Posts Tagged ‘Laura Horn’

My New Business Cards

Posted: June 24, 2014 in Living and Life, Novel, Writing
Tags: , , , , , , , , , , ,
12

A while back my stepmother recommended that I get business cards as a possible way to help further my writing career and possibly get some new readers. I’d considered getting business cards before, but the busyness of life (among other things) had kept me from actually designing and ordering some. That very evening though, I went online, designed some cards, and ordered them. And yesterday they arrived in the mail for me, all 250 of them.

I’m sorry if these photos of them are a little blurry. I’m using my digital camera, and it’s a few years old. Anyway, here’s the front of the card.

business card 1

And here’s the back.

business card 2

Now if you couldn’t make out the writing on the card, the front has my name, the slogan of my blog (“Scared yet? My job here is done.”), a little about the stories I tend to write, and the social media sites I use, as well as where my books are available. The back has the names of my books in order of most recently published. And as you can clearly see, the design is a typewriter.

I hope that these cards will help spread word about my writing. I get a lot of people who say they want to or will read my books, but then they end up forgetting. It’s understandable, my books are not exactly top priority in the lives of the people I meet, and sometimes people forget my name, how to spell it, the names of my books, and/or how to spell those. I’m hoping these cards will act as physical reminders that will get people to actually check out my books and social media sites. They may also help me perhaps find new people to work and collaborate with and possibly open up some doors for me. I can hope, anyway.

At the very least, I’ve already given out a few to people interested in reading my work, so I guess it’s up to them now to decide whether or not to actually use the card and find my work. I’ll keep my fingers crossed and see what happens.

I plan on writing an article about business cards for Self-Published Authors Helping Other Authors when I get the chance. In the meantime though, I’ve still got a few chapters of Laura horn to get through, so I’ll work on that first. Wish me luck as I try to finish one or two chapters this evening.

What do you think of my new business cards?

Do you use business cards to help with your writing work? What are they like? Do you think they’re helpful?

Self-Pub Authors: How To Write An Epilogue

Posted: June 14, 2014 in Journalism, Reflections, Writing
Tags: , , , , , , , , , , ,
0

Three articles within a week. I’m impressed with myself. And this one marks my 20th post for Self-Published Authors Helping Other Authors, which apparently is quite the milestone, seeing as WordPress gave me a congratulatory notification this morning.

Anyway, today’s article is How To Write An Epilogue, a follow-up to yesterday’s post about writing prologues. I figured that since I’d already written one on prologues, I might as well do one on epilogues, which require different tools from writing prologues in order to write them effectively. So far it’s gotten a pretty good reception, which I’m happy about. I hope plenty of people find it useful.

And if you’ve liked my previous posts on Self-Pub Authors, you should seriously consider checking out the other articles on the site. It’s a wonderful website, filled with helpful articles by other independent writers for independent writers on learning to write, edit, publish, and market independently without spending a ton of cash. I’ve certainly found it very helpful, and that’s why I write for them.

Now that this article is out, I’ll take a short break from article writing and focus on my other work. I want to conduct a few author interviews and then get back to work on finishing Laura Horn and promoting Snake. My life never seems to get easier, though I kind of like it that way. I wonder what life will be like for me when I’m no longer in school and I (hopefully) have a full-time job?

All for now. I’ll write again later if I can, my Followers of Fear.

Laura Horn: Part Three Done

Posted: June 11, 2014 in Novel, Progress Report, Writing
Tags: , , , , , , , , , , ,
0

Not sure how, but it looks like I have another piece of good advice to tell everyone about. Laura Horn, the WIP I’ve been working on on-and-off since last summer, has reached another milestone, with Part III: The Ringleader, done and out of the way. This part of the novel was actually rather interesting to write: not only did the three main characters find themselves isolated from just about everyone they know and care about, but I had to cut out two chapters I found extraneous and unnecessary, and I merged two more into one, reducing the chapter count by about three. Just goes to show that a lot can change between the original outline and the actual writing of the novel.

