write and publish a book

typed wrong date in this challenge starting over

I have a desk again! Yippie! And a chair too. It seems like ages since I’ve had a desk to sit down at. Forget the fire, my desk didn’t survive the flood. I’ve been without a desk for much much longer than we’d been homeless.



I am sitting at the desk right now. It feels so good. I can write without my back hurting again. It is so good to not have to sit on the floor to do my writing anymore. I had forgotten how good it feels to write and not have my back hurt when I get done. I had almost forgotten how good it was to have furniture.



It’s a nice desk. One of those white and black artists` drafting desks, with the tilting adjustable top. Can you believe it? Someone actually threw this thing out! Well, I’m so glad they did, cause otherwise I wouldn’t be sitting at it writing right now. Granted the shelves are missing and the white vinyl top has been peeled off, and it’s top’s been spray painted so to make it white again, but still, it’s a good sturdy desk and it’s useable no matter what it looks like. I’m glad we found it before the trash men came to pick up the rubbish.



The chair isn’t as good. The back is missing, so you have to use it like a stool, and the legs are all loose and wiggly, but it’s still usable, and it matches the desk. It’ll do for now.



Now I’ve got 2 yellow leather side chairs, one orange recliner chair, and orange 3-legged coffee table, a white desk, and a black desk chair. Not much, but it’s a start at having some furniture again. And I found every single one of them by sifting through dumpsters and trash bins. I can’t believe people are so wasteful an actually throw these things out! I’m hoping to find a mattress of some sort, like maybe a couple of sofa cushions or some such thing, that I could sleep on, cause the floors are so hard to sleep on. Sleeping on the ground, when living in the tarp-tent-thing that I used to live in, was much softer, and much more comfortable. The dirt kind of shifts around to fit your body, but the floor of the apartment is just so hard and stiff and uncomfortable to sleep on. I liked sleeping under the tarp better, cause the ground is more comfortable than this floor is. I kind of miss being outdoors, having walls around you is almost like being in a cage. I’ve tried sleeping in the recliner a couple of times, but I just can’t sleep sitting up. (The recliner don’t work, it just kind of rocks a little instead.)



I’m so glad to have this desk though. It’ll make my writing so much easier now. I’ll be able to write each and every day again, and write longer too. Trying to write on the floor is just murder on my back, which is why I’ve had such a hard time hitting my writing goal. It’s hard to write when you back starts hurting soon after you start writing. Since the flood/fire, nothing in our lives has been the same, including my writing. I used to write every single day, never missing a day, now I’m lucky if I get to write even one day a week. This desk is so going to change that. I’ll be able to write without my back hurting, so I’ll be able to write longer and more often.

A few years back, in 2003 accourding to what I wrote on the cover of the notebook, I had started writing a book. The notebook got lost, and over time I forgot about it.


A few weeks ago, as some of you may know, we were forced off of the land that had been in our family since our ancestor founded this town, over 300 years ago. In the midst of it all, we had to clean everything out of the house. My brother found some lost notebooks of mine, that had somehow found a way to survive both the flood of May 2006 and the fire of October 2006.


The notebooks found, were soggy and wet and molded, but still intact and so, I made an attempt to dry them out. The ink, must have been waterproof, because it still there and still readible in spite of the condition of the pages themselves.


What a great find though. Some of the papers were lost sections of my Twighlight Manor series. One, as I said was a book I started in 2003. Well, I know I’m working on SHIVER right now, but I’m going to take up where I left off on this book as well.

My writing goal is to write between 1,000 to 2,000 words per day. My average per day, is much less… more like 400 – 700 per day, once every three days instead of every day. Well, it’s better than nothing, and I’m still inching my way to my goal.

My problem seems to lie in that I get the urge to write at times when I just can’t write, but than at the time I set aside to write, I’m to bored or restless or want to read or whatever… anything that is not writing basicly.

I’ll be right in the middle of something, say walking my dog, or cleaning the catbox, when this great idea well pop into my head, with not a pen or paper in sight. Than an hour or two later, I’ll finally get to some paper, and I find I can’t think of what I wanted to write down, or else I can’t get it worded right, or worse I’ve forgotten it all together!

I write amazing outlines. You should see the detailed historical timelines I can come up with for my story ideas… than I sit down, my outline in hand, ready to type the story itself and nothing. I’ll just sit staring at a blank screen wondering what to write about.

Than I’ll start typeing away, got a 1,000 words before I know it… WOO-HOO! I’m done for the day! Than I read what I wrote. Not one word of it goes with the book I’m working on; instead it goes with some book idea I gave up on 4 or 5 years ago.

sheesh! Now I have to start all over again, cause those 1,000 words didn’t count!

I find myself doing this all the time… the result is I end up working on 4 maybe 5 stories at any one given time, and never finish them on deadline.

The up side: When I do get finshed, I have 4 or 5 stories finished at the same time.

