Half Price Books

A great time to stock up on books -- as long as you pay with a credit card or paypal, you'll get a 50% rebate on all purchases from All Romance eBooks. And, I've got a brand new Blackthorne, Inc. book that just went live. It's discounted, and I've also put When Danger Calls on sale for 99 cents. Details about it Monday, but meanwhile, you can check out DANGER IN DEER RIDGE here.

A Writer's Day

Thanks to Carolyn for yesterday's entertaining post. Remember, you can enter the drawing for her book through Friday, so if you haven't left a comment, scroll down and leave one under her post. And PLEASE pop over to SOS Aloha, where I was interviewed.

So, what do writers do all day? (Aside from sitting around in comfy clothes?) Here's a quick recap of all the things that count as 'writing' but don't get words on the page that I dealt with yesterday. This doesn't include the normal things like laundry, cooking, cleaning (ha!) or other non-writing tasks.

Check email – a given. More on dealing with it later.

Blog crawling. This falls under 'education and promotion' most of the time, and I don't hit all the blogs I subscribe to every day, nor can I leave comments on all of them.

Writing the next day's blog. Entails thinking of a topic, writing, uploading, looking for pictures, formatting. Tell myself to get farther ahead than one day.

Try to tweak Blogger template for the Retweet button.

Post a copy of yesterday's blog to the Savvy Author's site, since there was interest.

Discovering there's a "new" feature at the Kindle Boards that I haven't taken advantage of, so set up profiles for two of my books there. Not exactly sure where to link them, but here they are: What's in a Name? and When Danger Calls.

Wrapping Things Up

What I'm reading: Pride and Pleasure, by Sylvia Day.

Yesterday, the contractor told us that he'd requested the final electrical inspection, which is independent of the final inspection. Given that there was, in my mind, still work to be done, I wondered if he was trying to move too fast.
Sure enough, the inspector found four basic omissions which will have to be corrected. These seemed to be relatively obvious and simple things an electrician should know, but given that it's his job, and the job of the contractor to make sure everything meets code, I'm not going to fret. (After all, I'm the one holding the checkbook.)

When we're writing, we have to make sure we conform to the "code" of our stories. Whether we're aware of them or not, we're making promises to the reader. Just like the electrician promises a safe house, an author promises the reader that everything in the story will hold together.

I wrote the first scene of chapter 33 in my manuscript the other day, before getting "sidetracked" by digitizing things for All Romance eBooks. (Which, by the way, now includes 3 more choices.)

With my WIP at a Word count of almost 98K, it's time to wrap things up. I realized the brick wall I thought I'd run into was only there because the book was technically over. The mystery/suspense threads had been resolved. My heroine was safe. This isn't a book with international bad guys who might show up at any time. It was time to resolve the romance threads and get the heck out.

Only Trouble is Interesting

Thanks to Molly for yesterday's post (even if my books didn't make her list!). There's some good reading material there.

One of the first lessons I learned when writing was "Only Trouble is Interesting."

Conflict doesn't have to be earth-shattering, in-your-face, knock down drag-em-out. In fact, sometimes the best conflicts are the everyday events. They may not be "exciting" in terms of things like car crashes or explosions, but readers can relate to them. And these sorts of things can keep the tension going in between the big stuff. And too much of that 'big stuff' can either exhaust the reader, or get boring..

Recently, All Romance eBooks opened its doors to individual publishers, so I decided that I'd upload my two books, What's in a Name? and When Danger Calls to their online store. I'd already uploaded them to the Kindle Store and Smashwords, so I figured it would be simple enough.

Nope. First, there's no formatting provided. If you want to put your book on their site, you have to provide it in the formats they offer. Although I can handle PDF and HTML easily enough (those are simply "save as" options in Word), I was clueless about things like lit, PRC, mobi, and epub.

Regrouping

What I'm reading: Shadow Prey by John Sandford

After a trip through the movie listings, we found absolutely nothing that enticed us to leave the house and spend money. The James Bond flick was a single showing, at 10:30 pm, and that doesn't fit our circadian rhythm. However, we did go out for our traditional Chinese dinner. Nice to feel welcomed; they know us well enough to bring chopsticks and brown rice. And at least we're not in such a rut that we order the same thing every time (except the hot and sour soup). Plenty of leftovers for tonight.

Since we'd already watched out Netflix offering, we went through our meager DVD collection. When the kids gave us the player a few years back (trying in vain to bring Mom & Dad into the new century), they sent videos as gifts. We may even have bought some ourselves. We perused the shelf independently, and both chose the same movie. (After 40 years, we seem to spend a lot of time in each other's head). And, since the DVD had never been opened, it was 'new' for us. We watched "The Adventure of Sherlock Holmes" with Basil Rathbone. Good fun. We have "The Return of Sherlock Holmes" on tap.

Other news that reminds me I should be working harder on the writing (hey, I DID get all the errata for HIdden Fire sent to the publisher Wednesday). I'm getting more Google Alerts on When Danger Calls. Don't know if people are buying, but they're looking.

One head-scratcher. I got a review by a prolific reviewer who posts her reviews everywhere. She did one for When Danger Calls before it was released, and it's posted as a 5 star review on Barnes & Noble. The exact same review showed up this morning on Amazon, but with 4 stars? No clue why. But that's the game.

Also -- I have a short story featuring Randy & Sarah in the All Romance eBooks weekly newsletter, Wildfire. It was one of those "can't let the characters go" stories I wrote after I finished Finding Sarah, and it's been sitting around in my computer. Nice that it's getting a little time out of the hard drive.

Happy Hanukkah, Boxing Day, and Kwanza.

Last minute bits and pieces

What I'm reading: No One Lives Forever, by Jordan Dane

What I'm writing: Chapter 12, scene 2


News to share: All my titles are now available at All Romance eBooks. This should help with one-stop shopping for anyone who (myself included) doesn't like having to go through all the payment information at multiple sites. My Cerridwen romantic suspense novels and my Wild Rose Press short stories are all listed here.

And -- last night I got an email telling me What's in a Name? is a finalist in the Heart of the Rockies Aspen Gold contest. Thank goodness for postage on line, because they need two more copies of the book right away, and we'll be gone before the Post Office opens on Monday.

I totally blanked out on my vacation when I set dates for my website contest. I've extended the deadline to August 15th, so pop over and enter.

I don't think the writing is going to progress much while I'm gone, but I'm loading the ms onto my flash drive in case I find some free time. I'm hoping to use the time in Oregon to get more background information--terrain, flora, fauna, etc. And I'll pick the brain of my retired BIL for law enforcement details.

I'll be back on August 11th. If I have time to post updates while I'm away, I definitely will, so please check in.