Reminiscing on 2014

While time in general always seems to fly by, December, in particular, zips past in a blur. As always, when I reach December, I look back on the year and what I've accomplished. Back in January, I set myself a couple of writing goals. One was to complete two novels. I did that, by the skin of my teeth. The other was to write twelve short stories. Again, skin of teeth. For 2015 I'm not putting a set number on completing stories. Next year will be the year of earnest yet relaxed writing, if that makes any sense.

So here's what all happened this year:

1) I published my first pro-level short story, "Extraction," in Nature Futures.

2) I self published two novels, The Graveyard Girl and the follow up to that, The Necromancer's Return. It was both terrifying and fun, and I learned quite a bit.

3) I ran my first (and second) 5K race. I'm currently training to run a 10K. I'm sort of curious about how far I can run, and how fast I can run. Yes, I know I'm a little crazy.

4) I read 60 books, which doesn't include the handful I began reading and quit, or those I began reading and skimmed to the end because I couldn't get into the story. My favorites of the year included Clockwork Dagger by Beth Cato, The Martian by Andy Weir, Born to Run by Christopher McDougall, and The Seat of Magic by J. Kathleen Cheney. They're all fabulous, and even if you're not a runner, Born to Run is a great story.

I ended up selling more short stories this year than ever before, and more of my short stories came out than ever before. I already have a short-short slated to come out in January. It's one of my favorites, and I can't wait to see it out in the world. Here's to a prosperous and happy new year for all of us!

My Lifelong Obsession With Ghosts

It's almost October, which means it's almost Halloween, which means I'm thinking about spooky things, like ghosts, for example. I love a good ghost story. I love the gooseflesh that breaks out when someone tells a story that scares me. As a kid, I believed absolutely in ghosts, and I wanted to see one and speak with it. I felt it was only a matter of time before I stumbled across a ghost. After all, a lot of people had lived and died before I ever came along, so somebody's spirit was bound to be hanging around.

The Stanley Hotel, which inspired the Shining

Over the years, people have told me their personal experiences with ghosts, or with unexplained phenomenon that they attributed to ghosts. I found this exciting, and further proof that ghosts exist. I was going to see one any day. I grew up in an old house, I went to undergraduate school on the grounds (and in the buildings) of an old fort, and I even hung out with dead bodies my entire first semester of graduate school.

But I got nothing. Nada. Zip. Not even an inkling of being watched. I began to think that either ghosts didn't exist at all, or they didn't like me. After all, being super eager to speak with ghosts could very well be off-putting to them.

So I decided to write about ghosts in The Necromancer's Inheritance series. Or rather, I decided to write about a person who can see and talk to spirits. In a way, it's me working out my idea of what the afterlife might be like, if an afterlife exists. Does everybody really zip right on to the next place, or do some people hang around for various reasons, and what would those reasons be? Do ghosts really exist, or do people see things they interpret as ghosts because of the power of suggestion or the random firing of synapses in their brains?

At this point in my life, I've pretty much given up on seeing a ghost. I'm not sure I would want to. I'd be as likely to have a heart attack as to strike up a conversation with it. But I still love a good ghost story and the chills that come along with it.

Introducing The Necromancer's Return

Hey, kids, guess what's coming out soon! That's right, the sequel to The Graveyard Girl! I'm pleased to announce the impending release of The Necromancer's Return, not only because it continues Rose's story, but because it was immensely fun to write, and I think it's my best book yet. I can't wait to share it with everybody! Here's the blurb:

Rose has sworn off necromancy until a college statistics assignment sends her to a graveyard. Her entire grade depends on the assignment, so she uses her magic to convince the slackers in her group to help. When her powers don't work like they should, Rose discovers that there's another necromancer in Albuquerque whose inexperienced magic is affecting hers. Worse, she discovers there's a being called the Phantom who is devouring spirits and gunning for her and her powers. As if statistics isn't hard enough already, Rose has to track down this other necromancer and keep herself and her family safe from the Phantom.

Stay tuned for news on the release!

My Experience With Indie Publishing (Post 2)

If you missed my first post on indie publishing, you can find it here. This time around, I'll be talking about picking a cover, getting reviews, marketing, and writing the next book.

Initially I had grandiose ideas about creating my own cover. There are plenty of sites out there with stock photos, and people swear by Gimp for fiddling with images, font, etc. I know some people who have designed their own covers and do a fantastic job at it, Maya Lassiter being one. So I looked at stock images and started thinking about what I wanted the cover of The Graveyard Girl to look like. And I was overwhelmed with the choices. Choice paralysis is a real thing, and it was inhibiting my going forward with the cover.

