Samantha Bryant's Blog, page 76

Guest Post: Katie Teller, Author of Kiya: Hope of the Pharoah

It's my pleasure to introduce you to Katie Teller, a fellow Curiosity Quills author. I had the privilege of being a guest author at her book's birthday party yesterday on Facebook. Her book recently turned two. In case you missed that fun, enjoy hearing from Katie here! I asked her to write about lessons learned to share with my readers here.

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Two years! Wow. I've learned a lot since Kiya's release. Here are some of them:

Writing. Yes, thanks to great editors, like Mary Harris who edited all three Kiya books, as well as fantastic Critique Partner's and Beta readers, my writing has improved enormously. I'm far from perfect, but I've learned essentials like show vs tell, passive voice, improved grammar and so forth. When I dig up old manuscripts for edits, I'm surprised by the development I've gone through.

A Thick Skin. You know what they say, haters are gonna hate. At first those nasty reviewers really hurt me, and I fell for the rookie mistake of reading them. Bad idea, unless you enjoy crying and self doubt. Over time though, I learned to keep things in perspective. Bad reviews make my positive reviews look legitimate, which they are, but without bad reviews people believe the five star love is fake. So although some are just downright mean and there's no other way to say it, most reviews are positive and come from people who genuinely love the book. It's a learning curve, and I'm getting there.

Promotion Is A Beast. A necessary evil in the writing world is promoting your book. The trouble is
how to balance too much or too little. I'm terrified of spamming people, so I'm probably more on the too little side. What I do tend to do is find ways to help others and join in so people are exposed to me, thus become exposed to my books. Unfortunately though, promoting often sucks my creative spirit and I log for the times when I could write raw, unadulterated stories from my heart without stressing over keeping the promoting rolling.

Being an Author can be a 24/7 Job. Once a book is live, it's live all the time. Websites don't shut down for the night. This means sometimes I can be up late promoting a sale, or up early sharing a new release. There's no time frames for inspiration either, which is hard when you;re a mother and wife as well, both of which are also full time jobs that don't have a financial pay off. Finding time is a conscious decision, and I get a little peeved when people say to me "I'd write a book if I could find some time" like I somehow miraculously have abundant spare time between the chores, potty accidents, preschool, showering the hubby with love, doing my church duties, being pregnant and all that implies, and trying to fit in some sleep. So, often my "author time" is early morning or late at night, when it's quiet enough because everyone else is sleeping.

Kiya's Release Saved Us. No joke. When Kiya first released, my husband was without work. Within a few months, we were close to losing our home because we couldn't pay the mortgage with the meager income of my part time office job. Then, theKiya royalties started coming through and they were just enough to cover our mortgage. As time passed, we wracked up debts to get us by, so when my hubby did get a job, my royalties moved to paying off those debts. Now it goes toward prenatal bills/insurance. The Kiya Trilogy has literally saved us with the financial benefits of the extra income. I couldn't be more grateful.


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Born and raised in Australia, Katie's early years of day dreaming in the "bush", and having her father tell her wild bedtime stories, inspired her passion for writing.
After graduating High School, she became a foreign exchange student where she met a young man who several years later she married. Now she lives in Arizona with her husband, daughter and their dog.
She has a diploma in travel and tourism which helps inspire her writing.
Katie loves to out sing her friends and family, play sports and be a good wife and mother. She now works as an Acquisitions Editor to help support her family. She loves to write, and takes the few spare moments in her day to work on her novels.

Z is for Zonked: A to Z blogging challenge

April was an awesome month. I celebrated the release of my debut novel. I had a birthday. I got a few days off from the day job.

It was also emotional as heck and, darling friends, I am zonked. So, I'm going to take a little rest now, and leave you with a list of my postings from A-Z. I had a great time writing them, and I hope you enjoyed reading them. Good night.

http://static.guim.co.uk/sys-images/G...AtoZ Theme Reveal
A is for April 23
B is for BiologyC is for Curiosity QuillsD is for Dr. Liu
E is for Emeralds
F is for Family
G is for Goals
H is for Helen
I is for Impossible
J is for Jessica
K is for Knowledge
L is for Linda
M is for Menopause
N is for Nerd
O is for Overwhelmed
P is for Patricia
Q is for Queer
R is for Redhead
S is for Superheroes
T is for Time
U is for Unusual
V is for Violence
W is for Women Warriors
X is for X Chromosomes
Y is for Yippee!
Z is for Zonked
_______________________________________________This posting is part of the A to Z blogging challenge, in which bloggers undertake to post every day in April, excepting Sundays, which amounts to 26 postings, one for each letter of the alphabet--preferably along a theme. My postings will all be about my debut novel and my experiences writing it and seeing it published.

