The thing about knowing you’re going to write a trilogy from the get-go is that you can plan ahead cover-wise. So, even though I’m only a quarter of the way through writing Found, all the books in the Penny Black trilogy have covers!
And nothing motivates like awesome cover art!
Click on the image to add the books to your to-read on Goodreads.
Cover design by Robin Ludwig Design Inc., http://www.gobookcoverdesign.com/
ROW 80 update: Writing has been a little scattered this week. I had a hard time getting into Unfavorable on Monday because I’m trying to write without editing as I go and as a result of that couldn’t read what I wrote over the weekend without cringing. I changed a couple of things and rewrote maybe 500 words and then had to put it away.
I did end up starting one of the essays for my new, uh, book of essays - Be Awesome, Beautiful Dreamer. It’s not up on the BABD blog yet as it’s still in draft form, but that was a nice relaxing bit of writing that no one is WAITING for, so no pressure.
Tuesday I just finished the scene that was killing me in Unfavorable and moved on to the next one that was much easier to write. I got 1K in on that.
As for today – Imma bout to get to it. 
My Pretties:
That’s that! Talk at you all on Sunday.
Good morning and Happy Easter! I’ve got a crapton of eggs to devil, so I’ll get right to it.
The Zellie paperbacks have new inside and outside designs. (The story is the same – no matter how many people complain, the park bench scene stands. lol)
All of the books now have the blue sparkly e-book covers and I finally figured out how to make the page numbers start on the first page of the actual book instead of the literal first page. The covers are just starting to show up on Amazon and will probably take a while to show up everywhere else – they might, in fact, never show up on Barnes and Noble, as they still have the First Edition covers up. We’re on the Third Edition here, people, catch up!
(I’m too lazy to make the files small enough to download here, but if you’d like to seem them they are up here. Robin Ludwig is AWESOME!!)
At any rate, if you’ve been waiting around for me to change the paperback covers to look like the e-book covers, I’ve done it. Please help spread the word.
ROW80: I’ve had a pretty good first week. After a bit of a timer malfunction on Monday – my Focus Booster timer disappeared from my screen, but kept going off randomly for a couple of hours and scaring the crap out of me – I downloaded a proper Pomodairo timer and that’s worked out better.
Monday – Wednesday I wrote each day, although I didn’t make it the full two hours. I averaged about an hour. I’m still keeping the goal at two hours, but not beating myself up if I don’t make it there.
Thursday and Friday I didn’t get any writing in at all because I was working on reformatting the paperback interiors. I didn’t expect that it would take me that long, but I format for paperback maybe twice a year, so I forget things from one instance to another.
Saturday I got four and a half hours of writing in. In addition to timing myself, I’m also trying to write without editing as I go. Ouch. It hurts. I wanted to attempt to finish the first draft of Unfavorable last night, but I was literally writing nonsense by the end of it and decided to go clean some Parenthood off the DVR instead. I’ve got nearly 5K for the week and that’s great for me. I’m hoping to do the same this week, or even 10 K and get Unfavorable done.
I am dying to work on Found.
Oh, Sexy New Ideas.
I posted on Facebook and Twitter who won the copy or the Zellie Wells trilogy, but completely forgot to announce it here! So sorry to all that have been waiting to hear the news.
The winner is Kim Waters, a book blogger from Australia! Congratulations Kim!
I sent the book out to her today and one to the GRAND PRIZE winner, Sandra Lin.
If you didn’t win this go around, take heart, I do giveaways all the time -like the 12 Days of Christmas Reading promotion that starts on the 10th and another around Valentine’s Day.
Also, don’t forget that the e-book of Glimpse, the first book in the trilogy, is free at Amazon, Barnes and Noble, Smashwords and other retailers right now. AND, the e-book of the trilogy is only $6.15 on Amazon!
Thanks to all who signed up for the giveaway and please forgive me for not letting you all know sooner who the winner was.
I capped off a busy week with a super fun breakfast/reunion this morning. I got together with two friends who went on an exchange program to England with me in 1990 and the guy whose family hosted two of us. I had a wonderful time catching up with everyone – we talked about work and following your passion and kids and we reminisced and laughed and ate good food. It was one of those “picking up where you left off” experiences, really. And, I scored a roll of Rowntrees Fruit Gums.
Then I took the kids to a fun Star Wars birthday party (did you know that there are blow-up lightsabers?) and now we’re all worn out and I finally have time to do my ROW80 update.
