Tag Archives: Disorganize Me

THE AWFUL MESS gets a wiki video treatment…

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Not sure what to think about it, but I was invited to post this link to a video wiki of “13 Charming Books Set in Small Towns that Range from Friendly to Terrifying” that includes THE AWFUL MESS at #3 (at the 2:12 mark). Malwarebytes didn’t warn me off the site, so it should be safe. The narration seems spot-on, but some of the images were surprising. (Palm trees?) Anyway, I’m mostly just happy they spelled my name right.

The sequel for this, THE COMPLETE DISASTER, really is coming out soon, probably in November or whenever the research papers are all graded.

In truth, I have been feeling fairly disgusted by my chances as an author recently, but last Friday, in the course of a single day…

  • My father included DISORGANIZE ME in his weekly newsletter with the note that he and my mother think it’s my best novel yet. (They finally read it, since I sent them the paperback.) Which is nice to hear, since it doesn’t sell worth beans.
  • I got the wiki notice above.
  • I got invited to opt back into a curated library platform, this time with royalties (although said royalties were not specified, so I still have questions).
  • An acquaintance I ran into at a Stewart’s parking lot (she had acted in one of my short plays) told me she’s opening a new store and wants to stock my books.
  • I got two checks from Amazon. Granted, they were refunds for Goodreads ads that suddenly and mysteriously ran out of money years ago when they bought the joint, but I’ll take it as yet another sign from the universe.
  • Bonus sign from the universe: The next day, a guy at a booth at the farmer’s market ribbed me gently for being a “famous author,” and thus not interested in getting involved in their project. (I knew writing was going to be good for something.)

I also just read a really lovely little book called DEAR WRITER, YOU NEED TO QUIT. It’s by a writing coach and about not getting sucked into believing you must do things the way other writers do them (even if it appears that’s the only way to make any money). Highly recommended for anxious author types everywhere.

So, I guess this means I’ve finally updated my blog, after more months than I want to count. Maybe that’s a habit I should get back into. Or maybe not. Let me know what you think. (Deafening silence works as an answer.)

By the way, if you helped me out in a substantive way with DISORGANIZE ME, your paperback is very, very, very slowly coming to you. Apparently there’s a paper shortage out there, and my order of author copies is taking weeks to print and ship as a result. (I paid full price for the copy I sent my parents, before Prime ran out, in case a hurricane might reach them first.)

It’s yet another reason paper is problematic. The most annoying to me, at the moment, is that resellers can swoop in and offer your book for a lower price, cutting authors and small publishers out of any profit. I haven’t been on the Amazon-Is-Going-To-Destroy-Us-All bandwagon, because it’s obviously been good to me, but it does seem to well on its way to destroying the paperback market for authors outside of bookstore distribution. Bookstores should probably take some pleasure in that.

So I can meet other goals in 2018, this blog is going ad hoc

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By Sandra Hutchison

My writing goals for this year:

  1. Write 1,000 words a (week) day on the next novel (or two)
  2. Revise and either query or publish DISORGANIZE ME
  3. Try some new promotional techniques
  4. Maybe publish an audio book or two — though it would help if I could stand to listen to audio books myself.

So far I’m succeeding with the first one, slowly getting through the second one, and learning what I need to for the third one. Fourth one may have to wait for next year.

The problem: these goals are not compatible with blogging regularly, even monthly, because it often takes me at least a good day of work to get a decent post up. (Also, I’m a fan of having weekends.)

Mary and Winslow are getting a sequel!

Other than putting up a post when I really need to share some big news, I may try to start a routine of updating old posts, or posting reviews I have up in other venues, or just leveraging what I’ve already got by sharing it better. But right now I’m maniacally focused on the next book, a sequel to THE AWFUL MESS called THE COMPLETE DISASTER, in which new arrivals test Winslow, Mary, and the little town of Lawson.

