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.

When I allowed myself to really consider the possibilities – as in, consider it like something I might actually do – the freedom of it was more fantastic than I ever could have imagined. For the whole first month after I’d decided I would give it a shot, I was flooded with more ideas than I knew what to do with – than I will EVER know what to do with. For the first time in my life, there were no limits. It was a rather inefficient month, to be honest. Faced with a career of not having to convince publisher after publisher to take a risk on me — I would take a risk on me — I came up with so many ideas. Great ideas, bad ideas, half-baked ideas, some ideas that I’m still not sure how to implement just yet.

I could hear the voices of publishers in my head. All those same publishers who rejected my short stories (no hard feelings) saying: We enjoyed this, but it’s not quite right for us. Please send something else. In my head, they were also saying: What, so you want to write a story about lighthouses and yoga studios and an unfathomably caustic main character? You want to write novellas? You want to write tie-ins and spin-offs and prequels? AND a six-volume pseudo sci-fi drama series? What is this? You wanna write odd romantic-comedy-dramas that are not quite studious enough to be literary, but too serious to be chick-lit???

Yes, I do, I do, I DO!!!

And once I’d given myself permission to consider publishing myself, all those voices in my head, saying you can’t write that, nobody will want to read that, you won’t sell that – all those can’ts – went away. Do you see how it closes you down before you even get started? Instead of writing what’s in your heart, instead of tackling all those ideas you haven’t seen done before and you’re still not even sure how you’d implement, you’ve tainted it already. What will I call this? How will I sell this? How will I ever convince some publisher to get on board with this crazy idea?

Sure, people sell crazy ideas, new ideas, innovative ideas to publishers all the time. After so many years of rejections. I have to ask myself, is it really worth all that? With the prospect of self-publishing in mind, there was nothing but freedom. My stories and the people who would read them. That’s all.

So after a full month of making wild, hedonistic love to my imagination, I finally came back down to reality. The plan was a good one, but I wasn’t going to finish anything working like that. So I picked one book and I got to work on it.

But you see, all that isn’t why I decided to go indie. That was just how it felt to take the leap.

Here’s the why.

the list:

There was a decision to be made – whether to try the traditional route first or not. You might say: “Well, easy. Just try. What’s the harm in trying? If all fails, you can still self-publish.”

But no, in my heart I knew that self-publishing shouldn’t be a last resort. Not for me. If I was going to self-publish, I wanted it to be because that was what I really wanted for myself and my career.

I lay awake one night, my brain spinning on a loop like it does sometimes, and I couldn’t fall asleep until I’d written this list. So I grabbed my phone, opened up my notes app (a godsend for writers who get ideas in bed!), and I made two columns:

Traditional author:
- because I want to be respected.
- because I’m shy and could use the connections.

Indie author:
- because I want to keep all of my rights, to be free to write sequels and tie-ins when and if and in the order I choose.
- because I might want to get knocked up again, maybe, and I don’t want to be under contract when I do.
- because I just don’t want to be under contract in general?
- because I want to be my own boss.
- because I’m good at organizing and controlling things, and would enjoy it.
- because I enjoy posting bits on my blog and other places first, and I don’t want to worry about having to disclose that before I sell.
- because I don’t want to have to ask permission to share pieces of my own published work, wherever and however I choose.
- because I want to do odd things – web serialization, illustrated with photography, etc., and I don’t want to go through the hassle of trying to convince a publisher to get on board with my crazy ideas – I’ll own my own risk.
- because I want to choose which stories come out, and in which order.
- because I want to publish a few novellas.
- because I want to publish a collection of stories and poems and photography – all in one book, people!
- because I want to choose my own editors.
- because I think I’d be good at making my own covers.
- because I think I’d be good at social media marketing too.
- because I actually enjoy having a low-key but devoted cult following, and big NYC scares me a little.
- because (not to sound too arrogant) my stories are the kind that sell themselves, if they’re going to sell at all, and do well by word-of-mouth.
- because in the end, that kind of audience needs to be found by less traditional means anyway.
- because most authors have to do all that marketing themselves anyway.

And if we’re going to be honest about that “traditional publishing” list – if I work hard, and take off my wall-flower hat, I can build my own connections. And I hope, if I persist and work extra hard, I might even some day be respected? Not just by my fans, but by everyone, traditional and indie authors alike?

Way back when I first decided I would try this indie author thing, it was still relatively a renagade thing to do. Now, not so much. Now, every day authors are jumping ship on the idea of having a publisher to go it alone. I don’t blame them. It’s a good thing. I’m in good company. The stigma is wearing thin and the paths are being tested, proven, and paved ahead of me.

The bad thing? I won’t be so unique and renegade anymore, lol!

Which I can easily get over.

The past twelve months have only proven that the career model I suspected was a good idea, is really a terrific idea after all. And I am so sound in this choice that it pains me to even consider the alternative. This book will never be queried to agents or submitted to publishing houses – none of that. Not even once. The path this book takes to being born will be one I never would have imagined twelve months ago.

the resume:

When I first considered self-publishing, the idea of it sounded both arrogant and naive. I doubted it many times. I doubted it and came back to it, even multiple times in the same day. I’ve wondered, what gives me the right to just plop my book out there?

