Jolene in Real Life

Me!  It's me!  My manuscript, Island Runaway, was the winner in the Single Title Contemporary category for the Chicago-North RWA Fire & Ice contest! If you thought being a finalist boosted my confidence, this recent news has made me feel like a rockstar!  I received the news almost a week ago, but I've been in overdrive tweaking the entire work to make it that much better and starting on a short story to enter in another contest while I'm still feeling unstoppable and am just now posting the news on twitter and here. So now the plan is to self-publish sometime in October if I don't land any deals before then.  I don't honestly expect to, but then I also didn't expect to win the Fire & Ice contest so you never know.  Either way, I really need to start working on marketing myself including my web presence including here and spending more time on twitter.  You wouldn't really think it would be that hard, would you. In other news, last month I...

That's what some of my friends have been telling me to do.  When telling people what I do, tell them that I am a writer.  Own it!  Well now that I'm a finalist in a contest (finally!), I'm finding it that much easier to do so. On Thursday I chaperoned for my son's field trip and at lunch found myself sitting next to his teacher who I really like.  At one point she asked if I worked and I explained that I'm at home, but I'm a writer.  Just like that I said, " I'm a writer. "  I told her that I'm still trying to get published, but I did recently final in a contest.  I feel like that gives me more credential, as in "no, I'm not published yet, but it's not because my writing stinks." Mrs. T seemed excited to discover that I was a writer, even if my books aren't in print...yet. So that's right people, I'm a writer!  It's what I do, even if I'm still waiting on a paycheck.  It's what I will always do.

Friday night we went out with another couple that we have known for over a decade. The husband, B, has worked with my husband almost as long as my hubby has been with the company so naturally they end up talking a lot of shop. In an effort to steer the conversation, I told him about my recent good news (contest finalist) and after congratulating me he asked what I would get if I won. Bob and I laughed when we told him it was only $30, but I explained that counted as income which meant that I would be able to deduct expenses such as conference fees and printing out my manuscripts for beta readers. He then started to attempt to educate me on just how much I should claim to keep me within certain tax brackets. Seeing as I was on my second glass of wine, this was all going right over my head. My lovely husband finally cut him off and said "Let's just focus on the word income right now. We'll worry about the rest later." He's as excited as I am in his own way....

I'm a finalist!  Woo Hoo!  I have finally reached the finals in a contest.  To date I have entered my current finished work, Island Runaway, in five contests.  The first three were not finalists, but today I heard back from the Fire & Ice contest put on by the Chicago North RWA and I have advanced to the final round.  I gave out an audible gasp in the dealership waiting area when I read the email.  I even had to read it twice to make sure I wasn't missing the word not in the phrase "you are a finalist."  So now that I've made it to this point in the contest, what does that mean.  As a finalist I will get a certificate and a mention in the RWR, the monthly magazine put out by the national RWA.  It gets my name out there.  If I win, I get all of $30 (my entry fee was $20).  But again, it gets my name out there and perhaps in front of just the people I need to get me published.  IF nothing else, this accolade gives me more...

First of all, I would like to start by saying that I am going to make (yet another) effort to keep up with this blog.  And I'm even going to share it with people!  I really need to get the word out that I have a blog, but before I do that, I need a couple more decent posts for people to read.  Including this tale about my first Greater Seattle Romance Writers' of America (GSRWA) meeting. Last year I joined Eastside RWA and just recently decided to join GSRWA as well to take advantage of their awesome resources.  This Saturday was my first opportunity to attend a meeting as well as the last meeting before the summer break.  I wasn't too excited about driving all the way up to Shoreline on a Saturday morning, but I really wanted to make an appearance soon while my name was fresh in their minds from the welcome messages. My goal was to leave by nine-thirty giving me an hour to get to the library.  Plenty of time.  Except that I took too long getting r...

I have found myself home with no errands to run, the house is somewhat clean, and I still have almost two hours before I pick up the kids so I figured this was the perfect opportunity to post something.  Yay me!! My last post was about National November Writing Month, fondly known as NaNoWriMo.  It is an opportunity to sit down and write like a crazy person.  You have the entire month of November, thirty days, to write 50,000 words.  By the end of it you have either a rough draft of a novel, or at least the start of one.  And it's not only 'writers' who participate.  Perhaps you have a story in you that you just wanted to get out on paper, see where it takes you. I first participated in 2010 where after coming down with a cold followed by strep throat and then an extended trip to Portland for Thanksgiving, I managed to get just over 32,000 words.  While I was disappointed to have not made it across the finish line, I was excited that I had hammered...

