Sherri Cornelius

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!

I’ve been rockin’ it at the library. They say I’m a “quick study.” And indeed, much of how they operate hits me right in the instincts. It seems almost too easy. The time I spend there doesn’t feel like work.This is great for the prospects of my being able to handle a second job.

Or maybe when I finally get Black Veil Angel out in the world, I’ll sell a million copies at five bucks a pop and then I’ll just be working at the library for fun.

Haha, I’m so funny.

But even figuring I won’t sell a million copies (or even a hundred) I’m still on track to publish BVA by, oh, say, March-ish. I was thinking about entering the Amazon Breakthrough Whatever, but I realize that this book is not for that contest. And so I’ll continue with my little self-publishing venture.

My main goal here is to finalize BVA in my mind. When I put Mon Petit Ami out there, it was after years of going back to it, over and over, trying to fix it. It rarely left my thoughts. I put it “under the bed” permanently four or five times, only to find it as an itch in my brain some time later. Probably every person reading this has scratched that itch once or twice.

Then when I needed a piece to experiment with on Smashwords, it seemed like the logical choice. Imperfect, yes, but fairly solid and fun. I straightened its hair bow and pushed it onstage, and you know what? The itch left me. I published it over a year ago and not once have I had the urge to edit. NOT ONCE. I rarely even think about it anymore. I’m free! I’m hopeful this will be the case with BVA as well.

And if a few people get a little enjoyment out of it, all the better.

It feels good to be writing again, even if it’s the clinical, critical kind of writing that is editing. This isn’t rewriting. I’ve rewritten enough. This is taking out stuff I’m not sure of and filling in the gaps..with, by the way, fresh and untainted writing. A good piece to stretch my legs on after all this time, and when I’m finished I might even start a new book.

No pressure.

Suddenly I’m very busy. I’ve gotten used to having no schedule conflicts—indeed, little schedule at all—because for the past few years almost everything I do is school-related, and they don’t overlap things. I’ve also gotten to the point where if I get showered and brushed by lunch I’m doing well. It’s not that I sit around all morning, but only that I have nowhere to be.

I can feel this changing permanently.

Part of it’s my choice, like tackling some big repair projects around the house, and part of it is out of my control. My daughter has become involved in more extra-curricular activities in middle school, and my son will be there next year. This is on top of the back-to-school season. Another commitment I’ve made is to take charge of my health, which means appointments with various doctors. (I had my first lady doctor visit in about eight years, which tells you something.)

One small (and yet huge) step is volunteering at the library. I started Tuesday, and today it seems like it could have been a dream. I often dream I’m straightening shelves at public places for no pay. Really. I fear I’ll go back in there and they have no recollection of me.

My regular times are Tuesday and Thursday mornings. I have a name tag and my own drawer and everything. On my first day, the lady in charge of volunteers showed me around backstage. It felt strange to pass through that doorway, the one that reveals just a glimpse of the library machinery, and one I’d never considered I might enter. Turns out the working part of the library is almost as big as the public part, only instead of wide spaces and neat shelves, the rooms are stuffed with desks, and papers plaster every surface, horizontal and vertical. It’s wonderfully shabby; clean but impossibly cluttered.

After my tour I was handed off to my boss, (Darlene? Deborah? Oh crap, I’ve already forgotten her name…Yay, got it!) Dorothy. She showed me how to read the shelves, which is basically fixing all the books the patrons thought they were putting back in the right place but didn’t even get close. I will be working in the children’s section, where the shelves are always in flux. So my normal job is to read the shelves, but the each employee I met seemed gleeful about the possibility of using me for her own special projects.

I always suspected my hodgepodge of skills and interests would be useful in a library, and now I know for sure I should have been a librarian from the beginning.

This is a big step, knowing that I can work around people. As far as I can tell, they don’t use any air freshener anywhere in the building, aside from the public restroom. The employee restroom smells faintly of cleaner, but not air freshener. When I finished reading the Beginning Reader shelves my eyes were googly from the shelf reading, but otherwise I felt fine. It could change, I suppose, but at the moment I think I could spend all day in that building and feel fine.

Of course, I would like to work full time at the library someday. But for now, I’ll call it an internship. At least it’s something to put on my resume, and I get to help out a favorite institution.

