The other three professionals assigned to my group were S. A. Bolich, Parris ja Young, and Andrea Howe. All four started off their critiques by complaining that they wanted to read more and that they were sad that the word limit kept them from reading the whole story. So very flattering. The things they pointed out that needed improving were spot on or were gateways into ideas for improving and adding depth to my story.

The people at the convention are friendly and fun. I am finding it easier and easier to work my way past my shyness there. I’ve been going to my local con for almost 20 years and I still have trouble talking to anyone there.

Sunday night, I went to Whedonverse Trivia hosted by the Seattle Browncoats. Our team was composed of mostly Buffy the Vampire Slayer ‘experts’ and when the questions became Buffy-heavy our team won (barely). Had so much fun with that but now I am home and re-watching Dollhouse to expand my knowledge base for the next round of trivia.

Pictures from the car on the way to Missoula, MT. Beautiful scenery south of Spokane and west of Missoula.

Pictures from our room. The water ran high everywhere we went.

I’ve been wanting to find out what ‘filking’ was for several cons now. This convention I finally went to a session and then another and I had a blast. Here you can see the gang singing a filk song called JLA to the tune of YMCA. Talk about having a ball.

        

This is my third year. I’m still a relative noob but everyone is very friendly and it has quickly become my favorite con.

        

As I was driving up the main street behind the mall, I saw a double flash of lightning over the city in front of me and thought “Cool.” I called home when I got to the store to ask my husband to tell my youngest about it. He loves lightning storms. The sky was black with rain clouds but I shrugged it off as a ‘normal’ storm and went inside. Twenty minutes later everyone was asking me if I had looked out the window, the apocalypse was here. (People in my neck of the woods. . .er . . desert can be so dramatic) So I looked out the window and sure enough the wind was blowing the rain sideways and the rain was coming down in buckets, and that isn’t an exaggeration. So I sat in the chair for the Q&A part of the signing and watched the weather.

About 10-15 minutes into the presentation, a niggling doubt started worming its way through my brain. Did I close my car window?

I knew I opened it after work at 1:15pm because the heat had built up and my AC doesn’t work and I needed to alleviate the stuffiness. But when I got home and I had to park in the driveway because my dear husband still hasn’t moved the camping gear he left in my spot in the garage, then did I close it? I wasn’t sure. I didn’t know.

After the event, at my car, I discovered the answer. My passenger side window was indeed open. Only an inch and a half but it was open. And that was enough. I had a puddle on my passenger seat, literally standing water on top of my copy of Realms of Fantasy which I had left lying there. My jacket, which was on the driver’s seat felt dry when I put it on but my seat was damp.

It might have been ok if I had been able to go straight home. I live less than 10 minutes from the mall. But it wasn’t ok. The cops had blockaded off a crucial part of the route home (not sure if it was an accident or flood or something else) and we were detoured. The detour took me down roads I was unfamiliar with and so I followed the car in front of me, hoping they knew which way to go. The road looped around and I arrived back at the cop car. Was this a trick? A detour that led nowhere? I tried again, taking the loop in the reverse direction and finally on the far side of the loop found a tiny street that led out of the area and to my home. Huzzah!

Meanwhile, my rear end was now cold and damp and the magazine a soggy mess. I pulled into the driveway and opened the garage and my husband still hasn’t put the camping gear away. Grrr.

        

A new year has arrived! (. . . and there will be much rejoicing.) And with it the almighty resolutions and goals post.

You can read my goals from last year here. Let’s find out how I did.

• Finish and polish the novel I started during this year’s NaNoWriMo : Failed—I restarted this novel during NaNo 2010 and the story is much stronger now but still unfinished.
• Submit enough short stories to various markets that I have five pieces circulating at once: Failed, mostly—I had four stories circulating at once. I’ve decided that this goal was too loose and too long term. It allowed my procrastination tendencies to kick in and take over. It left me stranded at the end of the year with very little time due to the holidays and one last story to write.
• Attend RadCon and MisCon. Put my hand out and say “Hi” to at least one author at each. : Success—I attended both of these events and chatted with authors at both. At RadCon it was a narrow success. I said Hi and blushed and stammered and I don’t even remember who I talked with. Though I did spend an hour with Dean Wesley Smith and Darragh Metzger during the writing workshop and learned a lot.  MisCon was much better. I talked with Patricia Briggs, John Dalmas, Harry Turtledove, James Glass and others at various times during those four days. It was totally worth the heated cheeks to talk with these professionals.
• Research into a third con to attend, and if money permits go: Success—I found a third con to go to, SpoCon, but money was too tight to go. However I helped organize and put on a local writing conference, Rivers of Ink, and attended. I even had dinner with Patricia Briggs afterwards. I also attended Write on the River this year, and met and chatted with Terry Brooks, one of the first authors that made me fall in love with the fantasy genre. Before him, I mostly read classics like Little Women and Anne of Green Gables.
• Keep up with this blog, including more fiction pieces and more regular posts: Failed—I actually stopped posting for a while. I didn’t post any more fiction pieces and in general, I let you all down.

