It is time, once again, to honor book bloggers.

It's April, and that means my fellow indie author Terri Giuliano Long is sponsoring a little celebration of book bloggers.  The celebration only lasts through today, which is why this week's post is a day earlier than usual.

Long-time readers of this blog may recall my post on this subject sometime last year.  That is, you may recall it, and I certainly seem to recall writing it, but now I can't find it.  Maybe I posted it at the Indie Exchange.  Hmm.

Anyway, no harm, no foul.  Let's talk about book bloggers, and why they are crucial to the indie author ecosystem.

Traditional publishing wisdom asserts that one of the benefits authors get from signing with a publisher is help with promotion and marketing.  (It's not true, by the way, or it's not true of every trad-pubbed author; these days, only the mega-star authors get a marketing budget, and the rest have to bump along, doing their own promotional efforts, just like we indies do. Tell me again about the benefits of being trad-pubbed....  Sorry.  Off-topic.  Refocusing.)

Indie authors, however, don't even get that much (minimal) help.  No, we are stuck with making our own noise.  And besides personal appearances and chatting up all and sundry on social media, one of the best ways for us to get noticed is to be featured on someone's blog.  The blogger's audience becomes our captive audience, and if we can manage to be charming or entertaining or both, we might sell some books.  Those new readers, if we're very lucky, will become fans, and recommend our books to their friends, who may also become fans, and so on.  Indie authors are on a slow but steady career trajectory, and a lot of our growth wouldn't happen if it weren't for bloggers featuring us or our books.  My thanks must go here to the Cabin Goddess, who twice this year has let me visit with my characters in the Pipe Woman Chronicles in her Fourth-Wall Friday feature; and to Allison Bruning, whose virtual cruise stopped at both Naomi's condo and Swan Island last fall.

Many bloggers also review books, and their reviews can boost an author's visibility.  I am particularly grateful this year to my friends at Big Al's Books and Pals, Leanne Herrera, and Love of the Goddess for giving the Pipe Woman Chronicles such glowing reviews.

I'm sure I'm leaving some folks out, and for that, I apologize.  Dear blogger buddies, even if I didn't mention you by name, know that I am grateful for your help and support this year.  Thanks to all of you -- you rock!

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This week's news is mostly Camp NaNoWriMo-related.  The first draft of Annealed is proceeding apace; as of this writing, I am at 20,170 words of my 40,000-word camp goal, and 30,251 words for the whole book.  The first drafts for each preceding Pipe Woman Chronicles book have clocked in at somewhere around 52,000 words, so I'm comfortably past the halfway point.

No, I'm not going to tell you what's happening in the book right now.  Nice try, though.

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This moment of bloggy gratitude is brought to you, as a public service, by Lynne Cantwell.

Black Hills reminiscing.

While many of you (I hope!) are working your way through the events in Fissured, I'm immersed right now in writing the first draft of Tapped.  The setting for all of Book Three is southwestern South Dakota -- the Black Hills and the Badlands -- as Naomi travels there with Shannon to find Naomi's father.

I thought writing a novel set in Denver was difficult when I hadn't lived there for ten-plus years.  This novel is proving to be even harder.  I haven't visited South Dakota since I was in junior high, and I'm learning that Google Maps can only get you so far.

And too, our Black Hills vacation was memorable for reasons other than the scenery.

We did a lot of car trips when I was a kid, and after awhile, my father decided motels were getting to be too expensive.  So we got a camper -- the kind of RV that sits in the bed of a pickup truck.  Our truck must have been a little lighter-duty than it needed to be to carry our camper, so Dad (who was an auto mechanic by trade) got some extra-long bolts and bolted together two sets of two tires each, and then mounted them on the back axle of the truck.  It seemed to work pretty well -- if memory serves, we had run that rig to Florida and along the Gulf Coast the year before -- so Dad went ahead and planned our first vacation to the Pacific coast.  The plan was to go around Chicago in our usual way, then get on I-90 and take it all the way to Seattle.

Our first intimation of disaster happened the day before we were to leave.  Strong storms blew through our area and we lost power for several hours.  Not to worry, though -- we had a generator, so preparations continued.

We got on the road as scheduled and stopped in Iowa the first night.  There, the pump for the camper's kitchen sink went on the blink.  So my father had to fix that before we could get on the road again the next day.

Miles passed without incident.  I remember seeing the Corn Palace and our visit to Wall Drug (ramped up by all the signs for it along the way).  We got to Rapid City okay and found a nice campground; I remember the entertainment there one night was an authentic Indian dance by authentic Indian children.  I still have pictures somewhere of the dancers in their regalia.

But then things started to go to hell in a hurry.  There was one day when Mom let me have two ice cream cones on the same day -- from which I got a toothache.  Then, driving across Montana, I was napping on my parents' bed over the cab when the road suddenly seemed to get rough, as if we were going over a bridge.  Then Dad pulled over.  I poked my head out of the camper door to see what was going on, and my father proceeded to tell me that the side of the truck had fallen off.

Well, it wasn't quite that dire.  What had happened was the bolts holding the wheel to the axle had broken, and the dual wheel on the passenger side had gone walkabout in the field next to the highway.  A good Samaritan stopped behind us and helped Dad find the wheel, and then drove him into Missoula to get parts.  Thus repaired, we continued on, through the Idaho panhandle and around Seattle.  ("Dad, there's the Space Needle!  Isn't it cool? We're going to the Space Needle, aren't we?  Dad, we're passing Seattle!" "Don't you want to see the Pacific Ocean?" "Well, yeah, but Dad -- Seattle!" This, as the Space Needle receded in the distance behind us.)

We did make it to the Pacific (and went wading -- it was too cold for swimming!) and started south to Oregon, when, on a Sunday morning, we heard a radio news report about a riot in our hometown.  We'd left my brother behind, and my parents got scared.  So instead of doing the intelligent thing and calling home, we turned around and backtracked.

Somewhere in South Dakota, the same pair of wheels fell off again.  And this time, the bolts holding the wheels together snapped, so Dad got to chase the tires down separately.  At this point, he gave up on the idea of dual wheels as a bad job and mounted just one tire back on the axle.  We limped home with three wheels in the back instead of four.  But we had no further travel disasters, and when we got home, my brother was fine.

Not long after this trip, my dad traded in the camper for a trailer, and we never lost a wheel again.  Oh, and I had to have that aching tooth pulled -- but it was a baby tooth, so all's well that ended well.

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Speaking of travel, virtual and otherwise, this past week was my turn on the Orangeberry Summer Splash Tour to promote Fissured.  I was also the guest on the Indie Exchange's Blog Talk Radio show -- there's a link to the left, if you'd like to listen to it.  Later this month, Swan Island will be a stop on the two-month virtual cruise at Inside the Secret World of Allison Bruning, and the cruise will stop by Naomi's condo in October.

Starting next month, I'll be doing weekly posts for Indies Unlimited.  And looking ahead to December, I'm hatching a little something for the winter solstice with the Cabin Goddess.

All this, and the Indie Exchange birthday celebration, too.  Happy September!

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I'm Lynne Cantwell, and I approve this blog post.