Now I just have to hope ebooks don’t make libraries obsolete. Would be just my luck to find my perfect job only to have it stop existing. *crosses fingers*

I’m taking this publishing thing sloooooowly. Don’t know if you noticed. I first published Mon Petit Ami in October of last year, distributing through Smashwords. I learned the ropes, trying out the coupons and reviews and changing the price. It was free through nearly every retailer—B&N, Kobo, Sony, Smashwords—and racked up about 400 views over the next 6 or 7 months.

Amazon, however, is the whiny, uncompromising kid on the playground who is ready to take his awesome toys and go home if the other kids don’t play his games. Ergo, Amazon doesn’t give you total control over your pricing when you self-publish and you have to like it or lump it. The lowest they’ll go on any publication is 99 cents, regardless of length, unless you cast some magical price-matching spell which I was never able to figure out. So my little 1500-ish word story languished with no sales, unsurprisingly.

So I started to wonder how the story would do on Amazon. I had a half a year’s data on Smashwords, et al, and several good reviews from complete strangers, so I thought it was time to play Amazon’s game. The only way I could get my story on Amazon for free was to give them exclusivity, so I did.

I found out a lot from my 3-day free promo. Before I did this, I’d thought the reader pool among my friends had already been exhausted. After all, MPA had been free and periodically promoted for many months. What I didn’t realize was how many of my friends have Kindles and would download my story once it was pretty much effortless. I ended up with 77 downloads over three days on Amazon, a number that took about a month to reach on all other platforms combined, maybe a bit longer.

How eye-opening is that? No wonder people play by Amazon’s rules. They have awesome toys.

Now that this promo’s over, I expect my new downloads to drop back to zero. A dollar is just too much for a story this short, especially since it’s my only publication and bears an ISBN from Smashwords—a bias I’ve seen in the Kindle forums that can’t be dismissed.

One anonymous person gave me my first review, for which I am grateful. Reviews are like currency, so every star, whether it be one or five, helps. This one happened to be a fiver.

I feel like organizing today, but I can’t seem to find a place to start. I finally figured out that when I get to this state, it’s because I need to declutter before I can organize what is left. So instead of staring at the mess or moving it from one table to another, I’ll think about what I really need and put the rest in a donation box.

I feel pretty proud of myself for taking what I learned and applying it to change an old habit. For a long time I felt like such a slave to my unconscious (and detrimental) thinking patterns, so it’s nice to have gotten to the point where I can bring them out one at a time and deal with them. I guess this is what they mean when they say you become more of yourself in middle age. You start questioning the things others have drilled into you as fact, and you decide what you believe to be true.

And then, I suppose, most start drilling their own true facts into others, perpetuating the cycle. Is this something we are meant to do? I guess we’re not drilling so much as stating the truth as we know it. Maybe it’s human nature that the first 40 years or so we absorb our truths from other people, because we’re not experienced enough to trust our own truths.

I’ve reached a place where even though I might not be able to state my truth clearly, I recognize it when I see it. I recently saw the truth in a book about creativity called The War of Art, by Steven Pressfield. It is a small volume which tells me things I already knew but did not trust. I appreciate its compactness. Not a lot of jibber-jabber to fluff it up to an impressive size to the detriment of the message. I borrowed this from the library, but this one deserves a permanent place on my shelf. I’ll be putting it on my Amazon wish list.

So now I’m thinking a lot about what it means to be a creative person, how to not only accept that about myself but also how to celebrate it, and how to combine my creativity with my accumulated knowledge to let it manifest in my life.

The past couple of days have been pretty cool. Since I put my short story on Smashwords, it’s been downloaded over 60 times. I find it unbearable not knowing how many are friends and family, and how many are strangers. So far I’ve had a review on Smashwords from Allie, and several have supported me by sharing my link on Facebook and writing short reviews to go along with it. Thank you all! In a few days it’ll go into Smashwords’ Premium Catalog, which means it will be distributed to online retailers. It’s been a fun experiment.

So the next step is to get it on Kindle Direct. I uploaded it yesterday, but it’s still under review so it’s not available yet. While I’ve put it on Smashwords for free, Amazon makes you charge a dollar minimum. I’ve got to figure out if I want to charge for the Smashwords version as well, but I don’t think I want to do that yet--I might have to charge and then give a coupon to make it free, because of Amazon’s terms of service.

