Stories... Including my own ;)

A long time ago, in a galaxy far, far away, I was the editor for a news magazine, and I had to write a weekly opinion column. It was expected to be about local politics, and so it was, but unfortunately I am a very gray person and could never come up with anything definitive to say. It definitely didn't help that I had to work with everyone I wrote about, and so felt pressured not to really speak my mind at all. But the long and...well, long of it is I really hate writing anything that resembles a column.
I suspect this is why I've never really warmed to the idea of having and maintaining a blog. I know it's necessary... and that's about the extent of my feelings about having a blog. I look at authors like Rachel Deagan and Heather Hildenbrand, who actually seem to enjoy updating their blogs, and it blows my mind a little. Then I visit amazing, beautiful review sites like The Bookish Brunette and several circuits fry inside my head.
But I want to be here. I want to communicate with my readers, and other authors, and reviewers. So I'm going to try to do a better job of updating, and not just with 'professional' stuff. If I'm going to do this, I want it to be personal.
Things have been super hectic lately in my world. My husband, who is also my editor, and I have been traveling a lot. Probably four long weekend sort of trips (all 5+ hour drives) in the last six weeks. And we're not traveling alone. We have an 11-month-old son (who just started walking!).
I originally said Chosen, Stained book three, would be out in early July - a deadline I definitely thought I could make, and probably could have, had I skipped UtopYA or one of our trips to visit family. I'm slowly learning that as an indie author doing everything 'in-house', deadlines are totally unpredictable, and it's best not to say much about a book's release date until it's actually time.
For example, I just announced that Chosen will be out July 27. The book is long since finished, and EditorHubby (or should he be Editubby? that makes me laugh. hard.) has even edited it twice already. So I know I can make that deadline, because if something terrible happened between now and then, we could simply put it out as is. It's that close to being truly finished.
Most of my days lately have been all about Little Bear (my son) and Chosen. Editubby and I have hardly seen each other at all, which has been pretty hard, and all my face-to-face friends think I'm hibernating. Which I guess I am. When I do leave the house, I'm wearing baby food-stained t-shirts and Nike running shorts, and the odds that my hair has been brushed and I've put on makeup (even chapstick) are, sadly, very low.
Honestly, I usually don't know what day of the week it is. My dishwasher has been broken for almost a month, but since Serious Housecleaning Time could be PR time or Chosen time or Stained Four time or Over the Moon time or Bear time or Editubby time, I never can justify doing a serious clean, and because I'm embarrassed about the state of my house, I never call a handyman to fix my dishwasher. So my dishwasher has been broken for a month, and I just keep scrubbing dishes in little five-minute intervals between other tasks. So, yeah. That's my life right now.
Lately I'm really feeling the weight of not having Chosen out yet, so I'm probably looking forward to the release as much as the next person, if not more. My goal is to have Stained Four finished two weeks after that, and have it released one week later. So, the next-to-last week of August. I've been working on it for about a week, while Editubby and I overlap and crisscross with the editing on Chosen. So far, so good. :)
It's kind of weird that I'll be wrapping the Stained Series up, simply because it's been 'alive' for so long. I wrote my very first real(ish) book from 2005-2006 (oh, the days when it took a year to write a book!) and after that, I started Stained. At the time it was called Marked; that was before the YA book by P.C. Cast came out, or at least before I'd seen it. I wrote it in a week, gave it to Editubby, and was querying agents two or three months later. (And this, my friends, was considered a speedy operation).
I didn't query very widely because at the time I didn't know I should. I sent out 20 queries and got two request for fulls and two requests for partials. One of the full-requesting agents rejected Marked because she didn't like the characters. Just plain didn't like 'em. She also thought the beginning was too slow. (It was. It's still not the fastest thing, but it's not that slow anymore). The other one, a NYC agent who was and still is one of the very best, rejected with this: Your writing is beautiful, but it is just not quite distinct enough. To represent, I have to be sure. And, in cursive, in the margin, he wrote: Hope you understand. At the time, I didn't.
I decided to revisit Marked later, and in the meantime, I spent three years writing and re-writing another book, which would eventually become Over the Moon, book one in my Princeps Series. I re-wrote that book, from start to finish, same characters but EVERYTHING else different, four times during those three years, and that more than anything else is what taught me how to write and plot. That book got me through some tough times, so when I started querying for it in the fall of 2010, I was determined to see it published. I would NOT take 'no' for an answer.
This time, I queried widely (150 agents). I got a lot of requests for fulls and partials, and I got as close as you can get to getting an agent without actually ending up with one. (There's more to that story, but because I still 'know' some of the agents, I don't share it; anyway, it's not that interesting). One of my agent situations was particularly hard to get over. For a long time, I was heartbroken over Over the Moon. Like, would cry if the subject came up. After having written it four times in attempt to get it perfect, the only way I could make myself put it away was to promise myself I that I would re-write it sometime in the future. Do something new with it. Make it better. Somehow get it published.
By that time, I was pregnant with Little Bear, and I wasn't sure anymore if I was even supposed to be a writer. I wanted to give it up. I didn't want to be a writer in a world where Over the Moon couldn't be published. At the time, I knew nothing about ebooks. If an agent didn't want to try to sell my book for me, everything was over. When I put OTM 'in a drawer,' I felt like my characters had died, and I mourned them.
During the querying stage of OTM, I'd gotten this image in my head of a girl finding this guy in her backyard, which was a field - the field outside my aunt and uncle's house, on their farm in Alabama. That idea quickly became HERE (and the farm was moved to Colorado, where it became a wind farm). HERE was the book I didn't really want to write. You know, like that guy you start dating when you really don't want to date anyone because you've just had your heart stomped on...but you do because you have nothing else to do...and you're kind of half-assing it...and then at some point, it somehow becomes real. That was HERE. By the end of the book, I was totally in love with Nick (and Milo), which was important and good, but not as important or good as something else...
During the writing of HERE, a little over a year ago, I went to the beach, where I was given a Kindle, which I was told could be read easily with one hand while rocking or feeding a baby. My sister, who gave me the Kindle and who at the time had no babies, had no way of knowing I would never actually be coordinated enough to read and feed a newborn at the same time. But after Little Bear was asleep, during that window of time when you can't quite put them down without waking them up... I could read. And I did. I read Jessica Sorensen's Fallen Star series and Addison Moore's Celestra series, both of which rocked my socks.
I will never forget the day that I decided to see who published Addison Moore's books. I remember so well lying on my (big, fat, pregnant) side, in my big, dark, too-hot bed, in what I think was the heat of July, and scanning through the first part of her book looking for the information. And then the moment that I saw HER NAME. My world was rocked. Here was a BIG author...publishing HERSELF. And then I frantically checked Fallen Star. And it was self-pubbed, too!
I remember I was so excited - just that this avenue was out there, available. Well, possibly available. I didn't even know yet. I told Editubby, who at the time was just plain Hubby, one night when we were walking on a nearby college campus. I was still down and out because of what had happened with OTM. I didn't know what to do with HERE. I definitely didn't know what to do about ebooks.
Editubby suggested putting Marked up, just for kicks. Maybe someone would read it. At the time, I had no plans whatsoever for the book that I re-named Stained. It wasn't distinct. It wasn't going anywhere. But I dusted it off, gave it an edit or two, put it on Amazon... and, to my total shock, people did start reading it. Even liking it. Which was amazing. And which promoted the decision to write Stolen. And then Chosen.

