Book Release Marketing Stuff
I’m slowly starting to get things from Barbour that are making me excited about what I might receive from them next.
Last week, I received some “Meet the Author” book signing posters for the multi-author event I’m participating in December 13 with the other MTCW authors. In the same delivery (I’m getting to know my UPS guy, and he’s a cutie!) I received my 500 Stand-In Groom bookmarks. I’ve already started giving some of them away too—I actually need to take more of them to my friend Lori who works at David Lipscomb University. She gave away about fifteen or twenty of them last Friday and says she knows a bunch more people she wants to give them to.
Yesterday, I received this via e-mail from Shalyn, the Senior Trade Marketing Manager at Barbour:
These are the promo pieces that the marketing/sales staff at Barbour use when they go talk to booksellers about their upcoming new releases.
I know I should be receiving a few cover flats, and I hope that I’ll get a copy of the ARC when those go out to reviewers. I just know I’m going to make an idiot of myself, though, when my UPS guy brings me a big box from Barbour that has my copies of the book, which I’m hoping to receive before I leave to go to Arkansas for Christmas (I’m going early—because I can!). Believe me, everyone in my neighborhood will hear when that arrives!
In addition to the book signing on December 13 (where I’ll be signing book plates for people who pre-order Stand-In Groom through the B&N where we’re signing), I have an interview with ChristanBooks.com on December 4.
I know I’ve already agreed to a couple of blog interviews/guest blogs—Keli Gwyn on January 5, and I’ll be guest-judging Tracy Ruckman‘s regularly featured contest on her blog the week of January 12. And Lena Nelson Dooley interviewed me a couple of months ago to feature me on her blog some time in January, I believe.
If I’ve arranged with you for an interview or guest blog piece or if you’d like to set one up, please let me know. I’d like to get as much scheduled as I can now, before the madness of the holidays hits.
Miscellaney
I know I’ve been really bad this week about blogging daily, but I’m focusing on my last-ditch effort to finish Menu for Romance. I have about four chapters, or 12,000 words left to write. Unfortunately, I’m now at a point in the story where anything I share would give away important information about the climax and resolution, so I can’t do what I did last week and share excerpts.
I did start on character sketches for A Case for Love over the weekend, and I’ll be starting that one the first week of January, giving myself the month of December to figure out more than just the general plot of the story—to work on subplots and secondary characters, to brainstorm some scenes of conflict between the hero (Forbes) and heroine (Alaine), and to do some research on the legal aspect of the class action suit Alaine, her family, and neighbors are bringing against Forbes’s parents’ corporation. Fun stuff. 🙂
In the meantime, I just keep whittling away at that final word count on MFR, which I plan to complete by the end of this week, since I missed the deadline of the end of last week. Next week, I’ll print out the entire manuscript and spend a few days over at my undergrad college (Trevecca) in the library editing and revising.
And because I haven’t been posting, it means I’ve been missing hearing from all of you. So tell me what’s going on. What are you working on? What issues are you running into with your writing? Is anyone participating in NaNoWriMo? What are some series you’d like to see on the blog next year (or maybe a short one in December)? Throw me a bone—I’m starting to feel lonely!
It’s Your Responsibility
It’s your right. It’s your responsibility.
Fun Friday–The Scariest Movies I’ve Seen
I know I said I was going to be pulling some of my old writing from the “archives” for Fun Fridays, but since this is Halloween, I just couldn’t miss this opportunity to prove to y’all (especially you, Caleb), what a big honkin’ chicken I am when it comes to movies. I’ve narrowed it down to two reasons why I don’t like scary movies: I’m visually oriented, and I have a very vivid imagination. Once an image is imprinted on my brain, it’s hard for me to get rid of it. And once it’s there, it’s very likely my imagination will pick up and run with it. Therefore, I tend to stay away from scary movies, especially now that I live alone. So the following list represents some of the “best” and “worst” of the scary movies I’ve seen—as in, my best and worst experiences with watching a movie that frightened me.
5. The Watcher in the Woods. When I was in junior high, I attended a small Christian school where my mom was the science and math teacher. When I was in seventh grade, she was also my homeroom teacher, so it was natural that the end of the year party was at our house. We rented this movie because it was from DISNEY, even though it looked like it had some suspenseful elements. The next day, my mom got a call from one of the other teachers whose son had been at the party to ask her about the movie because Todd had nightmares all night due to this film. I don’t really remember its being that scary, but it must have been. And the reason this one is included is because of the #1 movie on this list.
