Available Now, Virtually Yours – and the Anticlimax

Posted by Joanne Huspek

It’s been a long and sloggish journey. First you have to have a germ of an idea (which you poached off your best Internet buds, with their consent); then you actually have to commit to time and energy to get your idea out of your head and onto paper and/or Word document (which is much harder to do than you think); after which, you have to commit to making it better (meaning surrendering your baby to a real, live editor and re-writing massive parts of the story); and after shiny and new, you enter it into several contests and query for a year (with high hopes and few positive resulting answers), before finally making the leap (because the sequel is nearly ready for the first edit and you have to get that out) to self-e-pubbing (and that alone takes a lot longer than you thought it would).

(For those Grammar Police: Yes, that was a very long sentence. Bite me. 🙂 )

With Book Baby, you don’t know exactly when your book will hit the “For Sale” shelves. (Maybe this is true of other e-book publishers as well, I don’t know.) Amazon was to take two or three days; the rest, two or three weeks.

At this point – between writing, re-writing, editing, formatting, and the dreaded Real Life sagas (which are too many to list here) – I am completely spent. I have officially entered the Virtually Yours anticlimactic black hole.

Imagine my surprise when I received a Facebook message from a friend telling me my book was out! So I investigated, and sure enough, it is!

So now the worries: I’m not sure I like the blurb. I’m not sure I like the cover design. And I’m for sure not sure I like that someone else wrote another Virtually Yours which appears several titles above mine. (Not that I’m angry she scammed my title and launched on or about the same time I did. My Virtually Yours is soooo different.)

For a brief summary, see below. For purchase on Kindle, go HERE.

Genre: Mom-Lit. Which is chick-lit, matured. Think of chick-lit as a bottle of Boone’s Farm. Think of mom-lit as a bottle of Kendall Jackson.

Characters: Six major, plus one interloper. It’s a lot, but there are stories bubbling with each of the six women. And the interloper.

Theme: Things aren’t ever what they appear to be.

Big Reveal: OH, LORDY, YES! But you won’t know until you read to nearly the end, so don’t give up too soon.

As for me and my anticlimax: After getting my employees paid, I’m going to retreat to my hole and write a few hours this afternoon. Because I should, and I must.

Posted in editing, NaNoWriMo, people, rewriting, Uncategorized, womens literature, writing | Tagged , , , , , , , , , 3 Comments

Book Babying It – Part Five: On the Way to the Amazon

Posted by Joanne Huspek

Today I finally decided to check my status on Book Baby to gauge the progress of Virtually Yours.

Yes, I am the most lackadaisical writer/author you’ll ever meet. I’m not one of those who clicks back and forth for a progress report. I’m from the old school: A watched pot never boils.

(In case you were wondering, My virtual book will hit Amazon in a couple of days. *WHEE!* For the other vendors, like Nook and iBookstore, it could be a few weeks.)

My reaction? Meh…

Besides never watching a boiling pot (and this is hard to admit), there’s a part of me that just can’t believe I’ve done this.

Come on, admit you feel the same way.

I’m a writer-wannabe. I dream of writing fine literature, and I practice constantly, but I come to the craft with a deficit. I don’t have weighty credentials behind my name. I have written stories ever since my mother handed me a pencil, but thanks to my own poor economy, I didn’t finish college. I thought it was more important to have a roof over my head and an occasional dinner. I’m a late starter, only beginning to write “seriously” after the kids grew up and moved away, so there was a twenty year gap between the last “serious” thing I wrote (a poem for my husband, coincidentally) and the next “serious” thing I wrote (my first novel).

I’ve been writing online (in some way or another) for years. (YEARS and years and years. Google me, and be amazed.) There have been times when the criticism has ranged from ho-hum-yawn to flat out excoriation. But I can take it – obviously, or I wouldn’t still be here. I know some people won’t like my work at all and that doesn’t bother me in the least. Virtually Yours is not literary fiction. Puh-leeze. I wrote it in thirty days, during NaNoWriMo 2009. It’s a light and silly beach read, which I hope is mildly entertaining to most of the people who enjoy light and silly beach reads.

So now I’m looking at ways of tooting my horn and announcing to the world that my baby is due to be hatched, without looking like I’m a narcissistic huckster pushing a product. Book Baby sent me some great articles on how to do just that.

Once I finish the yard work, I might take a look at those articles. (Lackadaisically, of course.) Because I’m a realist, I know that just launching a book doesn’t mean I hit the lottery and can afford to quit my day job – or my duties.