Blogging A to Z is a great opportunity to connect with some excellent bloggers and interesting people. I encourage you to check out other participating blogs, too!

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click the image to preorder on Amazon!

Y is for Yippee!: A to Z blogging challenge

So, I just had my birthday (yesterday).  It was pretty darn awesome. I spent it with my family. There was cake. There were hugs. There was singing and my girls both sing beautifully.

http://www.picgifs.com/graphics/snoopy
/graphics-snoopy-360370-840738/But what really made this one special is that it was my first one celebrated as a published novelist.

Good golly but that's great to say.

I was visiting with a high school friend this past summer (Hi, +David Holland ) and he reminded me that, in high school, I always said I was going to write a book. I don't actually remember that myself--high school is sort of this ugly smear on my memory that I've tried to obliterate with better experiences ever since.  I try not to remember it in too much detail as I do with other painful things in my past.

But I know he's right all the same. I can't remember a time before I wanted to be a writer. Pretty much as soon as I learned that was a job a person might have, it was on my list of dreams.

And this year, 2015, it feels more realized that ever before. Going Through the Change is out there--on shelves and stuff! People might buy it and read it. Some of them might like it! If I'm really lucky, my other books will get out there in world, too.

Yeah. It was a pretty awesome birthday.
_______________________________________________This posting is part of the A to Z blogging challenge, in which bloggers undertake to post every day in April, excepting Sundays, which amounts to 26 postings, one for each letter of the alphabet--preferably along a theme. My postings will all be about my debut novel and my experiences writing it and seeing it published.

Blogging A to Z is a great opportunity to connect with some excellent bloggers and interesting people. I encourage you to check out other participating blogs, too!

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click the image to preorder on Amazon!

X is for X chromosomes: A to Z blogging challenge

When I started to write Going Through the Change, I hadn't thought my way in too deeply. I'm a discovery writer that way--I just start writing and see where the story takes me. I don't really make a plan, it's more like I find the plan by looking at what's there. Then, I work backwards, making the story lead more clearly to where it ended up meandering.

L. Alvarez, drawn by +Charles C. Dowd Part of that meander was a research wander through genetics an gender.  Writing Linda/Leonel Alvarez had me researching and considering estrogen and testosterone, X and Y chromosomes, what kinds of things make a person "male" or "female" both genetically and socially.

Gender as a feature of identity is fascinating. Myself, I'm pretty dull. I'm cisgender. The world sees me as female and so do I. I'm even straight. Boring. But, it's who I am.

Linda's much more fluid than that. She was cisgender for 48 years. Then, a fluke of comic book science turned her into a man. The world sees her as Leonel, a virile man. Inside, though, she still feels like she's Linda, a wife, mother and grandmother.

Gender identity is extra tricky for her because she didn't choose change. As she says in the sequel I'm working on now: "I didn't cross the border; the border crossed me."

In writing, I found I needed both sets of pronouns for Linda/Leonel. When we're in her point of view, she calls herself by female pronouns and uses the name Linda, but the other characters call her Leonel and describe her with male pronouns. It meant I got to write fun things like:

"Her penis stirred a little against her new bathrobe as she remembered the pleasures of the night and the morning. He could still be hers, and she could still be his. They were the same people, even if she was housed differently now."

I'm so glad Linda came into my story. She's teaching me so much!
_______________________________________________This posting is part of the A to Z blogging challenge, in which bloggers undertake to post every day in April, excepting Sundays, which amounts to 26 postings, one for each letter of the alphabet--preferably along a theme. My postings will all be about my debut novel and my experiences writing it and seeing it published.

Blogging A to Z is a great opportunity to connect with some excellent bloggers and interesting people. I encourage you to check out other participating blogs, too!

____________________________________________
click the image to preorder on Amazon!

W is for Women Warriors: A to Z blogging challenge

Women are tough. Even those of us without comic book superpowers have regular superpowers like multitasking, managing crises, organizing families and partner-soothing.

http://static.comicvine.com/uploads/s...
/0/3133/105619-18439-108206-1-red-sonja.jpgMaybe this is part of why stories about kick-ass women become so popular. Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Black Widow from the Avengers series, Lisbeth Salander from the Girl Who series, Katniss Everdeen, Tris Prior, etc. There's my childhood favorite: Red Sonja.

The frustrating thing to me has been that, even in stories about amazing women, we still worship at the altar of youth. Think about that list I just made. Not a gray hair or stretch mark among them. Several of them still respond to "girl" without feeling insulted or weird. (And I listed the ones who work mostly dressed…unlike our friend Red here)

That's part of what drew me to writing Going Through the Change. I wanted a superhero story about full grown women with lives, jobs, families and responsibilities.

