Category: indie author

Legacy

Hello, Everyone!

Gosh, it’s been a long time since I talked to some of you, so this will serve as a catch-up about my activities as an indie author in 2018. It was very busy for me, partly because I made an ambitious resolution at the start of the year to bring out something new, free or discounted every month. And I did it! Here are highlights of the new stuff.

 

In April, I finished and published a brand new calendar mystery short story called “The 9th Street Gang.” It features Minty Wilcox and Daniel Price pursuing a pesky young gang in Kansas City in February 1900 just after they became engaged in Mischief in March. Click on the cover  to buy it for only $0.99.

 

In May, I published another short, “Detectives’ Honeymoon” that picks up exactly where Mischief in March leaves off. It resolves that little cliffhanger at the end of the novel and follows what turns out to be an unusual honeymoon. Click on the cover to buy it for only $0.99.

In July, I published Old Time Stories, a collection of fiction and nonfiction. It includes six calendar mystery short stories like the two mentioned earlier plus the previously unpublished story called “The Shackleton Ghost.” It also includes nonfiction pieces about the people and places that inspired my fiction. Click on the cover to buy the eBook for $3.99. (The print version is available for $10.)

And for those of you Minty and Daniel fans who wondered what happened to the April calendar mystery novel, I drafted it in November as a NaNoWriMo2018 project. I hope to publish it in April 2019.

 

(Note: the digital version of January Jinx, in which my heroine Minty Wilcox confronts all sorts of problems trying to get a suitable job for a woman in old Kansas City, will cost you only $0.99 in the U. S. at www.amazon.com/dp/B00HSSSBE4 or in the UK for £0.99 at www.amazon.co.uk/dp/B00HSSSBE4 from December 27, 2018 to January 3, 2019. It’s also available in print.

 

The project I completed and published in 2018 that I’m proudest of isn’t fiction at all. It’s Novel Basics, an Illustrated Guide to Writing a Novel, and very close to my heart as a longtime novel reader, writer, and teacher. Here’s a brief description of that book:

Let Dr. Juliet Kincaid talk you through her unique method of brainstorming a novel with twenty cards in the first part of Novel Basics. Then follow through with her expert guidance on time management, as well as drafting and revising a novel. Altogether, Novel Basics provides a compact yet complete practical guide to writing a novel, whether it’s your first or your fifteenth.

In this book, I describe the novel as a tool of infinite possibilities, a sort of Swiss Army knife with a million blades. And I view the book as my legacy for future novelists no matter who you are or where or when you write your novels.

Novel Basics is now available as an eBook at www.amazon.com/dp/B07K2LXFRP for $3.99 and in print (9781730833991) for $8.99.

Best, Juliet (aka Dr. J)

WiP Report: DONE!

I’m very pleased to announce that I finished my NaNoWriMo2018 project yesterday afternoon, certified it on the website, and printed my certificate. Whoop! Whoop!

To celebrate, this morning I’m wearing my NaNoWriMo2018 tee shirt for the first time. Also earlier I let myself linger over coffee and the daily Sudoku puzzle instead of flying into the home office, cranking up the Mac, and begin pounding away at the keys.

Something really interesting happened during NaNoWriMo this year. A week or so ago, I was floundering around trying to see my way through the plot of Apart in April, the fifth book in my Calendar Mystery series. Then I decided to use the methods I describe in Novel Basics, the book on novel writing that I recently published. When I did, my characters started talking to each other,  and I could see them moving through at least one of the settings. Super exciting!

Now, I can’t say that my NaNoWriMo project is a complete draft of a novel. In fact, yesterday I left off after brainstorming the climactic scene of the book. So I still have three more major scenes to draft and lots of other work to do before I’ve finished even the preliminaries for writing the book. (I’m aiming for an April 2019 publication date.)

Still, I’ve reached a major stage. Now I can relax a little before I have to think much about Christmas-shopping, addressing and mailing cards, decorating the house, partying with friends.

But first . . .

Backing up to Halloween, I must confess that I got in a hurry with Novel Basics by publishing the eBook version at eight in the evening on October 31 while my daughter gave out candy to trick-or-treaters, so that on November 1, I could start working on the 50,000 words of my NaNoWriMo whatever-you-want-to-call-it—marathon, sprint write, brainstorm, really rough partial draft.

