Uneasy Spirits and Halloween: Using Fact in support of Fiction

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“The feast of All Saints, which was ushered in Friday evening by the old-fashioned games of ‘All Hallows’ E’en, was yesterday celebrated in the Catholic and Episcopal Churches.” San Francisco Chronicle, 1879  “It’s barmbrack cake. Beatrice has baked a ring in it, and tradition has it that the girl who gets the slice with the ring will marry within the year.” Annie Fuller, Uneasy Spirits. The first quote above is from a real person, who was reporting for the San Francisco Chronicle about real events. The second quote is by Annie Fuller, a fictional person and my protagonist, from my newly published historical mystery, Uneasy Spirits, which is set in 1879 San Francisco. As we approach Halloween, 2011, I thought it would be fitting to discuss how I used factual data from the past to provide historical context for a Read more…


My Book Ate My Blog

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I ran across an excerpt of this interesting post entitled “My Book Ate my Blog” by Sophie Perinot on the Passive Voice blog (which if you haven’t discovered the Passive Guy yet, run right over and check him out!), about the difficulties of balancing the demands of maintaining a blog while trying to write. The comments on her site, and on the Passive Voice, were filled by people who agreed that blogging was taking them away from writing or how hard it was to maintain a balance. As I thought about my own history of blogging, I found an interesting pattern had emerged.  First of all, I am not a prolific blogger. For the whole time I have been blogging (21 months) I have produced only 40 blog posts-counting this one (which means an average of 1.9 posts a month). My blog Read more…


Why Self-Published Authors Know Best

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I ran across this quote today, from a post that historical romance novelist Courtney Milan wrote this week as an open letter to agents. The traditional information storehouse has been inverted. Right now, the people who know the most about self-publishing are authors, and trust me, the vast majority of authors are aware of that. For the first time, authors are having questions about their careers, and their agents are not their go-to people.  While not having an agent, in fact having decided in the fall of 2009 not to look for an agent for my historical mystery, Maids of Misfortune, I can’t really speak to this group’s effectiveness in this new publishing climate. Neither to I want to go into whether or not I think that the decision on the part of some agents to begin to publish their Read more…


Writing Full Time: What does it look like to you?

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I haven’t written a post in some time, because I was working furiously to finish the first draft of Uneasy Spirits, the sequel to Maids of Misfortune, my historical mystery set in 1879 San Francisco. The manuscript is now out to my first set of beta readers, I have just finished a week of family visits and entertaining my grandchildren, and, to keep from obsessing over whether my beta readers will like the new novel, I thought I would try to take stock of my writing process. I was particularly interested in looking at my own speed after the lively discussion on blogs this past month over this topic prompted by Dean Wesley Smith’s post on writing four novels a year. Last fall I made the decision to retire completely from teaching (see this post) and start to work on my Read more…


Ebook Publishing and the Great Price Debate: My numbers tell an interesting story

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Before Christmas and the great Amanda Hocking success story hit the blogosphere, the general wisdom among ebook self-publishers tended to be that $2.99 was the sweet spot  for selling and profiting from sales. Particularly after Amazon instituted its new 70% royalty offering (which didn’t apply for books priced at under $2.99), anything lower than that was seen as reserved for short stories or novella’s or at the most a brief promotional launch. However, the success of Amanda Hocking and a growing number of self-published authors selling their books at 99 cents changed the debate. They proved that you could sell so many books at that rate that it would more than make up for the loss of the 70% revenue. An additional upside to the 99 cent approach was that the sheer volume of sales at 99 cents would put Read more…