S.C. Green's Blog, page 5

Steff on the Creative Writer’s Toolkit podcast

In December I had a fantastic conversation with Andrew Chamberlain at the Creative Writer’s Toolkit podcast. We spoke about the challenges writers with disabilities face, how writers can accurately present characters with disabilities, and how I built my writing career.

Andrew was a lovely host, and I really enjoyed this conversation about some things that are extremely important to me. You can listen on the website, on iTunes, Spotify, and Stitcher.

Book news: New series starting this week, and limited edition Briarwood Witches collection

Happy New Year. I hope you got to have a bit of a holiday and hang out with loved ones. That’s what I did and it was magnificent.

My news is all in the title. I’m excited to be releasing book one in a brand new series on the 16th of January. The Nevermore Bookshop Mysteries are what you get when all your book boyfriends come to life. Join a brooding antihero, a master criminal, a cheeky raven, and a heroine with a big heart (and an even bigger book collection) in this brand new steamy reverse harem paranormal mystery series.

That’s all the info you get for now :) Join my mailing list or Facebook reader group if you want all the gossip and teasers and behind-the-scenes gaff.

Briarwood Witches – the complete collection

For a limited time only, I’ve released the entire Briarwood Witches series (all 5 books) plus a bonus scene from Arthur’s POV. This box set is going to be available for a discounted price of $9.99US until Jan 31st, and then it is going to DISAPPEAR. (It might come back in the future, but it might now).

If you want to read the whole series, I suggest grabbing it now. Available in KU.

That’s it from me (until tomorrow when I come back and tell you about my new year adventures). Enjoy!

Talking Reverse Harem and book marketing on the SPA Girls Podcast

This week I had the honour of chatting to the fabulous SPA Girls (Self Publishing Authors) about what I’ve been doing to market my books and about reverse harem as a genre. It was so much fun!

You can go here to listen to the full episode.

I’ve recorded a couple of other podcast episodes over the last month. It’s neat talking to other authors about your process  – it helps you define and refine my own ideas. Expect to see more podcasts from me come out in the New Year.

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How to balance writing with that pesky day job

For the last ten months I’ve been living the dream of writers across the world – whole uninterrupted weeks where I don’t have to think about anything except characters and plots and which cat will snuggle on my feet.

Not quite – I’ve still got to run my writing business, do chores, cook food, snuggle cats. But I’m not going to lie – being a full-time writer is awesome.

It’s taken me many years to get here. I actually quit my job once before, back in 2013, to run my freelance content writing business and hopefully become a bestselling novelist on the side. The whole point of me quitting was to gain more time to work on my own fiction.

It was a mistake. I wasn’t earning enough per hour to thrive, and we started building our house at the same time. No matter how much I worked, I couldn’t seem to get to a point where I felt ‘safe’. I could never do enough, never achieve enough, and every day, clients breathed down my neck – wanting more, more, more.

I was expending all my creative energy working on other people’s passion projects, and I had nothing left for myself. In 6 months I’d barely written 5,000 words of fiction. I was miserable. I never stopped working. A client offered me a full-time position – part of a growing marketing team for a small product within a much larger tech giant. It was an amazing salary and I could work 3 days a week from home. I said yes and immediately felt 100% better.

With that job, I was off the clock after my 8 hours, and I had all this time to devote to writing. I quit all my freelance work and just focused on the house and my novels. It was around this time I started to experiment with self-publishing. I decided that if I left the day job again, it wouldn’t be to work for other people. It would be because of my own stories.

I changed jobs twice in the ensuing years, both to different tech firms, all with some kind of work-from-home arrangement. The days I did work, my commute was between 3-5 hours each day. I was tired, but determined, especially once I started seeing success with Steffanie Holmes.

2017 was a tough year for me. We crunched the numbers and worked out that it was possible for me to quit, provided I could bring in a certain figure every month. I nearly did quit there and then, but because we hadn’t finished the house yet, I knew we needed to be sensible and save as much as we could and finish first, instead of run the risk that we had to use the money and we couldn’t get things done.

At the last second, as I wound up one job, I was offered an opportunity that was too good to pass up. The only catch was a 5-hour commute, 3 days a week. My husband would drive for an hour from our home, drop me at the bus stop on the way to his office, and I’d take two buses to get to my new office, reversing the commute on the way home.

