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Blurbs, pitches, loglines, and other book marketing necessities I suck at (#IWSG)
For those of you who aren’t masochists don’t write fiction, here’s something about the writing world that you may not know: authors have to be marketers. Yes, even traditionally-published authors, because apparently even the big publishers don’t invest a lot in marketing authors unless they are big names. I’m going to admit 2 things up front that will color the rest of this post: I find this fact frustrating. With a family and a day job, I barely have enough time to write, let alone learn how to market my writing. When I first started writing, I thought that’s what publishers got paid to do, seeing as how they have…
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Desert View Watchtower, Grand Canyon National Park
If you’ve hung around on this blog for very long, you’ve probably figured out that I love photo challenges (see just about any of my photo posts for evidence). Well, I just found a new one, the Amazing Stonework challenge over on the For the Love of blog. Anita’s goal is, “to highlight the artwork created by builders of long ago.” I’m fascinated by old stone buildings, from millennium-old pueblos and cliff dwellings to the midcentury brick homes in my Tucson neighborhood, so I’m excited to participate in this challenge. I’m also excited to use this challenge as an opportunity to share photos from places that relate in some way…
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PitMad and an Update from the Query Trenches (Otherwise Known as Rejection Report #1)
While working my way through the June posts in the IWSG Blog Hop, I found a wonderful post on Emma Louise Gill’s blog, in which she summarizes her querying experiences so far. I just started querying last month, and I found her post both encouraging and informative. Oh, and inspirational, in that it inspired me to post my own (much shorter and less eventful) query update here. I’ll try to make it a monthly tradition, so you can share my pain vicariously. I’m currently querying Vanishing, Inc., a time travel romance in which Alex Collins flees to a tiny town in the Arizona mountains to escape an abuser. There she…
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Prepping for #PitMad (#IWSG)
Thursday I’ll be pitching my time travel romance, Vanishing, Inc., in #PitMad. What, you ask, is PitMad? It’s a pitch party on Twitter, in which unagented authors like yours truly try to distill their magnum opuses into a 280-character tweet in the hope of attracting an agent’s attention. And I thought writing a query letter was hard. Fortunately, there’s lots of great advice out there for PitMad virgins like me. I’ll share the most useful tips I found, but first: This post is part of the Insecure Writers Support Group monthly blog hop. On the first Wednesday of each month, I and my fellow insecure writers post something related to…
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Better Babies Contests: Eugenics at the State Fair
I’ve written before about what we writers call research, and everyone else calls farting around on the internet. Today I’ll share an example from earlier this week of where farting around on the internet research led me. Warning: disturbing content ahead. I’m polishing up my time travel romance, Vanishing, Inc., to get ready to query agents, and I wanted to add a funny date scene set in a traveling carnival. A little Googling, a few clicks, and I found myself browsing through an Arizona State Fair program from 1916. Pictures of the fair commissioners, rules for livestock judging, who was in charge of harness racing that year… and then I…
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#SoCS: The pros and cons of time travel
This post is part of the Stream of Consciousness Saturday blog hop. Linda Hill posts a prompt every Friday; see https://lindaghill.com/2020/08/14/the-friday-reminder-and-prompt-for-socs-aug-15-2020/. This week’s prompt is “pro/con. Talk about the pros and cons of anything.” Some of you may know that I’m revising my first novel, a time travel romance called Vanishing, Inc. It’s about a young teacher who flees across the country to escape an abusive husband and lands in a tiny mountain town in Arizona. She finds what she thinks is the perfect home, a turn-of-the-last-century stone cottage. It comes with an overly-friendly landlady–and a visitor from another time. So, since time travel has been on my mind lately, let’s…
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#IWSG: Genre-morphing–and a question for my readers
Happy IWSG Day! For those who are new here, I participate in the monthly Insecure Writers Support Group blog hop. This month’s optional question is: Have you ever written a piece that became a form, or even a genre, you hadn’t planned on writing in? Or do you choose a form/genre in advance? Before I get to this month’s question, I have a question for anyone reading this post: Would you be interested in a series of posts loosely related to self-help for writers? I’m not talking about over-the-top, Stewart Smalley style self-help but rather some practical ideas from self-help literature, applied specifically to writing. I’ve been looking for a focus…
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Photo safari through a historic Flagstaff neighborhood
My first novel, Vanishing, Inc., is set in a fictional mountain town in Arizona called Ponderosa. I live in Flagstaff, a not-so-fictional mountain town in Arizona that makes an appearance in my story, but since I’m writing a paranormal romance (a time travel romance, to be specific), I wanted the freedom of a fictional setting. I don’t want some overly-literal reader leaving me a one-star review because there are, in fact, no time portals in Flagstaff. Hey, you know it could happen. I’m sure plenty of tourists have walked through standing stones in Scotland and become very grumpy because they did not immediately find themselves in the arms of a lusty…
Janet Alcorn
Suspense | Horror | Romance
