WRITING WITHOUT A NET

Perhaps the most often repeated advice to a new writer is "write what you know".  I'm sure that whoever originally came up with this meant well.  Maybe he meant,  Don't try to write about the life experience of an African-American street orphan if you are a white suburban housewife.   Or,  Don't set your book in the glamorous, high-stakes world of the Milan fashion industry if the closest you've ever gotten to couture is the sale rack at Target.  Possibly he just wanted to take some of the scariness away from sitting down in front of a blank page.  Write what you know.  It'll be fine. The main  problem with writing what you know is that what most people know is boring.  You know your job, your town, your family, your friends.  You know your experiences, which, on the whole, are probably pretty ordinary.  The purpose of fiction is to take the reader away from the ordinary, or to take the ordinary and to somehow make it seem...

Welcome back! If you are a writer, a wannabe writer, or just someone who likes to know how writers think, this is the place for you.  In upcoming posts we'll talk about how stories are born, how ideas  translate into words, and how words bring thoughts to life -- among many, many other things.  I hope you'll check in often. This blog has been dark for--hard to believe!--9 years, and a lot has changed since then.  It's not that I didn't want to reboot it, it's just that I didn't know where to start.  And the longer I put it off, the harder it became to find that starting point.  Kind of like writing a novel. So you've got this great idea for a book.  You more or less know what happens in your story, you've chosen the characters who will tell your story, and you know what you want to say.  But where do you start?  As a general rule, there are three places to open your book: at the beginning, the middle and the end.  It's up to you ...

This is the first time since December 2010 that I have not had a deadline looming within the next thirty days. I have written, formatted, designed, marketed, promoted, and published four books in the past eight months. Seriously. So that’s why you haven’t heard from me in awhile. I currently have 18 books under the Blue Merle Publishing logo, and I am finally beginning (and I do mean beginning ) to feel like a real publisher. And let me tell you something: it’s hard. There are people who have been doing this far longer than I have, and who have far more claim to expertise than I do, so I don’t pretend to set myself up as an authority on the subject of independent publishing. However, with all the rockets buzzing around the internet about what traditional publishing has done wrong, my recent experience in indie publishing, juxtaposed against twenty-plus years in traditional publishing, has pointed out to me that there is a reason why traditional publishing has survived for over a h...

Now available at Amazon.com Before Harry Potter, before Twilight, before the hundreds of thousands of vampire , wizard, demon, zombie, angel, fairy and just-plain-strange books that proliferate the marketplace today, I wrote a book about werewolves. It wasn’t, in my humble opinion, just an ordinary book, and these were not ordinary werewolves. It was at that time the best book I had ever written. Believe it or not, I wasn’t the only one who thought it was pretty good. The Passion (and its sequel, The Promise ) sold after a ten–day auction for a phenomenal amount of money (to be strictly accurate, it was not quite one million, but by the time sub-rights were sold the difference was negligible, to me, at least). Within the week, offers for audio, foreign, and large print rights were pouring in. James Cameron and Stephen Spielberg were both interested in film rights. And then it all went to hell. For reasons I still don’t entirely understand, the publisher abandoned the book. Possibl...

Tell me a story.   Hold out your hand, take me on a ride.  Entertain me, transport me, amuse me, inspire me, educate me, uplift or enlighten me. Engage me. Tell me a story.   Don't waste my time with pretentions of grandeur.  Save the world on your own dime.  I'm here to be delighted, enraptured, moved and transformed.  I want to believe.  I want to be transported.   Make me angry, make me weep, make me afraid, but for heaven's sake, make me care . Tell me a story.   Keep me awake at night, turning pages. Haunt me through the day. Draw me in to your world, wrap me in the shimmering, glittering colors of your imagination, let me drown in your words. Make me never want to leave.   Take me, I'm yours. Tell me a story.   --Donna Ball

It's hard to believe that it was only eighteen months ago that I first starting dipping my toes into the chilly waters of e-publishing. For the first year I was still under contract with my print publisher, and I experimented timidly with uploading some of my backlist titles to Kindle. All the time I kept daydreaming about sitting down and actually producing a new title-- an entire book--exclusively for self-publication. Finally, in May of this year, I got the courage to do it. And everything changed. Three weeks ago I actually withdrew a book from submission because a) I realized I could make more money by publishing it myself b)the book was too important to me to see it massacred, as so many other of my books have been, by the Big Six publishing system. So wow. I guess I am now officially on my own. Papa Publisher is no longer there to pat me on the head, tell me what's best for me, and make all my decisions. My safety net is gone, and it's a long way down. In my car...

Words written since last post: 57,323 Words deleted since last post: 17,201 Words rewritten since last post:  way too many! Okay, back to a semi-regular schedule after tornado recovery, internet failure and yes, in the midst of all this, the completion and publication of my very first original e-book! On that subject, I am still getting e-mail from readers complaining about my decision to publish digital editions of my books.  Some of these are a little snippy.  Some are simply hurt and confused.  Have I abandoned books?  What will become of those who don't have, or want to have, e-readers?  Don't I care about my reading public? These letters are particularly disheartening when they begin by saying, "I just got your last three books from a used book store/book exchange/friend or relative..." since, as we surely all know by this point, neither authors or publishers receive money from these sources and a lack of money is precisely why ...