Your newbie indie author questions, answered.

I know, I know -- it's Monday. I fell asleep early last night and forgot to post here.

I don't post a lot about indie author stuff here -- or not as much as I should, anyway, probably. This post ran at Indies Unlimited yesterday. Some of you probably don't frequent IU, although I can't fathom why you wouldn't; we have tons of info about the process of writing, editing, publishing, and marketing your work (as you will see if you click any of the links below).

Anyway, here's the post. Have a great week, you guys.

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Recently, I was invited to join a Facebook group whose membership includes a lot of new authors. I’d forgotten about some of these newbie concerns. I’d also forgotten how everybody asks the same questions over and over, to the point where those of us who have been at this for a while get kind of tired of answering them. So I thought I’d pull together some of these typical questions and answer them here. Feel free to bookmark this post and refer to it as needed.

Q: I have my plot, but I need interesting characters. / I have my characters, but I need a great plot. Can you help me?

A: Sorry, no. I have my own stories to write. (You may want to check Indies Unlimited for articles on developing characters and/or stories!)

Q: Do I really need an editor? Isn’t using Grammarly enough?

A: No. Just no. And running Word’s spellcheck and grammar check aren’t enough, either. Get yourself an editor. If you can’t afford one, line up some beta readers.

Q: What kind of music do you listen to when you write?

A: This is one of those time-waster questions. I mean, some writers use music to block out other sounds so they can concentrate on their writing; others find music too distracting and need to write in silence, or as close to it as they can get. My question to you is this: Why is that relevant to you? Instead of polling other writers about their musical tastes and habits, wouldn’t your time be better spent trying to write with and without music, to figure out which way works best for you?

Q: What’s your book about? What genre do you write in?

A: Another time-waster. I write in the genre of putting my butt in the chair and cranking out some words instead of trying to start conversations with other writers on Facebook.

Q: I don’t read books. Can I still write one?

A: Sure. But reading teaches you a lot about writing. Most writers learn about characterization, pacing, story arc, and so on by reading other people’s books. Plus you learn grammar and punctuation rules along the way. These are all important tools in your writing arsenal. Why would you forgo an opportunity to improve your toolbox?

Q: I can’t tell anyone what my book is about. I’m afraid someone will steal my idea.

A: Relax. Somebody once claimed there are only seven stories in the world. That’s probably an exaggeration – but guaranteed, somebody somewhere has thought of your terrific idea already, and there are likely multiple books, movies, TV shows, and so on that explore it. Mind you, that doesn’t make your story derivative and it doesn’t make you a failure. It means you need to tell your story in your own way. Besides, we all have our own ideas – nobody’s interested in stealing yours. And if someone does actually plagiarize your work, you can take them to court.

Q: Is it ever okay for your characters to go to the bathroom?

A: Depends. (Old joke, sorry.) Does the scene advance the plot? Does it explain something about your character that you can’t show another way?

Q: How about cursing? How about graphic sex?

A: I happen to curse like a sailor, and as for sex…oh. You’re asking about your story, aren’t you? Again, it depends. There are niche genres for just about everything. As a matter of fact, erotica sells really well. But on the flip side, if you don’t like reading about it, no one can force you to write about it.

Q: Are independent authors real writers? Don’t you need to have a contract with a traditional publisher to be a real writer?

A: Bless your heart.

***

These moments of FAQual blogginess have been brought to you, as a public service, by Lynne Cantwell.

In praise (more or less) of trying new things.

I mentioned a couple of weeks ago that I've been working on a companion guide to the Pipe Woman Chronicles, so that folks who aren't up-to-speed with all the gods and goddesses in the series can have one place to look them all up. I'm happy to report that A Billion Gods and Goddesses is now in the capable hands of my editing team, and I'm aiming for release sometime at the end of this month.

No, really. I'm very happy to report that. Pulling this thing together was nothing like writing the novels themselves.

The writing styles are different, of course. With fiction, you just put your fingers to the keyboard and start typing, and with any luck, a story comes tumbling out. There are stops and starts, of course, and digressions, and blind alleys, and characters who creep up behind you and bash you over the head so they can run away with the story. But you don't have to stick to the facts if you don't want to. The characters' emotional reactions have to ring true, yes, but you can pretty much make up everything else.

I think most of you know that I was a journalist in my younger days. Journalism (ideally) deals in facts and only facts. Even when you're writing about someone's emotional reaction to an event, your best bet is to stick to a dispassionate reporting style. Plus the factual details are right there in front of you, or at least fresh in your mind.

Writing the god guide was like neither of these -- and like both of them, a little -- and also like writing a 20,000-word thesis. Except more entertaining than a thesis. At least, it had better be. I'm certainly not using academic prose, and mythology is fun.