With the completion of Part III, I also move pretty quickly to the climax of the story. At the moment, I only have about twenty-five chapters left, and most of them will probably be less than ten pages left. Good for me, because I’m aiming to get the first draft of this novel done before I go back to classes in August. With the rate I’ve been going these past couple of days, as long as I’m able to not get distracted and find time to write, I might jut get there some time between the end of the month and mid-July.

Before I start Part IV though, I’d like to be able to take on some quick projects: I’d like to write a few articles for Self-Published Authors Helping Other Authors, as well as write some poems and some flash fiction pieces. Once I get those out of the way, I plan to finish off LH as quickly as possible and move onto the next project, which will probably be editing Video Rage and working on some short stories.

First, I’d like to update the page and word counts of LH (for those who weren’t around for the last update on those counts several months ago, I do this every time I make it to a milestone in writing my novels. Not sure why I broadcast it on my blog, it’s just something I like to do). Remember, by pages I mean 8″ x 11.5″ pages. The total for the Prologue was about 10 pages, and 2,190 words. Part I was 43 pages and 12,019 words. Part II was 107 pages and 29,634 words. And Part III came out to be 57 pages and 15,637 words. That brings LH‘s total to 217 pages and 59,480 words. Since most authors use word counts to gauge the length of their books, this makes LH just under novel length, by about 520 words. I’m looking forward to seeing where it gets with Part IV!

For now though, I’m going to head to bed. It’s been a crazy birthday, I’ve got a busy day tomorrow, and I’d like to be well-rested when I go about my day tomorrow. Especially with the articles and with work. Good night, Followers of Fear.

I’m Back From Europe

Posted: May 30, 2014 in Living and Life, Tales from Abroad, Writing
Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,
2
Ah, the Eiffel Tower. See how it glows in the night.

Ah, the Eiffel Tower. See how it glows in the night.

Hi honey I’m home! After about three weeks in England, France, and Germany, I’m finally back in the States. I will definitely miss being in Europe (I will especially miss transportation made easy through the Metro systems), but I was beginning to miss my family and my life here and I’m glad to be back.

Of course, now that I’m back I’m not going to spend the whole time on my butt (though for the most part that’s what I’ve been doing while I get reacclimatized). In addition to catching up on all my shows and going to see some movies that came out while I was abroad, I plan to be very busy this summer. I’ll be doing my usual chores and errands, for one thing, and I’ll be working in the financial aid office for the whole summer (and if I can find one, I’ll try for another job that’ll allow me to work one or two days a week to help with the income). I also plan to finish my novel-in-progress Laura Horn, which I think I can get done by mid-July if I don’t get too distracted. I also hope to write plenty of short stories after I finish the book, because God knows I have plenty of ideas for those (I came up with about 40 ideas for stories while in Europe, most of them short stories. The lesson to be derived from this is that if you’re a writer and you find yourself on a trip abroad, bring a notebook to write down any ideas you have).

What else do I plan to do? Oh yeah, Snake will be coming out on June 10th, so I’ll be getting ready for that. And The Quiet Game’s one-year anniversary will be in July, so I plan to hold a sale for that on the e-book. And I’ll try to do some author interviews now that I’m back in the States, as well as finally getting around to editing Video Rage, the sequel to Reborn City. And maybe I’ll finish some of the series I’m watching on Netflix.

In short, I’ll be very busy.

But enough about that. I said I was going to share some of the stories from my study abroad trip. I think I’ll start with my last night abroad, with the final dinner. Why? Because it shows how much we bonded over the trip:

We were having a special dinner on the second floor of a beer garden at Alexanderplatz in Berlin called Lindenbrau. The weather was cloudy and rainy, but we didn’t really care, because we were all very happy. Maybe that was because of the alcohol and warm food, but we were happy. I was talking with my teachers and y roommate Henry and my friends, and I had a wheat beer in front of me. Most of us were really sad to go, but we were also glad that we’d had this experience together. Also, a few of us were itching to go home, or to go to other places if we were staying in Europe longer (I might have and gone to see Poland and Italy or maybe go back to England, but I couldn’t afford it).

