Goodreads Giveaway

Hey there,

I'm not speeding along with National Novel Writing Month as quickly as I  did last year. It wasn't my lack of electric, but the sad things I keep hearing from others.  

I am seeing lots of out of state utility trucks so I'm not laying the blame in that direction either.

However, I'm trying to turn that around (I have plenty of plot in my head!) with a Goodreads Giveaway 

that will receive entries for 30 days. This is for a physical, paper copy that I will mail at my expense.

I am giving away two (2) copies of The End of the World Sucks.

St. Francis Feline Fellowship

I also blog for a cat rescue group, and since this is an update on why I'm not churning out the word for National Novel Writing Month - I've done some mud mucking besides bleaching the crap out of things.

On Saturday (or Caturday), a group of SARA volunteers with power troubles that barred our normal adoption afternoons went down to Union Beach, NJ to help St. Francis Feline Fellowship.

Union Beach, N.J. on Raritan Bay is a community hard-hit by Superstorm Sandy.  Even two weeks later, not all traffic lights are operational on Route 36.  One of the banks has a truck set up in their parking lot as a mobile banking center.  There were signs flashing alongside the road with info on where to get food, water, and ice.

NJ.com and News 12 have both picked up that Union Beach is a community that needs rebuilding.  From Tomas Dinges of NJ.com:

The night of the storm the wind-driven tidal surge swept into homes with violent force, crashing through locked doors and carefully sealed windows and tearing through living rooms, hallways, bedrooms and kitchens.

Walls ripped from foundations and two-story houses sheared in half. Brook Avenue and Front Street became roads of ruin, with homes like Stenquist’s reduced to concrete and wooden rubble.

Between 200-300 were knocked off their foundations or rendered uninhabitable, authorities say. More than 100 houses are simply missing from the tightly knit community of 6,200 that lives in the tiny town of one square mile.

Houses that weren’t obliterated were flooded, the water cresting at eight feet, then draining away, taking with it anything that floated.

St. Francis Feline Fellowship is located at a residence that still exists.  Repairs are needed to the residence, and while I was out there Saturday, FEMA came by twice to take pictures and notes.  Even though that'll help later, the primary home insurance adjustor has not visited.  The second step is the flood insurance, then FEMA's assistance will be last. In addition to the house, Sue's car was floated onto the front porch and considered totalled.

In addition to the personal loss, Sue realized that the storm surge was higher than it had ever been in Union Beach.  She stated her house never had this kind of flooding.

There is a cat sanctuary on the property.   It was recently built, and has an interior section with heat and air conditioning.   Feral cats were being sheltered in it, including a cat that was at my house for two years waiting for a sanctuary spot to open up.

Sanctuary - didn't think to take a pic till I was taking a break

Sue evacuated as many cats as she could from the sanctuary that night, in the dark and in chest-deep water.  They were crowded together on a high shelf, needing her help to reach somewhere safer.  Grabbing feral, scared cats is not easy, and even though Sue has practice handling difficult cats, the only thing that mattered was getting the cats out of this shelter.  Not a single cat was injured or lost.

Shelf, after I cleared out everything else

What I worked on Saturday was getting the sanctuary shelter cleared out, cleaning it, and getting it ready for the cats to return to their normal home. 

Out of the cat supplies, a great deal was lost.  Any soft furniture was waterlogged, cat trees with particle board bases was considered totaled, even if it did not come apart because of possibiilty of mold or mildew, blankets and towels were saturated with mud, and full bags of dry cat food had become wet.

There was a second small building that was used for recovery for any ill cats or those needing surgery, including spay/neuters.  There were more materials lost from that building as well. 

St. Francis Feline Fellowship needs donations - there is a donation button on the web site.  It's also 501(c)3, like Summit Animal Rescue.  It might seem odd one rescue group pointing at another, but St. Francis is similar to SARA, but also different.  Sue does more TNR, socializing cats that may seem unadoptable, and will sanctuary a limited number of ferals that have nowhere to go.

