Writing: The Challenges

This is my post for Day 13 of the Author Blog Challenge.




What has been the most challenging part of your book process: writing, building the book, printing, distributing, marketing, etc.? What do you wish you’d known before you began?

My books are not at the printing and distributing stages yet, so I cannot accurately discuss how difficult or easy those stages might be. However, I can discuss other aspects of the book process.


Writing the book is not the most difficult part. I can say this even though I have not finished any of my books yet, because I love the writing part of the process. I enjoy creating something from nothing. I enjoy letting my imagination run free and creating people, creatures and entire worlds that have never before existed yet come to life as I write them.


"Building the book" is a process I associate more with non-fiction books. With my nonfiction book, I feel more like I am buiulding it and putting it together than imagining it into being. And I am finding it very difficult. But maybe, in the context of the question for the writing prompt above, building the book has more to do with having it bound and creating the Kindle and epub versions of it. I admit that I have not yet created a Kindle file and don't know anything about the process yet.


This post is a bit rambling, but I am not finding any of the processes mentioned in the question difficult, not really. I think the hardest thing about writing a book is believing in yourself enough to know that you can do it.


P.S. Yes, I already know that the above picture has nothing to do with this post topic, but it's cute, isn't it?

 
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Writing: Book Covers

This is my post for Day 12 of the Author Blog Challenge.

Describe your process for choosing and designing your book cover. Who created your cover? How did you find him/her? What do you love about your cover? What might you do differently next time?

This doesn't really apply to me as I don't have a cover for any of my books yet. Just for fun though, I took a photo from one of my husband's Fairy Magic photo manipulations and gave it the title of one of my short stories. (No, I do not intend to create my own book covers, but my books aren't finished yet, so it doesn't hurt for me to play.)

I do not know yet who I will have creating my book cover and, to be honest, I haven't even started looking for someone yet. My main goal right now is to get my books finished, edited and ready. Organizing a book cover for each of them will come later.

(P.S. The fairy above is one of my daughters, Angelica.)


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Believing

This is my post for Day 2 of the 15 Habits of Great Writers challenge.

 

The Day 2 challenge for the 15 Habits of Great Writers (Day 2) is to get up 2 hours earlier so I can spend the extra time writing. That's completely impractical for me, because I get up when my children do, which tends to be around 5:00am, but ion the rare occasions that I wake up before the children, the very instant they hear me up and about, they get up too. In fact, it doesn't matter how quiet I am as I step out of my room, my youngest seems to have a built-in sensor that alerts him the moment my eyes have opened.

 

So I've decided on a compromise. I rarely get time away from the children to write, and the whole point of getting up 2 hours earlier than normal would be to give me uninterrupted writing time. So, with that in mind, I am taking my eldest daughter's offer and letting her take me out to Starbuck's for coffee and a marathoin writing session. (She's participating in Camp NaNoWriMo right now.)


I'm sure I will be able to carve out two hours of quiet and concentrated writing time from this.


The thing is, I already believe in myself as a writer. Yes, I have moments of weakness and self-doubt, but even when I doubt myself, I know that, as long as I keep at it, I will eventually achieve my writing goals. So I have been regularly carving time out from each day to spend writing.


Sometimes, my children interrupt me. Sometimes my husband starts to feel left out because I spend my free time writing. Usually, my housework doesn't get completed. But I have a goal and I know, from the experience of losing over 145 pounds of excess fat, that as long as I keep working at my goal and keep it as a priority, I will succeed.


So yes, I believe.


Do you?

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The Magic of Storytelling

I come from a family of storytellers.

When I was a little girl, my grandfather lived with us, and he was a storyteller. He often spun tales about his past as a cowboy on a ranch in Texas, and, as children, my siblings and I loved hearing his stories. He had a way of telling the stories that made us listen closely and wonder at all of the things he experienced. Even though he had immigrated to the US from Germany as a small child and moved to California in his later years, he had a slight Texas accent from spending so much time there.

My brothers, sisters and I felt an almost hero worship for him and believed every word of the stories he told us, despite the rolling of eyes that some of the adults displayed when he started telling one of his stories. One thing I learned from these stories my grandfather told was that stories are a wonderful way to learn about people.

My grandmother was a storyteller too. Her stories were about the different plants she grew and the animals around her home. She told us stories about the squirrels in the garden who would come and eat nuts from her hand and the hummingbirds who would flit to and fro right in front of her face as they came to visit and feed from the hummingbird feeder she had out in her garden. As an animal lover, I loved hearing about the animals in her garden and their frequent visits. One thing I learned from the stories my grandmother told was that stories helped us to learn about our surroundings.

My other grandmother told me stories about my relatives and ancestors, and I had a great-uncle who once took me on a drive from San Jose, California to Bakersfield, California to visit my cousin, and he spent the whole trip telling me stories about the "old highway" trails (even pointing them out to me along the way). He pointed out things of historical significance and would explain how things had changed, both from progress and from earthquakes that had moved mountains and rockfaces. From both of their stories, I learned that stories can teach us about history.

I grew up to have children of my own, and one thing that my children loved was our bedtime routine, because they got to choose a story for me to read to them. Sometimes, they asked me to tell them a "made-up" story, which was a story I would think up on the spot and tell them, usually about children like them with their names and with different adventures they would get into. They loved these "made-up" stories more than the ones I read from books. I hope these stories helped to spark their own imaginations.

Storytelling is magical in that it can teach and inspire. It can create emotion in the listener. It brings our past and our present together and even opens windows into new realities. History is relived. Worlds are built and worlds fall. New creatures are created and extinct creatures are brought back to life. Anything can happen in a story. A storyteller weaves a magic unparallelled.

Do you have storytellers in your family?

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