Contrary to popular belief, this is not a self portrait.

I had already signed up with Smashwords, so I went to their list of cover designers and started looking through them. I had a few questions in mind as I searched. Who had made plenty of fantasy and/or young adult covers? Who fit into my budget? Who had a professional looking site? Did they have plenty of examples of covers so I could get a feel for what they were capable of? I settled onVila Design because (1) she'd done a lot of covers, (2), they looked good, (3) many were in the genre I wrote in, and (4) she fit my budget. She gave me about eight to ten images to consider, some of which were really good but I never would have thought to include in my search. She seemed like a mind reader when it came to presenting me with the final two cover choices (or maybe she's made a billion covers so she knows what to expect), and she was fast. My choice paralysis was gone, and I had a shiny new cover.

Reviews are important. They let people know that someone has read your book, and they give readers a better idea about whether or not they might enjoy a particular book. Honest reviews help make a book more noticeable. It's a good idea to ask people for honest reviews via social media, or by asking at the book's end, or by asking for reviews from those who do a bunch of them. There are plenty of people out there who love to read and want to be among the first to get their hands on a good book. One helpful site I found is The Indie Book Reviewers List. It can take a long time to wade through all of the reviewers out there, so it's something I end up doing in bits and pieces when I have time. Word of mouth is one of the most important ways of selling a book, and if you find some good folks willing to review yours and spread the news, then that will help your book start to build momentum.

Once you've got your book out and you've spread the word, the best thing you can do to market it is to write the next book. People enjoy binge watching TV, and they enjoy binge reading their favorite author and/or series. The more books you have out, the more you'll sell, and the happier you'll make your readers. When I decided to self-publish The Graveyard Girl, I waited until I had a rough draft of the second book in the series and had the third novel roughly outlined. Right now I'm working on edits for the second book and tentatively hope to have it out by September, and I hope to have the third one out about four to six months after that.

I'm constantly learning as I go along, and I'm constantly tweaking my plans. As I cross items off my to-do list, others sneak on. But for someone who is a control freak (like me), self-publishing is a great venue. I rely on others to help, but ultimately, I get to say when the book comes out, where, and what it looks like. I was scared when I began this process, but that quickly turned into absolute happiness as I realized just how much fun the process was.

My Experience With Indie Publishing (Post 1)

I celebrated my book's appearance on Amazon in style.

Things are winding down after a frantic few weeks. On May 1st, I released the first book in a series. It was my first foray into indie publishing, and it was as exciting and terrifying as releasing a book through a publisher, perhaps even more so because ultimately, the buck stops here, so I thought I'd share my experience.

First of all, I had this idea that I would have a 'release day' in which the book went live across all electronic platforms. Excuse me while I go laugh hysterically in the corner for a second. Ahem. So. I'm sure it can be done, but I have no idea how. Amazon took a few hours to have the book ready to sell. Barnes and Noble and Kobo had it ready in about a day. The iTunes store required an act of Congress, a small blood sacrifice, and about two weeks of time to have the book ready. In the future, if I want a 'release day,' I'll simply plan on a day about a month after I start publishing the book. But since I'm fairly lazy, I'll probably just do it the same way I did it this time--one venue per day.

One of the first things I did when I decided to self publish was read a couple of books on indie publishing. I read Indie And Small Press Book Marketing by William Hertling. It includes a convenient checklist for the time leading up to publication, during, and after. I made my own checklist based off his, and it helped immensely. Instead of flailing and wondering what to do when, I could just make my way down the list, feeling self-satisfied as I checked things off. I also read Your First 1000 Copies by Tim Grahl. He focused most of his advice on making and using an email reader list, which is something I haven't gotten around to doing yet. And I read numerous blogs, trying to absorb every person's experience and decide what I wanted mine to be like, including Jeff Carlson's guest spot on SF Signal and these tips from M. Darusha Wehm.

I'm lazier than turtles sunning on a rock.

The next thing I did was make the book as polished as possible. After making changes based on reader feedback, I read it over. Then I let it rest and read it through again. Only when I was satisfied I'd done all I could on a macro and micro level did I bring in a professional freelance editor to look it over. I used E-Quality Press. Not only did they do a fantastic job, but the editor got what I was trying to do. He formatted the files for me in addition to editing (more on that in a bit), and when it came time to format the file for the print copy, he asked if I wanted the story to begin on page 13. I was amused that he had gotten to know me well enough in a short period of time (and through email, too) to even know to ask that.

