This is not going to be a post about what I think you should do – you’re the only one who can answer that for you – but this is a post about what I’ve decided to do, and why. It seems, since we all have these choices now, people feel inclined to vocalize what choices they’ve made. It’s become something akin to mommy wars – bottle feeding or breast, working or stay-at-home – which isn’t always a good thing. It splits us more often than it unites us. Has there ever been a time authors have been so split? Indie on one side, traditional on the other?

In any case, we feel inclined to talk about the choices we make, and that’s what I’m doing here. It’s something big and exciting for me – the most exciting change in my life since I became a mom. It is like becoming a mom all over again, the anticipation of launching my paper baby in a few more weeks. Less diaper-changing required, though paper babies do oddly require middle-of-the-night feedings sometimes.

the indie author hat:

It’s sort of funny how the industry has changed in just the twelve months since I first drafted this post. (And now you’re thinking: Who the hell keeps a blog draft hanging around for twelve months?!? Well, I do, lol!) When I first drafted this post, it was February last year. A little bird whispered the idea of indie publishing in my head – that bird was my friend Nina, so if you want to blame someone, I guess you can blame her. (more…)

It’s shocking to me how little I’ve managed to say publicly about this book so far, especially when I used to say so much about previous projects. I have my reasons – gun-shy about all those half-written books I didn’t finish (yet), which made me worry I’d never finish a project. That I was incapable.

I’m not incapable, I know now. I just had to find “the right one”, catch the right timing. Everything is kind of like dating, you know?

I’ve also got a great group of girls to babble to about it in private, and I find that’s a much safer option in the early stages of a project.

All that said, I can’t really say this book is in its infancy anymore. If a book was like a child, it wouldn’t even be a snotty pre-schooler, or a moody middle-schooler who thinks she knows everything. It might be a high schooler, that I’ve taught everything I know, and that I’m about to ship out into the real world, ready to stand on her own two legs. Oh how I hope she’ll make me proud! (Okay, that analogy is spent.)

Exactly Where They’d Fall is about many things: friendship, love, betrayal, trust. It’s the story of a group of friends – mainly Jodie, Drew, and Amelia – and what loyalties they owe to each other, or don’t. (more…)

Best Song: “Someone Like You” by Adele

This was one of the “soundtrack” songs I played on repeat while I wrote Exactly Where They’d Fall this year, so maybe I have a more emotional reason for considering it my favorite. If anyone was ever curious to know how my book feels in song form – it feels like that. Ouch, huh?

Gorgeous song though. I couldn’t get enough of it, even as much as they splashed it all over the radio.

Best New Toy: my Canon Rebel t3i

Best Date: we didn’t have enough of them, but dinner along the Occoquan River on Not-Rapture day – do you remember Not-Rapture Day, lol! May 21st, 2011 – the air was abuzz with hilarity and we were child-free for four hours. 6:00pm rolled around and nobody dissipated into thin air. We wondered briefly if maybe we just didn’t make the list… but then it seemed nobody made the list.

Best TV Show: this was the year I fell in love with Shameless (UK version). It’s not new to most people, but it was new to me.

Best thing that would have been totally awesome had it actually panned out: I started to do an online boating course as novel research, with the plans to buy an actual boat this spring. After finding the info I needed for the book, I never did finish the course. I will though. Because I totally want a boat!

And yes, we’ll then own a boat before we own a house. But that’s okay. Maybe we’ll just live on the boat and float around the world and never have to pick a place to stay?

Best Movie: Biutiful. This is a 2010 film we rented on Netflix. OMG, bawl my eyes out!

Best Place We Visited: This was a close call. I went to some pretty amazing places for the first time this year – Bath, in England. Seeing the clouds sink down into the Shenandoah Valley! Truly spectacular places to see. But after all the hype I’ve been hearing from friends over the years, we finally made a trip up to Traverse City, MI.

Fell in love, people!

Nevermind the fact that it’s hours away from almost everything (or well, maybe that’s *why* it’s such a treasure?) The charming town, the oil and vinegar shop, the popcorn, the little-bitty-almost mountains, the forests, the breakfast shop with the awesome omelets and the good coffee creamers, the farmer’s markets, the earthy people – there’s a lady with a coffee shop who gave a cookie with every cup of coffee, and she gave Dylan a toy with his orange juice! OMG.

And the water! The warm sand, and hot sun, and that icy, icy cold, royal blue water.

