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Author: Kelly

Pitchapalooza in Review

Published by Kelly on March 1, 2011

Last night I attended a Pitchapalooza event at the KC library and learned a lot of great things about how I can improve my ability to pitch The Redheaded Stepchild, both in query letters and in casual conversation with people. Here are a few of the takeaways I got:

  • Finding good comparison titles is really important. I need to do a better job of this, cause I’ve really got nothing. But I haven’t been working that hard at it, either.
  • Your pitch should give the pitchee an idea of a beginning, middle, and end to your story. This is a challenge for me since the plot is not chronologically structured, but there’s definitely room for improvement.
  • Ending with a question is a way to hook the audience and build intrigue.
  • You must make the intended audience fall in love with the main character (even if they just love to hate him).
  • Use your pitch as a way to demonstrate what a great writer you are. It shouldn’t sound like a use car salesman’s pitch.
  • Think of your book pitch as if you’re pitching a movie, and think to yourself, “who’s the guy on the poster?”

If you’ll recall, one of my goals for the year was to attend more of these events, so I am glad I went, even though I didn’t get picked to pitch. It was a free event, but I had some leftover cash so I bought the book and got the 20-minute consultation with @TheBookDoctors (find them on Twitter). So here is my pitch from last night… stay tuned for the refined version.

My book, The Redheaded Stepchild, is a series of non-chronological, thematically structured slice-of-life short stories about a young woman coming of age in a small town and her complicated relationship with her newly-appointed but icy stepmother.

Don’t get the wrong idea; it’s far from a Cinderella story. There are no singing animals, evil stepsisters, Prince Charming, or happily ever after – just a small town girl trying to establish her identity as anything else and leave her mark on the world, while struggling to escape the reality of where she comes from, and what her life is now.

At around 65,000 words, this 12-story book has the flexibility for publication as a series or as an entire manuscript. It is a work of mainstream literary fiction that will have a focused appeal to women and young adults, but is written for all who love a great story and have an appreciation for detailed prose.

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Weekly writing challenge 1/1/2011

Published by Kelly on January 10, 2011

As part of my writer goals for 2011, I am making myself write something every week. One of the things that helped keep me motivated last year was to give myself a weekly writing challenge. If I got inspired by something, I made it my challenge to put it to paper. If someone threw out a challenge, I picked it up. Some were easier than others, some ended up getting killed in the creative process, and some turned out to be phenomenal.

I was handed this challenge by one of my Twitter followers who is hosting a contest. I typically don’t go for writing contests because they usually have some ridiculous price tag and a ridiculously unattainable or puny prize. I also typically don’t bite for horror, because it’s not really my genre, but then again, I don’t really have a genre so I figured I could pull it off. It may or may not be as predictable plot-wise as every horror film from the 1980s, and may or may not be far too much like Rosemary’s Baby, but I hope what it lacks in originality it makes up for with literary merit and proseworthiness. But you be the judge of that.

New short story – The Rainbow Prison.

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My first electronic publication

Published by Kelly on January 6, 2011

One of the cool things about getting smaller works, like poetry and short stories, published is that they are considered small potatoes. The publisher gets one-time rights to print (or copy and paste) your work in their work, and then the rights revert right back to the author, which means the author can do anything she wants with it.

Trouble with this is, no magazine wants to publish something that has already been published somewhere else. They want to be the first ones to publish your work. So, after that manuscript has been published, it’s essentially useless.

Unless, as I recently discovered, you self-publish it as an e-book. I found Smashwords quite some time ago, and was very intrigued with their business model. If you’re unfamiliar, I suggest you go check them out. I decided to self-publish my short story Two Steps Forward, since it was published in a print journal late last year. After all, no one else is going to publish it, and it’s short enough I figured it would be a good one to cut my e-book formatting teeth on.  I read the Smashwords style guide, which was amazing detailed and full of information, but also made me inordinately grateful I wasn’t trying to format a science textbook for self e-publishing.

After a few hours, I had my first e-book. Yes, it’s 3 pages long, but they still call it an e-book. I’m not the only to put their short stories on there, so I figure it’s fair. If you’re a Kindler, as I recently am, you can find it here. Hell, even if you’re not, you can just download the HTML. I have no way of knowing how many people bought the first issue of Line Zero, where this short story first appeared, and I have even less way of knowing how many of those people read my story, but I do know that in less than 48 hours, I’ve had just shy of 1o0 people download my free short story to their e-reading devices, and only two of them are people I know. I’ve also already gotten one four-star review. All with very minimal tweeting and facebook promotion.

I made this one free, since it’s my first crack at it, and it’s already been published in print. You can bet your last dollar that I will definitely be adding more of my own published works to Smashwords. If I can get 92 downloads in two days, I bet I could probably charge 99 cents for my next work and at least make $20. And that will be the first time I get paid as a writer. Hello, 2011.

Unless, of course, you count my professional life.

