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Strange Animal Stories

10/13/2013

Having dinner with family tonight, I was reminded of several odd animal stories we have shared over the years. I'll stay away from the gruesome (don't drive with your windows open on the interstate if you are my brother) and the scary (don't pick up a pigmy rattlesnake with your bare hands even if you aren't related to me). Let's stick with the cute. We'll stick with kittens.

My brother had to take his dog to the vet. He loaded him up in the car, and they pulled out of the driveway. Glancing in his rearview mirror, he noticed a small kitten sitting in the middle of the road looking dazed and confused. A neighbor driving behind him stopped and honked, so my brother got out of his car, picked up the kitten and walked back to the neighbor.

"Did this kitten fall out of my car?" he asked the driver. Having a large dog in his car, my brother and the neighbor agreed that the kitten should be stored in the neighbor's car. The plan? My brother would drive and the neighbor would honk if another kitten fell out. A few more feet down the road and a loud honk emanated from the car behind him. They did this as one by one the kitten's fell out every few feet. They had climbed up by the engine to get warm in the not so cold Florida winter.

When my brother tried to retrieve the kittens from the neighbor's car to deliver them back to their mama, they discovered the kittens had found a new place to climb--under the dashboard in the car. Eventually kittens and mama were reunited.

Maybe Jade needs a kitten? On second thought, a witch with a cat is a bit too cliche. Maybe she can just have a fish with a cat name like my mother's Beta fish...Sylvester.

Any funny animal stories to share? Okay, I am getting back to work on Dreams in the Midst.

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Wow! I haven't written in a while!

9/6/2013

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    I just finished reading The Fault in Our Stars by John Green. My book club, The Red Heel Society, is reading this for the month of September. It is an amazing book about a teenage girl's struggle with Cancer and what it means to live a well-lived life when you aren't well and don't have a long life to live. When we got together for dinner a couple of weeks ago, each girl who had finished reading it raved about the book and declared it a tear inducing masterpiece. When I purchased the book at Books a Million, the girl at the counter, a book blogger herself, warned me to have a box of tissues at the ready.
    Spoiler alert: there is a death in the book and I am about to examine that death. If you intend to read the book and you are not the type of reader who reads the last page of a book first, stop reading this blog post. Go read The Fault in Our Stars, and then come back to read my blog post. Or just stop reading. I don't want to spoil the book for anyone, but I can't explain my state of mind without revealing at least a part of the end of the book. You've been warned.
***********************************
    When Hazel's boyfriend dies, she has to attend his funeral and read a eulogy. She has to face her life, however short it might be, without him. They argued; they didn't always see eye to eye, but at the heart of their story, they were in love. I get the tears, but I didn't cry them. I wondered if I had become cold and distant and some thing other than wholly human, some monster merely existing through my time on Earth, no longer able to live the kind of meaningful life the characters in the book might have striven for.
    But I am no monster. I have lived through Hazel's anguish. I have loved deeply and lost completely without the solace of a painfully long goodbye. And I was Hazel's age. Seventeen. I didn't have Cancer, but I did have a swelling pregnant belly. My Augustus was Anthony, and he died quickly and tragically instead of slowly and tragically.

I stood in front of a full church and grieved through a eulogy of sorts. I woke each morning and relished that brief millisecond when I could forget and think the former dreams of my life could still exist, that Anthony could still exist here with me. I woke in the middle of the night screaming and crying an inconsolable mess of salt and water and tangled sheets that must have terrified my mother.
    And here I am today. Seventeen and a half years later. Life does go on. I don't wake screaming and crying or thinking I have a life that became only a dream the day Anthony died. Not to say I didn't have other demons to deal with beyond the initial grief. I did not have Hazel's death sentence to satiate my love. I do not know how long I will live, so living a life without another love was something I could not commit myself to do. Yet, moving on into other relationships has its own sense of guilt, pain, and complications.
    All of this said, I am relatively balanced in my life now (as much as any writer can be), and I had a choice to make as I read The Fault in Our Stars. I could dive deeply into the pain and emotion I had experienced, reliving it as extremely as possible in the passages in the book, crying not for Augustus and Hazel but for Anthony and for a younger version of myself. Or I could examine it in a different light. I chose the later. I read through the tragedy, and it brought up thoughts and emotions, but I looked at them, at the experiences of the fictional characters, at my own experiences, in a more analytical light. Not cold, but through the lens of time and experience. I shed a few small tears at the end, and I am not fully certain for whom.
    So, reader, if you have made it this far, these are my thoughts. I am ready to finish the memoir I started back when I first saw those two lines on that little stick. It has taken me nearly two decades to feel ready, to feel whole again, or whole enough to tackle the raw emotion I lived through. I have felt this way before, so we will sI must apologize that this will take me away from writing my sequel, although I hope the urge I have to write will carry over to both projects. To The Red Heel Society, I still intend to have at least a rough draft of Dreams in the Midst in hand for you to read when my turn comes up in February/March. I may have A Whisper In Time ready for perusal then, too.

