Sherri Cornelius

This was my diary entry from 2 1/2 years ago. It resonates with me today.

Feeling today...like I need to find a way to release my fear that everyone's out to get me. Like holding back to protect myself doesn't really protect me. How would it feel to go through my day feeling like everyone I interact with has no agenda, no expectations, only a pure desire to connect and share? How would that feel? Everyone has an agenda, of course, because that's how we go through life. But what if I had faith that those agendas contained no secret need that I had to fulfill? What if I stopped looking for the punchline? The irony? The trip wire? What if I went through my day open to possibility, open to helping others when they need it? I'd like to be able to instantly assess when people need my help, even when they don't ask, my real help and not my propping up of their ego. If I get out of the mental fetal position and look people in the eye, what then? I think I'm afraid they WILL need me. I fear looking like a fool--too excited, too enthusiastic, too dumb, too womanly. I fear being myself, because that self has been criticized so much. Today I will stop working on my faults and start finding my strengths, and start working on those.

How about this: Today I will stop trying to hide my flaws. By trying to hide my flaws I'm hiding the good parts of me, too.

I had let the daily practice of this fall away, but I can see how I benefited from it. Maybe I didn’t exactly let it fall away as I simply let it fall inside. It’s been stewing and now it’s ready to come back out. Back then it was a what-if. Now that last sentence feels like a fact. Also, I’ve learned since then that flaws are subjective and forgivable.

I have this story called "I Can Fly". You can see it over there in the sidebar. It's very short, like 2k words or something. When I put it on Smashwords I was hoping I'd get the same kind of closure I got with Mon Petit Ami. I did get some, sort of, but not the same palpable sense of release. I decided to take it off Smashwords and give Amazon's KDP Select a chance to earn me a piece of their Prime lending pot.

(Aside: KDP Select has been a waste of time for me. None of my three publications has ever been borrowed, so basically I'm giving Amazon exclusivity for free. Great racket they have going there. I won't use it again.)

A couple of months ago I read ICF through for the first time in a long time. I downloaded my two shorts to test on different apps, and on the Kindle app I encountered the problem, which was the damn ending! And yes, I'm really mad about it!

I hate writing endings. I struggle with the ending every time and never feel satisfied. If I have an ending in mind when I start, I'm not light on my feet enough to switch it up when the story takes me in a different direction. If I don't have the ending, that keeps me from finishing at all.

I guess that's why I got the closure with MPA. It couldn't be published until I got the ending right. It finally came around, mostly satisfying, published and BOOM, closure. "Oooh, must have been because I published it! It's out of my hair and out of my mind, because I put it out there. This is a sure-fire way to get rid of those nagging stories I can't stop editing!"

Ahem. No.

With ICF, I did fix the ending, but the pacing was bad. And this is why they say let your stories sit a while before you read them again, and to print them out. The different format--a Kindle reader app--and a few weeks gave me the separation I needed to see why I couldn't stop thinking about it.

But so once I was to that point, Skin & Scales was racing down the track. I thought, that's fine because I Can Fly is in KDP Select. It's exclusively on Amazon and at 99 cents. Nobody's borrowing, and it's highly doubtful anyone would pay a dollar for a story of only 2,000 words. ICF could wait while I focused on S&S.

So that's what I did. And then two days after I received my first real copies of Skin & Scales somebody paid a dollar for I Can Fly! Huzzah! Finally, a sale for this little story. Then I felt guilty as I realized I hadn't fixed the ending yet. Bummer. I hope they don't hold it against me.

Anyway, this lit a fire under me. If people were going to be paying, it better darn well be the best I can make it. I took the laptop to the park with us so the kids could play and I could plug in at the pavilion. I reshaped the ending to I Can Fly with little trouble, much to my relief. Only thing is, now it's pretty obvious that the title for this new story should be "The Girl for Me." Not pretty obvious, really obvious. But I already have a cover I'm satisfied with! People already know it by its old title! What do I do, what do I do??

I already changed Black Veil Angel to Skin & Scales pretty abruptly, but that was before publication. I'm glad I changed it. But I Can Fly is an established title. I guess it can be transitioned a couple of ways--maybe a subtitle, or in the description I can say "formerly I Can Fly"--so as not to confuse those who've already downloaded it.

Maybe I'm making too big a deal out of it.

Here's the real link to the interview I posted yesterday. For some reason I linked to Dane's post about the interview instead of the interview itself, on his author blog. Gotta be smarter than the Internet, Sherri.

Author Interview: Sherri Cornelius | J. Dane Tyler.

What a crazy week it's been! Most of it wasn't good, obviously, what with the Boston Marathon bombing so close to the anniversary of the OKC bombing, and the tornadoes earlier in the week, and friends going through health issues that I can only imagine. I could lose myself in debilitating empathy, which I would have done a few years ago.

What I find happening instead is extreme gratitude. My world is peaceful. I have all my limbs and no cancer. My family is healthy and untouched by violence. I finally feel I've overcome the bulk of my self-destructive tendencies.

So yeah, my life is good. It's not perfect, but at least I'm safe, warm, and fed. Oh, and I was accepted into the Bachelor of General Studies program! Things are moving in the right direction. I have to call the school now and set up my class plan. The only thing I'm concerned about is the money sitch. I can't really afford to pay more than about a dollar out of pocket. This might mean taking fewer classes to stay within the Pell grant I'll be getting. I won't be taking out any loans this time. Learned my lesson on that one.