And then our teachers, Dr. Steigerwald and Professor Willging (affectionately nicknamed Dad and Mom, respectively, by our group), stood up to say some words. They said how proud they were of us, and how they hoped we would all stay in touch for years to come. And then they handed out awards to us, the kind like “Most Likely To…” or “Least Likely To…” awards. We were invited to guess whom each award was for, and I got about three or four of them before anyone else. My award was, “Most Likely To Wander Into Rommel’s Chateau.” Considering how oblivious I can be sometimes, that’s not very surprising.

And then something interesting happened: Ramsey Hardin, one of the people on my trip who had become probably my best friend while on the trip, arrived late and hungry. He’d gone to a museum to get a little bit more culture, but on the way back traffic had been really bad, and he’d ended up about an hour or so late getting to the beer garden. Believe me, he was upset, and only a jug of beer and a really huge ham could possibly relieve that anger.

Happy Birthday Ramsey Hardin! By the way, that's David Corrigan photo-bombing te shot. What a goof!

Happy Birthday Ramsey Hardin! And that David Corrigan with him, by the way.

But then a huge surprise came out: the waiter brought Ramsey a piece of chocolate cake with a single blue candle stuck into it, a flame dancing on the wick. It was Ramsey’s twenty-fourth birthday. Boy, did that cheer him up! I wonder what he wished for, though. He probably asked for a big book of history. Ramsey’s a huge history buff, and reads anything about the past. In fact, he was voted “Most Likely To Teach Alexander the Great History” or something like that.

We ended the evening with dessert and a few more drinks, and then I went back to the hotel, to get ready for tomorrow’s flight and to store all these wonderful memories in my head.

And trust me, I’ll have a fun time relating them to you all in the coming months (or until you’re sick of hearing about them). That’s all for now though. Hope you enjoyed the story, my Followers of Fear. I’ll tell another one when I have a moment.

Laura Horn: I’ve Reached Chapter Thirty-Five

Posted: May 4, 2014 in Living and Life, Novel, Progress Report, Writing
Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , ,
0

Some of you may recall a while back that I wanted to get to a certain stopping point in my work-in-progress Laura Horn before I went off on my study abroad trip. And last night, after a lot of work, some hilarious SNL skits, and just the craziness that is my life, I got to that point. Chapter Thirty-Five, the perfect stopping point at this point, has been reached. And it was over twenty-five hundred words, so when I was finished, I was frankly relieved.

Also, I would’ve written about this last night, but by that time I was thinking about going to bed. Which I did.

At this point, if I manage to get any more chapters written, it’ll be a miracle, as well as icing on the cake. The likelihood of that though is pretty slim at this point, because obviously I have a study abroad trip to prepare for. But if I do, then lucky me. I still have thirty chapters left to write. Anything that makes that remaining material a bit easier to handle is A-OK in my book.

Well, that’s all for now. I’ve got to get ready for my meditation class, so I’ll be signing off. I’ll write some more if I actually get my final grades back this afternoon (God-willing).

And to all my fellow Star Wars fans, May the 4th be with you on this most auspicious of days. Or as Chewbacca would say, “Graaaaaaaaaargh!”

Laura Horn: Making Some Wonderful Progress

Posted: April 27, 2014 in Living and Life, Novel, Progress Report, Writing
Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , ,
0

You may be familiar with my WIP Laura Horn, which I started last year and which I’ve had a heck of a time just trying to get halfway through. Between school, work, and other projects, it’s been a struggle to work on this novel, which is sad because I think it has a lot of potential. If I can only get through the first draft, I’d be able to test that theory about its potential!

But as I’ve spoken about before here, my study abroad trip will be in a little over a week (my, how time flies!), and I’ll be taking a break from blogging, writing, and most computer-related activities to go explore England, France, and Germany. This includes working on Laura Horn. Most likely I’ll kill some time in the airport on it while waiting for my flight to Heathrow, but after that it won’t be till late May that I’ll be able to work on it.

