Author Archives: Sandra Hutchison

About Sandra Hutchison

Indie author and publisher of THE AWFUL MESS: A LOVE STORY and THE RIBS AND THIGH BONES OF DESIRE.

Having trouble getting images to show in a revised Kindle book?

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The only reason this is here — midweek, off the regular schedule — is so I can find it again someday. But who knows, maybe you’ll have the same problem I did. I’m quoting these instructions from “John_Ha” at an Open Office forum because it literally took me hours to figure out why the revised Word file I was uploading to Kindle Direct Publishing wouldn’t show the images once it was converted. He finally gave me the answer.

When you’re updating an existing file that has images, you have to organize the upload zip file a certain way. I’m sure this will be mere common sense to people with an intuitive understanding of html. I am not one of those people. So I needed this:

Books with images:
Creating a zipped file of your book contents

If your book includes images, you’ll need to create a compressed file of your book for it to work on Kindle. To do that, follow these steps:

1. Go to the folder where you saved your book (by default, Word will save your files in ‘Documents’ so if you aren’t sure where it is, this is a good place to look).

2. You’ll find two files with the name you used: a folder containing your images and an HTML file containing your book.

Right click on the HTML file, scroll over “Send to” and on the menu that appears, click ‘Compressed (zipped) folder’

4. A new folder with the same name will appear with a zipper on it.

5. Drag the folder with your images in it onto the new zipped folder.

This zipped folder will be necessary when it comes time to upload your book to KDP.

Cover of The Short, Spectacular Indie-Publishing Career of Matilda WalterBless you, Jon (or John) Ha. I didn’t want to have to pay for formatting, since I hope this updated version of The Short, Spectacular Indie-Publishing Career of Matilda Walter will soon be perma-free once again. (It already is free at Smashwords.) It has a new chick lit cover (mine, but done with a lot more care than the first cover) and updated back matter.

It also has an intelligent Table of Contents … or it will after I fix the one on Amazon. Smashwords is already fixed, since they wouldn’t take it the wrong way. (Doing a proper linked table of contents is another how-to, but you can find that one pretty easily by googling for it. If you’re anything like me with technical instructions, I recommend going for a YouTube version.)

 

 

 

The importance of reviews and feedback … even in a climate of fear

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As if it wasn’t already hard enough for indie authors to get reviews, things appear to getting scary out there. Amazon is allegedly coming down hard on authors and friends and apparent friends who review each other’s books.

The thing is, authors often, as part of normal, professional networking, befriend people who review us or write in our genres or share our challenges. Or we may discover that some of the people we already count as friends turn out to be great readers and reviewers.

And I know that I have gone back to some of those readers who most seem to “get” what I’m doing for beta reading.

But now that means the people who wrote our favorite reviews the first time around and then give us initial reads on new books can’t safely leave a review when the new book is published. Amazon says they helped with the book, so they’re disqualified. These people can be quoted in a blurb —  a blurb that means absolutely nothing if the reader is not an author or some other public figure. A blurb that is also, by definition, hardly going to be a full, meaty review.

Frankly, these rules are really tough on indies. We often gain our first readers solely by virtue of knowing them. It’s not as if people are going to find our books in a bookstore or the New York Times Book Review, nor do we generally get the advertising support or the favored positioning that some traditional books do (and all of Amazon’s own imprints do).

I do believe it’s more ethical to mention how I know a person when I review a book, at least when a person is being him or herself. The only time I’ve held back is when it feels tantamount to ‘outing’ them — generally, when they seem to be trying to fly under the radar with a nom de plume. Which Amazon would seem to be encouraging, actually, with this crackdown, unless they also have some secret algorithm for figuring out who’s pulling that off. Which is possible.

And of course there are plenty of reviews I don’t leave because that would be kinder than giving my honest opinion, or because I’m not sure my honest opinion would be welcome — God knows I’ve occasionally discovered that it isn’t — though the great bulk of the reviews I haven’t left can be blamed on me not having read the book yet.

