Sunday Mashup

Video! (Via @markcoker on Twitter)

If you read one thing this week…
Seriously, read 6 Mind-Blowing Ways Zombies and Vampires Explain America. Need I say more? (via Kait Nolan)

This’ll put the fear of God into you
Or at least the fear of inadequate proofreading. (via @techsurgeons on Twitter)

Thought Provoking
Not only do I have problems with time management, I’m one of those people who has a lot of trouble with time in general. Though I usually did quite well in school with little effort, I actually didn’t learn to tell time until sometime in middle school. I have trouble calculating time zones, conceptualizing daylight savings, and when my husband–then fiance–got out of boot camp and insisted on communicating in 24-hr time, I was totally boggled. Yet I wasn’t boggled by Beyond The Punch-Clock Life: The Tyranny Of Modern Time II which talks about the measuring of time as we know it in a historical sense and seems like it’s leading somewhere very interesting in future posts. (via @CaraWallace on Twitter)

And her petticoat!
“…and her petticoat; I hope you saw her petticoat, six inches deep in mud, I am absolutely certain.” Well, yes, Louisa, but that might have something to do with the fact that It’s Raining Men, Jane Austen Style over at Kait Nolan’s blog. (via subscription)

#ROW80 Update and Sunday Mashup

My goals this week were to get the book launched, survive getting the book launched, and to not babysit my stats. We’ll call that a 2 out of 3. While I haven’t been as bad about it as I was last time–I haven’t been refreshing Amazon hourly–I need to stop. It’s already at the point where I’m dropping about 200 points every time I look and I don’t need to watch that. The launch peeked almost as soon as it started, got within about 50 points of the top 1000, but I didn’t have the customer base to get a foothold and stay there. While I made it to page two of my category bestseller list, I probably didn’t have enough ratings and reviews yet to entice browsing customers to take a closer look.

So what happens now should be a drop in rank concurrent with a trickle of sales, and then I’ll need to hope that the book bloggers who have responded to my offer of an ARC, and the fans who were excited enough to snap up the book in these first few days, will be able and willing to enthusiastically recommend it and give me a push back up to visibility again. And if that doesn’t work, I’ll have to come up with something else.

Mostly I just need to write the next book, and then the next book, and wait for my time and some more luck, though surely I’ve already had my share of that.

I don’t mean to sound bummed out here. Mostly I’m just tired. Getting back in touch with some of the fans of the series has been great. I had girls write to me who snapped up the book as soon as the links went out, read it that night, and had to drag themselves to school the next day. Hopefully learning absolutely nothing between being sleep-deprived and thoughts of Joss and Dylan. (I mean, they’ll be okay, look how I turned out.) After two weeks of crazy work toward this launch, I’ve just hit that point where it feels like it’s over already and it’s time to reflect and see what I’ve learned.

I’ve lost another 3.5lbs. Let’s all party because I just weighed in like it’s 1999.

Recommended Reading

Konrath gets lucky
So I’m on Twitter and @jakonrath tweets: “Konrath on How to Succeed: LINK.” And I’m like, Oh yeah? What’s that post going to be like? “Do the work, bitches. The End.” And it pretty much is, only much funnier. And it’s really worth reading because it ends with a sincere and important message. (via Twitter, @jakonrath, but I also subscribe)

Your writing is interfering with me reading this story
I can’t tell you how often this is a problem for me, to the point where I start to think: maybe it’s just me and I’m picky and being a bitch. But then I find this post over at KidLit.com. That’s what I’m talking about. Sometimes I just want to say, “Relax, find your own voice, stop trying to sound like your favorite book–I think it was from the 80s anyway and that’s not working anymore. I think there’s a great story here, I just need to hack away the metaphors, complex sentence constructions, and fifty-cent words to find it.” Anyway, I find this post dead-on and nicely instructive. (via @JamiGold on Twitter)

Have I ever mentioned practice = good?
I dunno how much I harp on it on the blog, but I totally believe in it. Dean Wesley Smith has an awesome article on how many writers tend to think about practice. As usual I think he totally nails it. Now he talks a lot in here about not reworking the same piece, but mailing it off or self-publishing it and then moving on to the next one. While I agree with the moving on to the next one, I’m not sure how I feel about inflicting something on the world that may be best shoved in a drawer. But hey, it’s a free world (void where prohibited). (via @dlmartin6 on Twitter)

Ticket to ride.
I’m going to try to get back on the Flylady wagon. Last year I was totally out of control with everything and it hurt my ability to get stuff done. If there’s anyone who reads my recs who feels like they can’t write (or [insert life thing]) and keep up with their home at the same time, check out the program. You don’t have to agree with everything she says, you don’t have to manage your stuff exactly the way she lays it out. But there’s a lot here worth learning. I’ve already opened up a #flylady column on TweetDeck; it would be nice to see some of my friends there. (I am a former Flybaby and know this helps.)

I’m still trying to get my head around this one.
Lastly, a post from Kristen Lamb that I found very complex in the fact that it is just chock full of an overwhelmingly large amount of helpfulness. Kristen says, again, that we need to stop being so…homogenous. Just go out and make friends with normal, non-writer people. Yeah, that’s so easy. But then she explains how to find them on Twitter. Oh, yeah, Twitter. I know Twitter. Okay…so maybe this is doable after all? Let’s go get sticky. (via subscription)

What I’m Reading

I read a lot of stuff I never talk about on the blog for one reason or another. So I thought maybe I’d start mentioning what’s at the top of my TBR pile at the moment.