A lot of authors format their files themselves. Initially I thought I'd go that direction, but when it came time, I simply had no desire to learn how to convert my Word document into the proper format (Do you see a pattern? Seriously, I'm the laziest person around. I'm worse than Garfield the cat). It was worth letting somebody else do that work while I panicked over other things, like the book's cover, which I will discuss in another post along with reviews and miscellaneous other items.

Until then, if you have any links or books or anything at all that you'd like to share when it comes to indie publishing, feel free to comment.

Everything. Everyone. Everywhere. Ends.

The tile of this blog post is the tagline used for the final season of Six Feet Under. Fair warning, spoilers for the show are about to happen, so if you haven't seen it and you want to, stop reading.

My HS economics teacher suggested I be a mortician. Seriously.

I've said it before, the finale for this series was the best finale to any show I've ever seen. Nothing has come close to topping it, not even my beloved Breaking Bad, good as that finale was. I've been trying to figure out why that last episode did so much for me, and I think I finally figured it out.

The show was about death. It was about funeral homes and how the little businesses stacked up against the big, corporate ones. It was about family. But mostly, it was about death. Every episode opened with somebody dying. There were old people dying of, well, old age, people dying in accidents, kids dying, spouses dying, parents dying. It was right there, in your face.

At some point in the last century or so, it became rather taboo to talk about death. I've seen people avoid the topic, or refuse to attend funerals. They might do the equivalent of sticking their fingers in their ears and saying, "Lalalalalala, can't hear you!" Not so long ago, people talked about death more openly. When somebody died, they were laid out in their home for the viewing. In Victorian times, people died young, and often. There was no avoiding the topic. But now we go to funeral homes to view the deceased. People live longer, and so they might put off thinking about the inevitable. It's a topic that makes a lot of people uncomfortable.

Shows like Six Feet Under are bringing death to the forefront, though, and perhaps encouraging people to think a little more about their deaths. So what is it about that show's ending that made such an impression on me? Well, almost every other series finale ends with the main characters still going about their lives in some way. But in Six Feet Under, we get to see snippets of how the rest of their lives played out, and how they died. Every single character's death is shown, all while Sia's "Breathe Me" played in the background. Incidentally, if you haven't heard this song, it's great. But there was no question about what happened to any of the characters. We saw them all die. It was such an intimate moment, and moving, and terribly sad, and completely satisfying. Holy cow, I'm sort of tearing up writing this. Yes, the ending was that good.

I'm not saying that every show needs to do this. But for this series, it was perfect. Everything. Everyone. Everywhere. Ended.

It All Leads Up To This

An article came out recently about three books bound in human flesh at Harvard. Since then, it's been shown that one of them is actually made of sheepskin, but that still leaves a couple of books allegedly made out of people. (And now I have an image in my mind of Charlton Heston falling to his knees and saying, "It's people! The dictionary is made of people!") I got excited when this article came out, not because I'm hoping to bind a tome in human flesh, but because the book of magic in The Graveyard Girl is made of the flesh of Rose's necromantic ancestors.

So I got to thinking about the various options available to people--and their bodies--once they die. Most people opt for a burial or cremation, and most people who go the casket route end up embalmed. In the U.S., embalming wasn't a popular choice until the Civil War when soldiers had to be shipped a long way to return home after they died. A man named Thomas Holmes is credited for creating modern day embalming, and it became a booming business. Interestingly enough, before he died, Holmes requested that he not be embalmed.

A lot of people are choosing green burials as an alternative. Simply put, no embalming fluid is used, and the body is contained in something biodegradable. There are special cemeteries that allow green burials, and having seen a number of dead bodies preserved with formaldehyde, I'm inclined to prefer green burials myself. I rather like the thought of a tree or some flowers growing over me.

But if cemeteries and urns sound too mundane, you can always turn your ashes into a diamond. Shiny!

As for Rose, her words of wisdom and her blood will end up in the book of magic to be passed on to another generation of necromancers because that's the way it's done in her family.

Every Day Above Ground Is A Good One

Over the next week, I'll be getting ready to release the first book in an urban fantasy trilogy. The Graveyard Girl features a necromancer named Rose, and so I've been thinking about death a lot recently and searching for interesting death-related tidbits of information as well as pondering my own experiences with death.

