Howdy, Squiders. This is just a quick note to let you know that the discussion of The Ancient One will be next Tuesday, August 2, instead of this Thursday, July 28. See you then!
Night Magic by Kathleen Ann Gallagher
Today, Squiders, I’m pleased to host Kathleen Ann Gallagher as part of her book blast for her new book, Night Magic, which is the first book of the Moonlight and Jasmine Series. The book is contemporary paranormal romance.
Krista Winter is in need of legal counsel. Several years ago she was forced to flee her life as a
teacher in New Jersey after being shunned for practicing witchcraft, and her past is about to
catch up with her.
Jon Bartolo is a dedicated attorney. His days are spent helping his clients with their struggles,
and his nights are spent in agony, lost in a world between life and death. His mother, who died
three years ago, lurks in his house, suffering from a curse for eternity, without a final resting
place.
A smoldering fire ignites between Jon and Krista almost immediately, however, he’s sure his secret would frighten any woman away. An afternoon escape brings them closer, but doubts
linger between the love-struck couple.
Burning questions about how to fuse their futures together with so much of their past still
clouding the future becomes a heavy burden that they’re both trying to bear on their own. It will take a touch of magic if there’s any hope in sight.
Kathleen writes contemporary and paranormal romance in her home in New Jersey, where she lives with her husband and their two fur babies, Luc and Chaz. She spent years working as a registered nurse in an emergency room. She is also active in Community Theater. She has three children and three lovable grandsons. Her favorite romantic getaway is Cape May, New Jersey. You might find Kathleen on a beach down the Jersey Shore, wearing a straw hat and sipping on an iced tea as she plots her next romance novel.
You can find Kathleen at the following places: ( Website | Twitter | Facebook )
The book is currently discounted to $.99 during the blast. You can buy it here.
Kathleen will be giving away a $20 Amazon or Barnes & Noble giftcard. You can enter the giveaway here:
Enter to win a $20 Amazon/BN GC – a Rafflecopter giveaway
Why I Loved Ghostbusters
Yay! Time for polarizing opinions!
Unless you guys have been living under a rock recently–and if you have, congrats, because this whole thing is ridiculous–you know there’s been a ton of controversy around the remake of Ghostbusters, mostly because of the decision to make the Ghostbusters women instead of men.
To which I say: sigh. Really? Is this really the worst thing that has ever happened to a remake? Have you seen some of the remakes that have come out lately?
Oy. People, your priorities are messed up.
But, anyway, let me say that I have seen the original Ghostbusters and Ghostbusters II, enough times to recognize and make quotes from them, but not enough times that they haven’t kind of conglomerated into a single movie in my memories. The first one is the one with Sigourney Weaver and Rick Moranis, yes? Gatekeeper, keymaster? Actually, looking on Wikipedia, maybe I’ve never seen Ghostbusters II, because that does not sound familiar at all. Okay! So I’ve seen the first movie a bunch apparently, and superimposed it into ideas for a second movie, which I apparently did not see or do not remember.
In my defense, both movies came out when I was very little. I was 1 when the first one came out, and 6 for Ghostbusters II. Most if not all of my nostalgic love for the franchise comes from the TV series from the late ’80s/early ’90s, which my sister and I watched religiously.
My thoughts when the remake was announced were basically along the lines of ugh, really? Must we remake every little thing that was ever at all successful? Couldn’t we at least remake things that were terrible and try to make them not suck instead of the other way around? And then I essentially wrote it off as a bad idea and forgot about it.
Then the announcement about the switch to it being a woman team came out, and of course the angry nerdboys of the Internet, most of whom probably hadn’t even thought about Ghostbusters in twenty years, came out in droves, which is always a bit sad, because, honestly, don’t these guys have anything better to do with their lives? Anything more fulfilling to worry about? If the worst problem you got is the diversification of a franchise from your childhood, man, something’s wrong with you.
I had a mixed reaction to the news. Part of me was intrigued, because we were at least going to try to do something different instead of just making the same movie over again for no good reason. But part of me was worried that they were going to do a terrible job, because most remakes are horrible, lazy things with bad writing and unnecessary action scenes, and if we were doing it just for a stunt, then it was a terrible, terrible idea.
