Category: self-publishing

June 2021 Newsletter

I have become the old woman that . . .

I have become the old woman that, wearing pajamas, robe, and flip-flops, totters to the curb on trash day to put one last plastic bottle in the recycle bin. Or still in her nightclothes, she carries the bird feeders to their hooks in the back yard. Or she takes pictures with her phone of the lovely lavender hosta blossoms that line the garden shed. (She hopes to start a watercolor painting of them at her weekly art class and possibly insert a rabbit among them.)

But I’m also the old woman that, changed into a green and pink striped camp shirt she’s had for decades and black pedal pushers with an elastic waist band she bought last year, gets to her computer in the home office by ten most mornings and averages twenty hours a week on her writing project.

So I’m pleased to announce that Apart in April, Book 5 and the fourth novel in my Calendar Mystery series, will be published on June 30 as an eBook. It’s now available to pre-order for only $2.99 at  http://www.amazon.com/dp/B095J4BB94. This special price is going away on July 6 when the price will become $4.99, so better get it cheaper while you can. And if you like it, please write a brief review on Amazon and/or Goodreads.

For those of you who prefer reading print books instead of on devices like a Kindle, a Nook, or tablet, I am very pleased to announce that I’m currently working on the cover for the paperback version of Apart in April and it will be available for purchase by July 15. (Yay!) I haven’t figured out the price yet, but I’ll let you know.

And just so you don’t think I’m asking you to buy a pig in a poke, here’s a brief description of this forthcoming book.

Apart in April features  love, loss, and dangerous secrets. In April 1901, after a deep personal loss, Minty Wilcox Price runs away from her husband detective Daniel Price. But she leaves behind letters containing clues (both false and true) as she goes undercover on her own to find out the truth about how a young woman died. Will the secrets Minty uncovers prove deadly? Will Daniel bring his own grief under control to find her and help her with the case before she comes into danger, too? You’ll find the answers to these questions and much more in Apart in April, Book 5 of Juliet Kincaid’s Calendar Mysteries that tell the story of business girl Minty Wilcox and detective Daniel Price from newly met to newly wed and beyond in Kansas City, a place that could get downright deadly a hundred years or so ago.

Also “The Barn Door” and “Lost Dog,” two prequel short stories to the Calendar Mystery series that feature business girl Minty Wilcox and detective Daniel Price when they first meet though they don’t realize it, will both be FREE from July 1 through July 5, 2021, at http://www.amazon.com/dp/B073G7ZXMP and http://www.amazon.com/dp/B0752SWBG1.

Don’t have a Kindle? When you get the stories, you can also download the free app to most tablets including a Nook. My books look especially neat on my iPad mini.

Stay safe and well in this troubled world, my friends.

Juliet

P. S. If you enjoyed reading this post, please share it with your friends.

April 2021 WiP Report

I hoped to report that I’ve finished my current Work-in-Progress, Apart in April, Book 5 of my Calendar Mystery series.

But it’s not happening, partly because my characters keep talking to me as I write. One of them will say, “How about I do this?” Another might say, “I wouldn’t do that! Take it out!” Or worst of all, some person in the book will say, “I’m bored.”

It’s practically axiomatic that every time a writer changes something, s/he introduces at least one error like a missing so there’s nothing for it but to edit each and every line of each and every page with a ruler on paper and/or by sliding the cursor down the margin, and/or reading each and every page word by word out loud at least once if not TWICE. (Did you see the glitch in the previous sentence in the previous sentence? [Repetition is another kind of glitch that often happens when the writer is switching stuff around.])

I’ve rushed the process before and ended up publishing a book or story that wasn’t ready yet. I’m not doing that this time. I have only forty pages to go in this draft, so it will be done by April 30 for sure. But then I will make myself take as long as the book and its characters demand for one last edit. After I’m done and I’ve tweaked the cover, too, I’ll begin the production phase, leaving time to set up the pre-order and all that other stuff. I’ll let you know when Apart in April is ready for you to pre-order at a reduced price.

In closing, an observation, especially for my fellow old fogey friends . . . At this stage of writing, I have to hold the entire three hundred pages of the book in fairly specific detail in my head. (Since I’ve made so many changes over the four drafts of this book, sometimes I have to go back and check the most recent draft to see what actually is in there.) A person with dementia can’t do that, and so I’ll end this WiP Report by highly recommending writing a novel as a preventive measure against senility.