But now… do I dare review anyone ever again, even with a disclosure? Anywhere but on Amazon, apparently. Which is the only place where reviews really matter, or have, up to now.

It’s all another argument for not depending too much on one monolithic retailer.

And please remember … even if you are a friend, or colleague, even if you fear crossing into dangerous territory by reviewing, most authors desperately want to hear from you. Did you read it? Did you finish it? Did you like it? So please … at least send an email, or put up a Facebook post, or tweet, or send a letter via snail mail, or resort to Goodreads, or try to post on Amazon’s competitors, or say something in the grocery store.

This brings me to the great compliment an old fanfic pal of mine paid me, recently, by sending me thoughtful answers to ALL the questions I’d put in the discussion guide for The Ribs and Thigh Bones of Desire.

I loved this so much I’ve put it on my web site. If you’re interested in it — and it does contain major spoilers, so keep that in mind — you can find it here. I’m sure she and I would both be fascinated to hear further discussion of any of these points.

 

Update: Brenda Perlin has an interesting post on this issue in Indies Unlimited this week, and includes a link to a petition to Amazon, should you be so inclined.

 

What a failed Kindle Countdown Deal looks like

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failedcountdowndeal
What you see here is what is known in babies as failure to thrive. In a book, it’s called not having legs. Or stinking up the joint.

When I ran a Kindle Countdown Deal for The Awful Mess, that spike went up hundreds of units further and stayed up, slowly settling even after my paid promotions ended. Because the book had done well enough that it went a bit viral, it rose in Amazon’s algorithms, and actually made more money for me after the promotion than during it.

That’s not going to happen this time. No wonder BookBub turned this one down. They know the market better than I do.

So, something didn’t work here. I can’t blame my paid promotions, either — I got noticeable bumps each day from E-Reader News Today (also known as “ENT,” and the biggest one), Fussy Librarian, Choosy Bookworm, One Hundred Free Books, and a few others. Just not enough to get them or me excited. I’m sure I also could have done more legwork to prep this and keep it going, but that’s true of everything in marketing. (I even tried boosting a Facebook post for the first time ever, with dismal results.)

Truth: Any given promotion will absorb whatever time and money you are willing to give it.

So now I need to do a postmortem, though it’s arguably a few days early. (The book is still discounted, though not as much, through Sunday.) But I doubt the questions will change much.

What went wrong?

Could it be the lovely, evocative, award-winning, but kind of bleak cover? Would the midriff cover (at left) have worked better than the one I chose? (In theory, I could test this.)Ribs2-1 The Ribs and Thigh Bones of Desire -- showing a (dressed) teenage girl on a bed, looking rather pensive.

Is it the overly-long, overly-literary title? (I could test that one, too. Not that I want to. I can be pretty stubborn, and I love that title.)

Is it simply that it IS a literary novel instead of an HEA (Happy Ever After) romance? (Not much to be done about that, and it’s true — genre fiction usually does better, at least until a book becomes that one book everyone is supposed to read — and that doesn’t happen very often.)

Was it my product description? (I just revised it, but it’s too late to make much difference. And for all I know I’ve made it worse.)

Is it not as well written? I don’t believe that. Feedback has generally been that it is better written, if not as much of a crowd-pleaser. I did choose to begin with an airplane crash and a wake. I have to keep reminding myself that I knew that was asking a lot of my readers going in.

This is a moment when I’m glad to be an indie author, able to tweak to my heart’s content.

But first, this is also a moment when I must acknowledge that a seasoned editor or publisher might have said, “I’m sorry, but this book simply isn’t going to work.” At least one fellow author warned me off on many counts, including cover, title, and less-than-idealized hero. I thanked her and went ahead anyway.

This happens to traditionally-published authors all the time, of course, whether the book is published and does poorly or never makes it out of the gate. As an indie it won’t impact my future career in any irrevocable way (at least since I wasn’t expecting to make a living doing this anytime soon).

In the meantime, I’m still proud of this book and glad it’s been published, because I’d like it to be read, and it has been — just not by as many folks as I’d hoped. I’ve enjoyed the feedback I’ve gotten. (I’ll have more about that next week). I also think it could save a girl or two from experiencing what Molly does.

