Bonjour - Je m'appelle The Juno Letters

I just sent a shipment of The Juno Letters Print Edition to the museum bookstore on Juno Beach - The Juno Beach Centre in Courseulles-sur-Mer. It will be on the shelves for the 70th D-Day Anniversay next June. Too cool!

Twitter in the age of Unsocial Media

My Twitter account has been the object of repeated hacker attacks this past month. I have reset my password several times to try and stop it, but I am concerned that this technology is so poorly implemented that it make represent more of a threat than an asset to my book promotions. If it continues I am going to probably drop Twitter altogether.

The Juno Letters on sale at The Juno Beach Center soon

I am pleased to report that I have just received a purchase order for The Juno Letters from The Juno Beach Centre, the Canadian museum honoring the soldiers who invaded Juno Beach on D-Day. I visited the Center last year at this time. It is in the commune of Courseulles-sur-Mer, one of the most delightful places you can visit on the Normandy coast. It also is the location of the climax of The Juno Letters. If you visit Normandy, please stop by The Juno Beach Centre and Courseulles - you will remember your stay always.

The Cross of Fire - First Draft

Draft 1 of Cross of Fire is completed. When you begin to carefully analyze such things as character development, timing, cadence, and continuity often some important truths appear - like the one that says its time to rethink the whole thing! This happenned with this book.

What I realized is that the three stories I have written and planned are really a series - The Juno Letters (book 1), Ariele (book 3), and this one... Cross of Fire. Why you ask? - you have to read it to find out.

I made a minor change in The Juno Letters to set up its Cross of Fire context, but it is one that no one will notice who already read the book. When all three books are completed, they will be republished as a series.

I have redesigned the prerelease cover for Ariele and have posted the prerelease cover for Cross of Fire. When the final draft is completed I will commission the cover artwork from my designer.

Buried in draft mode

I gave a talk the other day at a local community college about writing your first novel.  There were about twenty would-be writers in the room and all of them had great ideas, a desire to be a writer, and lots of question.  Not a single one has bothered to actually write anything.

Guess what - that doesn't work.  Telling people you are a writer is fun.  It illicits a lot of collateral conversations, and you find you are in great company.  But one of these days you actually have to put something on paper.  And that's where the fun begins.

Remember all those English classes you hated in school? - paragraphs, sentence structure, word usage.... blah, blah, blah.  When I discussed just how much work editing a draft of your own manuscript is, I was amused at the response.

Writing is creative - editing and publishing is about the craft of writing.  One cannot exist without the other.  Even if you job out the editing, you still need to be the expert, you still need to own your craft.

My best advice - get to work.  Talking about being a writier is not the same thing as being one.

Juno Letters on GOODKINDLES

10 Sept 2013 - I try to discover a new marketing platform once a month.  Today I submitted The Juno Letters to GOODKINDLES - a service that exposes the Kindel version of ebooks to readers specifically searching for Kindle editions.  It looks like a nice site, and I will be watching for results.

In addition, I secured the junoletters.com domain name and will begin the long process of migrating the branding of the trilogy from hewittmbm.com to junoletters.com - the same site, just a different name.

My own worst critic

Yesterday I completely gutted my new story, Cross of Fire.  One of the dualities of creation is the inescapable reality that you have to sometimes destroy what you create to make what you really wanted to create.  Kind of a Noah thing going on.

I reorganized Cross of Fire, and in the process realized I had written over 100 pages and just now was getting to the meat of the story.  When I had the thought - this should be two books - I knew I had to cut.  And cut.  And cut some more.

I eliminated one whole character - kind of like Back to the Future when the photograph changes - and threw away the entire WWI tie in piece.  This forced a change in the major plot vehicle, and elevated a minor character, Gela's boss, to star status.  Half of my research notes went into a holding folder as well as most of the 'snippets' I had already written.  Fodder for future work..

The good news is that it is a better plot.  Also, I have the makings of the next series... I had written about Case Yellow, the attack on Holland, as a part of the story of Mina Pientka, Gela's cousin.  That now will become a new story... a single event (the German assault on the low countires) and three unrelated mini stories stemming from that single event.  The first one is already written... Taunte Truss and Kindertransport (Google it- an amazing story).  I will put these pieces away until I am finished with The Juno Letters series, but will be looking for the other two plots as I go.

I feel good this morning!