But then the cast was announced. And then the first trailer came out. And it looked amazing, and I was onboard all the way.
Now, I will say that I am not someone who gets terribly invested in my media. I have never been one of those people threatening a studio making one of my favorite books or any of the crazy things people do. I like to evaluate everything on its own, without connections to previous movies/books/TV shows/video games, etc. So ragehating on something before it even exists is very foreign to me. (See above: don’t you have better things to do?)
So I went into the theater on Sunday expecting and hoping for a good movie, and that’s what I saw. A funny movie, with great chemistry between the leads, and some really cool bits, and at least one bit that actually scared me for a second (which was embarrassing, because I went with people I don’t know very well). It was what I hoped it would be. And I loved it.
Was it perfect? No. There’s a couple of throwbacks to the original movies that don’t really fit, and a character relationship subplot that’s a bit sloppy. Also, Kristen Wiig’s hairstyle just–I don’t know, I don’t like it. That’s a minor complaint. In general, it’s everything you need and expect a Ghostbusters movie to be. I cannot recommend it enough. I especially liked the characters of Holtzmann (which is an excellent name for an engineer, just saying) and Patty.
But, as you know, I exist on the Internet, and so I have also seen some reviews from people who really, really hated it. And I find myself wondering–did we watch the same movie? Are some of these people pretending to have watched it just so they can “legitimately” harp hate on it? Did they go in with low expectations and then spend the whole movie cataloging every mistake to justify their previously formed opinion? Did they watch the original right before going in and then fume about every difference?
I mean, I know people have differing opinions, but the wide divide between love and hate on this one seems very extreme.
Anyway, I loved it. I am plotting to go see it again if I can find babysitting, and I’m already planning on asking for it for my birthday/Christmas depending when it comes out on video.
Have you seen it, Squiders? What did you think?
Why You Need to Break the Mold
We’re doing a sewing analogy today, Squiders. Sorry.
So, at the end of last week I finally managed to get my patterns together. (Which was a pain in the butt–one pattern had to be traced off a sheet included with the book that included ALL the patterns on the same sheet, and the other one had to be printed off an included CD–in 21 pieces which then needed to be trimmed and taped together. Worst ever, why would you do that? The tracing is highly superior, in the end.) And I got all my pieces together, laid them out and realized…
…I couldn’t use them.
Well, I couldn’t use them as is. I remembered, as I stared down at all those pattern pieces, that I have to modify the patterns, usually extensively, because I am 9 inches taller than the average woman. I have to length everything. I have to change where the darts go. Sometimes I have to completely reshape a pattern.
And then I realized I probably hadn’t bought enough material for one of my planned shirts and had to go make myself some tea.
The same thing goes for writing. Have you ever read a book where parts of it felt derivative? Like, instead of spending any time on a character, the author just used stereotypes? Where, instead of focusing on a good-fitting setting, they just grabbed the status quo, even in places where it didn’t make sense?
It can be tempting to take shortcuts sometimes. To use the default setting, because it’s expected and familiar. To grab the usual bag of characters, because you know how they fit into a plot and why invent the wheel, right? And sometimes it’s okay to use the pattern. There are reasons patterns exist. They do work.
But it’s important to make sure you’re using the right pattern for the story that you want to tell, and if it’s not fitting right, it’s okay to modify it. The fit is what’s important, in the end. If your story ends up too long, too short, lumpy in odd places, too tight, too loose–all things that can be fixed with a little modification–your readers will notice. And next time they’re looking for a well-crafted, good fitting story, they’re going to go somewhere else.
Have you ever tried to use a standard bit of plot/setting/character and found it just didn’t fit? What ways do you employ to fix the fit?
(In regards to my shirt without enough fabric–because it turns out I need to lengthen it almost four inches–I think it can be salvaged by doing a sleeveless version. I had planned for elbow-length sleeves. I suppose I could go back and get more fabric, but the likelihood of the store still having the same kind in stock seems low.)