And then there’s the reality that I could get hit by a truck tomorrow. At least this child of mine is out in the world. But is this really a case of unfortunate indie impatience? Could be. I’m at that point in life, though, when I vastly prefer asking forgiveness to asking permission.

Unfortunately, any changes I make now would be a bit hard to measure. Selling books is like sailing in that you have to be making some headway in the first place in order to execute a good tack. Otherwise, you could just stall and drift, sails flapping uselessly.

It’s not all bad news, of course. The book has done well in most reviews and has been well-received by most — but not all — of my readers. And the next novel, thankfully, does have a happy-ever-after romance in it.

In the meantime, since I was already searching for some more wind for those sails, I have put together a collection of short stories called Missionary Dating and Other Stories that is now available for pre-order on Amazon, releasing June 30. It’s 99 cents now, but that will go up once it has enough reviews. (God willing.)

The people on my mailing list will get the first two stories in Missionary Dating free later this week. I’m also going to be republishing my perma-free comic story soon, with a better cover, if only because I can now say that yes, despite the lack of reviews, it did keep a steady dribble of sales on my other books coming in, especially on the other retailers.

A BIG HUG AND THANK YOU to all who helped me get the word out! I really appreciate your efforts. (And I’ll happily accept any advice right about now, even if I may not follow it.)

If you’re a writer who’s feeling less than illustrious yourself at the moment, you might enjoy this article in the Guardian in which seven writers reflect on their failures. Of course, they are all successful now or they wouldn’t have been asked to contribute, so it may not be quite what you’re looking for. Still, I think most writers can relate to Anne Enright on this:

Failure is easy. I do it every day, I have been doing it for years. I have thrown out more sentences than I ever kept, I have dumped months of work, I have wasted whole years writing the wrong things for the wrong people. Even when I am pointed the right way and productive and finally published, I am not satisfied by the results. This is not an affectation, failure is what writers do. It is built in. Your immeasurable ambition is eked out through the many thousand individual words of your novel, each one of them written and rewritten several times, and this requires you to hold your nerve for a very long period of time – or forget about holding your nerve, forget about the wide world and all that anxiety and just do it, one word after the other.

And I can’t really think of a better note to end on than that.

Recipe for becoming a writer: be an outsider

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by Sandra Hutchison

I know there are writers who never leave the town they were born in (think Emily Dickinson), but that’s far from my own experience. We moved often as my father’s career in newspapers advanced; I consider myself a journalism brat. And I think displacement is often a spark for writers who aren’t already tortured enough by some other trauma.

Moving can be fun, it can be educational, and it can be wrenching. One benefit is the keen eye that comes with simply not being local to a place. You naturally notice more — you have to in order to find your way around. It’s a survival mechanism that probably predates human civilization, when everything new in the environment was potentially deadly, and being the outsider was particularly dangerous.

I grew up in Florida, moved to the Northeast, and have always set my novels there. This makes sense because I noticed the hell out of the Northeast. It was a strange place with people who seemed standoffish compared to Southerners. I was a bit shocked by all the quaint housing and pastoral scenery that I had previously assumed was some sort of American mythology that only showed up in textbooks and historical novels like Little Women. Actual red barns covered in snow freaked me out.

This week as I am visiting my parents in Florida, I find myself noticing the hell out of their sleepy little town in Citrus County. I suppose if I moved down here, I’d be able to write realistic novels set here in a few years, not that I’m eager to do that. Right now, I’m still just observing, and aware that although I’m Florida born and bred, it doesn’t feel like home anymore.

I’m a naturalized Yankee who does remember and appreciate certain Floridian delights,  however, including live oaks covered in moss, Southern magnolias, the rare May morning that hasn’t gotten hot yet, pecans with just about anything, guava turnovers, Cuban sandwiches, and the vernacular use of “Bless her heart!” in the grocery store (you REALLY don’t want someone to say that about you).

A Florida live oak draped in Spanish moss

A Florida live oak draped in Spanish moss

And that’s all I have to say this week because I am busy with family obligations. As it is, I’m just glad I finally remembered my password to get onto my own blog.

