Monsters! Mormons! Not necessarily synonymous!

Moriah

The cover of MONSTERS & MORMONS, in oil painting impressionist style, with two women in skirts/blouses, with knives, fighting off purple tentacles.My editor and partner, Theric Jepson, who runs Peculiar Pages alongside my running of B10 Mediaworx, made some sort of joke on Twitter (don’t remember the joke), and Wm Morris of A Motley Vision (a MoLit blog) had an idea. And the idea was to skewer the 19th-century literary tradition of using Mormons as stock villains in pulp fiction by turning the Mormons into the protagonists instead of the antagonists.

Plans were being made. I felt no compunction to submit a story to this anthology of pulp fiction because a) I don’t read pulp fiction; I read trashy romance novels aka porn for women and so b) I didn’t feel qualified to write anything for it. But then Wm posted an update on AMV saying, “I’d like to see X, Y, Z, and A, B, and C.” Well, I thought. I could do Y, Z, and B. So I did.

When I got it done and Wm liked it (Theric was not my editor this time), I had second thoughts. Considering I’m kind of, you know, responsible for its publication, I figured there would be seen some sort of “in,” or conflict of interest. Theric and I discussed it and decided I’d withdraw it, but Wm thought my withdrawing it was a bad idea. So, okay. Onward.

What has resulted is the most wonderful collection of tales of the supernatural and bizarre. Supernaturally bizarre. Or bizarrely supernatural. Whatever. Including! Get this! TWO graphic novels!

So here’s a little taste of my story, of a Mormon self-styled “nun” packing nuclear weapons powered by cold fusion to zap demons left and right.

If you like science fiction, fantasy, paranormal, zombies, werewolves, ghosts, goblins, and things that go bump in the night, go get the whole collection! It’s available in the Kindle store, but print is forthcoming in the next couple of weeks.

A story

Moriah

Uh oh I Get in Trouble

by Tax Deduction #1
(3rd grade)

Chapter 1

Uh oh I get in trouble for drawing on the walls. “[FIRST MIDDLE LAST]!” Mom yelled really loudly. “WHY DID YOU draw a little dot on the wall!” “[FIRST]!” my dad snapped. “You are not going to have chocolate chip pie for 1 month.” “Ha. Ha, ha, haaaa, ha, stinky head!”* said [Brother]. “You are not having apple juice for 3 months.”

*do not say this to your mom or dad

 

Chapter 2

Now after 2 months I am getting bored. “When is my grounding over?” I asked. “After another two months,” my mom said.

 

Chapter 3

It’s been 4 months and I am not grounded anymore. “Hurray!” I shouted.

The gatekeepers, part 2

Moriah

Venn diagramThere’s a Venn intersection of writing themes going around the blogs in the last couple of months or so that I find absolutely fascinating.

A. The “write from your heart” blog roundup:

From Smart Bitches: “So if you needed inspiration today, make art! Write something. Don’t listen to anyone who tells you romance novels aren’t art – they are to me.”

I’m going to paraphrase that from “romance novels” to “romance that do not have anything in common with what’s on the bookshelves.”

B. The write what will make you a living.

From Dear Author: “Where have all the good contemporary romance authors gone?”

Well, you can read the thread and the answer to the question is: Midlist. There are a few names that keep cropping up, but those authors can only write so fast. The consensus seems to me to be that

A∩B
What the readers will actually read.

The question going around the writing world (at least for the last 50 years) is: What do readers want?

This is the wrong question.

The right question is: What will readers read and like if presented with it?

Likewise, there’s another Venn diagram of reading themes going around a few of the same blogs.

A. The “I don’t want to read about a character who does X.”
B. The “I want to read more of Y, but publishers aren’t putting that out.”

A∩B

Early adopter rage

Moriah

[2025-07-24: Blackbird Pie plugin no longer exists, nor do the tweets. Text pulled from backups.]

