Category Archives: A Gift of Time

A Gift of Time is free on Amazon today

21 Saturday Dec 2013

Posted by in A Gift of Time, Randomness

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Said it all in the headline. 🙂

But here’s the link: A Gift of Time

Please help spread the word if you can. Forward, share, reblog, whatever. It doesn’t have enough reviews to get picked up by the free sites, so the only visibility it will get is from what I can give it and that’s… well, you.

Two years ago, I set Ghosts to be free for the first time and I had 86 downloads by this time of the morning. Today… 2. Two’s better than zero, of course, so I am not complaining. Much. But my readers-to-hours ratio on this book is coming in at a number so far below the decimal point… hmm, I’ve just confused myself mathematically. But I’m at about 100 hours of writing time per reader right now, which is sort of an amusing way to look at it and sort of a really depressing way.

I think I’ll go walk the dogs.

Life choices

18 Wednesday Dec 2013

Posted by in A Gift of Time, Marketing and promotion, Randomness, Writing

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I dreamed a few nights ago that the first three Amazon reviews of A Gift of Time were all one-star reviews, written by the same person. She hated the book so much that giving it one star wasn’t enough, she had to rate it again and again, one star every time, and then show up at my house to tell me everything that was wrong with it. It was a weird dream. Definitely a nightmare. And in the dream, I decided to quit writing. That was the moment that woke me up.

The good news: I’m not going to quit writing. It really annoyed me that in my dream I’d decided to do so. For the next ten minutes, I was huffing and puffing at my dream self. What a wimp! What an idiot! You don’t give up something fun just because someone else comes to rain on your parade. You are a nerd, in the wonderful Wil Wheaton sense of the word, where you get to love what you love and damn the naysayers. Yes, I was lecturing myself. My dream self even. I sort of feel embarrassed.

But it sent me into a good spiral of thinking about writing and about what the last two years have meant to me.

Unless you’re a writer, you won’t care about this, but there are crowd scenes in A Gift of Time. Scenes where five characters or more are present and active. The first book I wrote (the one that no one has ever seen) had a scene with six characters and it was agonizing to write. So hard to manage all those characters. So hard to balance them. So hard to keep them all in the room, all active, all talking. In Ghosts, I can remember ruthlessly cutting characters out of scenes because I couldn’t handle having a fourth person present. That was too hard to make work. In Time, there are crowds. Literal crowds. Rose, Max, Meredith, Grace, Akira, Colin, Carla, Travis, and Emma–plus a bunch of nameless others–all in one room at one time–and I never even thought about it being hard to write.

With Thought, I decided I needed to learn to write action scenes. I love Ghosts, of course, but it’s all conversation. It could be a stage play if it needed to be. Hmm, actually, it would make sort of a great play–the actress who got to play Akira when she turned into Zane’s mom would have so much fun. So in Thought, there’s action, and it was hard work. Oh, the research that went into that parking lot scene. The careful mapping out of character’s motions. The reading about self-defense, the calculating of weights, the plotting out of positions. In Time, I just wrote the fight. I didn’t agonize over it at all. I did do some fun research–the whole Golgi organ reflex thing was super-cool–but the writing was just a map; grab here, push there.

In a sense, two years of writing have gotten me nothing. Time has sold about as many copies in its first week as Ghosts did, and I’m no more likely to earn a living by writing than I was two years ago.

But I’m pretty sure I’m a better writer than I was two years ago. And that’s something. And I’m absolutely sure that I’m not going to quit writing, no matter how many 1-star reviews Time gets. And that’s a lot.

Onward and upward–I’m going to finish writing Reckless, my last unfinished Eureka story, then turn my attention to Ghosts of Belize and Akira’s honeymoon. Probably around Feb, I’ll start my next project. It will either be Grace’s story or something entirely new–either a crystal-sensitive mermaid or a sarcastic, Sherlock-inspired princess.

If you haven’t reviewed Time… nag, nag, nag. Reviews matter. And I hate writing them, too, so I sympathize. But if you’re reading this and you’ve read Time, there is literally no better way to support me than to write a review for Amazon or Goodreads.

As always, my brain sidetracks on literally. You could just give me lots of money. That would be a better way to support me. Or you could pay off my mortgage, so that I didn’t have to worry about it–that would help. Or you could tell all your friends or buy an ad or get your local librarian excited about my books–OKAY, so maybe there might *literally* be some other ways to support me. But writing a review is by far the easiest.

A Gift of Time on Amazon

13 Friday Dec 2013

Posted by in A Gift of Time, Randomness

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A Gift of Time on Amazon

Ta-da!

