It's Amazing What Consistent Work Will Get You

My biggest fault when it comes to my author process is lack of consistency in how much I work. I'll get a wild hair up my nose and sit down at the computer for 4 hours and get a lot done, then not touch my WIP for three weeks. 

It's not very conducive to producing the volume of work I want to.

In July, my bestie, Jessi, sent me a meme that made all the happy little creative sensors in my brain light up.

And instead of doing what I normally do, which is brainstorm (daydream) for a few days, write a few scenes, then get distracted by the next new idea, I decided to start taking my ancient (by today's standards, in actuality it's like 10 years old) iPad mini to work and write over my lunch break.

Y'all! 

The amount of work I have been able to get done using just the notes app on my poor little iPad floored me. In just a couple of months, I've been able to write a whole novel, the fastest I've ever worked. It does help that the iPad can't connect to the internet at work (reduces my distractions), I'm still in Facebook jail (damn you, Zukes!), and I keep telling myself "It doesn't have to be perfect, it's a rough draft, just get the words down" but just the consistency of working for an hour everyday has kept the juices flowing. I don't have to spend a bunch of time rereading what I've written because I forgot what's going on. I can quickly scan over what I wrote the previous day to get in the right headspace and jump right in. 

After all these years of having people tell me it's key to write everyday, I can finally say "Yep, you're right. Good on ya."

I would love to continue this process but I have a feeling I'm going to have to update equipment. First, it's kind of a pain in the butt writing in the notes app because I have to email it to myself, paste it into a word document, then fix all the formatting that didn't carry over. Also, I don't know how much more my little iPad can store. 

I'd imagine, before long, I'm going to be investing in a tablet that I can use google docs or something on. If you have any spare pennies, feel free to throw them at the "Keep Katherine Productive and Help Her Buy a New Tablet" fund.*

Anyway, this is my way of announcing that my newest book will be coming out soon-ish. The rough draft is almost done (my goal is end of September but probably by the end of the weekend), then the rewriting, the editing, beta reading, more editing, and so much wine drinking has to happen. Then it will be ready. I'm calling it a sweet paranormal rom-com. Not sure if that's an official subgenre but that's what I'm going with.

*This is not real, please don't throw pennies at me, that's how you lose an eye. BUT, I would not object to having bills and/or checks thrown my way.

Audiobooks: yay or nay?

There’s this asinine argument in the book world over whether listening to audiobooks counts as “reading” or not. I think the argument is: if you’re not physically moving your eyes back and forth while understanding the words, it doesn’t count.

I don’t really agree with that. I feel like if you’re consuming books in one way or another, congrats, you’re reading.

Just… don’t eat them. Ok?

“Give them books and they’ll just tear out
the pages and eat the glue” -my dad

There are so many bigger and more concerning things in the book world (like racism, sexism, elitism, book banning, book burning, male authors not understanding literally anything about female anatomy, and the all-important Oxford comma debate) to be concerned over semantics of “reading” an audiobook.

This is not where I wanted this post to go. Back to the point: Audiobooks- yay or nay?

Until about 3 years ago, I was not a consumer of audiobooks. I think I willingly listened to 2-3 audiobooks in my whole life (one was called The Archer* that I checked out of the library to listen to on our family trip to Kansas City to visit my sister, I remember liking it… I should try to find it again) until I started working at an office job that let us listen to whatever we want to while we work. Once I exhausted my Pandora music stations and burned myself out on a ton of podcasts (the first couple of weeks after discovering true crime podcasts were some of the most paranoid times of my life), I decided to finally listen to my mom, download the Nebraska Overdrive app, and delve into audiobooks.

Let me tell you, digital audiobooks are a miracle. I remember my mom having audiobooks in huge binders of cassettes or CDs in the car for her six-hour-round-trip from Shelby to North Platte and back. It was all very stressful: struggling to change out the tapes or disks while keeping the car on the road going 75 mph, having to haul 37 lbs of plastic and booklet inserts with you just so you can keep listening to the book, and the constant terror of accidently losing one of the tapes or disks, rendering the whole book as nearly useless. 

Ok, that’s a thought and I’d love the librarians in the room to weigh in: what happened when you got an audiobook back in that was missing a piece? Did you just weed the whole thing, or could you contact the publisher and get a replacement?

The need for something besides Muzak to listen to and the allowance of audiobooks in the public library’s summer/winter reading programs was the incentive I needed. I quickly found out that I can’t listen to fiction while I work. I either focus too much on my work and miss important details of the book resulting in me being lost until I rewind the book and start the whole process over again, or I focus too much on the book and don’t work. Not a great idea.

