Short Story

During lunch yesterday, I sat down and banged out a short story.

I've gotten some ideas from song titles and certain lines within songs; go get the lyrics to Eleanor Rigby (do I have to tell you it's a Beatles song? :-)), and look for something about a face...and that's where I got the idea for the first in the Haven New Jersey series.

For a little over a week, I kept thinking of Jonatha Brooke's 10 Cent Wings. It's a lovely little song that hubby put up on one of his You Tube channels around that time. So I was humming it, thinking I might be able to make it into a short story of some sort.

Of course there had to be a fantasy element, which was easy for me to decide: An angel. But where would I set it, who would the story revolve around?

A boxer.

Stay with me...

I saw a boxing film earlier this year, one that I originally read about as a teenager in the RKO movie book. (I spent hours and hours devouring this and other movie studio books; still do, on occasion), and this was one of many, many movies I wanted to see.

It's called The Set-Up, and it stars Robert Ryan. He really was a boxer in college (Dartmouth, I think), and that comes through in this film. He's a down-and-out, over-the-hill boxer who thinks this bout, this fight, is the one he'll win; what he doesn't know is that his manager has sold him out, thinking that Ryan (playing "Stoker" Thompson) will lose anyway. What I really liked about this movie was its grittiness, in the best noir style.

So, using that as an idea, I set the story in 1950, in a "tank town" (a small town) that was big enough to have its own redlight district and sports district (boxing ring, basically). Then I set to writing and writing and writing.

And finished it. Yes, the angel is involved. For once, there really isn't any humor in it, so that was a departure for me.

The ending? It's not nice, to put it simply. To take on a happy ending would have been a terrible injustice to the story.

I'm actually (seriously) thinking of sending this one to a magazine. I'll let it go for a month or so, see if there's any interest. If there isn't any...meh, I'll just upload to Amazon and Smashwords.

Anyone typing out any shorts right now? Going to send it the magazine route, or is are you going to self pub it?

It's ALIVE!

I always wanted to say that, lol. :-)

My ebook is now live on both Amazon and Smashwords. It was easy to upload to Amazon; since I use Open Office on my laptop, I just saved the document as an HTML doc, and had no problems.

It's so exciting to see something up on Amazon and on Smashwords.

Smashwords Can Be a PITA

If the upload on Amazon was easy beyond belief, Smashwords wasn't quite that way. It wasn't torture (altho being 1,350 in the queue can try your patience, of which I don't have much). Fortunately, I kept it in perspective and didn't pull my hair out. (I still have to upload a pic of moi onto Author Central on Amazon; how would I look bald, I asks ya? ;-))

Everything was going fine on SW, until I checked it the next day, only to find out the document didn't pass EPUB muster. That's the format not only for Nook but a bunch of smart phones/whatever. (I don't have an infinite supply of moolah coming in for a smart phone or tablet - or both.)

Anyway, SW suggested a site to get the poop on what was wrong with the document, and of course it returned a bunch of techno gobbledygook that made no sense. So I did the Nuclear Method, copying everything in the document to Notepad, which stripped out all the formatting. I also took note that SW now doesn't require you to have the cover image in the document, so I took that out. (Like Amazon, they have a separate upload just for the cover.)

This is when I noticed I made a slight boo-boo in the story; nothing major, but it irked me, so I redid the Kindle doc, uploaded the revised doc, and it's (re)publishing today.

I had the stripped doc and the original SW doc both open, so I could redo all the formatting (italicized words, chapter headings, and paragraphs), and tweaked the bio.

I reuploaded the doc yesterday, checked this morning: It worked! But SW is out of free ISBNs, so I won't be able to get into the Premium Catalog until tomorrow (when a new supply is due in).

You'll see that I already have the Kindle title up in the right-hand column; I'll be putting up the SW link sometime later today.

Onward and forward! :-) Good luck to everyone, and may you all sell a ton of your books!

It's Not Alive - Yet

Okay, so I did the Kindle and Smashwords thing today.

Here's the cover:

Once it goes live, I'll put up the all the pertinent stuff, so all you nice people can buy oodles and oodles of copies. :-) (You are, aren't you?)

Just kidding. Sort of. Heh.

As I write this, the Kindle version is in review, while I'm #512 in the Smashwords queue. So much for my idea that people in the U.S. wouldn't be bothering with this during 4th of July weekend.

Oh well.

Waiting and waiting...

Coming Soon!

The writing and editing is all done. And the cover would probably have been done today if I had remembered to bring my laptop with me.

I can be such a doofus, lol.

So it will have to wait until tonight, after dinner, for me to upload my debut, Changing Faces, which will be available on Amazon and Smashwords (which will also take care of EPUB, Sony, etcetera, etcetera, etcetera). There's some last minute formatting to be done, which is actually just setting up for Kindle. I'm hoping everything goes smoothly with the upload (crossing fingers, because you never know how things in the electronic world are going to go).

I'll have an excerpt up a little later today. Just have to figure out what excerpt - and it won't be a long one, I promise. :-)

But I'm jacked to finally be at this point! (Wanted to make sure I used the correct punctuation, because I don't want any Elaine Benes' out there telling me I should've used an exclamation point rather than a period ;-))  BTW, this will be a series of short novels/novellas, about 25,000-30,000 words each, give or take. I could've stretched it out to novel length, but I don't want to add on for the sake of adding on; why give people extra stuff the story doesn't need?

