21 Tuesday Aug 2018
Posted in Marketing and promotion, Self-publishing
This entire post is going to be about self-publishing, including specific data on book sales and ad prices, so if that doesn’t interest you… well, you’ve been warned!
Continue reading
06 Monday Aug 2018
Posted in Campground, Grace, Marketing and promotion, Mom, Personal, Zelda
In the distance — not so very far away at all, but obscured by trees and campers and people stuff — I can see a glimmer of blue. A lake. And I assume it has a nice beach, because this campground was, over the weekend, absolutely filled with families and kids having fun.
I, however, haven’t looked at it, because Zelda can’t really walk and she makes bad choices when left alone. Bad choices! I used to tell R, when I sent him off to do things with his friends as an early and then late-teenager, “Make good choices,” and eventually he said the same thing to me whenever I left the house. It always made me smile.
But I would scold Zelda with that phrase if I could. Alas, she wouldn’t understand. But if I leave her on the floor, she jumps onto the seats to look out the windows, and if I leave her on a seat, she jumps to the floor so that she can go try a different window. She wants to be able to see my return. So no walks for me, because every jump for her causes a yelp of agony and yet she refuses to not jump if I’m not immediately available to stop her.
I like my campsite, though. The campground is very much a seasonal place, a mix of permanent installations and trailers that look like they’ve been here for a while with some short-term spots. But there was a grassy row — I’d guess four campers could get squeezed in if necessary — that I had all to myself. With a cute family kitty-corner to me with three small kids and a brand-new trailer and very Canadian accents. They made me smile, too.
Today is seven years since my mom died. I’ve been thinking about her a lot lately, about why she is the only person I want when I need to cry. She was a brisk mother. My ex once described her as “austere” to me, which I thought was totally wrong, but she did not suffer fools gladly and his experience of her was undoubtedly different than mine. But she could be quite dispassionate. I could cry to her and she would be warm and loving and sympathetic, but she wasn’t going to take on any of my pain and she was going to stop me as soon as she decided I was wallowing.
It occurs to me that maybe I said it best in my eulogy for her, so I’ll link to that: my eulogy for my mother.
But I didn’t need to be a grown-up with her. It wasn’t about love, it was about her endless ocean of calm. She was extremely good at pulling small children’s loose teeth, because she didn’t particularly care how much you fussed. If you were ready to have the tooth out, she was going to yank it. If you weren’t ready, she was going to shrug and leave you alone. I think she was probably an excellent nurse.
There’s a line in Grace — oh, a paragraph. I’ll quote it:
She wished she could talk to her mom. Just for half an hour. To hear her mom’s voice, to let herself be folded into her mother’s hug. She could imagine the sharp, searching look her mother would give her, followed by the, “Chin up, darlin’. That’s my girl,” words of approval.
Pretty sure my mother never, in my entire life, said those words to me or would have said those words to me. That wasn’t her language, and she wasn’t a southerner. But a look, a nod, a “You’ll be fine,” the confidence in me, but the hug, too. That was my mom. I miss her.
But no wallowing! Moving on, I’m on the road today, headed to a provincial park. Did I mention that I’m in Canada? I’m in Canada. It was fun being confused by the distances on the road signs — 88 miles to Ottawa? How did I get that so wrong! Oh, right, kilometers. Sigh of relief...
And today I’m looking forward to trying out a Canadian grocery store. I’ve eaten only snacks for the past two days — healthy-ish snacks, carrots and nuts and dried fruit and jerky and turkey slices — but I am ready to buy some ingredients and cook some real food.
So those are my goals for the day: get moving, go to a grocery store, eat some real food, and enjoy Canada. And not let Zelda hurt herself anymore. I’m not happy with how the stitches look, but I’m not yet so worried that I am searching for Canadian vets. And she’s putting weight on her foot now, so that’s a good sign.
Eight days until Grace releases. I’m trying not to be anxious about it, but I am. I try to avoid reading reviews, but you have to read the first few in case there are issues with the file or problems with the download. I’m going to bet myself a container of Sanders dark chocolate caramels with sea salt — extremely delicious, not at all good for me — that at least one of the first five complains about pronouns and Avery. If two or more do, I’m going to buy myself something even nicer, although I’m not sure what yet. Maybe a sushi dinner at a good sushi place. A win! (Although if you’re reading this, planning on reading Grace, and willing to write a review, don’t let this influence you, please. I know that people are going to complain about Avery, just the way people complained about not knowing that Henry was black in A Gift of Ghosts, but that doesn’t mean I’m looking forward to it.)
