new book

Writing projects update

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I have four writing projects and one puppy project on the go for January and February. Cully, our new Standard Poodle puppy is banging at the door to get in. Puppy classes began a week ago and we are making some progress in sitting and standing.

Graphic designer Karen Phillips and I are working on the cover for Dangerous Journeys: A Superior Crime and other stories. I’ve finished editing and the launch date will be sometime in February after the manuscript makes it through the process at Create Space and Kindle Direct Publishing. I still have to write the cover copy.

Painting of Sorrow, a stand-alone novel outside of the Dangerous Journeys series, is out for editing. I’ll work on getting it publication-ready through the summer and publish in September or October.

I re-edited Murderous Roots, book 1 in the series and I’m proofreading the hard copy now. I hope to finish that by the end of February.

The Facepainter Murders is at the beginning of the re-edit phase. It should be finished and republished by the end of March.

That’s about it for another Sunday in the Kawarthas. Mild and sunny today. Has winter left or is it hiding, waiting to pounce on us again.

 

Five Writing Plans, 2018

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I don’t make New Year’s resolutions but I outline my upcoming projects. So far:

    1. Reedit the first 4 in the Dangerous Journeys series. I’ve completed No Motive for Murder and have 5 chapters to go in Murderous Roots. I hope to finish by the end of January and republish February 1.
    2. I’m working on a short-story collection that will be titled Dangerous Journeys: A Superior Crime and other stories. Some of the stories have been published, some not. Five of them are Anne McPhail adventures. I’m editing at the moment and plan to publish in mid-February although I’m behind in ordering a cover.
    3. The next in line is a novel called Painting of Sorrow. It is ready to go, but for the cover. Out March 1, I hope.
    4. I’ve been working off and on for several years on a book called Stolen Children. Major reedits needed on this one, so I doubt it will be ready until June 1.
    5. After that, I have 2 novels in very brief outline and I hope to plan a 6th in the Dangerous Journeys series. Perhaps a trip to France for Anne and Thomas. These three will take me well into 2019 or 2020

 

So that’s it for the next 6 months, If I get to #5 on target, I’ll start work on Finding Caelon (tentative title) a novel about a water war in a drought-ridden rural county.

That’s it for a grey morning in the Kawarthas. -28C with the wind chill.

 

BREAKING NEWS: THE JEWELLED EGG MURDERS

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From the River Publishing announce the arrival, on Amazon, Kobo, iBooks, Barnes&Nobel and other fine online retailers, of The Jewelled Egg Murders, vol. 5 of Dangerous Journeys.

The Jewelled Egg Murders

A Christmas holiday in Vermont turns deadly for Dr.Anne McPhail whose hopes for a quiet family celebration with Thomas Beauchamp derail when his children reject her, and his mother falls ill.

Anne flees to her friend Catherine’s B&B for comfort and a place to stay, but when she goes for a walk in the snow to the town square, she stumbles across a body in her friend Erin’s antique store. A few hours later, Erin disappears.

Is Erin a suspect or a victim? While Anne joins the search, an old adversary, plotting revenge, arrives from Europe.  Anne stumbles over another body, and then the killer closes in on her. 

See it on Amazon.

Publishing Journey: Boxed Set

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Summer’s over, unless we get a spell of warm weather in September. Like so much in 2017, it came and went so quickly we almost missed it.

I’ve been writing and editing my next Anne McPhail novel, The Jewelled Egg Murders, these past few months and the end is now in sight. At least, I hope it is. My projected date for publishing is November 1, 2017 and I need to get advanced reading copies out before then. This business of working for yourself is great but the deadlines loom regardless of who sets them.

Before I publish The Jewelled Egg Murders, I’ve gathered my first four books to form a boxed set of e-books at Amazon.com, .ca, etc. Look for it as Dangerous Journeys Vols. 1-4.

Dangerous-Journeys-KindleI used Vellum for this task as well. This was amazingly easy and no rejects from Kindle Direct because of formatting or other issues. I can’t say enough about this programme. Tasks that took as a long as a month to get through, now take minutes. Well worth the cost.

Marketing, as always, must be done but I enroll my books at Books Go Social, Laurence O’Bryan’s terrific business in Dublin, Eire. Reasonable rates and terrific results.

That’s about it for today. Do check out Dangerous Journeys Vols. 1-4 and let me know what you think. Cover art as always by Karen Phillips of PhillipsCovers.

New Directions

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WORK-IN-PROGRESS

My work-in-progress, a novel, occupies most of my time these days. I’m revising. Last fall, I won a prize at The Book Promoter: an editorial review by editor/agent Svetlana Pironko of the Author Rights Agency.