A Day in the Life of a Freelance Editor
I sometimes get questions in my email from other people wanting to get into freelance editing, and so I thought it might be beneficial to share my general day with the Internet at large so people can get an idea how this works.
I do want to emphasize that this is me, personally, and that there are plenty of other good freelance editors out there who probably structure their day completely differently. Also probably plenty of bad freelance editors, which is why you should ask for an editing sample before you hire someone.
I also want to preface this with the disclaimer that I work part-time because I am first and foremost a stay-at-home parent with two pre-school children. On a good day, I can get up to six hours of working time in; on a bad, I may only get an hour, or even nothing.
I have three jobs I do (not counting working on novels/short stories):
- Freelance Editor (website here) — I specialize in novels and short stories, but also get a lot of college papers and technical documents because of my background in engineering.
- Contract Editor — I’ve worked for a company for almost five years now, where I currently edit college-level lessons before they go live on the website.
- Grant Writer — In February I was hired by a local performing arts school to write grants for them. We’ve won two of the grants we submitted for already, so not bad for taking over a job I had absolutely no previous experience with.
General Daily Schedule:
6-6:30: Get up. This varies based on when I went to bed. If I’m going to go to the gym first, I get up at 5:45. It’s completely random as to whether or not I will get dressed or just shuffle downstairs to work.
6:45-8:00: Working time. This is my most reliable section because my charges are still asleep. Usually. Hopefully. Unfortunately, it also tends to be my most unfocused. I normally get started fine, but then get distracted with administrative stuff, such as checking on blog tours, marketing stats, and reading emails.
8:00-10:30: Very little, if any work, gets done in this time frame, so I tend to spend this time with the kids and on things like laundry, dishes, yardwork, etc. Sometimes they’re distracted and then I can sneak some stuff in.
10:30-12:30: The smaller one usually naps at this point, and the bigger one is in school on some days, so this is another, and probably my most productive, working time. If I’m working two jobs at once (which is fairly common; at the moment I’m doing my contract editing and editing the second book in a series for a client) I tend to do one job in the first thing in the morning slot and then switch to the other for this slot so forward progress is being made on both. If one has a tighter time frame, however, I will work that one in both slots.
12:30-3:30: House stuff again. The kids and I normally play a game or do a craft. We also run errands at this point. Often to the library. We apparently have 26 books checked out of the moment.
3:30-5: This is a potential working period. It depends on when the littler one took her nap and if she needs another one (she might go down earlier or later, depending, but sometimes not at all), and if I can distract the older one without just plopping him in front of the TV. Sometimes I can enforce quiet time with him (he should nap, but won’t) which is lovely. But rare.
5-8: Dinner and family time, usually.
8-10: Wildly variable. Sometimes I can swing this for working, but a lot of times I’m just too tired. If I do get working time in this period, I tend to prefer to work on my fiction projects instead of paying ones. It tends to depend on deadlines, but I try to work far ahead so I’m not stressed.
I also get a lot of questions about pay rates, and to that I say: make sure you’re asking enough to justify your time. A lot of starting freelance editors ask for or will take basically nothing in an attempt to garner business, and you’re not really doing yourself any favors. I’ve found that clients who insist on cheaper rates are ones you really don’t want–they’re abrasive and rude, and don’t respect you as a person or a professional. Counter-intuitively, potential clients may also pass you up if you’re too cheap because they think you’re not good or not experienced, and that’s why you’re not charging more.
I have a flat rate for developmental/concept editing, and I charge a sliding scale for proofreading/line editing, depending on the state of the manuscript. Some people have a pretty clean document with only a few stray punctuation marks or typos throughout. Other people still put a carriage return at the end of every single line like a typewriter and write purely in run-on sentences.
So, there you go! Let me know if you have any other questions.
Siri’s and my longer blog tour for City of Hope and Ruin starts today! Our first stop is an interview with me, which can be found here. We’re giving away another $50 Amazon giftcard during this one.
Progress! Kind of.
Last week we talked about focus, Squiders, and my lack of it lately. I am pleased to say I am getting somewhere now! Well, sort of.
