Good Friends

I know many writers join writers' groups for "networking," and that's an extremely important function of any writers' organization. But to me, these groups offer the added benefit of finding friends who understand when I pound my head against the wall over a character's waywardness. Try telling your next door neighbor or your spouse that you pushed the hero overboard today and he wouldn't stay down. I'm lucky I haven't been locked up by now.

Some of my best friends come from accidental meetings of these groups. If I'm remembering correctly, I met every one of my wordwench pals at Novelists Inc or RWA conferences. I have unpubbed pals in several chapters because I move so much. And now that I'm back in St. Louis, I have friends here I met decades ago when I lived down the road. It's a lot easier moving to a new city when you already know people.

Friends I've met through writing groups have helped me set up my website, do my promotions, helped me brainstorm, critiqued my proposals, and even loaned me their sons to set up Myspace pages. The list is quite infinite if I sat down and tried to pull one together.

So this is a public shout-out to all the people who have helped me survive for so many years, as well as a reminder for those of you who hope to join this insane profession. Hug a friend today!

Self Promotion

I need to be able to read your comments while I write this post so I can remember all the points I'd like to address. (It's not as if I don't have an opinion on everything!)

Nina asked about my most successful promotion, but that's really impossible to know. I do know that BLUE CLOUDS was my first book to hit the NYT list and that I paid a lot of money for a promotion outfit to send out some really cool magnetic erase-boards with an image similar to my cover on them to a romance bookstore list. But my publisher also heavily discounted the books so the stores would carry them in large quantities, which was probably far more successful than my tiny campaign.

I'm an introvert. I'm simply not into smearing myself across the countryside. I'd like to believe the quality of my books is what sells them. But the sad fact is that there must be several hundred new romances coming out every single month, and that's just in print. E-books, we could probably add a few hundred more. How on earth is a reader to know when and where to find mine?

I'm beginning to think of promotion like lottery tickets--you can't win if you don't play. "G"
So I'll play where I'm having fun and won't go running around the countryside buying tickets everywhere. I looked at the Twitter thing, Sherrie, and almost went cross-eyed. I can't think that fast or read that fast. And I tried Shelfari well before it became a craze and decided I didn't have that much time to waste.

I'm still on the fence about Myspace. I spent half an hour pulling all the info together for the person setting it up for me. That's do-able. I have enormous lists of names to draw on for the friends page, if he's willing to put them in there for me. I'm not sure I'm willing to spend a lot of time on that. (I'll try to remember to "friend" you, Devon, but if you friend me first, that works, too. "G") I've already discovered their search engine is totally beyond abysmal, which turns me off. Someone suggested using regular search engines instead of the myspace one, and I'll have to try that. Maybe type in "Patricia Rice Author Myspace" and see what turns up.

Search engines, Nina, are Google and Yahoo and all those other places that run spiderbots across the web picking up websites. When I had my website set up, my webperson coded in certain "tags" that Google will pick up if someone looks for "romance novels" or my name or whatever. That's a whole 'nuther lesson to learn, one I'm not qualified to teach. I just know I haven't figured out how to tag this site so it shows up quickly on Google. One of these days, I guess I'll have to ask.

Day 2 Myspace

Or is that My Space or as Sherrie said, (I think) My Phiz? Considering yesterday's blog brought everyone out of lurk, I'm thinking this Phiz thing is a hot button.

Here's the truth, folks---I have no memory. I cannot tell funny stories of things that happened at booksignings unless I write about them while I'm at the signing! I can remember getting strange reader mail, but what it was remains lost in the mists of time. So, in a way, I have no life. Which is why making one up makes so much more sense! When I make up my books, the words are all right there on the computer in front of me. I may forget what the heroine is wearing that day, but I can just look back on another page and find it. If I didn't get so cold, I'm likely to forget to get dressed in the morning. The mailman might find me wandering around in underalls and a sweatshirt.

And Devon, I hear ya. I'm on writer lists where the promo is positively frantic. Really, how can anyone imagine that 600 busy writers are going to hop over to someone's blog because they're writing that day?

But I like new toys and I'm curious about the world and if I don't have to work too terribly hard, I'm willing to try new things. And I want a younger generation to take a look at my Mystic Isle books. I don't much believe in bookmarks and sending ARCs to book groups or any of this promo stuff we do, but if I don't do anything, I have this superstitious feeling that no one will know I exist. So this is my way of yelling "Timber!" when I cut down the proverbial tree in the forest.

Of course, someone may have to cut through the jungle to find me when I get lost in cyberphiz, so if I disappear, you'll know where to come looking for me...

My Space

Another one of the fun (not) things a writer gets to waste time on is publicity and promotion. I don't mind jumping in here daily to let off steam, but the rest of this promo stuff is mind boggling. So today I dutifully worked on the historical all morning, then spent the afternoon working with someone who is promising to put a My Space page together for me. The things they ask!!!! I think I need to hire someone to write the answers for me. A comedian, maybe. So I cruised around other author sites on My Space (I had to go beg for addresses because their search function is totally utterly useless for finding names) trying to get a "feel" for what I ought to be doing. What I ought to be doing is carrying a camera and a camcorder around with me, it seems. And maybe an iPod or two. How do people have time for all this?

I lead such a boring life!! I think I'll go make up someone else's life for that page...

Lesson for the Day

Since I've done nothing but work and re-work all day, I've decided to give just a little tidbit of what I spend my time doing. In my hurried outline/draft of the historical I'd written "He pinned her to the ground with his hard body." Ho hum. This isn't even a sex scene. It's a "meet" scene. The hero has just dashed out of the woods to save her from a fiery geyser (that he caused, you will note!).

How would you change that sentence to show the image more graphically or at the very least, show a little character? C'mon, give it your best shot. We're not winning any contests here.

And for readers not inclined toward writing, what would you like to "see" in this scene?