Shameful Author Secrets: Hidden Books

I'm going to spill one of those dirty, dirty little authorial secrets to you all. This could get me killed, so if I disappear… well, I hope it was all worth it.

Okay, it's not that big of a deal, per se, but it is something that authors maybe don't talk about as much, even in this wide and open new world of indie authors where nothing's really a secret anymore. This is still something that, in my experience, authors hold close to their breast and don't let out into the world. Well, I'm going to let it out right now. Here it goes… any second now.

Okay: there are books we want to write that we probably won't, and books we want to publish that may never see the light of day. And I'm not just talking about the whole "Authors have more ideas than they have time" thing. This is different. Let me just toss some examples out. Names redacted to protect the innocent, of course.

I have a very close friend who made her career writing romantic suspense novels. That's her brand. It's what she does. But I also hear a lot about wanting to write straight-up thrillers from her. She wants, just once, to try tossing the romance aside and going for a suspense/thriller novel. She also has a book that she wrote already that doesn't fit the romantic suspense themes, so it's sitting untouched.

Yes, this is a thing that happens.

Another friend dreams of writing action/adventure novels in the vein of Indiana Jones, but SF/F series are everywhere already. Again, we have a difference in branding and, yes, not much time to devote to things that aren't really on-brand.

I'm in the same boat, too. I'm constantly toying with the idea of writing a series of crime novels a la Criminal Minds or Bones or something like that. Shorter, episodic, and character driven. But they aren't what I've got plastered all over the internet as what I do. I do speculative fiction. Which makes it a little tricky to consider doing something so comparatively "mundane" as crimes on Earth with regular people.

And I, too, have a book written that is just sitting there. Two, in fact, with the third one due to be written in 2017. Yeah. Basically a series that I'm just not doing things with. It's one that I personally love a lot, too. It's on-brand… but I am nervous. And this is one you especially won't hear authors talk about. But we're all friends here, right? No one on the internet is ever mean or cruel to strangers, right?

Oh... nevermind.

I am nervous about it, though. I love it maybe a little too much. Enough that I still tout it as my best work… that no one can ever get their hands on. I tell myself how brilliant it is every time I think about it, but it's not out in the world. It's been schlepped to a couple agents, but that's it. I haven't really been ready to pull the trigger.

I wish I was here to tell you that I'm going to put it up immediately. I'm not, however. I'm still holding onto it until there comes a time when I'm flat-out ballsy enough to tackle it. And that might come in 2017. I hope it does. But we'll see, won't we?

So next time you encounter an author… well, just know that we have those nerves and those hidden professional desires. I don't know what you're going to do with that knowledge, but hold it close. Maybe it'll help you remember that we're just people, too. Personally, I have a hard time remembering that one, even from the other side.

Voss

State of the Voss

Jesus H. Christ, it’s been a crazy couple months. I’m sorry I kind of vanished like that, but life has been in pretty massive turmoil. However, I have been working, so there’s that. I have good news on that front… but first, the less than good news that’s kept me a bit distracted.

There’s a couple things that sort of conspired to make this mess. The biggest one has been the dogs with cancer. I talked about this in my last newsletter (Which was admittedly forever and a half ago), but we’ve had two dogs with tumors in the past couple months. One of them was a benign little mammary tumor, so that was just a surgery and she was good. The other one was a grade 3 histiocytoma… not quite as easy. Poor little guy went through a month of radiation, and he’s getting chemo every 10 days until they’re sure that he’s good to go. As you can imagine, that held quite a bit of my attention. For a while. But we’re settling into a routine around here again.

So, on to the good news. I’ve definitely not forgotten about Evenstad Media Presents. This cancer adventure (Let’s call it that.) put the brakes on a bit, but I officially can give you some actual information on this. Are you ready? The Tunnels, Evenstad Media Presents #4, is written. It’s edited and it’s formatted and all that happy whatnot. I’ve got the art request form in with my cover artist, so once that’s done, I’ll be able to get it up on the ‘Zon, get the print book put together, and it will (finally) be in your hot little hands.

I think The Tunnels is the best book in the series since The Park. I know I should love all my books equally, but… this one. Without giving too much away, this book sees a lot of long-running plot threads come to a head, and it sets us all up for a strong run to the final book (#7). Things start to get really shaken up in this book, and they only get more and more shaken until the series is over, which just excites the crap out of me.