Best, Juliet

P. S. It’s spring and doing stuff like potting these plants shown above is another distraction I’m dealing with.

 

WiP Report January 2021

Last Friday, I finished what I hope will be the next-to-the-last draft of Book 5 of my Calendar Mystery series, set in Kansas City, a place that could get downright deadly a hundred years or so ago for a business girl named Minty Wilcox and a dashing detective named Daniel Price. (Just practicing my blurb here . . .) The next day we ordered BBQ carry-out for a celebratory dinner. Baby back ribs! Yum!

In its binder, the book weighs 6.4 pounds which makes for quite a weighty tome though I hope of course that it won’t feel like that for readers when it’s done. The text now is 306 pages and 86,489 words long. I started it on November 1 for NaNoWriMo, so it took me 83 days for an average of 1,042 words a day. That’s really not bad considering everything that’s been going on including a very weird holiday season, the pandemic, and the political turmoil.

An FYI for my fellow indie authors: whenever I start a novel, I format it for its eventual publication, that is, with 6” by 9” pages, 0.75” margins, 1.15 line spacing throughout including between paragraphs, 12-point font, usually Book Antiqua, all paragraphs except the first in a section or chapter indented 0.3”. I also mark all section breaks with <> <> <> because I never know where they’ll end up after revisions. Plus, I paginate the pages, create different first pages for the starts of chapters, and different odd and even pages for the rest. And yes, I type my first drafts and all the rest. All of this lets me get a feel for the overall proportions of the book and about where to place the plot points in later drafts.

For more guidance, check out my Novel Basics, a concise yet complete guide to brainstorming, drafting, and revising a novel available in print from Amazon. com and as an eBook at www.amazon.com/dp/B07K2LXFRP . . .

Now back to the report . . . If I can cut the 10% that Stephen King says in his author’s memoir On Writing he cuts from the first drafts of his books, Book 5 of my Calendar Mystery series will be around 78,000 words or 275 pages long. Hopefully, I will get it out by the end of April. (The tabs on the book shown in the photo on the left mark pages where I need to do some editing. Yikes!)

I’ll let you know how it’s going in next month’s WiP Report. Meanwhile, keep an eye out for the fun short story “The 9th Street Gang” free from 02/03/21 through 02/07/21 at http://www.amazon.com/dp/B079YYVTTX and Book 2 of the Calendar Mystery series Fatal February, on sale for only $0.99 at  http://www.amazon.com/dp/B017081JHM and £0.99 at http://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/B017081JHM from 02/10/21 through 02/16/21.

The Once and Future Book

A WiP Report

I’ve reached midpoint of my current Work in Progress. (I think. I hope.)  So I’m taking some time to reflect on the book I’ve worked on – or at least thought about –  since the 1980’s when my daughter and I participated in activities of the Society for Creative Anachronism, “an international living history group with the aim of studying and recreating mainly Medieval European cultures and their histories before the 17th century” (Wikipedia).

In the years Jess and I were active in the SCA, we made many friends; enjoyed the group fantasy of wearing weird clothes, sometimes eating strange food at feasts, speaking an offbeat version of the English language; attending events like  Kris Kinder in December; and learning arcane skills such as transforming fleece into yarn with a drop spindle.

But when I decided to become a part time writer in addition to my full time job as professor of writing at a local community college, and my family responsibilities, my leisure time vanished.

Yet over the years, my mind has returned to the concept of setting a mystery novel at least partly if not completely inside the world of a Renaissance Festival and/or inside a group somewhat similar to the SCA. Some times I called the book Death in Shining Armor and sometimes Die by the Sword. Currently, I’m working on the fourth version, or maybe it’s the fifth, again called Death in Shining Armor.

I wrote the first version of Death of Shining Armor with a young female police officer as the protagonist in the early ’90’s. In 1993 I received a review of the book by a published author who  also  belonged to the SCA, so sarcastic and scathing I felt like I’d been beaten after I read it. As the daughter of a belittling mother, the ex-wife of a belittling husband, and a teacher of writing, I abhor that sort of feedback. I would never permit it in my own classroom. But since those voices in my head echoed that of the reviewer, I abandoned the project.

Later in the 90’s I returned to the book with a female private detective from a family of investigators. I actually got an agent to shop this version around to publishers, but she didn’t manage to sell it. So I moved on to a completely different project.