The thing is that I did the research for the earliest books in the series three-plus years ago. And in the god guide, I'm reporting on mythology, if you will, rather than using the myths as a springboard for my own creative interpretation, as I did in the novels. So I didn't just have to review my sources -- I had to keep checking the details as I wrote, to make sure I wasn't going too far afield (as well as to make sure I wasn't unconsciously plagiarizing a source when retelling a myth).

In the end, though, it was a good exercise. Authors sometimes talk about the differences in writing short stories vs. novels vs. screenwriting vs. poetry. Each of these types of writing stretches different muscles. Journalism stretches yet another type of writing muscle. And a book like A Billion Gods and Goddesses is an exercise of yet another sort.

Many years ago, when I worked for WKEE Radio in Huntington, WV, one of my co-workers was Toria Tolley, who eventually went to work for CNN Headline News. She made the jump from radio into TV with an anchor job in Charleston, WV. A few weeks after she made the move, I asked her how it was going -- and she said, "Now I can go work in a bank."

That's kind of how I feel about the god guide. It was an interesting project to take on, and it was a good excuse to stretch those non-fiction-writing muscles. But now I can go back to writing novels.

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These moments of muscle-stretching blogginess have been brought to you, as a public service, by Lynne Cantwell.

When the rules don't apply.

Reading can be a subversive exercise. Sometimes it encourages you to break the rules.

I just finished a book that I received in my book bag at last fall's World Fantasy Convention:  Lifelode by Jo Walton. I'd never read anything by Walton before this, so I didn't really know what to expect. But the book's description appealed to me -- it's set in what appears at first glance to be a fantasy world. Applekirk is more or less a castle, and those who live there more or less practice magic, which is called yeya in the world of this book. There are some peculiarities in this world: the farther East you go, the more yeya there is and the more time speeds up; the farther West, the more time slows down, and yeya becomes a rumor, or maybe even a fairy tale. But the oddest thing at first glance is that the book is written in present tense. And it works -- or at least, it worked for me, because one of the main characters views time in a non-linear fashion. Often when she looks at someone, she sees a sort of ghost or shade of their past or future self, so that everything happens at once, all the time.

Now, writing in present tense is not a usual choice for authors. Sure, Suzanne Collins uses it in her Hunger Games books, but by and large, the default is past tense. And the intarwebz are full of reasons why you should stick with past tense (although I would argue that a competent writer -- like, say, Walton, for instance -- would easily avoid the pitfalls listed in this Writer's Digest article).

It turns out that Walton stretched another boundary, too. While at first glance, Lifelode is fantasy, Walton says in the Q&A at the end of the book that it's definitely sci-fi. The novel's world is actually a pocket universe -- a fold in space-time -- which explains why time passes faster, the farther east you go. I don't know that you need to know that to enjoy the book; you can certainly read it as fantasy set in an odd magical world.

This tweaking of expectations is also evident in Ann Leckie's Ancillary Justice, which was my Rursday Read this week. This book is very definitely sci-fi -- spaceships, aliens, and artificial intelligences abound. Leckie's protagonist, Breq, was once part of the AI that operated a spaceship, which may be mind-bending enough. But the people of the society that created the ship have the capability of becoming either gender -- so their language has no gender. Leckie could have taken the easy way out and denoted this by having Breq use "it" as his/her default pronoun. But instead, it's "she". It's a little disorienting, and a constant reminder that the reader's not in Kansas anymore.

Both of these authors are multiple award winners. Leckie's book won the Hugo, the Nebula, and the Arthur C. Clarke awards last year. Walton's past work has also won the Hugo and the Nebula.

I'm bringing this up because I saw a bit of advice on Facebook this week about how you shouldn't use big words in your fiction writing. Supposedly, it's because throwing a bunch of unfamiliar words at your reader will throw them out of the story. Now, usually I'm on board with this advice; after all, I spent a lot of years writing radio copy. For that, you use short words and simple sentences because when you're writing for the ear, clarity is key. But fiction is a different beast, and sometimes complexity is better. One of my favorite authors is Stephen R. Donaldson, whose Thomas Covenant books are rife with unfamiliar words. Donaldson has said he used the difficult vocabulary in part to make it clear that the Land is not our world. And Donaldson's work has won numerous awards, too.

So we have three authors who have won a boatload of awards for breaking the rules. It's probably no accident that these three authors write speculative fiction, where rule-bending of all sorts is allowed, and even encouraged. But I think the takeaway is that each of these authors had a good reason for doing what they did. Donaldson used unusual words to set the Land apart from our world. Leckie's Breq calls everyone "she" to underscore his/her alien origins. And Walton uses present tense to reinforce the idea that time moves oddly in her world.

So if you're tempted to bend or break a writing rule, have at it. But don't just do it to do it. Know what the rule is there for, and figure out why it doesn't apply in the case of your story. After all, that's how the award-winning authors do it.

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Speaking of awards: Congrats to Birdman on winning the Oscar for Best Picture tonight! (Did I call it, or did I call it?)

