Monday, August 17, 2015

New and Free--Does it Get Any Better?

Getting published can be both the best and most frustrating experience of your life. Because YAY, an editor loves my book enough to take it on, but *SIGH* the waiting never ends, and patience? Not my greatest virtue.

As many of you know, I sold three book series (now semi-officially called the Texas Rodeo books because nothing is truly official until the book is actually printed) to Sourcebooks last November. Because these are rodeo books and the first is set in the summer, their marketing department strongly believes it'll sell best if released during the summer. BUT, there wasn't enough time to get it out there this year, which means waiting clear until next summer for the series debut, semi-officially titled Reckless in Texas, to hit the shelves.

Yes, dear readers, SHELVES. If all goes as planned you'll be able to pick this one up at your bookstore. Or even WalMart or your grocery story. But not my local grocery store (sorry people who live in my town) because I have it on supreme authority from a million-selling author that your book will never be on the shelves in your grocery store. It is an immutable law of the universe. 

In the meantime, people who've read and loved The Long Ride Home have been pestering me for something new. Since I finished the preliminary draft of Book Two of the Texas Rodeo series and have yet to get a real clue where to start Book Three (or possibly who the main characters will be), I dug out an old novella that I've always been rather fond of, gave it a serious tune-up, and posted it on Wattpad. 

For those who aren't familiar, Wattpad is like an online American Idol for writers. You put a story up and readers get to comment-- either on a particular line or at the end of the chapter--and they also get to vote at the end of each chapter, a sort of virtual thumbs up if you liked it. The more reads and votes you get, the more likely Wattpad will put your story on the front page of their website, which hopefully generates more reads and more votes and attracts brand new fans.

So, if you're looking for a quick, fun read and would like to help make me a star without having to hear me sing (believe me, none of us want that) come and join my Wattpad experiment. Read. Vote. And if you like it, use the Twitter, Facebook and other social media buttons to encourage your friends to come along for the ride. From a purely selfish standpoint, if you like my stuff, the more successful this experiment turns out, the more likely I'll make the time to do it again every three or four months until Reckless in Texas is released.

Here's the link to get you started: To Steal A Cowboy's Heart



Also, a huge ovation for Polly Icenoggle who took the cover photo. Is that awesome or what?



Friday, August 14, 2015

On Subways and Suitcases and the Big Apple

Traveling would be awesome if it didn’t require luggage. Imagine, waltzing through airports with nothing but a wallet and the clothes on your back—at least until you reach the security line, where they take half of those. Air travel with suitcases is the sole reason the term ‘baggage’ has come to refer to hauling around a heavy emotional load.

Last week’s trip to New York City for a writer’s convention was no exception. Before flying out of Bozeman I dropped my son at my sister’s house for a week of quality aunt time. Upon arrival, we discovered his suitcase was back home on his bedroom floor. Thank the stars that I have a male child, and he’d stuffed his iPad and toothbrush in his backpack. Buy two changes of underwear and a pair of swimming trunks and he was set for a week long vacation.

My baggage and I arrived simultaneously in the Big Apple, which is always nice, and I’d arranged a car directly from the airport to the friend’s doorstep where I’d be spending the first night. No sweat.
Then came Wednesday, when I had to get from her apartment to the convention hotel. I considered the cost of a taxi. Then I considered that I could board the subway two blocks from her house and be spit out two block s from the hotel for a mere three dollars. I did not consider that the subway system wasn’t designed for people with luggage. I bought my ticket from the vending machine, swiped it, and promptly got my suitcase wedged in the turnstile. A long-suffering woman in the glass booth shouted at me to back out, then let me through the handicapped door with a ‘Stupid tourist’ eye roll.

New Yorkers are masters of the eye roll. I know. I saw them do it a lot.

I proudly de-trained at the Times Square station, only to realize there were seven exits and I had no clue which was closest to my hotel. I made my best guess and hauled my bag of bricks up three flights of grubby stairs while wearing a skirt and sandals, emerging into the tourist mob without a clue where I was in relation to the Marriot. On the plus side, this is an excellent way to meet handsome, helpful members of the NYPD.

I have no idea how many toes I ran over slogging through the crowd, but I did eventually arrive at the right hotel—word to the wise, there are actually three Marriot hotels in the vicinity of Times Square—dumped my luggage on the first bellman who would take it and keeled over on the nearest couch. 

Not only had I arrived, but I could skip that trip to the hotel gym.

Four days later, I re-packed and headed for home, feeling smug. I had downloaded the Delta app on my phone, checked in online and paid for my bags. I couldn’t be more prepared. The shuttle dumped me out at Terminal Four and I started following signs to the Delta check in, which appeared to be up two floors. As I made for the elevator, a helpful airport employee flagged me down and instructed me to just bop around the corner, where there was a convenient ground level baggage check.

Yay! I barely reached the line when a guy came along waving and shouting at a whole herd of us to march down the terminal—hurry, hurry, hurry—to where another dude was grabbing suitcases and tossing them onto a conveyor belt. I handed over my first bag, expecting him to ask to scan my boarding pass, but he just tossed it on the conveyor with the rest. He started to reach for the second. I kept a death grip on the handle.

“How do you even know that was my bag and where it’s going?” I demanded.

He looked down at the bag we were currently wrestling over. “It isn’t tagged? They’re supposed to be tagged.”

“I haven’t checked them yet,” I said.

He looked at me as if I was the idiot. “You have to go upstairs for that.”