Dear Berkley, I was all set to buy INDIA BLACK on my Kindle, but it was $9.99. No Effing Way.
twitter.com/#!/MoriahJovan/status/22156474088169472

Dear Big-6 Publishers, it’s not that we’re not buying books. It’s that we aren’t buying YOUR books.
twitter.com/#!/MoriahJovan/status/22157961505800192

Journal entry: February 3, 2007

Moriah

I used to be a writer.  I wrote lots of stuff.  It never got published and I gave up.  I just … stopped … one day.  Sometimes I read what I wrote and I get a charge from it, and I catch myself wondering how the author would have finished it if she had finished it.  I suppose I’ll never know.

(I started writing The Proviso in August 2007.)

How to destroy a brand in one easy (lazy) step

Moriah

So most of us DIYers out here are trying to brand ourselves. We spend our time on Twitter and Facebook and message boards and whatnot trying to build an audience and a fanbase.

Then the midlist authors come along and digitize their backlists, and everybody’s happy because they already have a brand and they’re simply supplying a product that people want. Yay.

And then there are the midlist and higher-up authors who self-publish new stuff. That’s kind of an interesting experiment. I like watching it all play out even though, well, their brand trumps my brand and I have to work harder at establishing my brand.

Thus, it should make me happy when a very well-established author self-publishes something new and it’s crap. But it doesn’t make me happy. It makes me sad.

See, one big slip, and the reader suddenly suspects that you’re not a very good writer and that your editors made you who you are, and … you’re going to throw away years of investment in your brand and your work product  just because you want to cash in on a 99c romance novella heatwave or make money off your under-the-bed manuscripts?

You insult your readers. You insult your former editors. You make a mockery of your previous publishers. And you embarrass the hell out of yourself. Do you really not know how bad you look, or do you not care?

If your intent is to destroy the brand you worked for all these years because you just have to put up that novella right now because can’t wait because you’ll miss the self-publishing train if you don’t, then you are succeeding.

And you deserve it.

P.S. If you insist on going without an editor, learn how to fucking write. If you can’t do it after all these years and titles, you’re a fraud.

The perfect bookstore: Decadence

Moriah

Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3

The perfect bookstore has a name: Decadence.

This is not another one of my bookstore-of-the-future/how-to-save-brick-and-mortar-stores posts. This is about a bookstore I dreamed up while writing The Proviso four years ago, the one that spawned the previous bookstore posts. Specifically, it’s Giselle’s bookstore, which was torched, causing her to have to reboot her life at the grand ol’ age of 30 by going to law school. (Because that’s what everybody does when they have to reboot their lives, right? Right?)

A 19th-century 3-story brick building with shops on the bottom, with cars parked in front.
In the spring and summer when the trees and flowers are in full bloom, it’s gorgeous.

This bookstore was in the River Market area of Kansas City, Missouri, and most closely resembles this building:

A brick sidewalk in front of a row of shops of 19th-century brick buildings.

Giselle describes it this way:

I owned a bookstore for seven years [ … ] I shared space with a patisserie on one side of me and a confectionery on the other. Maisy and Coco weren’t my business partners, exactly; we just figured if we knocked down our walls and unified our décor, we’d all make more money and it worked. [ … ] Decadence wasn’t a bookstore with food. It was a destination. I stocked romance novels of all kinds. Couple that with Maisy’s gourmet chocolates and wine, and Coco’s pastries, the events we put on every weekend … I was doing very well; we all were. I was never going to be independently wealthy, but I made a lot of money doing something I loved.

I’ve been percolating this post for a long time, and after many, many Twitter discussions on the relationship between independent brick-and-mortar booksellers and the romance genre (not good) versus Borders’ and Barnes & Nobles’s willingness to step in where the independent booksellers won’t (but Borders, the more romance-friendly store, went bye-bye), I decided to do yet another perfect bookstore post.

Behold, my real idea of the perfect bookstore:

A drawing of a floor plan for Giselle’s bookstore.

And I still think this combination of products and location would make some serious bank. (Add an Espresso machine in the basement … ) (A used books section on the second floor … ) (Events at lunch and on the weekends … )

UPDATE: August 18, 2015, over 4 years later …

I was re-inserting pictures that got lost in the move so a friend could link to them, so I figured I’d add a couple of notes.

  1. Since YA has become a bigger part of the market now, that section would get expanded.
  2. I’m re-editing The Proviso, and Giselle adds this to her description:

    “Wine, chocolate, sex. [ … ] We had PMS survival kits. Better than Midol. Men came in specifically for those.”

