Before I get distracted (again) by emails, promo, and my latest book, I thought I’d tell you about my new office away from home.
 
Ever since my DH lost his job, I lost my peace and quiet, not to mention time in my home office. He follows me everywhere out of boredom when he’s not actively looking for work. Needless to say, my writing has slowed to a crawl despite my ever-increasing “talks” with him about leaving me alone for a few hours.
 
Desperation began to seep into my brain. Crazy schemes like drugging him into somnolence, killing him and burying him under the vegetable garden, and booting him out of the house were hatched and discarded.
 
More viable plans like getting up early (my best bio-rhythm is for morning hours and working late at night is hopeless, trust me) failed. He’d awaken, feel the empty place next to him, and come find me!
 
I don’t know about anyone else, but my income has been affected by the sluggish economy. I have to work to pay some of the bills. I can’t just take time off. I have deadlines to make, but can’t afford a leased office space, not even a shared one. Read the rest of this entry »

Today we lost two people who were influential to the last of the baby boomers.  Farrah Fawcett succumbed to anal cancer today at the age of 62.  Michael Jackson presumably has passed from cardiac arrest just shy of his 51st birthday (Aug. 29th).

Farrah’s stint on Charlie’s Angels brought about the popularity of the layered, blow-dryer look, her locks fabulous.  She also brought attention to Spousal Abuse with her portrayal of a battered wife in “The Burning Bed.”

Michael’s influence on music is as important as that of Elvis.  He made music lyrical again, imbued it with energy and creativity.  His physical ability to do amazing things with dance is still emulated.

Both Farrah and Michael endured a lot of pain, physical, mental, and emotional.  Perhaps now they are enjoying the peace that only a spirit freed of its earthly trappings can have.

May they both rest in that newfound freedom.

If any of you are on Twitter, Twitter Search #RWAFAIL and/or #RWACHANGE. If you missed it, you should read RWA President Pershing’s comments about what a bunch of hacks e-published authors are:

http://espan-rwa.com/rwa-president-pershing-responds/

I’m usually one of the last to abandon ship, but I did so this year. This shows I made the right decision.

Although all of us here know what a fiasco Trisk was, it wasn’t because it was an electronic publisher. It was a publisher that made bad decisions and had a few other issues. E publishers do come and go, and guess what, so do NY Print publishers. I guess Ms. Pershing hasn’t been reading Publisher’s Weekly recently. Pubs out of business, pubs restructuring, pubs laying off, pubs “down-sizing” their editoral and promotional staffs.

I’ve never been ashamed or sad that I choose to e publish. A) it was my choice B) My conscious feels better about being kinder to our planet C) My writing buddies made here and at other e houses have been as supportive if not more so, than any of the “published” RWA recognized authors I’ve associated with.

E Publishers come in all sizes; EC being the biggest, companies like my Aspen being among the smaller. I’m pretty sure that it is also true of print publishers (ok, so I’m being sarcastic)…and if you were to compare similar tiers in big houses to indie houses you’d probably see the same slide in royalties.

The insistance of making e companies do business the print way is ludicrous. It is barely working for the print companies right now. I don’t know about anyone else, but I was taught to emulate SUCCESSFUL models not failures. Pershing wants epublishers to throw money at authors and thus use that standard as proof that a publishing company is really a publishing company and that an author is really an author.  Another business model that doesn’t apply to e-books and one that has outlived its usefulness (rather like returns).  This is truly a case of comparing apples to oranges. Okay, so both are fruits, and other than the seeds it is pretty much where the similarity ends. Why does RWA insist on comparing ebooks to print books?

They are not the same and it is about time RWA tried trying to make this square peg fit in their round hole.

Lucynda Storey
www.LucyndaStorey.com

A lot of fiction writers are rejected for simple things.  I’ll be posting here little tidbits to help you improve your chances of receiving an acceptance letter.

If you want to improve your writing you really, really need to nail this skill:

Keep a scene to one point of view, view the action through one set of eyes. Read the rest of this entry »

Just this week, Publisher’s Daily announced the purchase by Amazon of the Stanza format for e-Books.  Stanza format is used to enable IPhone e-Book reading.   You can read the article at Publishers Daily by clicking on the link.