Last year is over, done, finished. On to 2011! My goals for this year are as follows:

• Write 5000 words a week for January, February, and March. This goal is much more immediate and set in stone than the above goal of circulating short stories. Some of these words will be on short stories, some on novels. I set the goal for the first three months because I know I can do better than 5000. I just need to get the habits into place first. At the end of March, I’ll reevaluate the word count goal for the next three months based off of children’s activities, work schedule, and how I did in the first three months.
• Finish what I start. This one is so very hard for me. I get these cool shiny new ideas and I whip out a fresh document and start typing. Less than 1000 words in, the shine has worn off and I want to move on to something else. This year, I will not let that happen.
• ePublish what I finish or submit to a traditional publisher. I will continue to fill up my inventory of titles available by yours truly this year.  This goal was the hardest to decide on. I was so tempted to say “Publish a short story every week or every two weeks.” I decided against that though as I want to also work on longer projects and if I fail once, I tend to give up. I didn’t want to leave myself that out. If I stay on target on the first two goals, this goal will be easy. I should also still be finishing enough projects to be self-publishing regularly.
• Continue to make contacts at conventions and writing conferences. As a part of this and expanding on last year’s goal, I will also start promoting my stories at these events. I will print up something to hand out to those interested in my stories and I will suck it up and talk about myself if the opportunity arises. I will be grateful that my complexion is such that only I will know if I am blushing.
• Keep this blog and the new webpage for my publishing self, Kandake Publications, up to date. I’d like to set a regular schedule for entries on the blog but if my schedule comes down to writing on a story or writing on my blog, I want the freedom to choose the story.

Those are my writing goals/resolutions for 2011. I’ll keep you posted on how I’m doing. What are your resolutions/goals for this year?

        

Today, I will describe how I prepared to e-publish this first time.

I downloaded the free ebook from Smashwords about how to format my stories for electronic publishing. That’s right. I learned how to format the silly thing before I even chose a story to put up. I read through the entire thing and familiarized myself with the process. I didn’t know everything I needed to know about formatting it after one read through. That wasn’t going to happen until after I put what I read to practice.

Choosing The Story:

The caps and the bold and the colon above make this seem like there will be some secret here. Some sort of great revelation as to why I chose Survive to Eat to publish first. The honest answer is that there is no secret. This story was available to publish. I’ve been sending this one out to traditional markets for over a year and have been getting encouraging rejection letters back but no acceptances yet. Since I had just come out of NaNoWriMo, I didn’t have any short stories finished and unsent. With the holiday retail season upon us, writing time is at a premium (have I mentioned I work retail?). So the only short story available was this one and while I can’t say that the writing is the best, I do stand by the story. I enjoyed writing it and Aetran is an interesting hero that speaks to me (he may even have more adventures in his future) and I hoped that others would enjoy his story too.

So the story is chosen, and it was a simple matter to then go through and format it according to the guidelines on Smashwords. The price was easy to settle upon. 99 cents seemed pretty fair for a short story.

A trip to the bank to open up an account exclusively for my internet profits and I was set.

I created accounts at all three sites and uploaded the file. Done.

But wait! What about the cover? you ask.

The cover was both the most complicated and the easiest part of my adventure. I tried a free ebook cover creator on the web but had issues when I could never create one of the free accounts (stupid, automatically generated emails that never made it into my inbox). Then I tried PowerPoint and I was pretty happy with the end result until I tried to resize it to 900 pixels tall by 600 pixels wide. The words blurred and the program kept ‘fixing’ it by flipping the numbers. I honestly don’t know what I was doing wrong and I didn’t want to spend the time to figure it out. I then tried the Paint program that came free on my laptop. I opened a photo my husband took of some interesting trees on a camping trip this summer. I then resized it and added some text and Voila! A cover is born.

The hardest part of this will be keeping this going. I want to publish a new story every couple of weeks but that will mean finished a story every week or so. We will see how that goes. Keep an eye on this page to find out.

