A terrific review

This author business is still new enough to me that when I get a new review I have a tendency to jump up and down just a little.

http://ndrosen.livejournal.com/416090.html

Anyway, it was lovely.

and on to another stop

On the blog tour.

http://romancingthewest.blogspot.com/2012/03/mm-justus-repeating-history.html

Jacquie was a very good interviewer, and on Thursday she will also be posting an article I wrote with some photos I took.

another blog interview!

The Dames of Dialogue are graciously hosting me, with an interview about how Repeating History came to be.

Montana museums

On my next stop on my blog tour, Velda Brotherton has hosted my article about visiting museums and archives in Montana and in Yellowstone while researching Repeating History.

I have to say that museums are one of the best idea founts on the planet.  I hope you enjoy the article.

my first blog interview!

Over the weekend, I was interviewed by L. Lee Scott, a fellow author I met through Women Writing the West, an organization I belong to.   It was a fascinating experience, and she asked me a number of good questions that really made me think about Repeating History and about the writing process. 

If you would like to read it, the interview is here.  I hope you enjoy reading it as much as I enjoyed being interviewed.

A time to reckon, I guess

These were my goals this time last year

1) Complete my first two freelance museum gigs.

I did. Both well enough to get rehired [g].

2) Find more potential clients and land more gigs.

I found one more new client, which I've been working steadily for since April, plus, as I said, rehired by both my old clients, although one has since gone dormant till spring for lack of funds.

3) Go to more museum workshops and a conference, and continue Heritage League committee work.

I've been to two workshops and taken two classes, but I didn't make it to any conferences. The HL committee I was on finished its work in September, but I've been asked to be on the board, and probably will.

4) Write the mystery house rough draft.

Well, no. I've been working on the Yellowstone trilogy, though, and I will get back to it after I'm done with it.

5) Revise Sojourn, last year's NaNo book.

Again, no, because of the Yellowstone trilogy. It's in the pipeline, though.

6) Figure out what I'm going to do about the rest of the Yellowstone trilogy (which may end up as a duology), and get back to work on it.

I did figure it out, and what I did was do one more edit on Repeating History, create a cover, and format it for Amazon and Smashwords. I self-published it in early August, and it's been selling a steady trickle of copies ever since.
And, no, the Yellowstone trilogy is not going to be a duology. True Gold, the second book, has an almost complete rough draft, and I have begun revisions.

7) Finish piecing the Imbolc Flame quilt, and finish quilting the Yule Log Cabin quilt. Maybe start a nice, simple throw of animal fabrics and the animal cross-stitch patterns I did last summer.

The Imbolc Flame quilt is pieced. I haven't layered it yet, but I'll get there. The Yule Log Cabin, well... It's the disaster I finally ended up giving away partly quilted. First time I've ever done that with a quilt. The throw has just started to materialize (sorry, bad pun). I started piecing on it last week. I've also created several quilted pillows and am almost finished quilting a baby quilt for the great-nibling due in April.

8) Find some good 6" square flower cross-stitch patterns for my Beltane quilt and begin stitching them.

I've stitched half a dozen of them, but I got sidetracked with some other projects, including a cross-stitched pillow. The Beltane quilt will happen. Eventually.

9) Go to Crater Lake, Yosemite, and WorldCon in Reno in August with my friend M.

We went, we had a great time [g].

10) Do more research on Washington history -- find some more good stuff for my writing.

I did some, but I got kind of sidetracked researching True Gold.

11) Blog regularly.

Weell... Regularly, but not nearly as often as I would have liked.

And now this year's goals

1) Complete the new museum exhibit by the end of February, and keep getting rehired to continue the textile collection work.

2) Pursue more collections work as opposed to exhibits work. Only sign with the dormant client if they have sufficient funds to finish what they hire me to do and a concrete objective for that work. Sign a contract with at least one new client.

3) Join the Heritage League board. Take a Photoshop class. Pursue other career educational opportunities including the Washington Museum Association conference, in Seattle this year.

4) Finish True Gold and self publish it by the first of June.

5) Write Finding Home (the third book in the Yellowstone trilogy) and self-publish it, hopefully by the end of the year.

6) Learn better book marketing skills and put them into practice.

7) Redecorate the living room. My living room has had a lighthouse theme for the last twenty years, and it's time for a change. I have picked out some cross-stitch patterns and quilt fabrics with North American wild animals on them, so it's a start.

8) Finish the baby quilt. Finish the animal sofa throw. Make a new table runner for the sofa table. Layer the Imbolc Flame quilt and start quilting it.

9) Make new cross-stitch pictures for the living room. I have eight picked out. We'll see how many I can finish this year.

