Summer and Writing

May 3, 2015May 3, 2015 / ginny200 / Leave a comment

Summer came this week: sunshine, temperatures in the low 20’sC, and neighbours emerging from winter hibernation. The daffodils are blooming.

It’s the month for me to canvass for Five Counties Children’s Centre, the facility for our area which helps children of varying abilities with physiotherapy, occupational therapy, speech therapy, and learning problems of all kinds. I started yesterday.

The official launch date for The Child on the Terrace-July- is fast approaching and I am doing a final read-through for typos, run-on sentences and so forth. A book trailer is next on my list.

I’ve been reading Syd Field’s Screenplay: The Fundamentals of Screenwriting, a book that is often recommended for its chapters from character to story-line. All useful for the novelist as well as the screenwriter. Thinking about Sequence, the linked actions that together form a section of the novel, with simple names like The Chase, or The Escape, helped me with developing a cohesive plot. This is my second time through the book, only one of many to come, I’m sure.

At some point, a novelist has to consider writing a synopsis which is a marketing tool. Jane Friedman wrote an interesting blog on the subject with a number of useful links added. Check out her number 1 pick, How To Write a Book Now for a step-by-step guide to the synopsis. As well, Scrivener’s outline function can be very handy when it comes time to write it.

The Write Life is another site with unexpected resources, like this week’s 21 Places to find Blogging Jobs.

That’s about it for this Sunday in May.

Signs of Spring amidst Revision and Marketing

March 15, 2015 / ginny200 / 2 Comments

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

10 Literary Devices

March 8, 2015March 8, 2015 / ginny200 / Leave a comment

I was browsing my writing files today. You know the kind, a dump for every website or blog you come across that has information that might be useful someday. I have two: Writing about Writing and a catch all Writing Stuff. Interesting items in both, especially one about writing devices.

Writing devices have names like aporia and pathetic fallacy and if like me, you’re a writer whose last formal English course was in 1st year, the definitions are murky at best or absent at worst from memory. The website below discusses 10 and relates them to Science Fiction, mostly movies, that make the use clear. Annalee Newitz posted it in 2012 and it’s well worth a read.

http://io9.com/5930325/10-literary-devices-and-where-you-can-find-them-in-science-fiction

Beautiful day in Southern Ontario and the weather promises to be seasonal and sunny for the next week!

I’m revising my WIP and still marketing The Child on the Terrace while waiting for my reviewers. If anyone would like an ARC, please let me know.

http://booklaunch.io/10202081974970941/54ccf3fd68a94f561bcb20af

New book: The Child on the Terrace

February 1, 2015 / ginny200 / Leave a comment

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.

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.

3 Marketing Tools

December 21, 2014 / ginny200 / Leave a comment

I’ve been working this week on developing tools I’ll need to market The Child on the Terrace.

Booklaunch.io: This site offers the development of landing pages. So of course I asked: What is a landing page? Turns out it is a page dedicated to a new book, ready to embed on a website, blog, Facebook etc, with all the information needed to market. It’s easy, once the book is listed on Amazon, the booklaunch software grabs the information and the design process begins. Lots of customization all ready available, with more to come, I’m sure.

The Child on the Terrace doesn’t have an Amazon number or 10 digit ISBN as yet, so I used No Motive for Murder as the practice book. See the page at https://booklaunch.io/10202081974970941/nomotiveformurder

The aim is to make buying the book as easy as possible to someone who lands on the page from anywhere: this blog, my website, Facebook, Twitter etc.

Mailchimp Part of marketing is an email campaign and Mailchimp has thousands of users who send newsletters to their customers with information about their products along with other content the user may like.

For example, a newsletter may be simply an announcement of the release of a new book, along with content such as the first chapter or the cover art, or a short story featuring the characters of the book.

I’ve been developing a sign-up form as well as a campaign ready to send when The Child on the Terrace is released.

I’m having trouble integrating the form with my blog because it seems I may have to upgrade to get the features I want, including the sign-up form. The form is all ready to view and for sign-up on the Facebook page for Dangerous Journeys as well as on my Twitter feed @ginnywinters

Book Reviews: To generate book reviews I’ll send advance reading copies to those kind people who have reviewed my other books, contact websites such as The New Kindle Book Review and the Gumshoe Review, and perhaps ask other authors that I’ve met or corresponded with to review for me as well. Anyone interested in reviewing, please contact me by commenting below.

That’s about it for this Sunday in December. The rest of the day I’ll devote to wrapping presents, phoning distant relatives, and deciding what to make for brunch for my visiting family on Boxing Day.

Happy Christmas to all.

