It’s the last day of the Swept Away Valentine Blog Hop!Follow this link for one more chance to meet over 140 authors and have a chance to win the prizes given away on each of their blogs. As always, be sure to leave your email address when you leave comments.
My prize is anauthorgraphed copy of my most recent release The Witchy Wolf and the Wendigo – a tale about an ancient Native American shaman who finds love in the modern world. Here’s the true root of the story at USA Today — The Witchy Wolf and the Wendigo
About Rose: I love words and choose them as carefully as an artist might choose a color. My active imagination compels me to write everything from children’s stories to historical fiction. As a persnickety leisure reader I especially enjoy novels that feel like they were written just for me. It’s hard to explain, but if you’ve ever read one of those, then you know what I mean. I tend to sneak symbolism and metaphor into my writing and always write in layers. You might say it’s a game I play with myself. It’s really a kick to have readers email to say they’ve found something or to ask if I meant what they think I meant when they read a portion and their brain goes, hey wait a minute… I want people to feel the story was written just for them and these hidden insights are my gift to my readers.
What does an immortal Native American shaman do when the grave he’s sworn to watch over for all eternity disappears under urban development? His purpose of guarding his wife’s burial mound is gone, Ashkewheteasu seeks to end his immortal existence. In his despair, Ash assumes the form of a wolf and steps in front of a moving car and into the life of Dr. Olivia “Livie” Rosalini. The veterinarian saves the animal’s life, and in the process saves the man within. Livie has no idea the wolfish dog she’s taken into her home and grows to love is a magical being seeking to win her heart as a man. While Ash is learning a new world filled with new love, friendship, and happiness, an old menace makes plans to steal it all away; just as he had 3000 years before.
Loving Leonardo the new 2012 CataNetwork Sensual Reads Reviewer’s Choice Winner in Historical Romance! An unusual bisexual, polyamorous, Victorian love story with a touch of reader-interactive art history Peek inside Loving Leonardo on Amazon
Bound by limits dictated by society, Art Historian Nicolas Halstead lived a guarded life until a tempest in the form of Elenora Schwaab blew into his world. At first Nicolas can’t decide if the audacious American is simply mad or plotting blackmail for not only does she declare knowledge of his homosexuality, she offers him a marriage proposal.
After Ellie tells him of a previously unknown work of Leonardo da Vinci, a book of erotic love poems and sketches dedicated to the artist’s long-time lover Salai, Nicolas joins her in a race to save the book from destruction. Along the way they encounter Historian Luca Franco and discover a comfortable compatibility that comes to redefine their long-held notions of love. The trio embarks on an adventure of sensual discovery, intrigue, and danger. Little do they know Leonardo da Vinci’s book is far more than meets the eye.
Dreamscape A haunting, a murder, a mystery, a reader’s puzzle, and a love story that transcends time. Peek inside Dreamscape on Amazon Unable to deny his own translucence, Dr. Jason Bowen determines his lack of physical substance could only mean one thing — he’s a ghost. Murdered more than a century before, Jason haunts his house and ponders the treachery that took his life. When Lanie O’Keefe arrives with plans to renovate her newly purchased Victorian mansion, Jason learns, ghost or not, he’s still very much a man. Jason soon discovers he can travel through Lanie’s dreams and finds himself reliving the days before his murder with Lanie by his side. It took one hundred and twenty years for love to find them, but there’s that insurmountable little matter of Jason being dead.
Hermes Online ACataNetwork Sensual Reads Reviewer’s Choice Winner 2011 – Contemporary Romance! A woman finds her lost confidence in a very unlikely place Peek inside Hermes Online on Amazon Imagine if you will a story begun in the halls of Mount Olympus long before this modern tale was conceived. It was a time when the god Hermes flew on his winged sandals and carried messages from the gods to the mortals below. And between that time and this, couriers became postmen and handwritten letters became bytes. It is said the gods still speak to those who listen… Left bruised and brokenhearted after a cruel breakup, Vivienne Bennet finds herself mired in a world of self-doubt. To her surprise, she receives an email that challenges her to rediscover the sensual woman she once was. Together Vivienne and the enigmatic man known only as S embark upon the world of anonymous Internet communication where suggestive emails lead to erotic chat, where cybering leads to Skype, and C2C sends both into the arms of a love they’d believed lost forever.