Have you ever been an outsider? Did that end up being a good experience or a bad one, or — as is so often the case — a bit of both?

 

How authors can have fun with Pinterest

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Like most Pinterest users, I tend to poke around in there for home decor, garden ideas, and recipes, as well as art and photography. But authors can get a lot of other use out of it, too.

I’m sure the number one way authors ought to use Pinterest is to market their books, but I haven’t added that to my regular duties yet. But I do find it ideal for seeking inspiration (or providing it) in three other areas: setting, characters, and cover design.

Pinterest is just great for exploring settings. I usually have an actual place in mind when I am writing, and when I need to ground my recollections in some details I can go looking for pictures of that place, or places like it, and easily “pin” what I find in one collection.

I actually started doing this the first time mostly so I could communicate with a cover designer. (If I’d checked earlier, I would have discovered that my memories of Peterborough — Lawson in the novel – did not match reality nearly as well as I thought they had.)

I have pictures from Greenfield, Massachusetts and environs for The Ribs and Thigh Bones of Desire, along with some of the art that plays a role in the book.

Bardwell’s Folly already has a page, too, but the tricky part is finding a slightly decrepit, entirely out-of-place Southern plantation-style house that could actually be sitting in a small town in Massachusetts. Feel free to suggest pins to me!

https://vanishingsouthgeorgia.files.wordpress.com/2011/03/hazlehurst-ga-jeff-davis-county-greek-neoclassical-revival-mansion-house-iron-fence-pictures-photo-copyright-brian-brown-vanishing-south-georgia-usa-2011.jpg?w=500

Pinterest is also fun for playing with characters. I’ll be honest and confess I don’t care that much how my characters look. I think readers fill in the details themselves. I only fill in enough to show that someone else has noticed them — for what is a better indicator of love than paying close attention?

So Mary did have to notice details about Winslow to be convincingly smitten.And for that I was inspired by a lovely painting I saw once in the Farnsworth Museum in Rockland, Maine of a young Jamie Wyeth. I don’t have the painting, nor can I find it online, but I do have a photograph of the actual young Jamie Wyeth on my Pinterest page for The Awful Mess.

Jamie Wyeth and a pig, from somewhere on the Internet. (I’ll update the source if I can ever find it!)

All I know about Mary’s looks is that she has brown hair she hasn’t cropped short yet, she’s underfed, she isn’t impressed by her own breast size, and Bert could describe her as horsy. My parents informed me that she should obviously be played by Sandra Bullock, which just shows you how long this manuscript had been kicking around. That got me thinking about how I would cast Mary, though, and I would probably go more along the lines of Hilary Swank.

I never got around to thinking of actors or paintings for Molly and David. It’s probably even worse for Dori and Joe in my current manuscript, because now I know what a pain in the ass it is to be limited by hair color when looking for good cover images. Seriously, I’m ready to search and replace hair color until I have a cover design I like.

Which brings me to my other favorite use for Pinterest: Whenever I see a cover I really admire, I pin it.This makes it easy to let my cover designer know what my taste is like. One of these days I’d like to use it to keep track of the books I read, but I have a hard enough time just keeping up with Goodreads.

PinterestbookcoversIadmire

You can set your Pinterest pages to public or private. I have a friend who keeps Pinterest pages as a kind of scrapbook for a book she is writing, pinning pictures and other sources of inspiration to it as she goes along. (Scrivener has a similar function, I believe, although I’ve never mastered it.) I know this because she invited me to join a secret page. So this means you can use Pinterest to share inspiration privately with friends, co-authors, a writing group, or a street team.

Last tip: If you do decide to use Pinterest, accept any time-saving plug-in or app it suggests. You definitely want pinning to be as effortless as possible.

I’m sure there are some real Pinterest power users out there. Feel free to weigh in with good advice. And if you want to ‘cast’ any of my characters, feel free. If you’re on Pinterest, suggest a pin for those pages!

