One Darned Thing After Another

When I’ve published my ebooks, I’ve never set a formal release date.  I’ve just put them out there.  As I worked on the reissue of my next book, A Summer Folly, it occurred to me that a book about summer should be released on the first day of summer.  With that in mind, I set June 21 as the deadline for getting the book out.

It didn’t happen.  The trip to California, complete with broken wrist, shot my schedule to hell.  I will not belabor that point since I’ve already whined about it.  I don’t care what my doctor said.  Typing with a cast on is hard.  Still, I persevered, and managed to finish the book.  I even got components for the cover art done.  After some back and forth, my cover artist came up with something I like and will be using. The result?  A Summer Folly will be published sometime this weekend.

Real life interferes with writing sometimes.  People in your life need you, other tasks demand doing, and your boss actually expects you to get work done.  Writers need to persevere, though.  We can’t wait around for inspiration to strike, or we’ll never get a word down on epaper.  Cast or not, cover problems or not, I kept going.  It’s something all creative people need to do, hard though it may be.  Sometimes, it may be the only bright spot in your life.  After all, if you’re like me, you were born with a burning need to create within you.  Go thou, and do so.

Oh, and the cast comes off in two weeks.  Yay!

Them's the Breaks

My mother, when she was alive, used to talk about getting old, about how from one year to the next she found herself able to do fewer things.  I believed her, but in an abstract way.  After all, I could still do pretty much anything.  Yes, I was low on energy, but I’ve always been sedentary.  And I’d recovered from surgery for TMJ and a hysterectomy just fine; in fact, better than fine, in that I was able to do things faster than anyone expected.  Obviously I was a fast healer.  And then I broke my wrist….

Last year, on a day of snow showers, I found the one ice patch in the entire city.  Out went my foot from under me; straight down I went, landing on a very well cushioned part of my anatomy, and my left hand.  I knew immediately that it was broken.  I couldn’t move it in any direction, and it felt curiously dead.  What I chiefly felt at that moment was disgust.  Yes, I knew that time would pass, and I’d get over it.  I just had to deal with it, day by day.  I was soon back to work, where my co-workers decorated my cast with pictures of Snoopy, and the symbol for crash test dummies.  My boss even wrote a limerick.  Sure enough, time passed.  The cast came off and I headed for physical therapy, which I worked at with a vengeance.  In time I got my strength and mobility back.  End of a bad chapter - or so I thought.

Fast forward to May of this year.  My daughter and I were on vacation in California.  We went to Santa Monica a couple of times, and Grauman’s Chinese theater, and Universal Studios.  On the last day of our trip we went to the Getty Museum, with a trip to UCLA planned for afterwards.  As we wandered through the Getty’s gardens, I tripped over a low curb protecting the flowerbeds.  Again I went down, this time landing on my right hand.  I will not repeat what I said to myself.  Suffice it to say it wasn’t nice.  This wasn’t supposed to happen, I thought.  I had this problem last year, and I should have been OK for a few more years.  Plus I was 3000 miles away from home and my support system.  How was I going to drive to a hospital for treatment, let alone get back to our hotel in Hollywood, 12 miles distant, in LA’s traffic?  And then to the airport the next day?  This was serious.  I was the only adult in our group.  There was no one I could call for help.  Eventually, though, I found myself in the hands of two very helpful EMT’s.  They loaded me in an ambulance, which I found vaguely humiliating.  Then there we were, the ER at the UCLA Medical Center.  We got there after all, just not in the way we’d planned.

I had a great orthopedic doctor.  He was the best looking man I’ve seen in a long time.  As he gave me his diagnosis, I was staring at him, wondering how I’d describe him back home.  Dr. McDreamy has been taken.  I know!  Dr. Delicious!  Hey, Mary.  Stop staring at this guy, and listen to what he’s saying.  He set the wrist, wrapped it up, and sent me on my way.  I’d already given up  all thoughts of driving.  Hertz could come tow the car.  We’d take a cab back to the hotel, and to heck with the price.  Then we’d catch a shuttle to the airport the next day.