4. The Silence of the Lambs. This movie came out when I was in college. My best friend, her sister, and I kind of wanted to see it, but we waited until it came out on video so we could watch it in my living room with all the lights on and the ability to stop it if it got too scary. I think I fared better watching it than they did, but we did end up with all three of us huddled together on one cushion of the sofa. For me, this was more psychologically disturbing than it was frightening, which is guess is the strength of the film as a “scary” movie. Of course now when I see it (usually while flipping channels), it makes me laugh because of all of the parodies that have been done of it, as well as the memory of the three of us huddled together in the middle of the sofa watching it.
3. Event Horizon. This film came out in the late 1990s, and my friend who’s the one who got me hooked on Star Trek and convinced me to go to my first Star Trek convention suggested we go see this movie. I’d seen previews for it (I thought I’d paid attention to them), and it looked like just another SciFi movie—Wow! I couldn’t have been more wrong. Fortunately, we went to see it at the dollar theater in the middle of the day (so it was still light when we left), but I remember thinking as I watched this movie that there couldn’t be a more apt visual description of what hell will be like. I don’t even remember what the story was about, I just remember thinking that.
2. Signs. This is my favorite “scary” movie. I know there are a lot of people who will laugh when I say that, but this is about as scary as I’ll go. You know the scene when the alien’s locked in the pantry and Mel Gibson gets down on the floor to look under the door and the alien suddenly sticks its fingers out? Not only do I experience a high level of anxiety as that scene unfolds, but I jump every single time I watch it, even though I know what’s going to happen. Sure, the solution to how to get rid of the aliens is pretty lame, but the rest of the story is so well written and acted that it’s easy to forgive M. Night Shyamalan for his lack of imagination when it came to finishing off the bad guys in this film.
1. The Pit and the Pendulum. Yes, it’s a “classic” film (i.e., it was made in 1961) and it stars Vincent Price, as all classic horror movies should. And yes, it’s based on classic literature (the short story of the same title by Edgar Allan Poe). But I have no idea what the three sixth grade teachers at my elementary school were thinking when they chose this as one of our monthly Friday afternoon movies that spring (I know it was spring because I remember hiding my eyes behind my arm which was in a cast, and I broke my arm over spring break). I tried to put it out of my mind that evening, but I did not want to go to bed that night. I tried listening to a favorite tape (maybe the taped record of Disney’s Robin Hood or Snow White and Rose Red or something like that), but when I closed my eyes, all I could see was the image of that swinging blade from the movie. And just like the parent of the kid who complained to my mom about Watcher in the Woods a year later, my mom called and complained to my teacher about showing this movie (obviously Mom didn’t learn a very important lesson about choosing films to show to kids). I don’t think I slept well for two or three weeks after seeing this film. And it’s thanks to this film that I’ve shied away from “scary” movies ever since.
The Passing of Tony Hillerman
“No matter how carefully you have the project planned, first chapters tend to demand rewriting. Things happen. New ideas suggest themselves, new possibilities intrude. Slow to catch on, I collected a manila folder full of perfect, polished, exactly right, pear-shaped first chapters before I learned this lesson. Their only flaw is that they don’t fit the book I finally wrote. Thus Hillerman’s First Law: Never polish the first chapter until the last chapter is written.”
Tony Hillerman, author of the acclaimed series of Joe Leaphorn/Jim Chee/Navajo Nation mysteries, passed away yesterday at age eighty-three. Over the past few years, he’d battled cancer and survived a couple of heart attacks.
“I’m getting old, but I still like to write.”(2002)
Hillerman had written about Navajo tribal police officers Joe Leaphorn and Jim Chee separately in the 1970s, but it wasn’t until he brought the two characters together in the 1987 novel Skinwalkers that he started garnering commercial and critical success with his novels. The book sold 430,000 hardcover copies which launched him into the best-sellers lists for the next twenty years. In all, he wrote eighteen books in the series, in addition to many other fiction and nonfiction titles.
Though not usually a mystery reader myself, I’ve read most of Hillerman’s novels and thoroughly enjoyed them. His attention to detail—whether in character development, plotting, description of the setting, cultural flavor, or the intricately worked mystery—sucks the reader in and doesn’t let go until the last page.
“It’s always troubled me that the American people are so ignorant of these rich Indian cultures. I think it’s important to show that aspects of ancient Indian ways are still very much alive and are highly germane even to our ways.”
Hillerman isn’t the only mystery writer to set his stories on a reservation or use Native American characters. But by choosing tribal police officers, and by creating two who are vastly different in their ages, beliefs, practices, and understanding of the world, his novels far exceed a typical whodunit that just happens to be set on an Indian reservation.