Off to the fields! More spouting when Virtually Yours is ready.

Posted in NaNoWriMo, rewriting, womens literature, writing | Tagged , , , , , , , , , 2 Comments

Book Babying It – Part Four, The New Proof

Posted by Joanne Huspek

Whee!

Late last night, I received an email from Book Baby informing me that my proof was (finally) ready for inspection.

Of course, since I’m tucked into bed by 9 p.m., I was too tuckered out to investigate last night. So the first thing this morning, I opened up my account and downloaded Virtually Yours into my iBooks.

For some unexplained reason, the download went off flawlessly fast. Lightning quick! As some of you might recall, the first download took me a few days and much mental anguish and technical jerry-rigging to get the book into my iPad. I have no idea what I did this time to get it to upload so quickly. (I have no idea what I did last time, either.) I’m from the “if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it” and “if you can get it to work, don’t over analyze it” schools of thought, so I’m not even going there.

There were some minor glitchy problems with my first proof. The resultant formatting wasn’t as I envisioned. This story takes place online, with plenty of email, IMs, and blog posts. My email exchanges were off center. All scrunched up, it was difficult to read. The blog posts weren’t immediately recognizable as such. Plus I made the error of using spaces and tabs. (Note to writers: NEVER use spaces and tabs! Set up your document correctly before you type the first word!) And worse, my emoticons were running into the text.

Plus I noted spelling errors I thought I had changed (I was in between computers, my main  laptop nearly succumbing to the Blue Screen of Death before I bought another) and other typos that were glaringly painful to look at.

My re-worked manuscript had no tabs or unnecessary spaces. I cushioned my smiley faces with a space before and a space after. The phrases I wanted italicized were, and the ones that shouldn’t have been weren’t. I made certain that each block of text was separate and readable.

Enter now my returned proof, which looks pretty good. So far, my only complaint would be that there may be a little bit too much space in between text blocks. (I know. I am super picky.) I also inserted a disclaimer and questions for discussion, and that looks good as well.

*Deep cleansing breath*

I guess I could do one of two things. 1. Pick it apart some more and send it back to see if the spaces can be tightened up. (Crazy, I know.) or 2. Kiss my baby goodbye and send it off into the world.

Let me finish up my proofing, but you know which way I’m leaning.

🙂

So far, I’m up to page 200 of proof reading. There is one word on one page that bothers me thus far, and I’m not sure I want to change it. I’m not sure it’s worth it to change it. I’m not sure anyone will notice.

Any advice would be much appreciated.

Posted in editing, music, violin, writing, women, life, NaNoWriMo, people, rewriting, womens literature, writing | Tagged , , , , , , 2 Comments

There’s NEVER a Good Time

Posted by Joanne Huspek

The last few weeks have been brutal.

Felled by sickness (I’ve been calling it the conference crud, because it started right after the San Francisco Writers Conference) a month ago, a lingering malaise that lasted nearly three weeks; moving on to moving my daughter-in-law back from Grand Rapids and seeing her back off to San Francisco after a non-existent job offer; followed by minor eye surgery (STILL surgery! and my EYES!); and capped off by the serious illness of my #1 Day Job office girl (in the hospital with double pneumonia, nearly died, OMG) – can life throw out any more lemons?

The answer is probably.

All of these major setbacks have thrown my writing schedule completely off kilter. I still have the ideas bouncing around. I have this Donald Maass online class I signed up for back in January, and I haven’t been able to keep up with the exercises, much less apply the exercises to my WIP. I probably should have dragged myself out of bed while I was hacking my lungs out, or tried to write via touch typing while my eyeballs were covered in miniature baggies of frozen peas, even though I’m pretty horrible at typing while blind.

In the meantime, I’ve tried my hand at writing some online articles, which I used to be able to whip off in my sleep. Okay, maybe not in my sleep, but back in the day, I could concentrate on work and writing at the same time. By the looks of it, this is a skill I have lost with the onset of old age. This one article alone took a full three weeks to write. Even the restaurant reviews are lagging in queue.

I have been harboring a huge case of regret at not being able to write. Fretting, actually. I miss my 3 p.m. time slot where I escape to my quiet house and write. Time is precious, and I don’t have a lot of it. I moved heaven and earth to make 3 p.m. my Good Time to Write.

All of this mayhem lead me to an observation: There is never a good time. For anything.