Using Novel Basics reminded me of some things I forgot to put in that book that I tell students whenever I teach the class in person. So now I have to revise that book, proofread it, republish the eBook, format the print version, do its cover, and get it out as well ASAP. Oh yeah, and I need to make postcards to give to my friends at a meeting this coming Saturday and . . . See ya!

 

WiP Report: Hump Day

Yesterday my NaNoWriMo word count reached 23,147, and since I’m trying to add 2,000 words a day, I’ve almost reached midpoint or the Hump Day for Apart in April, the book I’m drafting this month. At this point it seems very chaotic, filled with brainstorms and incomplete scenes, not necessarily in the final order either. Also sometimes I’ve gone back and added notes in red to what I’ve already written. Going back and trying to rewrite while you’re drafting is something others counsel against. For that matter, I do too in Novel Basics, my book on writing the novel.

I must admit that I didn’t feel swell when I got up this morning. About six to eight weeks ago I did something to my right shoulder at my exercise class. Don’t nag. I’ve seen somebody about it and even had an MRI. Last night I dutifully took my painkiller and muscle relaxant for it before I went to bed early, so I could get off to a fast start to my workday.

But pain in my shoulder woke me up in the middle of the night, probably because I played Spider Solitaire on my iPad mini for an hour yesterday afternoon while I waited for my daughter to come home for supper. It really annoys me when something I do for pleasure turns out to hurt me instead.

And my physical frailty makes this whole business of having a career as an indie author at my advanced age seem stupid. Why can’t I just be happy volunteering at the library or a senior center like some of my friends do?

So I was gearing up to a rant when an idea popped into my head. What if Daniel is the Watkins Man in this book? And the thought made me laugh.

That’s the main reason why I write, you know. It makes me happy. And now I have to get back to it. I can hardly wait to find out what my heroine Minty does when she sees Daniel pretending to be the Watkins Man.

Best, Juliet

Juliet Kincaid’s historical cozy mysteries tell the story of business girl Minty Wilcox and dashing detective Daniel Price from newly met to newlywed and beyond in Kansas City, a place that could downright deadly a hundred years or so ago. The first four books in the series are available in both digital and print versions. Check them out at https://www.amazon.com/Juliet-Kincaid/e/B00DB4HWRG/ref=dp_byline_cont_ebooks_1

NaNoWriMo2018: Day 7

I begin Day 7 of NaNoWriMo2018 with 11,211 words written so far and a big surprise for myself. (That’s something I love about drafting a novel. Really it’s a voyage of discovery into the untold reaches of my mind.)

Specifically, once I got started, I found out that Apart in April, Book 5 in my cozy historical mystery series, doesn’t follow the advice I give in Novel Basics, An Illustrated Guide to Writing a Novel.

What advice? you ask. Why, to Keep It Simple, Student. (Yeah, I know the second S usually stands for stupid. But I happen to believe the world could do with a bit more civility. Don’t you?)

Now back to the subject at hand . . . In the first section, Novel Basics presents my unusual method of brainstorming a novel with twenty 3” by 5” index cards. (It’s fun. It’s fast. Bet you’ll like it.) I call Card # 1 “the heart card” because it asks the essential question that every story must answer to succeed: “Who wants what?”

Well, I see that I need to back up a little bit and describe my Calendar Mystery series before I travel on. So far the series includes the novels January Jinx, Fatal February, and my personal favorite Mischief in March, plus six short stories, five published as Kindle Short Reads and all six in the collection Old Time Stories. (The collection also includes nonfiction about the people and places that have inspired my fiction.) And altogether the series tells the story of Minty Wilcox and Daniel Price from newly met to newlywed and beyond in Kansas City, a place that could get downright deadly a hundred years or so ago. (Yeah, I’ve been working on the description for a while.)

Now back to the cards . . . To my surprise, early in working on Apart in April, I discovered that it has a double heart. That is, it has two answers to the question, “Who wants what?” Daniel wants to find his runaway wife Minty. And Minty wants to solve a case on her own without her husband’s help. What fun! Now I’m off to work on it some more.