Trust me, I’d send my husband across the metro to Decadence to get me a PMS survival kit.

Writing: Ur Doin it Rong

Moriah

I saw this in an author post somewhere on the ’net:

Thinking isn’t writing.
Outlining isn’t writing.
Research isn’t writing.
Rewriting isn’t writing.

Putting pen to paper is writing.

Really.

That’s odd, because I’ve been writing in my head for years, starting circa fifth grade when I couldn’t understand the concept of an outline, but could construct a well-organized essay in my head after a great deal of reading, assimilating, and thinking. When I finally put pen to paper, the work was already done.

Get that? The hard part was not done on the paper. Ever.

Two cats fighting with the caption: “constructive feedback, ur doin it wrong”

And here I am, thirty years, innumerable essays, a gazillion blog posts, a few short stories, a novella or two, a speech or four, two screenplays and one stage play, ten novels, three agents, and a writing degree later, still constructing fairly well organized works in my head, and sometimes after much research. Not only that, but I write out of order.

So I have to put some scenes and ideas down on paper before the story can be fully realized. So what. Let’s face it: a novel is not an essay.

I do a lot of thinking.

I don’t outline as it is understood.

I research.

Then I rewrite. A lot. In my head.

And voila! A novel.

Now, I can write on spec, but I prefer not to. I prefer to take time to assimilate information, to percolate fleshed-out characters and their motives, to ask “Why?” a lot and attempt to plug all the logical fallacies myself, but it gets done.

What I find curious about such assertions is the assumption that that person’s experience is, to him, universal, and then proceeds to instruct the world at large that his way is the only way.

So. Authors. When you get stuck wandering around the ’net gathering advice and feeling guilty because you don’t write “right,” remember this: Writing, like life, is a journey, not a destination. You have to find your own way.

Whatever allows you to produce a finished product works. And why mess with what works?

Fiction takes you places

Moriah

Cover of William Golding’s LORD OF THE FLIES, with a yellow-tinted mass of jungle vegetation.A fan I tweet with regularly told me my books mess with her head and take her places she doesn’t want to go, but she goes there anyway.

I regularly hear the arguments that reading fiction can teach you empathy or give you a peek into someone else’s world. In other words, fiction is good for you. Like eating your vegetables is good for you.

Except … romance, which is porn for women. And young adult, which is too dark and dangerous.

Throughout my life at church, I’ve heard the call to seek out things (books, music, TV, etc.) which are lovely, praiseworthy, and of good report. I’ve gotten hammered for writing explicit sex and dropping the f-bomb. I’ve heard all the arguments about why fictional violence is more acceptable than fictional sex. Then there are the above-linked articles that basically say, “Protect deh wimminz anna childrinz cuz dey doan know no bettah!”

Thus, fiction is bad for you. It makes you experience things you ought not to experience.

Well … yeah. That’s the point. Imagine the following conversation:

Bishop X: “Sister Mojo, you said you wanted to confess something?”

Me: “Yes, Bishop. I killed a man and had sex with a woman yesterday.”

Bishop X: [jaw drop]

Me: “And I want to repent.”

Bishop X: “Uh … how did this all come about?”

Me: “Well, I turned on my Kindle … ” [insert confession of murder and lesbian action]

Bishop X: [steely glare] “Why are you wasting my time?”

Fiction takes you places. It’s a way to explore things you wouldn’t ordinarily explore without the risks involved in or resources needed to actually explore it. Maybe you don’t have a sparkly vampire handy.

You may or may not want to go there, but if you do want to go there (you dirty-minded perv) …

Well, look. It’s a whole lot easier to ’fess up to reading a murder mystery than it is to ’fess up to homicide.

People watching

Moriah
Three iguanas lounging on three tiny purple velvet chaise lounges.
Every breath you take and every move you make; Every single day and every word you say, I’ll be watching you.

Yesterday I had surgery for the first time ever (not counting wisdom teeth). It was elective and went well, so everything’s fine.

Anyway. I very rarely go out. I’m a serious hermit. When I do go out, I avoid people like the plague. I don’t care to be touched or talked at by total strangers. I’m very conscious and protective of my personal space. But.