Ooh, after 10 already, so time for me to get going. More about Grace soon! I’ve got some fun bookmarks to give away, so I need to think about how to do that. But check it out:
That is one ridiculously thick book. By my standards, anyway. My sister-in-law’s review: “Oh, it’s so pretty!!!”
31 Tuesday Jul 2018
Posted in Grace, Self-publishing, Tassamara
The above showed up in my email this morning. I thought, “Wow, that was surprisingly efficient of someone.” Well, or something — some computer system that is much speedier than I am, anyway.
But, yeah, since some people (or maybe just me?) have already received an email, it feels like a good time to say that A Gift of Grace, the fourth book in the Tassamara series, will be released on August 14th.
And is available for pre-order right now!
26 Thursday Jul 2018
Posted in A Lonely Magic, A Precarious Magic, Cover design, Self-publishing, WIP
I started work on A Precarious Balance, sequel to A Lonely Magic, last week. I didn’t get very far, partially because I kept getting distracted by Grace, but also because I was flailing a bit. I’ve got lots of notes, and there were things I’d already written that I wanted to re-use, so I compiled everything into a Scrivener file and got started. But as I tried to write, I was having a tough time finding Fen’s voice.
I finally decided two days ago that I needed to re-read the book again and refresh my memory on all the details, not just the ones that I’d put into my notes.
I didn’t like it.
That was a weird experience. I don’t always like what I’ve written (understatement, yes), but I LOVED writing A Lonely Magic. It was so much fun and I liked being in Fen’s head so much, and her adventures were so surprising, and such a beautiful blend of things I enjoy, science and adventure and fantasy and romance. But four years later, I’m re-reading and I didn’t like her at all. She’s bland and a little whiny and annoying.
And then, at about the halfway mark, I read the line, “Her own reputation had been shot to hell even before she dropped out and she hadn’t given fuck one.” and the “fuck” was startlingly out-of-place. It wasn’t the first time she’d used the word, but it was pretty close. And I realized that the version I was reading — which was in Vellum, which is the software I use to create ebooks — was the version I had once-upon-a-time tried to delete all the swear words from.
I wrote about it at the time. I was tired of getting negative reviews about Fen’s swearing so I tried to edit it into a “clean” version, and I realized partway through that Fen’s cursing is part of her, that it didn’t work to clean up her language, and I stopped. It REALLY doesn’t work to clean up Fen’s language. She goes from a character who is internally tough, a fighter despite her relative level of helplessness, to a… well, leaf in the wind.
In the hotel room scene, Swearing-Fen is stuck because she’s considered her options and she can’t find a way out but you know that she’s still fighting, even if it’s only in her head. (She never swears aloud in that scene, it’s all in her inner dialogue.) In the same scene, Clean-Fen is stuck and she’s passive and helpless about it. She’s going along with what other people are deciding for her future because she’s got no choice. Losing her inner obscenities takes her from edgy and angry to blandly accepting. She is not an interesting character to me when she’s being bland.
Largely, I think, that’s a good realization to have. I can’t write a book with Clean Fen. She is not someone I want to spend the next six months with. But it was not at all a happy realization to discover that the version in Vellum was the bland version. That means that the one available online is also the bland version. I know that because I only have one Vellum file and it has the latest cover. But oh, what a screw-up. I suppose it doesn’t matter terribly if I publish another version online, but these were non-trivial edits. They changed the flavor of the story. I don’t even know how long that’s the version that’s been available. Sigh.
The good news, I guess, is that it doesn’t really sell much — 100 copies in the past 12 months — so not many readers are going to know or care. Yay for being an unsuccessful author, I guess?
It is interesting, though, as a writer, to discover how such a seemingly minor change can become so important. One of my favorite occupations is playing with ideas for book covers. I’ve got probably at least a dozen designs for A Lonely Magic that I’ve toyed with — it’s literally been published with at least five or six different covers, but I’ve got a bunch more that haven’t seen the light of day — but I’ve never been satisfied, because somehow I’ve never found one that conveys the feel of the book to me. Maybe that’s because I don’t really know how the book feels?