The reader’s dilemma: What to do when you stall out

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All right, I”m going to confess. I’ve been reading the same book for the last three months. Which is to admit that I haven’t really been reading much at all. This is embarrassing for a writer with a reading list so long it stretches out the door and down the street.

Here’s the problem. This book just hasn’t grabbed me. It’s not terrible. It’s about some of the same themes I wrote about in my last novel, themes that obviously interest me. And a friend recommended it, so I purchased it AT FULL RETAIL from an actual bookstore, partly because I was feeling guilty for not buying enough from actual bookstores.

Every chapter I think, “Well, that was pretty clever.” But I don’t really care what comes next. I can’t get through more than one chapter at a time. Often, I fall asleep before I can talk myself into picking the book up at all. Honestly, the only reason I’m compelled to keep going is that I PAID FULL RETAIL FOR THIS DAMNED BOOK.

I will finish this book if it kills me. I think I only have another chapter left. I thought I was done last night. I even thought the last paragraph was a very good conclusion. Imagine my horror when I found yet another chapter followed it.

This is the last time, I tell you. The next time I stall out, I’m done!

Novelists, go read Donald Maass’s Writing the Breakout Novel if you haven’t already. Seriously. Your novel needs to grab people by the throat and not let them go. Or at least politely tug on the reader’s hand and keep pulling her down the road with you.

Don’t just lightly tap, and then walk away, wandering from one side of the road to the other as a patch of flowers or something catches your eye.

Yeah, I know some literary types look down on potboilers. Even a literary novel, though, needs some suspense to pull readers along to whatever sublime point is being delicately made. Otherwise, you basically have a fine performance of technique that only critics and other writers will appreciate — and even they may start skimming.

Plus, critics get their books for free, and other writers are too small an audience to keep the mortgage paid. The best case scenario is that your book gets such good notices that everyone thinks they have to read it, so they buy it even if they never finish it. (Here’s William Falk complaining about that very phenomenon.)

This is what I’m thinking about at the moment, anyway, as a currently irritated reader. And no, I’m not going to say whose book it is, because that would be mean, and maybe it’s just me. And I should have quit two months ago. (It’s definitely not The Goldfinch, which I have in my Kindle account but won’t start anytime soon after reading Falk’s piece.)

I just hope the next book is absolutely merciless in demanding my attention. As I’ve expressed on Jenny Milchman’s blog “Made It Moments,” I want to be TAKEN HOSTAGE by a book. I think we all do.

So even though my reading list is already too long, tell me what books you’ve read recently that did that for you — that just couldn’t be put down, that were brutally captivating.

Because I need one of those next!

catsleepingonbookpublicdomain

 

 

 

 

 

 

The five stages of grief of being rejected by BookBub

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1877 etching of Andromache grieving for Hector

“Grief of Andromache for Hector” from The Peep-Show: Amusement and Instruction for the Young, circa 1877. This and the background art below courtesy of reusableart.com.