I was a blogging fool this week. I participated in the YA Scavenger Hunt – which was a blast! Many thanks to Colleen Houck for including me. I also wrote a lengthy post that will go up on the 10th for the 12 Days of Christmas Reading. So, if YA books aren’t you thing and you didn’t get in on the scavenger hunt, you’ll want to make the rounds on 12 Days – lots of giveaways of all types of books.
Writing-wise, this week was a bit of a bust, but I don’t feel too badly about it because I was doing so many other author-centric things. 600 words on Back in Time and 87 on a pen name story on Friday. I want to finish both stories this week. We’ll see what happens - when I think my week is going to be chill it suddenly becomes busy.
Here’s to us all getting off one stop before Crazytown Central.
Such a busy week! We had three RBR tour stops, our last at A Children’s Place Bookstore yesterday, I saw Footloose, took my kids to the pumpkin patch and ended the week last night at Billy’s bar with pizza and vodka tonics and my Cards kicking some World Series butt.
The YA author tour went so well that we’re planning another one in the spring – with even more local authors! Cheri Lasota, Cidney Swanson, Craig Hansen and McKenzie McCann will hopefully be joining us next time around. (That’s a lot of C’s, people!! Just noticed that.)
If you’re a YA author and live in the Pacific Northwest, drop me a line at: Pacific Northwest YA Authors and we’ll talk. Going on tour as a group makes the experience a little less daunting. Plus, we have all kinds of fun – where else are you going to meet people IRL that geek out on e-book formatting and platform building? :)
Now that the tour is over and all I have to worry about are birthdays and holidays and cleaning my hole of a house, I’m going to try to write every day. I’ve got three long short stories to write by the end of the year – one I hope to publish by the end of this month. So, if you don’t see me around on the interwebs quite as often, you’ll know what I’m doing!
Word Count: I wrote 788 words on Thursday on my story for the Death By Chocolate anthology. Right now, the story is called Do Over. I totally hate that title and am sure it will eventually be called something awesome.
I’m off to write! Have a splendiferous ( or glorgious as Kait Nolan would say) week!
It’s only been since Wednesday that I last blogged, but it feels like it’s been weeks! Since Wednesday, I’ve made a Rain Boots Required stop at West Linn Public library and spent two long days at the Wordstock festival in Portland.
Dudes and dudettes, so much has happened!
The tour stop in West Linn was fabulous. We had another great turn out and this time our audience was filled with actual young adults. They asked great questions – about writing and publishing and technique. Watch out, y’all, the next crop of writers are gonna be some savvy upstarts!!
Thanks so much to Elaine, the Teen librarian at WLPL. She made us feel so welcome and she is such a dedicated and awesome librarian. The kids of West Linn are lucky to have her and her bosses on their side. The teen section of their library is a place that I know I would’ve loved to spend time in as a YA because I’m now having fantasies about escaping to there as an adult.
My apologies to Lisa Nowak and Laura Elliott for my less than stellar AV skillz. I think we can all agree I shouldn’t be in charge of taping the talks anymore!!
Saturday and Sunday were spent at Wordstock from 10-6. We had VooDoo Doughnuts at our table and let me tell y’all, doughnuts are the great equalizer. We talked (and talked and talked and talked) to so many people who might not have stopped by our booth if it wasn’t for those crazy doughnuts.
I shared a booth with authors Angela Carlie and Laura Elliott. Lisa Nowak was at another booth, but she popped over frequently to hang out. We had such a blast!
Since I had to register the booth name before we had even named our author tour and I wasn’t sure who exactly was going to share it with me, I named it Pacific Northwest YA Authors. Good name, right?
Plenty of folks thought so. In fact, a lot of people thought we were an organization and wanted to join. At first, we laughed about it and told them we just needed a name for our booth, then, well it occurred to us that maybe we were an organization of sorts. More of a group, but we had authors wanting to join and librarians and teachers wanting us to come give talks at their schools.
Never one to turn down an opportunity…
I give you Pacific Northwest YA Authors.
The website and e-mail address were created on Saturday night when I couldn’t sleep but for thinkin’. Today, we signed up four schools/libraries to give talks at and collected over 20 e-mail addresses from people who want to receive our newsletter.
There’s just a welcome post up there right now, but by the end of this week I should have all of our Abouts, videos, reference links, contact info., guidelines for joining, etc. up.
Another awesome thing that happened at Wordstock besides networking our asses off, was that Lisa Nowak noticed the Trends in Publishing panel was the most well attended one of the whole event. And you know what? The panelists talked about self-publishing, but didn’t have a ton of experience with it. So, Lisa and I tracked down the incoming director of Wordstock and pitched her a self-publishing panel for next year. She seemed into it and said we were the first people to pitch her a panel for the following year. Who knows what will come of it, but I can’t stress enough that it never hurts to ask for what you want!
