Julia Benally's Blog, page 6

The checklist is almost complete

I'd made a very long checklist about the road to the publication of "Renzhies."

I finally made all the chapter headings and formatted them to look nice and neat. I ran into a few problems. When you're making chapter breaks, you're not supposed to use page breaks, but section breaks. After that, you go into your header and click a button that will unlink the headers from the previous section so you can type in the new chapter heading without changing the previous chapter heading.

Well this suddenly stopped working and I was at my wit's end, until I finally realized that when I clicked into the chapter heading, it would jump back to the previous section, or even more. So I had to scroll all the way back down to the place I wanted to be, and then it worked.

I think my computer is doing its preliminaries to its death throes. Just great. It's the toughest computer I've ever owned, but I guess every computer has to die of something.

Anyway, I got it all figured out.

I was supposed to do the glossary while I was going through it, but totally forgot. Ugh....

Also, I found areas reflecting spots I'd had to rewrite and didn't change to match what I rewrote. There were about ten of them, which was quite horrifying. So I fixed them.

I feel like I'm on a tight deadline, when really I don't have to start worrying about it until April.

As always, Monsters and Demons: Nri Kryne is available on Amazon world wide. I strongly advise you pick up a copy for yourself so you'll know what's going on when "Renzhies" drops in June.

https://www.amazon.com/Kryne-Monsters-Demons-Mara-Duryea/dp/B08GV97VHF

Lost in Gallup, New Mexico on MLK Day

Several weeks ago, my brother and I were asked to pick a woman up from Gallup, New Mexico and bring her to Pinetop, AZ. She was going to be nursing another woman back to health who had to get a major stomach surgery.

I'd never been to Gallup in my life. I passed it on the freeway once going to Albuquerque. Times are hard and I was going to make money with this, so I was like, okay! Let's go to this totally unknown place.

We had instructions, me and my brother had figured out who was driving first and second, we had our snacks, we cleaned out the car, and then Sunday night the tribe went on lockdown. We were being essentials, though, so we cut out the next morning for New Mexico.

I should have seen the signs when we stopped at Speedway for gas. Speedway has the slowest gas pumps on the planet. 19 bucks and I was standing there for 15 minutes.

Getting to Holbrook and then jumping on the freeway was easy. I drove all the way to Gallup and got off at the exit that the instructions had indicated. Next on the list was "cross the bridge onto the old highway 66." Well which way do we go to cross it? Left, right, or straight? And I didn't see any highway 66.

We had to make a choice and of course we took the wrong one. We ended up on the freeway again and left Gallup. We were now headed for the capital. We got off the next exit and turned around, but for some reason the freeway was off to my left.

Where was I? What planet was I on? How did I get on this dinky, little road? At a complete loss, I followed it and ended up back in Gallup. I called the woman we were supposed to pick up and told her I was lost. I gave her where I was and then she said, "I have no idea where you are."

It was settled. I was going to die.

I started driving around, me and my brother searching for the landmark on the instructions. I totally know where all the slums are, where the people who live on the rich hill are, the favorite spot for beggars, the old buildings, the new ones, McDonald's, and the high school. The old Highway 66 appeared, along with other streets the instructions said to go on, but none of them connected. I know, I was there.

One day we found the house where the lady was waiting. I handed the wheel to my brother and now we had to find our way out of Gallup. At first we couldn't get in, and now we couldn't get out. We ended up crossing a bridge out, but it wasn't the same one we came in on.

I'd painted my nails all nice with gel polish, but after being lost in an unknown dimension of the world, I'd ripped all the paint off. My only comfort was that I hadn't bitten my nails off.

I fell asleep on the way home, but then I woke up and saw an exit reading ShowLow, which is near Pinetop. We were all the way on the other side of the freeway with these giant trucks lining every way into the exit. I was like, "hey!" I'd also been half asleep.

Pretty soon I recognized the Flagstaff Mountains. Ah! we were headed for Utah! We turned around again and I called my mom. Everybody was ready to yell at me, but I wasn't the driver! We finally made it back into Holbrook and then got lost in there because for some reason everybody was like, "Do you remember where the bus stop is?"

NO.

We eventually got out through a weird back road nobody knows exists and we made it to Pinetop.

