A Message to a Specific Unknown Reader

16 Monday Dec 2019

Posted by wyndes in Cici, Self-publishing

Thank you so much to the 31 people who purchased A Precarious Magic, and to the one person who bought a paperback!

As it happens, Dear Paperback Reader, you’re probably going to see the paperback edition before I do. Author copies get delivered remarkably slowly unless you’re willing to pay for expedited shipping, which I was not. But I also didn’t want to wait through the proof copy routine, because again, that takes a while. The proof copy is when Amazon prints a single copy of the title with a gray bar across the front & sends it to the author for review, before letting the paperback go live. Technically, you have to approve the proof copy before you can release the paperback.

I skipped that step, though, because I’m planning to send paperbacks to a couple of people (the ones mentioned in the dedication) and I was hoping I could get them out by Christmas. I decided to wait to send them, however just in case something was wrong with my files. I did not anticipate that someone else would buy a paperback first. I do hope the back cover turned out as nicely as I think it did.

So yes, you, Dear Paperback Reader, will be the first person to find out how the print edition looks and whether it’s all okay. I hope that knowledge is fun for you. 🙂 I also hope it does all turn out okay, but if it has any problems, do let me know and I’ll replace your copy if necessary.

In other news, I’m still working on Cici 2. I’m well aware that this is a stupid financial decision and I’m trying not to let that knowledge affect my outlook on life. But I had a long and lovely conversation with my friend Suzanne yesterday and she assures me that pet sitters can earn $40/day in Arcata, so there we go — future career assured. I will be an excellent pet sitter.

Meanwhile, a snippet:

The flunkey led Cici through the glittering foyer, past a luxurious reception room with thick carpeting and delicate chairs, and into an elegant office. The walls were paneled with blue Arguvian hardwood, with a floor made of the same wood inlaid with lighter blue patterns. Shelves against two walls held a selection of intriguing artifacts as well as traditional paper-bound books. In the center of the room, a large desk beautifully carved of more Arguvian hardwood held a comm terminal.

Cici did not roll her eyes.

Through still gritted teeth, she said to the flunkey, “Not here. Take me someplace less…” She cast an eye around the room. “…flammable.”

The flunkey swallowed. “Yes, ma’am.”

He led her back to the elevator. In silence, the two of them descended another two levels. This time, the elevator doors opened into a nondescript corridor, with doors leading off on both sides. Most of the doors were open and the corridor bustled with energy, beings moving, voices calling.

Cici caught snatches of conversation as they passed along the corridor.

“After the last time, there’s no way…”

“Are you watching the news? They’re saying…”

“Maybe we’ll finally get that upgrade to the…”

“She’ll want to review the progress on the weather station. Do you have those reports…”

“Twenty credits says she fires the Planetary Administrator.”

“Fifty credits says she sets fire to the Planetary Administrator.”

The last comment was said with a laugh, but Cici felt herself flushing.

How had the news of her loss of control spread so quickly? Had Asuke started talking about her brush with near death by dragon fire the very second they’d separated?

Cici glanced in the open door to see the speaker, feet up on his desk, leaning back in his chair. With a tiny spurt of magic — the merest smidgen of it — Cici pushed his chair away from his desk, almost out from under him. He yelped and scrambled to recover as she continued down the hallway.

She felt a little guilty. That had been petty of her. Better than flaming him would have been, of course, but still… She shouldn’t take her temper out on hirelings. Even hirelings who were making fun of her.

Although, she thought, feeling more cheerful, Randall would have done much worse. And her mother would have eviscerated the man with a single tilt of an eyebrow. Honestly, that guy ought to be grateful she’d been so restrained. Why, she’d practically been nice.

Almost nice, anyway.

Well, maybe not quite nice. But close enough.

*****

Happy Monday!

Release Day for A Precarious Magic

11 Wednesday Dec 2019

Posted by wyndes in A Precarious Magic, Self-publishing, Writing

≈ 10 Comments

It’s official: A Precarious Magic is loose in the world.

I even finished uploading the paperback covers this morning. I had a serious mental debate about those — did it actually make sense to spend money to make the back covers of those books pretty? Since it’s only really sold online, no one sees the back cover before buying the book and I could have made my own back cover using Amazon’s cover creator. Spending money for a pretty back cover is just… well, it’s just what I did. Quixotic? Is that the word I was looking for?