I’ve had plenty of time to think this over, and I don’t come to this decision lightly.

#1: I am a career storyteller. This is what I do – this is what I’ve always done, and what I’ll always do. I have NINE books in various states of draft. I have a lifetime worth of stories in me, and one way or another, they’re going to be told. There’s no option here for the “writing gig” to not work out. I have no corresponding degrees to put to use (English major through and through!). I won’t, for example, go and be an accountant, or dental hygienist – believe me, I’d be terrible at it! If I ever needed to get a job, it would be just that – a job. I have no other back up careers. This is it for me.

#2: I think writing web fiction has gotten me addicted to producing my own stuff, and I really, honestly love it. The feeling I got when I told myself I might go indie was such an amazing freedom of creativity. I was inspired! (Too inspired, lol!) Suddenly, there was nobody to tell me I couldn’t do this, or that. There was only the readers, and what they liked, and what they wanted. And I had stories for them to read. And I knew they were going to love them.

I wouldn’t have the guts to do this if I hadn’t spent a few years earning my little legion of cheerleaders who testify that yes, my stories are indeed worth hearing after all. I didn’t say that myself – they said it. You can ask them if you want. I’m doing this for them. Even if those few dozen people are the only people who will ever want to read my work, it’ll be worth it, to tell the stories I love to tell, the way I want to tell them.

(Shout out to my LH peanut gallery – I love you guys! *blows kisses and grabs a tissue* xoxo <3 )

As we were…

#3: I’ve paid my dues. I got the degree. I’ve taken the workshops, joined the writers groups, gotten the short story rejections, written a practice novel, put it in a shoebox in my closet, I’ve started three or four more novels (that, I hope, will not also end up in shoeboxes in my closet), and I’ve gotten more short story rejections, nicer ones, encouraging ones that were still not quite acceptances. I’ve spent the past ten years studying my craft, and spent the past two years working on this book in particular, and I’m ready. I know I am. You’ll just have to trust me on that one.

#4: I am quite confident that I have no desire to ever go the traditional route with my books. The only thing I’ll be missing to start is the prestige, but I’m hoping in time I can make up for that too.

I don’t like the traditional model – the advance, having to earn it out, the whole holds against returns thing. I don’t like offset printing – to the tree-hugging hippie in me, it doesn’t make sense. It might have served its purpose in the past, but there are better models out there now, and I think independent POD and e-publishing are some of them. I want to be in control of my business and know everyone who is working for me. I don’t want to be a little cog in their big machine.

#5: I have spent the past year studying the industry, both traditional and independent. I’ve read everything I could get my hands on, and I’m under no illusions about either route. I’m not counting on any magic or strokes of luck. I know how much work it’s going to be. I’m making a very informed decision, and I’ve decided to put on the indie author hat.

a note on worthiness:

There’s an odd thing in the creative writing profession that doesn’t really happen in any other artistic endeavor. You can buy some yarn and some knitting needles, practice until your fingers knot up, and then set up on Etsy to sell your goods – and you ARE a knitter. Nobody would ever dare say you were not. You can take pencil to paper or paint to a canvas, and you ARE an artist. You can play a jazz set in a bar, for a few hundred dollars and some free drinks, and you ARE a musician. You can be a seamstress, a woodworker, a photographer, a designer – you can just set up and BE. Nobody would ever dare say you were not.

And yet, for so many years, authors have felt the need to be picked. To be designated. To be allowed into the club.

When I first came to the decision to self-publish my work, it was one that was very bittersweet for me. I was ashamed to tell people what I was doing – that pesky stigma – afraid they’d think I was taking the easy way out, or cheating, or that it wasn’t the same or as good as “being published”. That it was second-rate, a cop-out, a concession. I can’t recall anyone actually saying any of those things to my face (who knows what wasn’t said to my face), but on the whole, people were accepting of it and excited for me. But still, for the whole of my young writing career, I’ve always been waiting for the day that I would “be published”, that some hand from the authorly heavens would reach down and pluck me up and grant me entry to this very exclusive club. That someone else would declare me an author. To look at my work and declare me worthy? Good enough? Accomplished? There are so very many writers out there waiting for this day.

Never in a million years would I have assumed that that person could be… me?

It’s exciting and almost anti-climactic at the same time. And I suppose that’s because for my whole writing life, I’ve been waiting for this moment that is now never going to come. Or if it does come, it will come in some other form. I don’t know what it will be – good reviews, fan mail, a collection of finished work, a little bit of money? The worthiness will have to be reconfigured.

Because the thing is this – if I can make a little bit of money (which, if you put in the work, is not as terribly uncommon as people will have you believe) doing what I love to do, does it matter that I’ll never be reviewed by the New York Times, or get a starred review on Kirkus, or have my book submitted to contest for the Orange Prize like so many of my favorite women writers? Does that matter? Should it matter? I write literary fiction, people! If ever there were a genre that thrived on recognition from the establishment, this would be it. But the thing is, once I get this gig going, I’ll (likely) be making some money doing exactly what I LOVE to do, and how many people can say they’re able to do that with their lives?

Recognition be damned.