After talking with her and reviewing the changes she suggested, I began a revision, this time on paper. I’m eighty pages in.

BUSINESS WRITING

As well, I follow a course from Susan Anderson — Freelance Writers Bootcamp — on writing for business, either business to business or business to client. Some of the types of writing she teaches — blogging, content writing for web-sites, white papers — are interesting to me. Her course teaches how to do those and about 10 more.

WORDPRESS

Yes, I have a WordPress blog and even my own domain name at Wordpress —ginny200.com — but I set it all up with only rudimentary knowledge. An article on Mashable, 13 cheap(or free) online classes to boost your digital skills, led me to a course called WordPress for Beginners. I’m taking it now.

EDITING

I have an extensive library of books about editing, everything from Self-editing for Fiction Writers, by Rennie Browne and Dave King, to the most recent, The Frugal Editor by Carolyn  Howard-Johnson. A favourite is Revision and Self-Editing, by James Scott Bell.

All this to explain that I’ve been busy this winter.

Spring thoughts: Literary devices and Genre fiction

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Spring has been creeping up, ambushing us with thunderstorms and lightning a week after a snowfall, with downpours that filled holding tanks and turned fields of clay to marshland, havens for the ducks. No flowers. Last spring at this time a solitary iris bloomed in the front garden. Spring Iris, 2014

It’s time to rake the leaves and twigs off the garden beds and plan a fresh covering of mulch. The chores of spring, a relief after a long winter of bone-breaking cold and ice and deep snow.

I’ve lost track of which draft of my work-in-progress I’m working on. It may be the 5th or 6th, but it’s growing closer to what I would like it to be.

That’s the problem, of course. What genre is it? Suspense, women’s fiction, commercial fiction, romantic suspense or my personal favourite: cross-genre.

My aim is a tightly-plotted page-turner that also says something about redemption and renewal in a woman’s life. Too lofty a goal, too literary for a novel that includes a brutal killer and guns?

In the U.K. newspaper, The Guardian,  Anita Mason, whose The Illusionist was shortlisted for the 1983 Booker prize, in an article that was adapted from an Oxford Literary Festival debate said:

So: of course there is a difference between literary and genre fiction. Our experience as readers tells us so, commercial practice says so. But it is not the difference between two continents separated by ocean. It is the difference between the two ends of a continuum. Between those two points is an infinity of fruitful positions.

In the Oxford Literary Festival debate, she spoke against the motion “Genre fiction is no different from literary fiction”. The article is worth the read and can be found here.

http://www.theguardian.com/books/booksblog/2014/apr/22/genre-fiction-literary-centre-anita-mason

That’s where I aim to be with this work-in-progress, on the continuum, moving a little closer to the hub where literary fiction lives.

Themes, symbols, literary devices of all types: all tools in crafting a novel.

Signs of Spring amidst Revision and Marketing

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Ides of March. For Americans, the taxman cometh. We’re waiting for spring, a spring the weather gurus tell us is going to be delayed. No one told the buds on the chestnut trees out front. They started to swell before the deep freeze ended.

Work goes on. Marketing and revision of my work-in-progress. In June, I’m joining Barbara Kyle’s Master class for revision of my first thirty pages.

The Child on the Terrace is still in advanced copy mode but soon I must send the final changes to the publisher. Most of my  reviewers, busy people all, have yet to get back to me.

Revision is difficult work, akin to juggling multiple objects rather than a simple set of coloured rubber balls. I’ve been following a blogger, Janice Hardy who calls her site Fiction University. She is half-way through a month of blogs on the process and very useful they are. Today’s is here, http://blog.janicehardy.com/2015/03/day-fifteen-clean-up-description-and.html#more but all the previous blogs plus a great deal more is available on her site. Well worth multiple visits.

This week I attended a dinner and lecture at the Canadian Club. The speaker mentioned a local artist, long-deceased, named W.A. Goodwin. As it happens we have one of his watercolours. When I bought it, I investigated him and found a lengthy newspaper record. He lived to almost 100 years old and was a well-know citizen. I did some of his family genealogy as well. Magpie that I am, I kept it all.