The Devil’s Brigade

November 23, 2014 / ginny200 / Leave a comment

The Child on the Terrace, the latest in my Dangerous Journeys series, takes Anne McPhail across Spain to Barcelona, into France and along the Mediterranean to Menton, a small town on the Franco-Italian border, where she and the child are in grave danger.

Menton has a storied past:

During WWII, the Germans occupied Menton until the onset of Operation Dragoon in 1944.

The Devil’s Brigade, a joint US-Canada Special Forces Unit, was established in 1942 by U.S. Lieutenant-Colonel Robert T. Frederick. The Brigade fought in the Italian campaign and the liberation of Southern France, among others. A stealth unit, it never failed to achieve its objective.

Since the war it has been the model for special forces around the world. In Afghanistan, the Canadian J2F2 was reunited with the American Delta Force for the 2001 invasion.

Every year, Menton Week is celebrated on or about the anniversary of the unit being disbanded at Menton on Dec. 5, 1944.

I’m in the midst of the final proofreading of The Child on the Terrace, soon to be published by Cambridge Books.

Missing and Exploited Children

November 16, 2014November 16, 2014 / ginny200 / Leave a comment

Sunday, November 16, 2014

Many will remember the abduction of Madeleine McCann in 2003. She was one of thousands that year and in all the years since. The statistics from the International Centre for Missing and Exploited Children detailed in the article below are horrifying.

http://www.icmec.org/missingkids/servlet/NewsEventServlet?LanguageCountry=en_X1&PageId=4896

The global problem of missing children is an issue that needs the immediate attention of law enforcement and officials around the world. It is estimated that at least 8 million children worldwide go missing each year. The U.S. Department of Justice estimates that nearly 800,000 children will be reported missing each year in the United States. Other sources estimate that 40,000 children go missing each year in Brazil; 50,500 in Canada; 39,000 in France; 100,000 in Germany; and 45,000 in Mexico. An estimated 230,000 children go missing in the United Kingdom each year or one child every 5 minutes…

About the International Centre for Missing & Exploited Children (ICMEC)
The International Centre for Missing & Exploited Children is a private 501(c)(3) non-governmental, nonprofit organization. It is the leading agency working internationally to combat child abduction, sexual abuse and exploitation. The Organization has built a global network of 22 nations, trained law enforcement in 121 countries and worked with parliaments in 100 countries to enact new laws on child pornography. ICMEC works in partnership with INTERPOL, the Organization of American States and the Hague Conference on Private International Law among others. For more information about ICMEC visit: www.icmec.org.

Canadian statistics are provided by the RCMP here: http://www.canadasmissing.ca/pubs/fac-ren-2013-eng.htm

Just for readers of the blog:

The Child on the Terrace: The latest in Anne McPhail’s Dangerous Journeys is back to the publisher after proofreading. Difficult not to edit as well but that’s not the stage we’re at now. Reproofing at Cambridge Books and then back to me again.

But she sees a child on the terrace of the local café 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.

October 5, 2014 / ginny200 / Leave a comment

Sent! Last Sunday I emailed the latest installment of Anne McPhail’s Dangerous Journeys to Arline Chase of Cambridge Books, Maryland. Working title is The Child on the Terrace and it’s set in Europe: Spain, the south of France and Liguria in Italy.
Writers write, but they also market, look for sources of income while waiting for the book to sell, and take courses to further their craft and to meet other writers.
Marketing The Child on the Terrace is next for me, but most of that waits until the book is actually available to buy. In the meantime, I’ve applied for a grant from the Ontario Arts Council for my work-in-progress. Applying is a time-consuming process, involving editing the first forty pages of the novel-to-be into the best it can be at this stage, printing 5 copies, and a synopsis and sending the lot to the office in Toronto. Novelists can also apply for Writers’ Reserve Grant: 10 pages but the applications go to recommenders(publishers) who support(or not) the application. http://www.arts.on.ca/site4.aspx

On October 17th, I’ll drive to Fern Resort for this year’s Turning Leaves writing retreat from Writescape. Always a fun and productive weekend. This year’s guest is Barbara Kyle, writer of historical fiction and crime novels.
Plans for the winter include rewriting several short stories that have yet to be sold or win prizes, work on the as yet untitled new novel, and proofreading The Child on the Terrace.
Recently I attended a tax seminar presented by Gwynn Scheltema of Writescape who, among other careers, was and is an accountant. Very useful and well worth attending when she next offers it through Writescape. Another visit to my own accountant coming up!
I’m off to Toronto for a few days next week to visit an old friend and perhaps the Alex Colville show at the AGO.
Happy Thanksgiving.