Have you visited my series of pieces Flirting With The Moon? I’m still working on this and have gathered it all into one ‘page’. I keep it on the blog I use for my fiction pieces. It all began with this song and two poems. So…if you run into some cold winter days with nothing to do…
Now I’m off to make a pasta sauce from scratch and a loaf of zucchini bread 🙂
Ellespeth ♥
Hello one and all!
I am excited to announce that I am working on a new promo opportunity for self-published romance authors with Coffee Time Romance and More. I am looking for indie authors to feature. If you’re interested, check out details and contact me through my blog page dedicated to the Coffee Time Romance Indie Author Feature here.
All indie author features will be posted here on my blog, and will be promoted through all of Coffee Time Romance and More‘s social media channels, and on the website directly. There will also be a Tweet-to-Win contest administered through CTR’s Google+ community, “Book Lovers Unite.”
This is an amazing opportunity for self-published authors to gain free exposure, and reach an established following of romance readers.
Contact me today if you’re interested. I’m looking to fill up monthly spots, and can’t wait to hear from all…
View original post 6 more words
I’m going to kick this post off with a quote from Ursula Le Guin’s speech at the National Book Awards.
Hard times are coming, when we’ll be wanting the voices of writers who can see alternatives to how we live now, can see through our fear-stricken society and its obsessive technologies to other ways of being, and even imagine real grounds for hope. We’ll need writers who can remember freedom – poets, visionaries – realists of a larger reality.
Hard times are coming. Some would say hard times are here. The media tends to promote the idea. The future looks big and scary with a lot of doomsayers in our midst. And kids get an earful of it. . . and an eyeful. The media gives them great heaping gulps of the awfulness going on . . . and the awfulness we might be headed into.
It’s not a complete…
View original post 405 more words
So here we are with the last post before this blog takes its first silent day. At least an official one because there’s always the chance that I had to delete an old post that was the only one on a day, but that’s splitting hairs. Also, I might still be reblogging on the off days. Still working on the format, but I think today is the right day to talk about the future here. I do hope people read all of this though.
I’ll have been a full-time, self-published author for 2 years this February and it’s been a wild ride. I’ve made amazing friends, gotten further than I expected in this short bit of time, been part of some fun projects, and had a few Internet scrapes. Yet, it’s all come down to a question that a friend asked me:
WHERE DO I WANT TO GO?
Contrary to the above video, I do want to be taken seriously as an author and reach that next level. I want to keep doing what I love to do. I want to make enough money to support my family. I want to see paperback versions of my book in a store. I want to be accepted as a professional outside of the indie author circles, which seems to be a goal that angers others. Not that I don’t love interacting with everyone, but I do want to reach that next level. It’s always been my desire to get there and I need to start looking into how it can be accomplished.
I’ve always said that I think a great use for the self-publishing circuit is for traditional publishers to view it as a talent pool. This is our ‘Open Mic Night’, ‘Demo Tape’, ‘Open Audition’, and whatever else the other artistic avenues have. As far as I know, novelists have never had a true arena to reveal their work to an audience and prove they have something. Even short stories in magazines needed to get through editors or some kind of review boards, so the public didn’t always see it. We’ve had to depend on query letters with excerpts, which has become increasingly more difficult to hit the mark with. Through the self-publishing world, an author can gather an audience and reveal that they have something. I’d like to think I’ve done that part and now I have to figure out how to move to the next level.
After all, it isn’t just my books that I have to market. It’s me and that’s where I tend to fall short . . . height pun not intentional. I need to bring this blog back to its roots of focusing on my books and my writing. I need to enhance my professional reach and prove that I’m ready to take on the next level of this business. Yes, I would love nothing more than to write my books and leave the marketing to someone else. I’d occasionally crawl out of my cave to say hello to fans and prove that I’m still working. Things don’t seem to work this way any more if this was ever reality in the first place.
So where do I go from here? Forward and backward in some ways. I’m pushing for the next rung while pulling back on the personal stuff here. I’ll still post responses to any questions that people ask on here. I’ll still talk about my books, my characters, and writing in general. The weekly goals will be the extent of my personal life unless a big event is going on that I feel is worth sharing. We’ll see what happens and if I can figure out my way. I’m sure I don’t want to be 100% indie author for the rest of my life, but it’s just figuring out how to get there.
Lend a hand and support a debut author as she heads into the final push for her January 30th release.
A tour and giveaway!
A topic that rarely comes up.
Mock covers created using ShutterStock images.
Whether designing a book or just the book cover, the choice of font is a very important design element.