So I will stand up and I declare myself an author. I also declare myself a publisher of my own work. I’ll arrange for my own readers, hire my own editors, study book design and research printers, make my cover art, build up my own platform, be my own accountant (or no, maybe I’ll hire an accountant), and I’ll do my own publicity (…oh wait, all authors have to do their own publicity anyway).

If I need help along the way, I’ll find it. If there’s something I can’t do, I’ll hire someone to do it for me. I’m not doing this alone. I’ll be building my own team. I’ll be heading up my own career.

In my quiet little corner of the world, I’ll reach my own hand down from the heavens and declare myself an author. If that’s like line-hopping, to all those people who waited so long, I’m sorry. Please don’t take it personally. It’s not exactly fair, but it’s not going away either. It’s like the mommy wars, except we’re fighting around our paper babies. It’s not easier; it’s just different. And in the end, this path is better for me, and it’s the one I have to take. It might be better for you too, but I can’t decide that. All I know is that I like the indie author hat – it feels nice on my head. It keeps the sun off my eyes, is just airy enough to be breathable, just casual enough to wear with jeans, and just cute enough to wear with a sun dress.

I can’t say I know what the future holds for me, but for the first time in my life, I know that it’ll be in my hands to succeed or to fail brilliantly. And for me, there is no greater inspiration than that.

So there’s the why. And in the next part, I’ll be talking a bit about how. The new “rules”. And money – I know all anybody really wants to talk about is the money.

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.

I’ve made the book its own page where you can read the full blurb. As the book launches, it will be a place to collect all the media snippets and extra goodies you might want to know about it.

If you’ve been reading this blog for long, you may have seen pieces of this story in draft form as part of last year’s 52-week photo/story project [here, here, and here]. In the following weeks, I hope to share a lot more. In the five weeks leading up to the release, I’ll be sharing the first five chapters of the novel, one chapter each week. But until then, I thought we might start out with an excerpt!

I thought long and hard about what would be the first bit I shared. There are so many bits, and so many carefully woven storylines, but I always came back to this. Since their whole collective world spins around this one night, I couldn’t think of anything better to share first.

Here you’ll meet Jodie and Drew. This is a scene from “chapter 1.1: a fraction of a sliver of a moment”:

Sometimes you know of a person for years, sharing outings as friends of a mutual friend, bumping into each other at parties but never speaking, never exchanging more than a nod, or a hello, or a goodnight. Jodie could still remember the first whole conversation she had with Drew. He and Amelia were already tied up with each other in that momentous but stunted way, but there was this moment – and Jodie wasn’t even sure if it was real – where she thought Drew might have actually been interested. She felt honestly ridiculous to think such a thing, to even think it in the private cavities of her own head. Interested in her? No, it was unlikely. It must have all been in her mind, that moment when Amelia was still an impossibility to him, before she was dating him, or sleeping with him, that inescapable night Amelia had dragged them all along to this cocktail bar, and left them there with smoke on their clothes and neon lights in their eyes. One single fraction of a moment when Jodie thought Drew might have considered her an option.

Jodie’s martini glass glinted pink light over her blunt-cut fingernails. Drew took the bar stool next to her, bringing in a breath of crisp fall air from outside, almost overpowering the smell of cigarette smoke in the room. “Why do you think she won’t date me?”

Jodie looked him up and down. “Because you look like you’re twelve?” The venom spewed from her mouth like a reflex. She didn’t know why. She didn’t find him unpleasant, and she didn’t know him well enough to hate him. He hadn’t even said anything to annoy her in the two hours they’d been out that night. In fact, in truth, he didn’t even look like a twelve year-old at all, but maybe eighteen, twenty on a good day, clean-shaven and gentle-faced as he was. He was so untouched by the world.

“I’m twenty-six, thanks,” he said.

“Maybe grow some chin hair then?”

His hand moved to rub his chin. “Believe me, I can grow plenty of chin hair if I wanted to.”

“Let me guess,” she said. “You want to get married?”

“Sure,” he said.

“Did you tell her that?”

“Probably. But in a general way. I didn’t pop the question or anything.”

Jodie shook her head. “What’s wrong with you freaks?”

He just stared at her. “What’s wrong with you?”

She gasped. “Wrong? Nothing’s wrong with me.”

“You’re so angry.”

“I’m not angry.” She folded her arms tightly over her chest. “Tell you what, I just tell people the truth. People don’t like to hear the truth.”

He pointed at her, his finger wagging slightly. “You’re so bitter, jaded. You’re statuesque almost, a strange approximation of a woman, stiffened by spite.”

She laughed out loud. “Who talks like that?”

“I’m going to write a poem about you.” He smiled then, which was both inquisitive and genuine. The unimaginable grace it must have taken not to hold the hostility against her. How could he stand it? It crossed her mind then to ask him why he thought nobody wanted to date her.

Didn’t she know the answer already?

He bought her a drink – martini, dry, with an extra olive. He drank an imported beer. They stayed for a while, and wherever Amelia had gone that night, why he’d stayed and Amelia hadn’t, Jodie didn’t know. It wasn’t a date. It was some drinks, some conversation, a night of company. They were friends, or at least, they would begin to be from that point on.