Novel Basics, a compact yet complete guide to writing a novel from brainstorming through rewriting, is now available as an eBook for $4.99 at http://www.amazon.com/dp/B07K2LXFRP

You can also find the books and stories in my cozy historical mystery series at https://www.amazon.com/Juliet-Kincaid/e/B00DB4HWRG/ref=dp_byline_cont_ebooks_1

Fireworks and Possible Romance Free

“If you have never read any of Juliet Kincaid’s calendar mysteries you are missing out. This short prequel story to the first book, January Jinx, is fun and introduces us to the two main characters, Daniel and Minty, before they actually meet.” Amazon reviewer.

Banker Hector Jones hires detective Daniel Price to get the goods on his young wife’s free-loading relatives on the July 4th weekend in 1898 in this prequel short story to Juliet Kincaid’s cozy historical calendar mystery novels and stories that tell the story of Daniel Price and Minty Wilcox from newly met to newly wed and beyond in Kansas City, a place that could get downright deadly a hundred years or so ago.

“The Barn Door,” the first story in Old Time Stories, a collection of short stories and nonfiction about the people and places who inspired Juliet Kincaid’s fiction, is FREE today, Thursday 09/27/18 through Monday 10/01/18, exclusively from Amazon at http://www.amazon.com/dp/B073G7ZXMP

Please also note that all four books in the series so far are now available in both digital and print versions. Check them out on Juliet’s Amazon Author Central page: https://www.amazon.com/Juliet-Kincaid/e/B00DB4HWRG/ref=dp_byline_cont_ebooks_1

 

Old Time Stories Now in Print

Join business girl Minty Wilcox and detective Daniel Price in old Kansas City as they sleuth, get to know each other, and fall in love in six stories that occur before, between or after JANUARY JINX, FATAL FEBRUARY, and MISCHIEF IN MARCH, the first three novels in the Calendar Mystery series. Included are “Detectives’ Honeymoon” which starts exactly where Book 3 ends and “The Shackleton Ghost,” published here for the very first time. OLD TIME STORIES also includes eleven nonfiction pieces about the real people and places that inspired Juliet Kincaid to tell the story of Minty Wilcox and Daniel Price from newly met to newly wed and beyond in Kansas City, a place that could downright deadly a hundred years or so ago.

Five-Star Review of “The Barn Door”
“This short prequel story to the first book, JANUARY JINX, is fun and introduces us to the two main characters, Daniel and Minty, before they actually meet. I especially like the descriptions of Kansas City in the 1900’s as well as the vivid descriptions of the characters. Read ‘The Barn Door’ and you will not be disappointed.” Amazon Reviewer.

Five-Star Review of “Lost Dog”
“What a delight to find myself in ‘old’ Kansas City again with such wonderfully drawn characters. I feel I know them and would love to follow them along the street while looking for the lost dog’s owner and I could just push that old neighbor back into the bushes after rescuing the poor dog from her vicious beating. Oh, this author brings them so alive and that is what keeps me reading her stories.” Amazon Reviewer

 

 

OLD TIME STORIES is now available as an EBOOK at www.amazon.com/dp/B07F4JL8D5 and a TRADE PAPERBACK exclusively from Amazon.

Dithering for Fitness

An Indie Author Lifestyle Blog

Perhaps you know the feeling. It’s ten until the hour. Your fitness tracker pulses you gently on your wrist. So you pop up from your desk where you’ve been hard at work on your next book (or story or promo pitch) and run in place. Or maybe you jog back and forth in your house, passed perhaps by another person living in the house on the same mindless journey. When your tracker pulses you again to tell you that you’ve gotten your 250 steps for the hour, you return to your desk, sit, and go back to work.

My mischievous monkey mind just flashed me an image of an open office filled with cubicles where dozens of workers simultaneously pop up from their desks to run in place. Or at the local coffeehouse, authors with their laptops hop off their tall stools and shift from foot to foot while they vigorously pump their— I just had to get up to get those 250 steps by walking through the house and met my daughter in the living room doing the same thing. (My daughter and I have become rather competitive in our fitness program. And fairly often, to her chagrin, I receive more steps, more miles, and more active minutes, not to forget all my hourly dots, than she does.)

