2010 was a busy and exciting year for me – most notably, sales for Waiting For Spring took a huge jump, leading to a deal with AmazonEncore. But things here at Ye Olde Blog weren’t very busy, nor very exciting. I’ve been neglecting it horribly, and that’s something I intend to change.

I hereby resolve to post here at least twice a week during 2011. Good posts, heartfelt and funny posts,  just like I used to make in the Days of Yore.

Other resolutions for 2011:

1.  Eat more cheese. And more chocolate. But not at the same time. Probably.
2. Ditto coffee.
3. Be more appreciative of what I have.
4. Oh, and no more dyeing my hair. This time I mean it. I’m 40 now. I can get away with it. And I’d rather go gray the salt-and-pepper way now than the white-rooted skunk hair way ten years from now.
5. I’ll chronicle the graying process here.

Happy New Year Everyone! Thanks for all your support in 2010. Buckle up for exciting things in 2011!

An excerpt from chapter 26 of Waiting For Spring.

(Mature themes, imagery, and language.)

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The door opened again, and in walked The Doctor.

She was friendly. Motherly. Earth mother, actually; a true Granola with proudly graying brown hair and no make up. She told us her name but I didn’t pay attention to it. In my mind she’d always just be The Doctor.She looked at Rachel’s chart, scribbled something down and nodded to herself. Then she looked up. Asked Rachel if she had any questions.

She did. Just one and it surprised me. Because although The Doctor misunderstood her at first, I knew, right away, exactly what is was she meant.

“Is it gonna hurt?”

“I’ll be giving you a few injections, to numb your cervix. That will sting just a little, almost like a pinch. But it will help with the–”

Injections. Needles. She winced. And it was a relief for me to see that she really did hate them. “I know. They told me that already. I mean…is this gonna hurt the baby?”

For a few moments there was nothing but silence, except in my mind. Because what I heard there was a scared, lonely voice that said:

It’s not a baby, Rachel. Not a baby. It’s an embryo. A fetus. A mass of cells. A mass of something. But not. A baby…

The doctor cleared her throat and said. “No. Not at all.”

And then she told us about nerve centers and weeks of gestation. Explained that there was no fetal pain before twenty-six weeks. That was a fact. And I looked at her, looked to her. Because she was The Doctor. The One Who Knows. And I searched her eyes, suddenly panicked. Because there was something that I needed to know.

Is this bullshit? Something you tell women to make them feel better? To ease their conscience? To ease yours? Because how is that possible? How the fuck, how the bloody goddamn hell can you even know that? What tests can you run to figure that out? What kind of scientific proof could you possibly have that could possibly fucking tell you that Rachel’s baby, or fetus, or embryo–that the mass of cells inside of her–won’t feel a thing?

But she wasn’t looking at me. She was looking at Rachel. Calm. Confident. Competent. Which is exactly what she should have been doing. What I should be doing. So I did it. I held Rachel’s hand and she looked at me. Determined, still, but scared. I looked right back at her, looked her right in the eyes. And I said it.

“She’s right, Rach. They’ve done tests and stuff. So they know.”

She gave me a weak smile, nodded, then lay down on the table. She looked up at the ceiling so I did, too. It was a drop ceiling, a grid. Big white squares with yellowish water stains here and there that looked just like piss. The Doctor and Dusty Pink Nurse talked to each other in low voices, about whatever it is that doctors and nurses talk about. And then it was time.

Stirrups. Ultrasound. The screen was pointed mercifully away from Rachel. Even if it hadn’t been she wouldn’t have seen it, because she didn’t shift her gaze, not once. Still looked straight up and I wondered if she was counting tiles. Or maybe counting the tiny little holes in the tiles. What were those holes? Were they there just for looks? Ventilation? Air bubbles that formed when the factory cooked the tiles? What the hell were those tiles made from, anyway? Styrofoam? Plastic?

It didn’t matter, and now I had to listen to The Doctor again. She was saying something about sedation. Demerol for pain and Valium to help her relax. Rachel nodded. She was all for that. Until The Doctor mentioned the dangers of giving it to her if she’d consumed any drugs or alcohol in the past twenty four hours. And that’s when she had to tell us.

