Lending Library

I love the library. Love. It. So when Amazon suggested that I make North Sea Dawn available to their Lending Library, I was ecstatic. Subscribers to Amazon Prime have access to more than 500,000 titles through the Kindle Lending Library. Which now also includes North Sea Dawn.

You can borrow one book at a time. Utilize the store from your kindle device and the option to borrow the book will appear for Prime members. And there is no need to remember to “return” it; the book disappears from your reading list when the lending period is up. If you loved it, you can buy it. If not, you still have space on your Kindle for hundreds of other books. What a great way to try out a new genre – or a new author!

North Sea Dawn Available

North Sea Dawn is now available for purchase on Amazon. I am so excited to have this work, my first original full-length fiction, out there in the world. With you, the reader.

I loved writing this story.  I laughed when the Vikings prepared for war in their boisterous, confident way. I felt terrible for Julia when her brother died and nearly cried writing her acceptance of his death. I was on the edge of my seat as I found the perfect words to describe that anxious, excited, nervous feeling right before the romance – and the worse anxious, excited, nervous feeling right afterwards. I grinned when Eric foreshadowed the Princess Bride by about 920 years. I actually jumped out of my seat when the villain finally got what was coming to him, yelling “take that!”, like a crazy person, at my computer.  I may have squealed a little during a particular, perfectly in-character, confession.

I hope you enjoy reading this even a fraction of how much I enjoyed writing it.

Who am I kidding, I hope you love it – more than chocolate, wine, and a shirtless Thor scene all rolled into one. Ambitious? Yes. But it’s out there. In the world. And that might be the best feeling an author can have.

Click Here to Purchase North Sea Dawn

Go forth, and read.

 

Cover Art

North Sea Dawn is so close to being done; I can see the light at the end of the tunnel. The last item I need to take care of prior to publishing is to select cover art. I’ve narrowed it down to two choices. I have read suggestions on several sites for choosing artwork. Particularly, it seems to be important to choose something that is going to look good as a thumbnail – given the number of purchases which are made online rather than in a bricks-and-mortar bookstore.  If you have read any of the excerpts I have posted, you know North Sea Dawn is set in 1066, during the Norman Conquest of England, and it has a heavy Viking component.  What do you think about my options? I would love to hear your feedback.

#1 Longship Sunrise shutterstock_85719376 #2 Longship Fog shutterstock_87761107

Punctuality

I said I would be done before Christmas with North Sea Dawn.

Obviously, that did not happen.

I do feel terrible that I missed my deadline, but the changes I am making to the manuscript will make it better – I promise.  In the meantime, because you have been waiting so patiently, I have another teaser. Below is a scene at the bathhouse:

The courtyard was still quiet, and nothing else was out of place. Soft curses and mutterings carried to his ears, although he was sure the woman inside had no idea how the stone walls and water transported sound. He caught a few words, ‘arrogant’, ‘handsome’, ‘self-assured’, and ‘peeping-tom’ were among them. He chose to focus on the compliments and ignore the rest. Her chattering teeth had grown loud enough to concern him when he finally heard her toss another cloth into a basket and climb out of the pool.

For a moment, he did not see the courtyard or pay any attention to potential threats. He listened to the sporadic pitter, patter of water hitting the stone floor and imagined how it would get there. His mind’s eye saw her black hair slicked down her back, water running across the curve of her bottom and down the backs of her legs. The snap of a towel as she shook it out caused his fantasy to lean forward over the table of linens he knew to be inside. The water would slide down her neck, across her chest, gaining speed as it reached the slope of her breast. It would caress the pale skin there until it slowed to a standstill on the rose-colored peak made hard by the cold pool. For the longest moment, the water drop would hang, suspended. A curtain was drawn aside in the bath house and allowed to fall closed. His fantasy collapsed, but Eric found himself licking his lips and wishing for the barest taste of cool water.

 

Medieval Curses

Two hundred ninety-four pages total in North Sea Dawn and I am a little more than half-way through with edits. Today I read perhaps my favorite comment from my editor, “Is this curse word historically accurate?”

Now, that is something to set you back a few hours of research. Did you know that most modern curse words didn’t exist in the early middle ages? Yeah, me neither. I did discover, according to several other authors on the interwebs, and as we all know if you read it online it is true, that with a few guidelines you can make up your own derogatory terms, full of vitriol to damn your villainous characters.

1) Insult the mother

2) Insult their looks and/ or physical capabilities

3) Use animal names, e.g. shrew, pig, dog, etc.

4) Bring religion into it

Devil’s shrew. Lousey, pox-marked son of a whore. Naggle-toothed swine.

This easily ate up an hour that would have otherwise been productive. It was fun though, and marginally educational.