But let us continue . . .

—arms. Sometimes my daughter gets caught short without her 250 steps completed while I’m driving us to our exercise class. So she starts stamping the floorboard and hitting her seat with her elbows until her fitness tracker gives her the message that she killed it for that hour.

Those little devices can be such tyrants and they’re also addictive, so I’d like to suggest a method of exercise that doesn’t require you to resort to dramatic measures that interfere with your writing or other activities.

What’s the secret of my success? Why, dithering of course. It came to me one day after I started from the home office at the front of the house to do something or whatever in the other end of the house. But by time I arrived in my bedroom, I’d forgotten what it was. Now as a senior citizen, I’m entitled to a certain amount of forgetfulness, but I’d like to suggest that, no matter your age, you too can exercise your way to admirable fitness and good health through purposeful dithering.

Here are some ways that I now dither on purpose to get more steps in my day.

Instead of dragging the hose from the back to the front of the house to water my planters full of zinnias in the front window, I dither back and forth half a dozen times between the kitchen sink and the flowers with a small watering can.

(My neighbor Joan does me even better by watering her plentiful array of flowers a half a Dixie cup at a time. On trash day she also puts the big bins at the curb early, so she has an excuse to amble back and forth with small bags of trash to dispose of or single items to recycle. This method also gives her plentiful opportunities to visit with passersby or to see what the neighbors across the street are up to.)

When I need more steps, sometimes I ferry items one at a time out to the assorted bird feeders in my back yard: a cob of dried corn on one trip and a suet cake on another.

I’ve also developed ways to dither in public without seeming to. For instance, occasionally I go to a grocery store I’m unfamiliar with so I have an excuse to wander freely back and forth from the bakery to the frozen food section several times in search of that special item. Youngsters, you can use this method as well. My daughter has become expert at matching coupons to products to get more steps at our drugstore.

And so in closing, I ask you to feel free to provide other methods of purposeful dithering you might use in the comments section. (P. S. To receive notifications of future blogs like this one, please subscribe.)

 

“Write Stuff Down”

An Indie Author Reflects on Senior Moments

Three of us dedicated senior hoofers have gathered near the back of the exercise center after class. We’re all 60+. (Well, to be honest, in my case, it’s 60++.) We’re all normal weight and short but not stooped over from osteoporosis. We all take at least three classes a week, so we’re far more active than the USA norm.

But still the issue of senior moments comes up. “Why . . . ,” says J. “My husband told me something yesterday and a half hour later I couldn’t remember what he said, so I had to ask him again.”

I almost parrot something I heard on NPR or read in the AARP Bulletin about the nerve endings or whatever in our brains not holding onto information like they used to. But frankly I don’t recall enough of it to talk about it, so I keep my mouth shut.

Friend D says, “I write stuff down. That helps me remember. I write stuff on calendars, things like that.”

“Yeah, yeah, yeah,” I don’t say since that would be rude. I do say, “Jess and I keep a calendar on the kitchen wall.”  My daughter and I put our appointments, classes and meetings on the kitchen calendar, a sort of plan for the household. But I also put my appointments, meetings, and classes on the engagement calendar Jess gives me every year. I put my daily to-do lists on that calendar, too.

The mention of calendars sends my friend J off into a lovely riff about the calendars her daughter gives her every year with pictures of the grand kids at Christmas, at Easter, probably summer vacations too though if she says it I don’t hear it because I’ve drifted off into a memory accompanied by considerable self-flagellation on the subject of writing things down. (I do that a lot.) Besides jotting down my daily to-do lists on my engagement calendar and print-outs of monthly calendars, I often put to-do lists in the journals I’ve kept since January 1986. Recently I created a checklist to use to track my social media activities.

And then I keep special lists, sort of like flow charts, of steps in the processes of doing new things in my journal or the backs of printouts of my work. For example, recently my daughter helped me with the cover for the paperback version of my most recent work, Old Time Stories. Specifically she told me how to work with some basic Photoshop tools. Before she started, though, I said, “Wait! Wait! Let me write that down.”