I do know that the last time I read the book, which was in a print edition just a few months ago, I laughed when I got to the ending. Despite all the reviews that criticized the cliffhanger ending, I never believed it ended in a cliffhanger, not once. Fen found family, she found magic, she’s in a safe place, she knows who wanted to kill her, she’s defeated the bad guy — what the hell is a cliffhanger about that? Except it’s totally a cliffhanger, because when I was reading it with the perspective of time, I ended it really, really wanting to know what happens next. Everything with Malik is interesting and even though he’s the bad guy, and his resolution technically doesn’t matter, I absolutely want Fen to figure out how he’s bound and how to get him unbound.
25 Wednesday Jul 2018
Posted in Grace, Self-publishing
The spine size on the cover is undoubtedly wrong. Grace is the longest book I’ve ever written.
The voices are driving him crazy. And he’s driving them crazy, too.
For Noah Blake, pretending to be normal is getting harder by the day. A near brush with death in Iraq has left him suffering from chronic auditory hallucinations. Ignoring the voices he hears isn’t always easy, but Noah knows it’s better than the alternatives.
Yet when a mysterious redhead hands him a seemingly innocuous business card, a new voice — that of a teenage boy — becomes too insistent to deny. It wants him to go to Tassamara. It swears he’ll find help there.
It’s bad enough to have hallucinations, but doing what they say is bound to lead to disaster.
Isn’t it?
I wrote that sometime before December 8, 2014. The reason I know the date is because that’s when I had the cover done for A Gift of Grace. I’m… amused? Yeah, that’s the word. It still applies! Four years later, innumerable revisions, a plot that’s included multiple career changes for my main character, about a hundred thousand words written and not used, and here I am, back where I started.
So what do you think of the blurb? Does it sound like something you want to read?
04 Monday Jun 2018
Posted in Audiobooks, R
A square cover equals an audiobook!
I made the appropriate professional(-ish) announcement about the audiobook of A Gift of Ghosts
I’ve wanted to make an audiobook for a while. I think the first time I considered it seriously was probably sometime in 2013, so five years ago. At that point, I looked into doing a royalty share production. That’s when an audiobook producer creates the book for 50% of the proceeds rather than being paid upfront. At the time, I listened to some auditions, but I just wasn’t sold on it.
One of the problems I’ve had with creating an audiobook is that I really don’t like audiobooks. I sometimes think the one life-skill I learned in high school was the ability to tune out completely when someone is talking at me. Audiobooks trigger that ability for me. I find it very hard to pay attention to them, even when I want to.
But back in 2013, I listened to some auditions and I just didn’t feel it. I wound up abandoning the idea.
In 2014, I decided to take a different approach and I invested a few hundred dollars and several weeks of my time trying to create a home studio and do it myself. The folks at Audible were nice enough to tell me that my delivery was great, but unfortunately, I couldn’t get rid of the air-conditioning noise in the background of my recordings. The guy I worked with suggested turning it off… in July, in Florida, in a closet with no ventilation. Yeah, no. I thought maybe I’d try again in winter, but I was busy with other things and it never happened.
Last year, I again looked into the possibility of doing an audiobook and I listened to a bunch of auditions. Somehow none of them quite did it for me. The thought of having to listen to any of the probably perfectly adequate narrators read my own words aloud just seemed torturous. I wanted the end product, but I didn’t want to go through the process of making it happen.
Then, this year, I got a tax refund. I’ll skip the details — no one wants to read about taxes! — but for Reasons, I felt like I wanted to do something for R with part of my refund. About the same time, he was deciding on graduate school, so I decided I would invest in an audiobook and split the proceeds of said audiobook with R.
Logical decision, right? Ha. I’m sure it makes no sense to anyone who hasn’t experienced the unexpected delight of small amounts of passive income. But one of the projects I did, the wedding anthology, seemed like an entirely quixotic, pure marketing investment when I first did it. I didn’t expect to earn any money from it. For a while, though, it made $20-25/month, and it was awesome. It wasn’t money that I counted on, it was just an unexpected small windfall every time. I almost always moved it straight to a Starbucks card and turned it into treat money. Obviously, I have no idea if the audiobook will earn anything — reports vary wildly about the profitability of audiobooks and I know people who don’t make much of anything from theirs — but I liked the idea of giving R at least a chance of windfalls.
Still, making the decision didn’t mean that I would be able to bring myself to act on it. But I went back to Audible and posted my project, this time not as a royalty share arrangement, but paying upfront, Screen Actors Guild rates.