And slowly I started to find that you can make money with ebooks. It's not big money in the very beginning. It's not that sought-after 'very nice' advance from a NY publishing house, but it's your e-rights. Yours. It's giving none of your money to an agent or a publisher. It's hard work, but it's worth it. And here's the best part: You can write what you want, when you want to write it - and (this is still a little crazy) you can put it online. Just like that, people can read your books.
So it's no huge surprise that one of my first attempts at writing a 'real' blog post led me here. I am busy, yes, but I am so, so happy to be doing this.

Less than a year ago, I wasn't sure how I could keep writing, knowing that my efforts might be for nothing. Knowing that if none of these 200-some-odd people wanted it, no one would ever get to see it. At least not in a situation where I'd be making any money. And if I couldn't make money on my writing, maybe I should be doing something else. The fact was, I wanted - and still want - to make money from my writing. I wanted my books to be seen. I wanted them to be priced reasonably, so that people would buy them. I wanted to be given a fighting chance at making a name for myself. None of this seemed possible before ebooks.

I'm sure I sound like so many other up-and-coming authors out there, but seriously: I am living my dream. I have a to-be-written list about a mile long, and because of ebooks - and because of you - I can actually write those books, and it won't be a waste of my time. It won't leave me broke because I'm writing instead of working a paying job. It won't leave me discouraged because I'm writing only for agents who don't think they can sell my work. I'm writing for you. Which is wonderful.