Easter Reflections

Greetings, and Happy Easter!

I love Easter. I’m not a religious type or anything, but I love the time of year that it falls in, and the low-keyness of the holiday. It’s great just sitting down to a tasty meal with the family, and just having kind of a lazy, enjoyable and peaceful day. Easter has all the best of Sunday, and somehow, makes it easier to ignore the looming week ahead.

I feel very thankful this Easter. Even though it’s not Thanksgiving or anything, it’s hard not to reflect back on the past year during holidays. You can’t help but think about where you were a year ago (even though, technically because of where Easter falls this year, it was more than a year ago. But, small potatoes, I say.)

Last Easter, I was still the post-college doldrums. Without a job, without a direction really, trying to figure out how I’d find an income in the worst job market of recent times.

But then, I started throwing myself into writing a book. The book I was writing never saw an audience (though I plan to get to it eventually), but I worked late into the evening on it every night. I stopped worrying so much about getting a job, and just enjoyed what I was doing.

A year later, I’ve got a career-type job, I’ve got a book published, I’ve got two more books in the works. I’ve got an e-book market that’s growing that didn’t even exist a year ago. I’ve got summer coming up.
I see so much promise for the year ahead.

So, these are my thoughts on this particularly blustery Easter on the high desert. I feel so thankful, and happy to be doing what I’m doing. And more importantly, I’m excited to continue on this path.

Happy Easter to all of you guys out there, and enjoy your holiday!

The Big Day

Today is the day.

The official day that my book, Drowning in the Dark, becomes available on Barnes & Noble, Amazon, and Smashwords in an e-book format.

And I have to say, it’s pretty damn exciting. This is my debut book, and it’s a wonderful feeling to see it online, available to the reading masses like that. Not to mention, the feeling of just writing and finishing a book. That’s pretty special too.

I never thought I would get to write and publish something like this so soon. I'm 23 years old, and I had always thought you could never really become a writer until you became older and more established. I always thought you had to slave away for years and years in far-flung corners of the publishing industry, and maybe if you were lucky, the earliest you could publish something would be in your 30’s.

But this whole new e-reader wave has really broken down those old and outdated industry standards. I feel so lucky to have the opportunity to be writing what I want to write at my age. And of course, to have the opportunity to have it published! That last part is pretty major. Because I’m pretty sure that if I went through the normal query route, my book would not have been be published, or if it did, it wouldn’t be ready for another two years or maybe more. And by then, it wouldn’t be cutting-edge anymore.

So what I’m saying is that I’m so extremely pleased to be apart of this new wave of e-reading. I truly do believe it’s the future, and I’m so thrilled to be apart of it, and have the chance to mainline my book directly to the readers.

On a side note, I’d really like to thank all the fine folks at You Come Too Publishing. I couldn’t have done it without their valuable insight and help.

So with that, I’m going to leave you with a description of the book below. Here you go:

There's a demon walking the streets of Freeport. And only teenager Samantha Carver can stop it.
It's hard to outrun your past. But that's what Sam thought she could do. After moving to a sleepy town on the Oregon coast to live with relatives, she thought she was safe. She thought she could be someone different. She thought she could be a normal teenage girl.

However, the quiet coastal town of Freeport is no refuge. After a girl at the high school is brutally murdered, the police believe Samantha's cousin and best friend, Terry, is responsible.

But Samantha knows what her friends, teachers, and the police don't. The murderer isn't human. Samantha has seen this before. Too many times. She has witnessed the dead rise from their graves and do unspeakable things. She carries the scars on her skin and the sorrow in her soul to prove it.

The evil that she thought she had left behind in the rotting graveyards of her past is still stalking her.

Will Samantha be able to save Terry, Freeport, and herself from the malevolent power that threatens to rip her world apart? Or will she succumb under a surging tide of evil and drown in the growing darkness that surrounds her?

In the tradition of Amanda Hocking and Charlaine Harris comes a paranormal romantic thriller with more chills than a cold and windblown night on the Oregon coast.

Pushing Past the Gray Days

So I’m relatively new at the writing game. There are those writers who say things like, "I’ve been writing since I was 10," and maybe that’s the case, but not for me. I always leaned in that direction, and I think back then I would have said that I was writer, but it was only recently that I really became one, and learned what its all about.

In college I tried to work at the student newspaper, but ended up not really liking it, so I kind of gave up on the whole journalism thing. When I graduated, I came out to a terrible job economy, and ended up working at a call center for a while. And then, I finally landed my current job as a reporter.

I’ve been at the paper for about a year now, and it’s taught me so much about being a writer. I learned that some days you have it, and some days you don’t, but regardless of how you’re feeling, that deadline comes no matter what. So you better just buck up and push past whatever block you’re having, otherwise you won’t meet your deadline, and pretty soon, you won’t have a job.

Being able to do that – to push past things even when you’re in a slump – is really the most valuable lesson I’ve take away from it. There’s no giving up. Some days you turn in stories that you feel less proud of than other days, but that’s just the way it works. It’s all about being persistent, and continuing even when you don’t feel like it.

I applied that same principle to my creative writing as well, and it’s really helped me. If I have a deadline for something, I know I can complete it within the time frame. Each day, I stuck to writing 1,000 words, no matter how I felt. Of course, going back through the editing process, you can see the days when you weren’t feeling it (Sometimes you have an overwhelming "What the hell was I thinking? moment), but that’s what the editing process if for. The first step is just to get the words down.

I only learned this recently however. My upcoming paranormal romance book, Drowning in the Dark (Got my title picked out!), is the fourth book that I started writing. I had tried to write three other books before this one, and I never got past 15,000 words because I’d get stuck and loose enthusiasm for the story. And soon I’d loose complete interest, and abandon it because I couldn’t get past those gray days.

So finishing and publishing this book is a really big step for me (I guess that’s a stupid thing to say – it’s a big step for every first-time author.) But I’m really excited about it. Even if the book doesn’t do well right away, the fact that I actually finished it and put it out there is good enough for me. (At least for now J ) Now that I’ve done it, I know that I’ll be able to again and again in the future. And that right there is pretty cool.