  1. DENIAL. This stage can’t last long. The email is right there and pretty easy to read. Writers generally have good reading comprehension skills. You can spend some time scanning it for clues, but if you’ve gotten this email more than once you know it’s boilerplate language. You may wonder why it got sent to you on a Saturday morning. You try to imagine who’s making these decisions, and how late they are working, especially since they apparently mulled it for three days. Was it like that time you sat in the jury box all day during jury selection before getting kicked out in favor of someone who hadn’t seen her brother hit a motorcyclist? Or did it just take three days because they are inundated?
  2. ANGER. Oh, writers are surely used to this. It’s why a lot of us self-publish. Back when I was still trying to find an agent or publisher, I would get some lovely and encouraging rejections. A persistent, resilient, emotionally healthy writer probably would react to these by thinking, “Oh, X likes my writing, so I should try with another book!”
    Then there’s me. I usually think something like “If you don’t like this, you’re not going to like the next one. A writer’s style is her style and her subjects are her subjects. So let’s not waste any more of each other’s time.”
    I teach literature as well as writing it, and the one thing my students and I always notice after a while is that the most acclaimed writers are almost always driven by something a bit dark. Of course, I refuse to believe this about myself (see “denial”), but if I were not driven by some unmet need of some kind, wouldn’t I be out spending my time actually being in relationships instead of sitting in a room writing novels about them? So, I must rationally conclude that I am probably about as prickly and neurotic as the next writer.
    It’s tempting to react with anger to BookBub, too, especially since their short, 30-day submission window means giving up many other promotional opportunities with longer windows in an attempt to nail theirs down, especially while trying to triangulate with Kindle Select and past promotions.
    If I hadn’t already had success with BookBub on the first novel, I might well decide to forget even trying in the future. Which would be stupid. Not all books are going to appeal as well as others. Ideally I’ll translate any anger into determination to “show them” (“them” being every person or entity who has ever not been immediately bowled over by my genius — sadly, there are legions of these people).
    3. BARGAINING. This is when you might be tempted to send an email back asking what it would take, or perhaps expressing some of that anger or desperation you feel, as if you could elicit some pity or even shame someone into doing what you want. DON’T DO IT. Speaking as a former acquisitions editor, the least pleasant part of the job was dealing with writers who wouldn’t take no for an answer. There is absolutely no way to do this and sound like a person anyone would ever want to work with in the future. You’ll be remembered, all right, and not in a good way.
    4. DEPRESSION. As an indie author rejected by BookBub, I have suffered the loss of some future income and reviews. The trajectory I had hoped for (and that I had the pleasure of experiencing before) is just not going to happen. Whereas last year I turned a small profit on this enterprise, this year I can now forecast that I won’t. Even though the writing income was never going to be enough to change my life significantly anyway, this requires some grieving. I just found this out, so the publisher in me is still grieving, because she would really prefer to be able to strut around a bit. The writer in me is, thankfully, already focused on the next two books. But she’s still a bit bummed, too. Writing inevitably courts grief as well as joy. Publishing inevitably courts grief as well as joy. You must decide for yourself whether the joy outweighs the grief.
    5. ACCEPTANCE. There was an interesting post by RJ Crayton on Indies Unlimited this week about people getting fed up with the hard work and poor returns of writing and/or indie publishing and quitting (aptly titled “Self Publishing Shouldn’t Be Miserable“). If you’re writing because you think it will make you rich, or give you status, you’re going to hit this point a lot sooner than someone who’s writing because she has something she really wants to say. Unless you’re very lucky or unusually brilliant, or perhaps awesome at marketing, there’s a long, long road to success as an author. Many never get there. For some, getting there is sadly temporary. Those of us who are older understand that we might well die before we reach the magical golden land of steady book sales to hungry readers.
    But I’m okay with that. This is a road that has its own rewards.
    The Only Way To Get There

 

Creating believable relationships: Who are your characters’ imagos?

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My husband and I made it through 23 years of marriage before certain fundamental issues caused us to decide to part as friends. I doubt we would have made it anywhere close to that long if we hadn’t, fairly early on, participated in a workshop at our church on something called Imago Relationship Therapy.

Have you noticed that you (or your friends, since it’s always easier to see it in others) tend to fall for certain types of people … who tend to have the same issues? We do this, Imago Theory says, because what makes us feel warm and loved is very much based on what we experienced from our primary caregivers when we were growing up. Yet these same things are also guaranteed to make us absolutely crazy.

Imago Theory posits that we are all seeking to heal the wounds of childhood through our choice of mate, which is what drives romantic love, but in the process we will inevitably exacerbate those wounds — cue the power struggle.

brokenheartI bring it up here because, although I am by no means an expert at this theory and its practical applications, it can also be useful to look at what drives your characters to each other, especially since what attracts people to each other is also what may ultimately heal them … if they can survive the conflicts along the way.

And conflict is the heart of all compelling fiction, isn’t it? Sometimes, but not always, with a nice healing resolution at the end.

(Those of you who know anything about typical patterns of codependency in alcoholic/addicted families will recognize similar patterns in Imago Theory.)