After the meeting, the manager of the local museum called me and asked to see it. The museum is mounting an extensive show from an archive of material the researchers acquired on loan from the family. I was pleased to contribute our painting and some of the information I’d gathered to their archive. Find the museum here: http://www.oldegaolmuseum.ca/exhibits.html

The museum created a Facebook page for W.A. with pictures, paintings, diary entries and more. An interesting and charming page.

https://www.facebook.com/W.A.Goodwin

 

Buds on chestnut trees, March, 2015

Buds on chestnut trees, March, 2015

 

 

 

 

 

Marketing and Revising: Ways and Means and Help

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Setenil de Las Bodegas, Spain, setting for The Child on the Terrace

I spent most of this week learning about marketing. Earlier, I received a series of e-mails from Nick Stephenson, writer and teacher of marketing about “Your First 10K readers“. He supplied 3 videos on the subject. Well worth the time spent, if only for the insight into how Amazon and other on-line retailers find books, but also for the methods of applying that insight to one’s own books. I haven’t applied his method as yet, mostly because, as I have a publishing contract, choosing such things as category and key words isn’t up to me. However, I shall put together a plan and suggest it to the publisher, Cambridge Books.

Laurence O’Bryan at Books Go Social offers a great service, connecting authors with each other and customers.

I’m revising my next book, working title Saving Fillide. One bit of advice that keeps popping up is to “kill your darlings”. and I did just that, moving the opening of the book to the third chapter. It has made for a more suspenseful opening, but in the process, I lost some back story and one subplot that needs to go back in but in a different place and manner.

Barbara Kyle, at a Turning Leaves, a Writescape retreat, suggested a book by her agent, Al Zuckerman, called Writing the Blockbuster Novel and it is immeasurably helpful in revision. I’m attending a workshop Barbara is giving on Friday, Feb. 20th at the University of Guelph Writers’ Workshop on Crafting the Bestseller; Your first 50 Pages and know I will learn more. She is an excellent teacher.

The Child on the Terrace is now available on major e-book sites. Connect through the link to my book launch page.Winters_Child_RT_jpgSM copy2

Author interview with Max E. Stone

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Author Max E. Stone has just released an exciting thriller, One Minute There, book 3 of his William/Bennett/Johnson New England  series.

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RUN…

Two torturous months came and went

Detective Bennett refuses to give up on finding his daughter

Even as the authorities of New England and beyond, trailing the blood in the girl’s wake, devised a ruthless manhunt to bring her back

Well aware of the young woman’s fragile state, Bennett is determined to locate her first

And terrified to learn that he and the officers aren’t the only ones looking…

FOR YOUR LIFE…

Tucked in a hideaway past America’s borders, courtesy of her only trusted connect as of late, Melissa is sure she’s safe.
That is until the hammering knocks at her door threaten her world, her sanity…

And her life.

THERE’S ONLY ONE WAY OUT…

Max answered a few of my questions about his writing life.

How do you choose your setting?

The setting comes from the places I visit and eventually fall in love with. New England, which happened to be the origin for the Warren-Bennett-Johnson series, was one of those places. If I go to a city or a country and love it, I work it into the story.

What does the setting contribute to the suspense?

Once I select the setting, I look at the places that I have physically explored and then see if I can add my own brand of suspense to them. Sometimes, I will ask others who live in the location about the history of certain landmarks as well. Other times, I do the research on my own and create the suspense.

Do you do site-specific research?

Depending on the story, yes. If I like a certain landmark for my story, I research it more and then talk to others who live there to get an accurate feel of the place.

Detailed planner?

After I figure out what the story is going to be about, I just write whatever comes to mind and then plan out the chapters as I go along.

Do you pull details of setting or characterization from your own life or your imagination?
I try to add both my imagination and real life details to any setting I use, giving the fiction that added bonus of realism. As far as characterization, I definitely use elements of me. That’s how I make my characters into people that my readers can see themselves in or identify with in some way.

Thanks so much, Max, and best of luck with One Minute There.

You can find copies of One Minute There by following the links.

 

Max E. Stone

New book: The Child on the Terrace

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At last, the advance reading copies of The Child on the Terrace are available, in print for now, at Amazon.com and writewordsinc.com. Comments, reviews welcome.
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Anne McPhail, retired pediatrician, shattered by her experience in Bermuda, rents a tiny house in Setenil, Spain, hoping to reconcile what she learned about herself and Thomas after the gunfire in that dark room on the island.

But she sees a child on the terrace of the local cafe who doesn’t seem to belong to her minders and then Ari, the Mossad agent who saved Anne’s life, seeks her out with a plan to rescue the child from kidnappers. Should she trust him? Three days later, she is on the run with Ari and the little girl, with killers Esti and Sergio on their trail. She glimpses a man she thinks is Thomas. Is he, too in Spain?

And why? How far will Anne go to save Naomi?

From Spain to France to Italy, this is Anne’s most dangerous journey.

 

Watch on Thursday for my interview with author Max. E. Stone about his new book, One Minute There.