Category: Blogger

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Calling All Writers:

One day I’m going to ask all of you to buy my book—when it’s published, of course.

For now, all I ask is this:

If you’re a writer, or ever hope to be, please check out the blog of wise author and writer Kristen Lamb. I read everyone of her blogs. She offers great advice, and seems to truly want every writer to become a published author.

Have you ever noticed the Twitter hashtag #myWANA? That’s all about her book, We Are Not Alone. For a profession that’s inherently solitary, Kristen Lamb has created a sense of community for us writers.

Many thanks to Kristen.

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A Writer’s Silver Platter

When is the last time you counted your blessings? Is it possible to prioritize them?

Health might be the most important, neck and neck with family; food is a necessity, as is financial security; intelligence cannot be minimized or taken for granted—and with that, education; and don’t forget love. No, this is not an impostor sitting in for Karolyn… who only a few short years ago might have mentioned new black pumps, Prada purses and pearls. Now all I want is to be published—and to retain the aforementioned blessings.

Why do I not have a whiskey in my hand?

As I type this, I’m sitting in a beautiful Colorado home, where my husband and I will spend the next week. He’ll be drinking coffee and reading. I’ll be transcribing pages and pages of notes I took last week when we were lucky enough to spend the week in Jackson Hole, Wyoming on my research trip for my current novel… the one I wrote while we spent the winter in Costa Rica.

Please forgive me here, I’m not bragging. This admission scares the shit out of me.

I spent eight years as an art dealer with an evermore lucrative art gallery (i.e. it started out paying me zero, and ended up paying me a monthly pittance). When the moment came to re-up my lease or close, I closed it so we could travel and I could begin writing. Now I’m back to being paid zero.

The scary part is that I have every opportunity and every bit of the responsibility. I have been given the Writer’s Silver Platter: a laptop, a location, loving support and lots and lots of quiet time. When I publish, I will have so many people to thank: my husband for his unending support, my parents for my brain and their encouragement, my children for growing up and leaving the nest, and countless friends who’ve given me so much encouragement and advice (specifically my former artists and Twitter friends who will not let me quit). But no excuses, and no one to blame if I can’t make this happen.

So, now I must produce. I have counted my many blessings, and I’m ready to test my skills. By October 1st, I will be querying agents for “Invented Lives.” Get ready World, here I come.

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Meet me in Hell?

Okay, have you noticed a pattern here? About every 8 weeks, I declare: I WILL POST ON A REGULAR BASIS FROM NOW ON. And then I don’t. Good thing I’m not signing away my First Born Son, or the 2nd Born, or the 3rd Born, or even the 4th Born with these promises. Then I’d be out of kids! Then I might get more blogging done… but my posts would be all sad and weepy, and you’d quit reading me anyway. So much for good intentions.

All right, no more promises, just more posts, as often as possible. So, here’s today’s Mind Blowing Story:

I’m officially ditching The Blue-Eyed Twin, all 18,000 words of it.

Monday I met with a doctor, a geneticist, and his genetic counselor to get some facts straight for the novel. They were extremely knowledgeable, helpful, friendly, and forthcoming. For 24 hours after my meeting I didn’t speak much. I was processing what they told me. Suffice it to say that I learned the premise of my story was weak. So I changed it. Remember: We hold the lock, and we hold the key! (That’s one great thing about fiction, but it also applies to real life.)

Today is back to square one. Have you ever done that? “Control, A, backspace” is what my son @Elliott_Krause calls it. (He’s 3rd born, the Iowa MFA student.)(Yes, I’m proud.) It’s defeating and liberating at the same time.

I owe a huge debt to Writer’s Digest magazine. In the current issue, one column about interviewing experts for your novel suggests doing your interviews sooner rather than later… so you don’t have to ditch 18,000+ words if your premise is flawed. What if I hadn’t read that, hadn’t interviewed the docs until much later? Thank you once again, WD.

So, I’d better get back to the drawing board, with my notecards, timelines, and character charts. Here we go again! Skippin’ along the yellow brick road ~ the opposite direction of Hell.

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Seven Things

Seven Things

Oh how do I get myself into messes like this? A dear, dear friend (i.e. An innocent Twitter acquaintance who I beat out in a live LitChat auction and have felt an obligation to ever since) tagged me for a chain mail list: Seven Things You Don’t Already Know About Me. So here goes… in no particular order.

