February 7th, 2013 
My new novella.
Danica and Rikki have missed their plane, which couldn’t be worse news because now they might just miss their own wedding. When a pilot of a small plane offers to fly them there himself, they jump at the chance; after all, the man swears he has one short stop to deliver supplies to a ranger station in Cache la Poudre, then it’s clear skies all the way.
The only trouble is, the stop along the way turns into a destination all of its own, when the pilot, telling the women they’re his cargo, delivers them into the hands of an armed man. They’re needed for a babysitting job, whatever that means, but job or not, being kidnapped is not on Danica and Rikki’s itinerary. They have a wedding to get to, and a honeymoon, and being chased through the wilderness, while a great bonding exercise, is not the romantic getaway they were expecting.
Then there’s the ‘babysitting’. Even if they get away from the kidnappers, dare they leave without checking first that there’s not a baby there somewhere?
(Click cover to download on Smashwords)
on Amazon Kindle:
http://tinyurl.com/amf572e
Pick-A-Project-Polka; a dance we writers do when we’re trying to decide what we feel like working on next; we listen to our muse, we dance with our muse, we kick our muse out and get practical, and we sometimes curse our muse and send it to bed without dinner. All of these I’ve done this time around, as well.
the island was a living entity somehow, and perhaps it was a sort of purgatory, and my characters were already dead, but in some alternate reality after death (See? Very similar to Lost). It hardly mattered what my story was about, though, because the whole shebang was a cheese-fest. Dialogue smarmy and uber-romanticized, like something out of a bad Harlequin (not to suggest there was ever a GOOD Harlequin). But I noticed all the stereotyping I was doing, with gender-roles. I, of course, had to have the man save the woman, and she was, of course, weak and frightened and only able to feel safe while in his arms. Repugnant, all around.
scene and getting tired of using “she” and “her” so having to fix that with sentence structure, and stylistic tricks. Another was beginning paragraphs and sentences with the same word repeatedly, over and over, again and again, until it became a repetitious, recapitulation, reiteration, replay, reproduction, rerun, reshowing and also a duplication. Amazing, the little lessons we learn about our craft that we hardly notice until being faced with them in the form of our own literary apparitions, ghost stories from the past. My muse was quite wispy and frail back then. Largely attributable to my early years of reading too many of the aforementioned romance novels, and also watching too many soap operas. I learned how to write poorly from both (these sorts of things also have a way of retarding your intellect, as well). My writing only improved when I began to read more accomplished, masterful authors. Like Edgar Allen Poe, Edgar Rice Burroughs, Robert A. Heinlein and later, Dean Koontz (in whom I have lost interest in recent years, perhaps because his writing has become a little tedious–though I did learn a great deal by studying his writing, to find out what he was doing to get me to turn that page every time).
Adult genre. I found those books hugely entertaining and delightful and quick-reading, which was what I wanted at the time. And more recently, I enjoyed Gone Girl, by Gillian Flynn, but was disappointed in the cop-out ending–a particularly potent peeve of mine. And I have only a few days ago, discovered Nelson DeMille, and he’s shaping up to be a favorite, if this book, Plum Island, continues to be as good as it has been from page-one. I’m excited about this possibility, since I see the stacks and stacks of books he has just waiting for my hungry eyes to explore.
waiting for me to continue that series. And I will continue to do that, while developing other series in the subgenres of lesbian fiction, and making most of them novellas since the trend seems to be shorter books, now. I guess people don’t have or make much time to read these days. Until then, I must keep my focus, and not stray into territory that I can’t occupy in a formidable way, and hope to gain an appreciable piece of the literary pie in that fashion.
the officer when they met a few months ago on a domestic violence call. Her hair. She was pretty sure Chloe was gay, too, but didn’t feel it was appropriate to bring it up. Ginger would certainly have asked her out, if there was no Izzy in the picture. But she had no complaints in that department. “Still. Not sure why you’d toady me. I’m just a detective.”
had the cheek to ask for a cigarette. Apparently, she needed one because blowing herself up had caused her some stress.”
“I got his number a few months ago,” Chloe told Ginger. “when he drew down one night on a plastic coyote that the residents had placed outside to scare the geese away.” She took the roundabout back into Windsor. “Somehow, he saw the thing and was startled, so dropped to the ground with his gun out. The coyote wasn’t moving, so he crawled over and poked it with his gun. He told me later he thought it was a chupacabra.”
Ginger had trouble concentrating because Miss Beecher had one of those egg vibrators on the table next to her chair. She almost forgot why they were there. Chloe’s eyes went to the egg and back to Ginger, and the desire to laugh was almost overwhelming. Chloe did a good job of maintaining her composure, but Ginger felt a case of screaming meemies coming on.