But still, there was this future that might have existed, spawned from that night, those drinks at the bar, with the music thumping in their chests and the neon lights in their eyes, and those few perfect hours that followed. A man like him – sensitive and tender – he would want a wedding, as much as he liked them, and maybe even a family. Children, in the plural. None of it was anything she ever wanted, but for that fraction of a sliver of a moment, she allowed the possibility to enter into existence. Maybe she also scowled at it, but it had existed there just the same.

And would anything have ever come of it? Nobody would ever know, because just days later, Amelia finally kissed him. She changed her mind, took him in, swept him into her arms, into her bed, into her heart, which was everything he’d been waiting years for. Just like that, whatever possibility might have existed with Jodie was wiped clean away with that kiss. The most inspiring connection of her entire life had lasted approximately seven hours.

Jodie had no plight to argue. She couldn’t say she liked him first. She couldn’t say she liked him better, or even that she liked him more. As much as she loathed to admit it, she just liked him. To a ridiculous degree. That was all she knew.

Exactly Where They’d Fall will be available in all e-formats and paperback March 13th, 2012!

(fine print: okay, so I might have to bust my ass to get the paperback ready in two months, but I’m gonna try like hell to get them out at the same time, dammit, lol!)

As always, you can follow me on Twitter or follow my Facebook author page for updates. As well as this blog, of course.

I know for as long as some of you have been hearing me say “It’s coming!”, two months probably seems like forever away, but trust me, I still have a LOT to do on the business end of things, with account set-ups for printers, and getting the formatting just right, and all the other little bits I need to arrange.

Don’t forget to stop back on February 7th, when I’ll be starting to serialize the first five chapters!

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!

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?

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.

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 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?

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.

So for now, until we can fix it (I tried, and I’m not sure if I can), or until we get a replacement, I thought, well why not use his perfectly good Star Wars lunch box from preschool last year?

“But mommy, what if the other kids say nah-nah, you had that lunch box last year?”

And I was stunned. Like, wow, would they even remember? These are five year-olds we’re talking about, who were four last year in preschool. And secondly, OMG, is it already time for social politics like this!?!

And so that got me worried more. How many of the kids packed their lunches at all? Do most of them buy lunch? Is it uncool to bring a home lunch at his school? Will he be ostracized even more, besides having a peanut allergy to begin with? Will he fail to make friends because of it and grow up spiteful and insecure, secretly resenting me for it his whole childhood, and will that eventually manifest itself in a drug addiction and/or gang involvement because he didn’t have the support system at home he so needed in his tender formative years!?!?

“Do any of the other kids bring their lunch from home in a lunch box?”

“Yeah, some of them do,” he said.

Whew! *swipes brow*

Okay. Next question. “What kind of lunch boxes do the other kids have?”

“I don’t know, like, mostly princesses.” He shrugged. “I don’t know why all the girls have to have princesses on theirs.”

Next chapter in the school of social politics, puzzlement with the opposite sex begins.

***

ETA: I actually have no clue why the comment form is closed on this particular post – I didn’t do that! lol! Thanks for reading everyone!

Please pardon my abrupt absence. I *officially and completely* finished the second draft of my novel a couple weeks ago (!!!), and then promptly ran off with my boys to northern Michigan for a week of fun!

I have a TON of pictures to sort through from the trip, and those will be posted to the Flickr set throughout the week.

Also, as I get back to work here in a couple weeks, I’ll be putting on my serious hat and hopefully writing some posts here in this blog that *aren’t* about my vacations.

I look forward to telling you about my upcoming novel, Likely to Fail (tentatively scheduled for release this spring!!!), and we’ll talk about writing and books and publishing (and games too, probably, as well as some nerdy things like rooting my Nook!). And next week, I’ll be shipping my little boy off to kindergarten, which means my first year as a full-time “working mom” and soon-to-be novelist!

I also need to redesign this website, to be a little more professional ‘n stuff… or at least have a page for my books.

Please stay tuned!

This was a small series of photos I found within other larger landscape photos I took in England. Most of these I hadn’t even known were there until I super-zoomed in and found these little candid moments that I never would have caught otherwise.

Taken from very ordinary and uninteresting landscape photos like this one:

See that tree, just right of the center?

Well I super-zoomed in to get this:

For being cropped from the actual pixel size in most cases, the image quality here is pretty fuzzy. So this is just for fun. Hopefully none of these people mind me sharing, because I am finding these random candid moments completely fascinating. I might have to go out and try this little game again sometime!

On DRM (digital rights management):

I am in support of fair use of DRM-free ebooks. Meaning, if you purchase an ebook, you should be allowed to read it on whatever device you want. DRM on ebooks is like saying (in terms of paper books), even though you purchased your paperback, you’re only allowed to read it at home – not on the bus, not on the beach, not at the library, not at your friend’s house. That book has to stay at home, for the rest of your life, and well, if your home happens to be destroyed or you want to buy a better one, you’re shit out of luck!

DRM will not stop book piracy. I’ve been reading tutorials on removing DRM the past couple days, and let me tell you, while it is a hassle, it is not hard. It involves downloading freely accessible programs and scripts, and anyone who follows a tutorial can do it. Believe me, if someone was inclined to upload an ebook to the internet for the purposes of piracy, a pesky little thing like DRM is not going to stop them. They probably already have the tools at hand.