I watch.

Maybe out of the corner of my eye. Maybe I use my ears to see (comes from years and years of transcribing for a living—you get to know people pretty well by voice inflection). Maybe a small gesture catches my eye. It doesn’t happen all the time, but it does happen enough that I get lots of ideas for characterization. I take lots of notes in my head. I’ve even taken notes on paper.

They never know I’m watching them.

Years ago, I was eating lunch at a restaurant, reading a book (natch), and three programmers for a medical software company headquartered here were talking in not particularly low tones. They were talking about a software they were selling that controlled the machines that administer insulin doses to inpatients. They’d found a bug that multiplied the dosages many times what was prescribed and it’d killed a few people before they caught it.

I managed to keep my jaw from dropping on the floor and went for pen and paper with great stealth. (Yes, I still have that conversation written down.) I went home after work and started writing as fast as I could. Before I got the story finished, though, it popped up on Law & Order, so I didn’t bother.
They never knew I was listening.

So yesterday.

My preop nurse caught my eye. I don’t know why. She was average height, with curly red-blonde hair, average facial features, and an overweight apple-shaped torso—in short, very similar to how I envision Giselle from The Proviso to look. She wasn’t particularly bubbly; she didn’t smile; she was even a bit terse. She was relaxed but confident. She wasn’t ugly nor truly fat. Just…plain. Ordinary. Average. Whatever it was, which I don’t know, it made her very attractive. In fact, I told Dude she was very pretty.

Next up: My surgeon. He delivered TD #1. Until I went to him last month to say, “I want this procedure,” I never really knew how genuinely caring he is. I’ve very rarely had that from the doctors in my life, but this guy … I’ve never written a doctor as a character before, mostly because my relationships with them as (by turns) patient, investigator, and vendor have never really been good ones. But now I have a model from which to write one.

Last: My operative nurse is someone I’ve known for years, from church. At church, she has always been very dour and standoffish. Her husband is affable enough, and he’s our new bishop (THANK HEAVENS!!!). But I’ve never really gotten to know her because of the brick wall she wraps around herself. But yesterday… Yesterday she was all smiles and genuine warmth and caring. I’ve never seen that before, and now it makes me wonder what about being at church makes her spine stiffen and her smile to go away.

I see people watching people all the time. They sit and watch people go by… You can tell. It’s the people watchers like me—the ones who seem to not be paying attention to anything around them—who could turn you into a character one day.

And you will never know.

Reviewing too close to home

Moriah

I wrote on this topic two months ago.

I still don’t know what to do, but I’m losing my patience because I discovered that writers of some of the stuff that’s really bad are giving writing advice. Oy. Stop it. You’re not qualified to give writing advice. Really.1

In light of this post and this comment,

in light of a recent romancelandia kerfuffle about writers/unpublished authors reviewing,

in light of Mormons’ cultural tendency to say nice or nothing at all,

in light of the fact that I’m a reader first and I’ve spent money on these books and I have a reader’s perspective and want to express it,

in light of the fact that writers reviewing is generally fraught with dangers, not the least of which is shitting in your own nest,

in light of the fact that my work is in no way intended for a Mormon market2 …

I’m still conflicted.

Mostly I don’t relish the idea of people like OutAndAbout (and I think I know who wrote that comment) coming to bash me for MY writing. It hurts my feelings. Yes, there. I said it. It hurts my feelings. Dirty little secret: It hurts every writer’s feelings.

On the other hand, there’s a very small minority of Mormons who’d brave my stuff anyway, so the worst criticism I’m bound to get—probably anonymously—is that I’m too graphic and my characters swear and they DNF’d it after the first two pages. Okay. And?

I’ve got several Mormon novels on my TBR list (albeit heavily weighted for stuff that’s been pre-vetted by readers with whose taste I get along). One I’m reading, The Road Show by Braden Bell, is pretty good. It’s not a page-turner and it’s episodic (natch, written by a playwright/screenwriter), but that’s never bothered me unless badly done. It gets a little churchy-heavy-handed in spots, but I like it.