She’d taken Something last night. Right before she’d hopped into bed.

“Just so I could sleep, Tess. Just so I–”

I put my hand up. “It’s alright, Rach.”

I said it even though it wasn’t alright. It was as far away from alright as we could get. But it was a done thing and right now I couldn’t do anything about it. Right now she needed to settle down and not worry about Condemnation and Judgment and Consequences. There would be enough of that later. But when it came it wouldn’t be from me, and it wouldn’t be about the Something that had helped her drift off to sleep. It would be even worse. It would be Rachel judging Rachel. I knew it. I could see it in her eyes. Already.

Thank you for all your support in 2010!

Wishing all of you joy, warmth, love, and peace. And pie.

If you are a currently self-publishing author, chances are you’ve heard of April Hamilton. If you haven’t, then chances are you have benefited from her expertise indirectly. Her voice was among the first to dare suggest that self-publishing was a viable, respectable way for writers to get their work out into the world. She has dedicated years of her life to helping writers in practical ways through how-to posts on her blog (which was eventually published as The Indie Author Guide) and encouraging us personally by her successful example and positive attitude. Nearly two years ago she founded the website Publetariat, “an online community and news hub built specifically for indie authors and small, independent imprints…to bring [authors] the most valuable content in books, publishing, book promotion, authorship and more from all over the web.”

In other words, she has worked her ass off for us. Now she needs our help. Early Thursday morning, she posted the following plea on Publetariat:

I am in desperate straits, and as a result, so is Publetariat. In March of this year I was diagnosed with breast cancer. Two days later my husband announced he was leaving me, and did. We would’ve been married 19 years last month. The small business we used to run together, which was our family’s primary source of income, is now a thing of the past and has been for months. I’m trying to sell off what’s left of its assets, but in this economy buyers are scarce. To say I’m struggling to make ends meet for myself and my two children doesn’t quite cover it. The bank is preparing to foreclose; I and my children are facing homelessness.

Publetariat’s audience numbers in the tens of thousands, and if each one of them were to pitch in just one dollar, it could keep my children and I—and therefore, Publetariat—afloat for a few more months, while I try to get more work and make other financial arrangements. So please…if you’ve found anything helpful, informative or entertaining on this site over the past two years, if its content has inspired you to keep going when you were ready to quit, solved a problem for you or answered your questions…if it has saved you a dollar’s worth of time, effort or worry, please donate that dollar now. If you can afford more, it will be much appreciated.

So please, all of you – whether you’re currently self-publishing, are thinking about it, have done so in the past, or if you’ve ever read and enjoyed a self-published book – please consider donating a buck to help out April and her kids. If you can spare more than that, well that would be awesome, too.

To donate, scroll to the end of April’s post.

Things on the Waiting For Spring Re-release Front are progressing very nicely. The cover, as you know, is ready (I’m posting it here again because that’s how much I love it) and the print book’s interior design is close to being finalized as well (obviously I’m not going to post that here. Nice try, though.)

To be perfectly honest, after having complete control over my novel for all this time I was pretty nervous about handing it over. But I’m absolutely thrilled with how it’s turned out! I can’t say enough good things about the people at AmazonEncore. They are fabulous!

I’m getting more excited by the day right now. I’m SO looking forward to May!! I can’t say that I literally pinch myself to see if this is all real, but figuratively speaking I totally do.

Expect more updates in the weeks ahead. In the meantime, here’s the new trailer:

 

 

Time to play catch up! A few pertinent links:

• This coming Monday – November 8 – at 7:30 PM EASTERN TIME I’ll be a guest on Backstory with Sandy Ward Bell. Hope y’all tune in!

• Last month, I talked to Kristen Tsetsi about AmazonEncore’s acquisition of Waiting For Spring.

• And to T.L. Haddix about writing while dealing with hemachromatosis.

Check ’em out!

Yes, I’m doing Nanowrimo again this year, November 1-30. This will mark my sixth time participating, because I did it twice in 2006; once in March on my own, then in November with the rest of the world. Technically, I’ll be cheating this year. You’re supposed to start with a fresh novel, yet I’m using the 30 day/50,000 word goal to do the rewrites on The Wendy House. Sue me.