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~ And Coming Soon ~
Loving Leonardo – The Quest
and The Witchy Wolf and the Wendigo Book 2 – Eluwilussit
Today’s the last day of the Something New, Something Naughty Blog Hop. There’s still time for one lucky winner to win the grand prize of a $60 gift certificate to EdenFantasys (adult store) and for two winners to win $25 gift certificates to their choice of the following book sites:Amazon, All Romance eBooks, Barnes & Noble, or Total-E-Bound
My post can still be found in the Life section of the USA Today in the Happy Ever After Blog. There I explain how I came to write The Witchy Wolf and the Wendigo — a story inspired by the urban legend of the Wisconsin wolf man. Here’s the link for a quick peek:
The theme for this Hop is naughty and/or new. With naughty in mind, I consulted Dictionary.com and Thesaurus.com to gain some insight on the word. In case you hadn’t heard this before, the thesaurus declares naughty a pretty impressive word. So am offering peeks into my stories through the naughty lens. Yesterday wasevil naughty (yes, the thesaurus says evil is a synonym of naughty), the day before unorthodox naughty, the we started with playful naughty. Today is errantnaughty. Errant, as in straying from proper standards.
Today I’d like to introduce an errant naughty snippet from Hermes Online - the CataRomance Sensual Reads Reviewer’s Choice Award Winner of 2011. Hermes Online was deliberately crafted to capture a publisher’s attention, and it did. This is the novel that opened the door to my becoming a multi-published author. Overcome by a broken heart and a confidence-shattering breakup, Vivienne tells the story in her perspective. But first, here’s the book trailer to explain the details –
S and Vivienne are enjoying their daily email exchanges. She’s lived the last several months in a drab haze of self-doubt, but S sets in motion an inner healing when he asks her to describe her self in full-colored, richly-worded, detail. At this point, the tenor of their conversation is beginning to change. There’s some wooing going on! In this scene, a good bit of conversation you’re not seeing here has taken place in S’s email.
…..And now I suspect there is far more to you than you realize, dearest V. Your sensual nature filled in where your paints left off, but is there more color to be had, I wonder?
Let’s take this further, shall we?For tomorrow… I enjoy kissing. Wield your pen. Describe a kiss from your luscious pink lips, and I shall do the same. Tell me, how do you sleep? Do your linens caress your bare skin? If not, allow yourself this treat tonight. For now, sweet dreams, lovely one.
S
I turned off the computer feeling that nature-driven lassitude that makes a woman drowsy after her climax. Smiling inside, I headed to bed. While I stood in my bathroom brushing my teeth, I eyed the hook that held my nightgown. I thought about his words. Never in my life did I recall deliberately sleeping nude. Yes, at various times after intimate exchanges in my past relationships, I fell asleep as naked as the body next to mine, but never did I set out to sleep without pajamas or nightgown at the end of the day. For some reason, the simple thought felt rather heady.
Being one of those people who actually takes the two minutes each morning to make my bed, for no other reason than not wanting to sleep in a jumble of sheets and blankets at the end of the day, I left the nightgown on the hook and turned down the sheets. My skin felt very hyper-aware as I stripped from the robe and snuggled in. The fabric softener scent lingered on my cotton sheets still, and the smooth flat surface of the fitted sheet felt cool against the remnant of my earlier sexual fever. I rolled over on my belly, one leg bent, one arm hugging the spare pillow that gave the illusion I didn’t sleep alone. I laid there assessing. My whole being felt lighter. For the first time in a year, I didn’t give Dan power over my dreams.
* * * *
I woke the following morning realizing I didn’t wake in the middle of the night as was my habit. In fact, I slept like the proverbial rock. It had been months since I slept through the three o’clock grief hour, that subconscious middle of the night wake-up call experienced by the grieving. As I took a languid stretch, I briefly contemplated revisiting last night’s date with the electric company. The corners of my mouth turned into a smile at the thought. Not now, I said to myself, tucking the option away and thinking I just might bring myself off later. The anticipation of another sensually charged email grabbed me. I found I relished the idea of writing…and reading…a kiss.