So, I decided to try out nonfiction for work: specifically, historical nonfiction, humorous nonfiction, memoirs, and biographies. Now, that’s where it’s at. I’ve laughed out loud, I’ve ugly cried at my desk, and I’ve learned a lot. I’ve had so many nonfiction books and biographies on my TBR list for years but I’ve given up on physically reading them because I knew I’d give up halfway through. With audiobooks, I can stay busy while “reading” and actually finishing them.

That’s not to say I only listen to nonfiction audiobooks. I found out how much more fun solo road trips are with a good novel playing, so now I make sure to download one or two when I’m planning on getting some serious windshield time.

I also discovered how soothing they can be. On days where my anxiety is high, or I’m just overstimulated by life, music and podcasts are a no-go. It’s better to download an audiobook and let the narrator lull me into a temporary place of calm. 

Jenny Lawson is one of my favorites. While her voice is kind of chipmunk-like (her words, not mine), she’s hilarious and honest about her mental health struggles, and she reads her books with such emotion that it’s easy to relax listening to her. Plus, I’ve read/listened to her books probably half a dozen times at this point and we all know about people with anxiety and rewatching/relistening/rereading things. 

Caitlyn Doughty on the other hand has an incredibly soothing voice, but unless you’re into death culture and death in general, I’d maybe skip her books.

Oh, and don’t listen to a book about the 1918 Influenza Pandemic in the middle of the Covid-19 Pandemic. It’s both anxiety-inducing and depressing considering the number of things we did wrong, again.

After those uplifting comments, where do you stand on the audiobook debate?

*I took a break to try to find the book I’m thinking of. It might be The Archer’s Tale by Bernard Cornwell but I actually can’t remember much about it beyond the main character being a young-ish lad, it explaining how amazing English longbowmen were (could have 3-4 arrows in the air at once), and how crappy early crossbows were in comparison. If anybody has read The Archer’s Tale and what I described sounds familiar —or not—, let me know.

Book Review: Gravy by Faith A. Colburn

I recently got to be part of my friend, Faith Colburn's street team for her latest book, Gravy. Here is my review.

Connor, fresh from the Pacific, is finishing out his enlistment as an MP on the army base outside of Colorado Springs recovering from a bad case of malaria and trying to deal with his PTSD.

Bobbie, a WAC, has spent much of WWII repairing radios in planes and singing at a lounge in Colorado Springs in her off time.
 
The pair hit it off, after overcoming a few roadblocks and manage to fall in love, even though both of them have one foot out of the relationship: Connor and his uncertain mental situation after serving in the Pacific, and Bobbie with her desire to return to the road singing with big bands and her uncertainty of farm life. But they decided that they loved each other enough that blow ups and forgone dreams wouldn’t stand in their way of making a go of it.
 
The couple work hard to make a normal life for themselves in Nebraska but the fear of Connor’s blow ups intensify when Bobbie is put through a traumatic pregnancy and labor that they fear damaged their daughter.
 
The fear of hurting the baby more and the inability to be a good mother sends Bobbie running and Connor struggling to understand how exactly their life together fell apart.
 
Gravy is the final book in a trilogy, the first, The Reluctant Canary Sings, chronicles Bobbie’s life in Cleveland, OH as a big band singer during the Great Depression. The second, See Willie See, is about Connor’s time with the Army in Panama and the Pacific with flashbacks to his life on the farm in Nebraska and his time tramping around the American west during the Great Depression.
 
Faith’s extraordinary ability to fill her books full of historically accurate details without bogging down the story never fails to wow me. Her characters are multi-dimensional and interesting without ever feeling fake. Their actions are completely in-character and the reader fully understands why they’re doing what they’re doing without needing huge info-dumps to get there.
 
While the beginning is a little slow going to set up all of the back story and the story’s moving parts, Gravy quickly becomes a steamroller that you can’t stop reading. The need to know what happens next and the will-they-won’t-they will keep you turning pages long after you should have gone to bed.
 
I feel that the overarching theme of the book is trauma, how it can come from different places, and affect people differently. Also, how important communication with loved ones about it is in order to maintain relationships and understand how it affects everybody.
 
Gravy is a wonderful conclusion to this WWII/family drama where two people work hard to overcome their own traumas to support each other and their family, making plenty of mistakes along the way but finally realizing what they ultimately want is to be together.

I highly recommend reading the entire trilogy, all three books are wonderful. The books are available on Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Smashwords, and Kobo.

Faith's website: https://prairiewindpress.us/

QMS News: Breaking (Bad) News

A few of the short short stories I included in Quarantine Monster Shorts were inspired by some of the weirder news stories of 2020 where I gave supernatural/paranormal/ridiculous reasons for them happening. I decided to share a brief explanation of those news stories in case you forgot. Here is the fifth one. Enjoy!

