Charlene Teglia

Happy St. Patrick's Day.

If you haven't read Neil Gaiman's Graveyard Book, the title may be lost on you, but the Macabray is the dance the living and dead share. Since I feel like I just came back to life, I'm
dancing the Macabray today. Or lurching. Whatever. My balance isn't great due to my effed up inner ear. I stagger a lot even without codeine making me dizzier.

I woke up early Thursday a.m. to this horrible pain in my ear and deafness. I didn't actually know ear infections could get so bad, so fast. I didn't know they could spread to your jaw and make you unable to chew, either. Live and learn. For the last 5 days I've been medicated to the gills and mostly too dizzy to read or write, but this morning I woke up better. Very encouraging. Now if my hearing and balance would just come back, that'd be swell. Fortunately, I can type sitting down and I don't have to hear the keyboard.

Thanks for playing, everybody! The winner is Mommamia, via random.org's random number generator.

M, just use the contact form on the site to let me know what title you want and in what format. Congrats!

It's Read an Ebook Week! To celebrate, I'm giving away any ebook in my backlist to one of today's commenters, so comment away and be entered. You can also play in today's hunt in All Romance Ebook's March contest for a chance to win one of my ebooks and a $10 gift certificate; just click the contest graphic for instructions.

So there you have it, two chances to win some ereading material. Happy Read an Ebook Week!

So I really love Michigan, except for one thing; since October, it's been like living in the Plague State. Our kids went their whole lives without needing antibiotics until we moved here; youngest has been on them twice, oldest once in the past six months. Every time I turn around somebody is sniffling, running a fever, or some damn thing. I feel like running up and down the yard yelling "Da plague! Da plague!"

We take vitamins and eat our vegetables. I keep Clorox wipes everywhere, and I use them. Hand gel is in the car and in the kitchen. I recently added spray Lysol to the arsenal to get germs hanging in the air. I think it's probably the fact that we're not used to having actual winters. With snow and subzero temperatures. If that's the cause, the spring weather should turn things around. It's in the 50s this week with rain, and that's just like the coast. So the plague will end, right? Right?

Come on, spring. I'm counting on you.

There’s a lot of hype about social media, often promoted by people who don’t really understand social media, i.e., that people who are using it do not want to be marketed to. New authors are common victims of the “go start building an audience” directive without any guidance.

If you want to know how to use social media effectively, start by understanding that other people do not want your spam. They don’t want to be bombarded with promotional messages. They don’t want to be your fan on Facebook; if they did, they’d go find your fan page and join it. They don’t want to follow a blog that consists of nothing but “buy my book”.

Social media is not about direct sales, it’s about relationships. What social media does for you is it allows you to make connections and become part of a conversation.

Becoming part of the conversation online is exactly like joining a conversation in the real world. You don’t interrupt. You don’t hog or hijack the conversation. You’re polite. You listen as well as talk. You understand that listening to others doesn't obligate them to return the favor.

Blogging is a wonderful platform for sharing your ideas and finding likeminded people. Twitter lets you share news, links and images on the fly. Facebook lets you keep in touch with mini posts or longer ones and play games and share pictures. Yesterday I used Twitter and Facebook to collect book recs for my kids.

My general rule of thumb for posting is that I try to make it worth somebody’s while to read what I have to say. I try to entertain or inform or be thought-provoking or do all three. I can’t be entertaining or interesting to everybody, but by focusing on what I find entertaining or interesting, I’m appealing to people who are interested in the things I’m interested in.

Well, then, how does it help sell books? Bump factor, for starters. Bump factor is the sales term for that thing that happens when somebody comes across your name multiple times. Eventually they notice your name, and remember it, and when they’re standing in a store and they see your book, they think, “Hey, I’ve heard of that writer.” And that might be the thing that prompts them to pick your book up.

I put links to my website on my Facebook and Twitter pages. A pretty high percentage of my website visitors come from Twitter, and they stay for several minutes. Long enough to check out my backlist, my current books for sale, who I am and what I have to offer. My main page has “buy” links to current titles so I make it easy for somebody who wants to buy a book to do that. But I don’t bombard visitors with “buy” messages; I provide them with information so they can shop if they want to. If they don’t want to, they’re still free to follow me on my blog, on Facebook, on
Twitter, to look at my Flickr images and read about what I’m reading on Goodreads for as long as they find me interesting or entertaining.

What about those authors who aren’t active online? There are people who buy my books who never visit my website or find me via social media. Social media is not the be-all and end-all of a writer’s existence. My advice to the author who has been told to blog/tweet/get on Facebook is to go ahead if they want to and have the time and energy for it, understanding that it’s not a handful of magic beans. But it is pretty cool to be part of the conversation, and you never know when somebody you follow on Twitter might need a book to fill a publishing slot or a story to round out an anthology. If you're listening, you can catch those opportunities.

I have been sandbagged by exciting ideas over the last couple of days. Sadly, the market for alien warriors and futuristic supersoldiers in romance is limited. My brain has gone so SF lately. Nuns and Huns was only the beginning. I even broke down and joined SFWA because I could see the handwriting on the wall. When all you want to write about are aliens and monsters and people with superpowers, you maybe belong in speculative fiction.