Later in the day I received a call from the county board president. It seemed my thoughts on creative reuse of the old Hornsby mansion had stirred more than one imagination on the board. In fact, so intrigued were they by my proposal that the house coming down was on hold for the time being. He wanted to let me know that my idea had become an agenda item on the special meeting he called this coming Thursday. Then to my ultimate surprise he paid me a compliment. “Honestly, Vivienne, I just have to tell you, I haven’t seen an idea come out of Planning and Development with this much potential in years. Your idea was inspired.”
I couldn’t believe my ears. For one, they’d suspended the tear-down, two, they’d called a special meeting, three, the board members I’d met with the other day had spoken favorably to their contemporaries, and four, I’d just gotten an extremely rare compliment from a guy who probably never even said “good boy” to the family dog. My idea was inspired!
Filled with possibility as I was, the ride home from work had my lips tingling as scenes from the world’s best movie kisses played over my head. To me the best were desperate I’ll-die-if-I-don’t-kiss-you kisses. My mind played with the concept for a mile or so.
Once in my life, and granted it had been nearly a half dozen years ago, I had been kissed just like that. The kind of kiss that throws your back to the wall and sends buttons flying from clothing in a fevered race to shed them just so your skin could make contact with his, to send that kiss to every nerve in your body.
Yes, I’d felt that once. My chest constricted with the memory of the architectural study tour one magical autumn in Greece and the amazing man assigned to my class. Wincing, I remembered the circumstance that ended the budding transcontinental relationship begun with such wonderful potential. My sensually handsome teacher had proposed to a woman he had been in a long relationship with just prior to leaving for Greece.
Neither of us planned to fall in love. It just happened when we found ourselves separated from the rest of the tour on the island of Delos. Waiting for the next ferry, we discovered a connection, one the entire pantheon of gods must have had a hand in, for it was incredibly beyond our control. But as blissful as that week had been, I knew from the onset there was no hope for anything else between us. His prior commitment was on the table. As surely as the seasons turn, my month-long class was over and with it came a return to cold reality. I felt his loss even now. As brief as our intense liaison had been, I had loved that man and he loved me and it was the kind of love you only got once in a lifetime. Broken-hearted, I left Greece without looking back and I didn’t leave my contact information for future study tours just in case I’d meet him again as a married man.
My tenuous emotional state couldn’t bear lingering here. In self-defense, I shook the bittersweet thought away and flipped on a talk radio station with its topic on how to get raccoons out from under your porch. Ignoring the rush hour traffic under my forced emotional silence, I got off at my exit and let my mind open to the conversation the experts were sharing with listeners. Twenty minutes went by as I learned about the nocturnal habits of raccoons. Who knew? The uninvited raccoons were exactly the distraction I hoped for as my sad thoughts of lost love sunk back into the dusty scrapbook of my memory. Three miles later, raccoons and opening deer season cleared my mind enough to think about the present. I turned the radio off and got to work crafting my perfect kiss, attempting to borrow from Hollywood rather than personal experience.
I settled on the fiddle-tempo kiss from Last of the Mohicans and combined it with the wave-crashing beach kiss between Burt Lancaster and Deborah Kerr in From Here to Eternity. That was nice, intensely hot. I then superimposed the kiss in the rain from The Notebook, and a bit of the library-shelf-climbing kiss from Atonement. “Wow,” I said, feeling electrified from the image I had woven.
Taking only enough time to do all the odds and ends one must do, such as making dinner, changing into more comfortable clothing, seeing to a load of hand-wash-only laundry and other less pressing bits on my weekly to-do list, I kept my computer at arm’s length until I had enough of a kiss in mind to write about. Two hours later, my computer fired up and so did my mind. I had mail.
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Fun Fact: When I came up with the title for this novel, the only thought I had in mind was the Greek myth of Hermes delivering messages from the gods. Flash forward to today and emails magically appear in our inbox. Add to that the fact my character Vivienne went to Greece as a student and I was quite pleased with my unusual title. Notice I said was. The title has been a source of a few chuckles along the way. First off, just about everywhere I’d posted a guest blog post about this book in 2011, the host tells me they’ve had a tremendous amount of hits on their blog for that day. That was nice to learn.
