Author: Moriah

A professional milestone

Moriah

It may or may not be common knowledge that, under my real name, I run B10 Mediaworx, an author services / digital formatting company, which I’ve been doing for the past … mmm … four years. I think. Anyway, before that, I was an at-home medical transcriptionist for six years. I haven’t worked out of doors in ten years.

Well, doing this with babies/toddlers isn’t easy, let me tell you, but once they started going to school, my work life got a lot more productive. And it was so blessedly QUIET. I love(d) working at home. Free and breezy. But a couple of years ago, I found I had a lot more work to do AND I was slacking on the internet during the quiet time. So I started going to the UMKC library on Sundays to work, because they’re open until 11:00pm. AND it was a hassle getting a password for the internet, which I declined to do, because I didn’t WANT to be on the internet. One problem: They aren’t open every Sunday. Well, okay, I could work around that.

Until I couldn’t.

In November, we found out my husband’s employer was closing its Kansas City offices and sending its employees home to telecommute. Talk about a life change. And I do not do well with change. Of any sort. Even good ones. (Don’t come near me for two weeks after I’ve moved into a new house. Just don’t.)

For reasons I don’t know, Sunday, I was cruising Craigslist for office space. I mean, that’s not what I started out looking for. But I found this awesome deal for a little hole-in-the-wall above an old store in an old section of Liberty, Missouri. And it happens to be kitty-corner to the perfect bookstore. (Which is still perfect and I see a whole lot of other people are just discovering the concept and thinking they were original. Heh.) I emailed, as per protocol, but heard nothing. My husband had Monday off and said, “Well, why don’t we go up there and see what we can see?” Well, why not, indeed. I took my checkbook, just in case.

An hour later, I had an office. 140 ft2 of rehabbed historical building on Liberty Square, across from the courthouse, down the street from Jesse James Bank Museum, with a door and a lock and, most importantly, NO BOSS.

Today, I started moving in.

And I am ridiculously giddy.

Back to blogging, maybe

Moriah
  • Dunham‘s wrapping up and going into production, which means I’m right on track for my July 4 release date.
  • I have the attention span of a gnat, and I’ve always thought/spoken in bullet-point lists. It just got worse since I fell in love with Twitter oh so long ago. 140 characters is just about perfect.
  • I had a midlife crisis recently when I turned 45, realized I might not actually die young like a lot of people in my family do, AND realized I’d done everything I intended to do and that Dunham is the culmination. It’s the book I’ve worked on sporadically since I caught the idea in 1990 and had no idea what to do with it. That may have been a miscalculation.
  • In terms of the publishing world, I’ve said all I had to say. If I were inclined to told-you-so’s, I’d be RTing my ancient blog posts all the freaking time. Welcome to my 5-year-old epiphanies, Publishing. You’re still getting it oh! so wrong, but I’m too tired to yell at you.
  • I’ve always appreciated good craftsmanship, whatever it is. I have occasionally featured artists on my blog before whose work I like because I think it’s important to tell a craftsman when you like his work.
  • Lately I’ve taken to Pinterest and Tumblr just for pretty pictures. I’m trying to find my Zen and it seems that pretty pictures and well-done crafts do that.

raspberries

  • I need to get my house in order. Declutter. Shred old tax documents. Craigslist the shit out of my house, beginning with paper books and CDs.
  • The things I feel strongly about and would like to rant about here include religion and politics, and you know what? I’m actually not interested in getting on a soapbox on my blog. That’s what my books are for.
  • Romancelandia (which is a nanoscopic part of romance readers) (which I found out at RT), is too fraught with infighting and contrary agendas and politicization and passive-aggressive hostility and cowardice and trolling disguised as activism / education. Not interested in getting into that, either. I like what I like and fuck you if you think I’m privileged / ignorant / stupid / still-under-the-thrall-of-the-patriarchy, and need to be protected from my deplorable taste in literature. And fuck you 60 times over if you don’t think “IT” (whatever “IT” is) should be written and/or read. GTFO of my entertainment. (That’ll land me on a few more badly-behaving-authors lists and garner some grudge-ratings and hate-readings, to which I say, if someone has the time to do that, they are very privileged to have that much time on their hands.) Now I have nothing more to say on that topic.