All worked out.  Though I couldn’t find an open pharmacy for my prescription for pain pills (note to LA:  leave the pharmacies open later on Saturday nights, and open earlier in the morning.  I mean, in such a big city, shouldn’t pharmacies be more easily available)?  After having my cast screened at security at the airport, to make sure I wasn’t disguising a bomb or some such, I flew across the continent with my arm upraised, for the swelling.  My sister met me on the other end, and I found myself in the care of people who mean a lot to me.  Now I sport a hot pink cast, with various signatures and a picture of Garfield.  I’ve been given the reluctant go-ahead from my doctor to drive, thank God.  When patrons at the library ask me what happened, I tell them I punched someone for returnng a book late.  Thank God I can get around and work and eat chocolate, though I can’t use a fork and writing is hard.  However…

We return to the first paragraph.  I’m not bouncing back from this as quickly as I did as a child, or even as recently as last year.  I get tired easily, and I move slower than usual.  Motrin and Vicodrin are my best friends.  And I can’t get up much energy to work on the book I want to put out this week.  My mother was right, as she usually was.  What a drag it is getting old.

This has been a long, and somewhat self-indulgent entry, but if I don’t feel sorry for myself, who will?  Such is life.  Thank you Pat, Marcia, Tom, Chris, Kling, Karen, and Frank, and my wonderful doctor, Mi Haisman, who asked me what I was doing back in her office.   And thank all of you who’ve persevered through this long story.  I promise you that better days, and better entries, are coming.

Relentless Self-Promotion

It is an axiom among ebook/indie writers that self-promotion is absolutely necessary for the success of any book.  Get on Facebook, Twitter, and other social networks.  Keep a blog, maintain a website, send out newsletters.  Hold promotions and contests, and make sure everyone always knows what you’re doing, all to get your book noticed.  Does it work?  To an extent, sure.  There are authors who’ve had a great deal of success because of their promotional efforts.  There are also authors who haven’t.  There are some who haven’t done a thing, and yet their books sell.  This is all well and good, but to date I haven’t done much of it.  The reason?  I hate it.

There are few things that bother me more than a hard sell, and that’s what relentless self-promotion is.  I’ve come to the reluctant conclusion, though, that I have to promote my books, at least, some of the time.  So, occasionally, I’ll write an entry about this book or that.  I’ll try to make it entertaining, so you’ll get something more out of it than a sales pitch.  In that spirit, I must say that I currently have 5 ebooks available for sale.  Two are Regency novellas:  “Gifts of the Heart” and “The Crystal Heart.”  Two are full-length Regency romances:  The Rake’s Reward and An Unsuitable Wife.  One is a historical romance, In a Pirate’s Arms.  I will also soon be releasing a sixth book, another Regency, titled A Summer Folly.  The release date is June 21, to coincide with the beginning of summer.  All my books are available at Amazon, for the Kindle; Barnes and Noble, for the Nook; and at Smashwords.com for a variety of formats.  Just search on Mary Kingsley, and the titles will come up.

There.  That’s the end of the promotional part of this entry.  Not too painful, was it?

Indie writers don’t want to admit that traditional books have any advantages over ebooks, but they do, and it’s important.  It’s the ability to browse.  Go into any bookstore and browse through the books.  Maybe you’re looking for something special; maybe not.  But something catches your eye:  a title, a cover, an author’s name, and you find yourself reaching for a book on the shelf.  You read the back cover copy and the inside cover copy, and you decide that, it might be not what you were looking for, but it’s exactly what you want.  Serendipity.

You don’t get that with ebooks.  Amazon tries to replicate the experience by showcasing books similar to those you’ve already bought, but that puts only a few titles in front of you.  In a bookstore, there are thousands.  Yes, Amazon has a far greater inventory, but their books aren’t available for you to touch and hold and browse.  There’s something to be said for the old way of doing things.

So, where does this leave the ebook author?  Forced to push her books onto an unsuspecting public, because she knows they’re not going to show up at airport kiosks or supermarket shelves anytime soon.  When I began this blog, my intention was not just to sound off, but to entertain, which is why I’ve written about such disparate topics as sleep, make-up (ah, Sephora), and daylight savings time.  My intention with writing books still is to entertain, but if you, the reader, don’t know what’s out there, how can you know what to buy?  Hm.  Maybe self-promotion isn’t so bad, after all.

This Old Book

When I was going through my old manuscripts a couple of months back, I came across one that was never published.  Facing the Music is my only semi-successful attempt at writing a contemporary romance, before I found my niche as a Regency author. And guess what? It’s not awful. Oh, it’s no masterpiece. While I did have an agent interested, it didn't sell. With experience under my belt, I understand why. For one thing, it doesn't really fit into any category. It's not a traditional category romance. It's not chick lit. If anything, it’s closer to the romances written by Elswyth Thane, one of my influences.

For all the negatives I just listed, it's still a book I like. I like the characters, who are people I'd like to meet in real life. The premise is slim, but can be beefed up. So can the characters' motivations. Do you see where I'm going with this? This book has caught me. It’s changed my direction.