Think about it. Some people wait to get married and have kids. The excuse? “It’s not a good time yet.” They’re waiting for money, maturity, a pinpoint in the horizon when life will be carefree and the backyard will be a replica of the Garden of Eden.

People sometimes wait to buy a house. They’re waiting for a raise, a drop in the interest rate, or a market collapse. They’re waiting for their Uncle Charlie to die and leave them a boatload of cash to make the down payment.

Some folks will wait to quit a job. I waited 12 years to quit my crummy job at the Post Office, and the reasons were many. I didn’t have to drive very far. I couldn’t get another job to match the money or the benefits. Never mind that I was miserable in a hostile work environment, I had two little kids who seemed to get sick every other week. My husband had just started his business, and he wanted me to stay on in case the business tanked. We might have been left with only my income. It took a local postal shooting before I re-thought my mindset.

I know people who will wait to take up hobbies until they retire. They’re full of big ideas of the places they’ll travel to and the things they’ll do, but then Life grabs them by the balls. They run out of money. They get sick. They die. Unfulfilled.

As writers, we have to be diligent about writing. There’s never a good time to write. There’s never a good time to do anything in life. You have to get out there with your machete and carve out your own little niche.

Which I will be doing for myself later today.

Posted in editing, NaNoWriMo, people, rewriting, womens literature, writing | Tagged , , , , 1 Comment

Words of Wisdom From the San Francisco Writers Conference

Posted by Joanne Huspek

I can’t believe it’s already been three whole weeks since the San Francisco Writers Conference! While Real Life has threatened to swallow me whole (and spit me out), I’ve been slowly unearthing all of the wonderful little tidbits of information I had gathered during my three and a half days at the conference.

Today, I decided to open up my iPhone and check my notes. Yes, this year, I took notes on my iPhone. This compact device does a lot more than remind me when it’s my turn for Scramble. It even does more than provide soothing hits of the ’60’s on Pandora. The bonus is that it’s small, discreet, and makes more sense to use for note taking, especially if you’re situated at a crowded table overladen with the best banquet food ever, with nine other people.

I pulled out the trusty iPhone when Lisa See spoke. She gave a writer’s checklist, of which I’ll give the Cliff Notes version:

1. Write what you know. (We know.)

2. Start where you are. (Sometimes we don’t know, but it makes sense.)

3. Write a thousand words a day. (I’m soooo bad at this. But yes, I’m kicking myself in the rear.)

4. Research. (It’s necessary, especially if you don’t start at No. 1.)

5. Write a charming note a day. (She means to fellow authors, to people who have helped you, to people you admire. In my case, I’m trying to write a charming thank you note a week, which is one more than I have before.)

6. Edit. (Absolutely necessary.)

7. Read books by people who inspire you. (I do!)

8. Support your local bookstores. (I wish there were local bookstores here. I’m having a difficult enough time supporting the big box stores.)

9. Be who you are. (You can’t write like JK Rowling because you’re not JK Rowling.)

10. Voice and authenticity. (? I can’t remember what she said here. I know. Old age.)

11. Be passionate. (Most artists are.)

12. Enjoy the moment. (Hell, yes!)

13. Remember the things that matter. (Meaning it’s not the heady rush of publishing, or even of writing. Sometimes the things that matter are the little things, the things that have nothing to do with writing. REMEMBER.)

14. Writing isn’t easy. (Who said it was?)

15. Cut to the bone. (Because we all know we don’t want the gristle.)

16. The word and your voice.

17. Art is the heartbeat of the artist. (YES!)

I’ll admit, some of the list items don’t make a lot of sense, but I was typing quickly and trying to gobble down dessert. However, the first five are the most important.

I’m not going to erase my iPhone note. Instead, I think I’ll set an alarm to remind myself to look at it at least once a week.

Posted in editing, Uncategorized, writing | Tagged , , , , 1 Comment

Book Baby-ing It – Part Three, The Wait

Posted by Joanne Huspek

Ya know, writing is so much more than writing.

This revelation hit me like a ton of bricks the day after I finished the first novel. Editing, re-writing, writing query letters, writing synopses, pitching, attending conferences, editing some more, proofreading, promotion, editing even more, researching options on publishing, choosing an option, and finally wrangling what you’ve written into a format that your chosen option will accept with the most ease – if you’re not tired reading this sentence, I want to hire you to be my shadow.

After four days of careful inspection of my manuscript, where I probably still missed some glaring errors, and where I still don’t get why some things came out italicized when they weren’t on my Word document, and why some purposely italicized phrases on my Word document didn’t come out that way, I finally closed the book on my proof and sent the corrections back to Book Baby.

