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.
Two days in a row, I know,
but don’t get used to it. I will try to post a little something often, but it
won’t be like before. I need to become greedy with my time if I plan on
finishing the two books I have started, and one more contemporary, plus at
least another short for Annie Acorn Publishing, before the end of the year. 
I have to submit my short
story for the 2016 edition of Spirited Tales (as soon as the 2015 edition of
Spirited Tales is available, I’ll let you know), plus a possible submission for
either the 2016 Valentine’s anthology or a 2016 Romance anthology – we’re still
tossing around possibilities. I have a story idea, but I don’t know if it will
end up being a short story, a novelette, a novella, or an actual novel. Annie
said to just write it, and we’ll worry about how to package it later. Love her!
She took that stressor and blew it out of the picture. Now I’ll just be able to
write the story until it’s finished, hand it over to her, and let her work her
brand of magic. I’ll be sure to keep you in the loop as things become more
concrete.
I will need to take at
least day away from writing in order to get all my financials together for
taxes. I do this all the time. I start the year off well, recording all my
income, expenses, mileage, etc., then I get busy and the “office work” gets
shoved to the back burner, and come January, I end up having to reconstruct ¾ of
a year’s worth of financials. Then I curse myself for not keeping up with it
because I can’t find all my receipts or the slip of paper where I wrote down my
miles for my trip out to Bumblesquatch; and then I swear next year will be
better, but I only seem to get better by a week or two. At the rate I’m going,
I’ll be in my nineties before I have a system down. Pathetic? Lazy?
Procrastination? Old timers setting in? Disorganization? Take your pick, any
explanation would fit.