When I was writing The Awful Mess, I gave Mary an alcoholic father, a powerful, critical mother, and a mean-tempered alcoholic first husband for a reason. Winslow definitely has a judgmental streak, and I’m willing to bet that Mary unconsciously grooves on that, just as she manages to feel comfortable with his almost comically judgmental Bible-thumping father. But Winslow being a cop and ex-Marine also freaks her out, since it means he has the potential for violence, which is what scared her the most in her first marriage.

Similarly, I suspect Winslow is unconsciously drawn to Mary’s bordering-on-depressive, withdrawing personality (though she also has a pretty mouthy judgmental streak of her own) because of what he experienced when he was growing up.

The Ribs and Thigh Bones of Desire -- showing a (dressed) teenage girl on a bed, looking rather pensive.David’s emotional remoteness in The Ribs and Thigh Bones of Desire echoes Molly’s experience of her own distant father, which is probably why he becomes so compelling to her when he does begin to establish a bond of affection with her. Meanwhile, Molly’s plainspoken exasperation probably echoes something from David’s wife and his mother, who hadn’t made any bones about her disappointment in him at key moments — which is why Molly’s affection can be so healing for him.

I won’t claim that I actually plan this stuff out when I’m writing (I’m a pantser, and I’m also probably too busy unconsciously working out my own demons), but once something is written and developing I do look hard at it and try to evaluate it in these terms. What are the wounds my characters carry with them, and how might they seek to heal them? (Not necessarily consciously or wisely, mind you.) Because that is one way to drive any character forward in a believable way.

If you’d like to learn more about Imago Relationship Theory, whether for your writing OR your love life, here’s a really helpful page: http://www.imago.com.au/. You might also want to check out the many books by its originators, Harville Hendrix and Helen LaKelly Hunt.

And here’s wishing you a happy, healing heart!

Sometimes less is more

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And not just in writing. This blog post is going to be short because I spent today doing something I’ve been meaning to do ever since I moved in: getting rid of this hideous shed.

Ugly metal shed

It was ugly, it was damaged, it was in poor repair, and animals I don’t know personally were using it. My son and I started unscrewing it and quickly realized that a crowbar, some muscle, and listening for the satisfying sound of screws going pop-pop-pop was a lot faster. Eventually we got to the point when we could just pull the whole frame down and start twisting it apart.

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I’m not going to replace it. I don’t need a shed. I have a garage, which already holds more stuff I need to get rid of (a vanity inherited from the previous owner, for example), and I haven’t even added shelves to it yet. I have a basement, too. So why bother with a shed? It’s just one more place in which to lose tools and equipment.

I think this space full of potential is much better.

empty spot where shed once stood

Obviously, this is still a work in progress. The locust on that awful slope needs to come down, but it’s on my neighbor’s property (which could also stand to see some paint — it looks fine in the front, but I think they like to pretend this side doesn’t exist). The arborvitae that is half bald and split under snow this winter needs to come down, too.

I’d like to build a retaining wall, but I don’t have the budget to pay someone else to do that right now. So I’ll have to see what I come up with.  If nothing else, it would be nice to try to fit my son’s car in the driveway the next time we’re getting 20 inches of snow.

At least I don’t have to start every morning with a view of that hideous shed anymore. I consider that great progress! Tomorrow morning I’ll get up early and drive it and the other accumulated dead appliances and scrap metal to the scrap yard.

010

As I told a friend today, I’m trying to get a lot of stuff done before I come up on my first-year anniversary in this house. I’m afraid that, as she put it, inertia will take over. I still have Chartreuse green walls, for example. But now I have central air instead of window air conditioners to wrestle with, and those walls are going to go ivory as soon as the semester is done. I even have a solar roof to power that central air, although I’m still trying to figure out what is going on financially with that — I’ll do a blog post when I have wrestled THAT mystery to that ground.

solar roofSo I’m feeling pretty accomplished today. Hey, I even got the weekly blog post done. AND I fit in a friend’s play reading. One of these days I’ll even get the onions planted before they give up on me.

Reminders

April 30 is the last day US residents can enter to win an author-signed copy of The Ribs and Thigh Bones of Desire, and I’m not sure if that ends at the beginning of the day or the end. Until then, there’s an easy way to enter right on my home page.