The good news is that since I took my finals, submitted my final papers, and now only have the distractions of work, trip preparation, and whatever’s on TV/in theaters/on my bookshelf to keep me from writing, I’ve been able to make a lot of progress on Laura Horn. In the past couple of days, I finished one chapter that I’d started on about two weeks ago and wrote about three more chapters. This has me elated, and I’m planning on getting more done before I go off on my trip. I hope to at least get three more done before I leave, because I’ll be a little over halfway through the novel then and when you know you’re well beyond the halfway point, the process of writing a novel becomes a bit easier and you find yourself being less intimidated by the amount of writing you have to do.

In any case, I plan on making some wonderful progress with this novel, and hopefully when I get back from Europe, I’ll be able to finish it by midway through July at the very latest. If I can do that, then I will probably feel less regret that I took so many breaks with writing the novel and look forward more to the editing and publishing process. That’s the hope, in any case.

In the meantime, I’m going to head to bed with the hopes that, after having watched a couple of scary movies these past couple of days and with the possibility of watching one more tomorrow (Oculus, to be exact), my twisted imagination cam come up with something really fun and creepy to write. In fact, I’ve been playing with this idea in my head for a story. I know how it’d start, but I can’t seem to figure out how to get the story to go beyond the first scene. Here’s hoping I can come up with something in my sleep!

And with that, I wish you a good night, my Followers of Fear. Pleasant nightmares, one and all!

Some Good News, Some Bad News

Posted: April 11, 2014 in Living and Life, Novel, Progress Report, Reflections, Review, short story, Writing
Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,
0

Good News: Somehow I managed to get several articles written for Self-Published Authors Helping Other Authors, all of which will come out in the coming weeks leading up to my study abroad trip. The next one comes out tomorrow, if I remember correctly.

Bad News: As the end of the semester comes closer, I’ve got a number of exams and papers to prepare for, including a 25-30 page paper for a research seminar! Oy vey! So as much as I’d like to focus on making progress in Laura Horn before I go abroad, I doubt that with my workload I’ll make it to Chapter 35, which would be a nice stopping-point before I go on my trip.

Good News: A short story I wrote for a class assignment got an A+ from the teacher, who “cried at the end of the story” and wanted me to publish it, along with some suggestions on ways to edit it. I plan to submit it somewhere this weekend, as well as submit a couple other short stories to other magazines.

Bad News: Another short story I wrote got rejected from a magazine this morning. I’ll try submitting it somewhere else, but I worry. Some of the criticism the editor gave me made me wonder if this short story is as good as I thought it was.

Good News: Reborn City got another five star review. This, along with a sale I plan to hold next month and the possibility of making it to the next round of the Amazon Breakthrough Novel Award make me hopeful.

Bad News: I won’t know about the Amazon Breakthrough Novel Award until Monday most likely, and I don’t want to go into more detail about the review or the sale until I have that info. Plus, RC‘s my first novel and I’m up against 399 other books in my category, all vying for 100 spots at most. I hope the excerpt I gave them is good enough!

Good News: I’ve found a camcorder that is within my budget that I can get after I get back from my trip. Creating book trailers and maybe starting a YouTube show or improving my YouTube channel might get easier with one of those camcorders.

Bad News: My local theater isn’t playing a movie I really want to see, a horror film with Karen Gillan of Doctor Who fame. Well, that’s not as bad as it could be. I might know a certain woman (my mother) who’ll want to go see it with me, even if we have to drag her fiancee with us to do it. Forget I mentioned it.

When you get right down to it, a self-published novelist’s life is never easy, especially when you also happen to be a student with a part-time job and a lot of homework. Sometimes, like when I get criticism from magazine editors, I feel a little down. But there’s always opportunity for improvement. There are people who enjoy what I write and let me know when they get the chance to do so.