I told myself when I took the job I would only do it for a year and not a day longer. I knew I wouldn’t be comfortable relying solely on Amazon’s whims for future employment, so I found some work as a contractor content writing for local marketing agencies. Four agencies sent me monthly work. It was perfect, because they handled all the client stuff that I hated, and I just wrote articles and blogs and emails.

Well, perfect-ish. The day job was taxing on the brain. The commute made me tired. I wrote my 2000 words a day hunched over a computer on the bus. My back hurt. When I got in the door at night I’d go straight to the computer and finish agency work, then write or edit my novels. Every night. I worked all weekend, every weekend. We got the house finished. I published seven books. I sent in (nearly) all my freelance work on time.

I barely did any book marketing – except applying for Bookbubs – because I just didn’t have the brain space. My husband got grumpy at me because I was always working. But we both gritted our teeth and forged onward because we knew we had an end-date. I wrote my resignation date in my calendar and counted down the days until I could quit.

My last day at work was one day before the exact date I began the previous year. My workmates made me an amazing card and we had donuts. I will never forget how supportive they (and all the other folk I’ve worked with over the years) have been, but I’d be lying if I said I was sad to leave.

Now… life is awesome. That gnawing stress of 2017 is gone. The house is (mostly) done, the books are doing well, the freelance work is starting to taper off as I focus more on building the book income. I get to be home all the time – where I truly want to be – with my cats and my man. I have headspace for cool projects and blogging. I walk outside every morning and pick handfuls of strawberries for breakfast. Life is good.

It took a lot of work to get here, and also luck and privilege. We don’t have kids who rely on us, my husband earns decent money, apart from the mortgage we don’t have debt. I’m fit and youngish and I get to do this awesome thing and I am so so so grateful.

If this is you, here are some tips from me:

1. Find an employee that allows you to work from home at least 1-2 days a week if possible, or at least that has flexible hours so you can, for instance, get into the office a 7AM and leave at 3PM. Both these things have given me a lot more writing time over the years.

2. Carve out space where you can and force yourself to do the things even when it sucks. I had a 5-hour commute 3 days a week for a year. I managed to write around 1500-2000 words a day on the bus even though it was a bit shite.

3. Eat lunch at your desk and go home early to write. Or write during your lunch hour if the culture of your office allows it. I was never at work to become BFFs with my workmates, so I’d always avoid taking time off for lunch if I could avoid it.

4. Give yourself an end-date, as a goal to work towards. It helps you to stay sane if you ramp up your efforts the year preceding your exit.

5. If possible, do something for a day job that will help you with your writing career, maybe by working in publishing or teaching so you gain contacts, or in marketing so you learn about how to promote your books.

6. Use hacks like the pomodoro technique to make sure you’re making the most out of the time you do have to write.

7. Talk to your partner, if you have one, often and openly, about what you’re trying to achieve. They can be supportive but also miss you, and it’s good to share your wins and make sure they’re aware that this crazy pace is not forever.

8. Think about how to protect your income when you DO go full-time, so you aren’t forced to go back the way I was the first time. Make sure you calculate exactly what you need to survive, and account for taxes, insurance, advertising, book covers, editing, etc. Look at freelance work and other ideas to help you even out your income.

9. Develop a draconian attitude toward your day-job hours. If they pay you for 40 hours, they get 40 hours. No more, no less. You’ll put in the effort while you’re there, but any unpaid overtime you do robs you of your limited free time. Remember, you’re not sticking around forever so it doesn’t matter that you don’t win, “most dedicated employee of the year” award.

10. Work on things that offer the fastest route to getting what you need. You only have finite time, so choose to only do the jobs that offer the highest ROI. Publishing a new book is much better than updating your website or making another social media page.

11. Do all your thinking at other times of the day so you don’t waste your precious writing time staring at a blank page. I do my thinking either in the shower or dozing in the car or on the bus.

12. Stick your goal in the calendar. Glue post-its all over your house. Put an alert on your phone… anything to remember why you’re doing this!

There you have it, 12 perfectly simple tips to help you write through the day job. I hope soon I’ll be seeing your announcement that you’ve quit for good!

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My writing and publishing plan for 2019

With the release of The Castle of Spirit and Sorrow, the successful LitCrawl festival done and dusted, and an application for a cool opportunity submitted last week, I’m officially done with all pre-scheduled deadlines for the year. It’s kind of a cool feeling that anything I do between now and Dec 31st is kind of a bonus.