Rewrites

Well, my editor is done. Did you know that after editing, comes rewrites? It didn’t sound that daunting three months ago. Now it sounds like torture to go back and correct all those little, and some big, mistakes in my work.

Rewrites are like dusting.  The house looks great, I am completely satisfied, and then someone lifts up the bed skirt and reveals all of my dust bunnies. Great. Now I have to try to figure out all the weird attachments to my vacuum and spend an uncomfortable amount of time cleaning a place I never look. But thanks to my editor, now I know the dirt is there. I could walk away and leave it as is, but in the back of my mind, I’ll always be thinking about how I left things unfinished.

I’ve put it off for as long as I can. I’ve dallied with other projects and made excuses about setting aside a really good block of time so I can dig into North Sea Dawn again. There is no more procrastination. It has to be done.

I just need to check my email first.

Characterization

Having a professional editor for North Sea Dawn has been surprisingly fun.  Prior to our first meeting I worried that my editor would bleed red all over my precious manuscript, and then I worried that they wouldn’t have any comments.

     “Well, what did you think?” said the author.

     “It sure was a story. Yep, lots of words,” replied the editor.

The actual experience was pleasantly in-between.  She has been flush with praise where due, and had great criticism that has improved my work.

But now I have a little bit of dread.  In our last session, my editor noted that I was straying a bit depicting one of my main characters.  She was right, for so many reasons, but now I have a bad feeling about our next meeting.  The last section of the book is being edited, and in that is this scene, this awesome, kick-ass, good guy triumphs and gets the girl, villain gets his comeuppance scene.  When I wrote it, I loved it.  I hit the last period and was all like, ‘Yeah! Take that villain!’.

My editor is not going to like it.

This is the first really hard cut I am going to have to make. I’ll have to sacrifice something I loved, that I worked hard on, for the sake of good characterization and the integrity of the story.  It will make North Sea Dawn a better book.

I still love that scene.

Cover Art

When I published my first short story, The Cottage, I had the option of using pre-made designs for the cover or submitting my own design or artwork.  At the time, I didn’t really know if anyone would even buy the story, so I opted to use a simple cover provided by Amazon.

One of my commentators recently suggested that I revisit the cover issue.  She pointed out, quite rightly, that readers do, indeed, often judge a book by its cover.  I took her advice and found that purchasing art and rights to use it as a book cover was much easier than I anticipated.  Choosing the content was the most difficult part!

Hopefully, the new cover will entice more readers to purchase my story.  It certainly is more eye-catching!

The Cottage at Amazon

Steampunk

I’m at a crossroads in my steampunk story.  Doctor Anderson has managed to uncover some top-secret research the U.S. government is searching for, and he’s reached a safe place where he can finally examine it.  Unfortunately, I can’t decide what type of research it should be.  I’ve got two choices:

1) Technology that will revolutionize a steampunk world, and has the potential to create economic shock waves that the antagonist can use to take power.

2) Something a bit more magical.

I like the magical aspect, because it adds something a little extra to the political intrigue that is the backbone for my story.  However, it may be a bit too much for the reader to deal with, as they already have to get used to a lot of terms that are unfamiliar and alternate historical events.  What do you think? Ground-breaking technology that Clayton Anderson discovers and must keep out of the wrong hands? Or supernatural knowledge that has the power to change the course of civilization?  Let me know your thoughts.

Fan Fiction

As a media consumer, fan fiction fills that time while I am waiting for the next episode or sequel.  Once I find a universe and characters that I love, I want more – now! (Isn’t that great commentary on a society of instant gratification?)  I think that is especially true of manga that is ‘complete’, movies that never get the trilogy deal I know they deserved, or shows that have been canceled.  Since the executives at Fox are apparently blind to the importance of an immersive experience, e.g. Firefly, fans can and will generate our own transformative stories that let us draw out the experience of discovering a story we love.

As a writer just learning the craft, it can be both challenging and educational to craft a new story with characters and settings already provided.  It stretches the creative process to express something old in a new way.  It also forces me to really work on those aspects that I feel I struggle with – deep character interaction and realistic dialogue.  I have a tendency in my original work to wax poetic for pages at a time describing a house, article of clothing, or a setting.  Just because I have spent hours imaging every detail, that doesn’t mean the reader wants or needs to hear about it – or so my copy editor tells me.  With a universe already created for me, and readers who are familiar with it, there is no reason to go on, and on, and on about visual details.  The reader already knows all of that with the same obsessive love that I do.  Instead, I can practice the skills that I know need work, and hopefully drive a little traffic, and media purchases, to the creative minds that I admire.  You never know, if they get enough readers, viewers, and fans, they might produce more of the stories I love.

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