On this uniquely American holiday, I want to wish you a Happy Turkey Day!
Wednesday, November 25, 2015
Wednesday, November 18, 2015
Ten (!) Books
I will have published 10 books by June. Two come out in
April, one in June, which means I now have 7 of them out.
When I started writing seriously, I think about 12 or 13
years ago, I fervently wanted to get ONE book published. I worked on that one
book for about 10 years, including a few years before the serious full-time
stuff began. When I finally had it polished into a literary masterpiece, I
started sending it to agents. I was shocked and dismayed at first at the
soulless rejections I got back. (In those more gentile days, all agents gave
responses to submissions, even if they were one-sentence form letters.)
Hubby and I were moved to a tiny town for the next phase of
his life after his ordination as an Elder in the United Methodist church. I
quit my programming job and, as I said above, finished creating my masterpiece.
What luck that I quickly discovered an online group of mystery writers, the
Guppies chapter of Sisters in Crime!
This is where I learned to craft a better query letter, who
to query and who not to, how to write a synopsis, and even, through manuscript
exchanges, that I should not use the word “little” to describe nearly
everything. (Thanks to James M. Jackson.)
Several hundred rejections and several completed manuscripts
later, I did get ONE book published, thanks to all the helpful mentoring I
received. But was that enough for me? What do you think? I quickly created a
sequel to that book (CHOKE), then wrote a book I’d had a hare-brained urge to
do (DEATH IN THE TIME OF ICE). After
SMOKE AND BROKE, the CHOKE sequels were out there, I finally found a publisher
for that first opus, which is now called EINE KLEINE MURDER. (I’m not counting
a couple of false starts that turned out to be novella length stinkers.)
The icing on my cake came with a Penguin contract for the
FAT CAT series, 2 of which are published.
(Books coming out next year are REQUIEM IN RED, FAT CAT
TAKES THE CAKE, and DEATH ON THE TREK.) (Details at http://kayegeorge.com/)
I’m finding out that it’s never enough. There are quite a
few more series I would like to do, but there are also sequels to my existing
series in my head. I’d have to live another hundred years to write them all. I’m
doing what I always dreamed of, published books, watching them actually sell,
getting reviews, and writing more books. Life is good.
The picture includes
short story anthologies, ARCs, and a couple of large print books. That’s why it’s
more than ten.
Wednesday, November 11, 2015
This N That
I thought I’d cop out—I mean—be helpful this week and give
you some links that caught my attention.
Bad news first, right?
I got this through Kevin’s blog, so I’ll post the link to
that:
Now some good news.
Jetpacks!
And some of my own news.
REQUIEM IN RED has a cover and it’s gorgeous!
Wednesday, November 4, 2015
Using a Shield
It occurred to me one day that my pen name is a shield. I
think it occurred to me because I realized I feel like a different person when
I attend a writers' conference or mystery convention and wear a name tag that
says I'm Kaye George. I used to register under my real name, Judy, then found
there was some confusion signing in, so I now have a bank and PayPal accounts
for my DBA of Kaye George. Keeps it simple.
Maybe the reason I can be braver as Kaye is because she
isn't really me. Kaye, as far as most people know, is the one who writes the
books. She can get up on a platform before dozens of people and expound on…whatever
they want her to expound upon. Kaye doesn’t need to be nervous or fear she'll
fail to entertain people. I think that's because she's a layer that I put
between me and everyone at the conference. She's my false front.
I recently went through this Ted Talk and found it aligns
with what I do.
After I thought a bit more about this presentation, I
realize that I also had a similar life experience. I never felt I wasn't smart
enough in school. I felt I was too smart, and people wouldn't like me. With my
acne, my extreme skinnyness and gawkiness, I just knew no one wanted me for a
friend. To top that off, I played in the geeky orchestra, not the cool band. I
remember walking down the hallways between classes and looking carefully at the
floor, afraid to meet the eyes of my classmates, afraid that if I said Hi, no
one would say Hi back to me. I looked forward to going to college and making a
new start.
However, when I got to college, I acted the same way at
first. I saw other people making new friends and wondered how they did that. I
got to the nadir—considering suicide. Thank goodness for my Aunt Kathryn, who
is now long gone. I thought through all the details, then imagined the
satisfying reactions of everyone I knew. They would be SO sorry they hadn't
been nicer to me. But then I got to Kathryn. I clearly saw the disappointment
in her face, so I backed off. I watched other people and came to the point
where I thought, What's the worst that can happen? If I say Hi to someone and
he or she doesn’t say Hi back, it won't hurt anything. Imagine my surprise when
I found that almost everyone DOES say Hi back.
I'm been doing it ever since. Somewhere in there is still
that shy, inadequate, unlikeable young girl, but she's plastered over, not only
with the outgoing, sociable Judy, but with another layer or Kaye George. It's
all good.
If my experiences can help ONE other shy person to either break
out of the shell, or bury it beneath a sunny new personality, it will be
awesome.
photo from morguefile.com
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