Beyond that, I’ve started working off of a yearly schedule. I mean, sure, it starts in July instead of January, but it lasts a year. Not important. What is important is what’s on it. By next June, I should have Evenstad #5 and #6 done and either out or ready to ship out very shortly, and then it goes on to the final installment. I also have Rings of Injustice, the third book in my big, sweeping sci-fi series (That I still haven’t published. Don’t worry, that’s coming soon, too.) on the schedule, as well as five books for The Other Me. I figured I can do about 9-10 books each year as long as I stick to my schedule.

Anything else? Umm… well, I’ll be at some conventions and such in the area with the Northwest Authors Co-Op. I believe our next event is at the end of September, for V-Con in Vancouver, BC. And I’ll be presenting a workshop at the Idaho Writers League conference in Couer d’Alene and at the Moses Lake Public Library Comic-Con in Moses Lake… at the library. Go figure. If you’ll be at or around any of those events, go ahead and swing on over and say hi!

I believe that’s it. I’ll make sure to keep y’all much more updated than I did the past couple months… unless something completely insane happens again. Then I may disappear for a bit. But barring the unforeseen? I’ll see you on the bestseller lists (Maybe… hopefuly?).

Voss

New Release: The Heart of God by S.A. Bolich

S.A. Bolich has a brand new book out today. If you enjoy a good fantasy romp as much as I do, check it out!

Imagine being the most girl-shy guy at court, tasked to facilitate your brother the King’s wedding…and two of the candidates are fixated on you. Poor Alarion Aravon begins to suspect that the artificial goddess Fate has her own reasons for putting those particular girls in his path—but he’s trying hard not to believe in her. Mortal means are required to straighten out the mess, but he quickly he comes to regret having ignored the willing and ambitious courtesans who have pursued him for years. He could really use that experience about now. Because one of those girls will do absolutely anything to be Queen.

Buy Now on AMAZON!

Contance Burris: 3 Things I Learned Reading Diverse Books for 3 Months

Hello, all!

I am thrilled as shit, pleased as punch, and possibly several other similes to have Constance Burris as my guest today. She, like myself, shares a love of diversity in fiction and she, like myself, takes it upon herself to write more books with diverse characters. She also reads them, which is something I did back when I read regularly (I'm getting back to it, promise...). So I wanted to hear what she had to say about her experiences with diversity in fiction.

Enough of me gabbing, though: here's Constance Burris!

$3.99 on Amazon!

I've been making an increased effort to read diversely for the past three months. Here is what I learned:

1.       It's addictive. If I'm reading the same race, sex, gender, age, or disability twice in a row, I get super sad and I start stalking book review blogs for my diversity fix, which leads me to my next point...

2.      The importance of diverse book reviewers. A suburbanite, who may only see black people on the 10 o'clock news or by watching slave movies with white saviors, might not be able to relate to a book about black teens living in the middle of Harlem.  I'm not saying you have to be black to enjoy reading books with black characters. Neither do you have to be gay to relate to gay characters. I’m just saying we need reviewers who read diverse books, so that when a book reviewer has the nerve to call a book ghetto simply because it’s filled with slang, we have five other reviews to give a different perspective.

3.      I need to check my bias.  I have to confess, diversity for me meant reading more books with black people, but after reading diversely for three months, my universe blew open.  Diversity is so much more than race. It's sexuality, gender, disability, age and so forth.



Constance Burris is on a journey to take over the world through writing fantasy, horror, and science fiction. Her mission is to spread the love of speculative fiction to the masses. She is a proud card carrying blerd (black nerd), mother, and wife. When she is not writing and spending time with her family, she is working hard as an environmental engineer in Oklahoma City.

If you want to learn more about Constance, you can find her on Twitter, Facebook, and on her website. And, if you're looking for fiction with some more diversity, try checking out Coal (Everleaf Series #1), Ms. Burris debut novel!

GUEST POST: Dragging Yourself Out of a Creative Dry Spell

Today, I'm thrilled to have Esther Jones over for some demon hunting... or tenth dimensional physics. Whatever she's in the mood for. Esther is part of the writing duo Frog and Esther Jones. Along with their Gift of Grace books (Grace Under Fire and Coup de Grace), they also run the Friday Indie Review. Check all of it out, and check out Esther's tips for getting out of those nasty creativity droughts.