After that, hopefully, will come another sequel called THE FULL CATASTROPHE. (I don’t even know what that’s about yet.) If I can get them BOTH drafted before next fall, I’ll know I can push my productivity up to where it needs to be to make this writing gig something that could compete with a day job.

Maybe the cover. Maybe not. Either way, sign up for my mailing list if you want to hear when it’s available.

Of course, DISORGANIZE ME still needs (more)  revision and edits and then I have to decide once and for all whether to give the traditional route a try or just stick to my current indie strategy. I’d love the next novel to get wider distribution if it can, and it probably wouldn’t hurt to have an official credential, for whatever that might be worth. But to be honest, it feels like a gigantic gamble, like farming a child out to somebody else who claims they can raise it better. Can they really? I see an awful lot of neglected children out there. So this is really a tough one for me. (If you want to weigh in, feel free.)

Thanks to the new tax bill, I already estimated my taxes and discovered that 2017 was a surprisingly good year for Sheer Hubris Press, which complicates all this decision making. I priced the books up a bit and right now I’m reaching readers who don’t just read indie books or even just eBooks. Is this a fluke, or something I can build on? Is this a smart strategy for indie publishing, really, or only for gaining a traditional toehold? (If you know, tell me!)

Selling along with Celeste Ng

IN GOOD COMPANY: Ribs is currently selling with a literary title that has a cover I coveted from the moment I saw it.

Anyway, if you’re a subscriber who actually looks forward to these monthly blog posts, my apologies. I’d be happy to simply correspond via email with you. I’m also addicted to Facebook and Twitter, so you can find me there (but I don’t recommend Twitter unless you can stand the obnoxiously partisan version of me).

I’ll let you know when anything major happens, and I’ll be updating the subscriber freebies  fairly soon, too. So please stay tuned!

P.S. I’m also trying a new cover for BARDWELL’S FOLLY. This poor baby is my problem child. I know it needs more reviews, and I’ll be trying to do something to give it a better shot at success, eventually. If you have any suggestions, feel free to pass them along.

 

 

A peek at DISORGANIZE ME

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Some time ago I promised a look at the first two chapters and then … nothing happened. I realized I wasn’t ready to share.

I’m still not, really. These two chapters are so rough I haven’t even opened the feedback from my beta readers on them yet. (For which I deeply apologize, beta readers.) I’ve had a weird reluctance to work on this novel since the semester began, and I’ve been indulging it. Sometimes you just know you need some distance from a project. (Sometimes you are also too busy teaching and figuring out things to do with way more garden produce than you ever expected.)

But I’m already a day late with a blog post this month, and I don’t have time to work up what I wanted to work up, so here you go, in all its glory. Consider it a peek at a writer’s work in progress and know that there may be wholesale changes before the actual book appears, including losing one or both chapters from the final version.

At this point this lovely cover by Damon Za is also subject to change.

What’s it about? Here’s the blurb, also subject to change: Hoping to recreate the serene and beautiful life she remembers before her mom left, Kathy gamely takes on her deceased aunt’s organizing business, not-so-organized house, and favorite employee, the handsome and hardworking Diego. But when their budding relationship triggers a cascade of disasters – including the discovery that he’s not the U.S. citizen he thought he was – Kathy will be forced to decide what she’s willing to let go, and what she’ll fight to save.

And here’s (the current!) Chapter One and Chapter Two:

Chapter 1 KATHY

Katherine White felt that everything in the world had a proper place, and that true happiness would follow naturally – she would attract the right man, have the right children, and live the right life – if she could just get everything put where it belonged.

She wasn’t sure why she believed this so passionately, but in her mind she always visualized the perfect life as a specific moment one Saturday afternoon when she was fourteen. Almost everything in the house had been cleaned that day, even the floors and the windows, and she and her mother were putting freshly laundered drapes back up in the dining room. Through the window her father waved at her and pointed at his pile of autumn leaves, flexing his muscles to show off his manly yard skills. Kathy had smirked at him and gotten down from the stepladder, only to stop, transfixed by the golden square of afternoon sun that lay across the old honey oak table, illuminating a basket of yellow chrysanthemums her mother had arranged earlier that day.