So not only does DRM *not* stop piracy (at all!), it only takes away the rights of paying, lawful customers.

All that said, I am not in favor of book piracy, but I am in favor of multi-format, fair use ebooks, and in trusting the consumer with a little common sense. If I buy an ebook, why shouldn’t I be able to read it both on my Nook and my Kindle? Or (for shame!) let my husband read it on his reader after I’m done!

I mean, hell, you can divorce a husband, you can sell a house you bought, you can change your career, but you can’t change your e-reading device? Ladies, we might love our e-readers, but we don’t want to marry them! (Or if we do, we want a pre-nup!)

So here we go, you’re going to need these:

- a Kindle Reading app (pick one for the same place you’ll install Calibre on…)
- a Kindle account, if you don’t have one already
- Calibre, which will very easily convert formats for you as long as the book is DRM free. Calibre is easy to install and very easy to use!
- your Nook’s USB cable

How I am still an Amazon Loyalist at Heart:

I like Amazon because the website is user-friendly and their prices are good (and because my credit card points give me Amazon gift cards!). And because they entrust the publisher with the decision to DRM or not. Sadly, most publishers (especially big ones) still choose to DRM their books, but some of the books you’ll find on Amazon are DRM-free! Nook store, on the other hand, sells only DRM’ed books.

And as a consequence, I really have no inclination to buy an ebook there if I have any choice in the matter. There are other vendors – I’m new to this still, but I’ll find them.

But for now, I have some choices. Today I found a book I really wanted, both at the Nook store and at Amazon. Nook store was 30 cents more expensive and had DRM – Amazon 30 cents cheaper and DRM-free! That’s a win-win, folks!

At the Kindle store, you can check a book’s Product Details. Right where it shows format, and file size, the next line should say “Simultaneous Device Usage: Unlimited“, and that means the book is DRM-free. If you don’t see that, it means it’s not.

Send the book to your Kindle reading app.

So you’ve bought your book. You’ll want to go straight into Calibre now, because your most recent purchase will still be on top in your Kindle Content folder. Make sure you do this right away, because Amazon labels their books in a jarble of indescript numbers and letters, so unless you only have one file in the folder, you’ll be hard-pressed to find it later.

And no, you can’t rename the file if you still want it to be Kindle-readable – I tried that :\

So open up Calibre – and this is so simple I’m not even going to take screenshots (because I can’t be bothered, lol!) Really easy though. The only three buttons you need:

1.) Add books (open your Kindle Content folder, if there are multiple files, then order them by date, and choose the most recent book file.)
2.) Convert books (you don’t need to go through all the advanced options if you don’t want to – just check your output format in the top right corner, and click “OK” in the bottom right.)
3.) Save to disk (make yourself a shiny new folder somewhere, and remember where you saved it.)

That’s all!

Really, that’s all!!! So easy!

Then hook up your USB cord and transfer the book into your Nook, and there you go! Read your book on a Kindle or a Nook! Or both! Or something else entirely some day in the future!

Limitations:

Of course, this trick only works with DRM-free books. You’ll find that most big-publisher books will have DRM on them. And in the case of Amazon, whether to apply DRM to a book is the publisher’s decision. Oddly, a lot of free books I found did have DRM on them, so you won’t find much luck there either. You’ll have the best luck with small publishers and independent authors for DRM-free books. Independent publishing wins in this case!

Calibre hosts a list of DRM-free books and publishers here: Open Books, so you can also browse that way.

And if you had any doubts that I was an Amazon Kindle loyalist, you can tune in a couple weeks from now, when I’ll talk about rooting my NookColor to turn it into an Android tablet and put the Kindle app on it, lol!

(And then I bring to mind what my Aussie friends told me “rooting” means, LMAO! I’m talking in geek-speak here though, so y’all get your heads out of the gutter! :p )

I added a new toy to my collection yesterday!

My new NookColor (left) against my laptop (behind) and my phone (right).

(Starring books by N.M. Martinez, Shana Norris, and Karyn Gerrard.)

Inside illustrations (if made in color) are displayed in color as well, which makes me very happy since I’m planning a collection of my own with color photographs as illustrations!

And it occurs to me that I didn’t take any pictures of the actual text of the e-book, lol! Well, the text just looks like text on an e-reader. It’s very readable though. I’ve only had it less than 24 hours, and am still exploring it, but I’m really liking it so far! The size is just perfect! I had looked at an iPad first, but found it too big and heavy, while the NookColor is light, very thin, and fits comfortably in one hand.

And kids books look really great on this too! You can actually choose the option to have some of the kids books “read out loud”, which is pretty cool! (While simultaneously making me feel like a really lazy mom, lol! So I don’t anticipate using that all the time, but it’s neat for some books, especially long bouts of non-fiction about dinosaurs or planets.)

There are a lot of features I haven’t used yet that I think I’ll really like. There’s lending between friends. And also, if you take your Nook into a Barnes & Noble store, it will automatically connect to their wifi, and you’re allowed to browse and read from their full library of books for one hour a day, which I think will be really cool. I think it will really do a great job of simulating the experience of picking up a physical book and flipping through to see if you want to buy it or not.