It’ll be free on Saturday, December 21st and Sunday, December 22nd. If you’re happy to contribute to my coffee fund, I am, of course, delighted if you buy it. (Not to mention that purchases help way more for the Amazon algorithms that let other people see it.) But if you can’t afford it, I’m totally sympathetic to that, too. Pick it up on Saturday.

And please tell your friends! (If, you know, they might like a fast-paced, quirky, romantic ghost story.)

(x-posted on The Write Push. Which *is* lazy of me, but yeah, so it goes. It’s been a long week.)

A Gift of Time

13 Friday Dec 2013

Posted by in A Gift of Time, Randomness

≈ 4 Comments

Time Cover-9-15Natalya Latimer’s ability to see the future has been as much curse as gift. Knowing that she would someday find his dead body destroyed her relationship with her best friend and lover. But when it finally happens, nothing turns out the way she expected it to and suddenly she’s flying blind, with no gift to tell her where she’s going.

And done.

I went on an editing binge. Completely stiff from not moving for hours in a row, hungry, cranky, voice worn out from reading aloud.

But I clicked the Amazon publish button twenty minutes ago.

(Cross-posting at The Write Push)

First Time reviews

04 Monday Nov 2013

Posted by in A Gift of Time

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As an editor, I worked on somewhere between one and two hundred books. I cared about all of them. Some of them I loved. Some not so much. But I did my best to make them all as good as they could be, and then I let go.

Insecure authors, though, drove me around the bend. While I soothed them with reassuring words and compliments, inwardly I was usually thinking, “It’s a book, not a baby! Get over it!” Now I know, though, that editors are like day care workers or teachers. And authors are parents.

I’ve spent so much time on A Gift of Time. It’s not just a baby, it’s a really difficult baby. A pregnancy that involved pain and endless vomit and back-aches. Colic and allergies and ear infections. If it was a kid, it would have sensory integration disorder and temper tantrums and nightmares. Really, this baby — this baby was a pain in the ass.

I got my first feedback from readers on the end product last night. (Well, not the end product, but the current draft.) I cried. They weren’t tears of relief, exactly, but… maybe tears of gratitude? These were from reviewers on fictionpress, so not people I know, not people who are invested in not depressing me.

Two quotes:

“I know you struggled, at times, with this one, but in the end it was very well done. It is, by turns, funny, thought provoking, and suspenseful all while remaining true to character and story. I love intelligently written books, and this is one. I hope its fate is not USB purgatory, it completes the trilogy and is still a great stand alone read.”

“quite possibly one of the best stories I have ever read, published or otherwise. Thought-provoking, with a well-rounded plot and amazing details. As a frequent silent reader of this site, I’m very glad you made your characters mature, reasonable people with good sense and practicality. Plus, I love the interwoven supernatural and realistic themes.”

Like I said, I cried. I don’t even have words to express how comforted I was. And really, how very grateful I am to those two strangers who took the time to tell me that my efforts were worth something to them.

The incredibly difficult baby might, after all, grow up to be a charming, delightful adult.

Time Status

21 Sunday Jul 2013

Posted by in A Gift of Time, Randomness, Writing

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So, I finally finished what we might call the first act of A Gift of Time yesterday. Six chapters, about 25,000 words, and the story is established: background, Natalya’s gift, the history between Natalya and Colin, and most importantly, the major aspects of the plot, which involve Natalya’s precognition and a lost little girl.

Woo-hoo! So on to what we fondly call the “murky middle”–the part of the story that leads to where I know I’m going, the outline details of which consist of clear guidance like, “Stuff happens and time passes.” I actually kind of like this part of the story, because it’s where there’s the most room for surprises. Instead of trying to get things done, it’s when I expect the characters to take over and do what they do. In the case of Natalya and Colin, I expect arguments and fun, some movement toward romance, heat in unexpected glances and most importantly, a gradual pulling together as they work towards rescuing a hurt child.

All of that is great. I’m happy with it and it’s good news.

But–why is there always a but?–I went back and re-read the last draft that I still have in order to see if there were any parts that I wanted to save. And damn it, damn it, damn it.

I pulled Rose out (mostly) of the latest version of the story. I realized that one of the things that I was not satisfied with in A Gift of Thought was that writing from a ghost’s point-of-view is limiting. Dillon’s sections sometimes feel slow to me because he can’t talk to people, he can’t act, he’s limited to watching. And a watchful point-of-view is hard to write and hard to make interesting. So I cut Rose. But re-reading the draft that I haven’t looked at in months made me go “ARGH!” and want to pull my hair out because Rose is awesome.