When I first started writing this blog nearly three years ago, I was just some freshman with one publishing credit to my name, a novel in need of some serious editing, and no idea how I was going to build a following or get my novel onto the printed page. Nearly three years later, I have a few more publishing credits, I’ve got two books out, a third on its way, and two more in various stages of writing/editing. I write articles occasionally for another website to help other self-published authors out, and I’ve made some friends who’ve been invaluable assets in helping me get this far.

So is my life as a writer ideal? I don’t know a single writer who can say that their lives are ideal. Even the biggest names in the industry are wracked by the usual anxieties, wondering if their work is up to scratch or if people will think their manuscript is sh*t or if they’ll ever live up to their childhood idols or if they’ll sell any copies.

I think for where I am at this point in my career, I’m at a pretty good stage. Would I like things to be better? I don’t know a single writer who wouldn’t want that. But I’m a lot better off than I could be, and I have plenty of space to improve, and the resources and friends to allow me to do that.

So as the weekend creeps nearer, I’m going to work to improve, to write and to publish and be the best I can be.

Good News: The future is open, and my Tarot tells me fortune is headed my way. I’m heading to meet it.

Laura Horn: Part II Done

Posted: April 6, 2014 in Living and Life, Novel, Progress Report, Writing
Tags: , , , , , , , , , ,
2

One of the creatures I think represent Laura Horn. It definitely captures her spirit.

I was starting to doubt I’d get this done before I left for my study abroad trip, but I got through Part II of my novel-in-progress Laura Horn. This brings me a bit closer to finishing the entire novel, and I’m happy to say it’s really starting to take shape.

Laura Horn is a story of a girl who is a victim of sexual assault but never told anyone about it. When she gets her hands on something belonging to elements within the American government, she becomes the one person who can bring down to stop a plot against the United States of America. At the same time, she must also face her past and learn to walk to the future. That was the concept that I started writing with, but since then it’s also morphed into a very different story than the one I originally envisioned. Along with being a story about overcoming the past (with a political thriller plot in the background), LH has also become a story about learning to trust again, about being a true friend in times of crisis, and about being courageous in the face of overwhelming odds.

If this book were written by any other author, it might make for great YA fiction. But since it’s me, I’m not sure it could really count as YA fiction. Heck, Reborn City has plenty of elements of YA, but I doubt you’d call that YA either, given the thematic nature of the novel. And Snake? No way in hell can that be called YA. That’s straight thriller with elements of a slasher film.

So now for the page and word counts. And remember, when I say “page”, I mean 8.5″ x 11″ paper with twelve-point Times New Roman font. That’s the thing with doing these counts: there are those who care more about the page count, and then there are those who measure with word counts, usually other writers who distinguish the differences between short stories, novels, and everything in-between using word counts. It’s a weird dichotomy, and one of these days I’ll write a blog post about it. But now is not the time for it.

Anyway, the page counts for the Prologue, Part I, and Part II were 10, 43, and 107 pages respectively, for a total of 160 pages. And the word counts are 2,190 for the Prologue, 12,019 for Part I, and 29,634 words for Part II. That puts the total word count at this moment at 43,843 words. Wow, that’s quite the increase in page and word count since I finished Part I. We’re well into novella range, which I define as between forty-thousand and sixty-thousand words (60,000+ I define as a novel).

Anyway, I might take a break from fiction writing tomorrow and just veg out on TV. Then on Monday, assuming my homework isn’t trying to bury me, I’ll start Part III, which I’ve entitled “The Ringleader”. Maybe if I’m lucky, I’ll finish it before I leave for Europe. Not likely, but I can hope.

Anyway, that’s all for now. I’m going to bed, so goodnight to you, my Followers of Fear. Pleasant nightmares, one and all!

I’ve Got Too Many Ideas For Stories At The Moment

Posted: March 29, 2014 in ideas, Living and Life, Writing
Tags: , , , , , , , , , ,
8

Over the past two semesters, the number of ideas I’ve had for stories has been growing quickly. At last count, I had about 117 ideas for novels/TV shows/movies/comic books/video games (I usually put those all on the same list), 152 ideas for short stories, and 36 ideas for articles on writing/editing/publishing/marketing. Just goes to show what happens when you give a mind with an active imagination and an affinity for storytelling too much stimulation.