Even if I don’t make a dime from online publishing, I’m glad I did it once. I’m now more secure in my knowledge of how publishing works, and the thrill of having work out there has erased most of my concerns about imperfection. And the thing is, I’ve found you can’t truly understand epublishing from just studying it or reading blogs—you have to dig in. I’m surprised at how not scary it is on this side of clicking “publish,” and while I thought I would feel more pressure afterwards, it’s actually been quite freeing.

I have a couple of books that couldn’t find homes with traditional big publishers (and a couple of small presses), so I’d been considering going with a small-but-successful online publisher like Damnation Books and others.(You might remember I edited for DB’s sister company, Eternal Press.) After all, they have a customer base all ready, free editing and cover design (free for me), and they pay for the ISBN. On the other side, self-publishing lets me keep a bigger chunk of the profits, and while I can’t afford to buy ISBNs right now, I could probably trade editing services with some trusted friends. And after making the cover for Mon Petit Ami myself, I think I might enjoy making others.

But I don’t have to decide right now. I’m not very good at taking incremental steps—a stumbling block to my writing career up to this point—so it’s time I learned. I’m slowly making a plan.

So what’s your experience with self-publishing?

I think if I just started typing every day, whether or not I have a topic in mind, I’d post a lot more often. Nothing seems important enough to write down, except for some stuff I can’t really talk about. But today I decided to take the plunge and just write anything. Just communicate.

I haven’t been writing fiction at all for a long while, so long that I don’t even feel guilty anymore. Letting my agent go let me go. I felt like the band of a slingshot must feel right after it releases its missile, flaccidly bouncing with the force of the release. I’m not ready to load another stone, but I am finally still enough to begin hunting for the perfect one. The hunt might take a while, and apparently I’m fine with that.

As I’m opening files and emails I haven’t looked at in months, I’ve found something disturbing. I’d thought Black Veil Angel, what I consider my better book, had been barely subbed, maybe to ten or so smaller publishers, while Ea’s Gift had been subbed to the death. Now I see it’s the other way around. My agent had abandoned EG in favor of BVA (apparently it was the better book), and I was so deep in my helplessness that I’d never laid the subs out side by side.

The reason this is disturbing is that BVA was going to get me another agent, if I ever decided to try that route again, and EG was self-pub fodder, something that didn’t have a life in traditional publishing but was good enough to experiment with. I thought my future was in contemporary fantasy anyway, so it would be fine. But the most likely next project, the one that captures my imagination, is another traditional fantasy like EG, complete with a dragon.

So all this means is that I still don’t know what the hell I’m doing. This whole time I’ve been trying to balance what I want to write with what I think others want me to write, which is impossible. I bought into the advice that it’s best to have a whole bunch of people read your stuff and tell you how to fix it, no matter what. I’m starting to think this is a big reason my creativity died.

Other people, those who don’t have a people-pleasing gene as dominant as mine, might do well with this advice. For me, it’s just managed to confuse me enough that I freeze up. I haven’t had a vision for my projects, I see in hindsight, except to write what pleases others. And not in an attagirl way, an ego puffing way, but that if other people don’t like my work, then my work isn’t valid.

What I see now is, if others don’t like my work it might not get published, but that doesn’t make it less valid. And once I understood that, it was easy to see that somebody is going to like my work, if I am authentic and true. Some people know this and apply it instinctively. I never did.

Three years ago I made a list of things I wanted, things I felt would make me a more fulfilled, whole person. I’m amazed at the number of things on this list that I actually did receive.

1. Brand-new car—My Saturn’s not brand new, but a perfectly wonderful substitute


2. Brand-new house—I no longer feel desperate for this like I used to.


3. Happy relationship—we’ve always had a rocky relationship, and I’m not seeing that change anytime soon.


4. Nicer clothes—Somewhat, because I’m working at it


5. off foodstamps—it was scary, but we are now government assistance-free


6. good health—The health problems I had then are still with me, but I’m learning to manage them. Also, I’m working on solutions now.


7. book published—grumble grumble


8. BVA finished—Done!


9. new recliner—Got one for my husband, and a futon for me.


10. home repairs--That’s happening next week.


