Let’s talk money: What it cost me to self-publish my book
What is it about money that makes talking about it so hard? As I sit down to write this, I feel like I’m about to write a personal post about sex. In fact, I’ve been wondering for a while now whether to write this post at all, but then I realized that this is exactly the sort of post I wanted to read eight months ago when I first decided to self publish my next book. So, all you folks who are thinking about self-publishing a book, this is for you. Today I’m going to tell you exactly what it cost me to self-publish Love at the Speed of Email and share six lessons that I learned along the...
Read MoreWriting Wednesday: Killing Your Darlings
Last week, after a string of awful nights, I decided to write a children’s story. The fun I had writing this little story did not make up for the exhaustion and aggravations of the previous week, but it helped. As I rhymed my way through verses about dogs, roosters, mosquitoes and various other midnight misadventures I even found myself laughing. My 2nd favorite line was the one about wishing all the roosters would die, but my absolute favorite line of the whole piece came at the end of the stanza about mosquitoes. It’s 4, and Mama Bear wakes in the dark She hears a buzz, the mosquito...
Read MoreSurprise endings and a fish foot massage (A Writing Wednesday post)
Yes, that is a picture of Mike in Cambodia, reading my manuscript while fish nibble at his feet. That was more than a year ago, and if you’d told me then I’d still be fine tuning this book 13 months later I may just have jumped into the pond and let the fish have me. Sometimes it’s a good thing that we don’t fully realize in advance just how much work is in store for us when we follow our passions. On Sunday Mike hung with Baby Bear while I wrestled with the ending of my memoir. This has to be at least the tenth time I’ve gone through this manuscript in the last two years. I thought...
Read MoreLandmines, literal and metaphorical (Writing Wednesday)
On Monday I took Baby Bear on an outing to the UXO museum (unexploded ordinance), because it’s never too early in life to learn about cluster bombs. (Or because I was desperate to get out of the house and the UXO museum is just a five-minute walk away). Dominic wasn’t all that impacted by the cluster bombs, he was far more concerned with the fact that I handed him over to the woman who was standing guard over the empty, one-room exhibit, and looking at him longingly. I figured that anyone who had to talk about landmines all day deserved a baby snuggle. Dominic wasn’t sure that he...
Read MoreA Big Decision: Writing Wednesday
Last Wednesday, I wrote about how some editors wanted me to turn my memoir into a novel. It seems that I first wrote a novel that reads like a memoir (more than once my hands came away red has been mistaken for my personal story, which has led to some awkward encounters with lovely old ladies who have patted me on the shoulder and told me that they’ve been praying for me as I recover from all that trauma). Now, instead, I’ve written a memoir that reads like a novel. I decided not to fictionalize the memoir, which left me with two options. I could either wait – shelve this book and hope...
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