I have no hands-on experience with TNR work, and I've only socialized a few somewhat feral kittens.  Morticia's, currently a resident in Sue's sanctuary.

Morticia

Sandy

Just a quick blog entry to say, yes, I live on the Jersey coast facing Staten Island, and not much got broken at my house.  The stray roof shingles I saw falling outside my window on Monday afternoon were from someone else’s house one street over, and they were in the middle of a project so it’s not like they lost their roof just before the worst of the storm hit.

I have no power, internet, heat, or phone (either) service when I’m at home.  I can do some things at work, but when I’m at work, I’m trying to work :^)  So I just wanted to briefly post something in case someone’s inquiring.

I’m fine, the pets are fine, and I’ve sawed the tree branches into easily handled hunks of wood.

Less than a week till November (National Novel Writing Month)

My head's been in planning mode for November and writing more Vanna and Thanos.

November 1st seems closer than it is because I attended a NaNo kickoff party this week.  It was scheduled on Oct. 23rd by the library because there's some other events next week.

I added a NaNo counter on the site here (<- to the left), but it might not take off quickly because I've already been scheduled to work at the second job on November 1st.  I also worked both jobs last year so I think I'm good, but I shouldn't be staying up late on Oct. 31st to start writing as soon as the clock strikes midnight. 

I've also been doing some tweaking on Neferseshotep before I put him aside for the month, unless I write like the wind, complete a novel in less than 30 days, and then can return to writing super-powered fantasy.

My book signing was nice.  I didn't sell out of books, I didn't sell half my books, but I did get a bump on my Amazon rank over the weekend so was it due to me talking to someone?  I also talked about National Novel Writing Month because I had a six foot table and only one title.  I added a selection of NaNo and Young Writer Program flyers to the front side.

Since I also set-up on Friday for the Pet Adoption Fair, I picked the tablecloth color that went best with my book cover. 

Wednesday Addams

Joining me at the table were two foster cats - Miss Wednesday Addams and Mr. ZuZu.  As you can see, I wasn't kidding around about being queen of black cats.


My other fosters were on the table next to us so I could easily answer any questions regarding their awesomeness, or tell off my mama's boy for sitting around with one eye closed like a furry little drama king.

ZuZu

Writing and Publishing

I’m feeling so inspired after reading Chuck Wendig’s blog post ‘Ask the Writer: “How do I get Published?”’ 

I like the storytelling bit, or I wouldn’t have written all that fan fiction while I was unemployed.  Then NaNo came along, and I thought I could write 50,000 words in a month, even though I was back to working, and working two jobs because Day Job doesn’t pay what my Old Day Job used to pay.  To up the ante, I figured I’d write something original – new characters.  An experiment.

Well, that experiment was moving along in November 2011 when I started the month off sick, then I got cheesed off at something so I flipped my writing back into fan fic to make myself happy.   My word count jumped, besides having 4 days off with nothing to do – neither job, no relative wanting me for Thanksgiving  - and I ended on Nov. 29^th with 167,756 words.  On the 30^th, both jobs had me scheduled, so no writing.

Half of these words were the zero level draft of The End of the World Sucks. The rest was fan fiction that I posted, got some real reviews for, and then got trolled … because that’s the way fan fiction works.

So back to Sucks – I had this chunk of words that I could post for free on fan fiction’s sister site, Fiction Press.  I hadn’t posted anything there, but thought about my CreateSpace coupon and the much-touted *fears* that Amazon was only using CreateSpace and the Amazon Breakthrough Novel Contest to steal everyone’s novels. 

Not MY fears, all the paranoid people that think they can’t pitch or query their novels because every agent and publisher is out to steal them.  200 word query = 84,000 word novel *stolen*?  Math doesn’t compute, but the logical part of my brain also calculates less people will see it if I never do anything with it.  Posting it free online will get some reviews and feedback, but this is different than fan fiction.  I don’t own those characters or settings so that’s for fun with no chance at recognition except as a quirky pen name. 