11. bicycle—Got this before I had a car to take Maggie Rose to school


12. tighter skin—probably wishful thinking, at my age. :)


13. new laptop, lightweight, fast, pretty. Plenty of memory, comfy keyboard. Strong but light. GREAT BATTERY! –Got this one for Christmas last year


14. cell phone—It’s been a life saver


15. I want to feel free to be myself.—Might never stop working on this one, but I feel more myself than ever


16. iPod—We have 3! Hand-me-downs from my mom, but perfectly usable.

That’s 12 out of 16! And while at the beginning, three years seems like forever, it’s really not long in the scheme of things. So maybe I need to make another list. It’ll be a lot shorter now that I’ve received so many of the things I needed. And you know what? There’s still time to receive the other things on my list.
Those things did enrich my life. They helped me feel more independent, more relevant, more connected—and most importantly they brought joy to me when I needed it.
Have you received anything you’ve asked for lately?

Over at Pimp My Novel, Eric recently did a multi-part analysis of book sales, broken down by genre.

He says science fiction is likely to be sold under another label, like fantasy or thriller. I think this is a good thing, because it shows that people still like it. The numbers on hard-core science fiction books are down, but I think that’s because it’s acceptable to have a little sci-fi in your mainstream now, or a science element in fantasy. We might stop classifying our sub-genres by subject matter, and start classifying them by writing style. This is probably already happening informally (like when they put in a blurb, “In the tradition of Stephen King” or whatever) but what if you walked into a bookstore and the signs over the shelves said, “Thoughtful,” or “Flowery” or “Hip” or “Wry”?

Or what if they started naming the sections after the big-name authors? I could read a book about knitting if I enjoyed the author’s voice, so I would go directly to the Stephen King section without worrying about a traditional genre. Realistically I know that wouldn’t work, because there are too many influential, distinct voices to have a section for every one, but you see where I’m going. The way we’ve classified our genres isn’t as cut and dried anymore. Look at Young Adult. It’s supposedly a genre unto itself, but YA can encompass anything at all, from vampires to drugs to cancer. Crossover is becoming the new norm.

Speaking of crossover, I have a book idea that melds fantasy and hard core science fiction, with a romantic element thrown in. Where would that go?

As an author--as a human, actually--there’s no way to guarantee a reader’s expectations will intersect with my offering. So many things are out of my control, and I just can’t know what makes a reader like or dislike certain things about my book. It’s like that Aerosmith song, "Same Old Song and Dance":

Get yourself a cooler lay yourself low
Coincidental murder with nothing to show
The judge’s constipation will go to his head
And his wife's aggravation, you’ll soon end up dead

I just finished a book wherein the ending came way too soon for me. I was so disappointed, because I thought I had a whole ‘nother chapter to go, judging by the number of pages left. So I finish a chapter, anticipating the “wrap-up” that should begin as I turn the page, and find instead discussion questions and an excerpt of the author’s novel. It was over. Like that.

I understand the need to market the next book, but this actually made a black mark against the author in my mind. Even though the book was fantastic the ending soured it for me. Because of where I expected it to end, I was reading that final chapter in a different way than the author intended. She knew it was the end. I did not.

I re-read that last chapter as a last chapter, just to see if maybe I’d missed a change in pacing or rhythm, the subtle signs that the book was ending, and sure enough, they were there. I think the ending was still weak, but it definitely would have been stronger for me if I’d had the right expectations.

Is my reader in a loveless marriage, or did her boyfriend just say he loved her for the first time? Did the cover promise something I didn’t include in the book, or is the reader a writer himself with his own ideas of how to do things? Did my reader just get the death penalty?

You just never know.

Printing out a novel for editing uses a lot of paper. Combine that with the kids' 2-hour-long scribbling sessions, and it makes perfect sense to use my old manuscripts as scrap paper. I mean, it's still good on one side, and though the kids can read, there's nothing OMG-terrible in BVA; it doesn't have sex scenes, per se, but the MC does think about sex in a flippant, jaded way, and there is colorful language. Still, nobody cares about the pieces of story on the other side of the page. The occasional cussword would go unnoticed.

So I thought.

I forgot my 11-year-old is a voracious reader with a vocabulary as big as mine. She wants to read all kinds of inappropriate books, as I did at her age, just because she's already read everything appropriate in the house. Last night she told me she'd been reading the backs of these scrap papers, because BVA was "awesome." She said sometimes she even gets several consecutive pages so she can read a bigger chunk at a time.

