Seeing Spots hits 100

Seeing Spots hit its 100th copy sold tonight, so I (barely) made that milestone before the end of the month. That's a pretty good start for me-- my books typically start out kind of slow and pick up steam as they go. I'm pleased to have sold so many already. Interestingly, I've sold about twice as many on B&N as on Amazon. I hope it'll start selling better on Amazon in the months ahead!

Interesting

I was just poking around my Amazon numbers, and noticed that while In the Mood continues to be far and away my bestselling Ellen Fisher title in the U.S., I've sold exactly zero copies of it in the UK this month. In fact, none of my contemporaries sell more than a couple a month over there. Love Remembered, my historical, is my bestselling EF book there, with 36 copies sold there this month, and 50 last month. Interesting, and a bit perplexing. I wonder why my contemps don't seem to sell over there...

A fan, cool!

I called my insurance company because of extremely minor wind damage to my house (we lost two shingles). When I told the woman who picked up the phone my name, she said, "You're the author, right?"

I admitted I was. It turns out she knows my father-in-law, and that he'd mentioned my books to her because she's a romance lover. She's bought all four available on Nook, and read two so far, and told me that she really loved them. She even wants a sequel to All I Ever Wanted. So that was a really nice start to my day!

Featured on Two Ends of the Pen!

My latest is featured here. Here's hoping it does great things for sales!

Hurricane stuff

I stocked up on water and bread today, and will stock up on pet food later. I'm still trying to convince Dad he needs to come over and stay in a nearby hotel. He lives in an old house surrounded by a lot of big, ancient trees, and he's only about seven miles from the oceanfront. I want to get him tomorrow, because if they call for a full evacuation of Virginia Beach, the governor can reverse the interstate, so that all the roads are running west. In that event, it will be extremely difficult for me to get over to pick him up. I really don't dare wait till Saturday!

Dad, Dad, Dad

My father is driving me crazy, yet again. He's stressing about the hurricane. He wants to come to my house. I agreed that he might need to evacuate, but reminded him that I have no downstairs beds, and no handicapped-accessible bathrooms, and suggested the hotel around the corner instead. But he doesn't really want to stay in a hotel. He wants to stay here, despite the clear impossibility of it (I may have him move in at some point, but I'll have to rip out a wall first). He's calling me twice a day and whining pitifully about how a hotel just won't be good enough.

Meanwhile, his third new television in a few months is "malfunctioning." Despite the clear evidence that he keeps pushing buttons on the remote and screwing the settings up, he blames the TV, every last time. He had to get his handyman over today because he was seeing a blue screen, and assures me that his handyman told him the TV is a lemon and that he MUST buy a new one. No amount of argument or persuasion on my part can convince him that he's doing something to mess up the settings-- he is certain the culprit is the TV. Apparently they just don't make TVs like they used to.

Sigh. This is starting to get extremely wearing. I really don't know what to do with him. He seems too coherent and mentally together to go into a nursing home, and he doesn't want to move in here (except when a hurricane is looming), but he can't keep on buying TVs every two weeks, either. And I can't stop him-- last time I took his TV to Best Buy and got it fixed, and he simply went out with someone else behind my back and bought a new one anyway. Ridiculous, and aggravating.

Earthquake!

I was in my Dad's bathroom when the earthquake hit. For a second, I thought the house was rattling because a jet plane was going overhead (he's right under the flight path of Oceana, and jets roar overhead all day long), but then felt the floor moving and realized it was an earthquake. I sat there, wondering what would happen to his fifty-year-old house if it was a really bad one. I imagined the house tumbling down around my ears, and contemplated the probable inscription on my tombstone: She died on the toilet.

It's the perfect epitaph for a Crohn's sufferer, really. Still, it lacks a certain poetry:-). I'm glad the earthquake wasn't that severe, and that no one seems to have been seriously harmed by it!

My books are apparently a gateway drug

I read this article on CNN about evangelical Christians trying to cure "porn addicts," and was struck by this line: "Christian media outlets like Today’s Christian Woman have recently run stories about women consuming porn, often theorizing that the habit starts with explicit romance novels."

Pain update

As I posted previously, I couldn't get to see my surgeon till the end of the month, and when I called my gastrointestinal doctor on Friday for advice, the nurse told me I'd have to wait till Monday because he was out of the office. I went to Patient First today and managed to get a doctor to prescribe me some antibiotics. I really hope that's going to help!

Awwww, is this cute or what?

My daughter's kitten Chell with her companion cube (which is amusing if you happen to play Portal):



Kittens are cute:-).

Pain, pain, go away

Something is not right where I had surgery. It's gotten to the point where sitting very long is quite uncomfortable. Even worse, I can hardly bear to walk, and I'm having to make my girls do most of the shopping for me. I had a followup appointment with the surgeon on the 25th, but they called yesterday and left a message saying he had to reschedule. Today I called back and told them I had realized I needed to see him sooner, because I was in extreme discomfort. Alas, the soonest he can see me is the 31st.