Love. That is all. <3

(I also kept thinking, it’s because we’re in tourist season, isn’t it? Maybe they all turn into frozen vampires once September rolls around. I’d like to believe not though.)

Best Book: Girls in White Dresses by Jennifer Close

Best New Addiction: Tumblr. Tumblr is so fun! I started up about three of them in seven seconds, lol! Combine Tumblr and Sims and you get a Simblr = OMG indestructible. Many a great moment have been lost to Simblrs!

Best Hippie Idea: Coloring hair with henna. I’ve been meaning to try it for a long time, but only got around to it this year. It’s fun to read about how to mix different colors for dyes.

Best New Pipe-Dream: indie authordom, for sure!

(Narrowly beating out my whimsical 5-year plan to buy a house in Traverse City?)

Best Accomplishment: finishing a whole novel! Beginning, middle, end, finished! Not 40% of a book. Not 85% of a first draft, with notes for an ending. A whole book.

I can finish things, people! I can!

And then I finished two more drafts of revisions on it too!

Happy New Year everyone! Here’s to a super awesome 2012!

This is one of those fluffy posts, because I failed to have anything more significant to say. You can be assured I’m just pouring all of my brain-power into my fiction. Because if this post were edible, it would be cotton-candy.

Modern songs that remind me of the 90′s:

Silversun Pickups, “Lazy Eye”

They remind me of old-school Smashing Pumpkins! I’m hearing a bit of “Cherub Rock” from Siamese Dream. How about you guys?

MGMT, “Kids”

I don’t know why this one reminds me of the 90′s, but it does, lol! Maybe the animation reminds me of “Paranoid Android“, in that way it’s deceptively childish while actually being nightmarishly disturbing.

Foster the People, “Pumped Up Kicks”

I first wanted to say the sound reminded me of mid-90′s Beck, but then when I actually went back to listen to some Beck it was a little off. Maybe I’m thinking of someone else? The dude’s voice is something else entirely, and I can’t think of who he reminds me of. Totally 90′s though.

Happy listening!

I made it outside a couple weeks ago just in time to snap a few fall pictures before the colors were gone for good. Now it’s December, and freezing outside, and we’ve put up our Christmas tree.

Wow, how did that happen?

A rhetorical question, of course, because I know how it happened – I’ve been working! I’ve been in my writing cave, revising up my third draft, and sending it happily on to my editor and another beta reader.

Oh, have I mentioned that I’ve hired a real and actual editor? Because I did! And I’m going to be setting up accounts with printers in these coming weeks. (I’m planning to use Lightning Source, for those curious.) And I’ve started an expense folder for my tax deductions. (I think I might need an actual accountant this year, rather than TurboTax.com, lol!) This is turning into a real operation here, folks!

I’ve also started work on my book cover. There’s a peek of the working draft of it – front and back – over on my FB author page. I’ve also made Exactly Where They’d Fall its own book page, and you can see a smaller peek of it there too. The final, official book cover image will not be very different from this – just some minor tweaks I want to make. But I’ll post it here, and make a very loud and official fuss over it when it’s finished!

I’m also planning a small refresh for this website – OMG, why didn’t anyone tell me how pink it was!?!

(No, I don’t mind the pink, sometimes, but I’m bored of it now.)

Also, every fall, somehow we always manage to get sick for the whole span of mid-September through mid-November. All those little kids and back-to-school germs, and before we know it, it’s December. It’s sort of shocking how short a time the fall colors last – just a couple weeks. We managed to sneak outside for a minute, in between colds and revisions, and see all the colors before they were over. Before they all turned brown and fell, to decompose and become worm food.

(click through for more fall pics, 6 in total)

So that’s what I’ve been doing. What have you guys been up to?

Summer is well done and over with, and I’ve been meaning to get these up here for a while now. These are not full reviews (because I don’t do real reviews, lol!), but just a few words on my five favorite reads from the first half of the year. Click through for the full GoodReads pages for each of these. And happy reading!

Paint it Black by Janet Fitch:

A young woman searches for meaning and closure in the months following her lover’s suicide, as she becomes involved with his mother and explores the complicated relationship they had.

Paint it Black was twisted, brilliant, disturbing, and memorizing, like watching a car crash. I read this book SO slowly, because it was so rich with detail and emotion. Expertly written. A very intense and darkly beautiful story. This was my first from Janet Fitch (I know, everybody else reads White Oleander first, lol!), and I have to say she’s a brand new favorite of mine!