10) Make my first long car trip alone in five years [sigh]. The plan is to take off for two or three weeks in June and drive east. Maybe a night or two in Yellowstone to scatter bookmarks, but I want to go farther east than that, maybe as far as Theodore Roosevelt National Park in North Dakota. I also want to visit some of the historic sites like Fort Benton.

11) Get the garden cleaned up.

12) Blog more frequently.

So, what are your goals for 2012?

Success, success, I did it, I did it!

By the skin of my teeth. It is 9:08 pm on Wednesday, November 30th, and I just wrote:



Ta-da! I'd rather have wine, but the little guy can have his beer. He's been working hard, too [g].

2404 words on Monday the 28th.
2242 words yesterday, Tuesday the 29th, and
a whopping 2950 words today!

So I have won NaNoWriMo for the second year in a row.

I only have what I think is half to two-thirds of a rough draft at this point, but I will have a completed rough draft by the end of the year if it's the last thing I do [g].

And now I am going to bed. Phew!

progress, and an interesting Yellowstone link

I've been head down in NaNoWriMo, so haven't been blogging properly, but I do want to report that I'm up to over 23,000 words on True Gold, the sequel to Repeating History.

And here's an interesting link to a series of photos made by NASA about the recovery from the 1988 fires in Yellowstone.  I hope you find them as fascinating as I did.

I love the Internet

Actually, what I love is the Open Library, which very politely digitized one of the early "no, we've never been there, but there's a big market for it" guides to the Klondike gold fields, published in 1897.  And made it free on the web. 

There's something just so incredibly civilized about being able to access an otherwise almost impossible to get hold of book by clicking a mouse a few times.

Also, I have written over 8000 words since November 1st.  We're still on the decrepit steamship, less than a day out of Skagway, and Our Heroine has already had more adventures (well, she is a long time ago and a fair distance away) than is good for her.

And it is officially Day 1

Of NaNoWriMo, that is.  2043 words on True Gold, the sequel of sorts to Repeating History, which is about a young woman caught up in the Klondike Gold Rush of the late 1890s.  I will be posting word counts, commentary, and occasional snippets at my NaNo LiveJournal account (sojourn_town).  These posts will be friendslocked, which means that if you wish to read those entries, you will need to have either an OpenID account or a LiveJournal account, and you will need to "friend" me at LiveJournal, at which point I will happily friend you back as long as I know who you are (comment here as well, with your ID, so that I do). 

I'm sorry to make it so difficult, but I don't want to be posting even just snippets of the draft out where anyone can find them.

That said, if you are interested, and you do jump the hoops, I hope to make it worth your while...

plotting

I have finally restarted work on True Gold, a sequel of sorts  to Repeating History (one of the main characters is the son of the hero of RH, and the book takes place twenty years later).  Things sort of came to a grinding halt earlier this year, but I'm trying something new to me.  Plotting has always been my bête noire.  I love character development, world-building (or, in my case, historical research), writing dialog and description and all the other goodies that go with writing fiction, but unfortunately none of them are any good whatsoever without a plot. 

In the past I've used the process outlined in John Vorhaus's wonderful but grossly-misnamed book, The Comic Toolbox, and it's been a great help, but it just wasn't working this time around.  I had run across Holly Lisle's website a couple of years ago and had read some of her articles on writing.  So when I was casting about for something to help me get past the plotting beast this time, I ran across Holly's website in my lengthy list of links to writing websites, and discovered her Create a Plot Clinic ebook.  What the heck, I thought, it's only $10.  So I downloaded it and read it.

I appear to be getting somewhere now, so it was obviously a case of Right Book Right Time.  I've never outlined a book before -- I've always been a write-by-the-seat-of-my-pants person (what the romance writing community affectionately calls a "pantser").  But since that wasn't working this time, well, heck, I'm always open to trying something new.

I'm beginning to hope to have the outline finished by Halloween, just in time to take advantage of the worldwide cheerleading gang that is NaNoWriMo.  And to have the entire draft finished by the end of the year.

Eep.  Did I just say that?  Granted, I've got large chunks of manuscript from the failed drafts that I can use (just because it failed as a whole does not mean there aren't some -- or many -- individual scenes that will work just fine), but still.  I think I just heard myself committing to getting the whole thing straightened out by the end of the year.  Publicly (for whatever values of publicly the couple of dozen readers of this blog consists of [g]).

Oh, well.  As a college friend of mine used to say many years ago, "'S good for you.  Builds character."  I certainly hope it does...

Oh. My.

Today Repeating History received its first reader review on Amazon.  It's by Janet Chapple, who wrote the definitive guide to Yellowstone, Yellowstone Treasures. 

