Marketing Woes

Okay, so I decided that I had overpriced my book, and went on to figure out how much I could reduce the price. Got some help from my dad, who owns a bookstore with my mom, to determine what a fair price would be. Had settled on one when he suddenly reminded me that I had to maintain the appropriate discount for bookstores, and pointed out that depending on my sales I might have to pay taxes. Frustration! Apparently, I have not overpriced my book! So, sorry, folks. Gotta pay Caesar! If you can't afford it, wait for the ebook version. (Or if you live near me, come talk to me!)

Rewriting old writing - here's a sample

Well, I did call this blog wordworker's books, so I should probably once in a while post something about a book, or at least story. Here is a piece of one I wrote several years ago and recently decided to resurrect.

          "The impact startled him, crashing onto his ears like a thousand breaking dishes. Dazed, he stared stupidly at the crumbled bricks on the smoking hood. Confused voices reached his auditory nerves as from a distance, incomprehensible. Dimly he associated the voices with the unfocused figures spinning frenetically across his field of vision. One of them with a red trembling nose flailed his arms at the wreckage. The man laughed.

            The way she had laughed at him when he came off the diving board fully clothed.   Showing off for the girls, as usual. With disastrous results, not as usual. That was the first time he ever saw her. It was his parents’ turn to host the monthly church social, and everyone was gathered in the backyard. The adults huddled around the grill debating methods of barbecuing ribs and recipes for potato salad. A couple of teenagers horsing around on the far end of the lot. His friend Beau, with sly looks in the direction of a gaggle of girls, had decided to demonstrate how to balance a pyramid of coke cans on one hand. Provoked into action by the evident success of Beau’s stunt, he declared he could balance the same tray of cokes on his head while jumping up and down on the diving board.

He took one look from the end of that diving board and it was all over. He had hauled himself out of the pool dripping and shivering in the October air while everyone scrambled to retrieve the rapidly sinking cans. All he remembered after that was the piquant mocking face over the side fence. He ran self-conscious fingers through his hair and tried to affect nonchalance. He sauntered in the general direction of the girl, his soggy sneakers making sucking sounds around his ankles.

            “Haven’t seen you here before,” he said.

            “I just moved here with my dad,” she told him, suddenly very interested in her cuticles. She added unnecessarily, “There’s water on your nose.”

            “Oh. Yeah.” He rubbed his arm unhelpfully across his face. “Uh, wanna come over?”

            “No, thanks,” she answered, abandoning her nails to look him over appraisingly. She flipped her red hair with an air of superiority. “My dad doesn’t let me hang out with strangers.”

            He felt his stomach flip. “Levi,” he gulped. “I mean – I’m Levi.”

            “From the Bible,” she said. “Me too. I’m Chloe. Ironic!”

            A man came to the door of the house on her side of the fence and stood watching them. Chloe looked toward him and turned as if to go.

            “My brother has a band,” Levi blurted, forgetting to ask what was ironic. “Sometimes I play drums for them.” He beat a haphazard rhythm on the nearest fence post, ending with a theatrical pirouette. He waited impressively for the admiring applause he felt sure his performance deserved, and felt his cheeks grow warm at the sound of her laughter.

            “I have to go,” she said. She flipped her hair again and turned away, leaving him stewing on his own side of the fence. At the back door she turned mocking eyes back on him for a moment, and he hung breathless. “See you in school, Levi,” she said. The man stayed in the doorway, watching.

            He moved away from the fence, feeling dizzy. Not noticing the Coke can under his feet. The bridge of his nose snapped on the pavement, and the can splatted against the wall with a hiss.

            The world turned black while colors he’d never seen before exploded behind his eyes. A spray of red banished the blackness as his head snapped back in the grip of an invisible rubber band. He felt rather than heard the windshield implode, spraying glass and washer fluid all over the front seat. For a suspended moment he gazed fascinated at the rainbow pinpricks of light flying toward him as if fleeing from the crumbling wall relentlessly bulldozing a path through his engine."

Perspective

Recently I have been feeling greatly overwhelmed by life. I have a one-year-old daughter who thinks she is twenty-one, thinks she should be able to do anything she wants by herself, and who can somehow manage to reach even unreachable items! I am three months pregnant with our second child, and consequently low on energy and high on hormones! I live several hours away from most of my family and still manage to get caught up in typical family disfunction without being able to enjoy many of the benefits. Health issues keep my husbands family in turmoil and us busy trying to help fill in the blanks left by those health issues. I am extremely active in the church, as is my husband, and that means about half of our free time each week is filled up with church related activities or preparation. Because of my husband's job and the degenerating morality of this country, we decided several years ago to take martial arts lessons to learn self-defense, so that fills up a couple of nights a week. Somewhere between all that, we still find time to be a family by ourselves. Writing? That almost never happens! All important, some enjoyable, but together quite a load! Occasionally, like this week, it becomes too much to handle. Then, I wake up and turn on the news. Flooding in New Jersey due to massive storms is driving thousands out of their homes. Tornadoes in various places along the east coast resulting in the same. And the biggest news item of all, thousands dead and unimaginable destruction in the Pacific due to the fifth largest earthquake ever recorded and the tsunami that followed it. Hey, what's wrong with my life again? I am alive. I have my husband and my children safe with me and need have no fear for anyone else that I care about. We have a house and a car, and money with which to provide our family's needs. I don't have to worry about how to survive an hour from now, tomorrow, next week... There is nothing wrong with my life. In fact, I have the greatest life ever!