So, on Martin Luther King day, while everyone was spouting things like, "I thought racism was dead" and "we all need to love each other," I was in Gallup screaming, "Somebody find me!"

PS: Nri Kryne is still available world wide on Amazon. Buy it here: https://www.amazon.com/Kryne-Monsters-Demons-Mara-Duryea/dp/B08GV97VHF

Letters from editors that made me go, WHAT?!

I've had a list of some seriously stupid rejection letters in my time, but during the Christmas season, I got a dose of WHAT?!

First one came right before Christmas. It was a big, fat no. And then, from the very same magazine, another letter showed up wishing me and everybody who'd submitted a story a Merry Christmas....

..........

..........

..........

The second letter came from a magazine who usually likes my stuff, but ever since the magazine hooked up with another one, it's been one rejection after another. "Too different" was the implication.

While I'm sitting there refusing to conform, I get another letter requesting me to vote for this magazine.

NEVER!

A few days later, a request to buy the magazine.

Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha!

You stupid magazine, you can go straight to where you're headed for all I care.

La Pascualita, the haunted mannequin

If you haven't heard of La  Pascualita, it's a big mannequin down in Chihuahua, Mexico. She stands in the window of a bridal shop.

The woman she was patterned after was the daughter of the bridal shop owner. The woman died on her wedding day. Some say spider bite, scorpion sting, and even suicide.

The woman's mother went into mourning for a while and closed the shop. When the shop finally reopened, the dead bride was standing in the shop as the new mannequin.

Rumors went floating around that the mannequin was actually the woman's corpse because her eyes would follow people as they passed down the street. Even the people who dressed her said she was real.

Hearing from a real mortician, if there was a corpse under there, she would have rotted and stunk like all get out. Her limbs would have been falling off. Her head is obviously plastic. That is a real mannequin, and a very artful one at that.

People freak about how real the hands look. You get people like Leonardo da Vinci or Donatello and people say, "Oh wow! True art! Craftsmanship beyond human ken!" You get the same exquisite art in Mexico. "Oh, it's haunted."

People say the eyes follow them when they walk by. If somebody would put some eyelids on that thing, it wouldn't be so creepy.

It's my opinion that since the bridal shop was closed for so long, the owners probably needed a ploy to get their customers back. They were in a district where competition was high.

Yup, that's it. Nothing haunted today.

Here's a site to go to so you can see La Pascualita: https://www.atlasobscura.com/places/la-pascualita

A YouTube video to make you superstitious: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ebo4e-WegGc

And the mortician video to dash away all your hopes of the existence of a haunted mannequin: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qRVVX5pJ62I

Last, but not least, MY BOOK! BUY IT, BUY IT, BUY IT! YAY! "Renzhies" is on the move and you need the first one to know what's going on in the second one!

https://www.amazon.com/Nri-Kryne-Monsters-Demons-Book-ebook/dp/B08GZR31B9

My battle plan for the release of "Renzhies."

Book 2 is coming out! YAY! And this time, I have a better head on my shoulders. I made a checklist and gave myself enough time to get the book out properly.

DECEMBER, JANUARY, FEBRUARY, MARCH

Item 1: Go over your editor's edits and apply. CHECK

Item 2: Fix that one scene that's been bugging you for months because book 3 was much like yourself and announced something last minute. CHECK

Item 3: Fix that chapter your editor had issues with. CHECK

Item 4: Look up the word "Sirix" in the first book to see if you had capitalized it or not. CHECK. It's capitalized.

Item 5: Add in title pages, About the Author, and all that mess for the before and after pages. (Not done yet)

Item 6: Make a new glossary, and while you're at it, capitalize all words "Sirix"

Item 7: Check that one section for discrepancies in a Syladin's physical makeup.

Item 8: Chapter heading names (funna fun-fun!)

Item 9: Format with section breaks instead of page breaks (I can format like a boss so I don't need to pay anybody. Thank goodness. I suppose this is where all my brain matter went.)

Item 10: Fix the page numbers so page one begins on the right side at chapter one instead of on the title page.

Item 11: Make sure page numbers don't appear by the chapter headings.

