June 30th Challenge

Hi it’s Christina –

Not really my kitchen

Good Morning! Today is my last day before insanity starts, so I am going to spend it getting my house organized. A bomb blew up in the kitchen, the waste baskets are overflowing, and I have a boatload of laundry to do… to name just a few. I also need to go grocery shopping, and I need to go back to Costco because when I got there yesterday, the pharmacy was already closed, and I needed to pick up a prescription.

I’m in a bit of a quandary. When I signed up for Camp NaNoWriMo, I said I was going to be working on a new story, Taming Tate, but I still haven’t finished Faerie Tale Queen. I’m thinking one last run through NaNo and FTQ will be finished, but I feel guilty working on the same book for three consecutive NaNos.

However, I do have some extra incentive to finish FTQ. Remember the NYC publisher, who wanted Corporate Blues, but I rejected the contracts he offered? Well, he came back again with a contract I would have accepted, but I had already published Corporate Blues. I told him I was working on FTQ, and I would give him first swing at it. If he accepts it, we’ll go forward; but here’s the catch, I have to have it to him before the end of July. If I spend July on Taming Tate, I won’t have time to finish FTQ.

I know this probably sounds like a no-brainer, but here’s the catch. Just like with Corporate Blues, Faerie Tale Queen already has a cover I love, and I assigned it ISBN#s. If I go with the publisher, my cover will change, and I have wasted the two ISBN#s because they will have to be reassigned. Am I being short sighted? Should I just suck up the money I spent already and go the traditional publishing route again? Hah, I’m getting ahead of myself. I don’t even know if they will accept FTQ. What do y’all think? I’d really like to know.

On another topic, my $0.99 Sale went well, but I fell shy of my goal of selling a hundred books, by eight books. I really thought the sale didn’t end until midnight tonight, but when I checked Amazon this morning, the price was back up to $2.99 (I lowered the price from $4.95 to $2.99 a little over a month ago). I know there are still several hours left before the end of the month, but I doubt I’ll sell eight books today. I did break the top 10K mark overall on the Amazon ranking list, and the top 500 mark for historical romances, so that’s something.

I can run another sale for Amazon.uk, but I think I will hold off until September so I can run the sale for both UK & US at the same time. Also, if I don’t go the traditional publishing route, I can include FTQ in the promotion.

What I’m really hoping for is that one of the fifty-tree copies of A Second Chance that sold will generate two more reviews so I can qualify for a different type of promotion. A friend of mine told me about it, and he sold over five hundred books during the promotion, and has been selling several books daily since the promotion.

Unfortunately for me, they won’t even consider promoting a book until it has ten reviews, and I have been stuck at eight for quite some time now. I don’t understand it. Why don’t folks review books after they have read them? It takes less than five minutes, and the reviews don’t need to be anything elaborate. A few sentences and you’re done. Yet less than 2% of the people who have read A Second Chance, have written a review for it. This is one of the most frustrating aspects of being a writer, because I have absolutely no control over it. Sometimes this whole marketing thing makes my head spin.

Enough! I babbled so much yesterday, we never got to the challenge, and I don’t want to do that again today. I hope you have a marvelous day, and happy writing!

Your Last Challenge was:

There was this one time…

There was this one time, many years ago, when I had wanted to pack everything up and move to Florida. I was working for a company which had offices in Jacksonville, and I would have been able to transfer. I would have had to pay my own moving expenses, but I didn’t care.

For months I poured over real estate listings, maps and school reports. I researched and carefully put together my pitch so I could sell my husband on the idea. I narrowed the list down to three possibilities. Each of the houses was in the best rated school district. Each home had five bedrooms, one for us, one for each of our children and a guest room. Every house had a pool, and one even had a dock for my husband’s fishing boat.

I got comps for our house here in New Jersey so we could get a good idea of how much it would sell for. Between the sale of our house here and the new one in Florida, our mortgage would have been less than $50K. The taxes for a year on the Florida home were the same as one month’s taxes on our New Jersey home. I would have been able to afford all the bills on my salary alone, and my husband would have been able to start his own business.

I had all my ducks in a row. The children were all behind me on the move. I was excited. I presented everything, full color photos of the property and all, to my husband, and he wouldn’t even look at it. There was no way he was going to move away from his family. It didn’t matter that I had made sure each of the houses would accommodate for an extended stay from them, or even my offer, that when the time came, they could move in with us. He wouldn’t budge.

