Tag: blogging

Straight To the Source, IWSG

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I’ve been emailing a lot of book bloggers asking if they’d review my book. Since my current marketing budget is a whopping $0.00 (unemployed for 3 months, remember?) the options to get Better Than This out there is limited, but I HAVE gotten a lot of positive responses. 😊 Actually, I’ve gotten more responses than I thought which is 1) shocking and 2) extremely shocking since I didn’t get the same reaction when I did this for Arizal Wars. I don’t know if it’s the genre or the story or what but people are ACTUALLY EMAILING ME BACK which means I have to be doing something right—right?

Part of it makes me nervous. I’m asking people—people I’ve never met—to look at something from my brain and rate it. Rate it on the internet for EVERYONE to see. When I think of it this way, I shake my head and say no, no, no and ridicule myself for imagining something so scary. (I try not to do this.) Instead, I try to think of it as the humble beginning to building my (hopefully loyal and supportive) fanbase. That sounds way better.

Maybe once the paychecks start rolling in or I win the lottery or become the Duchess of Sussex, I’ll do one of those professional marketing tour things. They make sense and sound like a good strategy, but I planned three releases this year on a non-existent budget, so I’m going straight to the source. Reaching out to the readers directly because 1) it is literally FREE and 2) cultivating an authentic fanbase sounds like the first block in any successful author platform. 🙂

Now that that’s decided, onto the optional IWSG Question!

What’s harder for you to come up with, book titles or character names?

I don’t really come up with either—they’re just in my head. It’s like I look to my muse and she goes, “oh, you need that information now?” and boom. I have it. But, I think it takes longer for her to hand me the book titles. On average 😊

Insecure Writer’s Support Group (IWSG) is a monthly blog hop for writers at all levels to share their fears and insecurities in a safe and encouraging place. Please drop by and say hi to Alex Cavanaugh who started this nifty concept in bringing us all together.

Seeking Brain Cells

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I haven’t written a lot this week. It may be because now that I‘m at the end of the first draft, it means going back to the beginning and really putting the thinking cap on. Before, it was just write to write. To get it all down so I’d have the story outlined and then it could Frankenstein itself alive. With a moving corpse, at least you have a place to start. But now I have to go back and start having it all make sense. Everything is basically there, but now it’s time to color it in, to take the blurry and sharpen the focus. To put a top hat on my cadaver and teach it to dance with Gene Wilder, so to speak. Okay. Maybe that’s a bad analogy, but going back to the second draft is sometimes harder than the first. Because now you really have to start making it better. And, I don’t know… maybe I don’t have enough brain cells to make it better. Like this post, for instance. I’m writing it on notebook paper at my job when I’m technically supposed to be working. It’s all chicken-scratchy with letters that aren’t really letters and it’s all pouring out of me, fueled by the free coffee from the break-room that I simply *must* enjoy. But when I go home and type this up, I’ll have to take an extra second and make sure everything written is like, coherent. Most of it is rambling, I know. But I still want it to make sense. So you’re not like “what the hell? I’m un-following her because she’s a bag of crazy tarts.”

And I am.

Anyway, back to the point—I haven’t written much this week because Hollywood keeps stealing my focus with Captain American and movies with Christan Bale. It’s like they sense my defenses are down and I’m looking for a reason not to use my brain cells. Alright. If I *have * to watch the first forty minutes of Captain America to see how he’s transformed from skinny geeky non-soldier to America’s finest specimen, I guess it’s not that big a deal. But while my brain thanks me for taking a few days off, my characters shake their heads in disappointment. You’re ditching us so you can be mindlessly entertained? Yes, yes I am.

I’ll get back to it again this weekend. Maybe tomorrow or next Tuesday. I’m not worried. I can only fall off the wagon for a few days at a time. After that, I get the familiar urges and start scratching again, my fingers itching for the feel of a keyboard.

Thank God writing is legal.

Blogs start somewhere. Today it was fifteen minutes when no one was looking. And I just didn't give a shit.

Blogs start somewhere. Today it was fifteen minutes when no one was looking. And I just didn’t give a shit.

Also, it’s Batman’s birthday today. Happy 2-8 you Caped Crusader.

Gotham loves you.

And so do I 🙂

Can you find Batman?

Can you find Batman?