Interview

You can totes read an interview with me over at Book Geek Speaks today. I may be a little excited about it. So you should click that link now. Before I start jumping up and down and squealing. Because that would just be embarrassing.

22 In Review

Today's my birthday! Which means it's time to go through all my bios and update my age from 22 to 23! Yay!

I've been in a reminiscing mode lately, mostly I think because I've been rereading the Soul Screamers books. The series just ended and it feels like I started reading it a lifetime ago. Of course, it wasn't really. I started reading the books over Christmas break of '09. They were some of the first ebooks I ever read, back when I was reading on my ipod. I wouldn't get my kindle until that summer, right before vacation.

Which starts me thinking about how I earned the money for it working as a Resident Assistant that summer, which leads me to think about hitching rides from my friend whose car barely ran and the driver side door only unlocked from the inside...

Memories are like an infinite series of links sometimes, the wikipedia of the brain.

But this post isn't about being nineteen, it's about twenty-two. This time last year I was getting ready to graduate from college and panicking because I had no idea what to do next. Now I understand that my professor was right when she said, "Just do something. If you don't like it, do something else."

But newly twenty-two year old me didn't understand that yet.

I wrote Tidal Wave over the summer while I was staying at home, then I got a job and wrote Queen of Broken Hearts. And now twenty-two will forever be the age at which I self published my first book. It'll be the age of working at Walgreens and living in a crappy apartment and learning to write a budget.

I'm not sure what twenty-three will be yet. Maybe more of the same, maybe not. Only twenty-three will tell. I expect I'll learn some more lessons, fall down a few more times, and pick myself back up. I hope it'll be the age I pulled off this crazy self-publishing endeavor, but it might just be the age where I kept trying.

I don't know yet, but I do know enough to officially declare twenty-two to have been a pretty good age, for all its drawbacks. So here's to twenty-two. May it forever be a long chain of memory links in my head, and may I never forget to visit every once in a while.

Indie Life: Endless

You may remember my hysterical meltdown from a few days ago. Actually putting a book up proved to be much more terrifying than anticipated. To be honest, I wasn't expecting that reaction from myself. I'm the kind of person who loves when other people read my writing. If you know me in real life I'm likely to shove my writing in your face and badger you to read it. I'm one of those writers. Which is why it took me so completely off guard when putting my book up for sale sent me into a tail spin of PANIC.

Publishing my book has turned out to be a lot like getting my wisdom teeth pulled. I was so obsessed with worry over the I.V. (I really hate I.V.s, okay?) that I never saw the real problem (a sore jaw and a numb tongue) coming until I was in the middle of it. And I'm kind of glad I didn't. Because if I had I would've have freaked out much worse beforehand, and what good what that have done me?

Now that I've had time to take a step back and a deep breath, I recognize where it's coming from. See, generally when I'm on submission and hit the point where I should be getting a response soon, I start stressing out and check my email every five seconds until I finally get the letter telling me I've been accepted or rejected.

I know how to deal with this. I can see it coming, so I've learned to distract myself by keeping busy enough during those times that I just don't give myself the time to worry too much about it.

I have no idea how to deal with having my book out there. It feels like being endlessly on submission, expect there's no letter that can arrive and end things one way or another. I can't just distract myself because there's no expiration limit on this. I'm just... stressed. And I'm not sure how to fix it yet. I think time will help. I imagine I'll get used to this, eventually. Pushing forward seems to be helping. I'm keeping myself busy with new projects and trying to direct my energy into that instead of fretting over things I can't control.

Plus, I'm making myself focus on the fun aspects of indie publishing. Even if I never make more than the dollar seventy-five I've made so far I won't regret my decision, because of everything I've gotten from the experience. And I'm doing what I've always wanted. I'm fighting for my dream, and that means something to me.

So that's where I am right now. Confused, happy, and stressed the #?F&6% out.

How do you cope with self-publishing stress? 

The Poetry Incident

So I had a weird night. First I watched too much How I Met You Mother, which isn't the weird part. I do that all the time. The weird part came after I finished watching "The Pineapple Incident" and groggily decided I needed to go to bed.

I went to check my email one last time, as you do when you're anxiously on submission and past the usual response time, and found the strangest acceptance letter ever (and no, it wasn't from the place I expected to hear back from five days ago). See, usually acceptance letters are all, your piece has been accepted, now wait fifty years for it to be posted (okay, I think the longest I've waited is six months? But that kind of feels like fifty years sometimes). This acceptance letter was all, oh yeah, your poem's been posted.

Me: *blink* *headtilt* Say what now?

So, yeah, my poem is posted.

Then I checked my amazon ranking, as you do fifty times a day, and noticed it had gone up despite the fact that I hadn't sold a single new copy. I don't know what algorithm amazon is using, but I'm pretty sure I couldn't understand it even if I knew how to do those double integral things (the professor was all,"we're doing this next semester," and I changed majors). (If you're wondering, my ranking has now gone back down again. I give up.)

So I'm still anxious about life, the universe, and everything, but I think I'm getting better. My sales seem to have stopped, so I can stop fussing about checking them all the time (hopefully). And I hit my goal of five sales! YAY! Next up, I want to hit twenty sales by October, which is a bit ambitious but if I pull off what I'm planning I'll have more stuff up by then, which should help.

I feel like I've learned a lot about the realities of self publishing over the past couple of days. Formatting is a pain, selling books is hard, life is flipping weird and WHAT ABOUT THE PINEAPPLE?

Book Launch Day, otherwise known as the tale of crazy

So I put my book up on Amazon! Yay! And then my sanity melted into a puddle and ran down the drain. Oh, how I used to ('used to' being, like, yesterday) laugh at those crazy authors who flipped out because of a bad review and obsessed over silly things like 'ratings' and 'stats.' I was so going to be the SANEST AUTHOR EVER and not even care. Whatevs, can't phase me.

I'm not even expecting sales! I said with a laugh. This is just the first thing I'm publishing, no one outside my immediate family will even know it exists!

And then, you know, I checked my account today, all casual-like, and saw I had five sales and one return. Who on earth had returned my book? And who were these three other people who were not my dad who had bought it? No matter, I was going to stay sane. Yup, I had this covered. So someone immediately returned my book. Whatevs. They probably bought it by mistake or something.

I clicked over to goodreads, intending on making some updates since I hadn't added the latest books I'd read. Then Goodreads was all, yo, some peeps added your book. And I was all, What?! Excitement! And then I clicked over? And my book had one rating. And it was one star. And being my only rating, that makes my book a one star book.

I may have flipped out a little at this point and done the thing I swore I would never do. I rated my own book and bothered my family to do the same. (Except they wouldn't because you have to sign up to rate things on goodreads or something. Evil plans foiled!)

In summary, I will never laugh at a hysterical author again. I will now wince in sympathy and totally understand why they e-stalked that person who left them a bad review to prove that person's review doesn't count. Not that I would ever do such a thing. Nope. I'm totes sane. Whatevs, I don't even care if my book sells.

If you need me, I'll be the one whimpering in the corner stuffing chocolate in my face.

(Oh, yeah, and if you want to buy my book? Like, whatevs, I don't care. But you can buy it here. Just in case, you know, you want to.)