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June Confession/ Update

6/5/2013

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    I have a confession to make. I haven't really done much over the month of May.   I set very high goals for myself and for Flames in the Midst. When I did not reach them, I got discouraged. I know I have potential as a writer. I know both my first novel and the sequel have potential. I know I have to get more books out, and the only way to do that is to work hard, but I still let the minor disappointments of the present get to me and create a wall in my mind and in my heart. A little nagging devil on my shoulder has been whispering,             "Maybe you should quit while you're ahead. Maybe writing is not your thing. Maybe it is time to stick with your day job."
    To confess further, I let those thoughts get to me. I let that self-doubt pool up around me until I practically drowned in it. Then I went to the beach for my best friend's birthday on Memorial Day. When I walked onto the orange sand (we have orange sand on our beaches due to the broken pieces of coquina), my friend's mother called out to me.
    "Why? What makes you think you have any business coming to the beach?"
    It took me a moment to recover. I had to make a mental check. I was invited to the beach, right? I wasn't infringing on a private family party. As I unfolded my chair and let the water-laden mini-cooler slip off my shoulder and land with a soft thud by my feet, I let her explain.
    "Don't you have a book you should be working on? Shouldn't you be home writing?" She had read Flames in the Midst only out of obligation at first since I practically grew up in her home half of my teenage years. When she finished, she was hooked.
    Part of me wishes I could tell you I dropped everything (or rather picked it all back up), turned around, and headed back to my house to sit for the next eight hours at my laptop while my children whined about missing the beach in another room and I put 3 or 4 chapters into the document for Dreams in the Midst. That's not what I did. I spent an amazing day at the beach with my friends and family. The kids played on their boogie-boards, we ate lunch, we built sandcastles, and I turned my daughter into a mermaid.
    She told me, "Mommy, you're really good at this. How did you get so good at this?"
    Practice? Imagination? Patience? Creativity? A little of everything? This was a moment of joy for me. She helped me to focus. I like creating things, and I like bringing joy to those around me, as well as those I may never see. I brought joy to my daughter by making her a mermaid, if only for a moment. I brought joy to my friend's mother when she read my book. I can't give up on any of these things. They are too precious and too valuable.

So, next steps?

The May pricing of .99 worked out okay. I had more sales than normal, but not as many as I would have hoped. I am going to stick to the pricing experiment simply because it is worth finding out. I don't think I will see a significant increase until book 2 comes out. I have just changed the price to $1.99 for the remainder of June, but you should still be able to get it for the next 12 hours or so at the .99 price.
For whatever reason, The Caffeinated Diva appears to be behind schedule. I am sure she is much like me in that there are other obligations in her life that contend with her time. I will keep checking to see if she reviews Flames in the Midst, but for now, I am not worried about it. I still appear to be on her reading list, and she is still making posts, so who knows.
Write.

That's it. That's the plan. Wish me luck! I want to continue building sandcastles and mermaids. When they get picked up in the wind or carried away by the waves, I hope they are not destroyed but merely living a life of their own to bring joy to others the way they bring joy to me.

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The Writing Experiment: Day 4

5/3/2013

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Results of Days 1-3

Flames in the Midst had some great results for the first 3 days of our experiment.

Flames hit #1 on two separate genre lists (the pic to the left is from the top 100 Free Books in Urban Fantasy) and came close to breaking into the top 100 free books on Amazon.
I had set a very high goal of reaching 10,000 downloads in five days. The first time I offered Flames for free, in four days more than 8,000 people downloaded the novel. This time around, the total number reached 1987—just shy of 2,000. Perhaps this is due to being a second free offer. It is also possible that offering the book at the beginning of the month played a part in these numbers. Despite the fact that Day 2 only brought a few hundred downloads, this was the day we hit the #1 spots in two fantasy genres. This makes me think that competition must have been very high during this period of time.

Next Steps

On Monday, The Caffeinated Diva will review Flames in the Midst. I am interested to see if that will increase sales.
For the rest of May, the price will remain at 99 cents.
In June, I may raise the price by $1 or $2.

For now, it is a waiting game. Overall, I know the best chance for success is to get more books out. So while I wait to see the results of the experiment, I am busy writing. By July, the rough draft of Dreams in the Midst should be complete. I plan to include a few sneak peeks as I go. So, stay tuned, and thank you for your support on my journey!