Wow. I received over fifty auditions. It was a really surreal experience. I spent a weekend in Arkansas listening to various people read the same section of Ghosts over and over again. After about the first ten, I noticed every mistake. But some of them were really good. Others were really good, but not at all what I’d imagined for the characters. And some were not so good, of course, but really, there were at least a solid dozen that were better than anyone I’d heard before, maybe even more than that.
It was not an easy decision.
But I kept coming back to one of my early favorites. I think she was the third narrator I’d listened to and the first one where my eyes widened and I thought, “Oh, yes, this could work.” Not just that I could get an audiobook made, but that I could listen to someone read Ghosts aloud without cringing inside. I actually laughed out loud when she was reading Rose’s lines.
And I sort of felt like the universe had drawn a big red arrow pointing toward her, and lit it up with shiny neon: her name is Sarah Grace, and the name of her company is GraceWright Productions. Ha. Given that I’ve spent three years trying to write a book with Grace in the name… well, it’s superstitious of me, but I did feel like the universe was all but jumping up and down, saying “this one, this one, this one.”
Since I don’t entirely trust the universe, eventually I made several friends (thank you, A, J, L & T!) listen to my top five candidates. All of them approved, and so GraceWright Productions it was.
And the process was not torturous! I chose to have Sarah team up with her partner, Tristan, to do the narration so Zane’s POV sections and all the male dialogue are in a male voice, and Akira’s POV and all the female dialogue are in a woman’s voice. I think it works really well. I admit to both laughing and probably blushing during the seduction scene, but I also started to cry when Zane talks to his mom and didn’t stop until that chapter finished. I was surprised at how moved I was.
If you’re an Audible subscriber, I hope you’ll take a chance on Ghosts and let me know what you think. If you’re not an Audible subscriber, but have considered trying the service, I should let you know that I (and by extension, R) get a bounty of $50 if Ghosts is the first audiobook you try and then you stick with the service for two paid months. The service costs $14.95/month, so you’d eventually get three ebooks for $30, which is a pretty good deal, but obviously not worth it at all if you don’t think you’d want three audiobooks.
And you can also, of course, just buy the audiobook directly either from Amazon
Of course, if you hate audiobooks, don’t feel obligated. But I will say that I, an affirmed audiobook hater, really quite enjoyed this one.
PS Privacy? Europe? Something-something mysterious abbreviations, crazy expensive laws? I guess I will write a privacy policy and add it to my site, but the only information I “collect” is whatever you enter when you comment. And I use the term “collect” quite loosely, because even though it’s probably sitting in the backend of the database somewhere, I would have no idea how to get it out, nor would I have any interest in doing so. I don’t use that information for anything, I don’t plan to ever use it for anything, and the only emails you’ll ever get from me, unless you’ve signed up for my mailing list, are entirely personal and individual. I was going to say that I’d never email you, but that would be silly, because I can think of half a dozen people offhand that I’ve emailed directly who will read this. But yeah, privacy — I respect it?
23 Wednesday May 2018
Posted in Personal, R, Self-publishing, Translations, Zelda
This morning, I knelt on the floor at my dad’s house to rub noses with his dog, Gizmo. Gizmo is, I think, a mix of cocker spaniel and poodle* — golden, soft, fluffy, with an extremely endearing underbite, and a passionate devotion to his person, my dad. With his person out of the room, he was willing to come be loved up by me and maybe even play a little.
When Zelda saw what we were doing, she decided to come play, too. Within minutes, she and Giz were both chasing after a squeaky skunk, racing down the hallway after it, shoving one another out of the way, even playing tug as they were bringing it back to me. Zelda was play bowing, batting at the toy with her paws, even mock growling, and Giz’s tail was wagging a hundred beats a minute.
If I’d had a tail, it would have been wagging even faster than Giz’s.
So Sunday before last, Z was sick and getting sicker. Not eating, hiding under the table, lethargic, no energy. Not even interested in going for walks. I’d been bracing myself for the worst and it felt like the worst was coming even faster than I could have imagined. Last Monday, I decided to stop the medication she was on. On Thursday, I got the news that she had no signs of a UTI and so I also stopped the antibiotic she was on. She started getting better immediately. Yesterday, at my dad’s suggestion, I took her to his vet. Instead of recommending an ultrasound and x-rays, which was where I was at with my vet, his vet put her on estrogen.
Wow. Just wow, wow, wow, wow.
The vet said it would take a couple weeks before we’d know whether it was going to help with the peeing problem, but watching her play with Gizmo; having her almost drag me out of the van to go for a walk in the rain; seeing her lick every last speck of food out of her dinner bowl, then nose me and look expectantly for more… I will buy stock in doggie diapers, I will plan on doing laundry as often as it takes, but oh, it’s so nice to have my energetic dog back!
