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Category: My Books

The novels I’ve written and/or the characters in them.

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Greetings and salutations, kiddies. One of the many reasons I haven't got Mary Anne's E-mail Enticement into paperback form yet (besides being an enormous slacker) is a little project she assigned me.

It seems the newest thing in publishing is the book trailer - essentially a short video to whet your appetite for a book. It's much like a movie trailer, except more of a pain in the gluteus maximus because you don't have any video footage to begin with and you do them for authors who just looooove words, words, and more words.

At any rate, with much fury, frustration, and cursing with Windows Movie Maker, I have finally completed Quacking Alone's very first book trailer.

Behold, A Faerie Fated Forever, the book trailer:

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A while back, shortly after the death of the late, great Paul Harvey, I blogged about his catchphrase - "the rest of the story." As that blog post advocated, the rest of the story can be a writer's best friend.  This post is a follow-up to that one because even the rest of the story has a flip side.  That flip side can be the rest of your story.

A Faerie Fated Forever was inspired by my muse and I discovering the famous Clan McLeod legend from the Isle of Skye in Scotland.  That clan has a faerie flag and shares blood with the wee folk thanks to a handfast marriage between a former laird and a faerie princess. After a year and a day the faerie had to return home, leaving behind the laird and their infant son.  The faerie returned to comfort her son one evening when music from a party drew his nurses away.  Left alone for the first time, the baby cried and the faerie mother soothed her son by wrapping  him in a special cloth.  The swaddling cloth was a faerie flag that could be used 3 times to save the clan. 

Well, that's a great legend, but my muse had to finish it - to find the rest of the story.  What happened to the laird who let his faerie bride leave without a fight or a fine bargaining session with the King of the Faeries?  Why didn't he at least try to renegotiate his deal with the King?  And later, surely the then-single laird married.  Let's say, he contracted a marriage because the clan coffers were dwindling.  How sad his forsaken faerie princess would have been on the laird's wedding day!  And would her father, the powerful King of the Faeries, just stand idly by, doing nothing at his daughter's tears?  Likely not.  Why, surely, he'd have visited the groom after the wedding and pronounced a curse on the lairds of the clan! The curse would have been aimed at making sure no future laird cast aside another beloved to wed for money or power.  It would have been a curse of love. 

And so the rest of the story of the McLeod legend became my first book in the Forever Series, A Faerie Fated Forever. 

While faeries may appear in the books at unpredictable intervals (the wee folk thrive on the unexpected, after all) the series isn't about faeries.  It's about what strong alpha males will do to secure their happily forever after.  The whole series is a flip side of the rest of the story.  Real life is too often about what women change, alter, amend or surrender in the name of love.  What do the men face?  What would we like them to face?  Wouldn't we like to see men who've had it all their way for way too long get so crazed with love that they'd surrender pride and duty and even do the thing they'd sworn never, ever to do?  Of course we would, and in the forever series, they do just that.

...continue reading "The Flip Side of The Rest of The Story"

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I've just uploaded A Sixth Sense Of Forever to Amazon's Kindle.  It will be available on Smashwords soon.  I'll probably go ahead and publish it to Lulu and Scribd, although I'm not certain.   

My talented graphic designer/computer programmer hubby did the cover, and it has deep meaning for the novel.  I think it's one of his best.   He's working to format it for CreateSpace, so it should be available in paperback on Amazon soon.

After the Amazon paperback is out, I'll upload the ebook to Lightningsource, the phenomenal ebook distribution service I'm now working with.  I hope to publish paperback versions with them soon, because they have a great network of retail partners for ebooks and paperbacks.  Unfortunately, there are some additional costs for publishing paperbacks through LS - namely, the purchase of ISBN numbers.  A block of 10 costs about $250-$300 and in today's economy with a downsized household and an eldest about to start college - that expense will just have to wait. 

But the book is on the way, so keep your eyes open!  It is Boz's story, and I think everyone who read Faerie and Golden wants to see how Boz handles his courtship.  Here's a hint - The Duke of Sedgewick gets struck harder than Nial or Colt.  But then, he had it coming.  

Check out Sixth Sense  and let me know what you think!

UPDATE 08/09/2009 10:00 P.M. from angryoldfatman:

A Sixth Sense Forever is already available for purchase on Kindle, though the page is only partially updated (e.g., no description yet). I have linked to it from the book list page and changed all mentions of the title in this blog post to point to the book itself. The sidebar has also been updated.

