I’m talking about. Reddit is a website where people post pictures, links, and comments about things they find interesting, funny, disgusting, whatever. There are thousands of “sub-reddits”, which are devoted to specific subjects. In my case, I was on the “Once Upon a Time” sub-reddit, where fans of the ABC network’s “Once Upon a Time” tv show post theories, fan videos, etc.

Right! Anyway, this leads into today’s topic, which is be careful how you advertise your book. Here’s what happened: a self-published author went onto this sub-reddit, thinking it was about fairy tales in general (i.e., she didn’t do her research), and posted a link to her book. This is obviously a silly thing to do, as the sub-reddit is for fans of a television show, and is definitely not a place to post what is essentially an ad for your book.

Most of the sub-reddit commenters ignored the post entirely. One did not, and took the time to explain to the author what she had done wrong. What followed was a very interesting conversation, which I think the author handled very poorly. She comes off as kind of haughty at the start, then gets snippy, and also kind of passive-aggressively implies the person she’s talking to is over-sensitive and a bit of an idiot.

Here’s a screencap of the convo (click to enlarge):

(Note: “/r/trees” refers to a sub-reddit about drugs, not trees)

So what can we take away from this?

1. Don’t advertise on a website if you don’t know the purpose of the website.

2. If you put your advertisement somewhere it doesn’t belong, just take it down. Don’t get into an argument with the person who points out what you did wrong!

 

Unrelated media of the day:

Source: http://imgur.com/gallery/hyUp9

 

 

What’s your opinion on ambiguous endings?

I, personally, get annoyed by ambiguous endings. I like my stories very clear cut — if I invest multiple hours of my time getting to know and care about characters, I want to know definitively what happens to them.

This has put me at odds with several of my friends, especially when we go see movies. For both Inception and Life of Pi, my friends walked out of the theater going “Wow! Amazing movie! I can’t believe that ending! What do you think really happened? Was it real? Was it a dream? Wow!” Apparently they really like to say “wow”. Anyway, then they turned to me and asked me how I liked it, and I had to truthfully respond “Meh”, because of my aforementioned fondness for clear cut endings. They then proceeded to sacrifice me to Enigmaticus, the god of ambiguous endings, but I may or may not have actually died because the ending to this story is left deliberately vague and you’ll never know if it was real or made up!

See how annoying it is? GAH.

Anyhoo, all that being said, I’ve recently been plotting out my NaNoWriMo book, and when I got to the end, I realized that there were two ways the story could end. Two extremely different ways. Both are totally viable options, and both would leave some really cool ideas and questions in the reader’s mind. But I’m having trouble deciding which one to go with. So I thought “Screw the rules, maybe I should just cut the story off right before he makes the choice and let the reader decide what happens!”

Of course, I immediately felt very guilty about this thought, because, again, ambiguous endings = evil incarnate (at least in my mind). But the more I think about it, the more I like it. And the more I hate it.

So I guess I’ll pose it to you lovely people — ambiguous endings: good or bad?

Take Our Poll

 

Unrelated media of the day:

Source: http://imgur.com/gallery/iXC2N

A Look at a Successful Fiction Marketer

Reblogged from chrismcmullen:

In this post, we will learn valuable marketing and marketability tips by looking at a successful fiction author. In addition to writing a highly marketable book, today’s author is also active with a variety of effective marketing strategies.

Sword and sorcery author Charles Yallowitz has a popular fantasy series called The Legends of Windemere. If you’re a WordPress blogger, you may know Charles, as he is an active and highly supportive blogger in our community.

Read more… 1,672 more words

A really fantastic look at how to successfully promote yourself as a self-published author! Not to mention the post features the esteemed Charles Yallowitz, fantasy author extraordinaire!