Too many choices!

We’ve had an eventful week or so with my last couple of unplanned posts. In all fairness, I did expect to get some knickers in a twist (which I did) with my post Pay the Writer. As a quick recap, I love used bookstores. They get a lot more of my money than I like to admit *looks up number to 12 Step Sponsor*

You don’t understand. Half Price Books has books ZEN DOODLES. No frigging idea what those are…just that I need some.

I’m not against “discovering” an author there.

But writers? If we promote used bookstores, make sure to remind readers you don’t get paid that way. Discovery must serve a purpose. Exposure must have the follow-up to be effective.

Because if you don’t ever make any money, you have to go work retail. If you work retail, one day you will be asked one too many stupid…

An Agnostic’s Thanksgiving Prayer

December 2, 2015

One morning last week, we all woke up to the news that Turkey had shot down a Russian fighter jet. This prompted one of those foxhole prayers we agnostics offer up in times of crisis:

God, please let this not be a shot heard round the world and the beginning of World War III.

It takes quite a lot to scare me into prayer. I’m often grouchy, and I’m nearly always sarcastic and cynical, but I’m also a glass-half-full optimist who feels very lucky with how her life has played out so far. I usually shrug off a Facebook feed full of doom and gloom, confident that humanity’s march toward little-E enlightenment, tolerance, and peace continues. Progress may be a two steps forward, one step backward dance, but we’ve come a long way since the big-E Enlightenment philosophers and scientists pointed us down…

Memoryball

October 21, 2015

The last time I paid attention to a baseball playoff, my nine-year-old daughter still needed a Bumbo to sit upright. It was Game 7 of the 2006 National League Championships, and the Mets’ Carlos Beltran stood at the plate in the bottom of the ninth with two strikes, the bases loaded, and the Cardinals up 3 to 1. This is the stuff baseball legends are made of: a batter who could win a championship with walk-off grand slam home run; a pitcher who might do the same with a final strike. Triumph and ignominy loomed. As my husband stood beside me, rocking from foot to foot, blood heated my face, my heart pounded and I felt like my head might explode. I needed to sit down but couldn’t. Adam Wainwright’s final pitch took flight. Carlos Beltran watched it zip into the catcher’s mitt; he didn’t even…

Map of Knownearth, the setting of Amanda’s first novel, Blade of Amber, and its reboot version, A Wizard’s Forge.

Roadmap to Change

October 8, 2015

As regular readers know, the One Year of Letters contributors have been commemorating the first anniversary of this blog by reflecting on our lives and work over the past year. Ever-gracious Kerry expressed her enthusiasm for the OYOL team’s introspections and observations. Elaina heroically looked back at her demons and once again stared them down. Colleen analyzed trends in our work and explored where this blog might go in the future. And our resident Picasso of words, Sigurd, took us on another journey through his thoughts and memories, each of which is a treasure. And Mary and Tatyana will be posting their one-year reflections soon, so be sure to come back for their wisdom and and insights.

The past week, I’ve looked over my old…

I am currently reading Kate White’s I Shouldn’t Be Telling You This: Success Secrets Every Gutsy Girl Should Know. There are bad books, okay books, good books and great books. But there is another kind of book and it’s the rarest.

The game-changer.

White has a witty, sassy style. She is seamlessly intelligent and down-to-earth in her fiction. And guess what? Her nonfiction delivers more of the same.

I’ve never recommended a book I haven’t finished, but this one has me far too excited. Even if Ms. White devolves into dirty limericks for the rest of the book? I still feel I have spent my money well. There are some points she makes which I feel are especially poignant and applicable to writers.

Part of the reason I’m referring to her book in this blog (even though I’m not yet finished) is that I might just chicken out unless I…

Tears, Fears, and Gears

September 24, 2015

The last time I cried at a birthday party was when I was nine or ten. A friend invited a dozen or so girls to a roller rink, and I was the only one who’d never skated before. Game to try, I giggled with the other girls as we shuffled across the thin carpeting of the shoe-changing area. The friction slowed down the skate wheels, providing me with a false sense of “this is easy!” Then I stepped onto the rink. The skates whizzed over the glass-smooth concrete but failed to bring me along and I fell splat onto my rear. I struggled up and slipped slowly around the rink, clinging to the wall. I don’t remember how many circuits I hugged that wall—I probably struggled through at least two before giving up. I spent most of the party sitting by myself, quietly…

Lost and Found 

September 9th, 2015

Dear Reader,

I love movies that make you think, and I saw one over the weekend:All Is Lost.Thisseafaring adventure is as tense and suspenseful as a thriller and has a knockout solo performance by Robert Redford. It’s also a fable about our world as we have made it. After thinking about it a lot, I decided the ultimate message is even the most competent, self-reliant person cannot succeed without help.

This message resonates in our current, highly divided political climate. I don’t know about you, but an awful lot of hate fills my Facebook feed. I’d planned to list some examples, but as I started to write them down, I stopped, because we all see it every day. We’ve also talked a lot about the hate here on OYOL. Colleen, Elaina…

Honor and the Cheating Heart

August 26, 2105

Dear Reader,

All right, I’m fessin’ up. I signed up for Ashley Madison, and my email is probably on that list.

Now that you’ve climbed back into your chair, I’ll tell you I signed up with full knowledge of my husband, and I did so to research the site for a friend. No, really, I did it for my friend. I never went past the free trial and never provided a credit card, and I closed my account after a single day and several emails from some desperate dudes.

The desperation made me sad, that these folks would reach out to a faceless stranger (I didn’t post a picture). The messages also skeeved me out, but they didn’t anger me. Who am I to judge these guys? As Glenn Greenwald has written, how can we judge people whose private lives and…

Ambition Makes Me Tired

August 12, 2015

The blank page. A field of white, unsullied and wholesome, unexplored and terrifying. There’s a reason you don’t see a blog from me every week here on OYOL. When Colleen and Elaina asked me recently if I could step up my frequency and submit every week, I cringed and begged off. Oh, no, I’m far too busy to commit. I have the family and the day job, not to mention two works in progress that need to be finished. One is a heavy rewrite of the third book in my fantasy/scifi series, the other my foray into literary fiction. Progress on the one is slow, while I haven’t worked on the other in years. Years.

If I applied myself, I could finish the one and get the other back on track. But the blank page stands in the way. To some writers, the…