According to several articles, his first agent told him if he wanted to get published, he’d have to “get rid of that Indian stuff.”
When his books first started being published in the ’70s, some accused him of exploiting his knowledge of the Navajo for personal gain, but in 1987, with the success of Skinwalkers bringing a different and more positive type of attention to the Navajo Nation, Hillerman was awarded the Special Friend of the Dineh by the Navajo Tribal Council. He repeatedly said he took more pride in that than in what publishing professionals might consider even greater awards he received, like the Golden Spur Award from Western Writers of America, the Edgar Allen Poe Award for Best Mystery Novel, and the Grand Master Award from the Mystery Writers of America, or even being elected president of MWA.
“I cross-examine my Navajo friends and shamelessly hang around trading posts, police substations, rodeos, rug auctions and sheep dippings.”
After serving in the army, and sustaining a severe injury to his leg, in WWII, Hillerman had a long career in journalism: he worked as a reporter for almost twenty years before returning to graduate school and going into teaching, eventually becoming chairman of the journalism department at the University of New Mexico.
But journalistic writing just wasn’t fulfilling him. “I thought, ‘Wouldn’t it be wonderful to work in plastic instead of flint; make your own imagination drive the writing.'” And it was the Four Corners region and the Navajo people that provided the inspiration he sought.
“Those places that stir me are empty and lonely. They invoke a sense of both space and strangeness, and all have about them a sort of fierce inhospitality.” (from The Spell of New Mexico)
But it isn’t just the physical landscape that makes his writing so intense. It’s his understanding of the way the Navajo (and Hopi and Zuni) people live. The crimes that are committed and solved in each book are more than just murders or grave robbing—they are affronts to the harmony in which the Navajo people try to live their lives daily. The crime is greater, because it’s an attack on the culture of a People—and many times, the crimes include aspects that are meant to be such an attack, whether it’s the body being turned face down or certain tokens or symbols left behind as a message. “I want Americans to stop thinking of Navajos as primitive persons, to understand that they are sophisticated and complicated,” he said.
No matter what accolades or criticisms came Hillerman’s way, he never lost sight of who he was as a writer.
“It seems to me that I am writing what Graham Greene called ‘entertainments.’ My readers are buying a mystery, not a tome of anthropology. . . . The name of the game is telling stories.”
He will be missed.
My books are on StoryCasting.com
I got an e-mail tonight from someone at a website I’d never heard of but that’s right up my alley: StoryCasting.com. It’s a place where people can choose the cast of characters for different books—just like the way I’ve been saying for years I do with my own writing!
Fun Friday–“Princess Emerald”
You know me, I love doing series (that way I don’t have to come up with a new topic every day), so I decided I’m going to spend the next few Fun Fridays dusting off some of my old writing and sharing it with y’all.
Tempting though it will be to go through and edit it based on what I now know about writing, I’m determined to post it here in its pure form, as it was originally written.
Today’s entry: a fairy tale I wrote as an assignment in my high school creative writing class. The local library was hosting a contest for fairy tales, so our teacher wanted us to enter. Of course he gave us certain rules/assignments—such as not using any cliches and having to use certain figures of speech.
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Kathy Dacus
Creative Writing
September 12, 1988
Emerald
A long time ago, there lived a beautiful princess. She had hair that was as golden as the morning sun. Her eyes were so green that she had received the name “Emerald.”
Princess Emerald was engaged to marry Prince Goodheart, from a neighboring kingdom. Prince Goodheart was a good and kind prince. He was tall and had hair the color of freshly harvested wheat. His sapphire colored eyes could look kindly on his people, but could also be stern with wrong-doers. He listened to his people and did all he could to make them happy.
Emerald and Goodheart were loved by all that lived in the forest, including the wood fairies. Sheba, the queen of the wood fairies, watched over Emerald and Goodheart to make sure that nothing bad ever happened to them.
One day, Emerald was picking flowers in the forest, waiting for Goodheart to meet her for a picnic. She wandered so far from where she had been supposed to wait for Goodheart, that she became lost. She wandered around in the forest for hours.
Emerald, frightened because she was lost, started to call out, “Help! Someone, please help me!” She kept wandering deeper and deeper into the forest. It was quite dark and cold.
Emerald sat on a tree stump and started crying. She cried and cried until she could cry no more. She wiped her eyes and looked around her. She got up and started walking to where it looked like it was lighter. In the darkness, she stumbled over a root. She put her hand on a tree to keep her balance and, to her dismay, the tree vanished and she fell through a hole.
KayeDacus.com 