I’m also signed up for Google Alerts which tells me when my title is mentioned on the internet. In theory that should work, right? To date I’ve never received notice of this book being anywhere, but I do get a DAILY notice of who’s selling Hermes handbags, purses, and clutches online! lol I suspect the uncharacteristically high volume of hits on all those blogs might have been from people hunting down handbags. Every once in a while someone will ask where the Greek gods are in the story. FYI: The gods are there, but it’s not their tale.
I’ll contact the winner of The Witchy Wolf and the Wendigo sometime this week. Thank you for joining me in the Something New, Something Naughty Blog Hop. Follow The blog hop link above to see who’s won the prizes.
Subscribe to my blog for updates, author and publishing insights, reviews, laurels and skinned knees, and just about anything that captures my fancy. And more Hops! I’m participating in two Valentines Day hops. I should have two new releases out by then too!
Good Morning! The scuttle on power restoration is “by 11:59 tonight”. Seriously, 11:59! I need to find somewhere to wash my hair..I may just go get it cut and have it washed. For some reason the prolonged ice-cold shower didn’t appeal to me this morning. It’s going to be nice to have electricity again, especially with the heatwave forecasted for this weekend. I have plans to work on a plan for future inconveniences of this magnitude. I only now remembered we have one of the black bag solar showers for camping. {sigh} I experienced all those ice-cold, heart-stopping, breath-stealing showers for nothing. I won’t tell you how they made my husband feel. LOL He’s been great. Knowing I was near frantic about not being at the author event, he tried to see to my every conceivable comfort during this crazy week. Boy, do I love that man.
Speaking of the event. My wrists ache from 9 hours of rapid typing. Yesterday’s turnout for the Summer Love-In blew me away. More than 80 people from all over the world showed up and chatted with us authors. It was great fun. The UT’ers are amazing. That’s my small author’s group – Universal Timing. And a more apropos title doesn’t exist. The Universe sat me in the middle of opportunity and I’ve been on a roll ever since.
What a busy day it was. There was a point there where I ran (yes ran) to the washroom and returned (ran back) to find 58 posts! I was only gone a moment. And that’s what it looked like from my end of things all day long. I no sooner posted something, then wham, another 30+ emails came in. It was amazing. Although, we’ll remain open a while for guests to return to read the files and take recipes, the temporary yahoo group will only be a happy memory. Stopping there this morning to add my recipes to the new Recipe folder, I’m seeing 1566 emails total from yesterday. Thank god I had presence of mind to delete as I read. As it is, I signed on to a loaded inbox.
I tried to read as many author offerings as I could but Holy cow did it move fast. I got into a few small one-on-one conversations and ended up with 3 t-shirts, one tote bag, and 4 ebooks and one set of S quote magnets won for my contests. Wow. I had no idea my promos would be sought after like they were for the well-known authors in my group. I imagined myself wearing Rose Anderson shirts for the rest of my life!
Firefox kept crashing on me and Yahoo kept freezing, forcing me to add any postings of mine through email..and that meant jumping through all those blasted encryption hoops yahoo forces on users — MH34rnpy, wWAML865 and dbGL76′s etc etc etc. I can’t tell you how many times I restarted the browser windows. I really dislike drama and there’s too much of that going on right now with my electricity off and life out of whack. I thought I’d lose my mind.
All in all, despite my inconvenienced life, my youtube trailers got dozens of hits. The one for Dreamscape jumped from 30 yesterday morning to 90+ right now. My blog got new subscribers. Three new followers on Twitter. I wouldn’t touch Facebook with a ten-foot pole but got two offers of friends there.
Doing another in several months has yet to be determined. We don’t really know if it worked like we hoped. Like I’ve mentioned before, promoting is hard work. I don’t know how this will translate into sales, but for this newbie it was heartening to feel like I actually had fans…even if I was only attaching my wagon to all of the other author’s awesomely bright stars. Maybe I got a few for myself.