So, I wrote down her instructions in my journal, or at least I thought I did. The next day when I tried to work on that cover without her help, I couldn’t find those instructions. What I did find in my journal were many to-do lists, mostly of the same six things over and over again. (You know, some times you can go too far with writing stuff down or following any good advice, for that matter.)

So, I thought that maybe I wrote it on one of the pieces of paper littering my desk. No luck there either because I had a little throwaway party the other day to clear my computer desk. I must have had a mental lapse (aka a brain fart) and put the notes in the recycle bag.

Regardless, I had to take up my daughter’s time for her to repeat the instructions. This time I did write clear notes in my journal. What’s more, I made a frigging tab with a sticky note so I wouldn’t lose those notes. I also transcribed the notes into my typewritten log to help me remember those instructions the next time I need them.

So what’s the big deal?

It’s like this. Senior moments like these strike terror in my heart that I’ve begun that long slide into oblivion. But maybe I haven’t . . . When I was weeping about forgetting the instructions my daughter gave me, Jess said, “That’s not a senior moment, Mom. It’s a technical moment. Anybody can have them.” Thank you, sweetheart.

Here’s the cover for the trade paperback version of my new book (currently in process).  It’s the first one I’ve done more or less on my own. You can pre-order the eBook version from now until its publication on August 29, 2018, for only $0.99 at http://www.amazon.com/dp/B07F4JL8D5

 

WiP Report 8/8/18: Fear of Failure

I am very happy to report that I finished editing OLD TIME STORIES, my new collection of six mystery short stories and eleven nonfiction pieces about the people and places that inspired the stories. And this past Monday I posted the digital version on Kindle Direct Publishing in plenty of time for the 8/29/18 publication date.

Promptly I moved on to the next phase of self-publishing: producing the print copy, filing for the copyright, and creating postcards to promote it.

For the first time so far, instead of producing the trade paperback through Create Space, Amazon’s publishing wing, I started the process through KDP, a time-saver since all the basic information about the book like title, author, description, etc. went right over to the paperback file. I even downloaded a template for the cover of the 211-page book.

But then the process came to a screeching halt.

With individual short stories like “The Barn Door” and “Detectives’ Honeymoon,” I’ve expanded my indie author skills to include simple eBook covers. But as yet, I haven’t done the cover for print versions. And my daughter, who did the covers for the previous paperbacks in my Calendar Mystery series, currently is as busy as a button on a back house door, to quote my dear old dad. The template intimidated me.

So I said to myself, Fine. File for copyright, something I’ve done in the past, though not recently. But when I went on line to do it this time, I got hung in the form.

Again, I said to myself, Fine. Do the postcards. I did the front of the cards some time ago, but darned if I could remember how I did it. So when I tried to put the jpeg for the text side of the card four times on an 8½” x 11” sheet, I failed about six times.

At that point, I got anxious and started finding excuses to do something else, anything else. I scheduled my exercise class for the middle of the day even though I know that meant I wouldn’t get back to my writing in the afternoon. I went on a junket to the drug store and the pet store, though I didn’t really need to. I checked my email, Facebook and Twitter accounts. I played Spider Solitaire over and over. And then, thank God, it was time to start dinner and I could cruise through the rest of the evening without beating myself up for being such a failure.

For please be mindful that any lapse for an indie author of an advanced age is a sign that brain rot has set in and it’s down hill from here.

A collection of six historical fiction mystery short stories and eleven nonfiction pieces about the people and places that inspired the fiction, the digital version of Old Time Stories is available to pre-order for only $0.99 cents until August 29, 2017 at http://www.amazon.com/dp/B07F4JL8D5

Good news about January Jinx

GOOD NEWS! The first book in my calendar historical mystery series now has a low price in thirteen countries across the globe. For example, my Aussie friends, if you go to the Kindle store on Amazon.com.au and type in January Jinx, you can get this fun cozy historical mystery for a mere $1.29 in your dollars.

 

 

And like all of my short stories and novels, January Jinx is always free on Kindle Unlimited. Click here to get this fun read, American friends: www.amazon.com/dp/B00HSSSBE4