Other links will be added to the list as Sixth Sense becomes available via the other sales channels Mary Anne mentioned.

Happy reading!

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I'm currently in the midst of a  pre-publication edit of A Sixth Sense Of Forever.  Yeah, Boz's story.  He played prominent roles in Faerie and Golden as the friend who kept his cool in the midst of Nial's and Colt's chaotic adventures.  So he's got it coming and he gets it - over the top and then some. 

In the course of this edit, given the current state of the world, the job market and everything, I keep thinking - what if we could edit our lives?  Think of the sections you could go back and rewrite.  You could take back the phrase "I quit" or you could say it instead of saying "I'll accept that."  You could respond differently to a job review or rewind all the way back to college and major in something different.  You could keep the one that got away or re-script a fight or nasty e-mail exchange with your spouse so that the words you can never take back get taken back.  So wouldn't it be great to get a shot at editing your life?

Well, there's a problem with that.  Like the old cliche about woman's work, editing is never done.  What book is ever the absolute best it can be in the mind of its greatest advocate and worst critic - the writer?   If Shakespeare had another shot at Romeo and Juliet  or if Margaret Mitchell could revise Gone With The Wind would they change anything?  As a writer who knows how I'd answer that question, I'm betting they'd find a hundred or more things they'd revise in what legions of readers find to be great work.  Because if you ask any author whether this book or that play is the absolute best it can be, the answer is always going to be - no, I can make it better.

With this edit of  Sixth Sense I find that the big bones of the story stand up well.  It's the little details I'm revising....a word here, a phrase there, rewriting a description or changing a comparison.  Mostly, as is generally the case, I find I can tighten up the language to make the story flow along faster and smoother.   The numerous places where I can tighten dialogue, edit lines and revise scenes are likely products of my creative process.  When I sit down to write something new, I make no effort to contain or control - I follow my muse where she leads.  With the hindsight of editing, I can make muse's meanderings make sense.

I suspect that all writers are prone to editing, but I don't know if they're as prone as I am.  I never like to post anything or send it to anyone without looking at it one more time.  If I got a call from an editor or agent tomorrow saying they'd read the posted free samples of Brotherly or Faerie and wanted to read the fulls, I'd make changes.  If they said they'd read the fulls and needed a word copy to present to a board or to revise themselves - I'd still make changes.  I expect that if they published the book and I passed it on a bookstore shelf somewhere I could leaf through it and yes, find things I'd like to change.  I wonder if my favorite writers - Julia Quinn and Johanna Lindsey - pick up one of their old volumes, flip through it and think - Boy, I could do that so much better today.   

The bottom line of the editing process is that as long as I'm growing and changing, as long as I'm working and improving my craft, then I'll see changes I could make to improve any past project.  If I didn't see those changes it would mean I'd stopped growing and learning and improving.  And that would be a very, very bad thing.

It's too bad that we don't get a chance to edit our real life stories to make them flow more smoothly.  Maybe that's because the bumps and bruises, the miscalculations and mistakes give us the experience that got us to today.  And maybe, where we are today is where we're meant to be right now, at this moment. 

We can't edit our pasts, but we can use that editor's eye to change our futures.  We need to pull out the story of our yesterdays and see the places we'd like to re-write and revise and understand the spots we'd like to alter.  We can't change yesterday's mistakes but we can refuse to bring the past into tomorrow.

Today is Volume I.  Tomorrow is the sequel.

Published on

To query or not to query, that is the question.

I stay about a project ahead. So right now, I'm doing a final, pre-publication edit on Boz's story, the third in my forever series - A Sixth Sense Of Forever.  My talented hubby, the graphic design guru, is working on the cover.  We hope to have it up and out very soon. 

I started editing Sixth Sense  after I finished my just-written legal-contemporary romance, Griffin's Law.  In the olden days of yore, before the gates of freedom and the rise of the internet made self publishing financially viable, I'd be working on a query letter about now.  That means, I'd be getting out my old, faithful list of literary agents and crafting the best letter in the history of letters to try to convince them that they want, need, bloody have to read the full of my MS.   This time around, I haven't even started the query. 