Today is the 8th anniversary of the release day of A Gift of Ghosts, which inspired me to go back and read my blog from December of 2011. I have my memories of where I was at and how I was feeling, of course, but I wanted to know how they matched up with what I wrote back then.

It was unexpectedly grueling, although it shouldn’t have been. Unexpected, that is, not grueling. The grueling part should have been obvious: it was a hard time in my life, and re-reading my words brought those emotions right back to me. It was my first Christmas without my mom — she died of pancreatic cancer in five brutal weeks that summer — and my best friend was dying. I lost her in February 2012. I’d quit my job to go to grad school, so had also lost the structure, community and connection of 9-5 work, and was within five months of dropping out of school. My anxiety was sky-high — I can see it in the energy of every word I wrote.

But this is my single favorite part of my words from December 2011:

I’d love to make lots of money from my writing and be really successful, but that’s not why I started writing and that’s not why I want to continue writing. A Gift of Ghosts is out in the universe now and I need to let it go and let it find its own way and let the process work. Because I didn’t publish it to reach it a goal. I published it because I thought it was fun, and I wanted other people to have fun with me.
And that’s why I’m writing: for fun, and so that other people will have fun with me.

Over the past eight years, my life has changed dramatically, and the publishing world has changed pretty dramatically, too. But that goal was always the right goal for me — to have fun, and to hope that other people would have fun with me.

I hope you find Fen’s continuing adventures as fun as I did!

Falling behind

11 Monday Nov 2019

Posted by wyndes in Personal, Randomness, Self-publishing, Writing

≈ 10 Comments

I’m feeling stressed this morning. It feels like there are so many things I should be doing, so much stuff to get done, and I’m not getting to any of it. I’d list it all out — a formal letter to get my rights reverted on the Spanish translation, investigate cheaper website hosting, first edit pass on APM, etc, etc, etc. — but the complete list would keep going and going, and it would make me more stressed. Instead, I’m going to breathe and remember the reasons why I’ve fallen behind.

I spent the first weekend of November camping with my niece at Lake Louisa. We used my camping chairs, ate good food, talked a ton, went to a writer’s event with my friend Lynda, built a campfire and toasted ghost-shaped marshmallows, and finished up by having Sunday brunch with my dad and stepmom. My clearest memory of the weekend, already a week later, is sitting in the camping chairs, watching the sky changing colors as the sun set and we talked about what it means to take charge of your own life.

My niece lighting our campfire at Lake Louisa. — I made C light the fire. It’s not hard to convince a 16-year-old that she wants to be the person to play with matches! (Not literal matches.)

Back in Sanford, at Christina’s house, I played games with C & co (her boyfriend & their sons). My favorite is definitely Song Pop Party, an Apple TV song recognition game that I’m terrible at but that I truly enjoy. We also played some Super Fight and some Azul. And we spent a full day playing Arkham Horror, including brunch in the morning with home-made hashbrowns and eggs, and pizza in the late afternoon. We knew it was going to take hours to play the game — it’s that kind of game — so it was a planned experience, but I think I am not someone who wants to play ten-hour games. It was moments of fun interspersed with much rules confusion and a fair amount of frustration. We did win in the end (it’s a cooperative game), but I would have accepted a loss quite contentedly if it came about four hours sooner.

On Thursday, I left Sanford to visit my friend Joyce in Casselberry. Our plan was to write, write, write. Instead we wrote a little, talked a lot, walked the dog, and enjoyed one another’s company.

On Friday, I drove down to Merritt Island to spend the weekend with my friend Lynda. Our plan was to write, write, write. Instead… well, we did write. I managed 1000 words on both weekend days. But again, there was much conversation. And 1000 words are okay numbers, but not NaNo numbers. Today is November 11th and my word count should be closing in on 20,000 words — instead I’m still under 8K. I’m approaching the zone where it’s going to be impossible to catch up. Not there quite yet, but getting close. Oh, well, I’ve been living a good life and that is more important than a word count! And Sunday was a beautiful day, with the kind of perfect Florida weather that has been scarce since I got here. We sat on Lynda’s porch and admired the water and talked for hours. A good day, even without the writing.

View of water off a dock and the moon rising, with a bird overhead. — The moon rising, from the back deck.