There's not a lot of them out there. Let's see…Helen Mirren in Red, Judi Dench as M, though neither of them are the "star" of those particular movies. Um, yeah. I'm stuck. Can you think of any? Hmmm…best get to work on those sequels. We need more of these.

_______________________________________________This posting is part of the A to Z blogging challenge, in which bloggers undertake to post every day in April, excepting Sundays, which amounts to 26 postings, one for each letter of the alphabet--preferably along a theme. My postings will all be about my debut novel and my experiences writing it and seeing it published.

Blogging A to Z is a great opportunity to connect with some excellent bloggers and interesting people. I encourage you to check out other participating blogs, too!

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click the image to preorder on Amazon!

V is for Violence: A to Z Blogging Challenge

Before I began writing Going Through the Change, I had never really written action scenes. My first novel (unpublished, His Other Mother, women's issues fiction), my short stories, my poetry and my essays had not featured things like people who could wield fire and fly, or even people who threw punches.

http://www.clipartbest.com/cliparts/d... violence well requires a different set of writing chops than I had yet developed. When I first started trying to do this, I really began to pay attention to what other writers did when they did it well (Larry Correia's Hard Magic is a great one). I also attended a writing advice panel at GenCon's Writer's Symposium called Mano a Mano that helped immensely. Lastly, I began studying German longsword. No one in my book fights with a sword, but it still helped me think about and understand body position in combat. (I'd like to think I did it well in the end, but that's for readers to say).

So, for other writers giving it a try, here are a few tips:


Keep logistics simple: The reader needs to quickly understand where the players are in relationship to each other and what exactly is happening. Don't lose your reader in over-detailed explanations or too-vague descriptions. Pacing is king: The middle of a fight is probably not your moment for a deep thought or flashback--stay in the momentRaise the stakes: The scenes are best if kept short, but even in a short scene changing the setting to someplace more dangerous, or putting someone in direct peril can really add interest for the readerDon't talk too much: dialogue can really slow down a fightCharacterization still matters: It's not enough to describe what everyone is doing. Your reader needs to have a pony in this race--they need to care who wins, who gets hurt, who gets away. If you can keep these things in mind, you can create a scene that is exciting and engaging for the reader and that forward your plot and characterization at the same time. You can rule the world! (at least that's how it feels)
_______________________________________________This posting is part of the A to Z blogging challenge, in which bloggers undertake to post every day in April, excepting Sundays, which amounts to 26 postings, one for each letter of the alphabet--preferably along a theme. My postings will all be about my debut novel and my experiences writing it and seeing it published.

Blogging A to Z is a great opportunity to connect with some excellent bloggers and interesting people. I encourage you to check out other participating blogs, too!

____________________________________________
click the image to preorder on Amazon!

U is for Unusual: A to Z Blogging Challenge

The women in Going Through the Change aren't used to thinking of themselves as unusual. In their own circles, each of them is pretty normal.

Patricia fits in well with the suits she spends her day with in the corporate world. Linda is happy among her family and neighborhood friends in her role as mother and grandmother. Jessica enjoyed her role as half of a power couple, at least until she was slowed down by cancer. Even Helen, who isn't exactly happy, doesn't stand out too much from other real estate agents and midlife divorcees.

Menopause can make any woman feel alienated from her own body. One of the major emotions of this time of life seems to be WTF!

http://static.guim.co.uk/sys-images/G... you've been reading along so far, you already know that the changes that these women went through were more extreme. The emotions though are more universal--we've all made this face at one time or another when we looked in a mirror.
_______________________________________________This posting is part of the A to Z blogging challenge, in which bloggers undertake to post every day in April, excepting Sundays, which amounts to 26 postings, one for each letter of the alphabet--preferably along a theme. My postings will all be about my debut novel and my experiences writing it and seeing it published.

Blogging A to Z is a great opportunity to connect with some excellent bloggers and interesting people. I encourage you to check out other participating blogs, too!

____________________________________________
click the image to preorder on Amazon!

T is for Time: A to Z Blogging Challenge

You hear a lot about how slowly the traditional publishing world moves. It's been described as glacial. It's a source of frustration, especially for eager new writers who are anxious to get their words into the hands of readers.