I should learn from this to stop editing myself, at least until I’m done. Really, it’s depressing to go back to a version that I tossed and declare it good. But here’s a little angelic Rose for a Sunday afternoon read. (It won’t be in the final book most likely, but don’t read if you hate all spoilers. Also, it’s first draft, unedited, ya-da-da-da.)

*****
Rose really hoped the sheriff wasn’t counting on her angelic nature to do him much good. She’d tried telling Akira that with no wings, no halo, and no harp, she couldn’t possibly be an angel. “Mmm-hmm,” Akira had murmured. “So why exactly are you babbling about hospitals and safe places in the middle of the night?”

Rose hadn’t had a good answer.

Natalya, though, said, “Pfft.”

Rose approved.

“So far our angelic assistance has consisted of vague presentiments of danger. I’m gonna want something a lot more concrete before I consider that useful,” Natalya snapped before stilling. Glancing around warily, she added, “Um, Rose? Are you here?”

“Yep,” Rose replied, laughing. “Don’t worry, I don’t mind. I can’t say as useful has ever been much in my nature.”

Natalya looked at Colin questioningly.

He shrugged and shook his head. “I don’t hear her. Did Akira call you earlier?”

Rose pursed her mouth. She leaned down, as close to Colin as she could get without letting her ghostly energy move through him and yelled in his ear. “I’m right here.”

Colin rubbed his ear as a faint frown creased his forehead. “Or maybe…” He tilted his head slightly, turning it up.

Rose tried again.

“Almost,” Colin murmured. He glanced back at Natalya. “Or I could be imagining it.”

Rose wrinkled her nose. She’d thought last night that Colin had heard her pretty clearly, much more so than most people did. Maybe that was because he’d just died. Maybe being a spirit, even if only briefly, had left him more perceptive than usual. But if so, it had been only temporary.

“I can’t believe I’m doing this,” Natalya muttered, before saying, in a louder voice, “If you’re here, Rose, can you give us a sign?”

“Help Wanted?” Colin suggested.

Natalya’s lips twitched, but she didn’t smile. “Trespassers will be shot?” she offered instead.

“Now how angelic would that be?” Colin drawled, his grey eyes alight with amusement.

Rose looked from one to the other, her lips curving up. She couldn’t read minds and she didn’t know the sheriff well, but she could tell that his thoughts were not angelic. Good for him, she thought. Life was meant to be lived after all and she’d always enjoyed a good flirtation herself.

“Dillon can send text messages,” Natalya told Colin. “If Rose can do the same, maybe she’ll let us know what she wants us to do now.”

“Oh, that’s so hard,” Rose protested. She’d tried, she had, but she’d never succeeding in replicating Dillon’s skill at controlling cell phones.

Still, Natalya had only asked for a sign. Maybe Rose could manage some other ghostly feat? She was good at switching channels on the television, but that wouldn’t work while they were outside. They wouldn’t notice unless the little girl came out and complained, and she didn’t seem like the complaining type.

With a sigh, Rose stepped away from Colin and into Natalya. Standing on top of her, her legs lost in Natalya’s body, she tried to think of the worst, saddest, bleakest thoughts she could.

It took her a minute. Death, the obvious tragic thought, just didn’t scare her anymore. Not hers or anyone else’s. Sure, it would have been sad if the little girl died, but she probably had a nice granny waiting for her through the passageway, and Colin, why he’d practically been looking forward to seeing his parents again. No, death wasn’t scary.

Loneliness, though, that had power. Rose imagined herself still tied to her house, but without Henry, without the boys in the backyard, without Dillon or Akira or Zane, without music or television or visitors.

Natalya shivered, tugging the light cardigan sweater she wore closed, and tucking one hand into a fist by her neck.

“Do you hear anything?” she asked Colin.

He shook his head. “Not a word.”

“Huh,” she said. “Well, maybe she’s not here.”

Annoyed, Rose tried harder, concentrating on the thought of a completely silent, completely empty world. Why, it was such a miserable idea that she almost wanted to cry herself. Natalya couldn’t possibly miss that.

Natalya shivered again, wrapping her other arm around her body in a tight hug.

“Weather’s supposed to change tonight,” Colin remarked. “Cold front coming in.”

Rose stamped her foot in frustration. “Cold front? I’m not a cold front! You asked for a sign. I gave you one.”