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The Writing Experiment: Day 1

4/30/2013

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My pricing experiment starts today. I don't know if all or any of the 8 sites I chose to advertise on will advertise my free days. I chose not to pay for the advertising this time around, so there are no guarantees. The goal: 10,000 free downloads in three days. The snag: I just read that the worst day to have a free promotion is the first of the month. Technically, my free promotion incorporates the first of the month, but it does not start on it. By the time I read this tidbit of advice, I had already notified the advertising sites and possible book bloggers.

By the way, I am super excited. Kim, The Caffeinated Diva, has agreed to review Flames in the Midst. Her review is due out on May 6th. I really hope she enjoys the book. So, Day 4 or 5 will bring the final results of the free promotion (I discovered last time there can be a lapse in the reporting of free downloads). Day 4 brings the next step: 99 cent sale for the month of May. Day 7 (May 6th) will include Kim's review. Who knows where we will go from there.

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The Writing Pricing Experiment

4/22/2013

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    No one seems to know the best price for a novel by a new author. I've read blogs that say 99 cents is the way to go. John Locke recommends this in his book How I Sold 1 Million ebooks in 5 Months! I recently stumbled across another Indie/Self-pub author, Sarra Cannon. Sarra has sold over 110,000 copies of her books. Although she doesn't price her books at 99 cents anymore, it was the strategy she used for building her audience. This makes sense.
    However, there are other strategies. I attended a presentation at a Florida Writers Association mini-conference on utilizing Amazon's KDP to publish your books. The presenter recommended upping your price to $5.99. The reason for this is because some readers will not look at a book priced below the five dollar threshold. Apparently there are those who think if a book is priced too inexpensively, it must not have any value. Now, that's a double-edged sword. On the one side, I've written a lengthy novel, and I would spend much more than 99 cents for a novel of the same length in the grocery store. On the other hand, the fact that I can price my novel at 99 cents allows me to build an audience as an unknown writer. The author giving the presentation already has a readership, so it was easier for him to push the price of his books up.
    So, what is my pricing experiment? I am leaning towards the 99 cent price to build my readership.

The plan:

Spend this week editing Flames in the Midst one more time.
Schedule 3 free days (April 30-May 2) with KDP select.
Advertise my free days on free sites.
Find book bloggers to read Flames in the Midst. (By the way, last time I ran free days through Amazon's KDP Select, I didn't know about marketing. I made about $400 after 8,000+ free downloads with no advertising or work on my part.)
Change the price of Flames in the Midst to 99 cents.
After one month, evaluate. I will either stay at the 99 cent rate or move up to $1.99 or $2.99 for the next month.
If sales slow way down, I do have 2 additional free days I can use.
In August/September, release book 2 in the Jade Hale series, Dreams in the Midst (tentative title).

So, the pricing experiment starts next week! I am nervous and excited to see what will happen. So far, I have sold about 150-200 books (I need to download all of my sales data and add it up). Let's see where Flames in the Midst can go from here!

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Writing is Scary

4/19/2013

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Today, I made a decision. My goal is to write full time within the next four years. I know four years seems like a strange time frame, but I recently took on a new job with a grant that runs for another four years. In my new position, I keep finding myself thinking about my future. I think about going to graduate school for an EdD or a PhD or going to law school. All of these things are just a distraction for what I really want to do. I want to write.

The thing is, writing is scary. I can follow the steps for another degree with reasonable certainty of success if I am willing to put in the effort and the hours necessary. There is no similar guarantee for writing. I can put in the hours and the mental effort, and I can fall far short of my goals. I can sell a handful of books. I can amass large quantities of rejection letters. I can spend more money on workshops, conferences, and book covers than I earn.

I have a confession to make. When it comes down to it, I have never really tried. Finishing my first novel, I had dreams of grandeur. I would be discovered. I would sell thousands of books right out the door. When that didn't happen, I became discouraged. I looked at writing as something to do in my free time, and when I didn't find any free time, I didn't write.

With that in mind, I have begun looking at writing differently this week. I am committing to writing 500-1,000 words per day. So far, I have met my goal every day this week. More than that, I am committing to a writing experiment involving Kindle Select, my current novel Flames in the Midst and the sequel. My next post will detail the plans of the experiment which will begin next Thursday, April 29th.

Writing is scary, but I'm up for it! By the way, if you are a writer, I invite you to share your average daily word count below.