Honestly, I think I've gotten by in romance as long as I have only because I wasn't writing traditional romance; I wrote in the erotic niche market where futuristic supersoldiers and alien warriors and yes, even Nuns and Huns, fit right in. The real problem is that I've yet to find NY publisher who wants alien warriors and futuristic supersoldiers. Monsters are an easier sell. I haven't exactly exhausted the possibilities, though. If my brain wants to write this stuff, I have to go with it and find a way to make it work.

Why? Why can't I just do something smarter, more marketable? Um, because I can't. I've tried the "write this, it's what will sell" route, and I discovered something about myself in the process. I didn't fully understand it until I watched
Temple Gradin's TED talk, though.

I write the movies I see in my head.

Apparently this is not normal. Apparently most people do not think in pictures. (Lest you think this makes writing a book easy, sometimes I can see the scene perfectly and yet I cannot get the language right. So I rewrite and rewrite and rewrite and cry and rewrite some more and beat my head against the wall and rewrite it again. Writing a book is hard work, no matter what your process is.)

What I've learned is that while I can create the right atmosphere to ask for a specific type of story and get the movie rolling when it doesn't happen spontaneously, it has to be an idea that is innately "my" kind of idea to begin with. If my initial reaction to a "you should write this" is "but I am not excited about that" or "who would want to read about that?" or "my God that's revolting", it's not my kind of idea. My kind of idea makes me go "ooooo. YEAH!" And the movie machine is off and running.

It takes excitement to get a story off the ground*, and if I don't find it exciting, interesting, a story I would want to read, writing it is going to be an enormous struggle. And since writing a book is hard to begin with, why set myself up for an impossible mission I won't even enjoy?

These are the things you learn through experience; what your process is and how it works, what you can and can't change about it, what kind of story is "your" kind of story and what kind you shouldn't touch with a ten-foot pole, no matter how much money somebody might be willing to pay you to write it. And why you are going to find yourself gearing up to write about futuristic supersoldiers even though Everybody Knows they don't sell.

Maybe to write the ideas I love, I will have to go write another genre, like YA. Or even straight SF/F. This is not the end of the world. What would be the end of the world, or at least the end of my creative world, would be turning off the movie machine instead of being entranced by the amazing, wonderful fact that I have one and using it. 

Also, I am now gripped with the idea that somebody should be getting graphic novels and comic books into schools for autism-spectrum kids above the picture-book age. Because a kid who thinks in pictures will have an easier time reading if they can "see" the story too.

Meanwhile, I need to gently direct the movie making mechanism back to the current works so I can clear my schedule for things like spring break and summer break. Now that it knows I will write the SF stuff later, it'll cooperate.

*The flip side to this is that things can happen to kill the excitement when the story is in a vulnerable unfinished stage. I'm actually contemplating going back to writing everything on spec and selling afterward to keep this from happening.

I've been revisiting a very good book,
Seven Steps on the Writer's Path, this week. If you haven't read it before, it goes through the stages of the creative process with tricks to get moving again if you get hung up on any of them. In my experience every project does go through those stages, and very often if I get stuck, it's on step 5, letting go.

There are various things that I've found help me let go. One is my book playlist. The right music helps put me in the right mindset for the story. Studies have shown music can alter brain waves. Music helps bypass the thinking, critical brain, the side that gets in the way when the emotional, intuitive, symbolic side that does all the real heavy-lifting when it comes to creativity needs to get on with the job.

Thinking about what I want is another way to let go. Why do I want to tell this story? What do I want it to be? What do I want next in my writing life? When you want something enough, it's easier to let go of where you are or what you're hanging onto and reach for it.

My current playlist:

• Billy Idol, White Wedding
• Social Distortion, When She Begins
• Naruto, Rising Dragon
• Naruto, Hero's Comeback
• Social Distortion, Ball and Chain
• Foo Fighters, Learn to Fly
• Powerman 5000, Action
• Social Distortion, When the Angels Sing
• Mazzy Star, Fade Into You
• The Clash, Rock the Casbah

Good sources for music online: Rhapsody, low-cast monthly membership for unlimited listening, or Lala, listen to any song once free, buy it for .89 cents.

Everything in the yard is budding. I don't care how much snow is still on the ground, it's spring. I will get my seedlings going as soon as I have all the starter seed. I'm eating spring honey from our local beekeeper. (If you have allergies, this is a way to build up immunity to your local pollen. Find a beekeeper near you and ask for spring honey!)

We're planning the garden. Went over hoop house plans last night. The cat is spending more time outside; the winter days of "NO thank you, my nose just froze" are past. (Seriously. On cold days we'd open the door for him, he'd sniff, back up, and go lay down someplace warm.) Birds are flocking around the trees; we need to get the bird house up so somebody can build a nest in it.

Also on my spring to do list; get done with books. Because once summer is here, I don't know how much I'll be working. Kids will be home all day, and we'll have activities going on, and I'm not sure I want to add deadlines to that. More books can get written in the fall.

Are you full of spring fever and itching to do everything on your list?