Still intrigued by the concept, I returned to the project some time in the ’00’s, but gave the book  a young female protagonist in peril who wasn’t an investigator at all. This version I called Die by the Sword. I abandoned this version and a tweak I tried of it in 2017. I think what bothered me most about that version was that I’d bashed some of the characters in it based on people I have known, something I said I abhorred, that is , critique the crap out of them without allowing them to do the same to me.

But apparently this is the book that won’t die. And so about six weeks ago I picked the suspense version up again. And it’s going better. I’m doing a better job of letting the supporting characters live their own lives. In contrast, I’m finding points of identification with the protagonist that help me sympathize with her more. Another thing that might help this version is I’ve set in 1988 instead of present day. (What fun!) Another thing that seems to be helping is the confidence in my own work I’ve gained from my experiences as an indie author since 2011. I’ll keep you posted on how my once and future book is going.

Meanwhile, to keep up with what I’m doing, friend me on Facebook where I’m juliet.kincaid and JulietKincaidauthor2016, follow me on Twitter where I’m JulietKincaid, and occasionally check out my Amazon Central Author’s page at www.amazon.com/Juliet-Kincaid/e/B00DB4HWRG for new publications.

My most recent published work is a boxed set of my first three Calendar Mystery books and a short story featuring a business girl and a dashing detective and set in Kansas City where living could downright deadly a hundred years or so ago. You can get your own copy at www.amazon.com/dp/B07QDKF413

P. S. When you read my work and if you enjoy it, please write a review and post it on Amazon and/or Goodreads. Just a few words, perhaps about what you like most about the book or story, would help. And I’d really appreciate it.

 

 

Transitions Take Time

A WiP Report

The closet in my bedroom in our little house isn’t big enough to accommodate my entire wardrobe, so this time of year I move my dark blue and gray sweat pants, my flannel shirts, my black and my brown fleece hoodies from the back of the house to the closet in the home office at the front of the house. I usually park my winter clothes on a chair while I haul out my spring and summer jackets, lightweight and colorful slacks and shirts (orange, peach, bright pink, yellow – oh joy!) and a skirt or two. I hang them on the door while I fill the front closet with items I won’t wear again for six months or so.

But the transition between winter and spring has been hard this year because of the late snowstorms and cold weather we’ve had around here. So some of my fleece pants and jackets have made the trip across the house two or three times.

My transition between writing projects has been prolonged and difficult as well.

Originally, I planned on continuing my cozy historical Calendar Mystery series set in Kansas City with an April book. I’ve had a very strong idea for this book for more than a year. But life-happens events gobbled up the time I needed to write that book and finish it this spring. And so I stopped working on it and set my sights on writing a book to bring out in fall that would start a new series.

Even that took several weeks because I dithered among three possible ideas, all of which involved books that I’ve already at least drafted: a science fiction novel set in a dystopian, matriarchal society that I wrote in 1986, a vast historical novel set in the Ancient World that I completed in 1989, and a series of academic mysteries that I’ve been fooling around with for years and years in one form or another. Characters from all three projects have called to me lately, the big historical especially, so much so that I hauled out the old notebooks and boxes of manuscripts for that project and put them on the shelf where my calendar mysteries lived for so long.

If I gave the heroine tiny feet like Cinderella and put dragons in the series, I’d make it into historical fantasy, and it might sell quite well as such. I could call the first book in the series The Spoils of War and market it as the next Game of Thrones, yet somewhat softer to suit my largely female readership.

But when I read Madeleine Miller’s marvelous novel The Song of Achilles, I began to doubt my ability to come up with enough detail to make one novel, let alone a series, come alive and sing. I also had problems even figuring out where in the future world I’d put the characters and action of the dystopian novel.

Then suddenly at last it became spring. And looking out my kitchen window as I washed dishes one evening, I admired my crab apple tree in bright bloom through the pergola. And I thought, if I write the contemporary mystery series, I could set it in my neighborhood. That way, I’ll find details everywhere.

And so, I’ve began brainstorming a new version of Fall into Murder, a contemporary cozy mystery that I drafted during my first participation in National Novel Writing Month in 2014. I’ll keep you posted on how it’s going.