I was somewhat waylaid bad a nasty bout of vertigo over the weekend, which was not fun and seems to be lingering a bit, though it’s mostly gone at this point. I’ve also got a bit of headache, but I’m not sure that’s related.
But other than that, progress! But not necessarily related to writing.
As we talked about last week, I had four goals for June, only one of which got done while the other three had minimal progress. As a recap:
- Write and edit a short story for an anthology, due July 15.
- Get to the conflict remapping stage of the edit/revision on the first draft of my Trilogy book one.
- Finalize the new description for Shards.
You might also remember about three weeks ago when I said the sewing bug had come a-biting. You might also also remember that the larger, mobile one is out of school and we are all going insane.
That’s important.
So, where have I made progress? Well, I have made some writing progress.
- I’m at about 7K for my story, which is probably about 60% done. I’ve been writing about 1K a day on it, so I should hit the deadline on Friday.
- One of the first steps that I do on the revision stage of a book is to look at all the characters and make notes for tweaks/identify issues that need to be fixed. This is a high fantasy trilogy, so there are a lot of characters. I am finally done with that. I’m now ready to start tackling plot issues (of which there are many).
- I sent the hopefully final version out to the two people who have been helping me. Unless they come back with something major, this is probably done. Yay!
On the sewing front, I took the smaller, less mobile one to the fabric store on Friday, where we bought patterns, fabric, and necessary accessories. The larger, mobile one and I have been doing crafts, trying to do it daily for our own sanity. So today we finally put our fairy house out in the garden (we’ve been working on for about a month) since we got the furniture in the mail, and we also made fabric bracelets, which was a bit of a fail, since mine are too big and his is too small. Alas. Here’s pics, though.
Man, the captions look terrible on this platform. Blegh.
Gotten anything useful done lately, Squiders?
What They Really Mean When They Say ‘Write What You Know’
I was working on an interview for our upcoming long-term blog tour for City of Hope and Ruin, and one of the questions was about the worst writing advice I’d ever received.
So I was thinking back over writing advice in general, and came to the conclusion that I didn’t think I’d ever really received any bad writing advice, just advice that didn’t apply or that I didn’t understand initially. And the age-old writing staple, Write What You Know, is one of the latter.
People tend to interpret it as something like, if you’re a banker, your main character should also be a banker. Or if you’re a woman, your main character also needs to be a woman. Or if they fight against it, it’s something like “Well, I don’t know about dragons, but neither does anyone else, hahaha!”
The thought is–if you’ve never done it, been it, seen it, how could you do it justice?
But that’s not what Write What You Know means. It’s not limiting like that. It’s not there to force you into the trappings of your own life.
What Write What You Know means is to pull things–mostly emotions–from your own life and apply them to other situations. You may never have faced down a horde of bandits, but maybe a gang of bullies cornered you once at school. Maybe you’ve never jumped off the speeding train, but there was probably something, somewhere, that terrified you. Or exhilarated you. Or both.
You can identify places in your own life which, while not as outlandish (probably, depending on genre) as what you’re writing about, are still applicable, still transferable. No one is actually expecting you not to write about dragons just because you’ve never actually seen one. They’re just expecting you to bring real emotion, real context to it, based on what you know from your own life.
Thoughts, Squiders? How’s your week been?
A Lack of Focus
Oh, Squiders. Normally I’m so good at multitasking. And then I go through bouts where I can’t seem to focus long enough on anything to make any progress.
Take June, for example. I had four goals.
- Finish a short story (related to CoHaR) that will go up on Turtleduck Press’s website in August.
- Write most of a story for a space princess anthology (first drafts due July 15).
- Get to the conflict remapping stage of the edit/revision on the first draft of my Trilogy book one.
- Finalize the new description for Shards.
I did write my short story. I started the space princess story (which is currently sitting at ~2600 words, which should tell you how that went). I read the current draft of my editing project (back in May). I wrote two drafts of a Shards description.
Aside from the short story (which is fairly short, under 2K), I didn’t really get squat done. I can’t quite figure out what I spent my time doing.