I’m also taking a class right now, called Write Better Faster. It’s the course from the book I mentioned a few months ago, called Dear Writer, You Need to Quit. I got so much out of the book that when the class kept appearing in my awareness — Facebook friends taking it, conversations showing up about it in weird places — I decided it was worth a try, and would complement my NaNo efforts nicely. As it happens, I’m no longer thinking it complements NaNo — it’s pretty distracting. But the first week of the class was all personality tests and thinking about writing pain points and how they mesh with and are caused by our personalities. Sadly for me, so far I think I’ve learned I should be an editor not a writer, which is not really the learning I was hoping for. But there are three weeks of the class left to go, so I’m still optimistic. And it is interesting, even if it’s not yet helping me write better and faster.

In other mixed news — is it good or bad, I wonder? — my Kindle Fire is dead. I have no idea what happened to it, but I suspect it might be the charging cable or the connection, since it basically just stopped working and will not start again. I’m sorta bummed about this, because I was playing two games that want regular check-ins. I’m missing my chance to collect dragons and lumber! But it’s undoubtedly going to be good for my productivity to not be able to check in on those games when I am looking for distractions.

Gorgeous morning clouds — View from the van window, 6:30 AM, November 11, 2019.

And now I need to get on with my Monday. I’m headed back to Sanford today, but I think my major goal for the day is going to be to write a complete to-do list — all those things that I chose not to include in the first paragraph of this blog post! — and start working on checking a few of them off. Dentist appointment, doctor appointment, oil change for the van. Book files updated and uploaded. Newsletter written and sent, etc. etc. etc. At least Monday blog post is checked off! And honestly, I have no regrets. The first ten days of November might not have been nearly as productive as I wanted them to be, but they have been lovely, enjoyable days.

Florida and KU

21 Monday Oct 2019

Posted by wyndes in Books, Marketing and promotion, Self-publishing, Travel

≈ 3 Comments

Tropical Storm Nestor inspired me to hurry to Florida. I really didn’t want to have to drive through the storm, so Thursday turned into a long driving day, and I managed to reach Mount Dora by midday on Friday.

I spent Thursday night at a free county park in Georgia, Barrington County Park. It would have been much nicer if a neighbor hadn’t needed to run his generator all night long and if an off-leash black Lab hadn’t really wanted to investigate Zelda, far beyond what Z was comfortable with. Sigh. And it was half an hour off the highway, so added an hour to my overall drive. Next time, I think I’d just sleep at a truck stop or a Walmart. But it was a nice drive down exciting dirt roads and good to get off the highway for a while.

I’ve since had a lovely weekend with my dad and stepmom in Mount Dora. We didn’t do much, but it’s nice to be here. Upon arriving, I told my dad that for Christmas I wanted enough storage to download a ton of books to a device, enough so I really can carry a library with me, not just have a library available in the cloud. My extended time without internet was fine, except my book supply with too limited. He promptly handed me a card for my Fire tablet and I spent Saturday morning downloading approximately 500 books.

Yay, reading material! Boo, temptation! I’m trying to resist the impulse to reread everything I own by Robin McKinley, Dick Francis, and Kathleen Gilles Seidel, all of which I’d kind of forgotten about because they were buried so deep in my Kindle library.

Meanwhile, I wanted to mention that Cici is part of Magical Escapes, a Kindle Unlimited book promotion this month. If you’re a Kindle Unlimited subscriber and like fantasy, lots of interesting titles are included in the group. And if you’re not a KU subscriber, you still might find some books you like! I downloaded several, but with all the driving, I haven’t had a chance to read them yet. (Also, I admit, Robin McKinley is distracting me. I’m rereading Rose Daughter for the umpteenth time. It’s not in KU, but the Kindle edition is available for $2.99, which is a good deal, IMO.)

Top Secret

23 Monday Sep 2019

Posted by wyndes in A Precarious Magic, Self-publishing, Travel

≈ 4 Comments

(Not really.)

But I spent far too long working on a sensible way to share a preview of A Precarious Magic, the long-awaited sequel to A Lonely Magic this afternoon. It was probably not a good use of my time.

That said, I’d already hit my word count for the day, so I could have been playing some silly iPad game. (My latest is Homescapes.) What I truly should have been doing was kayaking, but the tide was very low so I would have needed to wade out through quite a bit of mud to get the kayak into the water and that did not seem very appealing.