It's hard to turn down someone who's dying to read my work, and who will undoubtedly be complimentary. So after she begged me a while, I told her I would edit out the objectionable parts and let her read it. She's already bugged me about it twice more this morning.

So now I'm wondering, will this affect how and what I write? I want to write things my kids will love. The hubs doesn't read fiction anymore, so he doesn't factor in. Sex scenes embarrass me. It seems like a no-brainer to stick with Middle Grade or Young Adult. BVA is going to YA editors, I think.

Something to think about.

Nothing seems right. I'm restless. Anxious.

Spots of news:

• I painted the soffit above my kitchen cabinets, finally. When we moved into this house there was terrible (TERRIBLE) 80s wallpaper, red and yellow plaid with touches of green, overlaid with an ornate fruit border. I figured bare walls were better than that wallpaper, and I was right. A while back I'd painted the backsplash a nice, bright blue, but the soffits were bare for about three years. Now it's light coffee, a very nice neutral I found for $5 on the oopsie table at Lowe's. I guess in a few more years I'll get around to changing the green, red and yellow indoor-outdoor carpet. It's ridiculous.


• On a related note, for your next painting project, you simply must use the low- or no-odor paint. I think they've changed the regulations for new paint so that it has to be low-odor, so that means get rid of your old, stinky stuff.


• My plan for the summer had been to read a lot and let my creative batteries charge, after the long, slow drain of BVA. Being a bit impoverished, I snatch up all the bargain books I can find (with apologies to the authors, but I wouldn't be reading their books at all if I'd had to pay full price). I recently found a treasure trove at Big Lots, and picked up a few big names. The first I read was fellow Oklahoman Marcia Preston's Trudy's Promise. She writes with such beautiful, heartfelt simplicity. Now I'm working through Kate Mosse's Sepulchre, quite a different style from Marcia. Sepulchre took a while to hook me, because I thought it would beat me to death with the "was"es and the "were"s. Once I got used to her style, though, I've enjoyed it.

So what's been going on in your world?

I've stared at this blinking cursor a long time, so I guess I'll just start. I do have things to say, but I think I addled my brain with all the nothing I've been doing.

It's been a week since I turned in my manuscript. During that time I've basked in the glow of satisfaction, and also have identified some missed opportunities with the story. I could beat myself up about them, but I know those opportunities would never have become apparent if I hadn't let it go. Having been through this process before, I know there's always something I could have done better. In fact, I'm pretty sure it's that way with most writers, not just me, so I don't worry about it too much. I did what I did and now the book has to stand up tall, or fall over like a drunk girl on a slippery barstool. (Those days are long behind me.)

Anyway, it's done for now.

I've really enjoyed my break from writing. So much, in fact, that the first few days I started to worry I was enjoying it a little too much. Maybe I wouldn't want to start a new project, or maybe I'm out of ideas, or...whatever. But by Friday I was feeling that familiar pull to the computer, and then over the weekend little random ideas started pinging my brain, and last night I even thought about brushing off an old middle-grade book I started a few Nanowrimos ago.

I'm not ready to dive into anything just yet, but at least the desire is still there.  The blinking cursor no longer mocks me. That's nice.

Last night I cleaned out all the notes I've accumulated over the couple of years of writing this book, including handwritten, typed and printed pages, note cards and scraps. The pile filled the gerbil's old 10-gallon tank. That's a lot of trash. I did keep some notes, the ones showing the link between thought and finished product. Those were about five pages.

I've been working on this book so long, some of my newish blog buds might think it's my first. There was another before BVA, a magical romp with a young lady on the run, forbidden love and fireballs. It was called Stolen Magic at first, and later changed to Ea's Gift to avoid duplicating another published novel. This is the effort that caught my agent's eye, even though it went nowhere and was eventually shelved.

Writing EG was fun and exciting. I thought every book would be that way. Hahaha, what a silly goose I am.

Writing BVA felt like slicing open my own gut, pulling out my intestines, measuring the entire slippery length, then hauling them back in and stitching the wound myself. I didn't realize till I finished that sentence how true it is. Now that it's finished I can see why it was so hard, but that will be a post for another day.