My first semester in physical therapy school I took gross anatomy. I spent hours every week in a lab studying a dead body. It remains my favorite class ever, and I wish I could take a refresher course every ten years or so. Working on a human body is irreplaceable when it comes to learning how we're all put together. I'm amazed and awed that there are enough people in the world who donate their bodies to the purpose of educating those in the medical field.

As what happens so often when we're surrounded by death, we resort to humor to dispel the seriousness of the situation. When I went home for Thanksgiving break that semester, I endured many jokes about being the one to carve the turkey since I'd had so much recent experience with a scalpel. Normally my family is a sarcastic bunch, but I think, in this case, there was a little discomfort mixed in with the usual cynicism. After all, none of them (to the best of my knowledge) had ever cut open a dead human before. For a great article on what it's like to take gross anatomy, check out this article.

So for the rest of the next week or so, I'll be talking about death and all sorts of assorted facts, from shows like Six Feet Under to books made of human flesh (like the book of magic in The Graveyard Girl).

Research in a Cemetery

One of the things I love about writing is the excuse to do interesting things in the name of research. Recently I wrote a story about a necromancer who spends considerable time in cemeteries. As I was writing, I sort of used generic cemetery details with the idea that I'd research the setting later.

Later came along a couple of weeks ago. I went to one of the older cemeteries in town to walk around and take some pictures. While I was writing, I somehow had it in mind that the fence around the cemetery would be huge and imposing. Maybe I've read too many stories about grave robbing, I dunno. Anyhow, I was surprised to find that it was actually short enough that a person could easily prop their hands on top and hop over. Not that I did that, mind you, I went during regular hours and drove in like a respectable person, but my characters do odd things. Ahem.

Anyhow, one of the first things I noticed was that there was a separate section for the Greek Orthodox Church. When I got home, I did some googling and found that quite a few Greeks ended up in Albuquerque with the intention of making money and going back home. I'm sure some ended up doing that, but apparently quite a few stayed in the Land of Entrapment.

A Woodman of the World tombstone

Some headstones also told where people were from. Folk came from Missouri, Greece, Germany. I wondered what brought them here. Was it the railroad? Did they end up here because of tuberculosis? Around the turn of the century, a lot of physicians sent their patients here because the altitude and dry air helped with the symptoms. In fact, one of the founding physicians for a local hospital ended up here because he had TB.

I also discovered that there is such a thing as The Woodmen of the World. Initially I thought maybe these were people who belonged to some sort of wood carving group, but it's actually sort of a philanthropic organization (and they don't carve wood, alas). They provide life insurance, give away tons of flags, and for a while they erected these elaborate tombstones. According to Wikipedia, they stopped erecting the more elaborate stones in the 1920's.

Music and Writing

Plenty of people listen to music while they write. I make 'soundtracks' to my novels. While I don't necessarily listen to music while writing the rough draft, I often do listen to it while editing or rewriting in order to get me back to the same head space where I was when I originally wrote the scene. Or, I'll listen to the music and jot down ideas and images, then write in silence.

I just finished revising a YA novel. I added nearly 30 songs to this novel's 'soundtrack,' but felt that during revisions I needed a few more songs, preferably released this year or last year, and capturing the feel of the novel overall. Plus, I really needed to procrastinate before I tackled revisions.

The main character is eighteen years old and prone to enjoying alternative music (much like me, ha). I spent some time stumbling around iTunes and found The Graveyard Girl by M83. I love Midnight City, so I gave Graveyard Girl a whirl. It's reminiscent of the 80's in sound and subject (the lyrics even refer to Molly Ringwald). It's angsty, it reminds me of the movie The Craft, and my inner 15 year old loved it. I probably would have really enjoyed this song up to the age of 20 or so (and even a ways beyond), and so I felt it suited my 18 year old character well.

I also stumbled across a new artist, Jeremy Messersmith, and his song A Girl, A Boy, and a Graveyard. The album's cover art is adorable and a bit tongue-in-cheek, the song has a folksy, sorrowful sound that his voice is well suited for, and the lyrics are pretty darn nice. Plus, the song is about a relationship, and death, which are a couple of things my main character is wallowing in.

I would've never come across these songs if I hadn't been looking for something more to add to my 'soundtrack' (also, procrastination isn't always a bad thing). These songs, and others, helped me remember my adolescent angst and pour it into the novel.