Her mother saw her stop. “Isn’t that beautiful?” she said. “Look at how those petals glow in the light! Doesn’t it just say come in, sit down, stay awhile?”

And even though Kathy resented giving up her Saturday for all those annoying chores, she thought: YES. Yes, it was beautiful. Maybe there was even something heroic in cleaning a house and setting a table like that against all the disorder of the world.

Of course, not that long after that, Kathy’s mother had moved out.

Now twenty-four, Kathy was trying to make a living by creating beautiful moments of order and serenity for her clients, even if she hadn’t quite yet managed it for herself. She helped them get rid of what they didn’t need or want and put everything they did need or want in a place where it belonged.

Her phone erupted into the catchy beat of “I Need to Know” by Marc Anthony. Diego. She considered it an appropriate tune for him not only because he was Puerto Rican but because he always needed to know if she had any work for him.

Organize Your Life LLC had been her aunt’s before it was Kathy’s, and Diego had long been her aunt’s go-to for extra help. He was a young man who’d moved up from the city a few years back and, despite being hardworking and personable, had somehow never landed a full-time job. He’d never gone to college, so maybe it was that. Unfortunately, Kathy didn’t have enough work these days to keep herself fully employed, let alone Diego.

So that was awkward.

“Hey, there,” she said. Did he always call instead of text because his old flip phone made typing a pain? Or was it because he knew it would make it harder for her to say no?

“Hey! Just checking to see if you need me for any jobs in the next couple of weeks.”

“Well, I’ve got a couple of estimates today. I’ll know better after that.”

“Oh, good. I’ll hope to hear, then. Everything all right?”

“Yes, everything’s fine. I’ll let you know as soon as I can, okay?” she said, and added “Bye.” She didn’t ask how he was doing because he was probably hurting for money or he wouldn’t have called.

Also, she wasn’t sure how friendly she should be now that she was the boss.

Which was also awkward because they were the same age. Also, technically he’d been doing this work longer than her. After bringing Kathy into the business, her aunt had continued to give Diego parts of any project where it made any sense at all, even when it would reduce their profit on the job. When Kathy questioned this, Lucy said, “Honey, you’re going to need him when I’m not up to this anymore.”

Truth was, if Aunt Lucy hadn’t made Kathy promise to watch out for Diego, she might have taken the lawyer’s advice by now and farmed out all her extra labor to a firm that would manage its own payroll, its own insurance, its own bonding. Of course, those firms were also way more expensive, which could mean losing a contract or making less money. So it probably wasn’t just affection for Diego that had driven Lucy to stick with him.

And she’d been right in one very important way: Diego had been a great help with her aunt in her final illness. And he had refused to take any pay for any of it.

So, really, Kathy owed him.

Obligations were a kind of clutter, too, really.

Chapter 2 DIEGO

She’d sounded a little impatient, hadn’t she?

She was probably going to cut him loose soon. Maybe she already had and he was just refusing to accept it.

Diego wasn’t an idiot. He could tell Kathy was having some trouble getting enough new business. Everyone was struggling in this rotten economy. Supposedly 2010 had brought with it some improvement from the depths of the Great Recession, and supposedly the Capital Region with all its state employees had never suffered the worst, but it was still pretty damned grim. Even more so for someone like him.

He looked at his insurance bill one more time. Maybe he’d misread it.

Nope. It still said he needed to pay over almost a hundred more than last time. And this even though he hadn’t yet done what Lucy had told him to do – let the insurance company know he used the truck she’d given him for business. He’d held off on that. Thank God.

There’d been no tickets, no accidents, no claims, nothing. He’d already had it for over six months, after Lucy had decided it was too hard for her to get into anymore, let alone drive. It was old enough that he’d foregone comprehensive coverage, too.