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Violence in Our World: Boston and beyond

4/16/2013

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We survive the violence around us, for the most part. Sitting in relative safety in Florida, I watch the news, and the devastation from Boston floods my home and my mind. Each day we tune in, there seems to be a new tragedy. Has the world always been this way, technology bringing it to the forefront? Or is the violence around us building and changing our world?

I cannot begin to imagine the way lives have been ended or permanently altered by the events of yesterday in Boston. The scenes on the television are eerily reminiscent of other terrorist attacks broadcast to the population. Time passes, and we eventually feel safe again. We feel indignant when our civil liberties are infringed upon at airports in the name of safety. But, for a little while, we are engrossed in the terror of the moment enough to allow such infringements without grumbling.

When we are faced with these dangers, we realize the safety we perceive around us may only be a facade. At any moment, we could be amid the images on the television screen. We could be thrust into a nightmarish reality and our lives could be changed in an instant. So we hug our children a little tighter. We dismiss our frustrations with our spouse or our parents or our children. We take time out to spend with our family. Then the pace of our lives catches up with us, and we fall back into our same routines until the next blast hits.

Today, I pray for the victims and their families in Boston. But I also pray for the victims and their families in Connecticut, in New York, in Columbine, in Oklahoma. The pain each person experiences will be a permanent scar, a permanent change in them to be carried throughout their lives. It will dull with time, but it will always be there. Beyond that, I hope the change we experience in reflecting on these events can last in our own lives. The increased gratitude and appreciation for what we do have and the knowledge that our time is not a guarantee can help us each day to show love to those around us--family, friends, neighbors, strangers. Let's refuse to become complacent in the love we show each other. Let's treasure each day as a way to remember and honor those who have been touched by these tragedies.

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Freedom to Write

10/22/2012

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    I just returned from the 2012 Florida Writer's Association Annual Conference. I've learned a lot, but the most important thing I got from the conference? I am motivated to write. So much so that at 4 a.m. I couldn't stop thinking enough to get back to sleep, so I am up writing. Of course, my daughter heard me up, and now she is up, too. I guess this is just another challenge to overcome. How do you explain to an eight year old that 4:30 is too early to get up when you are up typing away?
    At any rate, there are several thoughts running through my head, and I have decided to share them with you. One, I am going to take a piece of advice from my friend Terri and not give myself a hard time about my blog. The point is to write. The point is not to make sure that every blog post is the epitome of perfect prose. I'll have to work on that one, but I would like to get my thoughts out more often.
    The second item on my mind has to do with the title of this blog (the whole blog, not this one post). I decided to go with "Thoughts of a Rising Writer" because I want a place to chronicle my thoughts on writing. I, of course, will write about topics other than writing as well because let's face it, life happens. Still, I want to get some things out there about writing and the process a writer goes through from the act of writing to getting published.
    Writing is hard work. I haven't been putting the hard work in lately. Writing, particularly when you have a demanding full time job like molding the minds of a hundred plus young people on a daily basis, requires discipline. Writing requires drive. Writing requires one to get out of bed at four a.m. when there are things to be said, and sometimes when there is nothing to be said. Writing is hard work. I hereby dedicate myself to that hard work.

My current writing space...hot chocolate included. I may need to clean up a bit.

   The business of writing is crazy. Still, I want to be a part of it. This past weekend I met with a few agents. One agent is interested in a project I have in mind that may rise out of a blog post or two. I haven't done much on this project, but she liked the idea so much she made it a point to approach me with her business card. Two are interested in Jade, but not book one. They are interested in Jade when I get book two done (the working title, by the way, is Dreamwalkers). Book one was self published, and that lends itself to a number of issues if an author wants to switch to traditional publishing. I'd like to give traditional publishing a try. So that leads me to my other thoughts.
    When I wrote Flames in the Midst, there were things I didn't know about the YA (Young Adult) genre. Most importantly, your character should not (traditionally) be in college. The age of eighteen is pushing the limits on YA. Jade has a few more books to go in her story, so I am going to make some changes to Flames in the Midst. I actually think the changes will build her character a bit more. I am going to knock her down by one year. How am I going to do that? You will see. Since I have a small following (hurray, fans!), I am going to post some of the changes I am making here. These will add to Jade's backstory and build a stronger dynamic between Jade and Zach.
    What does this mean for book two? For one, I promised one agent it would be done in six months. I plan to finish it much sooner than that, but it will need editing. (Yeah, motivation!) But it also means I won't be putting it out for the public right away. Since I do have a few fans, I will put out some of it via this blog. Let me know what you think. I need to make book two a stand alone book (since publishers apparently don't want to touch the self-publishing world unless you have six figure sales). I know I can do it.
    By the way, one of the agents told me, "Well, obviously you can write." I know it sounds lame, but it felt so affirming to hear that from someone in the industry. Truthfully, before I went to the conference, I had almost given up on myself. Now, I am ready to write!