For those of you who don’t know, the first draft of what would later become Waiting For Spring was penned during the aforementioned March 2006 personal Nanowrimo session. I chronicled my progress here on the blog, and it’s kind of funny to reread it four-and-a-half years later. Note my vague description of my planned novel in the comments section of my first Wrimo post:

I’m sticking with what I know for now: life in a small New England town as seen through the eyes of a quirky, uppity woman who doesn’t read Ephesians and is nursing a bitter grudge against a certain former Red Sox player.

Johnny Damon had just defected from the Red Sox to the Yankees. The wounds from that betrayal were still fresh, and the first draft actually contained a bitter diatribe against fickle, money-hungry ball players and their equally evil agents.

Also while writing that first draft, I ran into some potential legal trouble while trying to do some research.

Far from believing that I was a mere wannabe novelist in the midst of research, somewhere along the way she got it into her head that I was a crazed psycho planning some hideous plot to avenge the wrongs done to a friend or family member.

This year’s NaNo month will probably be less fraught with peril, at least for myself. My characters, on the other hand, will be put through hell. And that is how it should be.

See you all on the other side.

Happy Autumn!

Some exciting news to report on here at the ole blog. Waiting For Spring has been picked up by AmazonEncore, the publishing arm of Amazon.com. A little background from their website:

Even great books can be overlooked. And authors with great potential often struggle to connect with the larger audience they deserve to reach. We’re fortunate at Amazon.com to have customers who know a good book when they read one, so we’ve introduced AmazonEncore to help connect authors and their books with more readers.

AmazonEncore is a new program whereby Amazon will use information such as customer reviews on Amazon.com to identify exceptional, overlooked books and authors with more potential than their sales may indicate. Amazon will then partner with the authors to re-introduce their books to readers through marketing support and distribution into multiple channels and formats, such as the Amazon.com Books Store, Amazon Kindle Store, Audible.com, and national and independent bookstores via third-party wholesalers.

Yes…this is a huge deal. I can’t accurately express how thrilled I am to be working with the amazing people at Encore. Already, copy-edits are finished and the new cover is ready (which, for the record, I LOVE). Here it be:

The Encore version is available for pre-order now, if you’re so inclined.

I’ll post more information in the days, weeks, and months ahead. In the meantime I want to tell each of you how very much I appreciate everything you’ve done for me over the past three years. This would not have been possible without your support and encouragement.

I finished the first draft of my upcoming novel, The Wendy House – a not-quite-prequel/not-quite-sequel to Waiting For Spring – early this afternoon.

The writing of it caused many tears, sleepless nights, joy, headdesk moments, and spawned a coffee mug.

The plot itself didn’t change very much during the last two-and-a-half years, but pretty much everything else – point of view, characterization, narrative style, supporting characters – did. Goodness only knows how the rewriting process will go. But I’m very pleased with how the thing has fleshed out so far. There are lots of interesting and surprising twists for readers who think they know the story of Rick and Wendy LaChance, and I hope you all will be happy with it when it’s finally released.

Several weeks ago, I posted the first chapter here for y’all to read. What I didn’t tell you is that the novel will actually open with the first of many entries from Wendy’s diary. Here it is:

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July 17, 1992
I met Rick on a hot August afternoon. That seems important now, since I may never see another August. It was thirteen years ago, almost. We were both seventeen. It was on a dry dirt road and his car—it was a brown Chevy something-or-other—stirred up too much dust and made me cough. He pulled over when he saw that I was struggling to bury a porcupine in the hard ground beside the road. He didn’t ask me why, just grabbed the shovel from my hands and started digging. I told him anyway and he grinned.

It was the grin that did it. It was crooked, cocky. It crackled with sex, with life, and I wanted to soak it all up. To soak him up. I wanted him to be my first, my first everything, right at that moment.

When he was finished, once the corpse was safely hidden, he gave me back my shovel, lit a cigarette and asked me my name. I had to take a deep breath before I said, Wendy. He smiled again and told me his.

I knew at that moment a door had opened up for me. I just didn’t know that when I walked through it a thousand others slammed shut.