I have a confession... I'm not a very good blogger. I realize you are probably gasping with shock right now. Wait, that would require me to have followers for anyone to be shocked. And why don't I have any followers? Because I'm not a very good blogger. It's not even that I don't like to blog. I feel like I have a lot to say and would love to share my thoughts with anyone who is foolish enough, I mean willing to listen. The problem is that my brilliant ideas always come to me at the most inconvenient moments such as while I'm driving or out running. By the time I get access to a device, I'm too lazy to revisit my idea. Although perhaps that is a sign that it wasn't so bright after all. But being the Golden Social Age that it is, blogging is an excellent way to connect with people and build an audience for my yet to be published works. That and Twitter. Which I am also not really on top of. Obviously I need to be approaching this as a job. ...

Well, the conference is over and this is the first chance I have had for a new post now that we are in a hotel with free wi-fi since I am such a cheapskate (at times). On Saturday I had an editor pitch and later an agent pitch. When I had signed up for the appointments back in May, I had to be quick about it so as I didn't see any publishers I was familiar with, I had to do a quick search on-line to make sure that they published my genre; contemporary/women's fiction. Fast forward to the night before my appointment and I finally do the homework on the specific editor and discovered that she was the only editor who did not cover my genre. Damn it. So on a whim I decided to pitch a book that was her genre that I had in the works. I wrote the pitch minutes before walking in. She asked me questions and I answered them best I could. She asked me what the word count was and I said 60K which was a downright lie. The truth was that it was only 30K and what I did have I had de...

...At the RWA 2012 Conference in Anaheim that is.  I have a half hour left on the hour of in-room wi-fi I purchased so I decided to use it for a new post.  I bought that single hour of wi-fi because after the orientation meeting tonight, I realized that I really should have brought business cards down with me.  I had intended to.  But I procrastinated and then the day before when I still hadn't gotten around to it I decided it wouldn't be that big of a deal.  Boy was I wrong.  I managed to come back to my room with three cards after a single one hour meeting, but I felt stupid handing out strips of paper with my info.  So I purchased that hour of internet so I could go online and order my very own cards.  Unfortunately I won't have them for tomorrow as they won't be ready until later in the day, but I will have them on hand for Friday and even more importantly, for Saturday when I have my agent and publisher appointments. Other than feeling like ...

I'm not a big fan of fireworks, but most of the time I don't mind them. When it's a well done large production, I sometimes enjoy them. Especially if it's done to music. I love music. But when they are being shot off in the neighborhood at one a.m. on a Sunday night/Monday morning that isn't the 4th of July, I loathe them. Wait, it's not the fireworks I loathe, it's the idiots who think it's perfectly ok to shoot them off at this hour in an urban area. It is the same every year starting about a week before the Independence Day holiday. I get self-conscious if my dogs start howling between the hours of nine pm and nine am. I'm still a little embarrassed if they do it during the day, but as long as it isn't going on for too long, I know it's not really bothering anyone. I just wished everyone in my neighborhood shared my view of this common courtesy. Just because you don't have to be up at five am to go it work doesn't mean no...

It's been over a month since my last post, not as long since the one before that, but still not good for a supposed blogger. However, we just got an iPad recently and it finally occurred to me to look for a blogging app and as you can see I found one! Perhaps now I will write more without being glued to a computer. Not much to else to say, but I am excited that I will be more productive with my iPad now instead of just using it for Pinterest.

As of today I have a whopping 45 Twitter Followers.  I'm pretty excited seeing as how I've never actually asked anyone to follow me.  This whole thing has been a bit of an experiment for me in social networking.  But it occurred to me that some of these followers, especially the fellow writers, may actually stop at my blog since I have it posted on my Twitter profile.  Sadly they will find it lacking.  Unfortunately I haven't had many opportunities to get on my laptop so I've been using those precious moments to work on my novel.  I managed to snag one 10 minute appointment each with an agent and an editor at the RWA Conference in Anaheim so I want to make sure it is well polished.  Part of my reason (OK, maybe the main reason) for doing this blog and the twitter account is that I would like to create a ready set audience for when I am published either through a large publishing house or self-publishing.  My youngest son is starting Kind...

Blogspot has made some changes, not sure if I like them, but that may just be because I haven't figured out how to navigate it yet.  Also, I tried to get to the site by simply entering the address in the bar, but it was slow to load.  Actually it's still trying to load as I write this.  So I decided to just google it and click on the link.  Have no idea why, but sometimes this helps.  But on the first page for a search on "blogspot" there was no link to the actual website.  Then I tried "blogspot.com" and still the website was not listed!  I finally tried Bing and got lucky.  It really should not have been that hard. Anyways... So inspiration struck again at such a random moment.  I was walking my son home from school when we were passed by a guy carrying another student on his shoulders.  It was raining and she was wearing a sweatshirt that I am guessing was his since it was way too big and he was now in a short sleeve t-shirt....