But that doesn’t mean I’m kicking back and watching Brooklyn Nine Nine episodes on repeat (okay, maybe there’s a little bit of that). I’m writing the first book in a new series (sort of as part of Nanowrimo, but also because it’s gotta be done), and getting started on a few projects and plans for 2019. As I was doing my planning, I thought it might be useful for other writers to have a look at some of the projects I’ve got planned for 2019.

There’s always something else you could be learning, experimenting with, and pushing towards. I’ve got big, hairy, audacious goals for 2019 and beyond, and I’ve been breaking down those goals into smaller steps and projects and working on an overarching vision of who I am as a writer.

Here are some of the things I’ll be working on in 2019, in no particular order.

Business-as-usual. This means that I’ll be writing at least 6 Steffanie Holmes books in 2018. Usually, I hit 7-8 (I’ll be 7.5 by the end of this year, although, two won’t be published until 2019), but I’m aiming lower because I’ll be spending six weeks in Europe. Although I intend to write while there (aiming for 1000 words a day, it will definitely lower my output for the year. These books pay the bills, so it’s important I continue to put them out as a first priority.
Getting all my books into print. Ingram Spark is doing a special right now as part of Nanowrimo, which offers free setup of all print books with the code NANO until March 2019. I’m taking this opportunity to do a thing I’ve been putting off for far too long – getting ALL my books in print. This is my first project for 2019 and I may even complete it this year. It’s in part for completedness sake, but also because the next item on my to-do list is…
Talking to a distributor. Over the last year I’ve been actively working to improve my profile here in New Zealand, but the problem is that local readers can’t find my books because they don’t tend to read digitally. I think with a big catalog a local distributor might be interested in getting my books into libraries and bookstores. It’s definitely worth a try.
Launching Only Freaks Turn Things Into Bones. This should happen around Feb/March 2019. I’m so excited! If you don’t know, Only Freaks Turn Things Into Bones is a children’s picture book about a little grim reaper who gets bullied that I funded as a Kickstarter earlier this year with my illustrator friend Bree. The illustrations are all done and the book looks fantastic. You can pre-order a copy here. We’ll be launching with much online fanfare as well as media and maybe a bookstore launch.
Another Kickstarter. Bree and I had so much fun doing Only Freaks, we’re thinking of other ideas for a Kickstarter campaign. Nothing is going to happen until we’ve posted out everything for the last campaign, but stay tuned.
More speaking/podcasts. I had SO MUCH FUN this year meeting and talking with other writers at events and on different podcasts. Expect to see me stepping up this in 2019.
An international writers conference (or two). There’s a conference in November in the US I really want to attend. There’s also another in Aussie I’ve applied for in March. Currently, both are a little bit of a stretch for the business budget, but if things pick up and/or I can secure local funding to attend (as a professional development opportunity, of which the US conference definitely is) I will be there and it will be AMAZING.
Mastering CPC advertising. AMS ads, Facebook ads, Bookbub ads – I need to learn ’em. I’ve been coasting along without this for the last few years and honestly, it’s well past time I learned what I need to do to master these ads. This is what will keep my backlist ticking along and what I believe will propel me to the next level. I just need to focus on learning and set aside funds to experiment and make it happen.
Online writing/publishing course. I am creating a thing! In secret. It’s online and you will love it if you’re a writer. More news on this shortly.
Smash my income goal. Even though I’ve just come off a bad month (Self-published authors, October SUUUUUCKED, amirite?) it’ll looking optimistic that I’ll exceed my income goal for 2018, which was $120k (split between royalties from my books and freelance work). I know it can feel really crass to talk about money, but as an aspiring writer I always found it inspiring to know what a person can achieve as an author and a big part of that is knowing the numbers. That’s why I share the numbers. In 2019, I want to grow the percentage of income earned from royalties versus freelance work, and I’ve set an audacious income goal I want to hit – $200k. As November is looking up and I plan out December promo I’m feeling excited about making this goal a reality.

That’s my 2019. It sounds full and busy and scary and exciting already. But that’s the way I like things. How’s your 2019 shaping up?

Extra for experts

Around the same topic of scaling your business, growing, and planning for 2019, Joseph Alexander is on the Creative Penn podcast talking about these exact topics.