This is a true story, and as you can probably tell from my tone, it is one that still bothers me. Instead of having a nice new home in Florida, my husband having his own business, and our kids being able to go to college at greatly reduced rates, we are still here in New Jersey, in our fifty year old little ranch which does not have the same property value as it did ten years ago, paying exorbitant amounts on mortgage, taxes and college. I love the man dearly, but sometimes his shortsightedness makes me want to bang my head against the wall.

Your Next Challenge is:

You visit some place you have not seen since you were a child.

You have ten minutes (be honest). There is no right or wrong, just write. Spelling and punctuation don’t count, and NO ONE is allowed to criticize what someone else has written. Go.

June 18th

Hi it’s Christina –

Good Morning! Sorry folks, for the past few days I have been embroiled in two large projects, and for the first time, my blog was third on my priority list, but I just wanted to briefly check in so you wouldn’t think I fell off the edge of the earth.

I wanted to make one last push on the editing project I was struggling with, and I did manage to get some more finished, but I was not able to complete the assignment. I feel horrible about it. The book is really great, but I was having such a hard time focusing, that it took me an inordinate amount of time to edit each page properly. 

Honestly, I overextended myself, and my brain was fried. I should have never taken on the assignment, but the author is such a sweet, sweet man, and he is a talented writer, and I wanted to be able to help him out. Unfortunately, I let him down, and I let myself down. This is the first time I have missed a deadline, and I am more than a little annoyed with myself.

The other project was building another Indie author support network. I have roughly twenty folks in the group right now, and we are working together at getting all the kinks out for how the group is going to work, before we roll it out to other authors. Yeah me, the techno ditz, is trying to run an online group. Thankfully others in the group are tech savvy and are willing to assist.

On the home front, Lys arrived safely at my dad’s in Florida, Dani has finished school for the summer, and PJ just received notification he has made the Dean’s List again. Father’s Day was great. The boat only broke down twice while they were out, but the made it back to the dock in one piece, so it was a successful adventure. My garden is starting to look like a jungle, and I’ve been managing to keep my allergies relatively in check.

Okay, back to my projects. Hopefully I’ll be able to give you a writing challenge again by this weekend. Until then, I hope you have a wonderful day, and happy writing!

July 15th Challenge

Hi, it’s Christina –

{{SNAP}} and just like that July is half over. Can you believe it? In moments like these, George Carlin’s toilet paper analogy comes to mind. After watching the Randy Pausch’s Last Lecture yesterday (it’s on Youtube, you can watch it for free), I started to think. For the most part, I am a Tigger, but there are times when Eeyore does sneak in. I’m not old by any means, but I am noticing the toilet paper roll of life spinning faster. Although Eeyore the Disney character is adorable, the sentiment he portrays is not, and I don’t want him crowding in on however many days I have left in this world; be it a week or fifty years.

So who are you going to choose to be?

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

OR 

 

 

Your Last Challenge was:

 

 

Oh my God, what was I thinking when I said I wanted to do this on my own?

 

After my aunt passed away last month, I found out she left us some real estate in Florida. Turns out, she owned the top two floors in a warehouse which had been converted to luxury apartments. Correction, all the other floors are now luxury apartments. I on the other hand am staring at nothing but white walls. A clean slate, where I have cart blanche. The prospect is a little intimidating.

Thankfully, along with the apartment, she left enough money to convert the floors into livable space. The only decisions I had made so far were, other than erecting walls to section off the bedrooms, I was going to leave the floor plan open, and we were going to keep the top floor for ourselves and sell the floor below us after it was converted.

I wandered the space which was going to be our new home, sketchpad in hand. When I reached the middle of the cavernous space, I turned in a slow surveying circle, then closed my eyes. Images started to flitter through my brain. I opened my eyes and I could see the finished product. I plopped down, right there in the middle of the empty room and started to draw. My pencil flew across the pages.

 

Your Next Challenge is (K.M. Kinsley, another author, tweeted this question and I thought it would make a great writing challenge. I’ll tell you what the rest of her tweet reads tomorrow.):

 

If you could do anything without fear of failing, what would it be?

 

You have 10 minutes (be honest). There is no right or wrong, just write. Spelling and punctuation don’t count and NO ONE is allowed to criticize what someone else has written. Go.