Fonts come in many different shapes, from rectangular to curvy. They can be simple or complex. They can be serif or sans serif (the little decorations that you see on the ends of letters). They can be thin or thick, light or bold.
So which font should you use for your book or book cover? That’s the million-dollar question. It’s worth taking time to consider it carefully.
It’s not hard to find a free or low-cost font…
View original post 2,483 more words
An interesting set of questions.
We authors love to read, and we love, of course, to write fiction. We love stories. We love connecting with stories, because we love what they teach us about being human and how they explore what it means to be human.
So today, I wanted to offered a challenge by offering some questions you can consider (or not, of course) on your own time. During a spare moment. Maybe while sitting in traffic or something.
We authors know we have the bug to write, but how often do we really consider WHY we feel driven to craft stories about people who don’t exist? I don’t consider this very often, I know, and I’m a rather contemplative type. I like deep thinking.
So, here are just a few questions that might help you understand why you love writing, and how you can best write so as to develop as a person.
View original post 346 more words
This post might be a bit meaty since I have a lot of ground to cover. Yearly goals, weekly goals, a new page coming later, and covering a bit of confusion. Well, let’s get on with the fun.
End of an Era
Many people saw the ‘Beginning of the End’ posts this week and are aware that this coming will be the first one under the new schedule. Only MWF and Saturday aside from reblogging on the off days. Special events will alter this, but that’s what it is for now. I don’t know if this will really help with my writing since I scheduled everything before and I still plan on commenting on blogs. We’ll see what happens.
Now some people asked if I was leaving WordPress due to the tone of the previous post titles. If not now then I was preparing to abandon the blogosphere in the future. To that I have the following to say:
Dean Winchester
I guess I am slipping a foot toward the exit in case I feel like my time here is no longer fun or I have to leave for some reason. For now, I’m just shrinking my time here to focus on more important things. I won’t lie and say I’ll always be here. I’ve even considered closing up shop on days where I feel like I’m overwhelmed. No way to tell what the future will hold. I may even drop to a smaller schedule if things become chaotic enough. In the end, you’ll know if I’m leaving . . . at least if it’s by my choice.
Writing Plan for the Year
Those are the big writing goals of 2015 and I really hope they happen. The writing might be tougher than the publishing since I’ll finish the December release by the end of this month. I’ll try to do the outlining between books, but I should do some notebook work too. A big issue is that I’m getting closer to one series that I haven’t touched yet and it’s a whopper since I made each book a 4 Act adventure.
Another interesting point about these goals is that they leave me with a very interesting 2016. That may be far ahead, but that would be the year I write the final 3 books of ‘Legends of Windemere’. They won’t be released until 2017 unless something changes to allow for a 6 book release year. Still, that brings an odd sense to the workload I chose for myself. I’d be starting the vampire series near the end of that year, which begs the question: Do I remember have to start a fresh series?
Bugs and Daffy (Looney Tunes)
Opinion on 2015
Not impressed. Same crap, new calendar. It’s funny how we sometimes think the starting of a new year will change our personal landscape immediately. Maybe we expect everyone to start changing their lives and that will help us do the same. Either way, I’ve got a feeling that this year will merely be 2014 Part Deux.
In a few hours, a new page will be appearing on LEGENDS OF WINDEMERE. It will be a place where a person can post a question that I’ll answer in a later post. Keep in mind that it could be a month or so before I get to it. Also I do retain the right to not answer a question that I feel is too controversial for this blog. It’s really a simple thing that I had for my first year and got nothing. I’ll just mention it at the bottom of every future goal post to direct people to it.
Well . . . that’s it for this post. Guess we’ll see what happens Tuesday when there’s no post on here. Might be a reblog or two, but nothing directly from me. Enjoy 2015.
…NUTHIN lasts forever, so ‘they’ say… but change is in the air… and positive change for this ol’ Jurassic… okay, well, a wee hint… unsurprisingly, p’raps, it’s to do with my books…. those Jack Calder crime thriller masterpieces of mine that have bumped around the eBooks circuit for a little while… many of yeez Lads and Lassies of Blog Land have supported my incredible trip through this self-publishing slalom for the past 6 years… and in typical Caledonian immodesty, I can say I’ve learned a lot … basically ‘coz at the start I knew less than zero… my first ever laptop was purchased a week before I began to type THE VIOLIN MAN’S LEGACY... with one finger from each hand, which is still the my current modus laptopus typus… my notion of SOSYAL NETWURKIN was a business cocktail party every month or so… my, my, how that has changed……
View original post 262 more words