And so. This blog’s probably going to look like a Tumblr for a little while because a) I like to share things I find beautiful / useful / funny, b) I’m short on words right now, and c) I want to share my Zen as I stumble my way around life post-bucket-list to find it.

The making of Dunham

Moriah

And so begins a post (or series of them) (you know how wishy-washy I am) on Dunham, the privateer-heroine and pirate-hero Revolutionary War swashbuckler, which, for those of you not following the serial, will be available for sale July 4, 2013.

To kick it off, here’s the final cover for the official book:

dunham-fullflat-web

I struggled with the question of whether to go with a slightly modified version of the serial’s cover to deal with familiarity to those who’ve followed the story all year (yes, almost a year!). But in the end, I decided not to. Why? Several reasons.

1. At and during the RT Booklovers convention two weeks ago in Kansas City, I had a few marketing epiphanies courtesy of Tracey Reid (but most of which I can’t articulate yet, which is why I haven’t written about it).

2. My attempt at articulating this epiphany to my friend Melissa Blue brought forth an issue I hadn’t thought about: my books’ covers. ALL OF THEM. The fact that they needed a serious makeover. And that it must be done before Dunham was released to take advantage of the marketing wave.

3. So I did that. The Proviso, Stay, Magdalene, and “Twenty-dollar Rag” have new covers. In a different post, I’ll talk about the evolution of those, as I did before, long ago when I was just starting out.

bookcovers-banner

4. After I had done that, I realized that the variation of the serial cover I had made could not conform to the format I’d made for the previous titles, so I scrapped it and redid it from scratch.

I also decided to remove the series tag from Dunham and, subsequently, book 5, which is a post-apocalypse polyandry tale (as yet not officially titled). That, too, was for a reason: people see a series number and assume that the series has an overall arc and that book X is NEXT in the chronology. It makes them less inclined to pick it up because who wants to start something in the middle of a series? Even so, the four contemporary ones above, while perfectly able to be read alone, are, in fact, chronological, and so the series tag is appropriate.

Yet I needed the cover of Dunham to conform with the first four while still being separate. You will also notice that the featured couple is on the back instead of the front. Why was this? Because Dunham is as much epic adventure as it is romance, I want to capture male readers. There are ships involved and thus, naval battles.[1]

And so we have a cover that reflects the pattern of the four contemporary covers, but is also separate.

People DO judge a book by its cover because marketing has evolved so much that people can tell exactly what’s in it. Well. Maybe not exactly. But close enough to the target market to do the job.

____________

[1] I have done as well as I could regarding ship details and battles involving tall ships, which, I will have you know, is very difficult to come by for this very narrow window of time. It was a time of shipbuilding upheaval and drastic changes in naval warfare that began somewhere around 1760 and ended right around 1798, from which evolved the zenith of tall ship building and warfare, on display at the Battle of Trafalgar in 1805. In short, a LOT of significant things happened in shipbuilding technology and naval warfare between 1780 and 1805.

Veni, vidi, vici.

Moriah

stfu_lg1I had several ideas for this post’s title:

“I’m not one of you.”
“Repeating myself”
“Tired of the sound of my own voice”
“Being silent”
“Serial starter”

Anyway, all of them are pertinent to my point, but they all mean different things. I’ll take them one by one.

“I’m not one of you.”

In the cult of self-publishing, the loudest voices are the ones who write fast and put out an oeuvre faster than I can switch channels on the TV. They are the ones who say such things as:

“If you’re not writing, you’re not a writer.”
“If you want to make any money at this, you have to write X number of words per day.”
“Writing is a business.”
“You must outline to write a decent book.”

and my personal favorite,

“Writers are lazy,” which post I would link to, but it has since been pulled. (Here’s the rebuttal.)