Please note that I’ve put together a boxed set of the first three novels of my cozy historical Calendar Mystery series that tells the story of business girl Minty Wilcox and dashing detective 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. It’s now available to pre-order for only $3.99 at http://www.amazon.com/dp/B07QDKF413

 

Old Dog, New Tricks

A WiP Report

Recently I read Chris Fox’s Relaunch Your Novel, filled with tips about making money from one’s backlist. So I decided that it was the perfect time to bring out a boxed set of my first three cozy historical mystery novels plus a short story that follows the last novel. Little did I know (as cheesy fiction says) that I’d need to add a couple of things to my skill set. One of these required lots of trial and error and the time to make stupid mistakes and to fix them.

Assembling the text for The Calendar Mysteries Books 1 – 3 took little time since I just had to put together the most recent text files for January Jinx, Fatal February, and Mischief in March, plus “Detectives’ Honeymoon” with appropriate front and back matter. The latter now includes a promo for Old Time Stories, Book 4 of the series. Being finicky that way, I also ran a complete spell/grammar checker.

But then as what seems to be my habit, I got in a hurry and loaded the text onto Kindle Direct Publishing before realizing that I forgot to do a Table of Contents. And when I tried to do that, I discovered that the method I used for the trade paperback versions of my publications didn’t actually provide live links in the eBook version to the items listed in the Table of Contents. So I dug out the manual to Word and found out how to do that.

Learning how to create a 3D cover took lots more time. I started by looking at models on Amazon. I did some sketches of the front cover I wanted and flew them by my daughter who did the covers for the individual novels. And then I tried to find a template on KDP. No help. So I Googled the topic to find instructions. As usual, I found services that would do it for me. But it’s a matter of dollars and cents that I do everything involved in publishing myself. A video I watched went by so fast it didn’t help. Then I found a slide show that helped quite a bit – except for that author’s blithe assertion that I could do a 3D cover myself in five minutes. Oh sure. Now that I’ve figured the process out, I still think that I couldn’t do it in five minutes even doing a much simpler cover than I designed. It had ten elements: three 6” by 3” background panels, three thumbnails of the book covers, a box for the text, and three spines for the novels.

Also I found confusing the dimensions in pixels that the author specified for a 3D boxed set cover. Luckily, when I went back to one of the models I’d found and when I measured the thumbnail, I saw it was 2” by 3”. Then I had an aha-moment and realized the 3D cover for the boxed set had to fit inside the 6” by 9” rectangle KDP requires for covers. So then really all I had to do was decide on the dimensions of the cover and the spines, put them together, and skew the corners in a bit for the proper 3D effect. (Tip: With Photoshop for a Mac, go to Image > Transform and click on Skew.) That’s another skill I added to my set. (FYI: I settled on 4.5” by 9” for the front, and .5” by 9” for each novel spine.)

But when I printed out the cover, I thought that the text for January Jinx didn’t show up well on the dark garnet colored spine, so I started the whole cover almost from scratch, brightened the bottom panel, and the spine panel. Then again I got in a hurry and put the three cover panels together in the wrong order in the background, so I had to redo that. And then when I redid the spine section for January Jinx, I made the font too small and had to redo that.

With all my trials and errors, I ended up with 57 different files in that folder, including both jpeg’s and Photoshop versions. (Tip: when you get all done, make a new folder for the final text and cover files. This will save you a lot of time scanning those filled folders to see which one you need to publish.) I really have no idea how much time I spent on this. And it’s still not perfect. But I’ll no doubt be faster the next time I decide to do another boxed set (unless it’s been so long a time that I have to relearn the whole process).

 

The Calendar Mysteries Books 1 – 3 is now available to pre-order for the initial price of only $3.99 at www.amazon.com/dp/B07QDKF413 That’s a great bargain for a book 972 pages and 256,836 words long.

 

WiP Report: Life Happens, Part 2

Living My Life

Today I was going to write and post a really long, extensive follow-up to last week’s whine-session subtitled “Feeding the Cats” about my bout of illness, injury and insomnia. But frankly this week I don’t have the time because, for one thing, yesterday I made a proposal to Border Crimes, the local chapter of Sisters in Crime, started by notable writer Nancy Pickard, of how we might go forward in the future.

That’s part of the point of this WiP. Life happens. Things come up. I care about what happens to our chapter of Sisters in Crime, and I don’t want it on my conscience that it suffered because I didn’t pay enough attention to it at a critical time.