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2010 in writer review

Published by Kelly on December 31, 2010

The week between Christmas and New Year’s is always a time of annual reflection for me, and as I was reflecting on the year that was 2010, I realized how much of a success it has been, and here’s why:

  • I had a total of seven manuscripts published in either print journals, online magazines, websites, or some other medium. Before this year, I had none.
  • I had nine works get accepted for publication. Two of them (ironically enough, the first two) have yet to go to print, so I can’t really count them in the “published” category. What can I say? The world of traditional print publishing is slow.
  • I got a book deal. I didn’t take the book deal, because it was really crappy, but if I can get a really crappy book deal, chances are I can get a less crappy book deal if I keep at it.
  • I started reaching out to other writers, booksellers, and other publishing industry people on Twitter. My relationships on Twitter are directly responsible for three of those seven publications.
  • I pimped my writing – mainly my novel – at South by Southwest and reached out to industry people at the trade shows. This led to two of my publications, both of which were accepted for the site’s best-of-the-year collection.
  • I got a Kindle. This is going to help me understand how writing for this medium is different and will also give me instant access to other independent writers like me and their work.
  • I read. It should be common sense that all writers are readers, but I think we take it for granted. Every time I read something from another author I learn something new.
  • I began participating in an organization to help me with better public speaking skills. I have this pesky slight stutter that comes and goes, and I am an introvert like most writers, and feel uncomfortable talking about my own work, like most writers.
  • I wrote more than 1o new manuscripts. I started far more, but part of a writer’s work is killing the crap.

So, I would say that on a semi-professional writer’s level, the year was a wild success. But I have to keep getting better. Since resolutions are just imaginary, unattainable pipe dreams, I set yearly goals instead of New Year’s Resolutions. Here are my writer’s goals for 2010:

  • Join a writer’s group. I didn’t do it this year because I am not sure if I will be in Kansas City for an entire year, and I didn’t want to pay the year’s dues if I wasn’t going to be.
  • Attend book tour and other events at local bookstores. I’ve already signed up for Pitchapalooza by Rainy Day Books next month, and I attended my first book tour event this year and couldn’t believe I hadn’t done it before. The more I see how other people talk about their work, the better I’ll know how to talk about my own.
  • Give out more business cards at South by Southwest than I did last year. It was my first attempt last year, and I have to get more shameless about it.
  • Write something new, even if it’s just a sentence, once a week, for a total of 25 new manuscripts.
  • Read more books, with 50% of them being independent authors. The Kindle will come in handy here 🙂
  • Publish 10 manuscripts. If I can get 9 accepted manuscripts in one year, I can get at least 10 more if I try harder.
  • Submit something every week. This is always the goal, but I don’t always reach it.
  • Start submitting my novel to both agents and independent book publishers, especially those who specialize in e-print.

I think this is a good set of attainable goals, and I look forward to all that 2011 will bring.

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New poem up: The Split Fingernail

Published by Kelly on December 29, 2010

I wrote this poem a couple days ago and as standard practice dictates, I came back to it today and put my official stamp of approval on it. It’s called The Split Fingernail and it includes a made-up word, gravy, and lots of other cool detail.

It’s about this pesky fingernail I have that has grown in split down the middle for the last 3 years, after smashing it when I was working a side waitressing gig trying to make ends meet as a member of the newly-divorced.

Enjoy 😉

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Another poem selected for “Best of the Year” collection!

Published by Kelly on December 27, 2010

A few weeks ago, a poem I submitted way back when to an independent online magazine was selected for their “Best of the Year” collection. I found out about this site last year when I was at South by Southwest. It’s a collaborative content site that posts new submissions of art, literature, poetry, and other random stuff every hour. I submitted two poems to them in the last year, and they accepted both of them, and now both of them have been featured in their “Best of the First Year” collection!

You can check it out here:

http://w5ran.com/2010/12/best-of-the-first-year-to-a-moth/

http://w5ran.com/2010/11/best-of-the-first-year-things-in-my-stuff-drawer/

I must be New Years resolved to write more stuff in 2011!

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My life with Kindle: Part 1

Published by Kelly on December 26, 2010

Apparently the Santa in my life thought I was just nice enough to deserve a brand new Kindle for Christmas. Eventually, maybe, I would have gotten it for myself, but it really is a very thoughtful gift and so far, I love it. It’s also important because it will probably be the first format I publish my novel in, and as writers, we’ve got to get with the program.

My favorite feature on it so far is the ability to download a sample of a book before buying the whole thing. I decided to try this feature out on a writer I follow on Twitter who has done a shitload of self-promotion and whose persistence I figured warranted my no-cost 30-minute (40 if you count the part where I stopped to reheat my leftover Christmas ham) perusal. On Kindle, his book’s list price is $5.99, which is about 3 times what I typically pay for a book, and since I had the option to try it before buying, I leapt at the chance.

I was THIS close to buying the book after the sample, and it wasn’t even that good. Still, it had enough good moments to make buying the book a weighty decision in my mind. I know the sample will sucker me into cracking open the wallet for much better written books in the future.

It also gave me a little confidence boost. After all, this guy isn’t some schmo who self-published in his basement. He’s a guy that got picked up by an independent press that does their business mostly in ebooks. He was trying way, WAY too hard to imitate Tucker Max but did so badly. He overused metaphors and even did some shifts in tense in the same sentence – things even a lowly barely-published writer with a BA in Creative Writing from a state school could pull off. If this guy can get accepted by an independent book publisher and charge $5.99 for his work, then I probably can, too.

New Year’s Resolution to follow…

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New Essay: Christmas with Just Dad

Published by Kelly on December 7, 2010

I’ve posted a new manuscript that is somewhere between a flash fiction piece and an essay. I’m not sure which fits more, so I put it in essays because it starts out most like an essay. It’s called Christmas with Just Dad and you can read all about it here.

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