Scarlet Letters

This has proven much more difficult to write than I anticipated, probably because this is the hardest decision I have ever had to make. Harder than the decision to leave Memphis and my career in the arts in order to pursue a life in journalism. Harder than the decision to divorce my first husband, the father of my child. And I'm not one to take a leap without considering all the options, so you'd best believe that I have discussed this with Jim, with my parents, with close friends, with mentors. Probably until they were tired of talking about it with me. I have dithered and stalled, because once I post this, it's final. It's real. I'm leaving the newspaper. With that decision ends 21 years in daily journalism. Wow, that was hard to type. And I haven't even done it yet. Please click here to check out my new site and all the details about this amazing new journey I'm about to take, and how you can be a part of it.

In case you hadn't noticed, this blog is on semi-hiatus. Not that I don't enjoy sharing the menfolk's shenanigans and my latest rants, but there's a lot of things up in the air right now and I need to focus for a bit. However, the Fall Deathmarch must stomp on! Each year I say I'm not going to do this to myself, and each year I give in. Coming up: • St. Louis SPJ Student Boot Camp, Edwardsville, Ill. Sept. 23 (journalism) • Archon, Collinsville, Ill. Sept. 29-Oct. 1 (books and art/Literary Underworld) • Imaginarium, Louisville, Ky. Oct. 6-8  (books and art/Literary Underworld) • Leclaire Parkfest, Edwardsville, Ill. Oct. 15 (books and art) • journalismSTL, St. Louis, Mo. Oct. 23 (journalism) • Heartland Book Festival, Cape Girardeau, Mo. Oct. 28 (tent. - books) • St. Louis Indie Book Fair, St. Louis, Mo. Nov. 3-4 (books) • Contraception, Kansas City, Mo. Nov. 10-12  (books and art/Literary Underworld) • Edwardsville (Ill.) Winter Market, Dec. 2 (...

So, did anybody send us money recently? There's no polite way to ask that question, but I have to ask, because it looks like someone may have been swiping our mail. We have had three pieces of mail go missing en route to us in the last month, and each of them was related to money: a check for a Relay fundraiser, a graduation card for Boy with check enclosed, and a replacement debit card for my business account. We are getting the card replaced and the others have been informed. But the complicating factor is that Boy received a metric ton of wonderful cards, letters and other mail from kind family and friends congratulating him on his graduation. And in the time-honored tradition of the starving student, most of them sent cash or checks. Boy diligently wrote thank-you cards for gifts received before he went off to camp. There were a few that came in after he left, so those have not been properly thanked yet. (He's getting to them as soon as he comes home, he swears.) Bu...

Oh, just pick a state, willya... I greet you from a lovely bed and breakfast in Charlestown, Indiana. It's a charming mansion with many rooms decorated in a comfortable, Victorian-inspired style, a billiards and music room downstairs and lovely gardens, at least what I could see when I arrived after dark. So far I approve. The only downside of the room: No desk, and I neglected to charge the laptop, so I can't work at the nifty writing-desk in the hall. Therefore I have the laptop balanced on my knees in the Victorian contour chair so I can write this blog. The things I do for you people. Today was supposed to be a leisurely drive to the Louisville, Ky. area to explore the area before the marketing symposium for writers at Karen's Book Barn , the store hosting me and many other authors this weekend. Of course, I got hit with about five errands to run "on my way out of town," no less than two minor crises, and got twenty minutes away from home before ...

So let's recap, friends and neighbors: This weekend: • I have a signing at Maeva's in Alton on Friday night - " Writers of the Riverbend ." • On Saturday, I work for Ye Olde Newspaper. • On Sunday, I am running a fundraiser at Pottery Hollow for the Relay for Life team. This requires baked goods, as treats were promised to the people coming to paint things. I might be able to get away with cookies and punch. • Meanwhile Boy goes through his Ordeal for the Order of the Arrow. Next weekend: • I am doing a signing in Louisville, Ky. I am leaving on Thursday so I can do some photography on Friday before the signing on Saturday. • But as soon as the signing is over Saturday, I have to book it back to Illinois. Because... • Sunday is the 175th anniversary of St. Andrew's Episcopal Church . I am responsible for the coffee hour baked goods. And coffee hour is, as we all know, the eighth sacrament of the Episcopal Church. • Therefore all baking must be done...