In the past I haven’t always done that. One of my deepest regrets is not attending the funeral of a friend two or three years ago because I was embroiled in working on a book and trying to get it done. I don’t remember which book exactly, but I still feel guilt and regret for not properly saying goodbye to dear Barbara J.

So here’s the bottom line. I have lots of projects I could do. I always have. And so I have to choose. When I first began the Calendar Mystery series shortly after I retired in 2004, I thought I’d whip out all twelve books, one for each month of the year, and publish one a year. At that rate, I would have finished them in 2016. It’s now 2019, and I’ve only reached April and that only slightly, in a short story called “The Shackleton Ghost,” that appears at the end of Old Time Stories available now in print and as an eBook exclusively from Amazon. Since it’s impossible for me to write, edit, produce, publish, and properly promote a novel in ten weeks and get it out by the end of April this year, I’m setting the Calendar Mysteries aside at least for now. Maybe next year . . .

This year, I want to reboot an older series I’ve already published and return to a project I first completed thirty years ago. (Yikes!) Meanwhile, I hope to do things like going to my exercise class at noon today and to this evening’s book club meeting. (We’re talking about Kate Griffin’s Kitty Peck and the Music Hall Murders and I’m looking forward to hearing what my friends say about it.) Maybe once my Physical Therapist is through working on my sore right arm and left hip, I can resume my art classes. There are always day-to-day chores like buying for, preparing, eating and cleaning up after meals, occasional chores like cleaning the home office which I finally did yesterday, and everyday pleasures like walking around the neighborhood on a beautiful afternoon.

Also I’d like to be there to help an ailing neighbor or a group in need. I want to go to a friend’s funeral even if that means setting aside my writing or not posting on Facebook or my website regularly. In other words, live my life. For after all, life happens – until it doesn’t.

WiP Report: Life Happens, Part 1

Feeding the Cats

Our little panther Safa boy Bombay (on the left) isn’t a picky eater and chows down on dry food. But last March his sibling Honey girl (on the right) quit eating and became terribly thin. Thus began our attempts to keep her alive. (FYI: with our current budget, taking the cats to the vet isn’t an option.)

The staff at the local pet store probably got tired of me when I came in, and with their help chose a can or two of food to try. Over several weeks, we tried out at least a dozen different kinds. Most I took back because Honey stuck up her kitty nose at them and traded them for other kinds to try.

It took weeks and weeks until we finally discovered the magic ingredient that would pique her appetite – pork liver. Even then we had to narrow the choice to certain recipes of the brand we finally settled on. For instance, she won’t eat the hairball formula at all and the spayed and neutered only occasionally, but others like the aging formula she gobbles up so fast we have to supervise her eating so she doesn’t promptly barf the stuff right back up again. (Sorry for the graphic detail.)

Just finding the right food didn’t end the saga of feeding the cats. No indeed, it took many weeks to develop a system of feeding Honey that seems to satisfy her. Here’s the current one.

Around 6:30 AM, she begins her campaign of yowling at one or the other of her two Mommies, the young Mommy in her bedroom in the front of the house or the old Mommy in the bedroom in the back.

Some cats have a pleasant, euphonious meow. Honey has one of those high-pitched Siamese screeches about as dulcet as dragging fingernails down a chalkboard. She starts with that and progresses to vaulting the sleeper back and forth. If her prey still resists those attempts, she resorts to sneaking her paw out with nails slightly unsheathed and pricking the Mommy lightly on the nose. The thing, though, that always gets the old Mommy (me) out of bed is her purr. I can’t resist it and will get up at last to feed her.

The Mommy serves Honey a quarter of a three-ounce can of food four times a day. It must be thin slices in gravy because she eschews the (cheaper) loaf style in the six-ounce cans because 1) she doesn’t recognize that style as edible and 2) she won’t eat food from a can opened the previous day. We heap the tender morsels in a small puddle of gravy in the middle of a bowl. It has to be a perfectly clean bowl, not one that contains even the tiniest bits of an earlier serving that might be hard and dry. Before serving the cat, the Mommy covers the can containing the unused food with plastic wrap and then covers the can with a fresh bowl, so ants don’t get in it. (Note: we can’t refrigerate the food because Honey won’t eat cold food.)

So then the Mommy serves the quarter can of whatever to Honey and meanwhile tops off the bowls of dry food that Honey’s brother Safa happily munches on whenever he wants to. (Note 1: This kind of food must be a single layer or the boy won’t eat it either. Note 2: Sometimes the girl eats the dry food too, but only after she’s had her tender slices of pork liver in gravy.)

