My Moment of Glory

WALKING HOME and BIKING UPHILL are on sale now through Monday for only 99 cents! RUNNING SECRETS is free to anyone with Kindle Unlimited.

We made the decision to run this special deal to build readership. Nobody's making any money with prices set so low! But maybe, just maybe a few more folks are reading my work.

At about 9 pm last night I got an email from my book manager at Booktrope, the publisher of The Alki Trilogy. She sent this screen shot:

I know it's a very narrow Kindle category. I know it's just a moment, nothing more. I know that already, early Sunday morning, it's dropped to #2 (I checked). But for one brief instant, WALKING HOME was #1!

And BIKING HOME? It dropped to #1863 in Contemporary Fiction. Not a best seller, but going in the right direction. Do you think we can keep the trend going? With your help, anything is possible!

What Are You Working On ... Julia Park Tracey?

I (often) complain of being swamped (especially at this time of the year) with a college teaching gig and my writing-marketing world, and then someone comes along who wears so many hats I don't know how she knows which to put on when. Here's a post from Julia Park Tracey. Enjoy!

Julia Park Tracey is an award-winning journalist, author and blogger, with recent work on Sweatpants & Coffee, Salon, Thrillist, Paste and The Mid/Scary Mommy. She is the author of the Veronika Layne mysteries and the novel Tongues of Angels; two women's history books and a collection of poetry. Read more at www.juliaparktracey.com.

Facebook: www.facebook.com.juliaparktraceyauthor

Twitter: www.twitter.com/juliaparktracey

 

*****

 I’m busy! Booktrope has just released my second mystery, Veronika Layne Has a Nose for News, of the Hot Off the Press series. With a new release there is always a lot to do, from ensuring local bookstores have the book, to checking up on reviews, alerting the local media, and hosting a launch party. I have also sent books through the mail to reviewers, and entered the book in a few online contests. The work around releasing a new book usually takes about three months before simmering down.

I’m a freelance journalist, so I usually have deadlines and stories to work on. Currently I am reviewing a book and interviewing the author for an alternative newspaper. I just finished writing up a series of food reviews for a holiday feature on specialty foods. I get to taste them, and that was scrumptious; I tasted Meyer lemon marmalade, hot-sweet chili jam, lemon-herb pita chips, two flavors of hummus and some olives, artisanal marshmallows, whiskey-pistachio brittle, and two flavors of granola. I have written about cocktails, coffee, tea, oysters, hot chocolate, organic/vegetarian fast food, and most recently, a huge variety of coffee ice creams. I love that kind of reporting, but I need to do some crunches. I also review theatre productions and am going to see Nunsense this week, with a review due Tuesday.

I spend two days a week doing some in-house work for a newspaper plus the social media for that paper; some of the work I can do from home and other tasks I perform in-office. I don’t report the news, but I format and edit press releases and articles that come in, and make corrections on proofed pages. All of these separate tasks add up to a steady income stream that allows me to pay the bills while I write non-paying stuff, like poetry or research.

Alas, poetry doesn’t pay (much), but it is very satisfying. I am the Poet Laureate of my city and I volunteer a lot in classrooms and local groups to talk about writing and books. I just participated in a read-athon to highlight banned books last week; this week I have a meeting to plan a children’s poetry contest next summer. None of these activities are paid, but they are very satisfying.

And then there’s my current mania – family history. I am in the midst of looking deeper into our roots and have uncovered a few mysteries. One of these, about my great-great-grandfather, who was an Orphan Train child, we’ve just managed to solve. He wasn’t an orphan after all, and his mother wanted him back, but it was too late. I think this will make an excellent novel some day. It’s esoteric stuff, but I really enjoy it, and it pays huge dividends in teaching me about my heritage and giving me ideas on what to write next.

Send me an email at julia.editrix@gmail.com if you have questions about my current work. I’d love to chat about writing with you!

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To read the prior posts, go to the posts listing in the left side bar. If titles are no longer visible, just click on any month to select.

 

And finally, if you have a guest post you'd like to share on this blog, email me at aw@arleenwilliams.com.

Elena Hartwell & No Talking Dogs Press: The Interview Part I

As I head off to the Tri-TESOL conference to present No Talking Dogs: Easy Literature for Adults, I am pleased to share an interview with Elena Hartwell on Arc of a Writer. Elena began her interview with a question about writing easy novels for adults learning to read English. It was a pleasure to explain the work Pamela Hobart Carter and I have done through No Talking Dogs Press.

The Interview Part I

You write novels for adults learning English as a new language. How did you get started in that genre and how is that different from writing traditional novels?

 

I've been teaching English as a Second Language since I was a resident assistant at a private language institute housed on the Seattle University campus back in the early 1970s. This fall quarter marks my third decade w­­orking with immigrants and refugees at South Seattle College. Through the years I've taught all levels and skill areas from low beginners to college prep. 

For the past decade or so I taught the intermediate to upper levels. Not being a fan of most texts written for ESL instruction, I used Young Adult fiction. A few years back, I moved into the lower levels and YA was no longer an option. It was just too difficult. I needed books written at a first or second grade reading level that weren't picture books full of talking animals and the like. One day I was whining to my writing partner, Pamela Hobart Carter, about my struggles to find appropriate reading materials for my adult students. Her response: "I'll write one for you!" And, of course, I figured if she could do it, I could too!

Long story short ... READ MORE!

What Are You Working On ... Kit Bakke?

The first week of the 2015-2016 academic year is upon us, and already I find myself behind schedule! My apologies for the late posting of Kit Bakke's interesting essay.

Kit Bakke’s most recent book is Dancing on the Edge. Although she lived a peripatetic life for many years, she’s pretty much returned to her Seattle birthplace.

www.facebook.com//kitbakkeauthor

www.kitbakke.com

***** 

Have Words, Will Blog

by Kit Bakke

 

I’m working on a tricky historical nonfiction project, and my editor suggested I read Stephen Pyne’s book Voice& Vision. Which I have just done. Terrific book!! Well, if you are into that sort of thing. But a lot of his advice would work for fiction writers as well.

He’s not a writing teacher, he’s an environmental scientist who’s won a MacArthur fellowship and writes about wildfires among other things. He doesn’t sugar coat anything.

After providing lots of examples and thoughts about the craft and the art of writing, his last chapter is full of this sort of thing:

Writing is about choices,

 and among the first of those choices is

to assure yourself time to work.

Otherwise you are writing a diary or a blog.

There you go. If you spend all your time on the small stuff, the big stuff never happens.

He says that writing is like politics: it’s all about the art of the possible. Writers have to live with the “time, funds, sources, ideas and talent” that they have available to them. And it’s different for each of us. If you know what you have available, then you can tailor your writing project to those resources.

Like most books on writing, he makes the point that “If you don’t actually write, you don’t get anything written.” The old butt-to-the-chair advice.

One bit that I liked a lot was the observation that “ideas come from writing as much as writing comes from ideas.” For his nonfiction-writing audience, he adds “Writing is a means of understanding that ought to accompany research, not appear magically at its end. With practice, you will trust your ability to make the text happen. If you write, the words will come.”

Pyne addresses the question: “When to push on and when to pull back?” by which he means, how do you know when you’ve done your absolute best. Because it’s disastrous to stop before that. Again, he says, it’s a matter of choosing—“It’s about constantly making calls regarding what is good enough. Assessing the unstable gap between what you desire and what you can do is the hardest call of all.”

Wow, no wonder writing a good book is hard … all those choices, all that risk, juggling all those slippery inputs, the dangers of stopping too soon or never really getting going at all.

OK, back to the real work.