I’m not complaining or anything. I love all these ideas I’m getting, and I make sure to write them down as soon as possible so that I can remember them for later (my writer’s pride won’t let me forget them).  It’s just that I want to write them all, but obviously with school, work, homework, bills, errands, and everything else in my life, I can’t devote myself 24/7 to writing, much as I would like to some days. So writing is a slower process for me than what I’d like for it to be. So with all these ideas coming to me and not as much time to write them as I’d like, there’s a good chance that I won’t write them all. Just a small fraction of them.

Sometimes I wonder if perhaps this is why James Patterson has so many co-authors. If he’s just overwhelmed by ideas and that is why he relies on so many different people to help him write his work. Of course we all know his publishing company paid him a hefty advance for so many books a year over the next however many years, but you get the idea. You want more time and energy or you want help churning your ideas out as stories or a cork on whatever font of imagination you’ve got flowing inside your head. You just want the madness to stop and for the work flow to just even out.

But that’s just not something that’s going to happen. All these ideas keep coming to you, and you have no choice but listen to them, and write down as many as you can. Luckily with this many ideas I’ll have plenty to work on and never the excuse that I can’t come up with anything new. As a writer that’s a blessing, because as bad as it is to have too many ideas, it’s even worse to have writer’s block or ideas block or whatever you want to call it and just sit around each day wondering why you can’t write anything at all.

Well, I’ve finished getting that off my chest. Now I’m going to try and write another chapter of Laura Horn before I have to get going. A friend invited me to a party, and I am itching to get out of the apartment. Honestly, I’ll go stir-crazy if I don’t do something tonight. Have a good night, Followers of Fear.

Getting Reacquainted With Laura Horn

Posted: March 20, 2014 in Living and Life, Novel, Progress Report, Writing
Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , ,
0

I just finished going over what I have so far of Laura Horn. I honestly thought it wouldn’t take this long to get through less than twenty chapters, but at least I got it done sooner rather than later. Now I can start working on original material.

For those of you who are not very familiar with my WIP yet, Laura Horn is the story of a girl who inadvertently becomes the one person who can save the United States from forces within its own government. However Laura is a damaged soul, a girl with a traumatic past that often paralyzes her in the face of danger. So in order to save her country’s future, she has to confront her painful past. I came up with the idea for the story by wondering if I could write a genre story where a character with a seriously damaged past could grow in spirit throughout the story and become a hero at the same time. The rest of the story came from that.

I started LH last July but had to put it on hold in October because of an increasing amount of homework and because I was working on Video Rage, the sequel to Reborn City, at the same time. It was just too much to cope with, so I had to cut back (which may have actually added to my stress levels, but that’s a story for another time). When the semester ended in early December, I focused on getting Video Rage done first. Then when I finished that back in January, I worked on several short stories and articles, and finally during spring break I began looking through Laura Horn again.

My first impression going through the first twenty chapters was this: I remembered writing much better prose than what I encountered going through those chapters. Then again, this is a first draft so it’s supposed to suck a little. Anyway, while reading through the early chapters I found myself doing a lot of editing work so that the story would flow better and so that I could continue without obsessing over this or that mistake or inconsistency. At the same time, that extended my rereading of the early chapters so that I ended up needing a few more days to get through the first twenty chapters.

Well, I’m here at this juncture in the writing process now, the point where I can contribute some new original chapters to the manuscript. Better late than never. And now I’m going to reread the outline for the book, and then I’m going to see about starting on the next chapter before I get ready for bed tonight. With any luck, I’ll be able to get a few new chapters of LH done before I leave for my study abroad trip in May (trust me, I won’t be doing a lot of writing or blogging during that time).

Well, wish me luck, my Followers of Fear. I’m going to get back to work now. Have a good night and a great weekend.

Older Entries
Newer Entries