Zelda, attending R’s commencement ceremony. She listened about as well as some of the students around us did and was much less chatty. But it was a very festive atmosphere!
In other news, R’s graduation was lovely. New College students treat commencement as a combination costume party and picnic. It took place at sunset, by the water, and while there were appropriate speeches, suggestions to go out and change the world, and professors attired with dignity in their academic robes, the students were celebrating.
New College commencement
R had been torn earlier in the day whether he was going costume-party or dignity, but he went with the costume and I got to watch — with immense pride — my six-foot four, bearded son accept his diploma while dressed as a lobster. I’d been thinking prior to the moment that despite the whistles and cheers and yelling of the audience, I’d probably only be able to bring myself to applaud until my hands hurt, but as it happened, I yelled and whooped for him with the best of them. I’d worried that I might cry, but I think it is actually impossible to cry when watching a lobster graduate. There was much beaming with pride, though. He told me later that his favorite part of the evening was all the parents of the kids he works with coming up to him and asking to take his picture to show their kids.
And then another nice thing happened this week: I was taking care of some basic business stuff, including checking to see whether the Italian translation was finally available, and I remembered that I’d scheduled free promotions for the other translations. Instead of going to Amazon and looking for the German translation, I used Google and it took to me Amazon-Germany, where I discovered…
A German best given-away-er
I could have used Google translate to read the reviews, but I didn’t — I just enjoy knowing that they exist. And that for a brief moment in time, Ghosts — or rather, Die Gabe der Geister — was an international best-given-away-er.
*edited to add a message received in my email:
The Giz is pissed at you. He is not in any way genetically related to any Cocker Spaniel. He is a ferocious peek-a-poo, a descendent of a fierce line of savage Pekingese who mauled Cocker Spaniels every day. He will probably bite you the next time he sees you.
14 Monday May 2018
Posted in Cover design, Grace, Personal, Zelda
R told me a very funny story about love bugs yesterday (while we were having a nice Mother’s Day brunch) and it almost made me feel kindly toward them. For a minute or two. It didn’t last.
For those not from Florida, the bugs colloquially called “love bugs” — I have no idea what their real name is — have a brief mating season in spring and in fall. Every few years, their mating season is insanely crazy and there are bugs everywhere. You can’t go outside without breathing them in, because there are so many of them. They will crawl on you, they will get in your hair, they will fly in your face, and they will cover your vehicle. Yesterday, during my drive to Sarasota, I probably killed hundreds of them, maybe thousands. It does not make for a cheerful drive. So, so, so gross.
Fortunately (?), it’s also really rainy. Enough so that I checked the weather this morning with a wary eye. I’m not leaving Florida until R graduates from college and there’s no way I’m missing his graduation, but we actually might be looking at the first named storm of the 2018 hurricane season. About three weeks too early, but Al Gore warned us a long time ago about changing weather systems. It’s not a surprise. And it is handy for rinsing off dead love bugs.
I’m waiting on test results for Z, but she is unchanged. Yesterday afternoon, she peed on both beds, so I spent the afternoon and early evening doing laundry. The campground (Oscar Scherer Stat Park) has a nice washer and dryer, so I managed to get clean sheets on the beds, but it cost me $7 total. That’s going to be an expensive daily habit.
Meanwhile, she rejected fresh Atlantic salmon and rice for breakfast. I ate some and it was quite delicious. But she seemed hungry before I gave her the pills she’s supposed to take and it finally occurred to me to wonder whether the medication — which is not doing anything for the peeing problem — is making her nauseous. Turns out the side effects are restlessness, irritability and loss of appetite. I’m thinking we are going to stop those pills. I’ll continue with the antibiotics, at least until we get the test results. Eventually I will become nonchalant about the peeing, I suppose, if the other options are starving dog and/or dying dog. Peeing dog is fine in comparison.
I actually really wanted to make some cute flow chart graphics for this post. The first would ask, “Has Zelda peed inside?” and the answers would be, “No,” leading to “Of course not, what a bizarre idea, why would she do that?” and “Yes,” leading to “Seriously? WTF?”. The second chart would ask, “Has Zelda peed inside?” and the “Yes” response would lead to a bunch of variants, like “Did she pee on me?” and “Did it wake me up?” and “Did she pee on so many things that I must immediately do multiple loads of laundry?” and so on, with answers that would include “Great!” and “No problem,” for the lesser pee issues. Honestly, pee on the floor only bothers me now if I step in it.
