Ideas Stalk Me

(Reminder: this site is now ONLY my blog. If you're looking for my book links or contact options, events, or any other aspects of my writer life, please visit http://dangerouswhenbored.com )

 

Welcome to the first Wednesday of the month. You know what that means! It's time to let our insecurities hang out. Yep, it's the Insecure Writer's Support Group blog hop. If you're a writer at any stage of career, I highly recommend this blog hop as a way to connect with other writers for support, sympathy, ideas, and networking. If you're a reader, it's a great way to peek behind the curtain of a writing life.

Our Twitter handle is @TheIWSG and hashtag is #IWSG.  The awesome co-hosts for the June 3 posting of the IWSG are Victoria Marie Lees, Sarah Foster, Natalie Aguirre, and C. Lee McKenzie!

June 3 question - Do most of your story ideas come from one place (the news, dreams, etc.) or do they hit from all over the place?

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Story ideas seem to stalk me. They're EVERYWHERE. Some of them just open up like trap doors and I fall in. Others snatch at my ankles and trip me up when I'm trying to go to the grocery store. A few are responses to things I've seen or read or heard.  The weirder ones just sort of drift in like a cloud and rain on me for a moment. Every idea I have calls up her cousins and invites them to the party, too. Sooooo many ideas. 

image source

 The difficulty for me has never been coming up with ideas, but more in the choosing one and staying focused on it long enough to see it to fruition. I think that's part of why it took me so long to "get serious" about my writing life and start finishing things and ushering them down the whole road into publication. 

These days, I'm getting better at assessing quickly which ideas are "good" in the sense of having enough meat on their bones to make a whole story out of and which ones are more like a shower thought that might make a semi-clever social media post. The ones that are going to make it into short stories or books are persistent. They poke me more than once. That's part of how I know. 

How about you?  

A to Z: Going Indie: Z is for Zag

 Welcome to Blogging A to Z! My theme this year is Going Indie. I hope you enjoy it. Don't forget to check out the other participating blogs. 

 

I always intended to be a writer. My definition of what that means has shifted many times across my life so far. 

As a child, I was pretty sure writers were some kind of zany hermits. The kind of people that Raold Dahl might've made up. They somehow still had money to live in interesting places and just create, though.  

Coming up in academia, I really thought there was one right way to do it, and that involved traditional publishing through established routes, winning awards and building acclaim, and writing literary achievement kinds of things that would earn me gold stars from my teachers. 

Looking back now, that seems kind of silly. Literary fiction is only ONE of the kinds of things I read (I'm a omnnivore when it comes to books)…and if you read a lot of it, there's a sameness to it after a while that gets boring. And the stuff that is innovative is often smug, pretentious, and precious about it. Where's the fun? Where's the joy? Where's the creativity? 

So, each of these zags in my path led me to where I am now, a hybrid author (traditionally and indie published) who writes in several different genres, living her best life and having a great time. 

Thanks for coming on this A to Z ride with me. I hope you found something interesting, entertaining, or educational in all these posts and I wish you the best of luck as you zig and zag on your path to whatever it is that you want most.  

A to Z: Going Indie: Y is for YOLO!

 Welcome to Blogging A to Z! My theme this year is Going Indie. I hope you enjoy it. Don't forget to check out the other participating blogs. 

 If you read my post yesterday, you already know that I just turned 55. This isn't me complaining. It's a privilege to have made it this far and I'm hopeful of having many more years yet to enjoy. But, it also means that I've crossed a sort of meridian in my life and there's for sure fewer years left than I have already lived. 

So, it's time to DO IT. Whatever it is that you've been wanting to do and haven't done. For me: that's making a go of self-publishing, taking my writing life firmly into my hands and making all the decisions, accepting all the blame and any glory that might come from it. To BE A WRITER. 

Lucy had the right of it: 

 

A to Z: Going Indie: X is for Xanthic

Welcome to Blogging A to Z! My theme this year is Going Indie. I hope you enjoy it. Don't forget to check out the other participating blogs. 

Xanthic? I know…but X is hard! If this word was new to you (like it was to me), Merriam Webster tells us that it means: 

So, I'm thinking "yellow" like "you yellow bellied coward!" but I actually have no idea if this word works for the more metaphorical meaning of yellow. But, I'm going with it. 

So, what am I afraid of when it comes to going indie? 

I have two main fears: financial ruin, and that it'll take the fun out of it. 

In terms of financial ruin, I've taken a few steps to protect myself: 

• I waited until the "right" moment in my life, when I had some dollars to spare without sinking the Bryant Family ship
• I didn't invest in all of it all at once, but did a little at a time, spreading it out across months and even years.
• I incorporated as an LLC, because who knows what unknown water lie ahead, and I'd like my family's assets to be safe if I really screw something up and end up in legal or tax trouble of some sort.
• I took some business training and tax advice 

In terms of "taking the fun out of it," I'm still finding out, I think. It has added new types of work to my life (see my post on D is for Decisions for more on that), so I have to be careful to keep some sort of balance and not burn myself out. 

But, I'm not especially afraid of hard work. In fact, it's a joy to focus my efforts on something that is so personally important to me instead of just day job drudgery or dirty dishes!