How good is e-Book reading on the IPhone?  Pretty darn.  There is a fair amount of scrolling, but the font size can be changed and so worries concerning the type being too small are addressed.  You can also read black on white, or white on black and the IPhone will display color images.

Several of our authors have made booktrailer videos for their stories at Aspen Mountain Press and we are excited to share that we are embedding these videos to give our readers more about what the stories are about.

Who is Offing the Collectors

Cougar Club: Barely Legal

The Reckoning of Asphodel

Breaking the Covenant

The Long Way Home

Del Fantasma: Virgin Special

Scarred

Stop by and take a look at the trailers and pick up an earth friendly e-Book!

Character emotions remain some of the trickiest writing there is.  All too often authors fall prey to cliche phrases and dilute their writing by telling us what emotion we are supposed to be experiencing, rather than showing us what the character is going through.

In Creating Character Emotions by Ann Hood, authors are provided with a new way of expressing character emotions.  How?  Ms. Hood gives practical exercises drawing upon the author’s memories of experiencing the emotion being discussed.

The book is organized by emotions and then three poor examples are given with an explanation of why they are poor.  The author then follows up with three good examples and explanation.  Finally, she provides the reader with three exercises to write so the reader can create fresh writing for the emotion. Read the rest of this entry »

I am pleased and honored to announce that the third book in my epic fantasy series The Asphodel Cycle 3:Tempation of Asphodel has been nominated for a Golden Rose Award for Best Sci Fi/Fantasy Novel of 2007 by Love Romances and More.  To say that I’m stunned is an understatement; to even be mentioned on the same nominee list as Christine Feehan is beyond anything I ever dreamed about when I first started to kill off Elves in The Reckoning of Asphodel.

The voting continues until April 15th. You can find the voting page here and can vote for your favorites in several categories under the Love Romances and More aegis. It’s a wonderful thing to see nominees from small presses like Aspen Mountain Press alongside well known authors from huge publishing companies. It says a lot about how e-presses and independent publishers are changing the face of the industry.

Thank you so much to all of the faithful readers of Aspen Mountain books and especially fans of Asphodel.  None of this would be possible without you. So you have my greatest love and appreciation for the support you’ve continuously shown to me and to my work. Now go vote!

Cheers and many hugs–

Celina Summers

From time to time things happen that irk us in regards to our jobs/careers/professions.  We’ve all been there, probably more times that any of us would like to count.

Sometimes we really need to blow off steam, vent our frustrations, and just get our irritation off our chests.  There are right ways and wrong ways to go about getting this release. Read the rest of this entry »

Metamorphosis

Metamorphosis is a journey through the short stories of critically acclaimed author Celina Summers.  Every story deals with a transformation–from a world where the Church places the blame for original sin upon men to a New Orleans garden that brings a play to life. The collection culminates with a previously unpublished prequel to Summers’ best selling epic fantasy series The Asphodel Cycle. Sometimes funny, sometimes horrifying, Metamorphosis is a romp through the realms of speculative fiction–where anything can happen and nothing is quite as it seems.

Coming March 27, 2009 from Aspen Mountain Press

Edited by Lori Basiewicz

Cover art by Renee George

Metamorphosis is a collection of stories in the spirit of the original Metamorphoses, written by the Roman poet Ovid (Publius Ovidius Naso 43 BC — 17 or 18 AD). His Metamorphoses  serves as the primary source material for many of the transformation myths in Greco-Roman mythology. He also wrote the scandalous Ars Amatoria, a treatise on love and seduction, that eventually led to his exile from Rome by the emperor Augustus. My Metamorphosis explores the transformations of speculative fiction–not necessarily literal transformations like Ovid’s, but changes that make modern speculative fiction the new and exciting genre-bending world that it is. 

Metamorphosis’ stories range from humorous to dark, from fantasy to horror and I had a lot of fun putting them all together.  Look for it on March 27.  Also, in honor of Read an Ebook Week, I’m giving away a set of my series The Asphodel Cycle!  Go to my blog Elf Killing and Other Hobbies and leave a comment in the thread and you’ll be eligible to win.  Enter by midnight on Sunday and I’ll announce a winner on Monday.  That way you can be ready for the final installment of the series Apostle of Asphodel when it’s released in May.