And, not that I'm trying to pull a Sally Field here or anything, but -- she liked it!  She really liked it!

Five stars. 

Wow.

Go check it out:  http://www.amazon.com/dp/B005E8S8UM

WorldCon, Day 4

I'm tempted to write, well, more of the same, and unfortunately I'm not inclined to take a lot of photos at SF conventions, mostly because I'm pretty much a scenery photographer rather than a people photographer. 

More panels, more meeting up with friends from the Bujold list, more interesting conversations.

In the evening Mary and I went to the Hugo Awards ceremony, which is basically a People's Choice Award for all things SF (although you do have to be a member of the World Science Fiction Society, attending WorldCon or not, to vote), but it's a good deal more prestigious, or so I gather.  "Hugo Award winning" seems to mean something when it comes to book sales, at any rate.

It was highly entertaining, at least from my point of view.  The two hosts, Jay Lake and Ken Scholes, really should do standup comedy together more often, and several of the presenters and recipients were quite funny as well.

The best novel category did not go to Bujold's CryoBurn, but to Connie Willis's time travel duology Blackout and All Clear.  I've enjoyed some of Willis's previous work (To Say Nothing of the Dog was laugh out loud funny), so I really ought to look into these.  One of these days...

And that was my fourth and last full day at WorldCon.  Tomorrow, headed west again.

WorldCon, Day 3

Unfortunately, I don't have any cute or clever or pretty pictures of the third day of the con. 

The day's panels started with Lois Bujold reading from her upcoming book.  Ivan His Booke, as she's been referring to it on her email list.  Ivan Vorpatril is the quintessential sidekick from Bujold's Vorkosigan space opera series.  One of his several catchphrases is, "It's not my fault!" but that's not always the case, which is good for him.  Her fans have been begging for an Ivan book for years, but I don't know if that's why she's writing it, or if Ivan has just quit sidling off onto the sidelines and out the door.  At any rate, the excerpt she read was Ivan at his best, and I'm really looking forward to this book.  We probably won't get it till at least next year, though.  Alas.

Another panel was on treating horses and other animals realistically in one's fiction, and yet another on world-building.  Both were interesting and useful to me.  Given that Repeating History features horses (it's rather difficult to write a book set in the Old West that doesn't), it was nice to know that my research on the subject paid off.

That evening the listees (as the members of the Lois Bujold mailing list call ourselves) went out to dinner at an Irish pub-style restaurant with Lois.  I think there were about twenty of us there, and a good time was had by all.  At least a good time was had by me...

Mary and I decided to skip the masquerade that night.  We'd been to the masquerade at WorldCon in Denver, and hadn't been all that excited about it.  We did hear some interesting tales about some of the costumes the next day, though.

And that was my third day at WorldCon.

WorldCon Day 2

The second full day of WorldCon was much like the first.  I wandered from panel to panel and ran into friends.

One of those friends is James from England, who is yet another member of the Lois McMaster Bujold email list, which is the venue that got me hooked into this whole SF congoing thing in the first place.  James was in the process of arranging for listees attending the con to have dinner with Lois, and I helped a little.  Sort of.

Panels included one on alternate universes, and the panelists included Steve Stirling, Harry Turtledove, and Eric Flint.  And as my friend Jim (as opposed to James) commented admiringly, they didn't get into a single argument.  It was highly entertaining in spite of that fact.

Another was about writing full time, something I doubt I'll ever do again simply because I prefer to have a lot of irons in the fire, and because I like the museum curator gig.  But it was interesting.

A third panel, purportedly on cover art in the age of the ebook, turned out to be several professional cover illustrators bemoaning how they're not getting paid as much as they used to.  I walked out of that one before it was over. 

That evening I attended a Girl Genius Ball.  It was basically a steampunk dance, although the costumes ranged rather more wildly than that.  I did take some pictures, although most of them did not turn out well.  Here are a couple that did:



The young gentleman in the tailcoat was a sight to behold.  The lady next to him was running the show, very very well.



The gentleman in the center looked like he'd just stepped off the Titanic.  The costumes really were much more fascinating than these photos show.

 The dancers performed all sorts of sets, from waltzes to complicated country dances.  It was great fun to watch.  And, no, I did not get up in my khakis, t-shirt, and sneakers and dance.

A lovely second day.

WorldCon 2011, Day 1

And now to the geeky part of our travels.  Renovation, the 2011 WorldCon, was held in Reno, Nevada, in August.  I suspect it's partly because Reno in August is a very cheap place.  The hotel certainly was cheap and luxurious, a combination I can seriously get behind.  But then given the weather I could understand why they might have trouble getting folks to come visit in August. I could literally feel the moisture being sucked out of my body every time I set foot out of doors, and the smoke from the range fire burning down near Carson City while we were there enhanced the effect nicely.