It also has wi-fi and web browsing. My only gripe so far is that I’m finding the app market sorely lacking! There are only about 20-something free apps for it in the main app store, and only 300-something apps in total, most of which are very expensive. Maybe I just don’t know where to find good apps yet.

ETA: some second thoughts, now that I’ve been using it another day. One small gripe – Nook for Android is terrible! The margins are so big (even when set to small) that there’s hardly any room on the small screen for text. I never had this problem with Kindle for Android, where the lines of text stretch right across the screen. Has anyone tried Nook for Android yet, and know what I might be doing wrong?

I guess since my Nook is portable enough to carry with me pretty much anywhere, it doesn’t really matter if Nook for Droid sucks?

And my only complaint about the actual NookColor itself is that I’m not too fond of the keyboard so far. I miss my auto-correct (am I the only person on the planet who actually likes auto-correct? lol!), and I really wish a few more handy keys, like the apostrophe or question mark, were placed on the main keyboard screen. I use those enough that it’s really annoying to have to go to the secondary screen for them.

I’m looking into seeing if there’s a way to install alternate keyboards – that would make me a happy camper!

60 mph, white knuckles, barely enough room for two cars! 90-degree turns in the city, where I swear, people are not heeding the 30 mph speed limits! And if you were ever worried about driving on the left side of the road, or going through a roundabout, I say BAH! Try driving in the English countryside!

But the people are friendly and it’s a lovely place, really!… If you survive the roads and everything.

Picture heavy under the cut. These photos were taken between Wanborough, Marlborough, Swindon, and Bath. (Click here for the full set, 72 photos in total.) Please enjoy the following photos while I attempt to get my brain jump-started again to prepare some more verbal posts!

My boy finished his last week of preschool last week. This first year for us – first year of school for him, first year working on anything in a very focused capacity for me – went by sort of unnoticed, I think. We started it, and became immersed in it, and just as soon it was over.

I know it made a big difference for him to be in school. But I spent a lot of the year not feeling like I’d accomplished very much. During the days while he was at school, I’d often find myself on Twitter or blogs. I struggled with the discipline to sit down for those 3-5 solid hours and write for the whole time. For so many years, I’ve trained myself to write in little pockets of time. 20 minutes while he watches a cartoon, or 35 minutes while he’s in the bath, or 15 minutes when some toy has caught his attention, or 45 minutes before bed. So suddenly when I had a stretch of 5 hours uninterrupted, I didn’t know what to do with myself.

I’d like to say I got better at it as the year went on. Maybe I did. It’s hard to measure in any certain capacity. There were days when nothing went according to plan – hubby missed his train and I had to drive him to work, or I had household stuff to do, phone calls to make, errands to run or whatever. There were plenty of days where one, or two, or even all three of us were sick. (Starting school = disease, let me tell you!!!) There were days when one blog after another after another were just so damn interesting that I never got around to the writing, and before I knew it, it was pickup time already.

So the whole year, I felt like I should be doing better, but then looking back on it all from this point of view, I actually wrote a lot. From September to January I first-drafted the novel I’m currently working on, and a large part of what will become my second novel. I even picked at a couple of chapters on my “fine-wine” third novel. From January to now, I’ve been focused on banging out the second draft of this first novel, the one that I should be finishing up here in just a few weeks. (I’m well aware that I have too many novels in the works for anyone to make sense of it. I actually have another post coming up where I’d like to tell you more about my first novel, Exactly Where They’d Fall, and about why the novel I actually started first, Paper Birds is going to be another five or six years before it’s finished, lol! But that’s a topic for another day.)

So while the days didn’t go exactly as I thought they might, I did do a lot of work. And I’m not quite sure when that work was accomplished – maybe still in all those tiny pockets of time? I won’t slight the time spent on Twitter or the blogs, since I’ve met so many writers and learned so much about the publishing industry I’m about to jump into. The work got done. And now I’m sitting at about 80% through my second draft, with two more books waiting in the queue, and I can’t say this year was a failure. It was anything but. In fact, it was quite productive.

And that’s just on my part. Dylan did amazingly this year too! Preschool was great for him, and the school he went to was fantastic! His teachers were awesome and they really did a great job with the kids this year. (If anyone needs a preschool recommendation in NOVA, definitely check this one out.) He’s beginning to read already, counting and starting basic math, he made a few new friends, and he’s on his way to kindergarten this fall.

Now that he’ll be home with me for these summer months, I know I won’t be able to have the same output I did during the school year. And instead of being frustrated about that, I’d rather just not write, and enjoy our time together. I clearly remember how frustrating it was to be a full-time mom, and I think a lot of that stemmed from me needing to be a writer too. It’s not possible really, at the age he was, to be even a part-time writer in the days and still give him the attention he needed. Maybe other women can do it, but it didn’t work for me. Once he stopped napping, my work days were over. I could hardly manage the time to write a blog entry.