So I could be, perhaps should be, composing a letter to sell my MS to agents in the hope that one can sell it to a publisher.  The publisher would take a year or more to turn it into a book and then try to sell the book to Barnes & Noble, Wal Mart, Books a Million, etc.  If all of that succeeded, then the book might eventually, someday, be sitting on a shelf, trying to lure you -  all of you -- to put it in their basket and take it to the register.

Today, I can skip all the steps and put it out there for you to read and hopefully buy and more hopefully enjoy.  And it's not just little old me lured by the possibilities of getting it out there fast.  I understand that the Vonnegut estate is about to put the late, great literary geniuses' final work, short stories, out as an ebook first.  If the goal is to get the work in the reader's hands, ebooks do it a lot faster.

I love writing.  In my dream world, I'd get up every day and sit before my computer and write.  When reality and a day job don't intervene, I'm a pretty prolific writer.  I don't love trying to sell myself to an agent.  I don't look forward to getting a query letter together and getting it out there so that eventually agents can request material.  I'd then spend weeks and weeks, sometimes months, and in the case of my last contact with an agent - over a year and a half - waiting to get the letter that says thanks, but no thanks.  Oh, I suppose I at least progressed in the process.  My latter letters all generally said, you're a good writer, but....  Yeah, having folks who work with so many excellent writers say you can write is a compliment.  And I do and did appreciate it.  But it's a back-handed compliment at best - you're good, you're just not good enough for me and I've decided you're not good enough for publishers or the American public.

Self publishing is the ultimate act of democracy.  Am I good enough for the American public?  Will you enjoy the stories I so enjoyed writing?  Will you get my over-the-top style and understand it's a little bit "I wish men in love acted that way" and a little bit tongue in cheek?  Maybe or maybe not, but I don't have to convince a bunch of folks in the middle that I'm good enough to have the opportunity.  America is the land of opportunity and I can put it out there and let you decide. 

...continue reading "To Query Or Not To Query?"

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Mary Anne's husband here again with a brief announcement: A Golden Forever, the second book in Mary Anne's Forever series, is now available in paperback from CreateSpace. It will eventually arrive on Amazon.com; when it does, I will provide a link to it on the book list page.

In the meantime, enjoy my wife's blog entry about Michael Jackson the romance novelist below. AOFM, a.k.a. Hubby, out.

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Published on 2 Comments on If Michael Jackson Wrote Romance Novels…

Okay, get your mind off of all the weirdness of MJ's latter years.  As for the criminal charges, don't go there.  Think about the music and the performances.  Get yourself in that mind space.  Maybe it'll help if you squeal "Ooh" and "I'm Bad" three or four times.  Okay, focused now? 

 His death was tragic. Having a creative force like his snuffed out so quickly, so needlessly has deprived the world of years of music and magic.  So while it's certainly his tragedy, his family's tragedy, it's also a loss for everyone who ever turned on a radio or downloaded music.  In the wake of the sudden loss there were many retrospectives and tributes.

As one of those tributes Fox re-broadcast the first American Idol finalist show of this season featuring the top 13 performing Michael Jackson songs.  I watch American Idol and enjoy seeing the group working and growing into music professionals.  It's always fun to see someone working to make their dream come true.  But I'd forgotten about that MJ show because, at the time, it was just another show.  Too bad it wasn't done later in the season with the gloved one giving the finalists performance critiques and suggestions. 

My favorite contestant of this past season was Adam Lambert.  We all recall that he finished second.  My only explanation for that is that Kris Allen was everyman -- the one more like the average American watching on the sofa at home.  Adam has too much creative force to be contained or labeled in any one genre or tradition.  Adam will never be anyone's everyman -- but neither is Elton John and, of course, neither was Michael Jackson. 

As one of the last performances of the show, Adam Lambert did MJ's "Black or White."  Adam nailed it, standing out from the others like Sir Elton at a High School talent contest.  His performance impressed the judges too, including Simon Cowell, the one we love to hate and hate to love.  Simon's comments made me think and inspired this post.  Simon said Adam nailed it because (and I'm paraphrasing here because I didn't watch the episode with pen in hand) - To make a MJ song work , a performer has to be totally comfortable on stage, and he has to perform the song like Michael - over the top.

Why did that resonate with me? When Adam and MJ perform, they do it over the top.  When I write romance, I write it over the top.  For a writer or performer to succeed, he or she has to do it the way it comes naturally.  If Kris Allen tried to perform MJ over the top, it wouldn't work for him at all.  It worked for Lambert because that's how his art speaks to him.  It's the same for a romance novelist.  You can only write romance over the top and have it carry the reader along if that's how the story and the characters speak to the writer.  I understand MJ's approach to music because I know it must have come as naturally to him as my stories come to me. 