So why the increase? Was it the address change? He’d only recently moved into his third-floor walk-up in downtown Troy because he couldn’t stand sharing that disgusting garden apartment in suburban East Greenbush for one more month. Both his roommates apparently thought it would be a pussy move to ever wash a dish or clean a toilet. They were always helping themselves to his food, too. And God forbid a man might favor the Mets over the Yankees.

So there hadn’t really been any choice. And this new space was bigger, even if it was mostly empty. Like a lot of the third floor walk-ups in Troy, his apartment had high ceilings, beautiful old woodwork, and noisy plumbing. It was not any cheaper than his old share of the rent, so he was hoping the heat would rise from the lower floors in the winter and save on the gas bill.

But at least it was all his. The landlord hadn’t asked a lot of questions. Even better, he let him park his truck in the driveway off the back alley and let him store scrap there, too, though he wouldn’t guarantee its safety. Diego stood up and looked down through the old rippled glass. Yep, still there. A full load didn’t bring much – maybe $70 bucks on a good day – but that was better than nothing.

In recent months his business, such as it was, had mostly consisted of occasional gigs with Kathy at Organize Your Life LLC, supplemented by driving around on trash days looking for scrap metal, and doing favors with the truck for guys he knew who might buy him lunch or a six-pack and occasionally even give him some cash. The organizing work and scrap metal paid some, and his part-time on-the-books job at a local convenience store paid a little more. Those friend favors were mostly a sucker’s game.

Now the scrap yards were warning him of new record-keeping rules, probably thanks to too many jerks ripping the copper and brass out of houses and parks and cemeteries and whatever they could get into. Once a friend had even asked to use his truck for one of those jobs. It blew his mind: This guy wanted to get paid good money to build a house during the day, and then get paid again by stripping it down at night.

Not a friend anymore, that one.

The thing was, if the yards started reporting his scrap sales to somebody, he was going to have to start declaring it in his taxes. There just weren’t that many different yards to spread the wealth around to. And would it still be worth doing, then? Probably not.

Lucy had been trying to get him to go on the books with all his income and expenses for years. “You need to pay social security taxes on it,” she told him. “If you don’t, you won’t have anything to live on when you retire. I know it’s painful in the short run, but in the long run….”

Poor, sweet, naïve Lucy. She’d always tried to play by the rules. It wasn’t like she ever got back any of the money she’d contributed to her social security. Not even a dime of disability before she died.

Fortunately, Kathy had been around to keep the business from shutting down completely and keep her aunt cared for.

He leaned back in his scavenged chair at his scavenged desk and let a prettier picture replace his memories of a skeletal Lucy. Kathy was a sweet girl. Attractive, in her own way. Not too skinny, not too boyish, with a nice round ass and beautiful long hair, though she usually kept it back in a ponytail. At first he’d thought her nose was a tragedy, but he’d gotten used to it. It had character. Sometimes he even thought it was cute.

Also, it was not like he was so swarmed with adoring women that he was going to get picky.

He knew he had decent looks. He caught women admiring him often enough. But it took money to really get any action. Seemed like they all wanted him to dress to impress. They all wanted to be taken out for food and drink and movies and shit. They all wanted to be given presents all the time. Having a girlfriend was like having to properly impress his mother on Mother’s Day and her saint’s day and her birthday practically every day of the week. Even his last girlfriend, the one he’d thought wasn’t all that demanding, he overheard telling a friend, “Hey, he’s a ride. You know?” He wasn’t sure whether she meant sex or transportation, hadn’t even been certain she was talking about him, but he hadn’t been able to muster any real enthusiasm for her from that moment on.

But, of course, to Kathy he wasn’t even a ride. He was just a convenient laborer her beloved aunt had inexplicably attached herself to. Kathy was always polite to him, always respectful, but she showed zero interest in him as a man.

She had begun to rely on him with Lucy, though. When he’d been there to sit with her aunt, she could get out, run errands, get some business done, tidy the house, or just take a break. She almost never called him up and asked him, no matter how much he told her she could, but she looked grateful whenever he showed up on his own.