        

The first thing I want to say is that I am a pantser. I start with a situation, no idea how the story will end, and I write. I’ve tried (and tried, and tried) to outline or even throw a few notes down on paper before I start so that I have the all mighty “Plan” to fall back on when I get lost or bored with the story.

So far that hasn’t worked for me. I can only get about three to five scenes out and then I am blocked.

The second thing I want to say is that I’ve never finished* a novel length project yet. I’ve been writing off and on since I was eleven but I’ve never finished a novel. It has been less than two years since I’ve finished a short story (of course, it has been less than two years since I tried to write a short story).

I have no idea if these two traits have any correlation to each other. They are just facts.

That said. I am determined to finish NaNoWriMo this year AND keep going until I finish the novel. Until I get a finished one under my belt, I can’t learn how to write one. And believe me, I can tell that I don’t know how to put one together and it is painful.

So how am I keeping myself writing this time you ask? Two things I try to keep in mind.

One: I have no idea how many times I’ve read it, or who wrote it in such a way that it finally stuck with me, but I think of writing as a marathon or a journey. Each word is like a step towards the finish line.  When I look at the word goal for the day and think “I can’t write another 1k words!” <groan and thud> I try to trim it down. I can write another 200 words, or 20 words, or just write one more sentence, one more word. And that keeps me going.

Two: A couple months ago, Patricia Briggs came into the bookstore and we had a chat about this and that, and as always eventually the conversation came around to writing. She gave me a simple piece of advice and I’ve been using it a lot this week. The initial rush of words had passed and now the work is kicking in; traditionally the point I give up and switch to a new project. She told me “Have fun with it.”

Such simple advice and yet, so very helpful. When I find the story is boring me, or bogging down in details that I haven’t completely worked out yet and my attention is wandering, I remember to have fun. Suddenly, something new comes into the scene and bits and pieces of my favorite stories make an appearance. More humor and lightness infect my writing. The pacing picks up. And a romance subplot is allowed to be written (something I love to read, but have always been too self-conscious to write).

Step-by-step, having fun, I have progressed through this story further than I ever have before. Do I know yet that I’ll reach the finish line? Not really. But with these tools, I believe I can.

*I have trouble finishing a lot of things. Not just stories. Check my closet for half made afghans, cross-stitched designs, and way in the back, scrapbooks. It is a chronic thing.

        

National Novel Writing Month starts in 7 days. A frenzy of word count updates will be posted everywhere. The marathon for all writers and would-be writers will begin and continue on for 30 days.

And I can’t wait!

Last year was the first year I participated and I had so much fun. And more importantly, I generated more words on a single project than I ever had before. No, I didn’t reach the goal of 50,000 words in 30 days. I did reach 25, 000 words in 15 days. I simply wasn’t prepared.

I wasn’t prepared for the time crunch in the second half of the month. Between children’s activities, the Thanksgiving holiday, and a job in retail during the Christmas shopping season, time ran out. These commitments haven’t changed but I am ready for them. I hope to use the first half of the month to get ahead on my word count so I can ease up some during the second half.

I wasn’t prepared for how the story would evolve after 20k words. So much was going on that I became overwhelmed. My story ideas always seem simple enough but I sense there is a much larger picture behind them. I discovered I was correct and had no idea how to handle it. This year I am prepared to keep pushing through no matter how surprised I am by where the story takes me.

NaNoWriMo is coming. Are you ready?

        

Looking at his earnest face, knowing that I am also unpublished, I felt obligated to say yes. I resisted. I had to say no. I have a busy family life, work life, and writing life already. To commit to reading this stranger’s novel was more than I could do.

In fact, I had a sudden feeling of standing at the top of a very tall slippery slope; one on which I could very easily lose myself. Lose my writing time and personal reading time to helping others with their writing.

My husband can hardly ever say no and I have difficulty with it but in this case I steeled my resolve and said it. No.

How easy is it for you to say no?

        

I also had the very unique experience of my husband introducing himself as MY spouse, like folks would know me by name over him. It was very flattering and maybe a hint of things to come?

The drive back alternated between heavy grey clouds darkening the roads and torrential rain bouncing off of it. About an hour away from home we had the wondrous opportunity to see a bright double rainbow arcing across the sky. It was very beautiful and a good way to end the trip.

To sum up, I highly recommend this con for SF/Fantasy fans and writers. It is small but well-run. Friendly and educational. You should come next year.