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Voss asked me for a guest post on writing a while back, and since this is something I’ve struggled with recently, I thought it would be a good topic to talk about while it’s still fresh.

As writers, we’ve all had the weeks (or months, sadly sometimes years) where we just don’t feel those creative ideas percolating like they used to.  Personally, I’ve been fighting with a creative dry spell on and off for what feels like, oh let’s say, the last millennia or so.   

Now, I know that’s not factually true, because (for example) I’ve had short stories and a novel come out in the interim. 

But while standing in the middle of my own personal creative famine— where no new ideas for stories are showing themselves— it can be really difficult to remember the times when a story just walked up and walloped me behind the eyes without warning. 

Here’s a secret:   Every writer goes through periods of feast or famine like this.  It’s what you do to drag yourself out of the famine and keep writing that makes the difference.  Or at least that’s how it goes in my (admittedly somewhat limited) experience. 

Unfortunately, I am not one of the characters I write, and there is no summons or plot device that will make the ideas instantly come flocking back—like simply swiping blood across a rune.  But there are things I can do to go back to my roots and remember what inspires me. 

To drag myself out of the hole, I need to remember what I love about writing, and what I am trying to do by telling stories to myself and others. 

Now that last paragraph sounds pretty great in theory.  But what does it mean? 

I’m getting to that, I promise.

First off there are some very simple questions I need to ask myself.

11)      What inspires me and urges me write in the first place? 

For me, it’s always about an idea, and the characters that spring up in my head as a result of that idea… Which means if an idea isn’t coming, then I’m pretty stuck, right?  Well, not necessarily.

22)      Is the reason I’m having trouble writing due to something in my environment? Is it something I can fix?  If it isn’t, what can I do to lessen the impact it’s having on my creative psyche?

Sometimes when I’m having trouble writing, it really is because something in my vicinity is disrupting my focus.  It doesn’t have to be something big either.  It can be subtle.  

For instance, I usually listen to music as I write.  Occasionally, I’ve found my music clashed with the thought those wily and secretive creative-imps were trying put together in my head.  As soon as I turned the music off, the scene actually started behaving and flowing naturally.  

 If you’ve eliminated all the distractions, and you’re still staring at a blank screen, continue on to the next question.

33)      Am I just having general focus/self-confidence issues?  If so, maybe it’s time to go get some love from people who enjoy reading my work. Frog and I have often talked about how it’s necessary to have someone with a critical eye look at your work.  But sometimes it’s just as important to take the time to remember that you don’t suck.  There has to be balance.

44)      What do I love reading?  What do I love writing?

It can also be important to remember what I relish about books.  Sometimes, I’m a little embarrassed to admit my true tastes. They’re not always highbrow, or deep, or as literary as I think they should be.   Am I holding myself back from an idea, because I think other people wouldn’t like it, even though I (secretly) think it’s pretty cool?

Maybe it’s time to get down with writing some pure popcorn fiction, or just allow myself to write something crazy that I don’t think anyone else would ever want to read.  Those are usually the times where I surprise myself. 

Finally, if I still feel like I’m struggling, dehydrated and devoid of hope in the event horizon of a blackhole that (once upon a time) used to be a desert, I ask myself one more question:

55)      Where can I go or who can I enlist who will be willing to creatively engage with me? 

Don’t forget the resource you have in your fellow writers and friends.  No writer is an island; we all stand on the shoulders of the writers who came before us, and the hand-in -hand with the writers we read and interact with.  If I can’t figure out what I should be doing on my own, it’s time to go looking for advice and other authors who have been there and clawed their way out. 

Or I might even just immerse myself in the energy that comes along with being at a writer’s retreat or gathering.   Sometimes it ok to stop freaking out about being in the dry spell and just enjoy my friends and the craft of writing.

It’s always ok to step back and recharge.  Once you’ve done that, go back and start again—at question 1, if you need to. Hopefully you won’t need to.

You can do it. You can make it out of a creative dry spell, no matter how dire it seems.  But you can’t give up, and then you can’t give up some more.  Like everything else in writing, overcoming a slump or lack of ideas relies on your own persistence and will to keep trying to move forward.  

Pendragon: Revisited

Greetings, greetings! (Also: spoilers contained within. You have been warned.)