I’ve developed a routine of sorts. Wake, wash in cold water and dress, walk and feed the dogs, pack my computer and drive eleven miles to town. A quick glance at the dashboard tells me it’s 6:38 a.m. There they are – sleepy inconvenienced residents standing in line for coffee and bagels at Panera’s restaurant. My seat in the corner is still unoccupied at this early hour and I scurry over there lest another get to it before me. It’s an optimum spot with its back to the shade-drawn window and a coveted outlet an easy four feet away. Instead of a full 360 ° of distraction, I’m shielded on two sides and as the back door beside me isn’t opened yet, I have relative peace.
The same elderly woman I saw yesterday smiles and says, “good morning” to me. We don’t know each other but there’s a certain shared misery between us. I ask her if she wouldn’t mind keeping an eye on my laptop again while I get some coffee because she’s facing my corner spot and clipping coupons exactly as she did the day before. She tells me she’d be happy to. Yesterday I returned the favor by watching her pile of papers and tote bag so she didn’t have to take it all into the washroom.
Today the woman who cleans the tables asked me twice if I was finished, once for my plate, once for my cup. I’ve eaten my bagel and drank my coffee as slow as I can but now I’m obviously done and the message is clear. By 8:30, I’m in the library parking lot waiting on 9:00. There’s hardly anyone waiting there now, less than yesterday and a fraction of the day before when people filled the library necessitating some to sit on the floor. They all looked shell-shocked – the mental shock some soldiers experience in war. But it wasn’t so much the storm that has people staring blankly at their dead cell phones. It’s the fact they’re inconveniently unplugged and they really don’t know what to do with themselves.
Much of the county has electricity again. Those of us who don’t, look tired, wrinkled, and unwashed. Four minutes until the library opens, we wait and share our disbelief that repairs are taking so long. We talk like people stranded in a subway, or snowed in at a ski lodge — the laughing, friendly, conversations of people sharing something outside the norm. As soon as the door opens, we scatter like we’d never exchanged words. Forget eye contact. Funny how that goes.
So rumor has it I may have electricity sometime this weekend. As I mentioned in my previous post, this is just an inconvenience. Not a disaster, certainly nothing like the devastation so many have gone through since January 1st. My family and friends are safe. Even though much of my food spoiled, my frozen goods are still frozen in temporary freezer space. Better still – I have several hours of a generator to power my well pump to bathe and flush my toilets with. I’m glad, there’s nothing like unflushed toilets and heat in the 90 °. I mentioned to a friend yesterday that even my dogs were looking embarrassed.
Blah. The electricity will come on eventually. Hopefully before the heat wave due to hit my area this weekend. I shall say no more on the subject until the miraculous invisible power we all take for granted is restored.
***
So on to fun things… I have good news! A dear friend is lending me space in a fully electrified, online, and flushable home so I can participate in the Summer Love-In. It’s my first promo extravaganza and I would have really hated to miss the fun, especially with my new book coming out in less than a week. Especially since this has been months in the planning.
I’ve had lots of good feedback on Dreamscape’s excerpt, blurb and book trailer. Many people are looking forward to it, lots of people with good comments regarding the youtube trailer. I’m happy about that. I’ve been thinking a lot about formulas lately. It began by seeing formula writing in action (see earlier post). Formula writing. With how my mind works, I never see myself being any good at that. But formulas work for other things too.
I made the first youtube book trailer for Hermes Online with my tag line in mind: Love Waits in Unexpected Places. It’s true. I met the love of my life quite unexpectedly, in a place I never would have guessed. I envisioned a formula for my book trailers based on that thought. Hermes Online being my first novel, just so happened to have an element of Greek mythology in it. I thought, Cupid hangs with that crowd. From there I recalled those Valentines little kids give out at school parties – the ones with sneaky Cupids shooting arrows at unsuspecting would-be lovers. If Love Waits in Unexpected Places, chances are Cupid is hiding behind a bush, rock, or tree. Right?
My formula: Lay out all subsequent book trailers the same, for continuity’s sake.
From Hermes Online on, my trailers will have a Cupid done by an old master to carry on the theme of Love Waits in Unexpected Places. Why? So no one gives me grief for using it without permission. Same with music, apropos music is hard to find but odds are in my favor that the older the piece such as the late 1800’s piece for Dreamscape, the less headache for tracking down an artist. And period music is great. As part of this formula, I’ll give proper shout-outs to Siren (or whatever publisher I work with), the cover artist, as well as any photo or artwork I find that I’ve managed to gain permission to use. With several WIPs (works in progress), sometimes I go surfing for picture elements with my future book trailers in mind. I’ve found some terrific images so far and of the three requests I sent out, two artists have replied with permission.