But if all goes according to plans, my second draft will be in the hands of my beta readers this summer, and all will be golden. I’ll lounge by the poolside reading books (or well, no – that’s a fantasy – I’ll be in the pool splashing around with D probably, lol!). We’ll walk to the park, and take day trips to wherever, and take lots and lots of pictures too. And I won’t be writing. Or at least not writing much. I may be picking at a couple short stories over the summer, in the evenings, or in the twenty-minute spaces of peace – but otherwise, nothing serious.

I can take the summer off. After all, I did write a lot this year, didn’t I? *pats self on back*

And then in September, I’ll be a FULL-time (soon-to-be) novelist. And maybe I’ll even be better at managing all that free writing time. I’ll be diving into my third draft for this book, and hopefully getting it out to an editor by then end of October. Final edits through the winter. And then ready for release by late winter/early spring of 2012!

(Whoa, did I just say that out loud?)

And well, while I’m feeling so brave to say things out loud, I might as well say this out loud too (since I think it’s probably no big secret anymore, as much as I blab). Let’s make it official.

I’m going indie! (Independently publishing, aka self-publishing, for those not in the biz.)

After my next round of edits, I’ll be hiring my own editor and publishing my own work. This has been a very heavy decision for me, but one I’m finally 100% certain on – I have no desire, at this point in my career, to shop my novels to a traditional publisher.

But then, that topic is a whole (HUGE) conversation for another day.

There is no story for my photo this week. (And by the way, I’m sure anyone following this will have noticed that I’m hopelessly behind in my weeks, with little chance of ever catching up – and I don’t really care.)

Last Friday, I passed 50K on the second draft of my novel-in-progress, and just about as fast as I crossed that line, I promptly disappeared from the internet. Work-related anyway. I took an impromptu weekend off. I wasn’t supposed to be taking the weekend off, since I still need to plump and polish this draft by about another 18,000 words, and there’s this monumental and looming deadline to finish before my kid finishes school for the summer – self-imposed, but since I’m my own employer, I’m being kind of a hard-ass about it, lol! Oh, and we’re also simultaneously planning a trip to England in these same three weeks.

Yet even with all there is left to do, my brain spit out that 50,000th word, and shut down. It felt called for, felt necessary, and so it happened.

We didn’t take any big adventures, though my honey and I managed to go on a date. The rapture didn’t happen. We did some shopping and some cleaning and some laundry. I didn’t take the time off writing my novel just to write my web series instead (like I usually do on my weekends “off”) – I didn’t write anything. I let my Google Reader pile up – 108 blog posts waiting for me to sift through! The publishing industry went on happily without me. I didn’t manage to lose any Twitter followers (though they might not remember who I am next time I post). We watched some movies, and slept, and I played the crap out of my Sims.

I don’t write as fast as some people write, so sometimes I feel like I’m not working as hard. I’m not trying to be precious about my work, saying that my 800 words is harder than anyone else’s – I know it’s not. But the point is, anyway, that hard work isn’t necessarily defined by word output. I should know that – it’s the kind of thing I might tell another writer friend, and yet I hardly apply it to myself. So it creeps up on me, when I’m pushing out my 800 glorious words day after day after day (oh, and well, there’s the mommy/sloppy-housewife job too…), it gets to be a lot. And then, no matter how much I have left to do – or maybe because of it – my mind just needs to run off and hide for a couple days.

I’d like to think of it as a surge protector for my brain. Though it could also just be proof that I’m inherently lazy.

The point of this is not to replace a human editor. Really. But what a machine can do for you is to catch all that lazy writing, the things that slip by your eyes after several thousand passes through the same sentence. The things that might even slip by your critique partners after they’ve read several thousand words of your work and have become similarly accustomed to your lazy mistakes.

But a machine won’t – not the first time, and not after the thousandth time. That’s where machines work best.

Here’s a screenshot from EditMinion:

Do you see how great I am at using those weak words???

As always, you have to know the rules well before you can judge which edits to follow and which to discard. With either of these programs, I would only follow some of the edits. What I find they’re good for, in my case particularly, is catching passive voice, or when I’ve used too many adverbs or weak words (really, actually, totally!), or repeated the same word too many times.

But sometimes you do want an instance of passive voice, or a really/actually/totally… okay, maybe not “totally” Sometimes you just want to end a sentence on a preposition. And a lot of times, it’s only programmed to highlight trigger words, and comes back suggesting that “times” is a preposition? (Which I’m pretty sure it’s not, right?…) Well, if it is, I’m keeping it!

EditMinion: http://editminion.com/ is free, and works pretty well, apart from the odd mislabeled preposition. And though it suggests it does, it does not seem to catch any clichés. However, the program is still in beta.

AutoCrit Editing Wizard: http://www.autocrit.com/ is NOT free (by a long shot, unfortunately) except for the very limited trial version. But from what I hear, it does a lot, and is very thorough. But I do make as much use of the freebie version as I’m allowed. (Though I have to say, I really, really wish they’d make a one-time purchase, stand-alone version of this. Oh man, I’d buy it up in a heartbeat! But alas, I cannot justify paying $50-120 a year for a piece of software I’ll never own. Oh, *sigh*.)

But I also like that it gives little bits of encouragement with the report “nice job” or “yay!”