I’ve got a flower garden… with tall rose bushes over 13 feet tall. There’s one on each side of the path, and they grew up entwining to make a natural archway. Little songbirds sing and twitter all day long. It’s so peaceful and relaxing. There’s these old mossy logs, I sit on to do my writing. I find that if I’m stuck on my typeing on the computer, that the best way for me to get back on focus is to pack up a few pens and a lot of paper and head out and sit in the garden. By the time it’s dark I’ll have 30 or 40 pages written and I get to stay up all night typeing them into the computer. For me that is the best cure for “writer’s block”. I can’t explain it, but I do my best writing and my highest word count writing when sitting in the garden, listen to song birds and writing in longhand.

~~EK

question I see time and time again is: Is name of business here a self publisher, vanity press, or traditional publisher? How do I tell the differance?

While there are many branches of the publishing tree, these 3 are the big limbs, from which all the branches shoot off of. Here is how to tell them apart:

a self publisher, is an author who gets a business license, buys the ISBN #s, hires a printing press (print shop/printer) to print the books, than sells them themself… the author keeps 100% of the profits, because no one pays royalities; you keep 100% of the copyright (which btw, does not cost a penny)... you market the book and distribute it through local bookstores and Amazon.com

a vanity press is a print shop/printer/printing press, that does that for you, they usually ask you to pay money for them to edit your MS, they also chagre you if you want a color cover, (often they charge you for such things as “the right to keep your copyright”, or the ISBN #, in addition to the cost of everything else they chage) and than pays you a percentange (royalty), after you first pay them for the books… the royalty they pay, though it may sound high, is actually very low, because you don’t see that money until after they have deducted what you “owe them” for printing the books… in short, they make money, while you go broke, and you may or may not get to keep the rights to your book, depending on how much money you paid to buy your own rights back from them… you market the book and distribute it through local bookstores and Amazon.com

a traditional publisher, hires editors who read your MS which you send to them; they recive thousands of MSs each week, so it may take up to 2 years before they get around to reading it; after they read it, they either reject it or accept it; if they accept it, you well be sent a contact (and often with a recommendation that you go over it with your literay agent/lawyer before you sign it). Once you sign the contract and send it back, than the publisher’s laywer checks it to be certain that all is in order (and done legally). The publisher is given the tempory copyright allowing them to print and distribute your book to the public… they hire and editor to type set and spell check your MS, than they hire an artist to create the cover art, they distribute the book to bookstores worldwide, you never own them a cent, they pay you royalties

in other words:

self publishing is you starting your own business (a publishing house) and earning an income

vanity press is you doing a lot of hard work, getting your book printed, and getting scammed out of the money that should be yours, while they get rich and leave you with nothing

traditional publishing is you hireing a business to to the work for you and you both earn an income

I hope this helps

~~EK

well, I came on here today, because I am working on my novel… the one for this chalenge this time! it’s a ghost story, about a haunted house with several assorted ghosts living in it.

the “prime ghost” is the ghost of a black cat

the secondary ghost is a spirit possessed tree in the front yard

other ghosts include a hell hound, a bride, and a group of “little people” (not yet sure what to call these guys, they are somewhat like drawves or gnomes or leprechuans)

basicly I’m looking for any ideas, anyone might have, that they think would be useful in writing a ghost story; I’m looking for ghost cliches, urban ghost stories, how ghosts came to be, why do they haunt the places they haunt, how did they become ghosts, how can they escape from being a ghost, why might they haunt one person and not another, why are some ghosts goos while others are bad, how do ghosts kill people and why, and just about any ghostly idea you can come up with.

thanks for your help.

Yesterday I wrote above and beyound my daily 1000 – 2000 words a day. Only problem is, what I wrote was not for my current book project! I had this idea for an older project I was working on a few years back, and just sat down and wrote and wrote and wrote. I got a lot done, but for the wrong project for this challenge! eek!

Than today rolls in and I find my self writeing away, and making good time… on a third project!

If I keep going like this I’ll never get to the end of any of them! I need motivation to stick to just one book at a time!

Well, I’m 2 weeks into May, and not sticking to my schedual very well. I’m getting about 700 words a day, done at a rate of one in every 3 days! I need to at least try to write more often or maybe write more when I do write. I did so much better during NaNo 06.

Well, my long-term goal for this project is to have it in print via LuLu before October, so I guess I can let it continue the way I’m going, cause at this rate I’ll still get finished in time. I may have to give myself 2 months to write instead of one.

How’s every one else doing?

My new book (Shiver) is well underway:

summary and outlines have been written up;
the plot is semi-worked out;
the cover has already been made and approved;
the first chapter is going along good

I’m striving to write 1000 to 2000 words a day. I figure that I can do that, cause I’ve done it before through NaNoWriMo; in that case the group’s goal was for it’s members to write 1667 words per day for 30 days ending with a short novel 50,000 words long or approx. 175 printed pages. In the end I had just under 200,000 words and almost 250 pages. I set that book aside though, and have yet to publish it. My NaNo entry was more of a “private book”, a personal challange to myself to see if I could push myself to write each and every day. I did and proved to myself that I could do it if I put my mind to it.

And so now I’m working on a book, using the same writing methods used by NaNoWriMo. This time I’m going at it with the goal of writing a publishable book, and to do it in three months or less, writing 1000 to 2000 words a day.

Let you know how it goes.

~~EK