New tasks

The New Year is a good time to turn over a new leaf. (Isn’t it easy to fall into clichés?) I mean that I want to set up a good regime of work again, because if the Christmas holidays do nothing else, they seem to butt into everyone’s working habits. I’ve done virtually nothing for a fortnight now, but from today – things will be different!

So much to do. I’m learning all the time, and there are so many changes coming along that it is hard to keep up. This month my long time independent publisher Write Words, Inc will close its doors after 17 years and leave two of my titles homeless. 

I’m deciding whether to publish myself or canvas for a publisher for Banners of Alba and Dark Pool. How much do I want to re-edit them? They were my first books published, and I could probably improve them. Dark Pool in particular has never had much success, so perhaps a change of title and a new cover is in order there.

Certainly I shall do nothing with them until I have The Matfen Affair published, but other tasks will probably include trying to get Amazon to remove all traces of the old version, particularly the paperback of Banners – still for sale at the ridiculous price of £33. I’ll need to alter the book page here, too. There’s nothing worse than an out of date book page!

I'm also having another go at mastering Goodreads. In the past I have found it the most difficult website, but I really should have a presence there.

It didn't make my heart sing

Here's an interesting article: http://futurebook.net/content/do-editors-not-say-no-because-they-can-no-longer-say-yes
It's not too long, so I'll leave it to you to click through and read the whole thing. I hope agents and editors take it to heart!
As for me, I have gone through the first three chapters of Matho 1 - now entitled The King's Business after several titles changes - checking for conflict, suspense, drama and emotional intensity. Not to mention repetition, poor grammar, awkward sentences and the occasional missed word. Yes, in spite of all the work and time spent on these three chapters over the last three years, I spotted two instances where a small, two-letter words had been omitted. (Of course, I blame the computer for that!)
So later today I shall be printing the pages out, and if I think they're up to scratch I'll think about sending them to an agent.

I'm getting more and more reluctant to send things out. There's something truly disheartening about sending these pages out, waiting six or eight weeks and receiving no reply. I mean, how much effort does it take to zip off an e-mail and say "thanks but no, it isn't what I'm looking for?" All of a minute, I'd say. That minute would be a minute well spent, because I'd certainly regard that agency as more efficient, more courteous and one I'd like to work with in the future. The agent who scrawls a hasty handwritten "it doesn't make my heart sing" across the bottom of the covering letter and returns it to me makes me give a wry grin. It's a refusal, sure, but it's personal, and she bothered to respond. Good for her.

 I tend to forget about books I wrote some time ago, but they're still out there, waiting for their readers. Dark Pool is available on Kindle now, click, which it wasn't when it first came out. It's an exciting story about a young girl kidnapped by Vikings and taken to Dublin where she faces a forced marriage or the slave market. One reviewer said it was too harsh to be a romance, but as a portrayal of Dark Age life she thought it scored 100%. I know I enjoyed writing it!

Requiem

My publisher, Quaestor2000, is closing. Copies in stock will be sold for another month but after that, it’s over. So if anyone wants copies of Far After Gold or Till the Day Go Down, get them now, otherwise they’ll be pulped.

My sympathies lie with Roger Bennett, who began the Quaestor venture. Publishing is harder than people think. Or rather, to make a success, a profit-paying venture, is harder than it might seem. Getting a book printed is easy enough today, but the trick is in selling it. Faced with 500 copies of a title, where do you off-load them?

The big chain booksellers go through their chosen hubs, and select only what they think will sell in multiples. Persuading them to accept a novel from an unknown author is like trying to push a snowball uphill, in my view. Or, they accept politely, and eventually it dawns that nothing is really going to happen. The precious book never appears on their shelves. Or if it does, it's there for one week and then vanishes.

Some people are built for the task of selling their own work and enjoy it, but the mere thought of filling the car boot with copies and touring the countryside as a salesperson fills me with dread.

So, my brief time with paperbacks published and available is soon to be over. I’m sad about it, but console myself with the thought that I still have two e-books available – Banners of Alba and Dark Pool.

And soon I’ll have a contemporary ghost story, Shadows, coming from Sapphire Blue. As with everything else, its Onwards and Upwards and Don't Look Back.

(The pic? Prudhoe Castle in the snow.)

My video and The Making of Me

Well, I've done it. Someone said something, I got curious and the result is I have completed a "video" for Youtube all on my own. You might want to fall apart laughing but here is the link -
http://uk.youtube.com/watch?v=Iy7QehG-a6c


I've done it, but I'm not sure I could repeat the process! If it gives a flavour of the book, if it makes anyone want to read it, then perhaps I ought to think hard and do more! One for Banners of Alba, and I could prepare others for the books patiently waiting in the pipeline. Except that that might be the kiss of death - perhaps I'll wait until I have a contract!