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The Castle of Spirit and Sorrow is here!

The final book in the Briarwood Witches series, The Castle of Spirit and Sorrow, is now available for your reading pleasure. Get your copy here.

When one of her own is cruelly taken, Maeve Moore must unite witches and humans for a final stand against an undefeatable army of the dead.

In an epic showdown of fae versus witches, hopes versus desire, death versus immortality, and science versus magic, Maeve will sacrifice everything for the love of five remarkable men. Is it enough to stop the fae?

The Castle of Spirit and Sorrow is the chilling finale to the Briarwood Reverse Harem series by USA Today bestselling author Steffanie Holmes. This full-length book glitters with love, heartache, hope, grief, dark magic, fairy trickery, steamy scenes, British slang, meat pies, second chances, and the healing powers of a good cup of tea. Read on only if you believe one just isn’t enough.

Read now.

Paperbacks will be coming SOON.

Sign up to the mailing list to grab a free Briarwood prequel story, The Summer Court.

Antarctica in fiction: 7 of the best novels set on the ice

I may be a wee bit obsessed with Antarctica.

I’ve wanted to travel there ever since I read Bill Manhire’s collection, The Wide White Page: Writers Imagine Antarctica as a first-year university student, shortly followed by HP Lovecraft’s At the Mountains of Madness. Manhire’s collection of writings span eight centuries – from Samuel Taylor Coleridge to Ursula Le Guin to Manhire himself, and postulate an Antarctica that is at once both intoxicating and horrific. Manhire was part of the Antarctica New Zealand Artists to Antarctica expedition in 1998, and he

To writers, Antarctica is symbolic of many things – a final frontier, humankind’s inability to comprehend the vastness of the universe and our place in it, loneliness, isolation, wonder, adventure, unforgiveness, and a sense that we’re not in control of the earth or our destinies. As Antarctic science reveals the devastating effects of the climate changes we’re wrought, Antarctica also serves as a symbol of reasoned argument, of sobering evidence, of our own stupidity.

It’s no wonder so many writers have been captivated by the frozen continent as I have. Here are some of my favourite novels that feature Antarctica.

1. Antarctica, Kim Stanley Robinson (1971)

This early eco-thriller is well-known not just for being an excellent read, but for contextualizing within its narrative many of the most interesting questions around human interference and habitation on the ice. Robinson deals with non-European cultural perspectives of Antarctica through scattered haiku’s of his Chinese poet character, explores the role of women in Antarctica exploration and the idea of an indigenous population. This book relies heavily on research and experiences the author had while on the US equivalent of Artists to Antarctica.

Read Antarctica.

2. Blood and Ice, Robert Masello, (2009).

A troubled journalist is commissioned to write a feature article about a remote Antarctic research station. While there he discovers two bodies encased in the ice. The pair – a man and a woman – are chained together, and wearing clothes from the 1800s. As the bodies are brought to the surface and the ice around them begins to thaw, the journalist is drawn into a horrific supernatural world where what is dead is not always gone.

I loved the combination of hard-boiled crime and supernatural thriller. Although a significant amount of this book is set in Antarctica, and the frozen continent plays a vital role in the book, the story also spans four other continents and several centuries.

Read Blood and Ice.

3. At the Mountains of Madness. H P Lovecraft, (1931)

One of Lovecraft’s most famous stories (and also his longers), At the Mountains of Madness follows a disastrous scientific expedition to Antarctica where Miskatonic University explorers uncover a hidden city and prehistoric life-forms. Then things get scary, and scarier.

Lovecraft had a lifelong interest in Antarctic exploration, although he was bitterly averse to the cold. He was also heavily inspired by Edgar Allan Poe’s novel, The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket, although of course, he gave his story his own cosmic horror spin.

Read At the Mountains of Madness

4. The Brief History of the Dead, Kevin Brockmeier

People in The City are dead. They live in The City only as long as someone alive on earth remembers them. The City expands and contracts as needed to accommodate the dead within. On earth, the polar ice caps are melting and the Coca Cola company have sent an expedition to Antarctica to research the feasibility of melting ice to make soft drinks. Biological weapons set off cause chaos both on earth and in The City, and our heroine Laura Byrd is trapped between them.

This is a bizarre and utterly brilliant book that explores a dystopian future and asks important questions about climate change and commercialization.

