Mom and her mother in Mom and Dad’s new house, summer time, circa 1988 – 1990. My dad is about to buy a one-story house located roughly half a mile from where my sister and her husband live. His current house, built by him and mom about thirty years ago, is two stories, and at his age, the stairs, well. His knees aren’t as good as they used to be. This house, the one he and mom built, holds a…
I received the proof of the print edition of The Vampyr Series omnibus (V.R. Cumming) in the mail today. This thing is massive. While the cover size is 6×9″, the same as the individual novels in the series, the spine is about 2″ thick. It needed to be. The print edition is 776 pages long and contains over 390,000 words of story. Yeah, big. First thing after I got it, I flipped through it, checking page counts and print quality,…
I started researching self-publishing a couple of years before publishing my first novel in 2014. Richard, my editor and a close friend, discovered Joe Konrath’s blog way back in, gosh, 2012 or so. Maybe earlier! From there, we slowly began consuming the wisdom of other indie authors. Dean Wesley Smith and his “Killing the Sacred Cows of Publishing” posts. His wife Kris Rusch, whose weekly “Business Musings” are a personal favorite. David Gaughran of Let’s Get Digital fame, and Joanna…
I met this guy a couple of years ago. Great guy. Sweet, intelligent, funny. Everything a woman wants in a man. First thing, he asked me if I wanted to run away with him to Key West, and I knew, right then, that he was the one. It’s crazy how you just know something’s right. On some level, he felt the same way, and said so. Therein lay the problem. At the time, I didn’t understand it as such, a…
Last Friday, my sister’s high school basketball team (she’s the coach) played in the first round of the state tournaments in their division. The team did well during the first three periods by first maintaining an even score with their opponent (the defending state championships) and then pulling ahead. In the fourth period, the opposing team pushed back with a full-court defensive press and an aggressive offense, and pulled ahead of us. Meanwhile, our girls were struggling to defend a…
I have some rules that help me navigate the world without having to spend too much time stressing over silly things like what to wear and whether a particular sentence is appropriate in a particular story. The rule for the latter is much simpler than the rule for the former (which is a series of rules), so that one goes first. The rule is: Story trumps everything. Well, the core of that is that Story is Character, but the rule…
The Foxfire Museum and Heritage Center has a video on their Facebook page of my great-grandmother, Pearl (Hopper) Martin, explaining how to make a spring tonic as part of a JFG tea commercial. As she explains in the video, After a cold winter, spring was the time to renew the spirit and tone up the system with a tonic, and the mountain people used to use tea for that. I don’t have the recipe; it wasn’t passed down to me….
A few days ago, we received word that Richard, my editor, placed second in the Appalachian Narratives for Our Time essay contest judged by Appalachian author Silas House. His essay is entitled “From Moonshiner to Lawyer” and discusses the challenges of growing up within a moonshining family. Richard is an extraordinarily good story teller. I bugged him for years to start a blog sharing some of the stories he’s gathered over his life. A few months ago, he finally did….
A few weeks ago, I decided to write a completely new short story just for my monthly newsletter subscribers, a Dark Fantasy taken from a list of ideas I compiled last year when I was working on stories for Dreaming of a Dark Christmas. (That’s on sale for $.99 (US) right now, so if you haven’t read it, hop on over and pick up a copy.) The story is about a mischievous imp who, inspired by the hymn “Joy to…
When I first started writing, I fell into a natural pattern and process. I didn’t think about it, didn’t try to force anything or conform to anyone else’s standards. I just did what worked for me at the time, which turned out to be fortuitous. While I had that schedule, I was incredibly productive and loved every single minute of writing. A couple of years in, I decided that I needed to try to “fix” my process so that I…