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COVER REVEAL! Snow White and the Assassin’s Guild
Check out my beautiful cover for my upcoming short story, SNOW WHITE AND THE ASSASSIN’S GUILD I’m so thrilled with the design, from Delilah Stephans Design. Absolutely beautiful. Thanks so much! Story goes on sale on Saturday, March 22, 2014.
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CONVERGENCE – by Karen T. Smith, a YA Sci-Fi novel
Desperate for something new to read? My young adult (young end of YA, perfectly appropriate for most middle-grade readers) science fiction novel CONVERGENCE by Karen T. Smith is now available on all ebook platforms (amazon kindle, barnes and noble nook, smashwords for most other e-readers. Note: Kobo and Sony Reader distribution should be within the next 1-2 weeks. Apple mail trail a bit longer.) Paperback available at most e-retailers and Createspace.com. First of all, isn’t the cover gorgeous? I had a fantastic cover model (one of the kids’ babysitters!) and my really awesome friend Renee of The Cover Counts worked on this cover with me. We found some fantastic images,…
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Book Review – Ship Breaker by Paolo Bacigalupi
I recently reviewed the book Ship Breaker, by Paolo Bacigalupi, over on my mom blog – Suburban (in)Sanity. I really enjoyed this book, even though in general I’m tired of future-told dystopia stories. Hunger Games overkill I suppose. This one was fantastic, though, and kept me up late reading.
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E-book Formatting Checklist
How to Format your e-book for independent publishing In formatting ebooks for independent publishing, I’ve found that the detailed information offered in the Smashwords style guide, while top-notch and something that EVERY indie publisher needs to read, is a bit hard to parse when you’re going through the routine of formatting another book/story for publication, so I (with the help of my 9 year old son) documented the process in a simple(r) checklist, so I could be sure I was following the correct steps as I went. This is heavily based on that Smashwords style guide, so you really need to read that if you want to publish your own…
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Obsessed
I am officially obsessed with the writing site 750words.com. Premise: write 3 pages (about 250 words/page) each morning. “Morning pages” some writers call them. So this semi-brilliant guy has written a website where you can do just that (he talks about the details here). Only the best part is, you don’t have to do the pages in the morning. Any time of day will do (phew, us night owls all just breathed a big sigh of relief.) So a friend mentioned this to me a while back and I looked and thought the site looked interesting, but then moved on (as is so often the case.) Yesterday, when mentally beating…
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Why Write?
This is one of those questions that comes up on writer’s boards all the time. Why bother? What drives you to write? Well, here’s my why: I write because nobody has written the stories I wanted to read. The ones about a geeky girl who was good at stuff and had adventures and solved problems and was smart and cool and dorky and nice and confused and friendless and interesting and new around here and different and the same and interested in boys and uninterested in boys and… I write for all the geeky cool girls out there, because I have their stories to tell.
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Writing with my kids
So I’ve been doing a lot of non-writing lately. Or, more accurately, writing for purposes other than other’s enjoyment, as that’s the only way I can think of accurately describing a Needs Assessment document or a Benefit Communication Piece. I mean, I’m sure the people reading the needs assessments and benefit communications feel very…entertained in some way or another, but those venues are not typically accessing the creative part of my brain, thus I don’t think of them as “writing” exactly. Think this will be them at their own book signing in a few years? So I’ve been missing writing, and thus I’ve been thinking to myself that I need…
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On being a girl geek
Amanda Hocking has this remarkably insightful way of looking at things. If you don’t know who Amanda Hocking is, you should. She’s sold more books in the last minute and a half than most bestsellers hope to sell in a month. Or a year. Or their entire careers. Or something crazy like that. She puts out eBooks and Print On Demand (POD) books – she is her own publisher. It’s a fascinating case study in “going viral” because first her books went viral, then she went viral as the media rushed to report on her as a story. But who cares about that part of it (other than me, who…
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On being both a Mom and a Writer
I originally wrote this for a writer’s board I participate on, but it relates so well to what I talk about on this blog that I wanted to share it here, too. The context is that another writer was complaining that she is limited in her reach right not because she’s a mom. This is my reply: I want to give a little working/writing/mom love. Being a mom is a really important job. The kids really benefit from all we do. When they are small it can be very brain-sucking work (just how many times do I have to tell Junior here that hitting his baby sister with Thomas the…
