Here you’ll find progress on current books, behind-the-scenes insight and story inspiration, as well peeks at my life on rural, (usually) rainy East Hawaii Island.
The Blog Menu Dropdown highlights three categories, Hawaii Life(pretty self-explanatory), Stories I Love (also pretty self-explanatory, but includes books, movies, and TV), and Magpie Moments (bits I snatched from real life and incorporated, magpie-like, into my fiction).
Interested in something else? You can also Search for something specific—the little icon is at the end of the header—or just dive in and start scrolling.
I’ve been working on a bunch of last-minute book launch things lately. As an indie publisher, I am responsible for everything that goes into my book’s production, but I don’t personally do everything. That’s one reason many indie publishers don’t like the term self-publishing. A responsible publisher does not do everything him- or herself. I have a cover designer who makes Sydney’s world come to life. For Panacea, a developmental editor helped me see structural and plot and even footwear issues. As I explained in my most recent post, my copy editor has a fine eye for details like spelling Read more…
I’ve been getting The Perils of Panacea back from my copy editor in chunks this week, so that’s exciting. My husband asked, “Does she find a lot of stuff?” She’s reviewing a post-beta read final draft, which I’d like to think is reasonably clean. The answer is still, “Yes, she finds a crap-ton of stuff.” Okay, that might be exaggerating a little, but it’s amazing how many things slipped past me over the course of 100K+ words. Some were typos or awkward phrasing that I’d read too many times to notice. I’d introduced mistakes making changes after the beta reads. And I’d done Read more…
I’m constantly realizing things about my viewing and reading habits while writing this series. This week’s revelation: the Stories I Love are all about character. That makes sense. You can definitely enjoy a story that’s plot-driven, and there are some plot-driven stories I’d like to watch or read again, just to see how they made it work, sort of like a mechanic looking under the hood of a fast car. But how many of those stories do you return to time after time after time? The Thin Man movies stay near the top of our DVD rotation not because of Read more…
Last time, I talked a little about the file frustrations in moving beyond Amazon to add my ebooks to Kobo, Nook and iTunes. In addition to a properly formatted book and cover file (which I believe for one of those retailers requires the sacrifice of a purple baby unicorn on the equinox), you also have to complete meta-data (book details) sections for each retailer. You’d think these would be straightforward, but if you’re not careful your answers can come back to bite you in the ‘ōkole. (See—we aim to improve your high-brow Hawaiian vocabulary on this blog.) When I put Back Read more…
Barring any earthquakes or tsunamis or such-like, the next Sydney Brennan novel, The Perils of Panacea, will be released March 27, 2015. (At around 700 feet elevation a few miles inland, any tsunamis would have to be metaphorical or cataclysmic to directly affect our home; let’s hope for metaphorical.) Yay—happy writer dance! With the big date approaching, it seemed like a good time to get my website house in order, so I’ve made a few changes, and I’ll be doing a little more tweaking in the coming weeks. Take a look around and let me know what you think and Read more…