So, yeah, anyway: Chapter One of A Precarious Magic

I hope you enjoy it and it makes you want to read more! It hasn’t actually been edited yet — well, except by me — so if you spot any mistakes, feel free to let me know. Don’t feel obligated, though. I will probably catch them in one of my innumerable editing passes, starting in October. Or maybe November.

You will note that there is absolutely no description on the link. I’m going to guess that writing the book blurb on this one will take me days of hair-pulling misery. Book descriptions are hard to write and this one — well, I’ll figure it out when I get there. Fortunately, I’m not there yet so that’s a problem for another day.

In the meantime, I’m having a delightful time with the actual writing. I said to a neighbor here back at the beginning of September that the end game is always like finishing a jigsaw puzzle when you have room for twenty pieces but there are fifty pieces left. Well, my fifty pieces are all slotting themselves into place quite nicely. I would honestly think I’d planned it instead of just discovering it as I wrote.

I am also loving Maine. It is crazily beautiful where I am. The night sky is so gorgeous — lots of stars to see, not hidden behind light pollution. I even saw a shooting star Saturday night, which always feels magical. The leaves are all falling now and when the wind blows, they skitter across the pavement like some musical instrument you’ve never heard of. The trees across the river that were a block of green three weeks ago are now scattered with color — still mostly green but with bursts of deep red and yellow, and on my walks, I spot other leaves in scarlet and bright orange. The air feels clean, the water tastes clean… it’s lovely here. And this weekend was toasty warm, which was nice for me — I was starting to get a little worried last week that it would get cold before I finished writing. I don’t think that’s going to happen now, but I’m definitely starting to plan my trip south.

I keep trying to take a good picture, but none of them reflect what I’m seeing. Maybe it’s just impossible to capture the light, the air, the sound of the leaves, the colors. But here’s a panorama from the door of the van.

house, river, trees, autumn colors, blue sky — Zelda enjoyed the weekend sun, too!

A Lonely Magic

05 Thursday Sep 2019

Posted by wyndes in A Lonely Magic, Self-publishing

≈ 11 Comments

I think that I am finally done with my revision of A Lonely Magic. Well, or almost done. Before I post it, I’d love to have a few careful readers take a look and make sure I haven’t introduced a bunch of typos. Or really, any typos at all. If you’re interested, reply in the comments or send me an email.

This wasn’t supposed to be a major revision — it was going to be little tweaks, here and there, with one big but still minor change. But of course once you’re in the file… well, I just kept playing. It’s still much the same book. If I had a document comparison tool, it would be interesting to look at the first published version side by side with this version to see how many words I really did change — not many, I suspect, given how much time I put into it. But I made it slightly more YA-friendly. Still with plenty of swear words, though.

The big change was eliminating Theresa, the bookstore owner. She was originally important because Fen’s journey was going to take her back to her starting place. Maybe Fen’s journey still will take her back to her starting place eventually, but I suspect that by the time she gets there, Theresa will have been long since forgotten. Eliminating her also tightened the beginning & made Fen more active — she’s not pushed into accepting Kaio’s help, she chooses to go with him in order to stay alive.

Along with the revision, I have a new cover. When I hired the designer, I sent her a PDF showing all the previous covers, including the ones that I never wound up using. There were nine of them. Nine! That didn’t include minor variations — that was nine totally different covers. Along the way, I worked with six different cover designers (if I can count myself as one of those designers, which I am going to.) So this cover is the tenth cover and the seventh designer. I’m hoping those will be lucky numbers.

Book cover for A Lonely Magic with a girl surrounded by waves, and a blue phoenix pattern behind the title. Very blue. — I call this the princess Fen cover.

Revising A Lonely Magic is the kind of quixotic act that a traditional publisher would never go for — sales of the book just don’t justify it. So is writing a sequel, actually. I haven’t done the math recently, but between the professional editor I hired, all those covers, and the marketing I did when I released the first version… well, I’m pretty sure I broke even. But a new cover and many days spent revising were impractical at best. That’s okay, I love the new cover. And I love the revision, too. Let me know if you want an early look at it.

Thanks!

25 Thursday Jul 2019

Posted by wyndes in A Precarious Magic, Self-publishing, Writing

≈ 3 Comments

Thanks to everyone who shared their auto-buy authors with me! I have to admit, I don’t think I discovered the magical author whose name is going to open a world of new readers to me via $10 worth of advertising, but I did find lots of people who I might be interested in reading, so that’s a nice thing. Although maybe not a good thing for my writing career purposes. Too much reading generally translates to not enough writing.