NO KIDDING. Which was why I tried to go there in the first place, instead of this zoo where they were rechecking bags for connecting flights from other terminals. In the meantime, my untagged suitcase had disappeared into the bowels of the airport. Congratulations, JFK, for being the only airport to lose my luggage before I even set foot on a plane.

I hiked half a mile upstairs, where clerks did some truly exceptional eye-rolling and agreed the recheck guys were idiots but could offer no solution. I hiked another half a mile downstairs to baggage services, where a third clerk confirmed their opinion—along with the eyeroll—and made a phone call to see if someone could grab my bag before it dropped into the pit of no return. She did not appear optimistic that such a feat could be accomplished. There was mention of filing a claim at my destination and possibly being reunited with my belongings at some unspecified future date, but no one made any promises.

I dragged my aching feet another mile back upstairs, through security and to my gate, defeated. Just before midnight, I stumbled down the jetway in Bozeman to stare blearily at the baggage carousel, when what to my wondering eyes should appear than my missing suitcase. My fellow passengers didn’t seem to appreciate the magnitude of this modern day miracle. From their expressions, you’d think none of them had ever seen a woman hug a Samsonite before.

Writer friend Patty Blount, my very first little black dress, and yet 
another reason I would have wept if I lost my suitcase forever.



Wednesday, August 05, 2015

Wait and Hurry Up

Back when I worked in sports medicine as an athletic trainer, we used to say the job was comprised of thousands of hours of boredom interrupted by brief moments of sheer panic. You'd stand on the sidelines day after day watching game after game, and the most thrilling challenge you faced was trotting out on the field with a rack of water bottles during a time out and trying not to trip and fall on your face.

But always, in the back of your mind, was the knowledge that any moment could be THAT moment, when an athlete fell and didn't get up. When you raced onto the field reciting the A-B-C's of basic life support, replaying CPR class in your head, and running through a checklist of how to treat a spinal chord injury. In fifteen years, I'm happy to say I never needed to apply any of those skills, though there were times we immobilized and back-boarded a player as what turned out to be an unnecessary, precautionary measure. And I can honestly say, there's nothing that'll get the ol' adrenaline rushing like the sound of a human bone snapping with enough force to be heard from forty yards away.

Then it was back to the sidelines to observe a few hundred more hours of football or baseball or soccer without having to deal with anything more life threatening than a blister.

You're probably wondering where I'm going with this. Me, too. Give me a few minutes and maybe I'll remember what the point was when I started.

Oh, right. I was thinking how really, working with book publishers isn't all that different. In movies, the heroine gets a big book deal and is instantly whisked off on a glamorous tour of the world where thousands of adoring fans line up to fawn over her. Which actually happens to some authors, I've heard, but they skip over a few things. Namely, the months between when you sign on the dotted line and when something actually happens, because the gap between selling your book and actually seeing it on the shelf can easily stretch to a year. Or two.

Scheduling a book release isn't as simple as scribbling your name in an open slot on the calendar. A savvy publisher is looking at all kinds of factors. What other books are they releasing at the same time that could compete with yours because it's aimed at the same audience? Or, if they've picked yours as a book that's going to get an extra promotional boost, they'll want to avoid releasing on the same day as one of their big name authors who'll be monopolizing a lot of marketing resources. What books are other publishers releasing that might overshadow yours, especially if you're a relative unknown? What time of year do books like yours sell the best? (Yes, good marketing people know these things.) Plus a hundred other factors unknown to anyone outside the publisher's inner sanctum. 

All of this to say that yes, I signed a contract for a new, three book series with Sourcebooks back in November. And then...nothing. Well, mostly nothing, at least concerning the first book, which is already complete. I got to meet the whole Sourcebooks team and my lovely editor at both the Romantic Times and Romance Writers of America conferences and learned that due to reasons stated above, the first book is tentatively scheduled to be released in June or July of 2016. I gave them a few chapters and an outline of book two and floated some book three ideas past my editor. Other than that, I've just been cooling my heels over here on the sidelines. And writing another book that I fervently hope they won't hate on sight.

Then yesterday, POW. First email from the editorial/marketing/art department with a list of what they needed from me. Author Bio, character descriptions, book blurb, etc., etc., and by the way, is there any way you can get that back to us by Friday? Or before would be better.

I felt like I'd flashed back to my athletic trainer days. Wait, wait, wait, wait.....OH MY GOD WE NEED YOU NOW.

My first reaction was, "EEK, IT'S STARTING!" And my second was, "Oh...dear...Lord....I have to look into that manuscript I haven't opened in over a year and what if it has moldered into a pile of drivel in the dank basement of my hard drive?"

I'm happy to say, it didn't spit in my face for ignoring it. And in the process of reminding myself how I described these long ago characters, I even found a few things I liked. This line of description in particular, a welcome surprise considering character description is my least favorite part of writing. If I had my way, I'd start every book with photos of the guy and the girl and say, "Refer to this as necessary".

Anyway, the line goes like so:

"This close she could smell the clean sweat that had his hair hanging in damp clumps around his face, and see that his eyes were green. The color of luck, and money, and the grass on the other side of the fence."

I like to think the description tells you something about his character, and how the person doing the describing feels about him. That's the goal with good physical description, anyway, to reveal something of the character of both the subject and the person looking at them, not just an inventory of parts.

The other bit of good news is, I've already done this once before and knew what to expect, so I had most of what my publisher needed already in mind, if not on hand. One frantic email to my agent's office got me the hardest bit, so for once in my life I got my homework done and handed in ahead of time.

If only I'd learned this lesson sooner. Perhaps I wouldn't have procrastinated my way through eight years of college. Or not. Sometimes it's more exciting to just be ready to take the leap at a moment's notice.