...continue reading "If Michael Jackson Wrote Romance Novels…"

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Published on 1 Comment on An Ode To Daddy Dearest

Fathers are a lot like movie stars.

They cast the biggest, the broadest, the most all-encompassing shadow in the house.  They inspire, motivate, de-motivate and terrorize.  And all too often, they do it all without ever trying.  The memory that sticks in my mind from my own family features my hubby and Zack, our eldest (now 18 and about to head off to UCF to college although Mommy isn't sure how she'll like the dorm room). 

Zack, as a combat crawler at the age when he should have been toddling, had a couple of challenges.  First, his Mom worried constantly that he might be hungry.  (She still does).  Today he can just give me the look, say he loves me, and leave the table.  As a creepy crawler, he didn't have that option.  So he was a big butterball of a baby and toddling presented size challenges.  Second, his own mental make-up, even at that little age, meant he didn't want to do anything until he could succeed.  He did his combat crawling while his peers held onto furniture and took lurching little steps. 

Then one day Zack's dad was in the kitchen and Zack and Mom were in the den.  Dad started whistling and Zack jumped to his feet and ran into the kitchen, chasing the man making the merry noise.  Yeah, his Father inspired his first steps without even trying.

...continue reading "An Ode To Daddy Dearest"

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Did you know that Golden and Faerie - my books now out in paperback - are about Arts & Photography? 

It was a shock to me too.  I can only imagine how much it surprises, and perhaps appalls the highbrow artsy browsers at Amazon.  I can hear them murmuring and muttering now, one of those books in our section?  Love and lust, sex and second chances, over the top head over wonder worm heroes in love - right here with books about art?  How dare the writer post such drivel in this section!

Well, this invasion wasn't intentional.  I self published Golden and Faerie through the Amazon subsidiary, CreateSpace.  I chose that service after some research into pricing and retail channels.  With their pro plan, I can price my books reasonably, price them at numbers I'd pay for a book.  With some of the other services, by the time the initial publishers' commission got added on, and then Amazon or the retail channel commission got added on, a paperback book would be priced at $25 to $30.  Lord knows, I'd never pay that for a  paperback and wouldn't expect anyone else to either.  With CreateSpace and the pro plan, my books get automatically listed on Amazon.  I can price them well (now listed at $12.95) and everyone can still make a little money.  It's that automatic part that's caused me some trouble.

When I did the initial book listing, I paid a lot of attention to the category, genre and sub-genre. I debated pricing with my marketing-manager hubby.  What I overlooked was one small drop-down list.  It was the browse section, meaning, where books are listed for browsing on the Amazon site.  The first entry, where you'd get set if you don't change it, is Arts & Photography.  It's such a small little list compare to the rest of the data on the site.  Small and easy to overlook.  But sometimes, the small things are the big things.  Yes, I should have sweated the small stuff.

...continue reading "Sweat The Small Stuff"

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Drum roll, please! I got an actual customer review on Amazon. 

 A reader gave a brief review of A Faerie Fated Forever. She gave it 3 out of 5 stars, which ain't bad.  Yeah, 5 out of 5 would've been nice but heck, I'm pretty darned new at this whole publication business.  Besides, what has me doing cartwheels isn't the 3 stars.  It's what she said about the book.

The reader titled her review Good Read Overall.  She said she started reading and didn't put it down until the end, but thought there was a bit of over kill when he (Nial) finally decided he was in love.  First and foremost, I write to entertain.  When I pick up a book by one of my long time faves or by a new writer, I know it's a success if I have trouble putting it down.  If I pick up one and read it straight through - well, that's a home run.  Faerie entertained the reviewer.  That puts a big ole smile on my face.

The reviewer also said she thought there was a bit of "over kill" when Nial acknowledged that he'd fallen in love.  That comment only proves how smart this reviewer must be.  In Faerie as in ALL of my books, I write the love story over the top.  There's a fair amount of tongue in cheek involved in this and it's certainly not intended to reflect reality.  Anyone who has read this blog knows that I want my readers to escape reality.  And if you're going to escape this reality, why not write one that women would like to inhabit? 

...continue reading "3 Out Of 5 Ain't Bad"