At some point in our lives, each of us comes to learn of one luxury that we feel is vital to our way of life. Obviously, I think the internet is my most important luxury. Video games are probably in there somewhere, too.
But after that, it’s nice cars.

I’m no expert on cars, but I enjoy them. I’m always eager to drive something new, though the opportunity doesn’t come along all that often. My list of things I’ve driven is relatively short – Short enough that I can recount it right here.
As far as manuals go, I’ve driven a Chevy S-10, a Toyota Corolla, and a Dodge Neon.
For automatics, I’ve driven a Mazda Protegé, a Mazda 3, a Chevy HHR, an Oldsmobile Intrigue, a Dodge Caliber, a Ford Focus, a Ford Windstar, a Chevy Cavalier, a Chevy Malibu Maxx, and two different Ford Mustangs.

I don’t know what it was about the Mustangs that drew me to them, but I love those cars. Hot Wheels versions, still in the packages, hang above my sewing machine. A book about them sits on my shelf, there’s pictures of them on the calendar in the kitchen, a sticker of one on the back of my phone. That one serves an important purpose, at least; my husband and I have the same kind of phone, so a sticker means I can tell at a glance which one is mine.
There is also, of course, the Mustang that sits in my driveway. Her name is Rosie II.

But what does all this have to do with writing? It seems like a stretch, I know.
Writing Death of the Sun was an interesting experience for me, largely because it’s a genre I don’t even really read. I’m just not that interested in fiction set in modern times, I’d rather re-read The Chronicles of Narnia. Writing a book that was set in the real world presented a unique set of challenges. I had to bend the rules of the world around me to make something supernatural fit in.

I’ve always heard people say that it’s best to write what you know. I did a lot of research, but in the end, the things that make the fictional additions to the world seem believable are the ties they’re given to real places.
I spent some time thinking before I decided to set the story in St. Louis. It’s no secret that I grew up in that area, and I feel like adding a little fantasy flair to places I knew was what would really make it seem real. I’ve had several readers from the St. Louis area mention that they love the local references.

But as an extension of writing what you know, I decided to explore one of the facts of life that I learned when I was a teenager, and that’s where cars come in.

I suppose I was about sixteen or so at the time. A dear friend of the family came to spend a few nights with us, and his dad was the one who came to get him when it was time to go home. I’m sure I will never forget seeing him roll up the driveway in a brand new black Trans Am.
He’s always seemed like a quiet and mellow kind of guy. Serving in the Air Force, he had just returned from a tour in Iraq. He didn’t really want to talk about the war, I couldn’t blame him for that. Just speaking of coming home seemed to make his voice shaky. My mother asked him about the new car, and he just sort of laughed. “Well,” he’d said, looking the Trans Am over with an appreciative eye. “Life is too short to go without nice cars.”

I wrote a lot of life lessons into Death of the Sun. They often don’t show clearly, but that one line was something that had always stuck with me. Blaine, of course, speaks of the same wisdom. He may repeat it with some sense of irony, but since I ended up writing him with an awfully nice car, it’s easy to see that it’s some tie to humanity, some simple wisdom that can apply to anyone.

I’m not in love with Blaine’s car. It’s nice, don’t get me wrong – But it’s not my dream. I gave him his car, a 2002 Pontiac Firebird, in homage of that car being my husband’s dream. He may never get it, but that’s no reason to forget.

But the idea that life is too short to live without nice cars… that’s why I made the push to get a Mustang as my first car, because it was what I really loved. Once I had that, and I got to experience driving the winding paths that Route 66 cut into the southern Illinois countryside, I understood a little better.  There’s a real freedom in having a car. And if you’re going to give yourself that freedom, why not go all the way? Our time here on Earth is so brief. We might as well ride it out in style.

Everyone’s got a life luxury like that. What’s yours?

Let’s just admit it.
Despite everything our mothers taught us, all of us have judged a book by what we see on the outside, at one point or another. This is something I try not to do, being a writer. I’ve read some great books with bad covers, and some bad books with great covers. But at the same time, I’ve also read some great books with great covers.

I have to admit, my feeling on book covers is best summarized with one of Shannyn Sossamon’s lines from the movie A Knight’s Tale: A flower is only as good as its petals.
So as an independent writer who decided to go the self-publishing route, the book’s cover was, in fact, a big deal to me. I thought about it a lot, and often. I started thinking about it before I was even done writing the first chapter. We’ve all seen them, haven’t we? Those e-books that might be great stories, maybe they even have good reviews, but the covers look like something that belong on Photoshop Disasters.

I knew I wanted a simple cover, and I knew I wanted something Aztec-inspired. But beyond that, I hadn’t a clue. I looked around at a lot of services offered by artists who I’m sure could have done a lovely job with it, but at the end of the day, I was just another penniless writer, looking for my outlet for all good things in life – Truth, Beauty, Freedom, and above all things, Love.

Well. That settled that. If I wanted a book cover, I was just going to have to make it myself.

Over the course of several weeks, I looked everywhere for an Aztec calendar stone. Not a full-sized one, I’d never have anywhere to put that! But a small one, maybe an Aztec wristwatch stone, would be perfect. I don’t know how I became fixated on it, but it turned into a months-long search for the perfect picture of an Aztec calendar stone. I looked and I wrote, and I wrote and I looked. But the writing was going better than the looking, and before I knew it, I had completed the novel and was on to the task of editing, still with no cover.

What was I going to do? I was going to end up with one of those horrible Photoshop Disasters-style covers, I just knew it! I spent more time looking, and looked harder. The answer to the problem came one day, through no remarkable means. All that time, all I had to do was open my jewelry box.

Now, I make jewelry. I make a lot of it, mostly to sell on Etsy. Despite how much I make, I actually wear very little. I have a few bracelets I like best, and I wear those almost every day. My wedding ring and engagement ring rarely come off, obviously. Other than that, though, I only have a few necklaces and a few pairs of earrings that I wear, and I don’t wear them all the time. I was surprised that I’d forgotten it, but as soon as I made the rediscovery, I knew that I had found my cover.

My husband and I got married on a sweltering August day in Illinois. Because the Midwestern heat wasn’t enough, we then flew to Acapulco, Mexico for our honeymoon. The city was amazing, and I would love nothing more than to go back someday, but one of the most interesting things we did there was explore the local market.

It was amazing to see all the tents and tarps, run together to create some massive outdoors shopping center. It reminded me of all the fantasy stories I read, and I ran from stall to stall without ever really taking in what there was to be seen in each. Eventually, one stall caught my eye, selling silver jewelry brought in from Taxco. The gentleman running the stall handed me a basket and told me to pick up anything I liked. I found quite a few pieces, some for myself, some as gifts for my family. But the one piece I really fell in love with, the only piece I ended up asking my husband to buy for me, was a pendant in the shape of the Aztec calendar stone.

I don’t have a great camera. Actually, we’re not even sure where it came from. My husband served in Okinawa, Japan before we married, and most of his possessions were shipped back to the States when it came time to change duty stations. When we unpacked one of the boxes, we found a small Pentax camera that had seen better days. There were gouges out of the front, an ironic crack across the ‘waterproof’ emblem, and I couldn’t even make out how many megapixels it said it was supposed to be. It took a good hour on Google to find out what it was.

We still don’t really know where it came from, but it’s my favorite camera of any I’ve ever used. I snapped a few shots of my necklace on the coffee table, and cleaned them up in Photoshop. Honestly, it took a lot less work than I expected, and this was it! This was perfect. It may not be the most eye-catching cover in the world, but it has meaning to me.

Publishing Death of the Sun marked a new beginning in my life, the part where I decide to throw caution to the wind and just take a chance with my writing, see if anyone else likes it as much as my friends say they do. It only seemed fitting that it bear an image of something that represented another new beginning, now several years behind me. My Aztec pendant was the first gift my husband gave to me after we were married. That was the first step in my life transforming into what I always dreamed it would be, so it’s only fitting that it be included in the second step, as well.

Will that become a trend? Hmm… I don’t know.
After all, I don’t really know how my dream car would figure in.

It’s been a while since I posted. The holidays have come and gone, and the new year has started. My birthday is right around the corner, and a new chapter of my life began just a few days ago.

Last time I blogged, it was about the trial that was editing my first novel. Well, editing came and went, and then came again. In all, the book was edited four times. It was a long process, and one of the most difficult I’ve experienced, but at the end of it all I’m glad that it happened. One thing I’ve always said I would do has actually happened, and I think that’s something to be proud of! It was cutting it close, but I’ve managed to sell my work before turning 25.

So how does this happen? Well, for me, I decided to do it on my own.

My first novel, Death of the Sun, is now available on Amazon.com for the Kindle and paperback, and also on Barnes & Noble as a paperback.

The decision to self-publish the story as an e-book was a difficult one, but it was one made after much research and consideration. Ultimately, I’m pleased with the choice. I’ve only heard back from the first few readers, but so far, the only negative comment I’ve received is that they wished it had been longer.

Length was actually a major factor in the decision to make it an e-book. The final word count was a decent bit over 73,000 words, so it’s nothing to sneeze at! But it still falls short of what most publishers want for length. The story was complete in my eyes, so it would have felt wrong to try to pad it out and meet a word requirement. It would have seemed forced. After all, there’s nothing wrong with a short story as long as the entire story is told.

It’s been a beautiful learning experience. From figuring out how to format things myself to learning how a story should be structured, I gained an incredible amount of knowledge. On top of that, it was an interesting challenge. Death of the Sun is a romance novel, and a vampire story on top of that. I’ve always been smitten with vampires in classic literature, ever since I was a girl. But romances? I’ve never read a single one! For that reason, it’s possible that Death of the Sun is an oddity in the genre.

The story follows Angela, a young professional that’s become so wrapped up in her career that she’s never even decorated her apartment. She struggles with the desire to do something different with her life, and the desire to make her father (who just so happens to be her boss) happy. These are things that end up absorbing her, and everything else in her life falls by the wayside. It’s not until she meets Blaine, a vampire that no longer finds his condition all that it’s cracked up to be, that she realizes how off-track she’s gotten.

In that respect, it’s a story that chronicles the growth of the characters as people. Sometimes they’re enriching each other’s lives, sometimes they’re unintentionally making things worse, but all things considered, there’s the underlying feeling that everyone can be stronger when they have someone to lean on. In that respect, even if romance isn’t really your thing, I think there’s something in the story of people’s lives that all of us can relate to.

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It’s not that I’ve already run out of things to talk about. It’s more that this past week has been very busy – Last Sunday was one of the biggest, most important days of my adult life. Well, since getting married, at least.  Last Sunday was the day I completed my first book.

It’s hard for me to believe it’s taken this long, really. I’ve been writing forever, but I’m such a perfectionist that it’s hard for me to finish anything. I go back and edit a million times over as I’m writing, and that ends with me not getting anything written at all. That, and my attention span isn’t always the greatest, so I tend to jump between stories quite frequently. I have over a dozen books started on my hard drive, but until now, I’d never actually completed one. It was a huge step forward, a cause for great celebration, and the beginning of what I’m discovering to be the actual hard part.

This feels like a terrible thing to confess, but I’ve never actually gone back and edited anything. Even when I was in college, I never edited my papers. I wrote them out in one shot, ran spell check, and went from there. Part of this is good, because it goes to show you that my typing, spelling, and grammar skills are decent enough that I can skate by without having to check my work. But on the flip side, it’s quite bad, because it means I don’t have experience editing anything.

What do I keep? What do I cut? Am I doing this right? Am I doing it wrong? Can it be done wrong? I don’t even own a red pen! These are new problems I face every time I sit down to edit. I quickly learned that I can’t stand to read my work in the OpenOffice document it’s written in, I had to print out a hard copy and edit it the old fashioned way, flipping pages, proofreading three or four times over, marking things out and scribbling out notes between lines and around the margins of the page. But again on the plus side, at least it’s not a bad first draft. I have some odd habits that have stuck in my writing since the days I did chat room roleplaying, but overall, there’s usually only two or three things on a page that I decide to remove or change.

It’s been a huge undertaking, but it’s one I’m  happy to finally be doing. Once I’m done, I’ll read it again, but I’ll probably let my alpha readers review it to help find mistakes before I begin the second round of editing. When that will be, I’m not entirely sure. I’ve heard that the editing process usually takes about a week per session, but is that for full time writers, or people like me? People working retail and doing editing in the break room, coming home and doing housework and laundry, trying to squeeze in enough time to do a few more pages before bed?  I hope to have it done before the end of the year, but as my work schedule gets busier and the holidays get closer, I’m not always sure that I’ll make it.

But I’m going to keep my chin up. Every day of this is an adventure. And besides, I have my husband to help me with editing… apparently.