I watched Avatar for the first time (the blue people one, not the last airbender one) with the family. Normally I don't let the kids watch PG-13, but this was a special occasion. My son in particular has been bugging me to get it from Netflix--in fact, he watched it again this morning, and will probably watch it again before it's gone--but I think we all ended up loving it just as much as he did. I was pleasantly surprised to find it was actually a good movie. I'd expected it to be a cookie-cutter special-effects blockbuster with a superficial "save the planet" message. What I found out, though, was a great story supported by heartfelt, emotional performances--with the added bonus of the OMG OUT OF THIS WORLD FANTASTIC special effects. Did I say OMG?

The Na'vi were so realistic that it gave me the hope that my work-no-longer-in-progress could someday be made into a believable movie. The last thing I'd want for a movie made out of my book is a bunch of people running around in lizard suits. Is that so much to ask?

Another week of musical themes as I try to decide what I want my website to say about me. I think this one is quite zen, only for some reason it's not giving me the theme options in my dashboard, so it might change before you've even read this.

But the real news for the week is that I finished my book. Really.

No, stop laughing. I'm serious.

I spent all day Sunday in a marathon of editing, and at 9:30 pm a box popped up to let me know I had no more comments or tracked changes. The manuscript was clean. My eyes opened wide and then squeezed shut, and I put my face in my hands and squealed. I'm sure it didn't look weird at all.

At the end I still had some formatting tweaks to do, but the story was done, damn it, so I saved the formatting for Monday morning. Once that was finished I began assembling the package to email Sara, my agent, and soon found that I'd not done an important step: rewriting the short synopsis to fit the new ending. Rackin-frackin mumble mumble... At this point I was so close I could smell it, and it smelled good. Gah!

So Monday was spent rewriting the rackin-frackin synopsis, and then late Monday night I composed possibly the most momentous email of my life up to this point. I attached the novel, the regular synopsis, and a longer, 17-page synopsis specifically requested by an interested publication...and hit send. My agent confirmed receipt just a few minutes ago. It's out of my hands.

I really had no idea I'd be so relaxed once it was gone. I've gotten used to the low hum of anxiety that always, from the very beginning, accompanied this book. All day my thoughts would drift toward that waterfall: "Why am I doing this? I should be writing!" Now usually, the next thought is smashed on the rocks below: "I can't write, okay? I have to clean the toilets sometime!" But today, I realized the waterfall was behind me, and whatever whitewater tossed my thoughts about, a sparkling pool lay beyond.

So basically, that was a beautiful metaphor for why I cleaned toilets without guilt today.

I have so many thoughts and feelings about finishing, some will have to wait for another day.

Moonrat had a nice post today about her Magician's Book: "The perfect story you read as a child, and which since you read it has gone utterly unmatched and only vaguely echoed by anything else you read?" Hers was The Elven Bane.

Mine is, unfortunately, a book I can't name.

The story is etched into my memory, as well as the names of some of the players, the settings and the emotions and situations. Etched, I say. Only problem is I did not retain the author's name, nor the title of the story. It was not a book unto itself, because it was in a sf anthology. I remember it was fairly long, longer than all the other stories in the anthology. I wasn't really old enough to judge the length of a story at the time, but looking back I'd estimate it at 20k words.

The anthology came from my dead grandmother's library. We had a ton of books inherited from Grandma Jerry, all from the fifties and sixties, maybe up through the early seventies. This one seemed like a late sixties to me for some reason--maybe because it seemed really old in about 1980. Most of the books were book-of-the-month clubbers and Reader's Digest Condensed, none of interest to an eleven year old, but a few gems were scattered among them, like this book. It's almost certainly out of print now, but I wish I could read it again to see how it holds up. It took hold of my imagination the way few other stories have, and solidified my love of speculative fiction, though I didn't know there was a difference back then. A story was a story.

You may stop reading here, as the rest of the post is the story as I remember it, but before you leave, answer this question: What's your Magician's Book?

It was set in a somewhat primitive future after an unnamed but presumably man-made disaster, the clues pointing to nuclear weapons. Babies were inspected for mutations at birth and, if found to be imperfect, were left in the forest to die. The child protagonist lived among the villagers, because parents hid her imperfection: six toes on each foot. The protag's little sister, Petra, had a mutation that no one could see--telepathy.

The protag is found out, I think, or maybe not but for some reason she flees to the forest. Remember all those babies they left to die? They've created their own society in the woods, and they take in the protag. She meets an exceptionally lanky young man named (I think) Charles, and they war with the villagers.