Announcement! The Kindle edition of Moonlight Sonata  is now available for $4.99! I named my pet raven Edgar. He's happy to meet you. Q: Wait, the book's been out a week. Why is the ebook just now - A: Because I'm not Beethoven. Q: What? A: Amazon got the ebook version of my new short story collection mixed up with the various renditions and publications of Ludwig's Piano Sonata No. 14 in C-sharp minor , which he called " Quasi una fantasia " and we call " Moonlight Sonata ." Q: That seems like a difficult mistake to make. A: Well, it's not like I didn't know it existed. In fact, I listened to the sonata several times in the playlist I developed while writing the stories in this book. Along with a significant portion of the soundtrack to Sons of Anarchy . It's that kind of book. Q: So that's why there hasn't been an ebook up until now? A: Yes. The little hamsters running in the wheels at Amazon got my short stor...

T-minus one week for the release of Moonlight Sonata,  and I couldn't be happier. This collection has been a long time coming, and I'm delighted that this macabre mix of old friends and new stories will finally see print. Some of the pieces have been previously published, but at least half have never before seen the light of day, and I hope you'll like them. Wanna see a cover? I love my creepy little crow. I think I'll name him Edgar. From the back cover: All that can kill you is what you carry with you. Imagine a haunted church, where the ground has turned sour and something walks in the shadows to the mournful hymns. A silent covered bridge that no one dares to cross. Angry spirits that cry out from beneath the ground of a cemetery that will not lie still. An ageless man bound in love to a mortal woman, forever moving, forever haunted. A police officer chasing a suspect into the woods - and suspects they are no longer alone. A woman preparing to leave her ...

How terrible for his ghostwriter. In case you missed it a few weeks ago, James Patterson called off his novel The Murder of Stephen King .  It was actually a concept with potential, though not terribly unique: a serial killer is reenacting the deaths in a famous writer's books. Too bad Patterson decided to base it on a real-life writer, one who has already done this story a couple of ways, who has actually been stalked and terrorized by crazy people, and who isn't much of a Patterson fan. Okay, it was maybe a little unkind (or at least impolite) for King to call Patterson a terrible but very successful writer. Largely because it's public knowledge Patterson doesn't write his own books anymore. If his books are terrible, then he should probably hire better ghostwriters. Still, this was a tacky novel concept, so I'm glad he pulled it. I name characters after real people all the time, but only with their permission. And while my friends are largely delighted...

There's a piece going around the internet that is about 85 percent really good advice. So at first, I hesitated to say what bothered me about it. Here, read it. It's good stuff. " How Not to Sell Books at an Event ." I'll wait. If I had a dollar for every beginning author I've seen with one solitary copy of his book resting on a bare table... I always have at least one backup tablecloth in my bag, sometimes more. I have been known to offer them on loan to cloth-less authors, and every single time that author came back at the end of the day to say, "Wow, that really made a difference! I'm going to pick up some of these." Note to authors: Remnant sales at fabric stores. Get an eight-foot length because you never know the size of the table you'll get. Horror authors can pick up nifty patterns in the post-Halloween sales. Other questions I am often asked: Where did I get that great folding rack? Store Supply Warehouse , folks. If you'...

Twice in one week. Might be a good time to buy Powerball. Some time ago, I was informed that my car needed a new cabin air filter and a transmission fluid flush. One of those made sense. The latter, however, seemed a tad premature for a car barely two years old. Therefore, I took Ariane to CarZeus (the God of Cars). The original CarZeus is long retired, of course, but in his time he kept some truly atrocious pieces of automotive technology ferrying me to and from work. When he retired, he sold the shop to his top mechanic, and I've stayed with them loyally and referred others to them. They have always taken excellent care of my cars, explained things I didn't understand without an ounce of condescension, helped me avoid some costly mistakes, and have never applied the Female Surcharge that always seems to accompany car repair bills when I go elsewhere. CarZeus's crew confirmed what I suspected: the air filter needed replacement, but the transmission fluid flush was no...