Item 12: Make sure page numbers are consistent to the end of the story and then vanish afterward. (thank goodness I mirrored the numbers already)

Item 13: The dreaded table of contents (Table of contents, I hate you like a cat hates water)

Item 14: Now we add the pretties: scene breaks, nice fonts, good fonts etc...

Item 15: Consistent and ongoing, the book description. Agh! Agh! Agh! Agh! Agh!

Item 16: Take note of final page count and paper color you chose for the paperback so I can take it to my cover artist.

APRIL, MAY

Item 17: Meeting with my cover artist and he will design my cover as beautifully as "Nri Kryne."

Item 18: Send out the arc so I can get as many reviews as I can, because reviews make sales.

Item 19: Make the kindle edition using KDP's kindle create.

JUNE:

Item 20: Upload my slave labor to KDP and press the PUBLISH button.

Item 21: Make ads for "Renzhies."

Item 22: Book 2 is finally out! Now book 3, you have my undivided attention. Book 1: you just keep on being awesome.

"Nri Kryne" is available world wide!

https://www.amazon.com/Nri-Kryne-Monsters-Demons-Book-ebook/dp/B08GZR31B9

You can find it on Goodreads, too. Mark it on your "to read" list so you don't forget about it.

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/55174124-nri-kryne

Lost in Scottsdale; Pee Man; and no Uncas

About two years ago, my mom caught cancer, but the doctors were able to cut it out and now she's all right. They still want her to go for routine check-ups to make sure it hasn't come back. These check-ups are several hours away. My brothers and me take turns in bringing her to these check-ups.

This time, one of my brothers who knows the place pretty well was supposed to take her. He was going to take my mom to a nice place to eat that he knew of. He was probably going to take her shopping and all that good stuff. But then his EVIL boss demanded he come in to work because suddenly everybody got sick and couldn't come in.

And so, that left me as the only one who could take her.

For the last two nights, I have been wide awake. So here I am at 6:30 AM running on 6 hours of sleep from the last two days. We started on down to the doctor's office. The GPS said where we were going and how long it would take.

So la, la, la, la. We reach Scottsdale and now we have to go inside it. The GPS says: You will reach Dr. So-and-so's office in 8 hours.

8 hours?!

We were driving down the right street and the GPS said to keep turning right onto the street we were already on. It wouldn't shut up. It kept screaming, TURN RIGHT! Turn right! Turn right!

And then it said to turn on this other street, which took us through a neighborhood with a river running through it.

"You will reach Dr. So-and-so's office in 8 hours." It was going to make us get there in 8 hours if it was the last thing it did.

We had to turn off the GPS and find our way without it. We ended up in a bunch of suites five minutes later. My mom called the office and the woman working there had no idea where we were. She just kept saying, "We're across the street from that."

There was no "across the street." There was an "across the parking lot." A U-turn here, a stop sign run there, blocking off traffic as we sat and figured out where was what, and finally finding a map and trying to figure out what was on it because it was freakin' upside down.

We got to the office late, but HA! Found it! And the doctor was running behind, so it worked out. I had to sit in the car, though. I waited in there until the phone ran out of power.

Now it was time to go back. Where was a place to eat? Could we go shopping? No, this smart cookie had no idea where she was. Going to a store meant risking getting totally lost. And since the GPS was MIA, heck no! Nevertheless, we ended up in an abandoned lot of empty buildings.

We got out somehow and started home. At least I didn't end up in a haunted bathroom like the last time.

The trip home was going pretty good. We stopped to stretch our legs at a look-out spanning mountains and canyons. It was very nice. Then some old people pulled up and the old man oggled at me like I was a nymph.

He and his wife got out and walked behind the little building where the look-out was. As my mom and I drove past to get back on the road, we spotted the old man who'd thought I was so beautiful peeing behind the building onto the cement.

Now let me ask you something. WHERE WAS MY UNCAS?!

Be sure to buy your copy of "Nri Kryne!" Available on Amazon world wide!

https://www.amazon.com/Nri-Kryne-Monsters-Demons-Book-ebook/dp/B08GZR31B9

Book 2 release date

Book 2, Monsters and Demons: Renzhies, will be out in June in time for Father's Day!

Nri Kryne had its own set of problems, especially when it erased. Renzhies had its own problems, too, but it had to do with the villain. Every single scene that had to do with him gave me problems. I hate his guts and I hated writing about him, and yet I had to keep going back to his parts and fixing them, re-writing, and adjusting. His personality and villainy had to be cared for with hairpin accuracy. Whatever I did with his parts had a ripple effect that touched every part of the book.

I wanted to scream.

Now it's finally done and it will be out in June!

May you hate the villain as much as I do.

The Duck Man

My education in Spanish has been shoddy. I spent nine years in a Mexican barrio, but nobody spoke the language to me. They insisted on English. At school, they were trying to make everyone bilingual so they could get rid of the language barrier.

Spanish speakers were spoken to in English and they eventually caught onto the language in a few months because they were kids. Isn't that wonderful? English speakers were not to be left out. We were supposed to learn Spanish. Exciting, right?

We English speakers were subjected to a video of a strange man telling us how to say "duck" in Spanish for the whole year...the WHOLE year! El pato, like the hot sauce. Dog, cat, cow, red, blue, white, what's your name? I could count to twenty. But we weren't taught to have a conversation of any substance.

The teachers set up a whole Mexican market at the end of my sixth year learning "duck" and we were supposed to go in and order food, sit in little cafes, and there was a jail for people caught speaking English. It was very fun, except I could only say "duck."

Some of the Hispanic teachers tried to say the Spanish speaking kids were smarter than the English speakers, because they had learned English so quickly. Well the punks weren't subjected to the weird duck man for six years straight. Guaranteed we'd all have been walking around quacking if he was supposed to teach English, too.

I went off to college and decided to try and learn the language. I was used to the Spanish I'd heard in school and in my neighborhood. As soon as my teachers opened their mouths, I was so confused. What language were they speaking? Ah, Argentinian Spanish, Puerto Rican Spanish, Spain Spanish, every Spanish except the one I was used to! I found out I understood better the Spanish from Northern Mexico.

I was forced to "learn" different dialects because each teacher only taught the one they spoke. I had like eight of them all together, and each class was supposed to jump off of the last one. The tests the school gave were always in a different dialect from the one my current teacher was teaching. Did I pass those tests? No, I did not!

How does one reach advanced Spanish and still not know crap?

In the end, I could only remember the stupid Duck Man.

PS:

"Monsters and Demons: Renzhies" is coming out in June! Buy your copy of the first book today so you can be caught up and ready for the next epic adventure!

https://www.amazon.com/Nri-Kryne-Monsters-Demons-Book-ebook/dp/B08GZR31B9

I got book 2 back from my editor and my computer decided to be a punk about it

I got my MS back for book 2!
So I quickly contacted my cover artist, set up a battle plan for the launch, made a rough guess as to when the book will release, started making a to-do list of everything I need to get the book ready, (proper chapter headings and numbering, glossary, dedication page, works published, about the author, etc...), when to start working on the blurb, and then I went to download the MS so I could begin another long journey to publication.

First thing was to download the MS from my e-mail. My stone age computer took ten minutes to open up to the google page, and then it said it was unresponsive. So another ten minutes to try again. And then ten minutes to get to the e-mail page, another ten to sign in, and then five to download the MS, and then it wouldn't open, so I had to download it again, but open it from a different area, and then the mouse was skipping all over the place so I couldn't start applying edits.

I had to banish the computer to the time out corner so it could think about what it had done.
I'm writing this on someone else's computer, if you'd like to know.
And since book 2 is coming out, you had better read the first book so you won't be confused. It'll be like nothing you have ever read before. If you like Native American, then why not, right?
This link is in the US store, but the book is available world wide.
https://www.amazon.com/Nri-Kryne-Monsters-Demons-Book-ebook/dp/B08GZR31B9

Amazon Ad Profit Challenge, and it's free!

In about two weeks, Bryan Cohen will be hosting a FREE Amazon Ad Profit Challenge. This means you will learn how to make ads on Amazon without having to pay what Amazon wants you to for ads.

You'll learn three different types and all the ins and outs of it.

When I first took it, my mind was blown.

My PAPERBACK jumped in rank by 6 million by following this. You'll get a support group and help from professionals on facebook. I highly recommend this.

Sign up for it HERE