Great. I'll just lie on the couch and watch TV till then. It's not like I need to write, or cook, or take care of kids and my father, or do back-to-school shopping. I'll just lie here! No freaking problem!

Tylenol helps, so I guess I'll be taking lots of that. Plus, I do believe I'll be b*tching. That helps too, oddly enough:-).

This and that

Isn't It Romantic? is now free on B&N.

I got my first rating (not review) on B&N for Seeing Spots, and I'm happy to say the reader gave me four stars. It's nice to know that someone liked it!

Sweet Release

Pamela Clare joins the ranks of indie authors with the reissue of Sweet Release, a colonial American historical. Go buy it. You'll love it!

Shocking moments in parenting

My oldest remarked that she needed some clean shirts, and I said, "I'm doing some laundry tonight. I can toss some of yours in tonight, if you like."

"No, thanks," she answered. "I can do my own tomorrow."

Um...

Ummmm...

Did I really manage to raise a kid who can do her own laundry (and even prefers to do her own laundry) at sixteen? Seriously? Wow-- I guess I'm doing something right, after all!

Wow, that was prompt!

Samhain (a wonderful company which I've greatly enjoyed working with) has kindly agreed to revert my rights on my three books with them, since my books are not great sellers for them. I won't get my rights back for six months, per contract, but they've already been removed from some vendors, including Amazon. So if you're looking for those books, you'll need to wait six months to get them:-). I'll try to get them off my sidebar and website sometime this week, so no one is needlessly confused.

Seeing Spots is out!

Seeing Spots is now available on Amazon and Barnes and Noble.

Curiosity

I enjoyed the first episode of Curiosity on Discovery Channel, but I had some issues with its logic. Not that I'm saying I'm smarter than Stephen Hawking or anything:-). However, the conclusion put forth at the end of the show was that there was no God, because time didn't exist before the Big Bang, since the universe at that point was a singularity just like the black holes that can be found in our own universe. Nothing could have created the universe, because no time existed prior to the Big Bang.

Okay, but black holes exist in our universe, and there is time going on around them, even if not inside them. Therefore someone (not necessarily God) could presumably create a singularity. Just because there isn't time inside the singularity doesn't mean there isn't time outside the singularity.

I'm guessing Hawking's point makes more sense when written out in big, complicated (and to me, incomprehensible) equations, but it seemed like a fairly gaping hole in the explanation the show was trying to provide.

Take a breath in there somewhere, kiddo

My six-year-old, who has never learned to put a period in any of his sentences: "Last night I dreamed we were going to Busch Gardens, and when I got up I was like, yay, we're going to Busch Gardens, and I was really excited, and then I was like, waaaaaiiiiitttt, we aren't going to Busch Gardens today, we're going to church!"

Why exactly are you touching my toes?

Hero has never liked having his nails clipped at PetSmart, but the last time I took him in he was handled by someone he didn't know, and apparently got very obnoxious about it, even to the point of showing his teeth. This is a bad thing, as his nails grow fast and require cutting every month or so. So we're working on desensitizing him to having his feet messed with. I say "paw," take his paw, and poke it for a moment, then tell him good dog! good paw! in an enthusiastic voice, give him a treat, and generally make over him as if it's an amazing accomplishment. He's improving already. This dog will do anything for a treat!

More on revisions

I've gotten some more done on Seeing Spots-- some stuff that I noticed needed adding, some stuff that Jody suggested while kindly brainstorming with me. It's about 20,000 words long, and I think it's very near to being finished now. I'm really quite happy with it, and I hope my readers will enjoy it. I notice that my bestsellers on Amazon are my lightweight contemporary romantic comedies, and it's also obvious that there are a lot of fans of paranormal romance. So it seemed natural to write a "contemporary romantic comedy with a paranormal twist," which is the slightly cumbersome genre description I'm going with for this one.

Revision

My friend Jody was nice enough to look over Seeing Spots and beta it for me. Following her advice, I added a new first chapter which has more dialogue and less introspective, internal monologue-y stuff-- more showing and less telling, in other words. I think it flows much better now. I've been playing around with it all day, and will probably take a break soon, and get back to it later. Still, I'm very happy with how much I've accomplished on it today.

Agents who "assist" in self-publishing

There's a good post here by Laura Resnick about why agents who "assist" at self-publishing may have a conflict of interest. I totally understand why some people would be willing to give up 15% of their income to have someone handle stuff like covers, editing, and marketing-- some people just do not want to deal with all those details, and prefer to focus on writing. I'm not saying you should never, ever go into such an agreement with an agent, but I do think authors should approach such agreements with extreme caution.

Sales

Once again, this was my poorest month since January. But a lot of other people reported the same problem, so I'm not too worried. I sold about 4500 books (my best seller is still In the Mood), plus I had over a thousand free downloads of Isn't It Romantic? on Smash. It hasn't gone free on Amazon yet, alas.

I am very close to being done with Seeing Spots. I've been having some problems with my stomach that prevent me from working as hard as I would like to, but I hope it will be done and up very shortly. That will probably help sales.