No, this isn't just ads, I swear. You can trust me! First, the ads. *ducks* Seventh Star Press is putting my latest on sale for the post-Christmas season: Nocturne Infernum  for 99c. Ninety-nine cents, people. That's three novels, an entire trilogy, for less than a dollar. I personally am pretty proud of this book, which is really three books. If you bought the original trilogy, know that this isn't the Lucas Edition with extra CGI and annoying plot changes. It's the Director's Cut, with the dreck cleared out. Buy it on Kindle, or better yet: gift it to a friend. (Yeah, you can do that with ebooks, and it's awesome.) The ebook is regularly $4.99 - still a bargain for three novels. The paperback is $21.95 if you buy it from Amazon, $20 if you buy it from Literary Underworld . Which leads me to the real purpose of today's post. I think I've done a poor job in telling people what the hell LitUnd is, and that's ironic for someone in the communicati...

"If you want to take an author's hard work, and then use it to generate a profit, but you are not willing to pay that author in any way, shape, or form besides allowing them to sign their name to the piece, then you are exploiting that author. Pay them by the word, share your ad revenue, and by all means try to get a good deal on the work, but do not simply swipe it, post it online, and then roll around in the money like some kind of political cartoon." This terrific quote comes from Neal Litherland's blog The Literary Mercenary , which is an awesome blog name I wish I'd thought of using. It's drawn, of course, from the ongoing discussion about paying authors, as if that's such a radically bizarre concept that we just started questioning whether people should be paid for their work. I've seen Uncle Harlan's famous "Pay the Writer" clip from Dreams With Sharp Teeth about twenty times in these discussions, because it's exactly...

I have really got to stop doing this to myself. I am too old to run around the country like this. First, I must offer my regrets to the fine folks at River City Comic Expo in Little Rock. There will be many fine guests there this weekend, so please show up and visit with them! So that kicks me off at Dragoncon , where some postal shenanigans unfortunately delayed my official confirmation and thus my panel schedule is pretty light. At the moment, all I know about are panels on the Writers Track at 2:30 pm. Friday and Sunday, an Apocalypse Rising panel at 4 pm. Saturday, and my reading will be at 5:30 p.m. Sunday. More panels may be added in the future, and I will offer chocolate and a free limited-edition chapbook to attendees at the reading on Sunday. Naturally, a limited presence means less opportunity to sell books, especially in a zoo like Dragoncon among 65,000 of my closest friends. But I will be there, and I'm bringing the new book as well as some older titles and out...

While I was pregnant with Boy, I went through the precertification and piles o' paperwork in advance of his birth so the nonsense would be fairly limited when it came time to deliver the baby. As we were filling out the paperwork, I saw that they put my first husband's name down as the responsible party with his Social Security number. "Wait," I said. "I'm the patient, and our insurance is through my employment. Please don't do that." "I'm sorry," she replied. "It's hospital policy. The husband is always the responsible party for medical bills." I begged. I pleaded. I had already fought enough battles with that HMO to know that unless my name was on everything including graven images marked with blood, they would deny the claims. Besides, it was 1998, not 1958. Why in bloody hell did my husband have to be the responsible party? I handled the bills, the insurance was in my name through my employment. But he had the ...

It does take more than money to make me happy. But the sales from this weekend in Nashville go a long way. I'm not going to disclose numbers. But I will say that the gross sales figures from this weekend are within shouting distance of our gross sales from Midsouthcon, one of our highest-selling conventions.  Why is this shocking? Midsouthcon has more than 2,000 attendees. Hypericon had maybe 200.  Those guys rock. My authors were happy. The staff was happy. And the Literary Underworld Traveling Bar was well-stocked.  (This show's most popular items were an awesome maple bourbon provided by Underlord Stephen Zimmer and the famous apple pie moonshine provided by Michael Farnette. Yum.) It takes more than sales. It takes good friends, colleagues in the small-press trenches and intelligent conversation that goes beyond debates about the Heisenberg Compensator to the reflections of popular culture in the world around us. It's always worth the lost sleep. ...