So try out the freebies and see what you think. You’ve got nothing to lose, and neither of these programs will store or keep your text. I find they keep me on task, and keep me from repeating those same lazy writing habits that can creep into my work under the radar.

How about you guys? Have you come across any editing software you like? (Perhaps something similar to AutoCrit that doesn’t cost so much money? )

I will never write anything in a Word document again. Never. Not a blog entry, not a poem, not even a freewrite-background-note. Nothing. It all goes into LSB, somewhere. And what I love about LSB is that there’s a place for everything in it. It’s more than just a word processor – it’s… well, a binder! If a binder could have just the perfect amount of pockets you wanted it to have, in the perfect order and shape, and in all your favorite colors. It can be whatever you want it to be.

(view of my working space, click through for full-size)

The big box on the right, called “LTF, part 1″, is called a “Builder”. The top left, partially hidden box called “likely to fail, table of contents” is using the Outline tool. The bottom left, which I’ve lovingly called “write the crap out of this thing” is the Journal tool, where I keep track of my word counts.

It’s hard to explain what these things do without you being able to get your hands on it and try it yourself, which was part of the reason I kept putting off writing about this thing, lol!

But simply, most of the time, for almost any kind of writing I do, I’ll write directly into the Builder. Each of these items in the Builder can be “built up” into a Chapter, which is simply a rich-text document. The point is though, you can use the software in any thousands of ways, and I use these tools differently for each of the different projects I’m working on, or even each stage of where I am in the process.

(view of a novel in first draft, click through for full)

And please don’t mind the very first-drafty start to my second book, lol! What I wanted to demonstrate here is what I love best about the Builders, the ability to shuffle them around! When I’m first drafting, I write the whole thing into one big long Builder. I’ll give each scene its own item in the Builder, and it’s SO easy to move them around as I learn more about the story and what order they might appear. This is very useful to me, with the way I write my first drafts – as the scenes come to me, I don’t always know which order they go in. So here, I just write them down, sticking them vaguely towards the beginning, middle, or end, and that way I don’t have 3000 different word documents lying around, or have to have all my scenes pasted into the same long word document either.

Then as the project comes together, you can “build” all of those fragments or scenes into a chapter. You can move one item (or several items) from one builder into another. You can transform Journals into Builders, or Builders into Chapters, or Outlines into Chapters. It’s so customizable, and really does SO much! More than I’m even able to use very often, and the LSB website really does a great job of demonstrating it all.

The parts I use most often are the journals, outlines, checklists, the sequences for my photo-poems, and have even begun to use the character dossiers now too.

A few more of my examples, all from different projects:

An Outline, where I have each chapter detailed by scene, and color-coded by its narrator! (Another love about LSB, almost EVERYTHING can be color-coded!!!)

This is a Checklist, which I find useful for laying out my deadline schedules. (Don’t mind the red circle – I was just getting giddy a little bit over the 50% point, which I’m currently at! Yay!)

This one is the Journal, except instead of using it to write about the process and track word counts as I have in the first screenshot, this one is a STORY journal. Here I’ve detailed the scenes of a story in story-time, which is useful for big and complicated stories if you want to remember what your characters were doing (or couldn’t have been doing) on which days. I was quite pleased to see that LSB can go forward all the way to the year 2083, lol!

So those are the parts I use most, but that’s truly only a fraction of everything it can do. There is quite a steep learning curve (took me about two weeks to really get the hang of it), but after that, I never looked back! It’s currently about $45 to buy (free for 30 days to try out). And of course, I highly recommend (= am deeply in love with) it. Especially if you love organization and color-coding like I do!

This week’s excerpt is actually a title, from my in-progress collection of stories and poems:

How to Stand on Your Hands

notes: And so I went on a quest for the ultimate mangled dandelion. And I took a damn lot of pictures of them too! (I may or may not have even dreamed about dandelions last night… I know, that’s a bit much, isn’t it?)

But I had to have one! And not just any dandelion, but in my mind, I saw the perfect dandelion on the cover of this book. It would have to be a proud dandelion, mangled yet resilient, hanging onto its last few seeds, standing tall with its face to the sky. (As you can see, I am quite serious about my dandelions, folks!) Because as a collection, the stories and poems are about just that, hanging onto your last few seeds, standing mangled but proud with your face to the sky? Or something.

(And oh, wait, taking photos and planning my own book covers might be a little bit spoilery for the announcement I’m not supposed to be making for a couple more weeks still. But eh, whatever, lol!)

In the end, I’m still not sure if I’ve found the *perfect* dandelion photo for the book cover. Or perhaps the final image will be a mash-up of a few of these photos. The photo I chose for this week was just the one I liked best as an individual shot.

But really, I have a much more immediate cover image to take. I need to borrow someone’s sewing room, which should be a little bit dusty, preferably with wooden floors and an old drafty window that catches brilliant afternoon sunlight. I need a bolt of yellow tulle, to hang over a chair and pull out long, so it would trail off the chair and unravel, piled up on the floor in a jumble. I might also like to borrow someone’s legs (attached ones, I mean – dude, I’m not writing horror stories here! )

Anyone have a room like that I could borrow?

More dandelion outtakes on the Flickr page: