D. Hart St. Martin

I make female heroes badass AND believable

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For Naught or Not for Naught

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Many of my previous blogs have detailed the somewhat tedious task of prepping my book for publication, and at one point I briefly touched on why I decided to independently publish my trilogy.  But now it’s time to own up to the truth in full.  I really want to get read.

I have spent years attempting to convince agents and publishers to look at my book.  I wrote multiple versions of my query letter and synopsis, kept rewriting the book itself as I struggled to get it right, but the “Divinity that shapes our ends” refused to cooperate.  Through the decades the only “positive” rejection letter I ever received was the very first one.  Seems like a sign from the Divinity to me.

So last summer, after several new rejections in response to my latest endeavor at making a sale, I rejected the traditional publishing route in favor of self-publication.  In making this decision, I also committed myself to a singular objective.  I’d become aware of a contest that the online IndieReader was sponsoring, and completing the first book in the trilogy with an eye to the best presentation possible both in print and electronically grew into a necessity.  Lisen of Solsta: Fractured would finally receive a reading by someone with no reason to like it.

Let me be clear here.  I am not looking to win over a publisher or an agent.  I actually like, perhaps even prefer, the independent route to publication.  It has allowed me more control than any traditional publisher would have given me.  And I believe I’ve done a damn fine job of it.  What few readers I’ve reached thus far have blessed me with eight 5-star reviews on Amazon, and much as I believe each and every one of those stars was bestowed upon Fractured in absolute sincerity, they did come from people who know me and do have a reason to like it.

I have just completed a re-do of the Kindle edition of my book.  Although the print version looks fairly professional, the electronic version possessed some serious flaws.  Since (a) the best exposure for an author these days lies in downloadable data and (b) the contest requests a minimum of two manuscript submissions, one print and one Kindle, I had to get that Kindle version up to snuff.  With help from Smashwords.com, I created hyperlinks for chapters and made the text look as good as the best e-books I’ve read, and I’m feeling pretty good about that.

Now I only await the finessed hard copy from the publisher, and then I’ll complete the process by filling out the entry form and transmitting all materials prior to the deadline.  Then comes the wait.  I don’t expect to win.  In the fiction category, some contemporary tale of consequence will come in first, and that’s okay.

But if I can get that 4- or 5-star review from someone who has no reason to care, not only will it provide me with a new platform and, hence, more exposure, but it will also prove to me that all of this—the writing, rewriting, reconfiguring, proofing, reproofing, typesetting, in short, all that stuff I wrote about in earlier blogs—was not for naught.

Farewell, California Contessa

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When we met, I, just a teenager at the time, gazed up in awe at this beauty in her prime. Her youth behind her, my parents convinced her that an alteration of attire would benefit her greatly, and so it did. She went from the entirely inappropriate coloring of pink accessorized by baby blue to a more stately, perhaps even regal off-white accented with warm green, her strong iron jewelry all in black. This matched her terracotta bonnet, and she complemented her entire neighborly entourage.
My family loved her fiercely. We groomed her inside and out, restoring all those little corners and great rooms in a soul that people sometimes misinterpret. After all, her conception had brought together all the best that creative humanity could offer at the time; we would recover all we could of where she had begun.
For over forty-five years we loved her, depended on her, trusted her. Sometimes she let us down, but in the end it was we who brought her to where she lingers now. Unkempt, disheveled, she stands on her hill, filled with memories, more ours than those of anyone else she’s known. I sit with her on Sundays as I prepare to abandon her completely, and I remember. Oh, my dear God, how I remember. It halts me in my work.
Here we once put the Christmas tree, in front of the great, paned window in the massive living room for all to see.
And there, we painted the master bedroom on March 15, 1964, my parents’ twenty-third anniversary and the day that Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton married for the first time.
My balcony, a Romeo-and-Juliet balcony if ever there were one, turned out to be not nearly as well connected to her skeleton as it should have been. They had to tear up the floor in my bedroom and cable it to support beams in the far wall to make it safe.
Then there was the Sunday right before our first Christmas all together. I headed down to the basement to wash my hair and smelled the smoke. The Fire Department discovered the wooden framing for the cement catch below the fireplace, placed there thirty-five years earlier, had never been removed. An ember had caused the wood to smolder. The nice firemen put it out, then spent the next hour or so feeling walls for heat. Problem was that forced-air-heating ducts riddled the thick walls. Luckily we’d lived there just long enough to know where all those ducts belonged, and soon the gentlemen fire fighters departed, leaving my father to announce that not every kid gets a real fire engine for Christmas.
I feel her observing me as I think back. She remembers far more than I do, despite her dilapidated and slightly addled state. She watched as we moved in, and she’s watching as we prepare to walk away. It’s the right thing to do, I know. Her wounds and genetic defects will be healed once we are gone, and she will rise, a phoenix from the fire, unbearably beautiful in bright new feathers yet with a weathered eye. I will miss her terribly. I already do. But she will be the better for our departure. We have no money to maintain her. We cannot pay her taxes. It’s time to let her go.