ROW80 update: If you’ve stuck around, I have good thangs to share about this too! (Seriously, I had three doughnuts today and am soooo high on the sugar!!) I talked about my decent word count for Tuesday on Wednesday. Yay! On Thursday, I fired up my new Final Draft software.
Guys, I’m in love. Yes, I actually heart software.
Although my ultimate dream would’ve been to pick a TV format and then copy and paste what I’d already written directly into it, what I got was pretty close. I selected the script format that they use on Grey’s Anatomy and copy and pasted line by line what I’d written so far. Voila! Formatted script. So easy to use. I spent the last hour of my writing time creating new stuff for the script. It’s such a fun project because I get to rewrite my book without having to actually rewrite my book. Writing new dialogue for the Rosedell gang made me absolutely ecstatic. There’s a new conversation between Avery and his best friend Jason that had me laughing my butt off. It’s fun to be back in Zellie’s world in a new way.
Okay, I’m off to work on the PacNWYA website before my sugar crash commences. Peace out.
Hey all! Remember when I said there would be future chances to win the complete Zellie Wells trilogy? The time is now.
Jessica over at Hopelessly Devoted Bibliophile is having a giveaway. Two copies of the trilogy in paperback are up for grabs. I also did a guest post over the weekend revealing Pastor Paul’s top-secret potato salad recipe from Glow.
I’m thinking Pastor Paul might need to self-publish all his recipes, he’s got some good ones.
Well, my books are up at Powells.com.
Glow comes up immediately when you type Glow into the search feature. Same with Zellie Wells trilogy. Of course, they’re only available in paperback.
Glimpse and Glimmer come up if you change your search parameters to Electronic. They aren’t available in paperback.
There aren’t any synopses on any of them, but all the Goodreads reviews transferred over for Glow.
If you’re a fan of random pricing, you can get Glimpse for $2.99, Glimmer for $4.43, Glow for $10.75 and the trilogy for $24.75.
Needless to say, I’m a bit underwhelmed with accomplishing this particular dream. Therefore, I think I’m going to wait a while longer to post links until all the formats and prices even out. (Dear God, help a girl out. Surely you’ve got some pull at Google, those people owe you big time.)
I do get a kick out of seeing the books on the Powell’s site, though.
Now over at Google ebooks (which is responsible for all of this weirdness, as they are the distributor) I’m not so forgiving. They deserve the WTF of the year award. They’ve managed to import the reviews and synopsis for Glimpse from Amazon… along with the old cover, a random price and the predominant keyword of ”death.”
Say you’re perusing Google books and you feel like reading about death. Glimpse comes up. You’re confused by the synopsis, but you see that it has lots of good reviews and a strangely alluring cover with a picture of a diner on it. You click on it. What you find is a different cover (although just as alluring) with a smiling girl on the front. What does this chick have to do with death? The description indicates that she’s the stalker of a boy named Avery, but it doesn’t appear that he dies or that she tries to kill him. Hmm. Maybe this keyword cloud at the bottom here will give me some insight. Who the hell is Jenny Pox? Why is I’ll highlighted? Why is Zellie’s? Zellie’s what?
Your guess is as good as mine, strange person that wants to read about death.
Your guess is as good as mine.
I hinted at some excitement in my blog post yesterday, but if you read my Facebook page, then you already have an idea of what’s going on.
Author Angela Carlie and I are launching a Pacific Northwest book tour in October!
This idea was born after Angela wrote a blog post about not being invited to do a reading at Wordstock. I commented that like with everything else indie, we’d probably have to start one ourselves.
So, we kinda decided to start one ourselves. Two authors do not a festival make, however, it makes a book tour.
Stay tuned for tour dates in Portland, Vancouver and other Oregon and Washington cities in October. The tour will begin after Wordstock, where we’ve purchased a booth to sell our books and promote our tour.
I’m excited about having the booth because I can sell the books directly to the customer, without shipping fees and distribution charges. This means the individual Zellie books will go for $5 and the whole trilogy for $12.
If you’re in the area and plan on going to Wordstock, please stop by and say hi. I’d love to meet you!
Also, if you’re a YA/MG indie author, come join our tour! We’ve got author Lisa Nowak on board and are looking for a few more to join in on the fun. Make sure you check out Lisa’s blog today, she’s involved in a YA scavenger hunt that looks like a good time.
That’s all for today. Now back to fighting fleas and working on Takeover. Have a good one.
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