My current experiment is with voice recognition software. I was hoping that I could pick up the pace of my writing by eliminating a step between my brain and the end product. There are authors who swear by voice recognition, and claim that it makes their writing much faster. They can produce more because they’re talking to their computer instead of typing.

Ha.

An actual paragraph via voice recognition:

I was also hoping to work on my mailing list today Area reasonably stupid however answered me not want productive. When I was working on a precarious magic I stop looking at the computer in the end result with a couple paragraphs but I could not fight her at all. I had no idea what I was trying say. A triumph of technology.

And I think it’s really funny that the last line actually worked. Irony! So far I’ve tried the voice recognition in four different apps and they all seem to have their own unique quirks, but even if practice does make perfect, I don’t think voice recognition is going to be any kind of panacea of writing productivity for me. Oh, well.

I moved over to the garden house yesterday, and last night I got to have the windows open while I went to sleep. It’s been weeks since I was able to do that, and it was so lovely. Firefly season is mostly over, but there were still a few isolated sparks in the darkness and the sky was clear enough to see stars. It reminded me of all the great reasons to live in a van. In four days, it will be three years since I left my house. I feel like I ought to do a year-in-review post — how many places did I go? Cross-country both ways means that there were a lot of states involved. But I think I’ll save that post for Monday.

Meanwhile — again in the not-writing category — I’ve been playing some more with the fun ad-creation tool I discovered, www.bookbrush.com. My latest:

I made up a logo for myself a couple weeks ago when I was working on a mailing list email and needed something to put in the “logo” spot, but I actually quite like it. I honestly don’t think having a pretty Facebook cover on my almost non-existent business page is going to sell any books, but it still makes me smile so that counts for something.

And now, back to Fen. I got stuck on something silly — the word to describe an angry cat’s tail — so I started writing a blog post instead, but I am determined that today will be a day of many words, even if that means it turns into an evening or night of many words. But a snippet for the fun of it (with the usual caveats of draft, might not make it into the real book, la-di-dah, whatever)…

Fen glanced at him just as the kitten shimmered into view on his shoulder.
Its green eyes were glowing with a hard, red, extremely creepy light. It wasn’t the weird but natural glow of light reflecting off an animal’s eyes at night. It wasn’t even a normal, if authoritarian, stop-light red. This red was the deep, rich shade of fresh blood.
It screamed “Danger” like no color Fen had ever seen before.
“Oh, shit.” Fen barely had time to breath the words and take a nervous step backward before Ghost launched off of Luke’s shoulder.

Auto-Buy Authors

22 Monday Jul 2019

Posted by wyndes in Marketing and promotion, Personal, Self-publishing, Zelda

≈ 20 Comments

I wrote a blog post last week and didn’t post it, because it was sad, and also because it stopped being true. I spent much of a day saying good-bye to Zelda, torn between rushing her to a strange vet and letting nature take its course, eventually deciding through many tears that the most loving thing to do was to just be with her, letting her know how much I loved her.

Nature decided that it was a bad day, but not the last bad day. A couple days later she ate a little chicken and by yesterday she was walking again. Not with any speed, and I’m still pretty sure that the baddest of bad days is coming soon… but it’s not going to be today, and that’s sufficient unto the day.

Meanwhile, I am puppy-sitting and working my way through that scary to-do list. I made definite progress — I think I’ve whittled it down to about twenty items, but of course, the twenty items left are some of the worst and scariest. One of them is so tiny — fix the Subscribe button on the sign-up widget — but the fact is, I have absolutely no idea how to do that and am probably going to easily spend a full day working on it, feeling frustrated and annoyed the whole time.

Is that a good use of my time? Obviously not. Does anyone really care if the subscribe button doesn’t look like a button? Well, I do, so yeah, probably there are some other obsessive people who would be bothered as well. Mostly, though, I think it feels like a symptom of my life being outside my control. So many things I can’t fix, can’t make better, but here’s a thing I could/should be able to fix. I wonder if I could convince myself that leaving it alone would be a signal of acceptance? And signal is not the word I want, but I can’t find the right one.