Formula in action, making Dreamscape’s trailer took no time at all as I swapped out pictures from Hermes Online’s Powerpoint, changed the background etc, and found fitting music. The timing takes the most effort I think. It’s tricky to sync so the last slide ends with the song. Book trailers are useful too. Like other authors I know, I send the usual posts (excerpts, reviews, announcements) announcing this or that to all the writer/reader groups on yahoo. Every time I do, my hits on youtube increase. That tells me some people are actually reading my posts and are curious. Perhaps they’re buying my book too. I hope they are. I really enjoy making trailers. The creative process and the lovely end product make you feel pretty good when you get it up and running, almost as much as handing in those last edits!
Speaking of feeling creative and editing
My head-hopping is improving with editor’s corrections drilled into my subconscious (head-hopping and POV (point of view) = industry jargon for “who the heck is speaking here?”) I’ve been seeing new author emails fly past my inbox regarding painful editing and head-hopping. I’ve come to realize unless you’ve been formally trained through schooling, classes, tutors, whatever, most writers starting out do this unconsciously. We see every character in the room. We even see the pattern on the wallpaper because we’re the ones building the world. The reader only sees the words we give them. If we do this right, they too get a glimpse of the visual back story. I know the editing process has been good for me. I’m in the process of dropping several bad habits as the mechanics slowly sink in. I admit though, there are times when I just do not see those hopping heads. To anyone interested, this is the painful truth of editing:
The blue is the problem. The red is my correction. Now imagine running through 73, 756 words looking for blue. Yep, it’s mentally exhausting. All other writing stops for me. There’s just nothing left in my brain!
My author’s group got to talking about edits and a quote came around.
I don’t know why I did this but I suppose the words of Robert Brockway spoke to me on some level. I made it into a t-shirt and two coffee mugs, each with one of those sentences. Yes, editing is a necessary evil. I’ll be ordering my coffee cups before my next book comes back with edits. Unfortunately I couldn’t fit Robert Brockway’s name in this creation and keep the font large enough to read. Any author wanting one, email me and I’ll work out the true cost for shipping and printing and no, my time to order it doesn’t cost you a dime. Misery loves company.
Other cool things…Siren made Dreamscape a banner and boy is it cool!
I’ll put this anywhere I can as soon as I figure out how. My ARCs for Dreamscape came too (my advanced reader copies). I should be sending them out to reviewers but with this blasted power outage I’ll be behind. No, I’m taking a deep breath here. Really, I won’t bring up the lack of electricity again. Come to the Summer Love-In and say hi!
I might have mentioned that I signed up for several authors and readers groups over the last two months to keep my finger on the pulse of the industry. Most of these I view quietly. One is my go-to place for honest opinion and support. Some have regular sneak peeks at other author’s works. I read them all and always comment on those that move me. It only takes a few minutes and it does two things aside from entertaining me when I take a break from writing. The first, these glimpses into other author’s imaginations allow me to see that I’m not alone in how my mind works. I find it fascinating to see others using words as texture and color like I do. Fascinating because I understand their artistry on a very personal level. Ever the shy outsider, I can only take a phrase from my magnum opus ~ When one is out of step with the rest of the world, it’s exhilarating to find your own kind.
The other thing reading and commenting does is encourage. As writing is an emotional art form, having an occasional good word about it feels really good inside. It’s like being told it’s OK to cry when you’re ready to explode with pent up emotion, or it’s OK to think like you do when your view isn’t mainstream or popular. It says it’s Ok to be you.
Last night I received a few emails from peers that made me hopeful. These authors either read or were reading my book Hermes Online and had wonderful words of praise. One told me she hadn’t read anything like it before, adding it was one of the most creative books she’s ever read. Another commented I must have a degree to practice such fine wordsmithery. It makes me so happy to think these seasoned professionals were inspired to say such nice things. Not because I think my book is a bad one. I’ve said before, if I can entertain myself reading it then I know it’s OK on some level. But because they took the time to tell me.