And she’d made sure he felt welcome at Lucy’s funeral. He’d even been a pallbearer.

And there was still occasional work coming from her. Just not as much as he needed.

So he hoped those estimates panned out, and that they were big jobs that required some brute strength.

But they might not be. He looked at the city map he’d pinned to his wall. The next day was trash day on the East Side. Some people would already have theirs out. Might as well go see if he could find some scrap.

And I’m putting this out there just to let you know that yes, there really is another book coming someday. I promise. I just can’t promise when, exactly, yet.

If you want any tomatoes, however, come see me right now.

 

 

Niagara Falls, book research, wrong turns, and bucket lists

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By Sandra Hutchison

This summer I took a 3,000-mile road trip inspired by…

  1. The need to do some research for my next novel;
  2. The desire to bring home some bulky items left over after I helped my mother clean out my grandma’s house (you would not believe how excited I get by free power tools I will probably never use); and,
  3. The desire to check a few places off the bucket list.

That last one had felt more urgent after my last (plane) trip to my parents’ house. My folks  now refuse to travel serious distances. (Ocala, okay. Tampa, no.) They also refuse to get on a plane. Dad isn’t comfortable sitting in one place for any length of time. But it’s not just that. At one point during lunch in Crystal River I suggested a visit to their recently renovated park, which was apparently a good place to see manatees. Their response: “If you’ve seen one manatee, you’ve seen them all.”

That’s when you know your parents are old.

This suggested to me that someday I, too, might not be interested in manatees, or in getting out and doing anything that doesn’t revolve around a good cheap lunch. And you never know how soon that moment might arrive. So it was time to get cracking!

My first destination on this road trip was Niagara Falls. I always love waterfalls, yet had never gone there. Hadn’t even really thought of it. If anything, whenever I heard “Niagara Falls” I thought of what my ex-husband would immediate quote. (And he did it again, when I told him my plans.)

But because of the novel I was writing I wanted to better visualize a scene set there, when hero and heroine accidentally cross into Canada.

While it’s possible to google a location and read about various people’s experiences with it  and maybe do some interviews and then fake your way quite through a lot (God knows I do plenty of that), there’s nothing like actually being there.

Also, I was puzzled by the number of people who claimed to have accidentally crossed the Rainbow Bridge to Canada. (That’s the real bridge to the real country, not the metaphor for pets who’ve died.) How, really, could that happen?

So I drove off to Niagara Falls as the first stop of a very long road trip west and then south and back — about 3,000 miles over 10 days. This first half would include one night in Canada, one with a friend in Pittsburgh, one with another friend in Berea, Kentucky, and one in a hotel in Tifton, Georgia, mostly because I didn’t want to arrive at my parents’ after their bedtime, which has moved earlier at the same pace as their interest in manatees has shrunk.

The trip did not start out well. I was not even halfway along I-90 towards Buffalo when I noticed a cloud of vapor billowing behind my car. Luckily, an exit appeared just then and I was able to coast through it to a gas station, where I discovered a long trail of liquid behind my car. Two hours later, after negotiations with my insurance company for a tow to a local garage that lasted nearly as long as the transmission hose replacement that followed, I was back on the road, hoping that was the last car problem I’d have.

I was pretty frazzled at that point, which may be why I didn’t even attempt to ask the officer on the Canadian end of the bridge if a lot of people REALLY arrived by accident. She wasn’t the least bit friendly, for one thing. (When I got to the hotel, I realized I’d left a big scary garden knife just under the front passenger seat — after telling her no, I had no guns and no knives. It can really pay to be a harmless looking white lady.)

Anyway, I was tired, but I walked down the hill anyway before the light was gone and, yes, the falls were amazing.

 

They tasted better than they looked.