Read The Brief History of the Dead

5. The Birthday Boys, Beryl Bainbridge (1991)

There had to be at least one historical novel about Antarctic exploration on this list. I chose Bainbridge because I found it to be well researched, exciting, and brilliantly executed, but also because it tells a different story than the triumph of man over nature. The story follows five accounts of Scott’s 1919-13 expedition, and each account differs, with unreliable narrators abounding and the reader left to make up their own mind. If you enjoyed, as I did, An Instance of the Fingerpost, you’ll dig this book.

Read The Birthday Boys

6. Where’d You Go, Bernadette? Maria Sample (2012)

This is a comedy story narrated by 15-year-old Bee Branch, whose agoraphobic architect mother Bernadette goes missing just before a big family trip to Antarctica. It’s a little bit bizarre and completely wonderful.

Read Where’d You Go, Bernadette?

7. Troubling a Star, Madeleine L’Engle (1994)

Part of her famous Austin family young adult suspense series, L’Engle sends her popular protagonist Vicky Austin to Antarctica. The first chapter begins with Vicky stranded on an iceberg, and the story goes back in time to how she got there, picking up high-risk political and ecological intrigue. There’s an environmental thread woven through the narrative, and Vicky is such a fun character you will totally fall in love.

Read Troubling A Star.

What I love about this list is how different all these books are. We have adventure novels and crime thrillers alongside supernatural horror and young adult suspense. Do you have any favourite novels about Antarctica that I’ve missed?

Steff on Writer Files podcast

The Writer Files is one of my favourite podcasts for writers. I love that rather than focusing on how writers market their books and find readers, host Kelton Reid asks about writing habits and productivity and creativity. Previous episodes include interviews with mortician Caitlin Doughty (author of Smoke Gets In Your Eyes), fantasy author Catherynne M Valente, and science fiction novelist Andy Weir.

I was honoured to appear on the Writer Files podcast last week – my episode is in two parts: part one and part two. You can listen to them below or on the Writer Files website.

We had a lot of fun talking about rejection, perseverance, my obsession with heavy metal, ancient languages, and checklists, eating ribs with Nick Cave, and a funny story about my Kindle.

I hope you enjoy it, and don’t hesitate to shoot me an email or comment on social media if you have any questions about anything we discuss.

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More items added to the ONLY FREAKS TURN THINGS INTO BONES shop

As well as being able to pre-order copies of our book, Only Freaks Turn Things Into Bones, you can now order t-shirts and art prints from the Indiegogo shop.

T-shirts and art prints will only be available until the end of November, so if you want yours you’d better get them now!

Art prints

We’ve got three beautiful art print options, on 8×10 quality archival paper.

Sad Little Grim

Proud to be a FREAK

Little Grim in Graveyard.

T-shirts

Here’s our awesome t-shirt design, you can get it in black or white, in standard or fitted style, and sizes S-XXL.

You can grab your books, t-shirts, and art prints from our IndieGoGo store.

 

 

 

 

 

Steff Loves: Weather & Grey candles

I’m currently putting together a fun reader swag pack for my November 6th FB party to celebrate the launch of The Castle of Spirit and Sorrow and the wrapping up of the Briarwood Witches series. It’s a cool time to be doing this, because all my favourite gothic shops are releasing Halloween things, and I’m also discovering amazing new designers and makers.

One such discovery is Weather and Grey, who offer a variety of candles for the darkly inclined. The scents may be heavenly but the themes are anything but.

Weather and Grey is the flagship brand of The Candle Parlour in Claymont, Delaware, and their candles are designed to appeal to history buffs, romantics, aesthetes, dreamers, hipsters, artists, and old souls. Labels inspired by vintage artwork and scents evoking memory and mystery add to the experience. They also have a bricks-and-mortar store called The Candle Parlour in Delaware that looks amazing and I bet it smells even better.

Collections include vintage Halloween, penny dreadfuls (I love these literature-themed candles), history and nostalgia (everything from battlefields to Jack the Ripper), and the newly-released dark series.

Some of my favourite candles are Antique Books (paper, vanilla & leather), La Belle Epoque (cherry blossoms, white musk & myrrh), Midnight (clove), Mummy’s Curse (old cotton & incense), Vampyre (frankincense & clove), and Witch (pumpkin bread).

Visit the Weather & Grey website to buy their candles, or follow them on Instagram.