A contemporary romance author’s take on the world of writing and romance
My publisher, Wings ePress, has been hard at work getting its considerable backlist onto the Barnes and Noble NOOK. I’m proud to say that if you have a NOOK, you can now access all eleven of my contemporary romances on your NOOK.
YEAH!
Well, embarrassing as it is, I’m finally writing another post after way too many months. I supposed I concentrate most of my day-to-day blogging over at http://kaysisk.blogspot.com. Please come take a look.
An update on Woman’s World: I continue to submit and receive rejections, although a few of them have gone on to another editor. I persevere.
But about the title of this post: to be hand sold. Someday I would like someone to come up to me and say that they found my (wonderful) books because someone, not even a store employee, hand sold one to them. Whether that be at a book store, the grocery, in an email… I’m not picky. To have someone be so enthusiastic about your work that they’d open up to a stranger about it–now there’s a dream come true!
What brings this about is that I hand sold yesterday to a stranger. We were on opposite sides of a counter of trade paperback books at a Barnes & Noble. She had just put a book down and started her fingers running to another one when I noticed there were copies of Kate Morton’s The Forgotten Garden right in front of me.
I loved this book! It had all the elements I need: romance (several), mystery (you don’t know the answer until the last page), and several time periods, from Victorian to present decade. To top it off, it was based in Australia!
My spouse loved this book and recommended it to his friends. I’ve passed my copy around to several. So when the opportunity came to convert someone new… I seized upon it, overcame whatever shyness I have about talking to a stranger, and sold the book!
I started with the fact that I didn’t work at the store and had nothing to gain from her purchase but the knowledge that it was a wonderful book. As we talked, she said she hadn’t read a book in years. I didn’t ask why, I just know she’s about to start again.
Last summer, I queried Texas Co-op Power Magazine about writing an article on the catfish buffets in my area. There are three, all located in rural you-have-to-be-going-there locations. Each has a devoted following. Each, as my cohorts and I discovered as we ate our way through three delicious dinners, has a unique take on catfish.
So, I’m especially pleased to announce that my article is now in print and online. Here’s the link:
http://www.texascooppower.com/travel/east-texas/hooked-on-northeast-texas
YUM!
I submitted an eighth short work to Woman’s World, received an invitation to rewrite and resubmit number 7 and this week received three rejections from them. Sigh.
So now it’s like I have a clean slate. Eight in–eight back. I have two more ideas and I’ll be working on them next week.
Onward!
To update my writing efforts with Woman’s World:
I have submitted seven pieces of romantic short fiction. I have received three form letter rejections, one “well-written but not right for us” (or words to that effect), and one “well-written” which also included an invitation to rewrite and resubmit.
Wheeeeeee!!!!!!!!
I did! And what a wonderful exercise it was. The suggestion was made to change the point-of-view and I did. It became a much better story. If nothing else, I’ve learned how looking at the same story from a different and in this case, more personal, angle can change it. I mean, it’s not like I didn’t know that, but it was a good repeat lesson for me.
So, I hope it worked and was good for the magazine also!
It’s a bit embarrassing to realize that I haven’t updated this site since–egad!–September. My apologies. There aren’t any reasons, or more importantly, excuses. I just haven’t. I’ve been keeping up with my blog at kaysisk.blogspot.com instead.
However, I’ve decided to try something new in the way of romance writing. I still enjoy the complexity of novel writing, but I’m giving short story composition a try as well. Inspired by a few online articles and a recent email-workshop, I’m working on stories for Woman’s World magazine.
It’s very different having hero and heroine get to the point of “this could turn into something real” in 800 words. That’s less than four double-spaced pages. It has made me examine each word and turn of phrase very carefully. I’ve been surprised at what digressions I can do without when the word count is on the line.
So far, I’ve submitted three but have not received an answer, either acceptance or rejection. I’m working on a fourth.
Wish me well, and I will truly do better at keeping you informed.
First of all, I’d like to apologize for being seemingly invisible during the summer. My last post was in May. May? Where did the summer go? No, really. Wasn’t it just May? And now, it’s almost October. Time to get crackin’.
I started to sew with real, store-bought patterns when I was 14 and in Home Economics I. I think we all made the same blouse first, then were allowed to branch out. Through the four years I took HomeEc, I advanced to suits and linings and fancy buttonholes. I think my sewing skills were always more highly developed than my cooking, although I still do the latter (by necessity) and the former has dropped off.
Economics would be the principle reason: shopping wisely, you can buy almost any garment cheaper than you can purchase the pattern, good fabric, and spend the labor in fit and construction. That has not, however, stopped me from saving all my old patterns because I’ve always believed the more times you make it, the cheaper that envelope of tissue paper becomes. As each garment is made of different fabric, they are still “new.”