1. I love office supplies, specifically pens and pencils. It’s an abnormal thing that goes back at least to 2nd grade when I used to steal the big, fat chalk from my school. Perhaps I should have known decades ago that I was meant to be a writer.

2. I say all the time that I hate TV, and yet I watch way too much of it. I deserve ridicule.

3. I would never admit to farting in public (please see the list of aforementioned dear friend Kelcey McKinley). If I were alone in a room, and let out a stinky one, then someone else walked in, I would try to describe the horrific decayed animal I had just found and disposed of the minute before they walked in.

4. When I was ten years old, I owned a horse named Brandy. The cowboy who worked on the ranch where I kept it used to sing the song “Brandy” to me, and I was in love with him.

5. Number 4 was about the same time that I used to eat every spec of an apple—core, seeds, stem—just to gain attention from other little girls who also had horses. And once, I carried a huge western saddle 6 blocks to school at lunch time. It weighed the same as me.

6. My motivation for becoming a famous writer is so that I can buy a house in Santa Barbara.

7. That whole Karma, what-goes-around-comes-around thing better be true now that I played along with this If You Don’t Do This You Will Go To Hell list. Of course, this is the first one I’ve ever done; I usually delete them immediately. So maybe I hope it’s not true…

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People From My Perch

CLUES:
Rapunzel
Lighthouse keeper
Air traffic controller
Karolyn

ANSWER:
People in high buildings who watch other people!

I live on the 5th floor in a condominium—high enough for a good view, low enough to see the people who walk and drive by. We live in downtown Des Moines, which may sound like a joke to some of you, but actually it’s quite nice. (In another post, I’ll brag about this great city.) Today I’d like to talk about People.

How strange we are! For the most part, we all have two legs, two arms, a torso, and a head. Our faces have two eyes, one nose… oh, you know the rest. But how is it that humans, even babies and pets, can distinguish one human from another so accurately? We’re not THAT different. A centimeter here, a millimeter there, different colored eyes, and PRESTO: You’re a super model! Or a serial killer picked out of a lineup!

Ok, so maybe that’s not very profound to say, but the more you think about it, it is. Billions of us have been on this earth, and occasionally someone will say, “You look like so and so,” but never exactly. One would think there’d be less difference especially as our races intermix.

They say natural blondes will eventually be extinct, and it makes sense to think that skin color will moved towards cappuccino, so have you ever thought about what people will look like in 50 or 100 years? Now add in global warming and imagine how our clothing might evolve into more of a uniform to protect us from the elements. New Presto: Automatons!

That sounds horrible, doesn’t it? I don’t think anyone today would like that, but it may be such a gradual change that the people of the future won’t notice the difference, they may even embrace the new clothes—Silver Armani Jumpsuits, anyone?

For now, I’m glad that I don’t look like anyone else, although… I would love to have skin the color of Halle Berry’s.

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I Used To Be Funny

It’s difficult to keep up with me, I know, but I take full blame. You are busy. You are involved with highly technical and weighty issues every day. Me? I sit home and read and write most days (the days I’m not getting pedicures), and I haven’t been blogging regularly.

I am lucky to be married to a wonderful man who hates winter. Further adding to your reasons to hate me, he’s retired and takes us to Costa Rica for the worst months of Iowa cold—all of them. We came back this year on April 1st. Since then, I’ve noticed, my blog frequency and quality has slipped into the doldrums. For this I apologize.

I have excuses, but I hate excuses, almost as much as my husband hates winter. All I know is that in reviewing my posts that were written in Costa Rica (see archives from Jan, Feb, Mar, 2011), I noticed they were really funny. (At least I thought so.) Since then? Not so much.

The good news is that I’ve been very productive in my writing career since I’ve gotten home but in different ways from my productivity levels in Costa Rica. In the 10 weeks we were there this winter, I wrote 45,000 words on my novel, developed a Twitter habit, created a Facebook Fan page, and so much more. My production since I’ve been home has been more “big picture” stuff, albeit of less blog-able interest. I’ve also recently found the erudite blog by Kristen Lamb about social networking. She has promised me fame and fortune if I blog more! (Just kidding, kind of.)

