Category Archives: Site News

All Apologies

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Mmmm… I’m building a website. For a writer’s guild that I have joined. I’m on the board, actually. There’s this group of people I met in an Amazon.com discussion group who have decided that dammit, we need to really do something about the literary industrial complex. And holy c**p, about two dozen of us have gone and done something.

We’ve formed a non-profit writers’ guild, and plan to collaborate on marketing and publicity, and some other stuff, like a newsletter and making the scene at various book-fairs.

We have mad visions of doing for the literary industrial complex what blogging did for the legacy media. You know, storming the barricades, and all that.

Wish me luck, and keep that flaming torch handy. I may need it…

The Hollywood writers are on strike? Well, butter my buns and call me a biscuit – how the hell can you tell? Blondie just discovered that we have BBC-America in our cable package. We’re set for the next few months, what with Torchwood, Doctor Who and the new Robin Hood.

Jam Tomorrow – Progress Report

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“The rule is jam tomorrow and jam yesterday but never jam to-day.”

Or so saith the Queen, and I can just completely relate, because in the mad writers-life waltz that is my own life these days, there is always the hope of jam tomorrow. The bread today is plain and budget, and naked of jam, but tomorrow it may be miraculously spread with finest-kind Confiture Bar le Duc.

Or so we keep hoping. I think the cats are holding out for a can of nice juicy salmon, hold the toast hold the capers, just plain, thank you. The dogs will be ecstatically happy with anything edible that has only bounced once when it hit the floor.

Tiny tastes of jam include the fact that “To Truckee’s Trail” is in Booklocker.com’s list of top-ten print best-sellers, and I did get an email from this bookstore in Truckee City thanking me for my query and noting that they had ordered some copies from the Ingram catalogue to stock in their bookstore. I am testing out running an ad here; home central for all things Western… and I finally got paid for the magazine article that had been published several issues ago. (What a goat rope… I’m not really sure I want to submit any more articles, not when I have to wait to get paid for months and then throw a temper tantrum. How demeaning is that? And do publishers do it because it’s a hell of a lot easier to stall writers than suppliers and printers?) But I had some paid work at Dave The Computer Genius’ place of business, and he let me use his computer and soft-wear to tweak my book-website, so my need to buy my own copy of it is put off for at least a little while. All good, all jam., or at least a tantalizing expectation of same.

Still haunting the mailbox though; last week I ordered a box of copies from the publisher; these are the autographed copies which readers have ordered, and some are to be sent out to reviewers. I ordered another box this week; more review copies, and one for the kid in the sandwich shop where I get a smoked-chicken sub every Saturday… and I have promises of all kinds of linky-love and reviews in the very near future. As soon as I have the books in hand. And mail them out.

There was that saying about promises and pie crust, though…
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The Literary Game

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Is that the right word… literary? I’m not at all sure it applies to me, really. I fled academia years ago, whimpering softly to myself. Especially after the one Mod Lit class that I was forced to take… well, not forced, exactly. It just fitted in with my schedule, and I thought maybe I ought to be a little more conversant with the Giants of English Lit who had published something after 1940?

Well, it turned out to be a bad move, and I never made that mistake again. If it’s in the approved canon and published after the Depression then it’s probably a tedious and politically correct wank-fest, passing laborious to read, and generally about as much fun as do-it-yourself root canal surgery. Life is just too short, and I am an equal opportunity fugitive anyway. I’ll run just as fast from “The DaVinci Code” as I will from “The Corrections”. Oprah’s Book Club be damned… unless she picks one of my books, in which case I will cheerfully play along. (Scribbling notes to myself… Oprah Book Club… is there someone I have to sleep with, or something? Will they accept decorating advice or home-baked cookies, in lieu?)

Just don’t pop off the name of the literary wonderkind-du-jour in front of me, and expect any response but a blank expression, and the question. “Umm… who is that?” Look, I read all of Raymond Chandler, once. Surely that counts for something.

So… I am not literary. I tell stories. I tell stories about people, and interesting times, with a bit of vivid color and a lot of historical research, and I try to explain about how things were, and how they happened the way they did, and how it all felt to the people who had to cope with the resulting messy situation. If I identify with any literary heroine, I’m afraid it would be Flora Post, who hated team sports and untidiness.

If that works for you, it works for me. Buy a copy of the current book, or go here or here to read about the next book plus three. Give me interesting feedback, interesting factoids… be amused. So far, I need to sell another 1,999,992 copies before I can even think about moving into the castle next door to J.K. Rowlings’. I have mailed out a number of postcards to selected museum book stores, posted some flyers in various places, and scrounged a couple of links here and there. (OK, so I have blog-fans in interesting places, ‘kay?)