All that aside, WorldCon was very enjoyable.  This was Mary's and my second WorldCon -- our first was in Denver in 2008.  I think what I love best about science fiction conventions is the sense of humor of the organizers and attendees.  It's delightfully off-kilter.  For example, take a look at this grass-skirted Dalek:



For those who are not Doctor Who fans (and why aren't you?), Daleks are the good Doctor's most traditional villain.  However, I've never seen one in a grass skirt before.

 Then there is the Discworld golf cart:



Discworld, according to Terry Pratchett, who authors the books set there, is a flat world that sits on the back of four elephants perched on the back of a turtle which swims through the universe.



Here's a better view of Discworld itself.  The fringe is the water perpetually falling off of the edge of the planet.

 My first full day at WorldCon was partly spent wandering through the art show and the dealers' room, but it was mostly spent at panels where the topics ranged from writing in shared universes to the geek as hero.  I also enjoyed the opening ceremonies.

All in all, a very good opening day.

aw, shucks

According to this article and some scientists in Hong Kong, time travel isn't possible.  Nobody'd better try to tell that to Chuck McManis, though.  Who is Chuck McManis?  He's the hero of Repeating History, my new novel now out on Amazon and Smashwords.

Maybe they should have tried using a geyser.  Or an earthquake.  Or maybe both? [g]

And another small accomplishment

I have learned how to format a book for Amazon.  I'm not the techiest person in the world, so there was a bit of a learning curve, but I seem to have mastered it.  I still have a bit of tweaking to do (a bit of odd spacing in a couple of spots that, now that I look at it, are in the manuscript, too), but soon there will be a real ebook.

In the meantime, here's the shiny new cover:

Making progress.  Moving like a herd of turtles, as a friend back in Ohio used to say.  The photo is of Grand Geyser, which I took during the actual eruption that inspired the writing of the book.  Which is kind of nifty in itself, if I do say so myself.

what's in a name?

I always knew I was going to have to change some of the names in Repeating History, which, if all goes well, will be available for purchase at Amazon or via any of the formats Smashwords will provide, by the end of this month. 

Some of the characters in this story are real historical people.  Those who had only fleeting walk-ons have kept their names, but several -- mostly members of a family in 1870s Helena, Montana, and the man who married the eldest daughter of that family, are central characters in my novel.  I don't want to offend any of their descendants, so I've spent the last several days figuring out new names for all of them.

Speaking as someone who once fictionalized the small town of Libby, Montana, by giving it the name Campbell (okay, the reason is obvious to me, but I may be dating myself if no one else remembers the commercial jingle "Libby, Libby, Libby on the label, label, label"), I needed the names to be similar in ways that may not make sense to anyone but me.  Not just ethnically, although I did take that into account.  But the way they sound, their resonances and associations, and whether or not they come with nicknames were important, too.  For instance, I wanted to give a name that had a nickname to a man whose real name did not come with one.  This would have added some serious unnecessary editing time as I chose where he'd go by his nickname and where he would not, so, reluctantly, I chose another name.  Fortunately, as it turns out, I like this one better, anyway.

Why didn't I do all this at the beginning?  Back when I first started the novel?  Because, frankly, I didn't know who these people would turn out to be.  Generally speaking, most characters who show up in my head come complete with first, middle, and last names, and with entire backstories.  But most of the characters who show up in my head are not in real history books.  I wasn't sure how much they would change from their real lives as the story was written.   

And so this was my last editing chore before I sent the book off to be proofread. 

Now all I have to do is correct any errors found in that process, format the book for Amazon and Smashwords, finish monkeying with the cover image, and upload the darned thing!

I love the whole process of naming, whether it's a cat or a character.  Do you?

Something I never really thought I'd see

On an agent's blog:

Rejections from agents or general trade editors is hardly ever a measure of the quality of your work.  If you've gotten a lot of those, look at other ways of getting your work in front of readers.

This makes me believe that the publishing world honestly is beginning to change.  Speaking as someone who is finally getting up the courage to self-publish my books, that first sentence is the antithesis of what I've been internalizing for the last ten years or so.  To read that in a "traditional" agent's blog validates the route I've decided to take.  Mind, I would have taken this route, anyway, as on a personal level I need more control over my career than traditional publishing would give me (which is also why I am a former librarian and currently an independent curator and exhibit designer in my other life), but it's incredibly good to see this right now.