I’m going to rewrite Facing the Music. It’s a pleasant little book. It’ll never set the world on fire, and it’s still unsalable in the traditional way, but that’s where epublishing comes in. It will give the old, new life.

So, after being creatively dormant for over three years, I’m going to take a deep breath to calm my anxiety and plunge in to rewriting and revising this old book, for which I hold a great deal of affection.  Wish me luck!

Yay, Me!

I am now officially an indie author.  With my books for sale at Amazon for the Kindle, at B & N for the Nook, and at Smashwords, I have become a publisher as well as a writer.  Like many another indie author, I check my sales obssessively.  So I am happy to announce that I have sold 100 books in April already.  Yay!

There's Cake in My Future - I Think

I met the New Bedford Free Public Library's 50 Book Challenge!  Last Monday, April 11, at 11:14 PM, I finished book #50.  The date and time are important because I'm in a race.  My boss and I are in a competition to see who can finish first.  Since she was on vacation this week she had a time advantage over me.  However, I was a few books ahead, so I *think* I won.  And what are the stakes of this competition?  Pizza for her, if she wins; chocolate cake for me.  With chocolate frosting, of course.

The last time we had a competition, to see who could read the most books in 6 months, we tied, at 82 each.  I don't think that's going to happen this time.  Cake, anyone?

I Want My Hour Back

I hate the first day of Daylight Savings.  I'm never quite sure what time it is.  Let's see, I woke up at 8, but it was really 9.  Or the clock says it's 6 and it's time for supper, but my body thinks it's 5 and isn't hungry.  I seem to be playing catch-up all day.  Thank God it's always a Sunday, at 2 AM, or I don't know what I'd do.

That 2 AM thing has always bothered me.  Last fall, when we switched back to Standard Time, I was awake, looking at my iPhone to see what happened at 2.  What happened was, there was no 2.  As the seconds counted down at 1:59 AM, the hour changed to 1 AM.  This is the only time when 1 comes before 1.  2 AM came an hour later, which by the previous way of telling time should have been 3, but wasn't.  Confused?  The iPhone was; this time, it didn't know whether to spring ahead or fall back, and it made the wrong choice.  At 2 AM, when it should have been 3 AM, it said it was 1 AM.  So, here's my question.  How can you change your clocks at 2 AM, when there is no 2 AM?  And who picked that particular hour for the change?  It's all very perplexing.

Telling time is weird, anyway.  Without researching it, I'm pretty sure that the Romans invented the 24 hour clock.  Why 24 hours?  Why not?  I can live with that, as well as with 60 minutes in an hour and sixty seconds in a minute (and even with the hundredth of a second, which is apparently a long time in Olympic sports).  What bugs me, and always has, is that the day begins at 12 AM.  Midnight, as in the middle of the night.  By definition night is not day, so how can that be the start of the day?  I can see why that particular hour might hold some importance.  The numbering of hours probably started with noon, which is when the sun reaches its apex.  Fine.  That's an actual, measurable cosmic event.  So, 12 hours after that is midnight.  But why call noon12 PM?  Why not call it 6, if you're going to stick with the 24 hour day?  After all, it's midday, though with the clocks being changed, the astronomical noon probably doesn't happen at 12.  (and the true equinox doesn't happen on the day of the equinox - but that's another story).  If noon is considered to be six, it follows that what we now call 6 AM should be 12 AM.  That way, the day begins when it really should:  around daybreak.  Sunrise to sunrise makes a day.  Right?  I'm just saying.

So, fine.  Because of the Romans we're stuck with a weird start to the day, and because of Ben Franklin we have to adjust our clocks twice a year.  Yes, good old Ben came up with the idea of Daylight Savings, and it was enacted during World War II.  In recent years, it starts earlier than it used to, and ends later.  It has to do with conserving energy usage.  But did you know that not all states in the country follow it?  Hawaii doesn't have Daylight Savings.  Neither does one county in one of the midwest states.  Can you imagine that?  Every county in that state is at one time, except for this one.  So if you live in County A, but you work in County B, you'd better keep an eye on the clock and make sure you're where you're supposed to be at the right time, or it might be 2 when it's supposed to be 3. 

So here I am at 10 PM, reluctantly deciding that I should probably start getting things ready for tomorrow, and another week of work.  But it's really 9!  Last night at this time it wasn't last night at this time.  I had another hour to go.  Today I don't.

I miss that hour.  Think of what I could have done with it.  I could have slept later, written more, done a craft, even cleaned (well, no).  It doesn't matter, really.  That's my time that got stolen, and I feel cheated.  I want my hour back!