And so, dear friends and family, all 10 million of you, give or take, I will once again attempt to blog more often—three times a week from now on. Oh, the pressure! BUT, Ms. Lamb insists that I shall not bore you all with blog posts on writing… anything else is acceptable, but my deepest passion (other than my husband) is off limits. I cannot tell you about how lightning has struck me and I am closer than ever to success. You’ll just have to trust me, and I’ll just have to produce that novel I’ve been talking about, the one that caused my meltdown 10 days ago, the one where I blogged about not working… well, people, it’s working. And THAT is why I haven’t been blogging as much.

Oh, the irony.

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Conclusions, conclusions

Funny how timing works, isn’t it? A moment here, a minute there, and our whole lives could be different. Or, for instance, when people come into our lives and tell us something really valuable for where we are at that moment in time. How many snippets of advice have gone in one ear and out the other because the timing wasn’t right for us to hear it? How many people have we just missed meeting who might have become friends?

Yes, this is going somewhere.

Last week I had a phone consultation with Jenny Bent from the Bent Agency about my finished novel, On A Midnight Street. I’ve worked on it, off and on, for about 18 months. It’s complete and as polished as it’s ever going to be unless an agent/editor/publisher demands changes. (I should be so lucky.) After speaking with Jenny Bent, after she perfected my query letter, I was all charged up and decided I would send it out once more, to say 10 more agents.

Then I read a blog post by Allison Winn Scotch, about when to quit querying. I suddenly came to the conclusion that I was ready to move on because at this point, I couldn’t bear to do one more rewrite without the promise of publication. Even though my novel is “perfect”, even though my query letter is “perfect”, I’m movin’ on. I’ve written an 83,000-word first draft to my next book, Invented Lives, and that’s all I want to focus on now.

So, done. There it is. Close one book, open another. I am completely happy with this decision.
For now.

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http://karolynsherwood.blogspot.com/

Oh, the saga, the drama, the cursing!

I have moved my blog. iWeb just wasn’t good enough for me anymore. I want widgets, links, sidebars, tweet buttons! I do not want a photo of a girl in a bikini on a surfboard (the default photo above).

It’s common, I know, to lose stuff when you move. I momentarily lost all my photos from the last two years of blog posts, but thankfully, just got those back. Now I have lost all the comments you kind readers left me. Terribly sorry about that.

Soon I should be completely settled in, and blogspot will feel like home. But I’m truly going to miss rereading all your comments from before.

Perhaps as a housewarming gift you could SEND COOKIES, I mean, SEND COMMENTS.
I’ll make the coffee.

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Review: The Informationist, by Taylor Stevens

This is a great book, and I highly recommend it for anyone looking for a tense drama. Taylor Stevens is an excellent writer, and her story was gripping through the final scene.  The story is extremely detailed, taking place mostly in Africa. Thank goodness I could flip back and forth from the novel in iBooks to GoogleMaps to follow along! A word of advice to future readers, you’ll have to concentrate to keep the names straight: Breeden, Burbank, Bradford, and Beyard are all major players.

The main character, Vanessa Michael Munroe, was intense, and Stevens did an excellent job of evoking sympathy for such a violent person. I was pleased with the ending in that she truly evolved. That was important to the success of the book. Stevens threw in a few red herrings that kept me guessing who the real “bad guy” was until very late in the story. I like that in a book.

Amazing that this is a debut novel. It was seriously cinematic; I could picture the action as it happened, although, if it becomes a movie, I’ll have to cover my eyes for the final scene from Africa! Whoa!

Well done, Taylor Stevens. Can’t wait for the sequel in December!

Four Stars. (I reserve 5 stars for the literary giants.)

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New and Improved

Hello Faithful Followers and Newfound Friends. I began this Mind Blowing Blog a few years ago, then set up my own web site and blog with Apple several months later. The more active I get in blogging (3x a week is my goal), the more I realized that (for the first time in history) Apple didn’t have the best product. Of course, it’s likely that the problem is “Operator Error”, but I’ve decided to come back to Blogger none the less.

So, sign up now – be the first! to follow here. Please Follow/Tweet/Like/Email my posts to your heart’s delight. I’ll do my best to entertain you and make the transition as easy as possible.

Bye for now!
k.