The food Honey will eat isn’t cheap. Indeed, it costs up to $1.72 per can or around $50 a month. But this Mommy will not let it be said that the cat died because we were too cheap to buy food she would eat.

Okay, let’s go back to the title of this WiP Report, which presumably has something to do with my Work-in-Progress. Indeed it does. You see, when we started dealing with this issue last year, Honey was getting us up at five-thirty if not earlier. (You try explaining the change from Daylight Savings Time to Central Standard Time to a cat.) The young Mommy usually can get back to sleep after feeding the cats, but not me, the old Mommy. So gradually I got sleep deprived. For example, the week of October 21 – 27, 2018, I averaged 5 hours and 39 minutes. (Even my usual target amount of sleep of 7 hours and 15 minutes is well below the 8 hours and something others in my age group average.)

Then I injured my right shoulder and my left hip, probably for going after my exercise routine too hard. After that I got sick. I had a cold in November while I wrote a novel for NaNoWriMo2018 and an even worse cold at the end of December and the start of January. It was torture for me to get a decent night’s sleep rolling from my sore shoulder to my sore hip and coughing hard whenever I tried to sleep on my back. And so I got bronchitis in February.

I’m happy to report that I’m feeling better now that I’ve paid a couple of visits to the doctor’s office, got some medications, and started visiting a physical therapist. But you know what? It takes time to be sick and get physical therapy and all that stuff. And all of this interfered with my writing schedule.

 

Suffice it to say here that I’m now feeling more like myself and I will tell you about some of the decisions about my writing that I’ve made in my next WiP Report.

Best, Juliet

Thank you, Library of Congress

This isn’t the blog I intended to post today. In fact, yesterday I drafted a WiP Report about my life finally getting back to normal after several months of dealing with illness, injury and insomnia. Yesterday I was able to follow my normal routine of getting up, doing my yoga routine now supplemented with exercises supplied by my physical therapist, getting dressed and going on a walk – all before breakfast. Well, it was too slick underfoot to walk outside farther than the end of the driveway, but otherwise I started my day with what used to be my normal routine.

Not so today . . .

It was after eight when my daughter came in to find me, my hacking cough returned, still in bed as I listened to a story on NPR. Local schools have cut back on the entrees they offer the kids for lunch from two choices to one in case the government shutdown drags on until March when they’ll run out of funds.

Earlier I listened to a woman who last year became a paralegal for a governmental agency, something she was pleased with and proud about. Now, having trouble paying her rent and keeping food on her table, she doesn’t trust our federal government anymore.

This makes me very sad. My dad was a civilian employee of the U. S. Army Corps of Engineers for twenty-three years, a job he was proud of, a job that allowed him to provide well for our family and fund a comfortable, secure retirement for himself and my mom. Flash forward to January 2019 and one wonders if this sort of thing will still exist post-Trump and how many federal workers will be left.

One can hardly blame the 10% of federal employees currently unpaid who call in sick because they don’t have the money for gas to get to work or for childcare while they’re gone. Or they have to put the landlord off again, so they can buy food. Or they don’t want to take out a disastrous Pay Day loan and their local credit unions haven’t yet stepped in with interest-free loans.

But I’m thinking that our federal workers are much better people than our current president, and more steadfast and conscientious than he is by far. I have some evidence for this statement.

As some of you know from reading my past blogs, I register the copyrights of my work through the Library of Congress though other indie authors don’t. These include my most recent book, Novel Basics, a compact yet complete illustrated guide to writing a novel. I filed for the copyright online early in November. Usually, it takes about three months for the application to be processed. But I figured that this year the Library of Congress would be completely shut down, so it would take months and months before I received the certificate by mail. If the FBI is running out of copy paper because of the shutdown, I thought that surely the Library of Congress has run out of money for postage even if anyone is still working there.

But to my surprise the certificate of registration for Novel Basics came this past Saturday, somewhat ahead of the usual three-month time span. Thank you, dear Library of Congress, for restoring my faith in our federal government and those who work for it.

 

 

Novel Basics is available in print for $8.99 from Amazon and as a Kindle eBook for $3.99 at http://www.amazon.com/dp/B07K2LXFRP  (And you can read it for free on Kindle Unlimited.)

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!