Even today hasn’t gone so well. I sat down at the computer two hours ago with the intent of doing an hour and a half of paid editing and writing this blog post. I’ve done ~70 minutes of work and am about half way through this post. I have also talked to my mother twice (who wants to buy the larger, mobile one clothes for his birthday even though he does not need clothes), did some work on a different paying job that was not planned for today, and, quite honestly, I don’t know what else.
To say I am frustrated is an understatement.
I think a lot of it may be because the larger, mobile one is out of school for the summer and going stir crazy, and so is also driving me stir crazy. We’ve got him in some summer classes, one at the rec center on Mondays and one at his school on Wednesdays, but there is no longer enough structure in his life or something.
Well, if nothing else, it will give me an excuse to try out some things for a book I’m writing. But I may go mad in the meantime.
In other news, Smashwords is doing some sort of sale, so if you go direct to their website, you can get Hidden Worlds for free or Shards for a dollar. They’ve got every ebook format you can want, so head over that way or miss out! The sale goes through the end of the month.
Tips for focusing around children, Squiders?
New Marketing Round-up
I have been to the library 4 out of 5 days thus far this week. Do you think I have a problem?
Right, so we talked recently about how some of my staple marketing techniques have been giving diminishing returns, so I’ve been out and about, keeping my ear to the ground for new marketing things. I thought you guys might appreciate a round-up of what I’ve discovered.
BookGrabbr.com — I was on some marketing webinar earlier in the week promoting some authorpreneur cruise happening in midwinter. This service was mentioned by one of the presenters. From what I can tell, this is a service that sets up a way to easily share (and track who’s sharing) your book. For $25 a month, you can set up a place where people can “Grabb” your book or part of your book in exchange for sharing said book with their social media followers. You can set a cap on the number of “Grabb”s your book can have.
I’ve had a hard time finding any notes on the Internet from people who have actually used this service to see how effective it is, if anyone’s having any success with it, etc. It reminds me of the Pay with a Tweet thing from a few years back, which I tried with some Shards bonus content and didn’t have a lot of success with. $25/month sounds expensive, and I’d like to see some data before I invest.
Squirl.co — Same webinar. Squirl.co is a website where you can connect real-life places to your books, and then, if I understand the concept correctly, people with the app on their phone can find your places as they meander about. I’m not quite clear on how exactly it works, but it’s free and so I’ve signed up, never mind that I write fantasy without real world connections, in a lot of cases. Right now I’ve only got Shards set up, and I’ve been sticking in places that inspired the fake university and Pacific northwest city that most of the book takes place in. There is a real location in the book–the main characters visit the Acropolis in Athens–so I’ll get over there eventually, I guess. Not sure what to do with the rest of the books. Hidden Worlds is a portal fantasy adventure, with most of the story taking place in said portal. Do I just pick a random nail salon or high school and stick locations there? There’s no direct correlation to the real world.
Anyway, the interface isn’t too bad. I just don’t quite understand what’s happening. We’ll see if anything comes of it. Their genre options are pretty limited–you can do “paranormal” and “romance,” but not “paranormal romance,” for example.
Bublish.com — From what I understand, you upload your book in epub form, and then can add bubbles next to the text–background information about the scene, for example. You can share these bubbles across social media. They also have a premium feature that allows you to add bubbles to rough drafts and share them, in theory to build interest in your works in progress.
For free, you can upload one book, but if you want more than that (or to do metrics or the rough draft bubbles) it’s $10/month, or $100/year. Again, I can’t find anyone who’s actually used this and has data to report. I found a couple of posts about people starting the service up, and saying they’d come back to report how it went, but alas. The most concrete thing I found was an older thread on Absolute Write that recommended looking at a book’s rankings to see if it’s ranked decently.
Do you guys have any thoughts re: BookGrabbr/Bublish? I hate to sign up for some sort of subscription service that might be a waste of money.