I read Angela Hallstrom’s book Bound on Earth and I loved it. I’m dying to write a review of that, but I have nothing to say other than “I loved it” and respond to some reviews I read on Goodreads. Oh, and that it’s a novel a short-story-writer-who’s-not-a-novelist would’ve written (which is both its weakness and its strength). I’m interested to see if she can write a long work that’s not a series of interconnecting/interdependent vignettes strung together.

So what to do. What to do.

As a compromise, I created a new alter-ego to review, but I don’t like doing that. I’m not cut out to sustain such an act.

The unnamed book I previously linked has been haunting me (not in a good way) for months, because this is what the market base for Mormon fiction, the one that wants clean and good (e.g., my mother), associate with Mormon fiction. They are the people who need to be brought back into the Mormon fiction fold, and they aren’t going to be unless Mormon fiction improves. It can’t improve unless someone just says, “This sucks. It should never have been published. Next!”

Yeah, it’s clean.

But it still sucks.

______________________________

1.  But am I? No. It’s why I don’t give writing advice. At least not publicly. It’s hard to give writing advice to someone who feels free to harshly critique your stuff with great (if dubious) authority, but wants you to comment on theirs and the only thing you can say is, “It’s dead boring.” But instead you give advice on how to improve it, and they insist they’ve written a flawless masterpiece. And really, there’s nothing technically wrong with it except it’s dead boring. Boring sucks. First rule of writing: Don’t suck.

2.  Because I refuse to be held accountable for your salvation.

Mommy, why don’t you smile anymore?

Moriah

My son said this to me a couple of months ago and I’ve been guilting over it ever since.

Well, it’s because I’m stressed. My work life kind of exploded some time last summer when I decided to escape the (dying) industry I’d been in for the previous seven years in favor of the formatting work that was falling on top of me. I kept thinking I could do less work for more money and spend time with my kids, but … That’s not the way it worked out.

Is it ever?

In January, my career took a sharp upward turn when I was presented with an offer it’s taken me four months to stop resisting. (Details later, when it’s all finalized.) The deciding factor was time, because, in a totally unrelated twist, I was suddenly presented with a project I won’t be able to resist at all.

On the formatting front, I’ve got a backlog of work and I’m behind. I’m stressed. My house, until two days ago, was a complete wreck (thank you GroupBuy for that cheap house deep-clean). I have to do my taxes. My kids are after me for attention (as is their right), but they’re somehow easier to put off. I was sick most of December and February. Dude’s been sick for the last two months. I have a book coming out on Easter (in case you hadn’t heard). I’m publishing a book for someone else this month. I have another huge project for another client. I’m in charge of producing an important work from Peculiar Pages coming out June 30 and working on edits for the Monsters & Mormons anthology coming out in October. And we come around again to people who come to me for formatting their ebooks.

It’s exciting and nerve-wracking and stress-inducing and I haven’t been able to sleep without some serious medication, which happens to give me a hangover. I like it. I like helping people self-publish. I feel … important. Like I’m accomplishing something with my meager little life. I love it.

But …

Nighttime. A flat expanse of concrete with many equally spaced jets of water, with a skyscraper in the background.“Mommy, why don’t you smile anymore?”

So today I went to get the final item for the Magdalene Easter swag basket (spirit gum, if you must know) and it’s just down the street from Crown Center, across from which is a fountain.

(Well, in Kansas City, you can’t take two steps without falling into a fountain, so that’s not saying anything.) It’s 88F today, but the trees are still bare, which should give you an idea about how bizarre our weather has been.

I decided that, in spite of my backlog of late projects, I’d take the kids to lunch at Crown Center and then let them play in the fountain with about 40 other children. They didn’t have bathing suits on, but who cares? This is an issue of being spawntaneous.

They were happy. I was happy.

And I smiled.

20110409_ccfountainday4
20110409_ccfountainday3
20110409_ccfountainday2
20110409_ccfountainday1

We’re gonna do stuff like this more often.

NetGalley

Moriah

For whatever reason, NetGalley has decided to start putting tighter restrictions implemented publishers’ tightening of restrictions on who gets free eARCs (electronic Advanced Reader Copies).

So what.