• Carrie Ryan’s Forest of Hands and Teeth (audio)
• The Idiot’s Guide to Zen Living
• Kristen Lamb’s Are You There, Blog? It’s Me, Writer
• Malcolm Gladwell’s The Tipping Point
• DC Comics Flashpoint series

#ROW80 and Sunday Reading Recs

So, to further confound my ROW80 efforts at getting back on track with writing and the online stuff, I went to Florida where I’m almost never online at all. Hence when I checked my file for recommendations this week, I found it a bit old. But if they’re things you missed when they were knew, I hope they’re still interesting.

Meanwhile, though I at least posted a few times on the blog this week, I didn’t keep my schedule, my email is still a mess and I’m pretending I don’t know where Twitter is. Not doing great. Still, we’re hoping for better things after school starts.

I’m  still working on my blueprint for the next book, just not as much as I should be. And though Joss and Dylan were all over each other in the car last night on my way home from seeing Harry Potter, I don’t have a whole lot written down. I need to get on brainstorming for that while Kait’s brain is freeing itself on Red and before she gets on to the next thing.

Recommended Reading

Superhero Romance
Ooh, a post about superhero romances! Always good reading. (via Twitter @AMhairi_Simpson)

Ebook Vending Machines
An article on an ebook vending machine unveiled in Japan. It’s about time. I don’t get why this didn’t happen right away. I don’t get why the big chains didn’t set up ebook buying and put kiosks in their stores with self-checkout and point of sale displays of SD cards and other portable storage devices to encourage impulse buying from all book readers. Being in the bookstore makes you want to buy books, and if you’re an e-only convert, you have to go home and order it? Impulse sale fail. Anyway, interesting news item. (via Twitter @aeTyree)

Pantsting is okay but…
In a recent blog post, Joe Konrath talks about writing deliberately. He writes, “But if a writer is completely aware of why they wrote what they wrote, and can explain the reason for every chapter, scene, and sentence, I’d call that deliberate, and by definition, it can’t be crap.” Discovering a story by writing by the seat of your pants is an exciting process that often feels magical. And if that’s the way you roll, great. I think a lot of stories suffer, though, by the fact that too many unrelated bits of awesome escape the editing axe. A book only needs so many bits to give it character and style and some of those just need to go. One of the reasons I prefer to plot is that it’s intentional. The awesome bits I come up with are more likely to be related to what I meant to write about just because I sat down at the keyboard knowing what I set out to do. And then I don’t have to kill as much, which no one likes doing. Anyway, the post goes on to detail a number of things that can help you decide if you’re an idiot, which is also worth reading (esp. if you’re not as ZOMG-serious as some of the commentors). (via subscription)

On Borders
Kathleen Schmidt, aka @Bookgirl96, explains what Borders’ closing will mean for non-mega-star trad published authors. (via Twitter #MyWana @Elizabeth_Aston)

Random Netflix I’ve Enjoyed Lately

Andrew said, “More babbling posts pleeze!”

As I’ve no ideas for anything this morning, it seems like a good time to make him regret that and do some more babbling. Today on stuff I’ve seen lately that didn’t suck.

Not a lot of reading going on around here, but I’ve watched some TV! I watched the second season of Castle, and am now desperately awaiting the third. If you haven’t seen it, this is a great show. Nathan Fillon (Firefly, Buffy, Dr. Horrible’s…, Blast from the Past, etc) plays Richard Castle, a mega-star mystery/thriller author. At the series’ outset, a bored Castle has killed off the main character of his bestselling series and is not admitting to being at a loss for what to write next. When he’s drawn into a homicide investigation because someone is copy-catting the crimes portrayed in his novels, Castle finds inspiration for a new character main character, Nikki Heat, in the person of NYPD Detective Kate Beckett.

The series is clever and fun, and to me it feels very much like reading JD Robb’s -In Death books. Kate is not the tortured character Eve is, although she does have a backstory. Castle is not 1/10th as slick–nor as wealthy–as Roark. But, to me, the way they work together, the way the sometimes unwanted civilian consultant seems to know a bit about everything, have connections everywhere, and loves to spread his money around, is definitely reminiscent of the early books in that series. And I dig that!

I think the series is a great bet for -In Death fans, writers, and Fillon fans. Fillon is just brilliant in this role. Writers will appreciate how he so often wants to take another look into a case that seems solved because, “That’s too easy. I wouldn’t have written it that way.”

Moving on, Kristen Lamb turned me on to Confession of a Shopaholic. This was a cute chick movie about a young woman with a serious impulse buying/credit card problem, and her sometimes zany adventures, managing to find time to browse and shop sales while dodging debt collectors. When she sort of accidentally lands a job at a finance magazine, writing a financial advice column, she’s a bit over her head. There’s a sweet romance with the magazine editor, lots of wacky antics, and somewhat moving descriptions of what a little shopping can do for the soul. Very amusing, a great movie for girls’ night or a girl’s night–just you and the ice cream, and probably especially appreciated by those who have had some problems in the impulse buying/financial responsibility department.

I put Batman: The Movie (1966) on for my daughter this week. She’s a huge Batman fan. We had a discussion about fav superheroes in the car recently. “Batman or Superman?” “Batman.” “Superman or Spiderman?” “Batman!” “Superfriends or X-Men?” “BATMAN!” So obviously it was past time for this introduction, to get our BAM POW ZAP on and watch some Adam West. I love the villains. They’re just awesome.

Toy Story 3. OMGBarbie&Ken!! Was that not the best Toy-Storyline evar? Ok, well, maybe just me, but I really enjoyed this movie and loved the Ken and Barbie stuff. Ok, you guys already know I’m a huge Barbie fan, so I don’t know why you’re looking at me like that.

That’s all I can think of just at the moment. I should probably end by saying that, since coming back to Netflix, I’ve felt they’re really bending over backward to not suck the way they used to. I’m really glad they made that decision.