It Took Ya Long Enough

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Yeah, I suppose it did.  In fact, I’m surprised I’m here.  For thirty-five years, admittedly with several multi-year breaks, I’ve put all I could into writing the story of a young woman now named Lisen who learns that the destiny she’d envisioned for herself has dissolved into dust in favor of a far more ambitious fate.  This was always the heart of the story, always its thrust.  The fact that she now has seven years’ experience as a Southern California teenager behind her changed nothing.  In fact, that change in the initial setup only enhanced Lisen’s accessibility and the poignancy of her journey.

My journey, on the other hand, has followed a somewhat circuitous route.  I’m not going to lie down on the couch here and confess my innermost workings, but the truth is that my father was a great one for cautioning me not to get my hopes up and my mother—well, she lacked the ability to love.  I grew up incapable of finishing what I started, especially when doing so could bring me any sense of accomplishment.  And yet, the one thing I’ve never given up on—despite giving up on it a dozen times a day, sometimes for weeks at a time—is the tale of Lisen, the young woman of destiny.

When I realized this a few years back, I asked myself why.  It was my very first novel.  The sage advice is to toss that first attempt.  Or, at the very least, pack it away never to see the light of day again.  I tossed the first version, no problem.  Then I rethought it—re-envisioned it, if you will.  I dumped that version, too.  And then, once more.  Why?  The fourteen-year-old inside of me wanted me to tell her the story, to tell her the story the way it was meant to be told.  I think that’s when I truly committed my all, what I had and what I’d have to dig up from somewhere deep within.  Whatever it took, I had finally promised that inner teen and the outer me that I would never hold back again.

And I haven’t.  I decided to independently publish Fractured because I couldn’t seem to write a selling query letter.  I couldn’t afford to pay someone to prepare the book for printing.  I couldn’t afford to pay someone to design my cover.  I kept hitting the rocks in the road, sometimes allowing them bring me to a dead halt, sometimes jumping over them with glee.  But I overcame all the obstacles, and I am very proud of the finished product—the writing, the story telling and the package it comes in.

So, to anyone who aspires to a personal goal, I say this.  Success does not come from the number of people who know who you are or the amount of money you make.  Success comes from within and the satisfaction of knowing that, given your limitations, whatever they may be, you did your very best and never gave up.

Me, Myself and Me

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“Establish your brand,” they advise.

My what?

“Brand.”

Ah, I did hear right.

So, what the heck is my brand?  Kellogg, Honda, Apple—these are brands I understand.  They sell things, specific things—food, cars, high-tech toys.  Me?  I want to see my book out there and read.  So what is my brand?

This led me back into research mode.  CreateSpace, the POD publisher of my book, offers all sorts of information on what it takes to prepare your book for publication as well as advice on marketing said book once publication has occurred.  I searched for “brand,” and this is what I found.  My brand is me.

Whoa, wait a minute.  Me?  I can’t sell me.  Or can I?

My favorite topic of conversation?  Me.  My favorite stories with which I regale my friends?  Stories about me.  My favorite obsession?  All things me.  This just might work.  I talk about myself all the time, dominate conversations to keep the focus on me, manipulate the topic of conversation back to me when it’s wandered to what my companion of the moment wants to talk about.  Ask my friends.  They’ll tell you.  Some seem to enjoy my going on and on, expounding on the plethora of trivial pursuits my brain is prone to.  Others—I have no idea.  Do I care?  Apparently not.

Alone at home, I talk to myself about…what else?  Me.  Or my book, in an imagined interview with Oprah or Ann Curry.  I think I even bore my cats.  Oh yeah.  I forgot.  They sleep all the time anyway, so snoring on their part is not necessarily an indicator of a lack of interest.

In my soul I remain sixteen.  I am now an age that begins with “six,” but it’s a long way from sixteen.  In part, my sixteen-year-old soul owes its youth to my young shero, Lisen.  Once I decided to send her to Earth for an education, I knew I had to fully reconnect with my inner teen.  I like her.  And she is a part of that brand that is me.

