I did it!

I'm very pleased to announce that I did it: The Eye of the Beholder is now available in the Kindle store.  The book is also available through the Kindle Owner's Lending Library, for those of you who are Prime members.

Here is the book's description:

 I am a prisoner.

Born to power, the world was my playground. My every wish was a kingdom’s command, my displeasure every man’s worst fear. But then, at the whim of a merciless enchantress, all was stolen from me. My once lavish castle became my dungeon. My once-handsome form became that of a beast. There is no hope of release from the prison of my own body, for the only way to break this curse is to earn the love of another. I, who have never felt a drop of compassion, must hope to inspire devotion. I, who am hideous beyond compare, must hope to inspire passion. After hundreds of years, I have come to accept the truth: I will never know love. There is no escape for me.

I am a prisoner.

Born to two loving parents and a happy home, I was grateful for my good fortune. Though I was plain and prone to living in my head, forced to live in the shadow of my beautiful sisters, I had everything my heart desired. Then tragedy struck, and I lost my mother and my home. Papa was all I had left in the world, and I was utterly devoted to him. When his thoughtful gesture earned him the wrath of a horrible monster, I sacrificed myself for the sake of the one person I love. Now I am a prisoner in a decaying castle with only a terrifying beast for companionship. But I am determined not to give in to the beast’s wrath, to prove to him that he can never truly ensnare me.

*****

I published The Eye under the pen name Elizabeth Darcy.  This is for the sake of clarity, as I want to dabble in several different genres, which might not have been possible had I gone the traditional publishing route.  I'm really excited to think that I can publish what I want when I want to!  Elizabeth Darcy is the pen name I'll use for any novels that have a fairytale theme to them.

This has been something of an exhaustive process with a pretty steep learning curve.  I could not have done it without the help of several people, including but not limited to: my writing group, Emily Fleming (look for her books soon--there will be vampire goodness aplenty!), and my family.  A special thanks to my wonderful husband, Jürgen, who not only took the picture on the book's cover, but also put in a lot of time on Photoshop trying to help his very picky wife get it to look just so.

Coming down the pike are an as-yet-unnamed women's lit novel and the young adult dystopian novel Contributor, which I hope to publish in either late June or early July.

Really, authors?

A year ago, I stumbled on Goodreads, and it quickly became one of my all-time favorite websites: a social media site where I can not only discuss books, but interact with authors and maybe even win some ARCs?  Yes, please!  Let's face it, Goodreads is like a dream come true for rabid bookworms like me.  Thanks to Goodreads, I stumbled on some excellent reviewers, like Kat Kennedy, Stephanie Sinclair, and Wendy Darling.  Though I've read many of the same books as these reviewers, I don't always have the same opinion as them.  However, I love reading their reviews for one big reason: they make some outstanding points.

Recently, there has been a lot of buzz in the book world about authors laying the smackdown on reviewers.  When I first heard about it, I couldn't really believe it was real.  I mean, why would an author be crazy enough to attack someone who took the time to read their book?  Fascinated, I surfed book blogs, Goodreads, and author blogs, reading things that frankly amazed the crap out of me.

As an aspiring author, I understand that sick feeling you get whenever someone takes your baby, reads it, and tells you what they think about it.  I kid you not, I feel pretty sick to my stomach whenever I bring an excerpt to my writing group, or when I get an e-mail from a friend or family member with comments about one of my manuscripts.  It's not easy to hear others criticize something into which you've poured so much of your heart and soul.  This is why for YEARS I refused to let anyone read what I wrote.  When I finally made the decision to start giving people my work, I accepted the fact that not everyone would like it, and that they might say things that would hurt my feeling.  I dread this.  I was an absolute wreck before I read my reviews from ABNA this year.  I was convinced the reviewers hated my excerpt and had ripped it apart, and I had the tissues ready when I finally worked up the courage to read them.