Natalya stood. “It’s lucky we’ve had warm weather for the past few days. And dry, too. If there’s rain tonight and the temperature falls much more—well, it’s good that you found her when you did.”

Colin rose to his feet as well, standing on the step below Natalya so their eyes were level. “So no angelic assistance, huh?”

“My phone’s not ringing.”

Colin slipped his phone out of his pocket and thumbed it on, glancing at the screen. “Nothing on mine, either.”

Natalya dipped her head in acknowledgement. “If Rose is here, she doesn’t seem to have anything to say.”

Rose snorted, finally stepping outside of Natalya. “I’ve always got plenty to say. You’re just a terrible listener.”
*****

Dream

07 Tuesday May 2013

Posted by in A Gift of Time, Self-publishing, Writing

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I dreamed last night that I got a one-star review on A Gift of Ghosts. And not just a one-star review, a really mean, really hateful one-star. I’m personally a firm believer in everyone’s right to not like something and say so — the world would be bland and boring if everyone had exactly the same taste — but this review was different.

I just started to edit the first line of this post, but then I stopped myself. See, I actually think that reviews belong to the book, not the author. When Ghosts is reviewed, it’s the book that gets the review, not me. Instead of “I got,” that line should read “Ghosts got a one-star review.” I believe reviews are about the person who wrote them first, the story second, the author of the story a far distant third, and I try not to take them personally. (I wrote that originally “I don’t take them personally,” but I’m not a saint — of course there are times when a mean review lingers. But I try!)

Anyway, my opening line is actually right the way I wrote it in this context, because this hateful review was me. It was me being mean to me. And I realized it even before I woke up. (I admit, I did go check Amazon just to make sure I hadn’t found it while half-asleep and imagine that I was dreaming it, but no surprise, it wasn’t there.) Nobody is meaner to me than I am.

So… new plan for today. Not continuing rewriting Time from scratch — or giving up entirely, which was where I was at yesterday — but figuring out how to keep the parts I like of old Time, while resolving the plot holes that were giving me a nagging itch of incompetence.

The worst part — really, the only negative part of self-publishing in my experience — is that there is no one around to save me from myself, for both good and bad. No one to say, “Yes, you’re right, this isn’t working,” and toss out some suggestions for fixes but equally, no one to say, “No, you’re wrong, stop trying to re-invent the wheel and just have fun.”

Dropout

03 Friday May 2013

Posted by in A Gift of Time, Personal, Thought, Writing

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Right about now, minus one year, I dropped out of graduate school. If I’d stayed, and stayed on track, I’d be graduating soon, maybe even this weekend. I’m trying to decide if I have regrets. I sort of think the fact that I’d rather go drink a glass of wine and watch Doctor Who then sit with this feeling means that I do, at least a few.

Ostensibly, I dropped out of school to become a writer. Really, I quit because it was increasingly clear to me that I wasn’t healthy enough to be the person on the professional side of the counseling relationship. If it hadn’t been such an incredibly difficult year, filled with loss and pain, I think I would have managed, but in the long run, I don’t think it would have been good for me. The more into it I got, the more I felt like I was wearing a mask and that the mask was part of the job description.

I’m not sure being a writer is going to work out for me either, though. I know how to earn a living as a writer: write fast, write what you think people want to read, write and let go. Write to sell, basically, and produce as much as possible as quickly as possible. It’s basic math. Instead I’ve spent the past year kicking around A Gift of Time, writing and revising and thinking and revising some more and thinking some more. There is no possible way to become a successful writer if I spend a year working on one project and at the end of the year toss everything and start over. (Oh, by the way, I started Time over again this week. Ha. Back to the beginning.)

On the other hand, I felt really pleased to be starting Time over. Thought — well, I had promised to deliver Thought by June 2012 and so I did. And I love parts of it, just the way I love parts of Time. But I also think that it’s not nearly as good a book as I’m capable of. I learned a lot writing it. I worked on action scenes and pace, movement from place to place, descriptions, dramatic tension. But it was never all that clear whose story it was: Dillon’s or Sylvie’s or Lucas’s. I think Lucas is a better character in my head than he is on the page, and I wish I’d had sections in his POV to get him down better. Honestly, Lucas is probably the truly most important character — he’s the one who has the clearest goals — and he’s not nearly as good as he ought to be. The ending should have been his ending, as much as Dillon’s and Sylvie’s and it just wasn’t.