So. the Pendragon books. The brainchild of D.J. MacHale. I started reading them when I was ten or eleven, and carried through until the very end. And then, after I graduated, I read them again. Admittedly, I found them somewhat lackluster, by comparison to the first read-through. But I expected that. After all, I know all of the plot twists.

But I got a hankering again, not too long ago, and I dove back in from the very beginning: The Merchant of Death.

Here's what I've found, rereading it the third time, and the first time with an authorial eye.

The plot in these books is excellent. I want to point that out. It's all very solid, even if it doesn't make any sense until the very end of the book. The influence of Saint Dane (the antagonist) is, for the most part, subtle. At least on the grand scale on which these battles are fought. A merchant on Denduron, selling the miners the weapons they need for revolt. A scientist on Cloral, not so innocently making a fertilizer that happens to make crops poisonous. A friendly lounge singer with some very shaky mob ties on First Earth.

However, where I find plot falling apart is in the grander scheme. Not that it's a weak plot, at all. It couldn't be a weak plot, otherwise it wouldn't have carried ten successful books. What I've found is that the tension breaks... awkwardly at the end. There's a black moment, where Bobby sees his home territory of Second Eath destroyed. 70,000 people are sent off to another dimension. Or maybe they were killed. Who can say. In his rage, Bobby kills the man responsible. And Saint Dane tells him that was the final test. And he failed.

Now, through these books, we've been asking the same question as Bobby. Why him? Why any of the people chosen for this insane job of Traveler (those people who fight Saint Dane)? How does any of this work. Well... here's where the plot falters, at least for me. The black moment is the end of book nine, Raven Rise. The answers to our series-long questions come within the first five chapters of book ten, The Soldiers of Halla. For me, as a reader, it feels like a climax. We know. We finally have answers. Which makes it hard to then keep reading. Sure, Saint Dane's not dead and Third Earth still has a chance for survival. But we've hit the climax for the series before the climax for the final book. At least, for me, it was the climax.

All that being said, once you get past that and into the actual plot of The Soldiers of Halla, it's a good plot, too. It's just... overshadowed by the revelation of what are easily the series' biggest secrets.

The characters are just as incredible as the plot would suggest. And, unlike in many books, Bobby, the main character, is actually likable. I find that, in most YA books I read, the main character is tolerable, most of the time, with flashes of likability. Harry Potter and Katniss Everdeen stand out as prime examples of this. But Bobby is just some scared kid, whipping through dimensions and watching people get murdered. Get poisoned. Fight to the death as entertainment. And you feel for him, because he's a good guy.

The other characters are just as wonderful, too, but, for the sake of being concise, I'll limit myself to just one more: Saint Dane. The shapeshifting, immortal, genocidal, demon traveler. So yeah, he's pretty good at being bad. But that, to me, is not why he succeeds. In fact, I can pinpoint why he succeeds. It's a precise and brilliant moment. He's talking with Bobby (Saint Dane is a very classic, rug-chewing villain in a a lot of ways. The man likes his speeches) and points out that they both tamper with the way things are on the territories. In fact, for a while, Saint Dane had me convinced that he was in the right. The travelers run around, trying to stop him, while at the same time imposing the morals and ideas from their home territories on these other people. Who knows what effect that could have. Saint Dane can see all time and space. He can pinpoint his changes and direct them. He can go at it with precision instead of the potential toxic leak of the travelers. In fact, we even find out, in book ten, that Saint Dane started out with the noblest of intentions.

Of course, they were skewed. And so was he. But he started with a good plan, and he's so damn charismatic even I believed in him for awhile.

All in all, I recommend these books, especially if you're a young adult or you enjoy young adult sci-fi/fantasy. There's some rough writing in the beginning, but he has all the kinks polished out soon enough.

Definitely still 4 stars, as a series.
Voss

Guest Author :: Shira Glassman

I'm thrilled to be hosting Shira Glassman here today, and I must say her new book has me very excited.

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The Second Mango
by Shira Glassman
It's hard to find a girlfriend when you don't know any other lesbians, so the young, nerdy Queen Shulamit hires the legendary warrior Rivka to take her around the kingdom on the back of her dragon in search of other girls like her. But the simple quest quickly turns into a rescue mission when they discover a temple full of women turned to stone by an evil sorcerer.

So, why did I write a fantasy novel with a gluten-free heroine?