 Another 2020 story that I would've never seen coming (2020 you wily bitch): Meth Gators.

Police were concerned (reports vary at how sincere the concern was) that flushing meth down the toilet could lead to alligators eating it downstream. I can see why a methed-out gator would be a serious issue considering how unpredictable and aggressive they can be when sober.

Picture from USA Today

But think of how clean the swamps would be.

Look for "It's Not Meth" in Quarantine Monster Shorts, coming October 2021

QMS News: We all need some change

 A few of the short short stories I included in Quarantine Monster Shorts were inspired by some of the weirder news stories of 2020 where I gave supernatural/paranormal/ridiculous reasons for them happening. I decided to share a brief explanation of those news stories in case you forgot. Here is the fourth one. Enjoy!

The first sign that anything was amiss with the Department of the Treasury was an actual sign at my local grocery store. 

It said something about not giving out extra change, please pay with a card or exact change, no quarters, etc. Then I started seeing them everywhere: drive thru windows, restaurant Facebook pages, and my apartment office. I even heard some places were giving discounts if people paid in change so they could replenish their supply.

Who had coin shortage on their pandemic bingo card, because I absolutely did not see it coming.

I asked the gal at customer service at Hy-Vee (midwest grocery store chain) what was going on and she said she had been told that a couple of the mints closed with the lockdown and supply chain issues was causing the Dept. of Treasure (they really missed out on an opportunity there) was struggling to make enough coins to meet the demand. The teller at my bank said basically the same thing.

Thankfully, I had a small supply of quarters and I spent most of the lockdown wearing the same four pieces of clothing so I didn't have any issues. In fact, I ran out of quarters shortly after coins came back so I got two rolls of shiny new 2020 quarters.

Shiny new 2020 quarters celebrating the
Salt River Bay in the U.S. Virgin Islands

One is going in my pandemic scrapbook... if I had a pandemic scrapbook. I think at this point it's just a dusty old shoebox that I will sage and burn once the nightmare ends.

Look for "Coins" in Quarantine Monster Shorts coming October 2021.

QMS News: Mystery Seeds

A few of the short short stories I included in Quarantine Monster Shorts were inspired by some of the weirder news stories of 2020 where I gave supernatural/paranormal/ridiculous reasons for them happening. I decided to share a brief explanation of those news stories in case you forgot. Here is the third one. Enjoy!

I was going to think of something witty for the title but there's something so ominous about "mystery seeds" that I gave up.

In July, people all over the world started receiving packages in the mail that were usually labeled as containing jewelry, but actually held some seeds. Most people chalked it up to a one-off mistake and tossed them until a gardener in England asked a gardening group on Facebook about it and then the news exploded around the globe.

The seeds were traced back to China and after Covid tracing back there also, the panic and conspiracy theories ran amuck. People were convinced the seeds were actually bio-weapons to finish what Covid started, or some sort of spy device.

After investigating, the US government concluded that they were just seeds, but advised people to not plant them or throw them away. Rather, they should burn them, but that was primarily to prevent a rash of invasive species from popping up all over.

Was I the only one kind of hoping this was their one chance of growing a whole army of Audrey IIs?

Picture from WikiSciFi.

Look for "Feed Us" in Quarantine Monster Shorts coming October, 2021.

QMS News: Departure of Royals

 A few of the short short stories I included in Quarantine Monster Shorts were inspired by some of the weirder news stories of 2020 where I gave supernatural/paranormal/ridiculous reasons for them happening. I decided to share a brief explanation of those news stories in case you forgot. Here is the second one. Enjoy!

One of the longest lasting news stories of 2020 and into 2021 was Prince Harry and Duchess Meghan stepping down from their duties as senior royals and moving to Canada, then the US.

I followed the story closer than I follow many news stories in the US for reasons I can't really explain. Could be, like many Americans, I am simply fascinated by the royal family, or because of an inherited case of raging Anglophilia (Britanophilia?) - thanks, Mom - but whenever the British monarchy shows up on the news, my attention immediately shifts to that.

Of course there are a ton of speculation over the departure, even with Harry and Meghan's infamous Oprah interview. Vitriol and rancor was thrown at the couple from both sides of the pond but with the royal family being one of the most closed-mouthed institutions in the world, we will probably never know the whole truth.

But I have a theory of my own:

It was werewolves.

Still from Doctor Who "Tooth and Claw" ep 2, series 2.
Picture found on Warped Factor blog.

Look for "Royal Pack" in Quarantine Monster Shorts coming October 2021.