Seeking Feedback!

Okay all... here's a draft of the blurb for KILLING MOMZILLAS... thoughts?

Moo is getting married. Estela vows to do everything she can to give her best friend the perfect wedding. Of course, Paulina Hart, Moo’s overbearing, controlling, and evil mother, has sunk her Momzilla talons into the wedding details and is shredding everything! To keep Moo’s dream day from chaos and ruin, Estela takes a more hands-on role in wedding planning. At this point, she has successfully tackled a stalker and a serial killer. Facing a sulfur-breathing, cream cashmere skirt-suit wearing, demon with evil clown red hair—no problem.

Estela learns quickly that pulling off a hitch-free, Momzilla-free wedding while simultaneously dealing with a forced partnership with a sex-crazed dominatrix, a trip to meet her biological father and half-siblings, and a quickly changing friendship, is pretty difficult. Putting all of her focus on Moo is forcing Estela’s other relationships, including the details of her own wedding, to the backburner. When things start falling apart at the seams, Estela realizes that she has to do something to mend the cracks in her life before she loses not only Moo, but Caleb too.

Killing Monsters Update

I'm now 35 pages away from my initial edit of KILLING MONSTERS. Yay! I'm still not comfortable with the idea of stating when it will be available as I'm going to have a beta reader go through it, plus I'll be doing a "Nook edit" (which is basically when I put it on my nook and read it again), and I've asked a friend to help me out with the cover. So... still a lot of players involved, still a lot of work to do. My goal for this book is to be free of typos. Fingers crossed... it's very likely that something small will slip through, but I'm taking my time. I need to take my time because with KM1, I rushed it a little.

Sales are still somewhat slow, a few trickle in from day to day. I'm researching ways to maximize my sales. I probably should have offered KM1 as a free ebook, in retrospect. I do plan on offering it free for a few weeks before (and probably during the release) of KM2. I still don't know what price I'm going to put KILLING MONSTERS. Maybe I'll have a better idea after I finish reading the article that I linked above.

Wanna help me out with promotion? If you bought through Amazon, go back to my page and (1) leave a review!!! (please!!!) and (2) agree with the tags (found under Tags Customers Associate with this Product). Add tags if you want. The more people "agree with tags" the more likely the book will be placed in one of the tagged categories. Reviews are the most helpful though--thank you so much to the people who have left them on both amazon.com and amazon.co.uk!

All right... we're heading to the finish line!

As a side note: I just finished reading A STARTER BOYFRIEND. That one (as one of the final books I wrote while posting to FictrionPress) isn't in bad shape--a few typos here and there. I may end up working on it for a few weeks and then uploading it. So, get excited! :)

Holy Crap... This Is Happening

It's almost 2am and I just finished the second edit of KILLING MEMORIES. I also just posted the first chapter to FictionPress (CLICK HERE). At this point... there are probably little mistakes still, but I'm just gonna let them happen for now. If there are glaring mistakes then I'll deal with them when they come.

My next step is to format for Kindle. I'm not sure WHEN I'll be uploading the book today, but I'm pretty sure it'll happen before 11:59pm EST. :)

Oh and the computer that I created the covers on decided to die... so the cover will be one of the four that I posted. Not sure which one yet...

Checklist update

Wow, it's only Saturday and I've gotten so much done:

1. Designed a cover. (I didn't know how I felt about it at first, but it's definitely growing on me, especially for what I have to work with regarding my designing skills and software programs. This should work for now and if the book explodes maybe then I can hire someone.) Check it out above.
2. Wrote a blurb. (Thank god I saved what I had originally posted on FictionPress... I ended up tweaking that a little bit and I think it works--of course suggestions are always welcome).

What still needs to be done:

1. Finish editing (about 127 pages left, doable in 6 days I think--hopefully in the next two if I can keep pushing on).
2. Figure out how to start up Amazon and Smashwords accounts.
3. Format the book for Amazon (this I feel is going to be tedious).
4. Figure out what Smashwords will need (and if it'll distribute to a variety

Okay, let me get back to it.