This has me hopeful because my story is written in first person – everything is run through the lens of my main character Vivienne. I was told by the publisher, when they accepted my manuscript, that readers didn’t like this point of view. There wasn’t enough escapism in first person. They softened the shadow of doubt a little by adding my story was contemporary and unique. They’d wait and see. Talk about nail biting! Here I am trying to break into this industry with a POV the publisher frowned upon. Sheesh What a way to start. Combine that with no way to track sales at Amazon and Barnes&Noble and we have a fine fret coming on.
Why this POV? I wanted several things with this story…first I wanted the reader to know something before the characters did. In the first person point of view, I felt the readers would have the opportunity to feel the depth of the emotion Vivienne was feeling. (I say again, I’m no Cormac McCarthy. You feel his emotion by just holding the book in your hands.) Using the first person POV to convey this emotion just made sense to me. Lastly, I wanted the reader to see how words evolved into love one syllable at a time. That’s what I like when I read. I want to get inside the character’s heads and don their skins, slip on their shoes and walk their journey with them. I like reading first person point of view. It’s the difference between reading a biography and an autobiography. Who knows better what’s what than the person living it?
It’s been suggested I promote this story hard. Honestly, I’m shooting in the dark here. Everyday since Hermes Online released, I devote time thinking of ways to do this. From what I’ve gathered by reading author postings, things can sometimes move very fast. Hermes Online is not moving fast. At least not in any discernible amount on my side of the fence. My husband reminds me I’ve only been in this business since mid-March. True enough. But this confirms there is far more promoting needed than I realized and so much yet to do.
Those nice reviews have done much to curb my nail biting today. After speaking with several people, there is one thing I find curious. SirenBookStrand didn’t tell me they’d be releasing my book in paperback. I had two books in at the time and only one was slated for both ebook and paperback. It wasn’t Hermes Online. It’s rather short for one of their paperbacks. I am delighted to say it comes in both forms – on both Amazon and B&N. Perhaps, they found it unique enough to take that chance, even with the undesirable POV. I noticed today that Amazon only had one book left for sale. Apparently someone is buying them. Now if only they’d tell two friends, and they’d tell two friends…and they’d tell two friends…and so on.
I think I’ll go give myself a manicure before I start writing for the day.
Like so many of my generation, I grew up listening to my elders at the kitchen table. Melmac coffee cups and chromed percolator sat beside ashtrays whose blue-plumed spectres of Pall Malls and Terytons swirled to the ceiling. These ritual items of adult conversation would litter the tabletop while my parents, along with occasional drop-in relatives and friends, discussed the day to day business of life.
There was nowhere else in the house suitable for such discourse. Not in the living room with its comfortable couch and chair, certainly not on the porch where the milkman left his glass bottles each day. Such conversation could only occur around a kitchen table – a habit harkening back to the days when the hearth was the center of all activity. I’d sit there too, either on some aunt or uncle’s lap carefully playing with closed matchbooks whose covers had drawings of gemstones or harness racing track days, or I’d be quietly drawing amid the jungle of calves somewhere on the floor. I remember the smoky air didn’t sting your eyes down there. I have no recollection of ever being shooed away.
My values, political views, and general outlook as an adult came from these social gatherings. I remember my uncle and my father sketching out plans for bunk beds during the Cuban Missile Crisis, as if staying in the basement would keep you safe in a prime-target city. I recall political topics after two Kennedys were killed. I remember Chicago riots during the Democratic Convention and after Martin Luther King was murdered. Thinking on some of these moments now, I realize the words themselves didn’t worry me as a child. The emotion of the people speaking them did.
Words have power. This is why they have the ability to soothe or stimulate, to conjure and encourage, to maim and destroy. Words should always be chosen carefully.
I came across a book of speeches recently. These carefully chosen words are considered to have changed the course of history. In fact the title of the book is Speeches That Changed the World by Simon Sebag Monteffiore. There are 224 pages of powerful words, not all of them coming from rational or kind minds but powerful nonetheless. On this side of events, I think they’re worth a peek, if for no other reason to get a glimpse inside the speaker’s minds.
I think today I shall focus on finishing my next novel. Inspired by great words, perhaps I’ll write a few of my own.
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