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The Day Our World Fell Apart

9/23/2012

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    I woke up to the vibrations of my phone next to the bed on Tuesday morning. Jon, my husband, a deputy for the county, wasn't home yet. It was 5:15 a.m. I saw on the caller ID that it was him calling, and wondered if he was going to be home late.
    "Did you leave your car unlocked last night?" he asked as soon as I answered.
    "No," I responded groggily.
    "Your car is gone. It's not here." I tried to process what he was saying. I tried to remember if I could have left my car somewhere other than our driveway.
    "Are you serious?" I asked, half awake and wondering if this was a dream or Jon's poor idea of a prank. I also had the fleeting thought that if someone wanted my twenty year old Buick, they could have it. Before I could say anything else, Jon interrupted the quick succession of my thoughts with the one thought that had not crossed my mind.
    "Check to see if Christian is there." Our sixteen year old son still should have been asleep in his bed. It hadn't occurred to me that he might have taken my car. He only had his permit. Later I would learn Jon thought Christian might have been out joyriding. When I said the words, "He's gone," Jon took off to check the nearby parking lot of his friend's apartment complex. He was already back in the driveway by the time I came out with the note. Christian didn't intend on coming back or being found. He left his cell phone behind.
    I can't explain with the clarity I would like to the emotions I experienced that morning. Needless to say, I was a wreck, but I was also holding it together. Yes, my son was missing. I cried; I hyperventilated; I hugged my husband; we got to work. Falling apart was not going to bring Christian back. Jon handled the legal side. He put out a BOLO, reported our car stolen, and reported our son missing.
    I called the bank and argued with impassive employees about the need to divulge any information about Christian's debit card usage. We discovered he had used his card at one gas station, but he wouldn't use it again, so that became a dead end. We discovered poetry and notes on an anonymous poetry website and on Facebook, but those led us in the wrong direction. I began posting his picture and information about his disappearance on Facebook. People re-posted and spread the word. Family called. Friends tried searching for him both in town and on the highway. The detectives and deputies did everything within their power to search for him. In the end, Jon made one prediction that turned out to hold the truth. "When he runs out of money, he will be home." Christian pulled up in our driveway around ten in the morning on Wednesday. He had been gone for close to 36 hours.
    We can't thank everyone enough. There are no words to truly express the gratitude my husband and I feel for what friends, family and even complete strangers did to help us in our search. We are grateful to the detectives and deputies who worked so hard and checked on us so often. We are grateful to all of our friends and family, but especially to Mike and Derek, who drove to Miami to search for Christian even though they knew it was a shot in the dark. We are grateful to everyone who posted Christian's picture, assured people his disappearance was real and tried to reach out to him on Facebook or through e-mail.
    Anytime someone experiences tragedy--a lost child, a lost home, a death, an illness--it reaffirms my faith in humanity to see how our communities pull together. We have community with family, with friends, with our home town, and with the world at large. We come together to help those in need, no matter what the need may be. There is something within us that wants to help, that wants to be there, that wants to reach out and support humankind. We thank all of the people who were a part of or became a part of our community in our time of need.
    We head now into a time of healing. We don't know why Christian left with any amount of certainty. He came to a point in his emotional state where leaving felt like the only option. The only sign we had that something was wrong was his increased sleeping habits. We were looking into those, but we didn't know with certainty that his sleep pattern was a sign of depression. It could have been anything, only it wasn't. We didn't get in an argument. He sat with us Monday night while our youngest child opened presents for her birthday. We ate dinner as a family, minus Jon since he had to leave for work. We ate cake. We watched a funny movie. Christian did his chores; I pulled weeds in the front yard. Our youngest learned to ride her bike; our middle child took a bike ride around the block with a friend--only the second time we had let him do this without a parent. Monday couldn't have been more normal. Still, on Tuesday morning, our world fell apart. Now we'll work to put it back together.

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A teacher, a writer, a mother, a wife and a friend. All people wear what feels like a million different hats at any given time. In this place, I choose to have freedom. That doesn't mean I'm not still juggling my hats; it just means I choose which of them I balance on my head as I write.

Strange Animal Stories

Wow! I haven't written in a while!

June Confession/ Update

The Writing Experiment: Day 4

The Writing Experiment: Day 1

The Writing Pricing Experiment

Writing is Scary

Violence in Our World: Boston and beyond

Freedom to Write

The Day Our World Fell Apart

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