I signed up for the Romance Writer's of America Conference in Anaheim this July.  I'm a little apprehensive, but I am incredibly excited.  I've already printed out the list of workshops and have marked the ones I am most interested.  Though this isn't my first conference.  I attended one in Edmonds, Washington called Write On The Sound (WOTS) a few years back, but haven't made it back since because of either budget or time constraints.  It had some great workshops, but this big one down in California has so many more and even research workshops.  For example, there is one on real-life hostage negotiations to help writers add realism to their hostage scenes. Our family was already planning a trip to San Diego around the same time so we just decided to roll it all into one which means my husband and two kids will be down there with me.  That should be interesting.  My husband will have to entertain the kids the all day while I'm in meetin...

Just got back from the dentist today.  I hate having my teeth cleaned, yet I look forward to going to my cleanings.  That's because I get the nitrous oxide.  When I first started going to my dentist on a regular basis, I confessed my anxieties about having metal scraping at my teeth.  They gave me Valium to get my foot in the door and the nitrous to keep me in the chair.  Since I no longer have the panic attacks just thinking about going to the dentist, I have forgone the Valium.  But I won't go without my gas.  And as I was laying there enjoying the tingling sensation spreading down to my toes, I began to think about what a miracle it is that I'm not a drug addict.  Last weekend I had a monster headache.  Earlier in the day I took Aleve, but that didn't last long.  I was trying to think of something to take that was strong and would relax me without being a sleep aid since those make me groggy all the next day.  I remembered that I...

Being an Agnostic household, we don't actually celebrate Easter.  Not in the traditional sense at least.  On occasion we have attended brunches when invited, we even did an Easter egg hunt last year as part of a family get together.  But we did it the weekend before since other family members had real Easter plans.  Friday night when I was putting my kids to bed, my older son, asked me how many days until Easter.  When I told him two, he squealed with glee.  I was a bit apprehensive only because I was worried he was expecting something from the Easter bunny.  But when I asked him why, it turned out he was excited for an egg hunt.  An egg hunt I could handle, in fact it would be good for the kids.  Anything to pull them away from the television, right? Since I had exhausted my supply of plastic eggs (translation: I had thrown them out) I needed to run down to Target on Saturday and buy some more.  But then after I got home fro...

Two parts to this post: First, what do I really expect to achieve with this blog?  I'm beginning to think it is another form of procrastination.  Think back to my last post about procastinating versus just being lazy.  If I'm blogging on here, then I'm doing something that involves writing.  But it gives me less time to do actual writing, as in the kind that might get me published.  I haven't written any more on my sci-fi short story since Monday, however I managed to watch the highlights of the People's Choice Awards.  Perhaps I feel that if people enjoy reading this, then they might enjoy other things that I have written.  Seeing as how nobody is reading this, that part isn't going top well for me just yet.  But I will continue to write on here because every writer has a blog, right?  I promise it won't be all about writing though, that would just get boring.  If I ever end up with any followers, I might actually...

I just recieved the email confirming my membership to Romance Writers of America and I'm so excited!  It's kind of sad that it has taken me this long to sign up, but, better late than never!  I wonder if that counts for my accomplishment for the week.  Sadly I haven't done any actual story writing since Monday.  This morning I came to the realization that laziness is not to be confused with procrastination, at least not in my case.  Being lazy would mean not doing much of anything.  But I find myself doing plenty, mostly as a way to put off what I really should be doing.  Even now, writing in this blog means I am too busy to tend to auction items I should be inputting.  And when I finish posting this, I plan to explore the RWA website a bit with my new access.  After that I might get some auction work done, if I have time before I have to pick up my son.  Busy, busy, busy!

An observation that I wanted to share... Over the winter break we watched the movie Thor, an awesome movie by the way, and the next day I found myself thinking about how more evolved races are sometimes portrayed in movies.  Thor's father was alive during the time of the Vikings, and then was still ruling in present time.  In the Stargate series, the Asgard also had long life expectancies.  There was a more recent Star Trek Movie (Nemesis I think) where Captain Picard ends up on a planet where they could slow down time.  Which made me think, to evolve properly, we need to move slower.  (I'd like to point out here that when I refer to evolving, I don't mean as a species, but rather as a society.)  For modern society, slow does not appear to be a word in our vocabulary, unless we are complaining about it.  My husband found this youtube video a while back about how fast technology is changing and it's rather mind boggling. " http://www.youtube.com/e...

I'm currently sitting in Starbucks with my laptop and actually using their wi-fi.  I feel like such an urbanite.  Ok maybe that's the wrong word, but I feel cool. It's barely eleven in the morning I feel like I've had such a productive morning.  Actually got up in time to get a shower and dress properly.  Both boys to school on time, always a good thing.  I did make it out of the house without my laptop knowin full well that my goal for this morning was to work on my short story.  I almost said oh well and kept going.  But then I was proud of myself and turned around to get it.  We weren't even out of the neighborhood and truth is we are alwasy early for preschool since my older son starts a half hour earlier.  So I really had no excuse to do so.  Swung by the grocery store for a couple needed items, dropped off a few things at Goodwill that were cluttering up my garage, made it to the coffee shop and yes, I did get a few mre para...