You’ll enjoy this one if you like lavishly beautiful prose and complex family dramas.

Hungry for You by A.M. Harte:

From Goodreads: “Love is horrible. It’s ruthless, messy, mind-altering, and raw. It takes no prisoners. It chews you up and spits you out and leaves you for dead. Love is, you could say, very much like a zombie.”

A collection of short stories about love, from a world full of zombies!!!

A favorite quote: “They tracked the car’s progress like sunflowers, faces upturned and yearning, all broken bones and gangrene smiles.”

This was a truly unique collection. Delightfully macabre, yet still tender? I’ve never read anything like it, but I was fascinated by every single page.

I’m George, mwm, 52 by George Everyman:

A married man expounds on his twenty-something-year marriage and the “affairs” they both had, as well as his thoughts of the general universe and humanity and a few other dozen things.

I found this book both engrossing and maddening at the same time. First, it’s written as a long, loose ramble, as if you were sitting with a friend in a living room at 4am (drunk and possibly stoned too) listening to his life story for 300 pages. Which is not entirely a bad thing – the narrator is engaging, thoughtful, and funny! And despite it’s loose structure, it still has the (vague) plotting of a story. (Memoir, actually, as the author seems to claim this is a true story.) The ending was just as engrossing and maddening as the rest of the book.

A favorite quote: “I like mixing up serious and frivolous things. Frivolous things like making a living, and serious things like playing games about death with kids.”

Overall, the book is quite profound, engaging to read, and enlightening, even if sometimes frustrating. Definitely an adult read, and an honest, no apologies one at that. If you enjoy rambling stories about life and love and well… everything, you’ll enjoy this.

Ruin, by NM Martinez:

Ruin is a terrifying and savage world where Paula, the Neutral daughter of an activist spy, has been exiled from the only life she knows. Now her only options are to adapt – and fast – or instead perish. The people here are ruthless and powerful, and Paula doesn’t even know if she can trust her own family. She’ll discover who she can trust, as well as who she can’t, and she’ll try to reinvent herself because going back is not an option, and going forward is the only way she’ll ever survive.

With sharp detail and riveting emotion, this debut novel by NM Martinez is moving, shocking, impossible to put down, and impossible to forget. If you like post-apocalyptic sci-fi with a good dose of swoon, humans with mutated powers that have consequences sometimes charming and other times spine-chillingly scary, you will love this!

Bonus – it’s the first of many more to come!

The Boyfriend Thief by Shana Norris:

A supercute, funny, heartfelt, and uplifting read. Avery is a hilarious and heartbroken young lady, fiery and yet so vulnerable at the same time, with a lot of damage to sort through. Lucky for her, the utterly adorable Zac is her polar opposite, and as they’re paired to work on a school project together, she doesn’t even know what’s about to hit her.

A favorite quote: “FILE CABINET! For the love of argyle socks, use the freaking file cabinet!” LOL!

One of the things I love most about Shana’s writing is how she’s able to weave the story between side-spliting humor, and deep emotional depth. The Boyfriend Thief is sweet enough for younger teens, and a refreshing and romantic pick for grown women. The story is packed with laugh-out-loud humor and the intense emotional scenes are perfectly expressed. I enjoyed it a lot!

On the bookshelf this fall: The Naked Gardener by L.B. Gschwandtner, The Unnamed by Joshua Ferris, The Opposite of Love by Julie Buxbaum, Room by Emma Donoghue, Water for Elephants (which everyone has finished by now except me!), and hoping to have time for A Gate at the Stairs by Lorrie Moore too. Oh, and I hear I need to read The Help too!

Not to mention Shana and Nina both have new books out or coming soon! Eeek! My to-read list is infinitely long!

(Also, totally not trying to make these into “pimp my friends” posts, but damn, my friends write good books! )

He’s more like his mommy than he knows.

Have you ever written a stalker protagonist before? My friends and I were talking about this this evening, and they helped me compile a list of some more twisted love songs.

Yes, I’ve written one. A short story. Her name is Lynn, she likes to jog (past people’s houses…), lol!