So my patterns are old and used. In many cases, the envelopes are torn and they’ve been repackaged in zippy bags. I may even have that first blouse pattern if I looked really hard. I have four drawers of patterns. Four. They’re arranged by garment: blouse, dress, coat, etc. There’s a drawer for children and one for costumes and home decorating. The last two are evergreen so I can justify keeping them, while the rest, I really should think about letting go.
So what does this have to do with being a writer? Well, we fall into patterns. We write the same type of heroes, the same type of situations, no matter we use different characters and locations which subtly change the way the book looks and reads. We specialize in comedy or romantic suspense. We become good at it. Perhaps we become bored and decide to change our pattern, to go to another genre, write a beta hero instead of an alpha. We take a huge risk. Will our readers follow us? Will they stay with us? Will we still like what we’re doing?
After all, don’t styles change? Change in length (shorter books, longer skirts), change in fabric (erotica, cotton or polyester), change in design (comic covers, plaids). What we enjoyed reading or wearing in the 60s or 80s, we won’t necessarily enjoy (or look good in) now. Still, we hang on to our ‘keepers’, books or patterns. Somehow, it’s been far easier for me to divest myself of my old books than my old patterns.
I’ve written a book which is women’s fiction. It’s being considered by an agent. Of course, I hope she considers it worthy. But it was making a new pattern to put it to paper. It was a risk to see if I could get it constructed.
Then there’s the work-in-progress. It’s a contemporary romance; it’s the old pattern but in a new fabric. It’s still comfortable. But while I work on it, I’m thinking about the new pattern, wondering if making it the second time–writing another women’s fiction–would be easier than the first. Knowing how it’s constructed, how it fits… But it too would be of different fabric, lay differently on the model. So much to consider.
I guess there’s a reason I’ve kept all my old patterns and keep buying new ones. Comfort, balanced with risk.
Sometime this last year, amid the Kindle and the Sony eReader and the iPhone, sometime in this maelstrom of digital awareness, I crossed over into new territory, me and all my formerly e-published compadres. At some point, e-published has stopped being a hang-up as the reading public scrambles for new and different content for its reading devices. At last, the world is catching up with the one I joined 10 years ago, and I have gone from e-published to d-published.
Gee, it’s been 10 years since I signed my first publisher contract. Then, e-published meant available by download file or a CD-Rom for your computer to read. Then came the Rocket eBook reader and those files went mobile. But that didn’t last nearly long enough. It was simply ahead of its time.
Now, it would appear that just about everyone is d-published, available in a variety of formats to suit every taste. So I guess it’s time to welcome the rest of the world to my world. That would be the world wherein we’re all digitally published.
Oh–and still available in print too!
When I started writing over 15 years ago, I didn’t tell anyone. It was a challenge to myself to see if I could have a story idea, start a book with it, and then finish said book. My teenage sons quickly found me out because I would be hurrying to finish writing just as they came home from school, but they kept my secret. I’d wager it was because they were male, my sons, and thought nothing would ever come of it, so why bother telling anyone, much less their dad.
But about the time I finished that book, The Mermaid and the Eagle, I saw an article in the regional paper about a writer’s conference in Dallas. It was three days long and not something I could disappear to between breakfast and supper. In order to go, I’d have to confess what I’d been up to between 1 and 3 each afternoon.
There was minor condescension, but I got to go with nothing else but a ‘be careful on the road.’
It was a general writer’s conference put on by a Dallas-Ft. Worth writers’ group which I believe is no longer functioning. I know the conference fell by the wayside in the mid-90s. It was a true eye-opener for me, a series of ah-ha moments wherein I learned I didn’t know anything except I had the constitution to finish a book.
I went to two others, then switched to all-romance conferences when I joined Romance Writers of America in 1996. I immersed myself in the myth and story-telling of my genre, all the while acknowledging that basic craft and writing techniques were the same across all genres.
I just returned from the Oklahoma Writer’s Federation conference. It served a general audience and included many sessions I would never receive from RWA: freelancing, regional magazines, travel writing. Since, as well as writing romance, I now freelance for a regional magazine, McKinney Living, I found all of these to be very interesting and helpful.
I think I’m going to have to get out more.
The contest season, that is. For romance novels published in 2008, the time is now (or even a bit past), to be entering the contests sponsored by local Romance Writers of America chapters. Since Wedding Belle Blues was published in January 2008, it is eligible for contests which allow electronically published books, and I have entered it in three: The HOLT from the Virginia Romance Writers; the National Readers’ Choice Award from the Oklahoma RWA; and More than Magic from Romance Writers Ink, again in OK. I won the HOLT for Short Contemporary with A Suite Deal in 2003, so I’ve a bit of excitement over that one.
These are reader-judged contests. What a wonderful way to get your work in front of the romance-loving public.
The Grandmother of the contests is the RITA, sponsored by the RWA and judged by its published members. I was a finalist in the non-published contest, the Golden Heart, in 1997 for what became Lyla’s Song. I didn’t win, but it made the RWA conference in Orlando much more exciting that July.
I’ll keep you posted.