I walked around, but it was getting late, and I was hungry, so I hiked back up to the hotels, hoping for a little comfort food before bedtime. Almost every restaurant in Niagara Falls, Ontario appears to belong to a huge tourist chain. I finally settled on oddly disintegrating pancakes at IHOP for $15.99, which was, apparently, the minimum you can pay for anything in that area unless you go to Tim Horton’s, which I hadn’t found yet.

The next morning I went down the hill early, before breakfast. It was worth it because of the beautiful morning light.

After a couple of hours of exploring and having a long conversation with a lady from Singapore who just wanted to talk and eating breakfast at Tim Horton’s, I checked out and hit the road and the Rainbow Bridge again.

I didn’t even try to ask the very friendly American official at the end of the bridge about people accidentally crossing. I’d already figured I’d need to change my plans there. Really, who could accidentally cross that bridge? There were plenty of signs. Even if it sometimes happens, people would think it wasn’t plausible. (There are A LOT of things in real life that don’t seem plausible when you put them in a book.)

I figured I’d at least stop in at the Niagara Falls State Park, since it was easy enough to drive in and park. You don’t even have to pay parking if you stay for less than twenty minutes. And the falls are RIGHT THERE, so it’s easy enough to pop over and take a look.

This park has been renovated recently, apparently (renovations are still under way in some places), but it’s AMAZING. I had so much fun, I stayed half the day. The falls are one thing, but the river streaming towards them is beautiful in its many various sections, too. The park is beautifully laid out with walking trails and overlooks and, if you want, the Maid of the Mist and other attractions. The people-watching is great, too.

I decided to forego anything that would drench my shoes and leave me blinded by spray on my glasses for long stretches of time. Still, at moments I felt overtaken by sheer awe. It’s amazing to stand RIGHT THERE next to all that pounding power.

Time was passing, and eventually I needed to head for Pittsburgh. Once there, I told my friend Ann that I was going to have to change my plans for the book, because there was no way anybody was really going to go over that bridge accidentally.

She said, “Well, I’ve got a story to tell you.”

Turns out a few years back Ann was hosting an exchange student from Thailand when she and another host, Peg, rented a van and took a load of exchange students up to Niagara Falls. Just the American side, because the students were here on visas. Crossing the border would be way too complicated. So they left their passports at home.

After a fun day at the park, they decided they wanted to go eat dinner, and voted on pizza. (Or Chinese food. There’s some disagreement between Anne and Peg on this.) So they put that in their GPS, followed its directions and suddenly realized they were already on the approach to the bridge and could not back out (literally, their tires would be punctured if they tried).

So they drove into the duty-free shop, where the woman said oh yeah, it happens all the time, the Canadians will give you a sheet of paper to say you didn’t really enter, and send you back.

But what about all those students who might be denied re-entry without their papers?

Oops. So Ann walked them to an ice cream shop just off the bridge, while Peg went ahead and drove across with the van. The Canadian officer laughed and responded just as the duty free clerk said she would. The American officer, however, was suspicious. Peg got questioned at length, with the same questions over and over, and then he searched the van before finally letting her go on her way.

Oh, man. Never have I been so glad to hear someone’s GPS horror story.

So, Kathy and Diego get to accidentally cross the Rainbow Bridge after all, and will have to cope with all that follows.

It’s just the power of suggestion, probably, but I see Niagara Falls everywhere now. On the way back up from Florida, they were in a painting in Juliette Gordon Lowe’s birthplace in Savannah (that city was a bucket list item), in Jefferson’s dining room at Monticello (another bucket list item), at the Farnsworth in Rockland, Maine (a stop I make every year), and at the Albany Institute of History and Art (couldn’t believe I’d never been there before!).

I’d love to take this as a sign I’m being carried on to something good with this book. It could just as easily mean I’m heading for a fall. More likely, I’m just noticing something I hadn’t noticed before. And that is good enough for me.

If you’d like, comment with your own GPS horror story, or some of your bucket list items.

Next month’s blog post will feature another author interview (and a chance to win a free copy of THE FAR END OF HAPPY) with the talented women’s fiction author Kathryn Craft.