Also pasting the list here. There were some songs not available on Grooveshark, and also, Grooveshark likes to delete songs over time, so here’s a static list for reference:

“Meg White” by Ray LaMontagne
“Every Breath You Take” by The Police
“Olive Grove Facing the Sea” by Snow Patrol
“Possession” by Sarah McLachlan
“Lily” by Smashing Pumpkins
“Hungry Like the Wolf” by Duran Duran
“I Put a Spell on You” by Creedence Clearwater Revival
“Love Letter” by Bonnie Raitt
“The Blower’s Daughter” by Damien Rice
“I Will Posses Your Heart” by Death Cab For Cutie
“#1 Crush” by Garbage
“Creep” by Radiohead
“Possum Kingdom” by the Toadies
“Watching Alice” by Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds
“One Way or Another” by Blondie
“Stan” by Eminem

Happy writing! Or not so happy, depending on whose point of view you’re writing it from!

This was a really good post, by Jane Roper over at Grub Street Daily: What is women’s fiction, and what does it mean to be a “women’s fiction” writer?

This part struck the feminist in me particularly hard:

As best I can tell, Women’s Fiction refers to fiction that focuses on the relationships and emotional lives of women, and that is marketed to and read almost exclusively by women. The large majority of these books are also written by women, although there are some male authors of so-called women’s fiction (Nicholas Sparks comes to mind.)

Likewise, books that focus primarily on the relationships and emotional lives of men, whether written by men or women, are called Men’s Fiction.

Just kidding. They’re not. They’re called fiction. And they’re marketed to and read by both men and women.

As a soon-to-be indie author, I won’t get the freedom of letting someone make this decision for me. I don’t get to pass the “sell-out” buck to my publishers, and claim that “Oh, I hate the terminology too, but you know, my publishers get to make that decision.” Nope, I am my publisher. So whether my books are marketed as “women’s fiction” or “chick-lit” or something else is entirely my decision alone. I do have to say, there would be some strong advantages to having a clear-cut divide between the author’s personal ethics and the publisher’s need to market the book in the most effective way possible.

Because you know what? Dammit, women’s fiction and chick-lit SELLS! And it’s a clearly-defined market that I think my book would slot nicely into. As a feminist, this puts me in a sticky spot though. I could refuse the label (as I’ve often seen Nicholas Sparks do in interviews, lol!), but I don’t want my book to live in obscurity. Being an indie author, I’ll be obscure enough as it is. I’d love to use genre marketing to my advantage, but yes, it does make my skin crawl to call my book “chick-lit”. “Women’s fiction” is slightly better, though still not perfect.

I’m now beginning work on my book’s cover, which I’m quite smitten with the idea of. There is no pink on it, no shoes or dresses or shopping bags either. Not even a cocktail glass. (Though there are definitely some cocktails in the book!) At one point, I thought there might be some hearts on the cover, but no, I’ve decided against it. What there is, if I might be cryptic: hand-made paper stick people and a watercolor painted sunrise. (Really, you’ll just have to see it, lol!) The cover is going to be quirky, a little bit dorky, a little bit more funny, charming (hopefully), and as an undertone, both romantic and deeply sad. And well, that actually captures the mood of the book quite perfectly!

I suppose I’m designing the cover to fall more in line with literary fiction titles, while keeping the fun and emotion-rich sense of women’s fiction. If I want to be honest with myself, the book is probably cross-genre anyway.

I do hope some men might read my book. (There’s no pink on the cover, and quite a lot of blue, so maybe they wouldn’t be too embarrassed to carry it around? And one of my three main POV characters is a man!) But I also imagine many more women will enjoy it. I am quite confident that women who read chick-lit and women’s fiction will *really* enjoy it. Perhaps I don’t agree with what the market has been named, but regardless, it’s one of the markets I’m writing for, a valid market that has a powerful fan base, and I’d be a fool to turn my nose up at them. Not only just a fool, I’d be denying both myself and my readers that special chance to connect with each other.

So, if you write relationship-based fiction, how do you feel about the label? What would you call it instead?

D started kindergarten this week, which is a full day program here where we live.

I’m packing him a lunch from home, so far. I’d first been worried about his peanut allergy (come to find out, they only have one, very apparent, item that has peanuts in it – a peanut butter and jelly sandwich). Then I was then worried about all the other hippie stuff I worry about, high fructose corn syrup and hydrogenated bullshit. But that’s sort of beside the point though – the point being that D broke his brand new Transformers lunch box zipper on the second day he used it. That was kind of tragic for him, because he loved that lunch box and was very excited when we found it.

You know, it’s Transformers. (more…)