I've also got my FB author page, altho I haven't done anything with it as yet (hmm...maybe that's something I can do next, putting up an excerpt or two, and then the cover).

Some Fun, Some News From the Homefront

First, the Fun

I've been surfing the web in between working on the 2nd book in the series (in between working on the cover of the first book). I Googled a certain phrase and found a couple of fun blogs on crappy SF and fantasy covers.


A couple of the covers weren't that bad.

But most were horrific. One had 5 different fonts on the cover. One had a squid in among a bunch of other crap. (I kid you not.) A few had naked warrior-type (I think) men with strategically placed...stickers, sparkly things, and who-knows-what-else. (I kid you not.) There was even one mostly-naked woman whose groin area was (wait for it)...dark. I mean, darkness as in black-hole-in-space darkness.

Wow.

Here's the first one: The Joys of Awful Sci-Fi and Fantasy Book Covers. Appears to be U.S.-based (but what do I know, lol?) The June 20th entry starts off with a truly bad Ray Bradbury cover. Didn't he deserve something better? (I think so.)

The second one is U.K. based: Good Show Sir - Only the worst Sci-Fi/Fantasy book covers. This one has one book per blog post. Read the comments; they're as hilarious as the deadpan captions under the crappy covers.

You're welcome. :-)

From the Homefront

So, yes, I'm working and working on the cover for Changing Faces, the first in the Haven New Jersey series. They're short novels/novellas, all contemporary fantasy. Plenty of humor; the MC, Tessa, doesn't take herself seriously at all. (First person, BTW.) I'll probably post a couple of excerpts at some point.

Life Imitates Art? (I'd Like to Think So)

Okay, so I've been writing the next in this trilogy of short novels/novellas, showing (hopefully) that the main MC, Tessa, has grown some cujones. She actually gets pissed at the woman who's been helping her out; not the nicest thing to do, but Tessa felt she'd been babied for way too long.

Segue into last night. Hubby and I had an argument, a heated one. (Everything is fine; just one of those things.) He was yelling at me about something, and what I usually do is not say anything and avert my eyes - you know, try to make myself even smaller than I am (and I'm pretty tiny).

However...I had just written the part where Tessa grows a pair, and that scene stuck in my mind. So I yelled back. For more than a minute. Cursing. I hated doing it - I hate arguing about anything - but I felt it was necessary to stand my ground, considering what he said (which I won't go into here).

You know what? Hubby gave me a thumb's up for standing my ground, after all was said and done. No broken dishes or broken windows or anything else. Just an "Okay, I see where you're coming from," kind of a statement.

So maybe what I'm writing isn't literature with a capital "L". Doesn't matter. If someone gets an idea or enjoyment out of reading my stuff, it's all worth it.

HAPPY BIRTHDAY!

Yup, it's me birthday. :-)

Before I get to all the gushy stuff...

LOVE The Beatles.

The music from the video below actually takes me back to when I was a young girl.  I'm a Joisey Girl through and through but I haven't sounded Joisey in quite some time (living in another part of the country for a year does that to you ;-)).

I grew up in northeastern New Jersey, and all my cousins and aunts and uncles pretty much lived in that area.  But what the music below really zeros in on are (of course) summers and pool parties.  My dad's niece and her husband had a nice house with its allotted 1/10 of a square inch backyard (that's a Jersey joke; if you've ever lived here, I think you'll understand).  They had a round, above-ground pool that took up most of that space, with the rest for chairs and a small grilling area.  I had a ton of fun, and I look back on that time very wistfully.  (This is why I rarely stroll down memory lane; the memories are too painful.)

The wistfulness comes from all those tons of cousins I used to see on a fairly regular basis and from all the aunts and uncles who have passed away.  All the cousins have moved out of the area, they have their own families.  (Think of the Jewish Diaspora, where all the Jewish tribes were blown to the winds.)  And as I said, all of my aunts and uncles are gone.  Anyone who wants to be immortal can have it - I can't handle the thought of having to deal with the death of loved ones over and over again for an eternity.

Sorry for the downer; this is supposed to be a happy day (and it is :-)).  After all, I've made it to 49, more or less physically intact, my humor intact, my mental capacities...mostly intact ;-), and with my first book to go live by the end of the month (if all goes to plan).

So, for your viewing and listening pleasure, Theme From a Summer Place...

Google Reader

I have one person (or maybe more; what the heck do I know?) who has been reading posts off of Google Reader, and for some reason, the new posts weren't popping up.

I did some finagling with the feed, including pinging this blog, and I'm hoping this means new posts (like this one!) will finally start to appear on a regular basis on Google Reader.  And don't forget to hit that refresh button over at Google Reader - my posts do pop up that way.

Sorry I haven't posted much, but it's crunch time!

More in a day or two...

Be Careful Out There

If you are contracted with any of the traditional/legacy publishers, make sure you read your contract.  Among Kristine Kathryn Rusch, Dean Wesley Smith, and the lawyer dude who is Passive Guy, there are a lot of crappy clauses and what-not that publishers are hoisting onto writers, whether those writers have been in legacy publishing for a while or those writers who are about to sign their first contract.

More info here:

http://www.thepassivevoice.com/05/2011/strip-mining-the-authors/

What was it that they used to say on Hill Street Blues?  Oh yeah.

Be careful out there.