Time for me to get my day started. I hope you all don't let the week get you down too much. Enjoy what you have while you have it.

Just a quick note to let you know about my first interview EVAR! It's up over at Dane's new place. Go check it out!

Author Interview: Sherri Cornelius | En*DANE*gered.

The first two stories I e-published, I didn’t do any promotion aside from tweeting and facebooking and blogging. And really, not a lot of that. They were short stories, and I intended them to be free from the beginning. This in itself ensured they would be downloaded. People like free stuff.

With SKIN AND SCALES I decided to go a different way. First of all, I decided to charge a book price for it and see what happened. (Very little, of course.) Second, I put it straight into KDP Select instead of offering it on Smashwords first. The benefit of KDP Select is that Amazon Prime members are able to borrow the book for free, but the author still gets a small royalty. I had no borrows on the short stories while they were enrolled, but I thought people would be more likely to borrow a book. (Apparently not my book.) Third, I intended to publish it quietly and just let it sit unpromoted, but I got caught up in the excitement, especially when my mom virtually shoved a couple of twenties in my hand for a Facebook ad. So I tried it, expecting nothing but an education and receiving what I expected. It was an interesting and enlightening experience. The results were definitive, and I quit before I hit $20.

So now I think what I need is some reviews. My theory is that any review is good for business. Even a solid 3-star review would indicate that people were reading it and it isn’t completely awful. A 1-star review would keep people engaged and on the page, though I presume I would need a couple of higher stars to counteract it.

TOMORROW only, April 10, SKIN AND SCALES will be free for download on Kindle. This serves a two-fold purpose: to allow the folks in my acknowledgements to get a free copy and to garner a few reviews. I hope everyone who reads it will at least throw a couple of anonymous stars up there. Don’t be shy! If one person breaks the ice, others will follow.

If you don’t read weird stuff but still want to support me, you can recommend the book to your weird-loving friends. If you don’t have a Kindle but still want to read it, you can download a reader for your computer or smart phone here.

Thanks for all your support!

It wasn't supposed supposed to be scary, self-publishing a book on Kindle. I wasn't particularly excited about it. I saw self-publishing as a way to get Black Veil Angel out of my hair for good. It worked so well with the two shorts I published, after all, and I wasn't really nervous about those two. It was really no big deal, and once they were published, even if by myself, they were finalized in my mind. I had struggled so long with BVA--and even after deciding to publish, the process dragged on and on.

But then it just stopped dragging.The instant I saw the image on iStockPhoto I knew it was THE ONE. I had been looking for months, but I'm glad now I didn't try to force it with another image. As the final cover started to come together I got more and more excited.

I'm really happy about the title change. "Black Veil Angel" had a couple of things about it that I thought didn't represent the book. First of all, if you've googled it, you know that the term black veil angel is a common name for a type of angelfish. It wouldn't be a huge leap for a reader to expect at least some symbolism involving a fish tank. Another is that confounding word "angel." It's used in the Christian angel way so freakin' much that I thought it would give potential readers the wrong idea. Especially with the Light on the cover.

Skin and Scales is more descriptive, fits the tone of the story, and plus I think it sounds pretty cool.

I wasn't going to do any promotion beyond a quiet link here on the blog. But once the cover was finished and I started the actual publishing process, I found myself making author pages on Goodreads and Amazon, almost like sleepwalking. I wrote a blurb and all the front matter of the book in a single afternoon. No major problems formatting the manuscript. It was just time, I guess.

I had planned not to care, based on my previous self-pub experiences. What I didn't take into consideration is the fact that this is a full-length novel. A novel I worked on for several years. A novel which ushered me through the hardest time of my writing life thus far. (Hopefully forever.) Maybe I do care, a little.

Skin and Scales will be available exclusively on the Kindle for three months. Woo!

 

BVA has been proofread by a reader with fresh-eyes. Hopefully this will be the day I finalize it and get the ball rolling on the peripherals, like the front and back matter, and make some good progress on the pesky cover. Lofty goals for a single day, especially when I have two DVDs of Downton Abbey waiting, not to mention much housekeeping.

At least I don't have Castleville to distract me anymore. It's felt like housekeeping for a long while, And I finally got the nerve to block it. I thought I would miss it, but when it pops into my head it's a relief to be able to dismiss it and move to something else. So much of this modern Internet-centered life is habit, and I've found my attention span leaving me. I have trouble reading a book or focusing on a home project long enough to get it done. How am I supposed to build back into writing if I can't think about it for more than ten minutes?

The attention span isn't the only symptom, though. It's also lazy thinking. I'm used to taking in other people's creative ideas now, and I have to remember what it's like to call up my own new ideas. Working at the library is helping a lot with that, and I wonder if I would even be considering a re-entry into writing if it weren't for the stimulation I've found there. The atmosphere nurtures open discussion of problems from all level of employees, giving me the opportunity to practice thinking of creative solutions. And looking at all those book covers has prodded my sleeping writer, the dreamer who five years ago knew she would one day see her own book on those shelves.

I think this time my approach to the business side of writing will be different. Shoot, it already has been. I'm trying new things that I wouldn't before for fear of hurting my career. But trying something new and failing doesn't hurt a career, stagnation does. Quitting does. Fear does.

But we all know this.

This time it's been a slow build, going at my own pace and trusting that I'll be at the right place at the right time for the path that is right for me.