Speaking of things I can’t control, I’ve been experimenting with ads this weekend. I’d really like to get book sales back to where they were before I tried putting Ghosts into Kindle Unlimited. I was never earning enough money to live on, but I was steadily managing to push off the day when I’d have to start filling out job applications. That day is now zooming toward me. Is it ironic or just sad that one of the big reasons I’ve been avoiding a 9-5 is my reluctance to leave Zelda alone all day?

Anyway, ads. I had fun making them, but so far, they’ve been a pointless waste of money. My clickthrough rate is 0.13%, which is roughly equivalent to 0.

ad for A Gift of Ghosts with gray background and lots of text — The long blurb

I might do better with more comparable authors — the authors I chose were almost at random, just people I liked, with audiences sizable enough to give me a big, reasonably inexpensive pool. (Robin McKinley, Sarina Bowen, Ilona Andrews.) So here’s a question for you: who are your auto-buy authors? Oh, and comments on the ads also welcome. Feel free to make suggestions!

Defying expectations

15 Monday Jul 2019

Posted by wyndes in Cover design, Grace, Self-publishing

≈ 2 Comments

If you read my last two posts, you might reasonably expect today’s post to include the new cover for A Gift of Time. Alas, I don’t have it yet. I do, however, have the new cover for A Gift of Grace, which feels like an appropriate substitute.

I didn’t ask the designer to add freckles to Grace, but we did get all fancy with both models’ clothing. Any second now they’ll be running into a bear. And I really like their expressions.

Alas, responding to comments on the last post reminded me that the point of new covers was to expand my audience and appeal to the many, many, many book-buying romance readers in the world, and those expressions are probably all wrong for that audience. I should have made him half-naked and had both of them looking sultry. Covers like that might not have been to my personal taste (or yours!), but the point of a cover is to appeal to a specific audience and I’m not my own audience. Or at least I am my own audience, but I’m not the part of my audience that can buy enough books to let me go on eating and paying vet bills.

Oh, well. I still like their expressions.

I’ve been working on lots of marketing type things. Some of it is very fun. Much of it is not. But on the fun side has been trying out keywords to include on my book listings. “Ghost romance paranormal suspense mystery” should be a terrible set — according to Kindle Rocket, there are 6046 books found with that search. But, at least yesterday, A Gift of Ghosts was at the very top of that list, which means it’s a terrible set for some other 6000 books, but not a terrible set for my book. That was fun to discover.

Speaking of Amazon, today is Amazon Prime Day and I had $10 of Amazon money from spending $10 at Whole Foods, plus the $5 Prime Day deal on printed books, so I spent a very pleasant 45 minutes looking at all the items on my wish list and deciding what not to buy. But I finally went for Salt Fire Acid Heat, a cookbook I’ve been debating forever. I’m probably not going to carry it around in the van with me, but I’m at my brother’s so I can store it with my Christmas ornaments and scrapbooks when I drive away. And I’m excited to read it.

I’m suspecting that this week isn’t going to be a terribly productive week for me, though. I’m dog-sitting, so I’ll have three dogs to take care of, and the puppy is energetic and always trying to convince the two older dogs to play. This does not go over well with the two older dogs, so dog-sitting the puppy is a lot more like dog-sitting a toddler than it is house-sitting. But it should be fun, even if it means that I don’t finish all the many miscellaneous things that I’m working on.

To-do list

12 Friday Jul 2019

Posted by wyndes in Cover design, Self-publishing, Thought

≈ 11 Comments

I created a To-Do list this morning with well over 80 items on it. Not a single one of those items was “create a to-do list”.

Also, not a single one of those items was “spend twenty minutes browsing to-do list apps on the app store, hoping to find one that’s better than plain text before giving up in frustration.” If you’ve got a recommendation for a to-do list app, I’d love to hear about it in the comments.

Actually, my to-do list is kind of a work of art. But it does not include “write a blog post,” so I’m going to make this quick.

Pennsylvania continues to be lovely but I am spending far too much time sitting on the guest bed banging away on my computer. I’m taking advantage of the internet to try to get lots of internet-related business tasks done — updating my mailing list software, setting up an automation sequence, working on the websites, that kind of thing. I’d rather be outside playing with my niece and the dogs, but honestly, it’s about time I took the work side of life a little more seriously.

Speaking of which… a more serious cover.

book cover for A Gift of Thought — Guys in stock photos never shave.

Wynded Words

~ Home of author Sarah Wynde

Category Archives: Self-publishing