What if I wanted to do something for some money – average author annually makes $500 so I’m not thinking about my new Beverly Hillbillies lifestyle, just over time, if I write more books, I’ll sell more, and gradually make it worth the hours I invested in November.  What I didn’t realize is how many more hours I’d invest in edits and rewrites.  I spend more time doing that than writing, but I will hopefully become better when I write future zero level drafts.

I queried and entered contests.  Is it a jackpot moment to talk to an agent on the phone?  Yes and no.  I do really and deeply appreciate the call – no question in my mind that I gained something out of it.  I think I’d compare it most with a job interview.  I don’t mind job interviews so much, unless they’re clearly wasting my time.  And here’s the kicker, this happened early April 2012.  Some people query for a long time before getting THE call.  I got off the phone, bridges unburned.  If I altered my story to a genre-compliant zombie novel, I could submit my manuscript to him.  Since I now had his email address, I could have submitted it with no changes, but I understood what he was saying regarding the marketability. 

While this plum was dangling, I was reading online and going to talks regarding traditional publishing.  I work with metrics and contracts in periods of my professional career so my expectation was different from the way the publishing business works.  However, I can understand their viewpoint because they allow books to be returned by bookstores so the initial shipment does not equal sales.  They also package the author’s product and even if promotion is pushed onto the author, they do make the publication available through their distribution channels, which may have some proprietary aspects.  I can even understand the parts about the advance and it being applied to future royalties so I will not get paid again for that title until x number of books sell.  I didn’t jump into the ‘boo, hiss, they’re evil’ camp because I wasn’t learning about the inner working of publishing, just the author/publisher/possibly agent relationship. 

It didn’t sound like something that’d make me happy.  If I aspire to try to crack $500 annually with my writing, which is way less than minimum wage at the rate I write and edit, then I should go after what will make me happy with this – my plot, my characters, no mystery re: earnings.  Money would improve my outlook, but if only a handful of authors make substantially more than $500, that means that many more earn less.

Maybe it’s because I’m getting older that I consider what I would like to do after everything else is done – I went to work, did things for the pets and foster kitties, washed my clothes and now I have free time. I could watch T.V., read, or run loose in the streets yelling my drunken head off (welcome to Sharon’s street – where I see people with red Solo cups dancing around the stop sign on the corner at four o’clock on a Saturday afternoon.  

Since I’m not joining the town bacchanalia, I stay inside writing, and I’ll rewrite to bring them up to the level where others should like them.  It’s my time to waste, and if I don’t feel like writing based on a genre formula, well I guess I’m throwing money away so I won’t be cracking the $500/year threshold to make it into Big Time Authorhood.

Help for authors - a couple web sites

Wow, I might be the last person around to know about Wordle created by Jonathon Feinberg.  Dani M.of Florida mentioned it on one of the NaNoWriMo forums as a way to find overused words.

In the past, I've looked at some prowritingaid reports to correct my weak points.  Though they don't seem to understand my New Jersey ways - I love writing 'get' and 'got' in that initial draft. Got that?

I have to say - I recommend both to help authors.

Here's what Wordle did with The End of the World Sucks (yes, I see a big 'get' in there) -

I think it's a very nice representation of the book.  It has a little bit about zombies and there's a vampire, but it doesn't dominate the text.

This one's a work in progress, so Neferseshotep should have a different look later as more characters, settings and action is written.

The largest words are character names at the moment, and there's a tiny 'get'.  I'm still writing and editing so that 'now' and 'like' might disappear also.

I'm just thrilled to find these clever and free tools.  Do you mind me sharing that?

Update: Pet Adoption Fair Flyer

The flyer for the Pet Adoption Fair - if only I had waited one more day :^)

I'm one of the things not mentioned, but that's OK.  It's about the animals, and maybe the bake sale.