I could persevere with Time. I’ve been doing that for six months. I’m actually at 35,000 words, which is a solid chunk of book. And if I was going to earn a living as a writer, that’s probably what I ought to do: write, write, write, finish it off, accept the fact that it’s not as good as it could be, and move on. But I just can’t do it. I’d rather not earn my living as a writer, but love what I’m writing. Love and be proud of. I want to someday re-read Time and think, ‘oh, I amuse myself’ with a cheerful glow of contentment, the way I do when I re-read some of my best fanfics. That means starting over. That means being profoundly impractical about the hour-per-product investment of time.

I don’t know that dropping out of graduate school was impractical — maybe not nearly as impractical as quitting my editing job was in the first place. But a year later, I don’t seem to have figured out anything at all about my life and how I intend to make it work. Except maybe that doing work that I’m proud of and that I love is more important to me than my long-term retirement planning? Which is a nice thought, of course, but it’s not going to pay the mortgage when I run out of savings.

Meanwhile…back to Time. The nicest thing about starting over is that after a year with these characters, I really know them. I spent six months fighting Natalya’s propensity to be sarcastic and now I’ve given up. She’s the kind of sarcastic person who can usually keep her mouth shut, which is why Akira thinks she’s so serene and sweet, but Akira doesn’t know her insides the way I do.

Motivations

18 Monday Mar 2013

Posted by in A Gift of Time, Anxiety

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The dog is watching me pack. Every time I stop moving, she tries to climb into my lap. She has an opinion about what is happening, and it is very low. Her worried look would be charming if it wasn’t so very worried.

In un-related frustration, writing about a character who knows the future in the same book as a character who has various angelic abilities is somewhat maddening. I’m halfway through and continually stumped by the “well, wouldn’t she know that?” and the “couldn’t she handle that?” type questions. But I’m bringing my iPad keyboard with me because even at my current rate of eking out a few sentences at a time, I really love Nat and I don’t want to leave her behind for ten whole days.

Akira is cautious. Sylvie is a planner. But Natalya is orderly. And having her order messed up is stressing her out. In the sense that all the characters I write are really just parts of me, I’m pretty clearly working out my anxiety issues on paper. (Um, pixels.) But that said, there’s something about what’s happening with Natalya right now — in my head, anyway, if not quite in the pixels yet — that is just plain fun. A long time ago, I had a bumper sticker on my car, selected by R, that read “Not another learning experience!” Nat is having learning experiences and she doesn’t like it. But they’re good for her and she’ll wind up better off in the long run, so it’s okay, and meanwhile, I get to feel both sympathetic and amused.

I’ve already planned out Grace’s story (more or less) so I know it’s not going to have anything to do with anxiety. Grace is not the anxious-type. But eventually I’m going to give an HEA to a character who has full-fledged panic attacks. Maybe I’ll write…oh, no, I won’t. I was going to say that I’d write the first agoraphobic romance, but I’ve actually seen one before. It’s erotica, and I haven’t read it, but for fellow agoraphobes, Escorted, by Claire Kent features an agoraphobic hero. (I think, anyway.)

Moving on, back to the packing. Or maybe back to eking out another sentence or two. It would be convenient for me to be able to post my latest chapter to fictionpress tonight, so that it’s easily accessible from my iPad tomorrow. Hmm, good motivation.

Tactical mistake

29 Tuesday Jan 2013

Posted by in A Gift of Time, Writing

≈ 3 Comments

I made a huge mistake last week. Time was going well. I knew what was supposed to happen and it was happening on plan.

Why, why, why did I go back to the beginning?

Actually I do know the answer. I finally figured out how Nat’s gift works, and it’s pretty cool. It’s way more fun and interesting than it was in the beginning and it even has a touch of plausibility. I’ve been stuck all along on how it would be possible to see the future and not have the future be pre-determined. If you know what’s going to happen, doesn’t that imply that what’s going to happen is fixed? I don’t like determinism, I don’t believe in it, but a logical proof of precognition would seem to require it. But I finally managed to wrap my brain around a way that Natalya could have foresight without violating the uncertainty principle, and even managed to bring in a nice use of the observer affect. Yay, physics.

So I went back to the beginning to fix the early references to her gift.

Gah. So much easier said than done. One little tiny change and yep, I’ve spent the past five days revising Chapter 1 for the … I don’t know how many-ith time.

I really wanted to have this book written and ready for beta readers by the first week of February. Instead I might have the first chapter finalized. I keep telling myself that as long as I persist, I will get there in the end. In the long run, persistence is what matters. And it’ll be a better book because of all this. But I am seriously missing writing fan fiction where if something didn’t work, a new episode would change everything anyway.