A Time For Everything

A few weeks ago, on my writers group loop, a friend posted a link to a blog post about how to stay connected to readers without feeling overwhelmed by all the social media platforms available these days.

The advice was two fold--be clear and consistent and make it easy.

The blogger suggested that I and anyone else reading his words of wisdom take an hour and write a new message. From scratch. Then post it wherever I or they maintain an online presence.

Saturday morning while the house was quiet, I took that hour. Then I posted my message on my website as well as Amazon and here and an abbreviated one at Goodreads (they only accepted 2000 characters) with a link to the page here. If you want to read it, click here.

The thing that I really liked about this post was that this blogger verified my feeling that it's okay to be on only one or two platforms consistently rather than being hit or miss across all of them. Someone else has said it before too, though I don't remember who. Kristen Lamb or J.A. Konrath, I think. Writers get inundated with social media advice, most of which says you have to be everywhere. When are we supposed to write if we've got to juggle a day job, kids, spouse, and house too? And if it's not fun, you're less likely to do it.

One of the reasons why I finally took that hour--well, really, it was forced upon me. DH was sick and had to sleep on the loveseat, so I didn't want to disturb him with housework and stuff while he was actually getting some sleep.--is that last week I worked to get my second Romance Writer's Guide book ready for publication and I wanted my author message current, consistent, done and out there.

Remember, one of my goals for the year is to publish at least three more of them. The topic had been percolating for a while and it needed to get put on paper, so to speak. So I spent time before and after work, writing and revising and finding examples. I read it out loud to hear the cadence and flow of my sentences. I tweaked some more. I added new text. I deleted repetition. It needs another read through before I'm comfortable putting it out there. The cover is done too. I took some time this weekend to create it as well. That's my least favorite part--creating the cover. I find the process tedious and time consuming. But it's ready to go when the book is.

Another of my goals was to read books about plotting--the hardest part of writing for me. I think. I spent some time on Christmas day looking for books about plotting on Amazon and bought five of them with the gift card I had. I started reading one of them last week. We'll see what nuggets I can pan from it.

How about you? Making any headway on this year's goals?

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.