End of The Year

Well, the Mayans were wrong. We are still all here. At least for a little while longer.

Two Indie Ladies is wrapping up this blog. Lee and I are choosing to take our blogging in a new direction and we hope you will follow along. We soft launched a new blog, Baby Boomer Writer Chicks. It will be official with posts February 1st. Until then we hope you will check it out, click follow, and join us there for our adventures as writer chicks of a certain age with the fun of being the sandwich generation with children, grandchildren, aging parents, and writing our books.

Jill and Lee

http://babyboomerwriterchicks.wordpress.com

Happy Holidays

Like Lee I’m taking a blogging break for the holidays to enjoy family, friends, great food, and counting my blessings. Jill

Happy Holidays to All!!

TO Blog or Not Blog

This is the season when we’re swamped with Christmas deadlines, writing deadlines, party deadlines, shopping deadlines, and gift giving deadlines. Throw in just your normal everyday life and everything goes haywire. So the question came do I blog or not? I decided to take a break til the New Year, simply because I have too many deadlines.
I’ll wish you a very Merry Christmas and excellently Happy New Year. I’ll see you out in cyberspace somewhere in the next year.

Lee Lopez

Squelch The Rumors — Jill James

Even when I was trying to get traditionally published I would listen to the rumors every day. That agent doesn’t like stories with babies, don’t submit to her. That publisher is ripping off its authors, don’t submit to them. This agent likes this, but not that. That agent likes that, but not this. Man, your head could spin with all the info overload.

Don’t get me wrong, information is good. Sometimes we need it. But, now with self-publishing it is like there is a new rumor of the sky falling down by the day, nay, the hour. Amazon is out to get rid of Indie authors. The Big 6 who are now the Big 5 are out to get rid of Indie authors. You will never hit the highs of years ago, months ago, last week!

Squelch the Rumors. Write the story. That is all you have control over. Put in the earbuds. Listen to the music. Listen to your heart. Write your tale.

Jill James, author of contemporary and paranormal romance.

My latest, The Lake Willowbee Series, Books 1 – 3

Available now online in eBook and soon in print.

Self-publishing is growing up!

Amazon’s Kindle ereader is celebrating its 5th birthday. The name was very apropos for a device that would ignite writers into bursting with books to be published–self-published!

Check out a great article by Anne R. Allen about the distance self-publishing has come in what is really a short amount of time.

http://annerallen.blogspot.com/2012/12/indie-publishing-in-2013-why-we-cant.html

Jill James, author of contemporary and paranormal romance

Edits, nature of the beast

I’m deep in the middle of edits and completely forgot to blog today. So what else can I do, but talk about edits. They are a pain in the butt. You’ve written ‘The End,’ and your not even close to finished. It is the nature of the beast and writer. We go right back to the beginning and read, fix, hope the story makes sense, make sure there is GMC, a beginning, middle and HEA. Grammar is mostly fixed, spelling laughed at as you wonder, ‘what the hell word is that suppose to be?’ And realized suddenly your green eyed hero somewhere in the middle of this work suddenly is brown eyed. Scratching ones head. All we can do is fix it, hope we caught all those little quirts and move on. To smile and laugh some more at what I consider, for myself to be oddities. But sometimes those oddities are so good they get to stay.

A writers job isn’t done until the final draft of corrections, and the final read through. All of it is driven by a odd passion for those words in black on a white background. Even before the computer, the compulsion was to put the story to paper. Today it’s not much different, maybe a bit easier. The only thing that makes this whole process easier, we don’t have to worry about typewriter ribbon, and writing a whole page over again in edits. That’s why Hemingway, Wolfe and those who came before us, had room full of interns fixing their mistakes and doing the edits and rewrites. The computer age has made our lives so much easier, but not completely. We still have to edit, and rewrite, just like every other author going back to Homer.

This book is months behind. It’s been a struggle to finish it. I’ve written the end, but am not done yet. So back to edits I go, so I can get my WIP to Jill by the end of the week as I sit in a Barnes and Noble, listening to Christmas music, drinking my venti Americano, avoiding the scones.

Typing “The End” — Jill James

Whether traditionally or indie-published, there is no satisfaction to compare to typing “The End” at the conclusion of your story. Granted, if you publish traditionally they will delete “The End”, but even knowing that, I still wrote it at the end of all my stories. There is a satisfaction you shouldn’t give up, the knowledge of writing a complete story.

What would stories be without Once upon a time… and The End? It never gets old to see the words become sentences, the sentences become paragraphs. To see the pages add up until you hit that teary-eyed …and they lived happily-ever-after moment.

As a reader I have to get that moment or I feel cheated. As a writer I must have my teary-eyed moment so I can hope the reader will too.

Now, I write romance and read romance, most of the time. But, I do read other genres so I do realize that they don’t all end happily-ever-after. But, at least leave me with the promise that all things COULD work out. Even if in the writer’s mind they don’t, leave me with a shred to hold on to–a moment of perhaps, a slice of what could be, a portion of thinking it might.

I will admit that at The End of Defend My Love tonight I did get teary-eyed. I put Megan through a lot in this story, so her happily-ever-after had to be — more! And it is the end of the Lake Willowbee series and I’ve grown to love this little town. So much so, that next year I’ll be writing The Single Mommies Club series and it will take place in Lake Willowbee too. I’m not quite ready to leave the place.

Jill James, author of Tempting Adam,
Divorce, Interrupted,
Dare To Trust,
Defend My Love, coming REALLY soon!,
and Dangerous Shift, in eBook and Print