So, yeah, I get it.  Wouldn't it be awesome if every last word I wrote was a stroke of pure genius over which my every reader could not help but fawn?  Yep, it would be.  But that's not reality, folks.  Reality is a world full of people with varied tastes, interests, and opinions.  This means that some of them will love what you write and others will hate it.  With a passion.  That absolutely does NOT give you the right to rip them apart for expressing their opinion about your work, even if they're snarky and tear it to shreds and say means things about it.  As long as they're not personally attacking you, they can say whatever they like about your work, and you need to just suck it up.  If it bothers you, don't read the reviews.  Just stay in your happy place, where you're sure everyone loves your book as much as you do.  But you won't improve if you do that, and I really hope no author publishes with the thought, "I'm completely cool with mediocrity."

Years ago, I started writing a truly epic fanfic.  I'm not gonna lie: I lapped up the positive feedback.  Ego stroking FTW!  But you know which review stuck out the most, which review I still think about to this day, even though it was written years ago?  The one where I was told that my character was just too good to be true.  Boy that stung, and my first reaction was to get defensive and to insist that the reviewer was wrong.  I clung to my self-righteousness and left the work as it was.

But you know what?  I was wrong.  I see that now.  Maybe my character is okay and maybe not, but that's really neither here nor there.  The fact of the matter is, I could have thought about the comment and then gone back and read my fanfic to see if there was something to it.  I could have found some flaws and decided how I would improve upon them later.  In short, I could have used this feedback to help me improve my work.

I am now in the process of editing a manuscript that I will indie pub via Kindle Direct Publishing and possibly, later, Smashwords, if the book does well on Amazon.  I am really excited at the thought of people reading this manuscript.  It took me seven years to write it, and I'm now in something like the fifth round of revisions to it.  It's a story that is near and dear to my heart, a manuscript that I have loved ever since I first started writing it.  But it's flawed.  I've changed it quite substantially, especially over the past month.  This is because I've been reading tons of reviews of other books and thinking, "Could these criticisms apply to my manuscript?"  If the answer is yes, I try to do something about it.

At the end of the day, I know that I will not be able to please everyone who reads my book, and that's okay.  But changing my book in an attempt to avoid some of the pitfalls other authors have stumbled into does not degrade the integrity of my work.  It does not make me a sellout.  It makes my work better, stronger.  It makes me challenge myself to try to rise above mediocrity, to move out of my comfort zone and into the arena.  It's scary as hell.  And I am grateful for it, because it will make me grow.

Once I publish, I'll set up a Goodreads author page.  And I make this promise to anyone who reads and reviews my book: If you criticize my work, I will not flame you.  I may cry, I may wallow in self-pity for a while, I may go through a period of feeling like my book is terrible, and I may think you're the meanest person in the universe.  But I will pick myself up, dust myself off, and try to do better next time.  And I will have you to thank for that.

And if you love it, I'll give you cupcakes.*

*The does not constitute an actual promise to give reviewers cupcakes.

It all makes sense now!

Well, at least I hope it all makes sense now.  At any rate, I'm finished with the first round of edits to the chapters I wrote during NaNoWriMo.  Some of them needed extensive rewriting, while others just need a little tweaking here and there.  I also wrote an entirely new chapter, so I boosted my total word count by around 5,000, now that the first round of work is over.  This means I can now continue working toward finishing the manuscript, at which point I'd like to try to do another round of edits before I consider it ready for exposure.

Last night, my husband and I sat around for a while as I worked out some thorny plot issues verbally with him.  I'm determined to do my best to make the plotting very tight, and to avoid those convenient little episodes that are oh-so-handy in terms of moving the plot along.  If some event happens, I want there to be a reason for it, and so I was using him as a sounding board, trying to figure out which of the options I was playing around with struck him as the most believable.  It was extraordinarily helpful.  Though he's always been supportive of me, reading my manuscripts and offering feedback, I think this was the first time I really used him in this capacity.  I guess this is because, while my novel is infinitely interesting to me, the last thing I want to do is bore other people to death talking about my work.