So I thought I'd share some details of the how much time went into the creation and release of Going Through the Change. For me, from conception of the idea to a book you can now buy (!) was almost exactly three years.

http://40.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_mbi... Spring 2012, I was struggling to finish the first novel I ever wrote (unpublished, His Other Mother, women's issues fiction). It's a dark story and it was emotionally hard on me to finish it.  So, part of my brain was trying to escape, and I came up with the general concept and some rough character descriptions for a superhero novel, escapism at its best. I filed them away and used them as a bribe to myself to make myself finish that first book.

In July 2012, I finished writing His Other Mother (that one took four years just for the writing of the first draft), and let myself start writing Going Through the Change. I finished the first draft in August 2013 (somewhere in there, I picked up my Magic Spreadsheet habit, which really increased my productivity). By the end of 2013, the book had been through my critique group and I had rewritten it. Keep in mind I also had a full time day job (middle school teaching) and a family during this time--there was only 1-2 hours per day I could get for direct focus on writing, often less.

I started querying it and submitting it in January 2014.  I won't make you suffer through the rejections and no-answer-answers with me.  The story ends happily with a book contract from +Curiosity Quills Press in August 2014. CQ had a really quick process. From my initial submission to my contract offer was only a space of about two weeks.

Since then, we've been working steadily on edits, cover art, marketing plans, etc. All the behind-the-scenes stuff that makes my book as beautiful and polished and perfect as it can be.  So, here we are on BOOK RELEASE DAY! It's been nearly three years to the day since I thought up the idea. In traditional publishing, I'd call that speedy-fast-quick!
_______________________________________________This posting is part of the A to Z blogging challenge, in which bloggers undertake to post every day in April, excepting Sundays, which amounts to 26 postings, one for each letter of the alphabet--preferably along a theme. My postings will all be about my debut novel and my experiences writing it and seeing it published.

Blogging A to Z is a great opportunity to connect with some excellent bloggers and interesting people. I encourage you to check out other participating blogs, too!

____________________________________________
click the image to preorder on Amazon!

S is for Superheroes: A to Z blogging challenge

"A superhero novel? Really?"

That's a pretty common response when I tell people what Going Through the Change is about. Superhero novels is getting to be a pretty nifty little niche market in fiction (check out Eric Searleman's excellent blog on the topic for more information), but it's still pretty small. A lot of people say, "I didn't know that was a thing!"

I've been a comics fan my whole life and I didn't know there were such things as superhero novels until a few years ago when I met James Maxey, author of Nobody Gets the Girl , and was thereby introduced to the sub-genre.

I've since read a lot more great books in this genre. (See my posting on DIY MFA on April 24, 2015 for some of my favorites).

Writing a superhero novel about menopausal women was the most fun I've had so far as a writer. It's still fun, as I finish up the sequel and make plans for a third book. I'm so happy to be playing on this particular playground!

_______________________________________________This posting is part of the A to Z blogging challenge, in which bloggers undertake to post every day in April, excepting Sundays, which amounts to 26 postings, one for each letter of the alphabet--preferably along a theme. My postings will all be about my debut novel and my experiences writing it and seeing it published.

Blogging A to Z is a great opportunity to connect with some excellent bloggers and interesting people. I encourage you to check out other participating blogs, too!
____________________________________________
click the image to preorder on Amazon!

R is for Redhead: A to Z blogging challenge

Redheads run in my family on my mother's side. Many of us have at least some red to our hair, and one of my cousins inherited the beautiful carroty shade I always coveted to go with my freckles. 
My grandmother was a redhead. I can even kind of remember her as a redhead, though she eventually had to stop dying her hair because the natural white beneath made dyed red hair look Bozo the Clown orange. But Grandma Liz was proud of her red hair, and she remained a redhead her whole, by nature if not by appearance. 
I always liked the idea that having red hair was indicative of your temperament somehow.  My grandfather definitely seemed to think that Grandma's stubbornness, quick temperedness, and impulsive nature all had something to do with her red hair. 
So, that's part of why Patricia O'Neill, one of the main characters in Going Through the Change, is a redhead. 
Real redheads are relatively rare compared to other hair colors. It's my understanding that it's a kind of mutation of the genes that makes it possible. I liked the idea that the mutation of the genes that made Patricia a redhead, and may have contributed to her fiery temperament, also made her susceptible to the superheroic sorts of changes she underwent. I think Grandma Liz would have liked that. _______________________________________________This posting is part of the A to Z blogging challenge, in which bloggers undertake to post every day in April, excepting Sundays, which amounts to 26 postings, one for each letter of the alphabet--preferably along a theme. My postings will all be about my debut novel and my experiences writing it and seeing it published.

Blogging A to Z is a great opportunity to connect with some excellent bloggers and interesting people. I encourage you to check out other participating blogs, too!

____________________________________________
click the image to preorder on Amazon!