Here’s the thing: NetGalley charges what is, to me, a micropress, an astronomical amount of money to give away books. That’s right: I would be paying to give my product to people in exchange for … very little in the way of a quantifiable return.

NetGalley is not in business to lose money. It’s in business to make money by providing a publishers’ colony. However publishers decide to define their ROI (return on investment) is how NetGalley’s going to be bringing in the money.

Follow the money.

When all other explanations fail, just follow the money.

Printgasm BINGO

Moriah

I totally don’t blame Scalzi for being sick of the arguments for self/digital publishing. I self/digital publish and I’m sick of the evangelizing, too. (Because most of the arguments are just shitty logic.)

HOWEVER.

There’s another side of the Electronic Publishing BINGO card: Printgasm BINGO, for those who believe that reading ebooks is just one step away from civilization sliding back into the primordial ooze.

“Printgasm” BINGO card. Text: “B1: I can dog-ear the pages. B2 [in various colors]: I can highlight passages in books in color. B3: I can write margin notes in a book. B4: I can put a Post-It note in a book. B5: I can use pretty bookmarks. I1: I like the feel of a book. I2: I like the smell of a book. I3: Books are prettier than electronic files. I4: I can show off the cover to strangers. I5: I can look at books on shelves. N1: I can read books in the bookstore while I drink my coffee. N2: You’ll pry my print books from my cold, dead hands! N3: I’ve never read an ebook, but I hate them. Nya nya nya. HATE! N4: I like to see the books in my TBR stack. N5: I don’t need a machine to read books. G1: Books keep printers employed. G2: I can buy books used. G3: I can re-sell my books. G4: I can lend a book. G5: Books don’t have DRM. O1: I can burn a book for emergency fuel. O2: I can take a book to the beach. O3: I can use pages for emergency toilet paper. O4: I can read a book in the bathtub. O5: Books won’t break if dropped or sat on.

Writers, reviewing

Moriah

The last year or so (by my completely unscientific method of measuring time, which is to say, “It feels like a year, what, it was only a week, it wasn’t a year? It felt like a year … ”), there have been increasing conversations across Romancelandia about whether writers (especially those writers who are not Nora Roberts) should review books and give them less-than-glowing reviews.

It’s coming to a head now.

Eh, I don’t really care about reviewing books from Romancelandia. There are A LOT of books and A LOT of romance readers, and so other people do that just fine. More to the point, I don’t really care to review, because some books seriously just piss me off and then my head would explode online and that’s always a mess to clean up. Actually, the only books I really want to write about are the ones that piss me off, and so that would skew my blog the other way, making me look like a recidivist toxic bitch.

Oh. Wait …

Anyway, I’ve reviewed some books. I’ve pretty much stopped reviewing books, except for a notation here and there on my Reading List. I’m on the fence about the “be nice and also it could wreck your career” versus “I’m a reader too and I have a right to review honestly and fuck you if you don’t like what I say, especially if I paid money for your book and spent time I could’ve been making money to read it.” I just hate feeling taken advantage of by a bad book, in both money and time.

All that said, I do have my foot in one lit world (Mormon lit) that’s so small that if nobody reviewed anything, nobody would get reviewed at all. And that’s a shame. Because some of the stuff I’ve been reading, put out by the major Mormon publishers, is really bad. And the stuff that’s really good (i.e., brilliant, e.g., Bound on Earth by Angela Hallstrom) gets lost in the shuffle because a) people who want to read good stuff will assume it’s bad and b) people have been reading schlock so long they don’t know what’s good.

Handwritten note that says, “Dear Sudoku Thief, NOT COOL! Of all the things in this office to steal, you chose a sudoku book. You have deprived a terribly bored person of their only mind-saving activity at work. —Pissed off sudoku puzzler.”
Well, I mean, that is a killin’ offense.

But you know, from the cradle, we’re trained to be nice. (Clearly, most of that didn’t take with me.) Our cultural heritage is Nice. And so what does Nice get you? Crap work because nobody wants to say, “This is crap work. This is why it’s crap. Everybody, take note. Don’t write like this.”