The other thing I’ve seen recently is services that put your book up on book promo sites for you so you don’t have to. These are those places that list free or discounted ebooks when you’ve got them on sale and blasts the lists to their followers or list them on their websites. (BookBub, of course, being the grandaddy of book promo sites.) I watched part of a webinar that was advertising for one that was starting up–which wanted $300 to have you join the group, and then you needed to pay up to $25 for each promo once in, oy–and saw another one on IndiesUnlimited today. From what I understand, though, book promo sites seem to be one of those marketing things that’s dying out–people paying $10 to get listed on a site and only getting a handful of sales, for example, unless they manage to get a BookBub promo (which costs hundreds or even thousands of dollars).
Any thoughts on that, Squiders?
Lastly, I’ve been taking another look at Wattpad. It seems like, if you play your cards right, you can leverage quite a few fans and followers from it. Whether or not said people actually buy your books seems to be up in the air, but people have gotten traditional publishing and movie deals from the site. Something to think about, when I have some free time.
Anything new that looks promising to you, Squiders? Anything you’ve tried recently that has worked/been a terrible waste of time and/or money?
The Adventures of Kate Readalong: Heartlight
Right, as promised, here we go, Squiders!
I found this to be an easy read (I read it in bits over three days) but it also rubbed me wrong a lot of times. Let’s get into it, shall we?
First off, I want to say that my cover is thoroughly ridiculous. I have the Tor July 1994 edition (the book was published in 1990), and it features a giant floating head of whom I suppose is Kate’s grandfather, through the age lines look unnatural, hovering over a yellow galaxy, with Kate (looking too old) holding a blue butterfly about the size of a toaster. I know covers really don’t matter in the long run, but I don’t know that I would have picked this book up based on that. Also, the back cover copy is wrong, plotwise, which–what?
Anyway, on to the book itself. Did you guys read this too? How similar in tone to A Wrinkle in Time would you say it is? I would say, tonewise, the two books are near identical. Both feature a reluctant young female protagonist whose sole purpose for being on an adventure is to save a family member, both feature formless evil entities, and both mix metaphysics into the general mix.
As a general summary, Kate and her grandfather are near inseparable. Grandfather (as he is referred to throughout the book, even when it’s in his own point of view) is an astrophysicist who has been studying something he calls pure condensed light (or PCL). PCL is the secret to how stars work, and also to faster-than-light travel. When he discovers that the sun’s PCL levels are plummeting at a rate that gives it only a short time to live, he springs into action, using PCL to jet about the galaxy in an attempt to find answers before it’s too late. It’s a bit more complex than that, but that’s the general gist. Kate discovers him gone and goes after him.
I’m not sure this book counts so much as an “Adventure of Kate” so much as a ‘Kate bounces about and screams for help a lot’ sort. I mean, she does eventually gain agency and is useful, and we can’t all be Katniss Everdeen, but I just wish her first predilection wasn’t to panic.
There is also a lot of head-hopping, which bothers me in general. You know, avoiding head-hopping is one of the first thing “they” teach you as a writer, yet the amount of it that gets into published books…
Anyway! This has always been my least favorite of the trilogy, and it still is. It reads vaguely first novel-y (and probably is), and even with the high concept astrophysics/metaphysics, still comes across a little simplistic. I mean, it is a middle grade novel, but I guess I’m just a little spoiled. There are some things that are a little convenient (everyone can communicate with no language barriers), but whether or not that bothers you probably depends on your level of suspension of disbelief.
I also feel like the novel ends on a weird note, which I’ve seen before with scifi (though I would not necessarily deem this true scifi), where the author feels they need to be unnecessarily weird and/or metaphorical. I can’t fault that too much–it’s a genre convention. Some people probably like it.
So! TL;DR–not my favorite. Not sure I would recommend it to people who haven’t read it. As I mentioned in the intro post for the readalong, I came in at The Ancient One and read the rest of the books based on the strength of that one.
Speaking of The Ancient One, that’s up next. It’s a longer book (~500 pages IIRC) so give yourself time if you’re following along. We’ll discuss on July 28, to give us an even month. I’m excited–as I said before, this was a formative book for me, so it will be interesting to see how it holds up under the test of time.
Read the book, Squiders? What were your thoughts?
