Syndication at last
Broken
sjb_wing
Thanks to the excellent captainsblog, you can now follow the feed of posts for my new site, The Extrahuman Union here on LJ!

Here you go:
http://syndicated.livejournal.com/susanjbigelow/

Moving to WordPress
Broken
sjb_wing
Hey everyone!

I decided, for a lot of reasons, to move these operations over to a brand-new WordPress site. WordPress.com just works better for the ways in which I use the web, and I hope you'll all follow me over there.

The new URL for "The Extrahuman Union": http://susanjanebigelow.wordpress.com/.

And if any of you nice folks with paid LJ accounts wants to create a feed from the new site for LJ people to follow, that would be amazingly wonderful!

-Susan Jane Bigelow

Release Day!
Broken
sjb_wing
Hey everyone! Well, today was the release date for BROKEN, and everything seems to have gone well!

You can find the book in a bunch of different places. First is here at Candlemark and Gleam's site, where you can buy it in a bunch of different formats. Or, if you're a Kindle user, you can buy it via the Amazon Kindle store.

If you do read the book and want to tell others what you thought, be sure to leave a review, either on Amazon, Goodreads, or anywhere else you want.

There's a contest going on over at Bibliognome, which you can enter to win a free copy! There's also an interview with yours truly over there, and tomorrow they'll be putting up a guest post from me. I've done lots of interviews from both sides of the keyboard, and I have to say, this one is pretty much tops for the amount of fun I had answering the questions.

It's surreal to have something like this finally go down, after so much time invested in working on the book and the promotion. Wow.

Now I think I'm actually going to try and do some fiction writing. We'll see how long THAT lasts!

Looking into the past, and some hometown library nonsense
Broken
sjb_wing
I had the occasion to read through some of my old entries on my private LJ, and WOAH was I annoying in late 2004!

I'm actually taking it as a good sign that I find myself from six or so years ago to be completely insufferable. I talked about nothing but politics, and major news stories! I guess it's easy to see how I drifted into intense political blogging by early 2005.

I did post a few excerpts from the novel I was working on for National Novel Writing Month, which eventually turned into BROKEN (see? It's useful!), and I'm amazed by how much both did and didn't make it into the final cut of the book. Of course, it's been six years and a bit, and my writing style and storytelling abilities have developed since. It was still kind of cool to go back there now and think, wow, this is like 90% garbage. Thank goodness for a) maturity and b) my awesome editors.

In other news, my town's government got annoyed with a film series the library is showing, and instead of backing up their librarians or making constructive suggestions, they threw a fit and threatened to withhold funding unless the film they objected to ("Sicko" by Michael Moore) was dropped. Needless to say, as a librarian myself, this did not make me happy. You can see my response posted at CT News Junkie, where it will hopefully reach a wide audience. I hope some of the librarians in my town see it.

First Sentences, Chapters, Etc.
me
sjb_wing
I kind of love that Bibliognome has put up the first sentence from each of the chapters of BROKEN, as a way of summarizing the book. Something that leaps out at me is just how short and action-packed many of those sentences are.

I feel like have a better handle on how to actually use chapters than I did when I wrote the first draft of this book, and I wrote my current project with those lessons in mind. I have a clearer idea of where I want to go with each chapter, and what each chapter should accomplish, when I start to write it. Far better than my old method of figuring "eh, I'm about fifteen pages in, let's have a chapter break for some reason!"

In other news, reviews of BROKEN have been positive in advance of the release date, which is next Tuesday. My mother has been bugging me about why there isn't an Amazon listing yet--sadly, Amazon only lets certain publishers do pre-orders, so no listing till the day the book comes out. Sorry, Mom!

Also: Twitter contest.

Busy Month for Writing
me
sjb_wing
So the publication date for BROKEN is nearing - January 25th! I'm hoping that we'll be building at least a little buzz for it.

I've never gone through anything quite like this before, it's fun to see the book start to find its way into a lot of different hands. I'll have more to say about the book and the release over the next few weeks. I'm pretty excited, I have to tell you. Nervous, too!

In the meantime, I'm writing in a few other places as well. You can catch some short pieces by me over at 30pov.com, an eclectic online literary magazine (here is my author page). I'm also continuing to write political analysis pieces every Sunday for CT News Junkie, a Connecticut-focused political news site.

I've got a few other projects I'm starting to work on, but all the other stuff is crowding out the fiction in my head! I'll get back to it soon, I know.

UPDATE: Finally got my GoodReads profile up and running.

Month of Writing Approaches
Broken
sjb_wing
I totally agree with Ursula Vernon's defense of NaNoWriMo here. How can I not? I did NaNo one year and it eventually turned into Broken.

But I also agree: it's high time I finished a few of the many projects I have outstanding. The Jeena book is the one I've always wanted to write, and I've written a good 30,000 words of it already. I've got some good ideas for it and maybe I can make a stab at finishing that story this November and beyond.

That, and I need to keep making edits on Fly Into Fire so I can actually get it submitted. Oh, and the final edits on Broken, which need doing too.

And there will be post-election writing to do for CT News Junkie... wow. I guess I'm going to be busy with writing next month! That sounds good to me.

Random Writings
Broken
sjb_wing
I've been oddly prolific lately. One thing I did last night was a cute little kids-ish story about bats, because a friend on Twitter pretty much dared me to. It's a .rtf file, and it's called The Bat and the Mouse. I liked writing it because it's happy, it has a nice ending, and it has a positive message. Hooray! The writing itself is beyond sloppy, but it has a plot and everything.

A less happy story is the follow-up to yesterday's piece, "Kate Hits Bottom," called "Jill to the Rescue." You can read more about Jill and her relationship with Kate here. In today's short, Jill tries to pick up the pieces after Kate ruins her life.

Jill to the RescueCollapse )

Short fiction: Kate Hits Bottom
Broken
sjb_wing
I was feeling crappy this morning, so I thought I'd write something to chase the darkness away. I went back to my story blog, Dome Land Story Factory, and wrote a bit in the setting I'd created over there. This one's about Kate, who is ruining her life for no reason she can think of. I've also posted the story over there at Dome Land, where the formatting is probably slightly nicer.

Kate Hits BottomCollapse )

what makes a writing career?
Broken
sjb_wing
Back when I was a little whatever-I-was I remember wanting to be a writer more than anything else, and to have a Writing Career. Whatever that means. And yet, that also seemed like something that was pretty much constantly out of reach. How could I have a career as a writer? I was too busy being a teacher, and later a librarian and blogger, for that.

And yet. I did write a relatively successful political blog for five years. That's done, but I do write for CT News Junkie (here is my latest piece published there), and I've done some opinion and editorial writing for newspapers in the past.

Then there's Broken, which if all goes well will be on an e-reader or computer screen near you this January. I'm really happy with how that book's coming along, by the way.

So does that add up to a "writing career"? Do I get to call myself a writer now? Is someone going to send me the gold watch and chess set soon?

Maybe it doesn't matter. I suspect my child-self would be a little surprised at what's happening with my writing now (and it wouldn't be the only surprise) but I'm thrilled by it nevertheless.

?

Log in