Imagine being a happy, well-off teenage girl with a loving father. You do well in your studies because you devour nonfiction for fun, and other than the fact that you don't know if you'll ever find a girlfriend because your culture doesn't openly talk about homosexuality, your life is pretty uncomplicated.

Then you start getting sick all the time. It starts with stomach cramps, and a bloated feeling. Soon, you're spending all the time in the bathroom, and food doesn't stay down very often. You start becoming afraid to eat, so your already spindly body becomes weak. You're scared, because you've never had to deal with anything like this before. And the worst part is that because nobody can explain it, they start to think you're making it all up.

Now superimpose that scenario onto a fantasy setting.

The main character of my novel, The Second Mango, is twenty-year-old Queen Shulamit. When she was only a teenager and still just a princess, before her father passed away, she lost her ability to digest gluten (a protein in wheat) and also an unidentified protein in poultry. However, because her world lacks the technology and medical advances to understand digestive disorders, her father and his court are left to muddle through with typical pre-gunpowder-era medical cluelessness. She's royalty, so poison is quickly tested for and ruled out. The king sends for a magician, but he determines that she's not under a curse.

At this point they just stop believing her, and she's left alone in a prison of anxiety and disgust with her body.

Into that prison steps the palace sous-chef, Aviva, with a glass of water. She's a working-class woman, about two years older than Shulamit, and thanks to a lifetime of caring for a sick mother, she's got ideas of her own about how to treat the princess's malady.

By the time The Second Mango opens, however, Aviva has vanished with nothing but a cryptic Dear Jane letter behind her. Shulamit is left to manage her food issues on her own, and they form a key portion of her adventures and characterization in the book.

How will Shulamit navigate a world in which every meal is a challenge? In a fantasy story you have no Glutino; you have no Udi's; you have no food safety code, either.

The main plot of the story is Shulamit's search for love, family, and her own strength as she flies around her kingdom on the back of her bodyguard Rivka's dragon. But her simple quest to get through the day without getting sick is the ominous background music through all of that. It's a background music that many of us face in our real lives -- my spouse, my father-in-law, my dear friend Ducky to whom the book is dedicated -- and I wanted to tell that story, too.

Available from Prizm Books HERE. The print version will be here sooner rather than later.

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If you want more information, Shira has both a BLOG and a TUMBLR that you can mozy on over to.

RadCon Wrap-Up

So, Radcon was, in a word, marvelous. I've always liked this convention, to be totally honest, but this one was a definite highlight. not to mention that this was the first time I ended up on panels.

So, we start with the drama: I go to the green room right away (led by a very helpful volunteer security guard, I might add) and there's my packet with all my pro information, my pro placard, my schedule...but not the pro badge. Well, turns out there was a minor snafu and, instead of being upstairs, my badge had mysteriously ended up sitting downstairs. Oh well. No big deal.

I'm not going to spend time giving you a blow by blow of every panel. That would probably get horribly dull, after all. But there were some real highlights. For those that didn't know, Tanya Huff was our Writer Guest of Honor. Well, after a panel, we stood out in the hallway for a solid half hour just talking to her and she said something I think is very heartening to a lot of authors. Someone asked if she, like other authors out there, writes from 9-5 every day. She does have her hours set aside for work, but she doesn't necessarily just work during those hours. She's very good at spider solitaire. In fact, her original response to the question was, word for word, "Hell no!" She produces a single book every year. You can breathe that sigh of relief, now.

The other wonderful thing was talking to Patricia Briggs in the same hallway, a few feet away, at the very end of the convention. She, I think, is the epitome of what authors should aim for when dealing with fans. She doesn't really differentiate, not the way we're 'supposed' to. She'll talk to you. It's wonderful. Really wonderful.

And I met some wonderful new people doing the panels. The standout of the weekend for new acquaintances had to be Esther Jones, part of the joint writing team Frog and Esther Jones. A bright, intelligent woman, and the two of them have their first novel, Grace Under Fire. Obviously, I haven't yet had the chance to read it, but it sounds brilliant, and is pretty well-reviewed on Amazon. I would give it a look.

I also got the chance to (finally) meet Tonya Macalino, a fellow member of the Northwest Independent Writers' Association. It was a brief encounter, and all that really happened was the snapping of a picture, but she spoke well at her panel, and seemed very chipper, a rare sight on the final day of a convention. (Normally, that last day is full of zombified geeks moaning around the halls, myself included).

All in all, a fabulous convention.

Voss