Kindle, My Mad Crush, and General Insanity

It shouldn't be too long now, but soon As The World Dies: The First Days will be available for the Kindle. We were not going to go this route at first, but after several conversations with Indie Authors and hearing about the good response to this format, we went ahead and dove in. It was a total bitch to format, but thanks to April Hamilton's wonderful pdf on the subject, we sorted out the issues. We loaded it up last night and hopefully it will be available for any Kindle owners out there shortly.

Update: The Kindle version of the book is now for sale! Yay!!!

Back in April, I wrote about my mad crush on Morris Rosenthal. He wrote a very good book about self-publishing and has a very informative blog as well. I make sure to read it every week and it always gives me a lot to think about. Yesterday, he gave me a little shout out on his blog, which I thought was very cute. Of course, I just write about vampires, I'm not one myself (thank God! I'm Italian! I need my garlic!), but it was pretty damn funny. It actually made my day. Yeah, yeah, I'm easy to amuse. I'm low maintenance that way.

I have to say that both April Hamilton and Morris Rosenthal had a huge impact on me when I decided to go Independent and I am grateful for the advice they doll out on a regular basis to writers who want to see their words in print, but have battered themselves bloody against the gatekeepers of the publishing industry.

Today I was speaking with a colleague from one of our Dallas office and he was very intrigued with the news of my decision to be an Independent Author. He spoke of how he knows many musicians who spent years and years sending out demo tapes to recording companies. Now, they don't give a damn about the recording companies and are doing it on their own terms thanks to the new media. The Internet opened a gateway to a new form of success and many musicans have grabbed onto it.

Authors have been a little slower to adapt to the new media. My colleague even said, during our conversation, that many of the writers he knows have given up on their dreams of publication. "They gave up. They got too beaten down."

I was recently talking to Andrea Dean Van Scoyoc, a very successful Independent Author, via Myspace. We had spoken years ago when I was supposed to be polished by a small publishing house. Kody Boye had brought her up in a conversation and I remembered her almost instantly. I touched base with her again about her Twisted Dreams magazine and one of the things she said to me was that she was back to being an Independent Author after working with publishing houses the last two years. It was a reminder, once more, that the path I have chosen is a good one and it's up to me to make it work.

Meanwhile, promotion and the Kindle formatting nightmare has consumed a lot of my recent time, but I am making progress on the rewrite of As The World Dies: Fighting to Survive. The tangled mess is untangling slowly, but surely. It does feel good to be writing new scenes with my old familiar characters. Jenni had me giggling out loud the other night. Calhoun amuses me to no end.

In fact, I have come to realize Calhoun really does know where the zombies came from. He's just so batshit crazy, the way he describes things muddles it all up. But he knows far more than anyone around him realizes and that is much more to him than meets the eye.

Anyway, progress is progress...

Computers Gone Wild! Unexpected Turns of Events! AUGH!!!

I was bound and determined to finish my novella set in the world of As The World Dies this last weekend and seemed to be well on my way. ATWD: Untold Tales-Eric's Story was going great and I was pretty excited about the flow.

Then my keyboard began spewing nonsense at around 1 AM in the morning on Saturday and I was left cussing and swearing. My husband did his job as tech support and after around 30 minutes declared the keyboard dead. Since I wrecked my wrists when I was a teenager writing endlessly in notebooks, I need an ergonomic keyboard to type and I was stuck for the night. On impulse, we hit the only store open at that time of the night, but, alas, WalMart did not have what I needed. My husband ended up buying a new wave keyboard for his use and handed his old ergonomic keyboard off to me. It's exactly like the one I have at work, so I am satisfied with this scenario. At least it isn't typing out some weird alien language.

Sunday, I was back on my roll, typing away and having a good ol' time, when I smelled something acrid. Realizing it was coming from my computer, I quickly saved what I was writing and tried to shut down. I had barely hit the START menu when the computer went dark. It was dead dead dead dead dead.

My husband was out buying his new keyboard at the time and when he got home, I pointed my finger at the computer and wailed, "It died!" He looked at me incredulously and began messing with the computer. He couldn't believe it when it wouldn't start at all.

So off we went to Fryes this time, rushing to get there before closing to buy a new power supply. When we got home, my husband shoved the new power supply into my computer and bingo! there was light.

I hate it when my computer malfunctions.

Needless to say, I was a little grumpy to be behind schedule for finishing up the novella, but last night the flow was great. When I finished the story, I felt good about the ending. It was not exactly what I had planned in the beginning, but it really worked well.

A character that was meant to die actually managed not to and stuck around to the end. It was one of those weird little scenarios where I had the story mapped out (loosely) in my head and was concentrating on the character development of the lead. A big dramatic event occured and a minor character who was supposed to basically enter the story and die, didn't. Of course, it was my own character development that did me in. I had made her an athletic, young woman who was an avid runner. That she would be able to physically survive the situation just made sense. It was a definite case of a character being true to her concept. I firmly believe that if you build good, solid characters and create a world that has its own rules and stick to your boundries, your story can definitely develop on its own. With the right mix, things just pop.

So I kept her around. Her character personality was a good contrast to the lead and actually pushed the lead to evolve. Thought I wasn't conciously thinking it, later a fellow writer pointed out that the readers of the original story knew the lead wasn't going to die, so having Stacey (the other character) in the mix created tension because no one knew if she was going to die or not.

The ending was extra poignant because of Stacey's contribution to the story and when I wrote the last sentence, I felt a sense of accomplishment.

So its been a weird couple of days, but I do feel back on track. Having the computer up and running again is a huge relief.

My husband is close to finishing the website and we hope to go live sometime in the next week or so. I'll definitely post here when that happens.

Meanwhile, I'm probably gonna kick back and enjoy a day or two off then jump into the next Untold Tale. Edits are calling to me on the second book and the vampire novel. So I may start that tonight.

Things are back on track. And it is good!