A new novel of mine, Cubicles, Blood, and Magic, is getting ready to ship out in e-book format to various e-bookstores over the next month or so. Plans are in the works to have a print version ready by the end of 2012.
I’m going to see if I can get a JPEG of the cover up tonight on the website. It came out great considering the very limited budget Osuna had for cover design.
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Tagged Cubicles Blood and Magic, Dorelai Chronicles, L. M. May news
I want to give a heads up now that there will be a shift in focus by my website over the next six months. I’m going to be broadening out from posting about writing issues to posting about anything life-wise that catches my interest (for example, my last post was about the struggles to manage time in an era of an endless supply of entertainment).
I won’t be posting more frequently. In fact, the post rate might go down slightly. I’m in the middle of writing a trilogy at the moment, and between that and editing a novel and dealing with short stories that are going out to various editors, at the end of the day I find the last thing I want to do is blog.
I’d rather not do a blog post if I feel I don’t have something worthwhile to say. So it’s possible I may post less often.
Also, another change that will be coming is that by winter there will be a monthly post for readers about upcoming fiction of mine. This website, more and more, will be here to serve readers as well as writers. I’ll still blog on occasion about writing, and the pages with links to posts on surviving as writers and dealing with writer’s block are going to stay up.
But as I grow as a writer this website needs to grow with me. I don’t want these upcoming changes to come as a surprise to anyone (hence this admin post about changes).
It’s going to be exciting.
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Posted in Admin stuff, L. M. May, News
Okay, so I’m a bit excited. The new cover for Soul Cages is done, and is being uploaded. Some e-stores will take longer than others for the new cover to appear in (could take as long as a three weeks).
I didn’t think it was possible to make a cover that expressed the personality of the novel since it’s a strange cross-genre story, but the photo that was found nails the heart of the book so closely that I feel a bit stunned.
That’s one wonderful thing about the e-book era. It’s a lot more forgiving of a publishing startup’s learning curve in doing book covers. The cover for “Parallels” also got completely redone about two weeks ago to try and get closer to the feel of the story. Let’s just say that a magical realism story set at Christmastime is darn difficult to convey in a cover and still have room for the author’s name and the title and some general info.
Now that this cover tinkering is over, more stories of mine will be rolling out in e-format this fall and winter. We’re hoping to be able to do print trade editions of novels and short story collections by fall of 2012–a rather steep learning curve awaits on that.
Almost two years ago I finished a YA novel, Soul Cages, that I knew in my heart of hearts was going to be a nightmare for an editor to get past the sales & marketing department of a traditional publisher.
That’s because in my gut I knew it was going to be difficult to get any readers to even want to pick it up. I knew the book was in trouble sales-wise as soon as my usual first reader burst into tears while reading the synopsis, and then refused to read the manuscript. I had to get other readers to take over for that book. Most ended up loving the story, but I never forgot the response of that first reader.
Seeing your first reader cry in sorrow really sucks.
Let’s face it. Most of the time, readers are coming to a story to mentally relax for a while. They’re coming for entertainment. I’d written a story that was a weird horror/romance/special issues tribute to Judy Blume, C. S. Lewis, and Stephen King in one go. It dealt with ugly nasty stuff like family abuse, the way kids with Asperger’s sometimes get treated badly, the abuse of Scripture in the Bible to justify cruelty, and anti-Semitism…among other things.
None of that stuff is appealing for entertainment. Ugh, who wants to read all that after a bad day?
The novel went through several rounds of editing, but there comes a point when you realize as a writer that you can only make a weird “Frankenstein” novel marketable by censoring your protagonist and mutilating the story by chopping it up. Chop out the romance, or chop out the horror, or chop out the Asperger’s.
In the end I decided to leave the main character alone. It was her story, not mine, and I decided to let her story stand as she’d told it to me, and I went on to write new stories.
And it was the best decision I ever made. I’ve written another novel and many short stories since I put Soul Cages to rest, and a lot of exciting things have been happening behind the scenes these last six months. Things that would not have happened if I had attempted to keep rewriting Soul Cages to death.
Soul Cages itself has been released in e-book form, and it is still under consideration with a certain midsize traditional publishing house (though I suspect in the end the editor will fail in getting it past marketing).
I’ve done no email blasts, no blog tours, no ads, no book launch party, no “push” of any sort. And I don’t intend to. My limited work time is better spent writing new stories to improve my craft, and some of those new stories will prove to be more marketable–i.e. more appealing to readers–than Soul Cages is.
But am I sorry that I wrote Soul Cages? Do I feel I wasted my time by working on an unmarketable novel?
No.
I think it’s good for an artist to write at least one story where it feels like you’re spitting in the eye of the market. Writing that unmarketable novel made me a better writer by making me a gutsier writer, and I think I’ll be reaping the benefits for decades to come.
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Posted in Business of writing, Craft of writing, L. M. May, Learning the craft of writing, Markets, Publishers, Voice
Tagged Business of writing, Craft of writing, Getting Ideas, L. M. May, Learning the craft of writing, Markets, Publishers, Soul Cages, Voice
One of the roadrunners in the neighborhood decided to jump over our wall and explore our backyard back in January. I actually got a couple of pictures, and one turned out okay. It’ll be harder to get pictures of the coyotes since they’re only out at night and prefer to stay in the arroyos.