First it was John Barrowman, then Colin Jackson and last night Vanessa Mae in a programme called The Making of Me. I find it fascinating, and you might too. It is the old argument of Nature v Nurture. The first programme brought up an interesting theory on why homesexuals are as they are - not genes, not upbringing, but a hormonal imbalance while the infant is in the womb. Too little testosterone for a male, or too much for a female can make the child "different." The theory make sense, but I can see that mothers will not want to feel they are to blame for their child's orientation.

As for Colin, he was born with 25% super fast twitch muscles, way above the level you or I might own. But without all his hard work, perseverance and a supportive family and environment, those muscles would have done very little for him.

Vanessa Mae admits she did not have a normal childhood. Immersed in music from age four, she finally broke loose from her mother at the age of twenty one and has not spoken to her for eight years. As I understood the programme there is nothing Vanessa was born with that has led to her being a maestro and worth 30 million today - except, perhaps, that she has very sensitive hearing. The rest is down to thousands of practice hours, an excessive drive for perfection and an extrovert personality that thrives on risk.

Something new

I intended to blog more about Save the Cat, and how it affected my writing, but I got totally sidetracked by trying to make a tiny video to go on Youtube. For someone who likes to paint, using Photoshop to adapt and edit pics is sheer heaven! The pic left is my first attempt at visualising Eba, my heroine in Dark Pool. On reflection, perhaps she does look as if she's sitting in a murky pool - but that is soon altered!

The work is hard on the eyes. I have stopped a couple of times when I realised such close detail was giving me a headache. Pity graphic artists who do this for a living, but perhaps they work on far bigger screens. I hope so!

I've got my pics ready. Now I need to discover how to use Movie Maker. It seems simple, but the pics are too close together in time, and the legend doesn't always come up on the right picture. Still, I'm getting closer all the time and it is absorbing. I've done very little writing overt the last few days.

Weatherwise the last three days have been gorgeous. Over 70 degrees F (21C), especially if you found a sheltered spot like my garden!

Reading and YOUtube

I love this image courtesy of PDPhoto.org

Two thirds of the way through Save the Cat (STC from now on) and it is an entertaining read even though I don't think I'll take to writing screenplays. A lot of the theory behind it applies to fiction writing as well, and that's why it is interesting. Already I'm making notes! One cryptic scibble in my notebook reads: "How does F cope when she realises she NEEDS Jack? She can't tolerate it!"

Ah well, no doubt it'll work in somewhere.

I'm surprised and pleasedf to find that I'd already figured out that certain things need to happened at a certain spot in the category romance (and possibly with all fiction with the exception of literary fiction which these days seems to have no plot at all but strings words together beautifully as it meanders along.) The screenplay is 110 pages, no more, no less. So if I multiply that by 3 to get a rough approximation of category romance, we have 330 pages with which to play. (Not quite that many, but near enough.) Then he breaks it down into 15 beats or Places Where Things Must Happen, and lo and behold, these too fit the category novel.

As for You tube: it is something I have fought shy of, believing it to be the home of restless cyber kids. But as of today, if you put DARK POOL into the video search box, up pops a two minute video about my book. Let me know what you think, and hurry, because I don't know if the person who did it is going to leave it there!

It's cold outside

No picture of the frogspawn as it is too cold and dismal, but the taddies are starting to break free. One or two are out and about on their own. I hope they survive. I am longing for warm weather, not so I can rush out and photograph them, but just simply to be out and about in the garden and not freezing to death while I'm doing it. I have some sweet peas to plant out any day soon.

Second draft of my wip going apace, and WsB is on the last chapter with the critique group. I've had my eye off the writing ball this last week because I've done a little promoting for DARK POOL on 14 different groups. Let's hope it does some good.

Easter

It is Easter Weekend, and I've done very little work, so no answer yet about the titles I puzzled over a couple of days ago, but I shall get back to it soon. The weather is very cold and windy, which always drops the temperature still further. A scattering of snow arrived on Good Friday, enough to turn the lawn white, but that is all. We braved the elements for a walk that afternoon, and took ourselves out for a meal at the Keeper's Lodge at Matfen on Saturday, but otherwise, it has been very quiet.

TV has figured prominently in our lives over the last couple of days, especially since the F1 year has begun again. The first race in Melbourne was amazing as only nine cars finished out of 22! Yesterday's race at Sepang had more finishers and was rather pedestrian by comparison. Hamilton is now finding out that luck doesn't hold good for ever, and Kimi is coming on strong. Go Kimi! It was fascinating to know that the family in Oz was watching the race via a sling box connected to our television! The wonders of modern technology...

I've read Simply Magic and Simply Unforgettable by Mary Balogh. The first was excellent, but the second I thought dragged a little towards the end - but still good! One good thing about not needing much sleep is that I get a lot of reading done in the wee small hours while everyone else is asleep. Like now...

I participated in a chat day on the 21st over at eBooklove and thoroughly enjoyed it. I put up some excerpts from Dark Pool even though the book is not newly published, and they were well received. Perhaps I ought to go and do a little more about getting myself known!