Annette Drake's Blog, page 16

Shhh! Can you keep a secret? Yeah. Me neither.

Everyone who knows me knows this about me: I can’t keep a secret to save my life.

On New Year’s Eve, I received an amazing gift, but it came with one caveat: don’t tell anybody. Eeek! I could feel the tug of war begin inside me: how can I not tell everyone?

Here’s what happened. During the last days of December, I was reading a blog post by Hugh Howey. He’s a self-published author whose book, Wool, has broken records. New York Times bestseller. All that jazz. Hugh has done well for himself, and one of the results of his success, is reaching out to help other self-publishing authors. Indie authors, we’re called.

On this blog post, he talked about the sequel to Wool, a book called Sand. He also mentioned how thrilled he was with the cover art. Cover art is an author’s first and sometimes best means to convince readers to buy the book. It’s the way we first grab a reader’s attention.

I looked at the cover art for Sand, and it was perfect. I saw the author’s name, Jason Gurley, and I thought, wow. What I wouldn’t give to have a cover that nice. And I thought, heck, I’m going to write to the guy. Sending an email is free. I’ll ask him what he would charge and if he would work on a book like Bone Girl, which isn’t his usual science-fiction genre.

I did this. I sent an email to this stranger, thinking I would probably not hear back. I’m a new author with only one title, Celebration House, which isn’t really selling. But, the next day, there was a response. He said he wouId consider it. So we corresponded some more, and he agreed to do my cover at a price I could afford. I couldn’t believe this news. But it gets better.

On New Year’s Eve, I filled out the form he requests of all authors, talking about the characters in the book, the setting, what I thought were the most visually important elements. And I thought, maybe I’ll hear back in a month or so. Meanwhile, I got busy and drafted the blurb, the short paragraph on the back of the book readers scan to see if they want to buy it.

Excuse me. Could you hand me a Kleenex? I get teary-eyed when I relate this next part.

I woke on New Year’s Day and at 8:25 a.m., there in my email inbox was the first draft of cover art for Bone Girl. Not just one version, but three I could choose from. Holy. Buckets!

For the first time, it felt like someone besides me and my family believed in Bone Girl. Someone saw my vision and added to it. I felt empowered. I felt like I’d grown wings and could fly. After hearing so many no’s, I heard a loud yes.

And I know the marketing department – if I had one – would say, let’s keep this under wraps for now. Show no one. Tell no one. We’ll plan a cover-release event.

But as I’ve already explained, I can’t keep a secret.

So then, here, dear reader, is my cover art for Bone Girl. All credit to Jason Gurley. Stand back. This. Is. Huge!

Huge!

 

 

Author spotlight: Troy Lambert

Author spotlight: Troy Lambert.

Saying goodbye to 2013 and welcoming 2014

Happy New Year’s Eve!

When I was a child, tonight was a big deal. I’d listen to Casey Kasem count down the top 100 hits of the year, and I’d sort through my closet, cleaning out old clothes and making room for new. It was a chance to shed off the person I was and make big plans to be the person I wanted to be.

2013 has been an exciting year, but I will be glad to see it end.

Here are the high points:

I published my first novel, Celebration House. Thank you, Tirgearr Publishing.
I started a blog, a professional Facebook page and a Twitter account.
I made the journey home to the Midwest and spent time with family dear to me.

But there were a few low points too.

I learned there’s no such creature as job security. It’s a false promise. Forgive me if this sounds dark, but I now question if the road to financial security is paved by an employer with an hourly wage. Perhaps there’s another way.
Those closest to me were not always supportive of me. This begs the question, why make room for them in my life? Perhaps it’s time to stop.

 The best-learned lesson:

 I’m the creator of my own universe. I’m the fulfiller of my own daydreams. I didn’t know this until 2013. Now, I do.

 

Welcoming 2014

I will nurture the writer within. I will make time and a place for her.

I will self-publish my first book.

I will clean out my emotions closest of all naysayers, skeptics, pouters. I will neatly package up these people and send them away from me with no return address on the brown box. Goodbye, I will tell them. Good luck.

One thing’s for sure, it’s going to be a hell of a year.

Hands and arms inside the cart, please. Next: Finishing the book. Again.   

E L James, I am not

A few weeks ago, feeling bolder than I should, I began writing a novella for a project called City Nights for my publisher, Tirgearr. Here’s the pitch: a contemporary romance, which takes place over 24 hours and is set in a major city around the world. The books would be entitled A Night in _____. How cool is that? And only 20,000-25,000 words? Sweet. I told myself I’d have it finished in two days. Ha!

The novella takes place in a city. Well, the books I write take place in locales where I’ve lived. Otherwise, I’d have to make stuff up. Sheesh. So, I chose Anchorage, Alaska, because I’ve lived there and for folks who haven’t, it sounds exotic. If icy…

I contacted the editor for the project, Troy Lambert, and his response was classic: Anchorage, Alaska? Sure. Just a city where romance can take place. Side note: Troy is the subject of a new feature on my website called “Author Spotlight.” A brief interview with him will be posted there on Jan. 1st.

Anyway, I put my characters on a plane leaving Anchorage when bam! Mount Redoubt erupted and their flight was cancelled. Now, what to do? Why, head to the Captain Cook Hotel, of course, the swankiest hotel in Anchorage. It’s where everybody goes when their flight is cancelled, and they can drop $700 on a hotel room. In truth, it got my characters downtown where a lot of fun touristy things happen.

Now, the problem: the heat level of the book. Romance books are divided into different heat levels, depending on how much sex is in the book. My first novel, Celebration House, is considered a “sweet” romance, in that I only show the characters kissing. Here’s the criteria for determining the sex rating:

Nothing but kisses,
Passionate kissing,
Sex but the door is closed
Slightly steamy sex with some description
Steamy sex with somewhat graphic description

City Nights is meant to be a genre called erotic romance. Lots and lots of sex. I had never written this type of material, so I accepted Troy’s generous offer to send me a book called, Awakening, book 1: The A-B-Cs of Sex by Scarlett Valentine. Holy buckets! This book is definitely a 5. I don’t read a lot of erotic romance, but I believe Awakening is well written. Lots of active verbs. Lots and lots of description of sexual intercourse, including, how to put this delicately? anal sex. Perhaps there was a little too much description?

Reading this novella, I realized I could never write this type of book. To begin with, I don’t think I know the subject matter well enough. I’m too tame. Awakening is a hot mole sauce. I’m more of a whipped cream.

Perhaps I could research it. A good friend of mine in Alaska gave me a book entitled, “The Guide to Getting It On.” She told me, don’t return it with sticky pages, so I didn’t return it at all. I looked up some of the activity in Awakening in my guide book and sure enough, it was there. Yikes!

But in the end – oops, an unintended reference to Awakening – sorry. My bad. Reading the novella made me realize I don’t want to write erotic romance. Someone close to me called it “literature to masturbate by.”  It’s not what I want to read and thus, not what I should be writing.

The kicker is, I really did like the two characters in my Anchorage novella. They’re funny, and although I’ve only gotten them off the plane, checked into the Captain Cook and having breakfast at Snow City Café, I really enjoyed the time I spent creating them. It made me happy. That’s probably the kind of book I should be writing.

Hands and arms inside the cart, please: Tomorrow, saying goodbye to 2013 and welcoming 2014.

A sale, you say?

Yep. My novel, Celebration House, is 50 percent off today and tomorrow, as are all of the other titles published by Tirgearr Publishing. Check ‘em out!

Here’s where to look: http://www.tirgearrpublishing.com/

Merry Christmas!

Fiona’s interview: So many questions and at the bottom, a sneak peek at A Year with Geno

Here is my interview with Annette Drake.

Happy Veteran’s Day

I hold his right hand in mine, feeling its warmth, gauging its willingness to bleed. A quick swipe of an alcohol pad and two thorough dustings with clean gauze, then I strike his fingertip with a lancet. A bubble of red appears on his flesh. I gather it up and feed it into the hungry machine that tells me if his blood is too thin or too thick.  Confessions from a Coumadin clinic.

Through his thick glasses, he studies my machine. I put a small Band-Aid on the cut I just made. He scowls. I watch him, his blue eyes still so blue. The wrinkles on his face pay testimony to his long life. Almost 90 years old.

It’s Veterans Day, so I make small talk while the machine judges his blood.

“Are you a veteran?” I ask.

“Uh, yeah. World War II. Europe.”

“Were you in France?” I ask.

I’m a closet Francophile. I know I shouldn’t be. They hate Americans or so everyone tells me. But there it is. I watch Rick Steeves traipse across France, and I want to leave my mundane life and follow him. I listen to a language CD borrowed from the library, trying to recall the French I spent two years in high school and two years in college learning. “Bonjour, monsieur. Pardon? Je ne comprends pas. Je suis Americaine.”

“Battle of the Bulge,” he says to me. “Coldest winter on record.”

His blue eyes meet mine. “I wasn’t there on vacation,” he says.

The machine beeps, and his blood is neither too thin nor too thick. It’s in range. It’s perfect. I tell him so, and we make a date for four weeks when I’ll repeat this simple task. I help him put on his heavy winter coat. As he leaves the small exam room, I shake his hand and thank him for his service. It seems such an insignificant gesture, but it’s all I know to do.

Hands and arms inside the cart, please. Next: My favorite poet

Lessons taught by old movies

This weekend was a lot calmer than my previous weekend; I didn’t need to call for a tow truck. So I had time to watch some of my favorite old movies.

I started Saturday morning with French Kiss, starring Meg Ryan and Kevin Kline. Great movie! I love the metamorphosis of the main character. She’s so delicious. “I hate Paris in the springtime. I hate Paris in the fall…”

I spent Sunday morning watching Tootsie with Dustin Hoffman and Jessica Lange. It’s curious to me that I’ve seen it so many times, but I still catch lines I didn’t hear before. My favorite: “I don’t believe in hell. I believe in unemployment.”

Later that day, I watched While You Were Sleeping, starring Sandra Bullock and Bill Pullman. I love that movie because it’s so light. I mean, really, not a whole lot happens in this movie. No car crashes. Nobody dies. No huge moral dilemma. But it’s the characters I love, especially Jack’s family. It’s the grandma with her heart condition who takes photos during the disastrous wedding. It’s Joe Junior, the neighbor from Hell. He’s a hoot! This is a croissant of a movie – light and airy.

And this is what I hope my next book will be: light, funny, silly. A lofty goal indeed.

Meet Elaine Dodge, author of Harcourt’s Mountain

“Tell me what you don’t see.”  It’s almost as good as, “What if…”

For a writer, these magical phrases launch adventures. They begin the journey of one idea giving life to another, linking the pictures in my mind with the words on the page. Granted, it’s also the start of a lot of hard work, involving too many cups of coffee and a fair amount of banging my head on the keyboard while I cry, “What happens next?”

One afternoon, what happened next was the timely arrival of the fire-brigade. I was in the throes of discovering, “What happens next?” when outside, the gazebo caught fire! I had taken Henry, the cat, for a stroll around the garden to get the creative juices flowing when I stumbled upon the landlords trying to extinguish the smoldering fire while coughing from the thick black smoke. The chimney had gotten too hot as a result of the garden rubbish that was being burnt in the fireplace.  When the fire-brigade arrived, the excitement ended quickly. With the fire snuffed out, the gazebo looked as though it had a bad case of the flu and had sneezed violently.

The good thing about being a writer is that every sight, sound, smell and emotion is grist for the mill. The fire was labeled and stored away for future use.

My book, Harcourt’s Mountain, started with a “What if?” and then moved onto, “What happens next?”

I live in South Africa and have never visited British Columbia, so this faraway place filled my imagination. Harcourt’s Mountain flowed well because I plotted the novel in advance.

I can’t do that for my current work-in-progress, “The Device Hunter.”  The characters won’t let me. This inability to plot has never occurred before, but the characters in my next novel are fiercely independent. They’ve taken control of the story, and I find myself wrestled to the ground, clutching my notebook to my chest and moaning, “Yes, but what happens next?”

As a first time novelist, I’m learning to navigate the pitfalls of marketing Harcourt’s Mountain while writing The Device Hunter. Discipline helps although it battles daily with procrastination. There’s a children’s story in there somewhere. Meanwhile, “What happens next?” is the question continually on my mind.

Thank you, Annette, for having me on your blog. It’s been great!

 

More about Elaine:

Elaine was born in Zambia, grew up in Zimbabwe and currently lives in South Africa. Books have filled her life from the very beginning. She trained as a designer, worked in that industry for years, even running her own company for a while. A long stint in advertising followed. In the last few years, she’s been toiling away in the TV industry, winning an odd international award. But that wasn’t enough. She wanted to “tell stories”. She is passionate about it. She feels most alive when she’s writing, and delights in letting her imagination run riot. In November 2011, she finally took the plunge and decided to “wrestle the Rottweiler” and started putting all those stories on paper.

Harcourt’s Mountain

Spring, 1867 – The western frontier of British Columbia hardly seems a likely place for romance. Filthy, terrified and confused, Hope Booker is waiting to be sold off the ‘bride’ ship. Luke Harcourt happens upon the sale. It’s not love at first sight, but he feels compelled to save her from a life of slavery and prostitution. To allay her fears of being raped, Luke promises never to touch her. Although he is a man of his word, this is a pledge he finds almost impossible to keep.

Battling their growing attraction to each other, they learn to live together in the forests of the wild and unexplored mountains. They face white water, Indians, wolves, and dangerous men. No longer able to deny their feelings, their ‘happy-ever-after’ is shattered when a corrupt land baron forces Luke’s hand. Enraged at the man’s actions, Luke rides into town—and disappears.

Alone and pregnant, Hope faces the prospect of the worst winter in ten years. The trauma of fighting off a hungry grizzly brings on labor, but the baby is stuck. Luke meanwhile wakes up on a ship bound for South America, captained by a revengeful sadist who plans to murder him. Will Luke survive and make it back to Hope in time?

Where to find Harcourt’s Mountain

http://www.tirgearrpublishing.com/authors/Dodge_Elaine/harcourts-mountain.htm

http://elainedodge.weebly.com

http://www.facebook.com/pages/Elaine-Dodge/422105531221691

The dream

Last night, I dreamt I was at a children’s writers convention. Much to my surprise, I received an honorable mention for something I penned, and I was invited to join a panel of writers at the front of the room.

I took my seat with the others, but when I opened the manila envelope, I saw that the manuscript which was being honored was not mine. When the speaker reached me, after briefly interviewing all of the authors to my right, I stood up and called out the name of the author/illustrator whose work had been mistakenly filed in the folder with my name on it. He jumped up and ran to the table, a bevy of excitement and joyful noise. I sat back down.

I’m amazed at two things: 1) the degree of complexity of my dreams. I remember the vibrant colors and complex storyline of the picture-book manuscript that was misplaced in my folder, and 2) how quickly my mind works to make sense of the events that happen when I’m awake.

You see, yesterday, I received my first royalties statement. No money yet, but I know how much to expect. Dare I share it with you? Probably not. That would be crass. But let me say I was correct when I joked that I could expect “tens of dollars” from my first novel. Here’s another hint: I make in one hour at my current profession the same amount that Celebration House garnered in two months of sales. Succinctly put: writing is a financial waste of time.

My publisher tells me I need to promote, promote, promote! That’s done by sending emails to bloggers and asking them to review my book and/or feature me. I call it blog begging. And I did that. A lot of that back in August. 

My publisher tells me to write a second novel. But I did that. Bone Girl was finished last summer. The problem is, my publisher doesn’t buy children’s fiction. Bone Girl is meant for kids age 8-12.

Yet, here I sit at 6:20 in the morning, writing a blog post. When I’m done with this, I’m going to read over the last scene I was polishing in “A Year with Geno.”

I think, for now, writing must remain a time-consuming hobby. And the idea of writing full-time, supporting my family with my storytelling, well, that’s just a dream.

Hands and arms inside the cart: Next: please meet Elaine Dodge, author of Harcourt’s Mountain.