There's a lot of it I REALLY enjoy, too! I'm giddy sometimes with all the little delights that have been a part of this process: new things I've learned, new connections I've made, that feeling of "I made this!", positive reception of my work, etc. 

So maybe I'm not really all that metaphorically xanthic after all (if that's even a thing). 

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By the way, today's the day! Release day! Book birthday on my actual birthday! (I'm 55 today!)

So, if you've been interested at all by Not Too Late as I've nattered on about it in these posts, do a girl a solid and go buy a copy today! It's available through Ingram, so you can order it at your favorite bookstore, request it at your library, or buy it online at a lot of different venues. 

 

 

 

A to Z: Going Indie: W is for Writing

 

 

Welcome to Blogging A to Z! My theme this year is Going Indie. I hope you enjoy it. Don't forget to check out the other participating blogs. 

Writing is the hardest thing to do while indie publishing, at least for me so far. Every day there are so many business/publishing details to handle, that it's hard to get a good long writing session in. 

Sometimes that's frustrating, but I'm only four months into my adventure, so I'm trusting that over the long haul, some of the business part of things will get easier and I won't have to research every step any more because I'll be able to just do again what I did last time. Muscle memory. 

Here in April, my current ploy to find more time for the creative writing bit is to get up earlier. I'll be 55 this year, so even on a day when my day doesn't require that I wake early, I wake early. Usually 6:30-7:00, when my day-job workday doesn't usually start until 8:30 or 9:00. 

Since my kiddo is now old enough to get themself up and going for their day, my responsibilities are small during that time: dressing, grooming, eating, caffeinating, medicating, doing the dogs' morning routine. I'm a low fuss woman--no makeup, no fancy hair preparation, simple clothes, so the "taking care of me" bit doesn't take me very long. My husband is here, too, so sometimes he takes care of some of the dogs or helps out by making me a breakfast sandwich while he's making his now. 

I don't open my email or go to my to-do list during this morning time, but just write something. This month, that's been a lot of blog posts and interviews rather than time on the work-in-progress novel, but that's still writing and it feels good! Still, I'm looking forward to the day when I can retire, and not give so many hours to the day job. I've got better uses for those hours!

A to Z: Going Indie: V is for Vellum

 

Welcome to Blogging A to Z! My theme this year is Going Indie. I hope you enjoy it. Don't forget to check out the other participating blogs. 

If you're old like me, you probably saw "Vellum" and thought about that thin, translucent paper you used for school projects back in the day. 

But in this case, I'm talking about software. In particular, software for book layout. (Fair warning: Vellum is a Mac-only software, so you'll have to find another tool is you're a PC user). 

Book layout is something I was kind of stressed about when I thought about Going Indie. It's important to get right, and I assumed it would be difficult. After all, most software I've used related to graphic arts has been complicated and unintuitive (for me at least).  

But Vellum? It was a breeze. 

Now, I'm not trying to be fancy yet. Maybe in the future I'll learn to do things like add custom art as section dividers and all of that. I'm just using the basic settings and options the book itself provides, but it really was as easy as importing my Word file, then playing around with menus until I found a look I liked. 

A few style options from Vellum

Then I went through the document, making sure the import hadn't screwed anything up, like chapter divisions or spacing, fixing the odd little things I found. 

For Acid Reign, I began each chapter with song lyrics from an imaginary song by the imaginary band I created for Abby, so I had to decide how that should look. It took a little finagling, but I settled on putting the lyrics in italics and right justified, with the song attribution in regular text, then adding a little three-star border to indicate where the actual chapter starts. That was as complicated as my layout for these three books got, and it only took me an hour or so to figure out then set up for each chapter. 

 

Page 1 of Acid Reign

Then I use the "Generate" button to create whatever kinds of files I need (in this case, .epub for ebooks and .pdf for print), then uploaded those to my printer/distributor (I went with Ingram for both, then uploaded the ebooks separately to Amazon so I could claim them for ACX and audiobook production). Ba-da-bing-ba-da-boom! It was so easy. 

The paper books and ebooks both seem to be working well. It all looks right on the page, indistinguishable really from books that came from big publishers with their our layout specialists. I was pleased that I could manage this bit myself and not have to hire the work. 

A to Z: Going Indie: U is for Unfinished

  
Welcome to Blogging A to Z! My theme this year is Going Indie. I hope you enjoy it. Don't forget to check out the other participating blogs. 

Last time, I talked about time management and my struggles on that front with taking on Indie publishing alongside everything else I do. One thing I'm having to come to peace with is letting things stay unfinished longer than is my liking. 

My work-in-progress is a Gothic romance called The Architect and the Heir. My goal is to finish writing the book by summer, so I can get it to an editor and perhaps bring it out this fall/winter. And I've made progress…it's just slower than I'd like. 

Draft cover for the Gothic

 

That's kind of ironic since one of the appeals of going indie for me was being in charge of my own timelines, being able to get more work out there faster. But then I remind myself that I'm already bringing out three books in 2026. That's a lot! I'm a greedy girl, though. I want it all!

But for now, this novel remains unfinished while I work on bringing my other three novels out into the world and into the hands of readers. Unfinished isn't a permanent state.