Actually, what I want to say is, “This was vetted by a Gatekeeper who asked money for it, and I spent that money and I spent the time based on the fact that it was vetted by a Gatekeeper, and now I have to wonder what the Gatekeeper thinks is good writing, because this ain’t it.” Our market is flooded with (sub)mediocre writing, and it distresses me. I’d rather have nothing than most of what passes for good in our market. Are we so starved for “clean” content that we’ll take anything we can get and call it good?1

Now, after reading Shelah Books It lit blog, I think I may have to gather all my little courages together and review the Mormon lit I read, because she has said, in language I can grok (i.e., cranky), what I’ve been thinking all along.

And I can’t be the only one.

______________________________

1.  Please note: I did not give the name of this book because I felt so bad about about what I had to say. In the comments, an anonymous poster came after my book with the same complaints. Oh, I don’t care if she doesn’t like my book; a lot of people won’t. What I care about is that she felt she had to post anonymously. Because in our culture, when you can’t be Nice, you be Anonymous.

Never, never, never, never, never give up

Moriah

If I hear/see that one more time, I’ll puke in my wastebasket.

What bullshit is this? Who came up with this? Who thought this was a good idea? Oh, Churchill? Right, him. The guy who was leading the charge in World War II before Pearl Harbor was a glimmer in our tears. He gets a pass.

You could come back at me and say:

“Changing your tactic isn’t giving up.” That’s true.

“Retreating now to fight another day isn’t giving up.” That’s true, too.

But maybe, if you are stacking up too many “nevers” to modify your “give up,” you should probably rethink your goal or at least think about it in realistic terms. Without context, platitudes and proverbs mean less than nothing.

Sometimes, giving up is simply breaking out of a jail you built for yourself.

First rule of self-publishing:

Moriah

Get a professional editor.

Period.

No excuse.

I don’t care how good your beta readers and critique partners are.

I don’t care if you’re a traditionally published midlist author going out on your own.

Get a professional editor.

You want to self-publish? Put in the time and the effort and the money, just like a big publisher would. This is a business and you are creating a product to sell to people. Give them a good product.

That product begins with a professional editor.

I’ve been published!!!

Moriah

Like, by somebody else. (Inorite?)

Original cover of my novelette TWENTY-DOLLAR RAG with a fisheye view of the Country Club Plaza at night with Christmas lights, and a woman’s face.

So Freya’s Bower (one of the veteran epublishers in the landscape) has this annual anthology called Dreams and Desires, where the proceeds from it go to a charity. This year’s charity is A Window Between Worlds, a non-profit organization that provides art supplies and training for art as a healing tool free of charge to battered women’s shelters across the United States.

Marci Baun, Freya’s Bower’s Perpetrator In Chief, asked me to contribute a story to the anthology, and because it’s a) for a good cause and b) for the #1 cause on my personal list of good causes, I said SURE! The result? Short story Twenty-Dollar Rag.

For fans of the Dunham series, the hero in this one is the weird kid from Stay (who wears kilts and sleeps in trees), Vachel Whittaker, all grown up and possibly more normal than the rest of the Dunham men. Lo, there is no religion or politics in it.

Here’s the blurb for Dreams and Desires:

True love, freedom, self-worth, security … Dreams and desires of the ordinary woman, or man. From a thirty-something, single woman who wants a baby to a jeweler who finds love with the least expected man to a widow who wants to finish her degree and find love to a young, futuristic woman who’s still searching for herself to an 18th century saloon girl whose lost hope but still dreams of love to a man who has escaped his abusive lover but has lost himself. This collection of nine stories celebrates the attainment of all one can dream or desire. Which one do you secretly yearn for?

And here’s the blurb for Twenty-Dollar Rag:

One night. One man. One dress.

Regina Westlake sees nothing wrong with her clubbing lifestyle until the gorgeous guy cleaning her pool refuses to play her games. When he’s hired to be her arm candy for a formal event, he makes his disdain for her clear by re-dressing her in something far more appropriate than what she had worn to the party.

Shattered, she takes his contempt, his dress, the memory of his kiss—and rebuilds her life from the ground up. She never expects to see him again, but when she does …

Buy the collection, have a few hours of entertainment and help somebody out at the same time. Win-win!

Dreams and Desires
Twenty-Dollar Rag