It could have been worse, or so I keep telling myself. The price tag for my stupidity is pretty high, however. A new hard drive with lifetime warranty, plus data retrieval of whatever they can rescue from my dead drive. A new battery, required because my laptop was declared vintage within the last couple of weeks. That means Apple will no longer manufacture the parts, and since my battery was about to die, I needed to get a new battery while they're still available. Therefore I was going to postpone my planned RAM upgrade until I could recover from this financial gut-punch. However, I figured out that if I did the RAM now, it wouldn't cost me any additional labor costs and it came with a lifetime warranty, as opposed to the 'crack the case and pray' warranty that comes when I do the work myself. Total cost: $525. To be fair, the cost would have been the same if I hadn't been stupid. However, I wouldn't be sitting here praying that they are able to rescue ...

Let me preface this by saying that snarky or even well-meaning comments about Apple really will not be welcome at this time. I can't believe how often I have to say this, but seriously, guys. I am quite stupid. It's not like I don't know the golden rule of computers: Thou Shalt Back Up. I'm actually quite good about it, usually. My mobile devices back up daily to the cloud. My laptop backs up to an external drive I keep on my desk. It isn't wireless, so I had to remember to physically plug in my laptop for backing up, but it works. Or it did. A few months ago, my external drive went kablooey. That's a technical term. We planned to replace it, but we were stony broke that month - like, tuna and macaroni broke. We also knew that the house wifi router was three years old and getting twitchy. So we discussed it, and decided that we would kill two birds with one expensive stone. The Airport Time Capsule is an awesome dual-band router and a 3TB wireles...

The Good • Boy's theatrical debut was delightful fun, and he had a smashing time. I had not seen the scaled-down community theater version of Les Miserables before, and as my dad put it, the very young, energetic cast was obviously giving it absolutely everything they had. Boy was terrific as an ensemble player. He was a disturbingly convincing drunk, which means he's seen too many cons, and died most heroically on the barricade. (Spoilers!) I was not prepared for it to be so stressful! I was much more nervous than he was, hoping nothing went wrong. My stomach was in knots! But I was even less prepared for my emotional reaction to seeing Boy on the stage. The theater meant a great deal to me as a young woman, and I have never once regretted my decision to study it. I also have not regretted my decision to give it up, but I was overwhelmed by emotion when I saw Boy up on the stage obviously having so much fun "At the End of the Day." • The Author Fair went off ni...

One of the fun things about an author fair, even one with light foot traffic, is the chance to talk business with other writers. Chatting with the other authors at this weekend's signing convinced me to try KDP Select for one item as a test case. I've not been terribly fond of the exclusivity requirement; I am concerned about what Amazon's market dominance means for the rest of us, and I have generally followed the philosophy of having my work available in as many formats as possible. If my readers want it in iBooks or Smashwords, they should be able to get it there. However, my standalone novellas have not been terribly successful on the other formats. The difference is drastic. In a strictly-business review of sales, I lose very little by taking a novella and putting it exclusively on Kindle for three months. I'm conflicted about it, but if I look it at solely as a businesswoman, it's an experiment worth doing. Some authors have said they lost a bucket on KD...

For the record, brain, it was not very polite of you to come up with the title and two-thirds of the plot to the next Nocturne  novel at church today. Especially since we're obligated to about three more projects before we could possibly get to that one. It's gonna be kickass, though. ---- Day two of Waiting for Dreamhost. Something like Waiting for Godot; when something goes wrong with my website, they respond instantly, and sometimes I can even get a live chat for help. When something goes wrong with the webstore, I must post in the forum and wait for a reply. It's been more than 24 hours and no response. If I call them, the price is $99. Waiting. Waiting... Let's make bets! ---- Boy: Are we doing anything Tuesday? Me: *parabola-mouth* Boy: What? Oh. Oh my God. Me: *supersniffle* Boy: It's your birthday Tuesday, isn't it. Me: *pout* Boy: I may have to do some shuffling. I forgot. Me: For the record, that's the last time you get a free pass...