Now Available!!! Also Known as Syzygy, book 3 in the AKA Investigations series
First of all, this reader I mentioned is from New Zealand, and I write toward an American audience. These product names and brands I might use are all familiar to American readers, and so it does create a clearer picture for them than it would a reader who might not even recognize what that some brands are. So the tendency to want generic, might be predicated on a need for familiarity. This is precisely the reason I don’t read books with foreign settings, or books like The Hobbit…I don’t want to be lost in that landscape, confused about what everything means. I detest that in my own life, in my own landscape. I like familiar things. They ground me. I like specificity. It keeps things clear.
SIDEBAR: I also recall a reader mentioning that my character’s use of electronic cigarettes was distracting. Again, this is a product not yet in the common usage lexicon, psychologically. So a reader will notice it more. The same was true for tobacco in fiction, until it became passé to have characters smoking. (Watch any old black and white movie and you will suddenly notice how EVERYONE is smoking. It will seem odd and distracting).
drink, sandwich, sedan, convertible, phone, coffee….and I always had the thoughts, what kind? I wonder if this character likes white or red wine? I wonder if this character buys American or foreign? I wonder if this character likes expensive shoes or cheap ones? It kept me from gaining a full appreciation of that character, and tended to make them cardboard cutouts–and I find THAT distracting.
It’s so satisfying to sit at my desk and write to the sound of the ocean. Only this time, it’s not in my earbuds, but outside my window. Our move to Dunedin placed us within walking distance of the beach, and the rhythmic breath of the waves at shore soothes me. The cool, robust breeze from the water sometimes spits through our windows like a fire hose, but it helps regulate the temperature in this upstairs master suite, high above almost all other houses on this hillside. It’s Summer here, though luckily for me, the fall and winter-loving, heat-intolerant moi, there really hasn’t been much heat yet. Weather is weird everywhere, as I understand it.
finally create some normal routines.
Thus, over the years, I have managed to produce work in myriad categories. Fourteen, at last count. But it has become clear to me in recent months that my approach has not been wise. This diversification has only managed to erode the ground under my literary feet, and prevent me from getting a proper foothold in the market–especially when so many other writers have established theirs. And they are the ones who enjoy better sales. There’s a reason for that.
It seems that most of THOSE-WHO-READ (myself included, though I made the error of thinking other readers behaved differently) tend to pick the type of book or author they like, or both, and then they continue to read that book/author. When they run out of an author’s work, they seek other authors who write in a similar genre and/or with a similar style. Thus, the readers who buy my books have read whichever genre of mine they are drawn to, and then discover there isn’t another book in that genre from me, and they move on to find those other authors they might also like who have books available which they have not read. This does not encourage a strong, growing readership.
probably would have existed by now, after 29 books. Had those 29 books been in one genre, I would not have taken such a hit when digital publishing swelled to its current oceanic level. According to factzone.com, in America, a new book is published every 13 minutes. This groundswell of publishing is attributable to the ease with which we can now publish our work. Yes, that means more bad books from bad writers mucking up the booklist for the rest of us, but it also means more freedom, and demands that we employ smart-marketing techniques. Hence, the issue at hand with my diversification.
The Next Big Thing Blog Hop, wherein writers talk about their current Work in Progress (WIP), has apparently been going strong for 26 weeks, and so many writers have taken part, that I had a hard time finding the originator of the idea… I could have found it, eventually, but then, that would have me spending way too much time on Google, and not enough writing. I’ve been guilty of that before. Guilty of that often. Guilty. Most of the time. Did I mention I’m legally changing my middle name to Google? But this NBT Blog Hop thing has taken root in cyberspace and it’s spreading. It’s like an Internet fungus. Okay, that was too pejorative to say about a vocation I love. Kudzu? No…let’s see….how about it’s blossoming like a well-tended garden?
It sprang from the first draft pages of my AKA Investigations Series, Book 3. I was getting so bogged down in the plot machinations, filling my dry erase board and desk pad and index cards with scribbles and bubbles and off-shoot ideas….and suddenly my main characters had been pushed into the background, and the secondary and tertiary characters were taking over the story. So in a fit of brilliance (which looks very much like a Grand Mal seizure, and may or may not have come from Kate–though she doesn’t have seizures when she has ideas) I figured out that maybe I was trying to write two different books–maybe this other one wanted to be written first.
combination. But this one did not lend itself to much humor and I had to intentionally go back and add some levity by creating some other characters. It worked out well, because those characters turned out to be important to the plot. But Syzygy is written in Third Person Limited, from various Points of View. My books are generally either First Person Limited or Third Person Omniscient Narrator. Thus, in this book I was taxed with the need to write from the mind of characters I neither liked nor fully understood. I had to write their thoughts, when those thoughts were abhorrent to me. I had to imagine what their motivations were, and how they would respond to certain situations, when I could not even fathom being in that situation in the first place. I also found that tense and point of view was a real beast for me to keep control of. I made some very amateur mistakes and am thankful for the proofing and beta reading Kate has been doing for me…she has spotted many things I missed, and forced me out of my comfort zone.