I am also waiting for a check from the local magazine that I did a version of this article for, so I can order a humongous quantity of copies for review and to send to people who have ordered copies, or to whom I owe copies. The more I order at one time, the better the price break for me, you see. I expect the damned check this week, having gotten the assignment in March, done the work in April, turned it in by a June deadline, for publication in July. Really, I wish I could stall my creditors at the rate that my creditors stall me.

So, that’s where it stands. Stay tuned… I’m sure it will get more amusing.

It’s Here!!!

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Ta-Dah!

Roll of drums, please… the great unsung pioneer epic “To Truckee’s Trail” is now available, thanks to those lovely people, Angela and Richard at Booklocker.com… here, and in the sidebar ad… I think.

A great heaping pile of thanks also to reader B. Durbin for the lovely picture which was used for the cover, and the encourangement of reader KC and mobs of others… it would have never have happened at all, but for those fans of The Daily Brief who first read the essays about the Stephens-Townsend party a couple of years ago, and who said “Wow! What a terrific story… why hasn’t anyone ever heard of these people?”

If anyone would like an autographed copy, let me know by sending the cover price plus $2.50 postage to my Paypal account by next Thursday, when I will be ordering a box of copies of it from the printer.

Later: Whoo-whooo! As of 4 PM Thursday, three copies sold, through Booklocker! Another 1,999,997 to go, and then I can think about buying a castle next to J.K. Rowlings’ !!

Even Later: As of Sunday morning, it’s added to the Amazon.com catalogue, here

Crescendo for the Writers Life Waltz

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Just a quick update on the current book, scribbled between slaving over a hot computer, a couple of job assignments, and mundane things like… oh, I don’t know, cooking meals? Taking the dogs out for a walk. (Er, drag-around-the-block. They. Drag. Me. Just to make that point absolutely clear.)

The text is uploaded to the printers, and the cover is finished and approved… it has all taken nearly two weeks to accomplish this; much longer than I expected. I hope this might be some kind of indication that business is absolutely booming with the POD houses. I was clawing the walls with impatience all this week, but the cover is well worth the wait, thanks to B. Durbin’s very generous offer to let me use one of her photos of the Truckee River. (Appropriate credit is given, natch!)

So, once I have a hard copy in my hot little hands, and approve the whole thing, “To Truckee’s Trail” will be in the booklocker.com catalogue, all 272 pages and eighteen long chapters (with notes!) of it; a gripping read of adventure and discovery along the 19th century emigrant trail to California. I’ll be doing some more marketing, and scrounging for reviews and ad space here and there, and generally trying to sell a good few copies of it. At the very least, I can claim to write fewer clunky sentences per chapter than Dan Brown, of “The DaVinci Code” fame! (That blasted book was unreadable, to me… I kept tripping and falling headlong over sentences that sounded like entries in the current Bulwer-Lytton Bad Writing Contest!)

And I’ll be scribbling away on the Adelsverein saga, or “Barsetshire with Cypress Trees and a Lot of Sidearms”. Going by my latest chapter outline revision I’m about halfway through volume two, although as complications and side-stories develop, this is guaranteed to expand to epic proportions, so to say. There are just so many interesting people, and fascinating scenes, dramatic and historic events; a kid in a candy store has nothing on me! Of course, I can’t help writing about them, I tell stories, it’s what I am driven to do. I just completed a tension-filled account of the local Confederate provost-marshal’s men searching a house for a draft-evader… on Christmas Eve… the searchers being unaware that the man they are looking for is dressed as Father Christmas. (In the parlor, with his family… and everyone who knows what is going on is frantically pretending that nothing is the least bit out of place.)

But three volumes of about twenty chapters each… and my chapters seem to clock in at 6,500 to 7,000 words each… that will mean 400,000 words.

So, back to slaving over the hot computer keyboard…

Later: Just realized upon consulting the archives, that today is exactly one year to the date that I was fired from (Boring Corporate Entity Inserted Here) and decided to try for that “best-selling writer brass-ring-thingy”! With the very book that is about to be launched upon a hopefully breathlessly-anticipating world. So, I have way to go to beat out that Harry Potter book… still, funny old world, innt it?

A Milestone to Remember

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As of approximatly 6 PM, CST, this blog passed a not-insigificant milestone… our 200,000 auto-spam comment!