Really, what I'd like to do is to try to create a smaller, more focused group of fellow writers.  While going to the large group is extremely helpful, it's also a bit limiting because, naturally, we want to give everyone a chance to share some of their work, which means we only have time for small excerpts from each person.  I used to think writing was an entirely lonely exercise, and in some ways it is.  However, as I've worked on some collaborative projects and become involved in writers' groups, what I've found is that it can be really eye-opening to sit and toss ideas around with other writers.  I have a teaching background, so this doesn't entirely come as a surprise to me.  One of the things I liked doing as a teacher was attending conferences or team meetings where we'd share activities we'd done in class.  It inevitably resulted in surging creativity as the thoughts of one person were embellished by another person, and so on.

At the end of the day, if this novel becomes successful, it will be the direct result of not just my own writing, but of all of the assistance I've received from various friends and family members.  Without their contributions, the novel would definitely not be what it is, nor would it continue to evolve as it has without their feedback.  This, for me, is the most rewarding part of writing.  For a long time, I kept my work to myself because I was afraid of criticism, but now that I've taken a leap, I find the feedback and the time others devote not only feeds my creativity, it makes me a better writer.

And now, a small tidbit.  This particular bit of conversation really speaks to me.

***

          “But what’s more despicable is that the system not only allows this, it actively encourages it.  How many times have you been told you should report any suspicious activity?”

             

            More times than she could count.  “We’ve always been told that it’s for our own security,” Dara said.

             
           “That’s always what people say, when they’re busy stripping away rights.  If you work everyone up into enough of a panic, they’ll be glad to hand you things they’d normally never even think of giving up,” Mal told her.  “Don’t believe me?  I can give you plenty of books on the topic—books you’ve likely never seen in your life.  Why do you think that is?”

I'm kind of loving editing

NaNoWriMo has now come and gone, and I'm left with a manuscript of which I'm rather proud.  However, it was also a very messy manuscript, thanks to its evolution over the course of the month, and the anti-editing philosophy of NaNoWriMo.  While it was a good thing to concentrate on getting words on the page, it's also a relief to me to now be able to go back and fix those parts of the novel that were so incongruous they were setting my teeth on edge.

I'm happy to say that I have now edited around half of the manuscript and am more pleased with it than ever.  Now that the first half all makes sense, I have an even better sense of the flow of the narrative, and I really like where it's going.  I feel like the pacing is good and that the character development is coming along nicely.  While everything I've ever written is special to me because it has all been the result of blood, sweat, tears, and passion, I have to say that there is something magical about this one.  It just feels so intensely right.  This may have something to do with the fact that I was stepping way outside of my comfort zone when I decided to shoot for YA dystopian fic for NaNoWriMo that there is immense satisfaction is seeing that things are working out far better than I'd hoped.  Though I have a tendency to freak out a little when I face a challenge, I find that the intrinsic rewards of succeeding at a challenge to be extremely gratifying.

I've also been flying high all day because, last night, I returned to the writing group I'd been participating in, but have missed for several months due to various and assorted reasons.  It felt so good to be back with a group of like-minded people, sharing our work and offering one another feedback.  For so many years, I was deathly afraid of showing my work to anyone.  The very thought of participating in something like a writing group was enough to make me break out in a cold sweat.  Now I find myself wondering why I waited so long.  Not only do the people in the group offer very good feedback, they are a wonderfully supportive bunch, and everyone is genuinely interested in helping everyone else succeed.  More than that, everyone truly believes in everyone else.  It's a fantastic environment, and I have learned so much from everyone there.

I brought a two-page excerpt of my novel and volunteered to go second.  This time, I didn't really even have that nervous flutter.  I was actually excited to hear what everyone had to say, whatever it was they had to say.  To my delight, they were very complimentary about the excerpt.  I've often heard that writers should write what they would like to read, and I have always adhered to this philosophy.  However, I think this also engenders insecurity about whether it's something anyone else might like to read, so I was very happy to find that the others seemed to enjoy it.  It's more than just validation (though the validation is very important and wonderful!), it's knowing that my work may actually have a chance of finding an audience.

As much as I've love writing, it is a very solitary experience for the most part, so to be able to find a group of people with whom I can share this passion is a wonderful thing.  It's an amazing feeling to be in a roomful of creative people who are bouncing ideas off of one another.  I'm extremely grateful to the members of the group for boosting my confidence and inspiring me to continue on with my work.