I’m still formatting Chapters 1 and 2 of Bardwell’s Folly, the next novel, and sending it to my subscriber list soon. They get the first peek. Sign up for that list here.

The writing life: Should we risk offending people, or not?

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Last month, an article in the Romance Writers of America newsletter Romance Writers Report by Jennifer Fusco caused quite a bit of controversy by recommending that authors avoid controversy. It gave specific examples in telling authors what to avoid comment on: “…religion. Gay marriage. The ruling in Ferguson, Missouri. Politics.”

Screen cap from Sean Munger: https://seanmunger.files.wordpress.com/2015/03/rwr-advice.jpg

Screen cap from Sean Munger: https://seanmunger.files.wordpress.com/2015/03/rwr-advice.jpg

And thus, ironically, Fusco did exactly what she was advising authors not to do.

The response apparently began with Racheline Maltese, who writes LGBTQ romances and was understandably offended by the idea that she should shut up about a matter of basic civil rights.

Sean Munger took it a step further, noting that the kind of author who would avoid any comment on matters like this is just plain boring. I think it’s a brilliant analysis.

Then again, it’s convenient for me to think that, because I find I just can’t shut up about this stuff. I did try. One of the first things I did before starting out into social media was read M.J. Rose and Randy Susan Meyer’s What to Do Before Your Book Launch (which is quite useful, yet oddly costs at minimum $115 new at Amazon right now — and, I’m sorry, but it’s not THAT useful — the first link up above is the ebook for Nook at $5.99). It essentially offered the same advice, without the specifics to rile people up.

It was advice that resonated for me at that point, because at the time I had just taken my son’s computer for fixing to a local guy whose shop turned out to be full of rabidly anti-Obama stuff. While this was still arguably better than going to get some high school kid to work on it at the national chain where I’d bought the machine, I swore that I was never going back to that guy again. (Incidentally, his web site gave me no clue of what I was getting into.)

It’s not that I boycott businesses owned by Republicans — I have a number of Republican friends. I occasionally even vote Republican in local elections. But I felt practically assaulted by all the vitriol in his shop — and I couldn’t help but conclude that anyone THAT rudely in-my-face about his politics didn’t really deserve my business.

And in social media there’s often no mediating personal relationship. I may not know that you are at heart a kindly fellow who will go out of his way to help the poor at the local food pantry. I only know that you are spreading what I consider racist propaganda. CLICK! You’re unfollowed.

This works both ways, of course. I notice that if I get specifically down on, say, the GOP’s attitude towards what they call “entitlement” programs, I immediately lose some Twitter followers.

Of course, it doesn’t pay to be too fast in our judgments, especially in an age of irony. Is this guy joking or is he serious?

The thing is that while I do indeed try to employ what Mary Maddox describes as “a benign detachment that leaves room for readers to draw their own conclusions,” anyone who reads my books with a keen eye may notice a strong point of view about feeding the hungry and marriage equality (and other aspects of inclusiveness in the Episcopal Church) in The Awful Mess, and about women’s rights and justice issues surrounding rape in The Ribs and Thigh Bones of Desire.

So if I’m going to anger people who disagree with me on those issues anyway, why should I hold back before they buy the book? Is it my job to try to fool people into thinking they’re going to read something else?

Of course, after teaching college English for some years, I have also noticed that people will read pretty much whatever they want to believe into any given book. Seriously. So … yeah, if I didn’t want to chase away any potential readers, I suppose I could keep my views hidden and they might never even notice that I disagree with them.

But I still can’t do it. These views matter, or I wouldn’t have written in the books in the first place! I didn’t write the books to be able to say, “Hey, look, I wrote some books! Aren’t they shiny?” I wrote them to say something. It’s all working towards the same end. It’s all living out loud.

So I’m just going to be as obnoxiously opinionated as I feel called to be by my concept of the truth. Yours may well vary from mine. We can still respect each other’s right to speak. You never know, the world might even benefit from our discussion.