Jayne Ann Krentz

Because I work for one of the busiest library systems in the country, I attend a lot of author events. It's part of my job to set them up, sometimes I host them and I always learn something from every author I hear speak about their book, writing experiences and career.

I'm actually shocked when we have a popular author at one of our libraires and the crowd is "thin" -- because I think one of the best ways you can learn about writing is to attend free writing workshops and author events offered at libraries and book stores. In the Seattle area, on any given night you can find award-winning authors from any genre. I'm lucky to live in one of the "magnet cities" for book tours. Even better, we have a LOT of authors living in the Pacific Northwest.

One of my favorites is Jayne Ann Krentz, who also writes historical romance as Amanda Quick and futuristic romance as Jayne Castle. I remember the very first Amanda Quick book I picked up, Mistress. When I discovered her smart heroines and funny, engaging style, I devoured her books. Later on, as I developed my own writing, she was my model. I didn't know until I met her many years later that she was a librarian. I should have known. Librarians are the iconic masters, (or maybe I should say Mistresses) of my universe.

While many people are familiar with Jayne's writing, they probably don't know how much effort she's put into helping to make the connection between the romance genre and library staff. She speaks at library conventions like PLA (Public Library Association), has been part of panels for our library system to talk about the importance of genre fiction and makes time to present book events at libraries. As the book market shrinks along with discretionary dollars, she understands that readers will need to turn to libraries as an important resource and that programs and events at libraries will help authors find new audiences.

From the perspective of both my "day job" and my writing career -- I'm grateful that bestselling authors value their relationship with libraires. Take a page from Jayne's book, and be nice to your friendly neighborhood librarian. You never know what she's reading, they're sneaky that way. And a lot of them love to read romance.

Back in the Saddle Again

After six long years of writing, submitting and more writing, (not to mention even more submitting), I sold my second book.

As I reflect on what took me so long, I keep coming up with different answers. Were the sales of my first book too low? I have no idea what my print run was, because my publisher didn't share those numbers. Possibly. Was it an awful book? Maybe, although I received very good reviews and lots of great feedback from my readers. Was the timing all wrong?

I think that's a big part of it. My first book was published as part of a national contest, and although I didn't win first place, all the books from the three finalists were published. It was wonderful to finally see my book on the shelves at bookstores. I loved signing at events and attending conferences as a "published author".

But then I wrote my next Western historical romance, and received no interest from my publisher, and even though I came close to selling in several instances, I finally gave up and put the book away. I wrote other things, contemporary romance, a historical romance with paranormal elements.

I kept submitting.

Last summer, I decided to submit the Western to a new publisher I'd been hearing a lot about, The Wild Rose Press. I received a request for a partial almost immediately. Then I was given a bit of encouragement. The editor told me there were problems, but she felt I could fix them.

Would I be willing to revise the partial?

I know there are writers out there who would refuse to do this, but I'm not one of them. I want to become a better writer, it's my first objective. So of course I revised the partial.

Then she requested the entire manuscript. And she asked me if I would be willing to revise that, with her suggestions?

Of course and then I got the response I'd been waiting for since 2003. "I want to buy your book."

That's the best possible ending! Stay tuned because this is just the beginning of a new chapter in my life.

Reflecting on 27 Things

Now that we've completed the final lesson for the 27 Things Project, we were asked to reflect upon the experience. There are a few things I feel compelled to comment about.

• Sometimes the lessons sounded so easy, but when I arrived at the website to fulfill the commands of the 27 Things -- it wasn't quite as easy as it sounded. I found that I had to repeat several exercises several times in order to understand what was being asked of me. I think there was an assumption that it would be "intuitive" -- and sometimes it was. But for a beginner, there were challenges.
• Password Overload - Is it my google or my flickr, should I have used the same one for everything? Nearly every site wanted me to register, create an identity and unique password. Eventually, I was in the midst of an identity crisis. (But recovered by going to MySpace, where I found who I really was!)
• There was lots of fun stuff, and some cool stuff and then there was the way cool stuff. I plan to review the lessons now that I have more time, and will learn more about many of the things we were introduced to.
• I manage to impress folks with my profound knowledge of the internet. They think I'm so cool and tech-savvy. I chat with my friends and family via MySpace, send photo montages of my trips to friends, use tags on de.lic.ous and brag about all the books I'm reading by stacking them LibraryThing. I have a blog. Best of all, I have my very own SouthPark character.
• Would I do it again? Yes-sir-ee. (maybe we can develop a website with that word, something reassures people when they have to make a decision, yes.sir.ee.com, when you feel confused!)

It was fun to learn new things, and now my goal in life is to learn more new things. But it will require that I forget a few old things, so as of today, I am wiping the theme song from "Beverly Hillbillies" from my memory.

Dean Koontz Was Cursed!

I've thought for a long time that one of the best uses we could make of the web would be to connect our readers to authors. I found a series of podcasts by one of my favorite authors, Dean Koontz.

http://www.podcast.net/show/86121

He talks about his books and writing. The best program so far is his talk about his early career and how nearly every publisher he signed with went out of business. He calls it the "Koontz Curse". It's always great for new writers to learn about all the hurdles the NY Bestselling authors went through in their career.

A great way to promote our author events would be to put the podcast address on our webpage along with the information about the program. Even better would be a blog too that let the author interact with our patrons for a few days before an event.

YouTube

More Google

I visited Google Labs and immediately found the Notebook. This could really be helpful to me in my writing life. I have tons of notebooks (real ones) around my house that hold notes, webpage references, character sketches, etc. for my fiction writing. I could actually have on-line notebooks that store all the information, which would not only be easier to store (and free up shelf space at my house) but would be easy to access.
In theory -- but I'm not sure I've figured out exactly how the program works. I've tried to cut and paste into my notebook, and I can't make it happen. As with all of the things we've done so far, I can get just so far, and then probably because this stuff isn't intuitive to me, I struggle.
But, I don't give up.
I could also see that putting program notes for the library into a file might be helpful, but since I already do that in Word, I'm again not sure how much time it would save me. Also I rarely work on any different computers. But, if I did travel around and work from different sites -- this would be very useful.

I also really like the on-line word processing. Again, for my writing this would allow me to post things and then have my critique partner read them, make comments and never have to sit down in the cafe again to talk about the stories.
This could also be a "downside" of cyberspace. It's fun to sit down in a cafe and talk about books, writing and stories.

Google - My Way

This is my custom search engine, and when I finished I found that I did get to several websites I was very interested in knowing about. I love google, use it every day and in many different ways. I'm excited to discover there are even more things to do.