This is the point where I wish code, computers, and conversions would be magically impregnated in my brain during my sleep and I would wake up tomorrow infused with the kind of technical knowledge I need to make my travel from written word to e-book-ready word a skip down the garden path.

One thing I can say about Book Baby, they are helpful beyond words. I even received an email from the CEO. You know me, it’s all about customer service.

That’s not to say I’d use them again. For one thing, and it might be a long shot, maybe someday I can learn the Smashwords conversion. (I might have to be dropped on my head first.) But more importantly, the Internet is constantly changing. I can’t tell you how many start up similar businesses (to Book Baby) that I met while at the San Francisco Writers Conference. The indie book business is booming (more on that later), and with the boom comes the requisite people trying to fill a gap in the niche. Book Baby has been great so far, but what about all the up and comers?

Like it is with any purchase, if you decide to go this way, check out the company’s track record. Remember, you get what you pay for, so scrimping on this service is not a good idea. And most important: Customer Service. I have capitalized this because 1. you are the customer, paying for a service, and that service had better be stellar, and 2. you’ll appreciate it in the end.

Now that Virtually Yours is virtually put to rest, it’s time to work on the sequel. 51K words so far, but it’s a mess. See you in a few.

Posted in editing, music, violin, writing, women, life, people, rewriting, womens literature, writing | Tagged , , , , , , , , Comment

Book Baby-ing It – Part Two

Posted by Joanne Huspek

When last you left me, I had uploaded my work onto Book Baby and was waiting for the shiny new proof of Virtually Yours to arrive in my inbox. So I waited. And chewed down my fingernails. And waited. And emailed. And waited and waited some more.

After ten anxiety-ridden days of terror, most of which included thoughts of “Should I do this?” “Am I nuts?” and of course, the perennial favorite, “Am I ready?”, word came of my proof being ready. Wha-zzaa! But wait (I’ve already been waiting, so I was used to it), by the time the congratulatory email arrived, I was still in San Francisco. I was also by that time terribly ill and not in the mood to tackle anything on the screen. So I thought I’d hang for a couple of days and see what was up once I was safely on my own turf.

Once back in Michigan, I opened the email, which directed me back to my Book Baby account. There I found instructions as to the next step. (Remember, I so judiciously decided to spend the extra bucks on the proof. Thank the Lord, as you shall learn a few paragraphs down.)

There was a huge problem with the proof, and the problem began before I even got a glance at the e-printed page. For one thing, one must upload the file onto an e-reader or iPad.

I have an iPad (older version), and had no problem in the past with uploading purchased books. But files…that’s another story. I’d never done it before. And you know me… s – l – o – w when it comes to the wondrousness of the Internet and our modern technology. This is the kind of technological clod I am: I’ll be texting my daughter, and write the response I want to give her down on a pad of paper before I realize what I’ve done. Like DUH.

I had to download the file to my computer, then upload (or backload, or sideload, whatever) onto the iPad. You’d think this would be easy, but noooo. For one thing, my computer didn’t recognize that my iPad was connected to it. Which is funny, because when I connect to iTunes, it knows my credit card information to charge me for books, movies, and music. I could see the actual file on my computer, but I couldn’t copy it onto my iPad, since it didn’t exist in my computer’s mind.

Stymied, on Saturday, I had to give up. I tried all three recommended ways of getting the file – through iTunes, through Kindle, etc.; it just wasn’t working. I also realized an e-book I purchased from Amazon while in San Francisco wasn’t showing up on my Kindle app. Snap. My problems were multiplying.

Yesterday I gave it another go. The iPad was dusted off (let me tell you, it was dusty when I’d unearthed it), charged up, and ready to go. I was feeling much better and had taken a couple of tylenol as a preventative measure. I followed the steps on the Book Baby site, as well as on the Apple site.

I’m not sure how it happened, but there it was! My book! It was in my library, along with The Legend of Sleepy Hollow. (I’m downloading the weighty classics on the iPad. They’re so physically heavy. And this one was free.)

The cover looked fab (although I’m still having cover-second-thoughts), and the beginning pages were great! Then I noticed a few formatting glitches. And spelling errors. Oy vay.

I had to hold the presses, as they say.

My next step is to fix the errors and continue on.

More later…

Posted in editing, music, violin, writing, women, life, NaNoWriMo, people, rewriting, womens literature, writing | Tagged , , , , , , , , 5 Comments