Finished: Edit #8

I just finished the eighth edit of THE SPIRIT KEEPER. It's now 540 pages (174,590 words, which is about 100,000 words over the average YA novel length). I did cut some with this edit... maybe 5 or 6 pages. I personally think that the length works for the story I'm telling in this book. I wouldn't care at all if I already had an agent. The big issue is finding someone who won't pass on it because it's too long. At this point, I can't find anything else to cut so it's either going to stay at this length or an editor/agent will need to tell me what doesn't need to be there. Oh well... it's done, for now. I can only hope at this point that my main character, Evelyn, is more likeable/interesting. I like her.

My next project is to start editing KILLING MEMORIES. Lord, I hope I don't make it longer. I'm going into it with the mindset of just cleaning it up, but who knows what will happen. The good thing is that I re-read it a few months ago and it's not horrible, like I thought it would be. [I thought so because I wrote the first half not really knowing where it was going and then outlined the second half, and rushed the ending.] My goal is to have it up as an ebook by May, so I'm glad that I finished up the edit today because now I'm free to work on it. Although, I should start working on the next book in my SPIRIT KEEPER trilogy (and I should submit it some more). Maybe I'll try to multitask.

Anyway, it's so beautiful in Maryland right now (although it's supposed to be like 80 degrees later this week and I think it's too early for those temps!) I had a few friends in town this weekend and we went to see the cherry blossoms, a beautiful D.C. staple. Japan gave the trees to the United States as a gift and this year is the centennial birthday (I guess that's what it's called). They bloomed early this year because of the crazy nice weather we're having. Happy Spring everyone!

Cherry Blossom tree along the Tidal Basin, Washington D.C. Across the way is the Jefferson Monument.

E-Book Covers and Cookbooks

Now that I'm seriously considering turning my early FictionPress stories into e-books (or even self-published books), I'm starting to think about book covers. A beautiful/engaging cover can really push a hardcover or paperback. Is the same true for e-books? At the moment, I'm really unsure of what I should do for KILLING MEMORIES. Fancy text on a solid background? Some kind of photograph? I did a sketch of Moo and Estela, but I'm not a great drawer (sadly) and it just seems impossible to get what I'm thinking to come out of my hands. I wish I was an artist. Painters, sketchers, watercolorists, whatevers... I'm so in awe of such talent. I wish I had a small sliver of it, but I don't. All of my creativity is with words.

I haven't  bought a lot of e-books myself so I'm not sure what people are drawn to. Price? An awesome cover? The synopsis/blurb? All three probably. I just don't know where to start. Thoughts?

So, I ended up completely cleaning up my FictionPress profile and stories. It seems just a little pointless to have a bunch of unfinished stories on there. So now it's just "Chemical Games" and "My Darling Bunny." Hopefully I can add a new (and permanent) story soon. I'm so tempted to start posting chapters of ARABELLE WILD and that maybe reader feedback will spark me into finishing it. But I don't want it to end up like GEORGIA SWIMMER or THE JADE BRACELET. I sometimes think about how good (even though it was really bad) I had it being unemployed for nine months after graduate school. I could write so much then. And I swear, I'm letting valuable writing team get eaten away by my disgusting TV habit. I. Love. T.V. I do miss the times when I could write all day long and really produce. Oh well, I'll have to adapt.

I just bought a new lamp. It's got two pull cords that turn on the light bulbs. It had such an old-timey feel to it, which I liked. It seemed like the perfect fit for my writing desk. Now I just need to get myself off the couch and seated at the desk. The portability of this new laptop really has it's downfalls.

Costco had this for half the price.

And to continue the randomness of this post... I just bought a really awesome cookbook called EVERYDAY FOOD: LIGHT (from Martha Stewart's kitchen, no less). I was looking something that had meals under 500 calories (I'm in a pretty good "get healthy mode" at the moment). The best thing about this cookbook, besides a lot of delicious looking recipes, is that there is a color picture on each page. I have to have pictures in my cookbook. I'm a decent cook, but I still like the visual to know how it's supposed to look (even if most of the foods are professionally photographed, fancied up, and possibly not even cooked). I'm really excited to make a few of these recipes. As a cooking side note: The Food Network magazine is pretty awesome too.

A journey toward healthiness and a journey toward publishing are kind of the same: hard, frustrating, hopeful, and tiring.