So eventually, an airship comes and drops these filament things over the whole battlefield (can you say deus ex machina?) which hardens over everything and everyone, including the protag and her boyfriend. I remember a horse suffocating, but I can't remember if everybody else died. I know the main people were cut free and taken up to the airship where they were transported across the nuclear wasteland to civilization. Apparently, Petra, the little sis, had contacted them telepathically, and they embrace the mutations.

After all that, I think I remember the protag's name is Marie. Wish I could find that anthology again.

Once again, my self-imposed deadline for finishing BVA has come and gone.  This time it's been finished, but I can't stop finding things to fix. You know that stage, I'm sure. I've also come to the conclusion that my eyes will never be able to keep up with my imagination. That is, I think about my book all day, but the sinuses get irritated so easily that the eyes are always on the verge of fatigue. Looking at a computer screen and thinking at the same time is hard some days. I simply require more downtime than I feel I should.

I haven't been online a whole lot to save my eyes for the really important stuff. I expect to send the book off to the agent within the week. She may have edits for me, but they shouldn't take long. I'm ready. I'm done, now I just have to get the manuscript to agree.

Where to start, where to start?

Well first, I'm just coming out of a migraine so if you haven't seen me around in a few days, that's why. Darn sinusitis.

I quit drinking coffee for a while. Figured out that I can have one cup with no ill effect on my tummy, but my problem is stopping at one cup. I enjoy the ritual of the coffee, and also I feel like I owe it to the coffee to drink it. Weird, but that's how it is. I think a lot of us have that "clean your plate" mentality, which affects all my habits around food. A while ago I said I was going to do better with my food choices, and I have. I've only lost about five pounds, but I'm really working on the habit part rather than focusing on losing weight. Things like making sure there are healthy things in the kitchen, not being lazy about cooking, and thinking about portions rather than just shoveling it in till I can't anymore. Those are the things that will make me a healthy weight and keep me there. I can wait to hit that mark if I know it will last.

What else...

Oh yeah, I finished my book. Sent it to my first reader on Tuesday and had a migraine headache an hour later, whatever that means. Thinking of everything I've gone through during the course of this book is a bit overwhelming.

I didn't have the confidence to write this book when I started. It doesn't fit into a template, I see now.  I tried to make it fit a template and ended up spinning my wheels for a couple of years. For a long time my forebrain told me it was a mess, even though it made a lot of sense to me, and the characters spoke with their own voices. Only when I threw out the template did it come alive and drive me to the finish.

We'll see how the public receives it, but whatever happens I've written the book I wanted to write, and that's a pretty damn good feeling. Later in my career, I will say, "That's when I learned how to be a writer." Shoot, this whole BVA period has taught me how to live.

Well, I made a major decision as I wrap up my current book. See, the nature of the world in this book makes it likely that one would meet people from all over the world, and from lots of different eras. My main character is American but of Mexican descent; a supporting character is Spanish of some kind, and another is Scottish; lesser characters are Southern, Persian, British, and others. Not all of them speak English, but most of them do. That means a lot of accents to understand and apply, and besides the accents you have idioms unique to the individual culture. This is tough.

What I did while writing the book was write each character the way he/she sounded in my head, and for most of them this worked well enough to get the accent across. My Scottish guy was the exception.

He never sounded Scottish to me. I really really wanted him to be Scottish. Really really. However, although I'd decided he should be Scottish, I'd done very little research on how to actually make him seem Scottish. I thought I'd be able to layer it in at my leisure. I'm finding it's not that easy. Also, there's no real reason to have him be foreign, except that I wanted lots of different places represented.

So now I'm on the verge of completing the book, and changing "your" to "yer" ain't gonna cut it. And I started asking myself, "If he didn't sound like a Scot in your head, why did you make him one anyway, you dimwit?" And the answer is, I didn't. I didn't make him a Scot. He's an American who sometimes says "wee lass" and "are ye out of your mind?" See? Now, I could go and make that "are ye out o' yer maind?" and that would be fairly Scottish. But to go back and spend an extra month to add that accent to an entire character's worth of dialogue wouldn't have a good cost/benefit ratio.

So Caellum is now Scottish-American, if there is such a term. He's still a rakish musician, still mysterious, still over-sexed, but I think he'll be relieved to stop speaking with an accent. He wasn't very good at it.