It’s all bullshit. Rather, the fact that all writers must follow these instructions as gospel is bullshit. The fact is, writers write for a whole host of reasons, only one of which is to make their works commodities. I provide a commodity service. I’m not in the business of writing novels to make them commodities too.

Commodities are soulless, interchangeable widgets, and I don’t believe that books are commodities at all. I also don’t believe that writing fast makes a book soulless. I simply can’t write that fast and put the time and thought into them that I do.

So, to you incessant voices in self-publishing and those of you who were trained as midlist authors to keep putting product out there, I’m not one of you.

Which leads me to my second point:

“Repeating myself”

I am not on the vanguard of self-publishing. Dan Poynter is. Aaron Shepard is. Morris Rosenthal is. April Hamilton is. They are mostly nonfiction writers and they speak to writers of niche nonfiction. For instance, Dan started out publishing parachuting and skydiving treatises.

I am, however, on the vanguard of self-publishing fiction, along with Ann Somerville and others in niche genres. I took a lot of heat for it, too. The loudest voices in self-publishing now were once rabid anti-self-publishers and some of them attacked me personally both publicly and in email for it. Hey. Assholes. I blazed your trail. You’re welcome.

(Oh, is that arrogant? Yeah, I know. I’m a woman. I’m not supposed to be arrogant. Suck it.)

I’ve said all I want to say, I’m noticing repetitious themes in my writing that annoy me, and I’ve become

“tired of the sound of my own voice.”

You may have noticed that, other than posting Dunham chapters, I haven’t blogged a lot.

“Being silent”

I seek silence like water seeks the ocean. You wouldn’t know it to meet me at a cocktail party, conference, or convention, but I’m an introvert. (Please see “Caring for your introvert” and “Maker’s Schedule, Manager’s Schedule.”)

“Serial starter”

I like to start projects. I rarely finish them. The ones I finish, I really, really care about. And then I abandon them. Because I’m bored with that.

“Veni, vidi, vici.”

You know where I’m going with this by now. For decades, I have wanted to be a published author. Like, since I was 15, which is exactly three decades. It may have been earlier, when I was around 10 and wanted to submit something to one of the Reader’s Digest quip sidebars. I knew how to follow instructions. My submission wasn’t published. But by the time I was 15, I had found out a) how to submit to Harlequin, b) what to submit to Harlequin, c) how many words I had to write to submit to Harlequin (Presents line, in case you were wondering), and d) about how much a Harlequin advance was and how much in royalties I could expect and when (answer: zero, which was okay with me at the time).

Along the way I have had disappointments and obstacles and tangential projects and replacement projects, all while going to school, earning a living being, basically, an administrative handyman because I had an unbelievable skillset and a degree. You know, living life as a marginally normal person. There was always something odd about me. Everybody knew it but me, until I finally got a clue by working in a very dysfunctional place.

So along comes 2007 and, after 7 or 10 or however many years when I had given up writing totally, out pops this doorstopper. And so I published it. And so I had MOAR STORIES TO TELL!!! So I did that. And here we are, five years later and I’m about to publish book 4 in a planned 5-book series, and I realized this morning…I’m done. I did it. I did what I wanted to do, which was to get my stories out on paper and to the public.

I have no more stories. I will write book 5, but it’ll be a while, and I will likely go dark for that time, but I owe those fans who have been slowly accumulating and who love the world I built.

The difference this time, in seeing the light at the end of this obsession’s tunnel, is that for the first time in my life I have no overarching “This is what I want to do.” I’ve done it. I quit writing once and had nothing to fill that creative void so I made a cross-stitch design company and permanently killed my love for my favorite hobby. But always, getting a book published was my overarching life goal–because I thought it would take my entire life to do so. Writing was my life’s work and I never thought I’d run out of stories to tell.

But I have, and now it’s time to move on.

So…where do I go from here?

I dunno, but I’m gonna read a lot of books while I try to figure it out.