Yes, of course it was deleted… and, thanks to the anti-spam software installed by Timmer (all hail, all hail!) sometime around Christmas, none of these disgusting abominations actually sifted through to be posted. But the software includes a spam-o-meter. It was kind of like watching the odometer of the VEV turn over to 200,000. I can vividly recall that moment! It was while I was driving to work at Lackland AFB – On the 90, just a little way east of Wilford Hall… but a little uncertain about the year. Say early fall, 1996, just before I retired from the USAF!

I run my nimble fingers through the moderation queue a couple of times a day, heartlessly emptying them, all these pitifully miss-spelled attempts to look like a chummy, friendly comment, flogging prescription drugs, diverse alternate sexual experiences and perversities, payday loans… and now and again the occassional almost-legitimate looking business or service, which looks almost embarrassed at being caught in such disreputable surroundings.

Really, most of the spam comments are of such resounding stupidity as to make me wonder why on earth they bother. Absolute gibberish with a link to a website flogging pharmaceuticals sent out several hundred times over to the same website isn’t likely to last long enough to garner a link or two… nor is a vaugely complimentary mention of the colors and design of this site, especially if it has been sent about three or four hundred times with the same exact errors in spelling. And a comment larded with a hundred links to assorted pharmaceuticals or sexual kinks… like, if it wouldn’t make it through a Yahoo spam filter, why would it make it through ours?

Anyway, thought I would make a note of this. Carry on with your regularly assigned duties.

Faster Than The Blog

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Faster Than The World (FTTW) now has a side blog up and running.  All of your favorite whack jobs from FTTW will now be posting in a blog format as well as their weekly FTTW Magazine articles.

What’s it called?  Faster Than The Blog of course.

That doesn’t mean I’m finally done for the well and all with The Daily Brief.  I’ll still save any military news/opinions for here, but in my current state of mind about the whole military…thing…there’s just not going to be much of that for awhile.

I was hoping not to burn out before I retired.  But watching and participating in some of the most recent bullshit has simply enforced my opinion that I’m making the right move at the right time.

This is not the Air Force I joined.  This is not the Air Force I love.  This is not the Air Force I spent 23 years trying to improve.  I don’t know what this is…but it’s not my Air Force.

My Current Project

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Without further ado, may I present the project that I have been working on, all this week, courtesy of my friend, Dave the Computer Guy; the website to market my books.

Well, the one that I did a couple of years ago, the one that I finished and which will be published (one way or another!) by September… and the three-part saga which I am currently working on. I am doing all this under the pen name that I began with… just to keep things tidy, and maintain my families’ assorted and respective privacy.

www.celiahayes.com

I am still working on some of the bits… like closing each page when you go to another one. And the “interview” page is still under construction… and my brother has promised some original art for some of the elements, rather than the bits supplied with the template.

This site is currently piggy-backed on Dave the Computer Guy’s site, so my next expense will be paying for a year of hosting, and for Dave to do some additional marketing. Feedback and suggestions are invited.

So are donations- (Paypal button over on the left, under the link for the first book.)

The Writers Life Waltz: Lento

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A little slow this week; working on revisions and rewrites to “Adelsverein Part One”, or as one of the regular readers calls it “Barsetshire with Cypress Trees”. I have begun sending out query letters on it, reasoning that by the time I hear from an agent who wants to hear more, I will have finished the revisions and polished it all to a high gleaming shine.

I also put together all the materiel necessary— basically, the first fifty pages and an expanded outline— for “Adelsverein” and “To Truckee’s Trail” both, and submitted them to Tor Books, which is just about the only one of the big publishers who condescend to review un-agented submissions. They take four to six months to make any sort of decision, by which time I’ll be well along in finishing “Adelsverein Part Two”. Part Three, maybe… depends on how fast I can research and write. (links here, here, here, and here, for those who are new to the site.)

At this point, three separate agencies have looked at “Truckee” and have turned it down. They all liked it, said nice things about it, but… and this is the Big But… sorry, no. Either it is too hard a sell, defies easy categorization, or there is no place for it in their current collection of offerings . But they all wished me luck in getting it published, and threw in some blah-blah-blah about it being a subjective business and perhaps another agency blah-blah-blah.

This is the book that just about every who has read it in full has loved, and at least three-quarters of those people are not related to me at all. Sooo… the fallback position is that if Tor turns it down, I’ll do POD, and hire my friend Dave The Marketing & Computer Genius to set up a website specifically for my books, AND do some serious marketing. Even if Tor does think it worthy (and you’ll be able to hear my jaw hit the floor all the way across several time zones if they do) or I do manage to get an agent, I will still do a book website of my own.

Hence, the Paypal donate button, over on the left, just under the link to my first book. The PJ ads support the site, donations will help me get the best book about the most incredible wagon-train story you have never heard about get out there in the mad world of books.