A Time For Everything

So DD brought these to my attention...


And I want some pretty badly, but as I'm not Canadian, I can't order them from the Canadian branch of Amazon and they're not available in the US.

What I want to know is WHY WHY WHY??

Hockey has a pretty decent following here in the United States. I mean, TWENTY-FOUR of thirty-one teams are home-based here. What the heck, SHOP.NHL.COM??? Why aren't you carrying these???

Can I get NHL Commissioner Gary Bettman's email so I can contact him about this travesty??

I'm finally gonna (self) publish a romance novel.

I've been dabbling for over a decade. It's been a cycle of love and self-doubt and life getting in the way.

Much to some of my chapter-mates continual confusion, the drive to get a publishing contract just isn't there. Never really has been. It's not that I wouldn't love to make money with my writing, but that's not my motivating factor.

When I first joined my writing group, getting a contact with one of the Big Six Publishing Houses was still the be all, end all of writing. The landscape was changing, however. The first e-publishers had been around trying to make money, trying to gain respectability. Some have come and gone, many are still around. But the e-book market is booming. I prefer an electronic book these days to paper.

Much as I loved reading Harlequin and Silhouette romances growing up, I never really wanted to submit to them, or any of their brethren. I had some minor experience with an e-pub early on and that seemed like a good way to get some publishing experience--working with an editor, meeting deadlines, making editorial changes. But it still didn't feel quite right.

And for the last I don't know how many years, the self-publishing option has been on the table. For me, being more of a hobby writer, the ability to self-publish feels just right. As to why it's taken me so long to finally get around to it, well, that's a journey I've been on and here I am.

In a couple of weeks, I'll be sending my book, by no means the first one I've ever written, off to a content & copy editor. It's a bit nerve wracking. Yes, other people have read my work. I rarely get anything but complimentary comments. This particular book has even been read by a handful of others, including a chapter mate who also copy/content edits for pay. But sending this book to a person who doesn't know me from Adam, who I'm paying to give me her expert (?) opinion--well, I'm nervous about it. I know that even though I've been writing and learning my craft for close to a decade, that I struggle with certain aspects of story telling. So hearing what a complete stranger thinks of my skills--it's a good thing, but scary. Can I fix my mistakes? Can I strengthen the book's weaknesses?

It's time to find out!

Stay tuned for highlights of the journey. :)

Alas, not an actual romance novel, novella, or short story despite the fact that I have a good dozen of them in various stages of completeness.

Now, some of my readers know this already, so please bear with me while I re-tell the tale.

A few months ago, August to be precise, I was reading JA Konrath's blog. For the self-pubbing author he has a lot of info he's willing to share, so if you don't read him, you may want to check him out.

Anyway, he shared a story about when he was a kid/teen and would write stories and have them printed and bound and then he'd give them away. All because he loved to tell his stories and share them with people. He went on to say that once you start publishing and caught up in the grind of revisions and deadlines, you tend to forget why you started writing in the first place: to share a story with people.

Then he went on to talk about a super secret experiment he conducted to see if he could re-capture some of that child-like enthusiasm by publishing a book in an hour. He ended up with four tongue in cheek tales, each written and published, including cover art, in an hour or less. He said he makes maybe $50 a month on them combined, but hey, it's $600 a year into perpetuity for a mere four hours worth of work.

He challenged his blog readers to do the same, and if they completed the challenge to contact him somehow or another and he would then feature everyone's creations in a subsequent blog post. Tons of people met the challenge--not me, though--but I was intrigued by the idea. I even mentioned it to at least one of my critique partners. She didn't follow the challenge to the letter, but did eventually get her two self-published novellas uploaded and published. Here's the original blog post, if you're so inclined. Scroll down a bit to find the relevant part of the post.

But back to me....

So the whole idea of throwing together a short book to sell at $.99 has stuck with me and, the other day, during a proofing job, an idea for the subject of such a book finally came to me. I hadn't really planned on taking up the challenge at this point, nor had I planned on non-fiction over fiction, but then I got a wild hair last weekend when we were iced in and I went for it. And The Romance Writer's Guide to Punctuation was written, edited, proofed, cover created and published. I might have exceeded the eight hours by a little bit, but it didn't matter. What mattered was that I finally finished a damn book and published it. Here's the listing at Amazon.com. And here's my cover. No, it's not much, but it gets the job done and that was also the point.


I have a couple more topics in mind for non-fiction, but I definitely do want to get some fiction out there as well. But with Sonshine's birthday, Christmas, and fireworks season upon us--not to mention a proof job--the chances of any of that happening until after the New Year are pretty slim.

But-- I DID IT!

Thanks to my writer friends, for your friendship and support. It means the world to me.