So, what does this mean?  Perhaps it means I can go on about me here, where people can choose whether or not to listen, and I can take the pressure off my friends.  Then again, I probably won’t let them off that easy.

Beware of Falling Rocks along the Learning Curve (Part 1)

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So now I’m writing a blog, and I have no idea what I’m doing.  Of course, I could say that about a great many things I’ve done in the last few months.  Independently publishing a novel brings with it a series of learning curves with falling rocks around each one—falling rocks which must be driven around, drilled through, climbed over or tunneled under.  So why should a blog be so different from anything else?  (Or a “blob” as I seem to keep typing it.)

It began with a series of negative responses to e-mail queries.  In the old days, I sent out five letters a week—including synopsis and/or sample chapter(s) depending on requests—with the obligatory SASE (self-addressed stamped envelope) and then waited, sending out another five the following week.  Without access to an agency’s web site, an author had to rely on what the current year’s guide said about them. 

These days, one researches the agent, peruses her recent sales, studies the submission guidelines, and learns, in all too many cases, that one agent seems to sell only ethnically oriented books, another seems to handle very little or no fantasy even though the guide says they do, and a third has shut down accepting submissions for an indefinite period of time but “please do check back with us in a year or two.”

The good news about this is that the writer can reject many, many agents who don’t fit her needs.  It does, however, limit the hope factor.  It also limits how many queries go out because so much time gets spent on eliminating the hopeless.  The one thing it does not limit is the response time.  Some rejections arrive within hours of the queries having been sent.  In the meantime, the psychology of juggling queries—of always having several out as the rejections come in—that psychological incentive gets lost when the negative response is so final in its immediacy.  I quickly became discouraged.

One day in July, I woke up to what I really wanted for this book I’d pored so much energy, time and love into.  I wanted it read, in its entirety, by someone who felt no imperative to like it.  No imperative to hate it either.  I couldn’t get an agent to read it.  For some reason, my queries fell like the great silence that overtakes a stadium when a player is injured.  My book was hurt, and I had to find a way to resuscitate it.

Enter independent publishing.  Enter print on demand (POD).  And enter contests for self-published books which guarantee a full read by an expert—agent, publisher, writer, whatever—someone who has no need to like me or my writing.  Literally, ENTER those contests.  This would require doing more than preparing the manuscript for digital publication; I would have to prep it for paper and binding. 

Luckily, I came to this with skills already in place.  I’d self-published twice before—once doing all the set-up myself and even binding the books with my father’s guidance, and once via a POD publisher for whom I had to prepare the document, but I did not have to make decisions such as type face or the size of the book and I did not have to design the cover.

Near the end of July I began prepping my manuscript.  I proofed, and two readers pointed out a few errors as they read the book as a document on their Kindles.  I made some changes and then performed a series of edits on each chapter to accommodate the differences between manuscript and book.  I will get into these in the second part of this blog, but it was an intense process. 

It was also a satisfying process, one which gave me control over everything, and nothing can beat that.

Post? Page?

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Can’t tell the difference between a post and a page.  Just trying things out here.  If you’ve already read my first “page,” you’ve read this.

I’m a blogger!  Been threatening to do this for years, and, finally, here I am.  Admittedly, I have taken this step to establish a presence on the internet, and I hope that a few people will show up to check out what I have to say.  I love to write and have been doing so since I was in grade school.  I thrive on the challenge of a story that requires delving into the darkness in our souls, and I work hard to meet my own admittedly perfectionist standards.

I am here because of Lisen.  Lisen is a friend of mine.  We grew up together, in a manner of speaking.  She taught me what it means to lose everything and come back fighting.  I showed her what life on Earth was like, and, in turn, she has rewarded me with some of the best moments an author could ever ask for from a character.  Now it’s time for her to venture out into the literary world, and I want to do everything I can to help her succeed.  So here I am.

The book’s name is “Fractured: Lisen of Solsta, Book 1,” and it is available on Amazon in both hard copy and Kindle.  This blog will often delve into Lisen’s world, but I also hope to look at writing in general, the pros and cons of independent publishing versus the traditional publishing route.  When the need drives me, I will also write about the dilemmas of life as they strike me.  I know it will take a while to build a following.  This first blog is not likely to attract followers in droves, but it is a start.  Show  up in a week or 2 and hopefully I’ll have something to say that’s actually worth saying.