However, creating a flow chart turned out to be a lot more work than one would expect. I wound up having lots of fun playing with book cover designs instead. I’m a long way away from needing any new book covers, but it was fun to try out some variations. (I was using free templates from Canva and my own photographs.)
Of course, the book I’m really working on is Grace, so I should get back to it. No progress this weekend, unsurprisingly, and this week — given the graduation and the distractions inherent in being in the same town as R — is probably not going to be my most productive, but I’m really pretty close to finishing a draft for the first time ever. And I have no current impulse to start over from the beginning, which is a good sign.
I’ve got one other distraction happening this week, though, which is pretty fun. When I was walking Z this morning, I was wondering why it felt sort of like Christmas Eve. You know the feeling, that slightly magical sense of anticipation? And then I remembered that it’s because The Penderwicks at Last
First, though, some Grace!
07 Monday May 2018
Posted in Anxiety, Audiobooks, Zelda
On Thursday, I got nothing done. Zelda had a vet appointment at 4PM and I spent the day trying to drown my worry in puttering. Laundry, re-organzing cupboards, washing dishes, wiping down the floor, folding clothes in different ways… Eventually, we made it to the vet, who ruled out a urinary tract infection or kidney problems. That left, as I had suspected, hormone-related urinary incontinence.
Or dementia.
Don’t ever google canine dementia.
It’s not something you want to know anything about if you love a dog, not unless you’re forced to.
Zelda started the incontinence medication on Friday morning. It takes between 5-10 days to take effect, so the fact that she’s peed in the van multiple times since then does not mean that she’s got dementia, not yet. But the incontinence really is getting dramatically worse — she went from an unexpected accident inside in February to peeing on my bed on April 13th, to doing it again a week later, then three times within a week, then yesterday three times within the day.
I am… well, somewhat distraught, actually. It’s not just the peeing, although that’s obviously uncool. Yesterday she managed to pee on two fitted sheets, two pillowcases, and a top sheet! Plus the floor, plus a rug, or maybe two rugs. Fortunately, I’m parked in a friend’s driveway, so there was a washing machine nearby.
But she’s also not eating well, she’s doing weird things like burying bits of food around the van (so not okay), she’s sleeping on the floor instead of my bed, and, of course, every odd thing she does now looks like a symptom of dementia to me.
I don’t think I could possibly be living a worse lifestyle for a dog with dementia. And my vague thoughts of settling down by renting a room from someone are obviously impossible with an incontinent dog — I can’t imagine how stressed out I would be, if I was that tenant.
After I lost B, I realized I needed to develop a Zelda Loss Survival Plan. I can’t remember if I wrote about it, but I really did take it seriously. I knew that if losing B was bad, losing Z was going to be… well.
Anyway, I was walking her this morning and realized that the fundamental problem with my ZLSP is that it also needs to be a LZSP — a Losing Zelda Survival Plan. If her loss isn’t a lightning bolt, but a long, slow nightmare that includes the possibility of her no longer recognizing me, no longer knowing who I am, becoming aggressive… yeah, I need a different plan.
I have no idea what that plan looks like, but it probably starts with taking one minute at a time. And in this minute, it’s a lovely day in Florida. It’s probably going to get too hot, as always, but my window is open, I’m listening to clucking chickens from the neighbor’s house and chirping birds, and there’s a cool breeze.
I haven’t managed to get any writing done at all in the last week — haven’t even tried! — but I am working on a project that I should finish my part of today, and then I’ll try to get back to Grace. And the project that I’m working on — well, maybe I should save the details for another blog post. But for me it involves listening, not writing, so it’s a novel experience. WordPress just tried to change “novel” into “lovely” and I wouldn’t describe it that way — I actually find it sort of uncomfortable and torturous — but I think the end result is going to be excellent. And in the moment, it’s a really good distraction from worry. Perhaps my LZSP should include immense focus on work?
05 Tuesday Dec 2017
Posted in Self-publishing
So this happened.
I feel like I should say something profound about it, but… yeah, I’ve got nothing. It’s incredibly gratifying, though. If I still drank, I would definitely buy myself a bottle of champagne to celebrate. Instead, I think tomorrow I will go to Starbucks and buy myself an ever-so-appropriate gingerbread latte. 🙂