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These moments of rule-breaking blogginess have been brought to you, as a public service, by Lynne Cantwell.

Closing Pandora's box.

It's been quite a while since I wrote a punctuation-related post. Guess it's time.

NNBTK | deviantart.com

One of the most common punctuation mistakes I see is when an author wants to use punctuation to set off a phrase, but doesn't do it correctly. Here, let me show you want I mean. See if you can spot the errors in the following sentences:

I introduced my brother, Hal to the group.*

Frieda swears she's going to shave her head because her hair (which is naturally curly is so hard to manage.

The most annoying thing about punctuation mistakes -- the thing that makes my teeth itch the most is that they're so easily fixed.

In each case, the author has begun the job of setting off a parenthetical expression with some type of punctuation, but has not followed through and finished the job.

I get that sometimes people get going on their point and forget. Or in revision mode, they add something here and forget to adjust the sentence there. But sometimes I wonder whether people even realize they're making a mistake. Hence, this post.

I guess first we ought to define what this thing-that-ought-to-be-between-punctuation-marks is. If you can take the words in question out of the sentence and it's still grammatically correct, then what you have is a parenthetical expression or a parenthetical phrase. And yes, that's what it's called even if no parentheses are involved.

So for our examples above, if I take out the parenthetical material, the sentences would read like this:

I introduced my brother to the group.*

Frieda swears she's going to shave her head because her hair is so hard to manage.

The most annoying thing about punctuation mistakes is that they're so easily fixed.

See? The sentences work just fine this way. So if I go back and insert the words I've left out, I need to set them off on both sides with my punctuation of choice -- commas, parentheses, dashes, brackets, whatever -- so that my reader knows where the parenthetical material starts and ends.

When you put in the first punctuation mark and don't put in the second, it's a little like you've opened Pandora's box. You know that story, right? Zeus was mad at Pandora's husband, so He gave her a box (or actually, a jar) and told her not to open it. But of course her curiosity got the best of her. As it turned out, Zeus had stuffed the jar full of all the bad things in creation, and when Pandora opened it, they all escaped into the world. But the jar contained one more thing: hope. And when the bad stuff got out, it did, too.

So when you put in the first punctuation mark, you've opened the box. You need to remember to close that box when you get to the right place -- or else you run the risk of doing a bad thing: confusing your reader. Setting off that parenthetical material on both sides makes your sentence easier to understand. Which is all punctuation does, guys. Honest.

Anyway, I'm hopeful that you all will remember to close the box the next time you include parenthetical material in a sentence. (See what I did there?)


*A word about this sentence: I've set off the name with commas here (or intended to, anyway) because in this example, I'm assuming Hal is my only brother. So his name is superfluous to the meaning of the sentence; regardless whether I name him or not, I'm still talking about the same guy. However, if I had two brothers, I would omit the commas because the name is now critical to the meaning of the sentence. If I say, "I introduced my brother to the group," my reader won't know whether I mean Hal or Fred unless I say his name.

So:
Only one brother? "I introduced my brother, Hal, to the group."
Two or more brothers? "I introduced my brother Hal to the group."

Okay? Okay. Glad we've cleared that up.

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In the news: I was very pleased to learn that I've been named to a 2014 Honours List of Indie Authors in Australia. Thanks very much to Tabitha Ormiston-Smith for the hono(u)r!

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This moment of bloggy box-closing has been brought to you, as a public service, by Lynne Cantwell.

Punctuating dialogue.

Two bits of business before we start:

1. I'm honored once again to have one of my books nominated for a Big Al's Books and Pals Readers' Choice Award. Tapped: Book Three of the Pipe Woman Chronicles is up for the award in the category of Fantasy this year. As the name of the award implies, there's a popular-vote component. Coincidentally, voting opened today -- and there are prizes in it for you!  If you're reading these words, would you please click here and vote for my book? (Rafflecopter gets testy with Internet Explorer, so if you have another browser available, it's best to use that one.) A number of other nominated books -- many of them Rursday Reads -- are also worthy of your vote. I'd like to draw your attention in particular to Laurie Boris's Sliding Past Vertical, K.S. Brooks's Night Undone, Carol Wyer's Just Add Spice, D.V. Berkom's Yucatan Dead, and the Brooks/Hise/Mader humor pastiche called Bad Book. Consider giving them a little love while you're at it. Then come on back. I'll wait. And thanks!

2.  Keep an eye on your inbox (or spam filter -- I have no illusions) for a newsletter from me. There's info about the Undertow launch and a special feature or two. I'll be putting most of it on the blog eventually, but newsletter recipients will get it first. Not on my mailing list yet? That's easy enough to remedy -- just head on over to the left and sign up.

Now then. In advance of National Grammar Day, which is coming up on Tuesday, I offer you this post that I wrote for Indies Unlimited. I'm re-running it because the topic keeps coming up -- mainly, I suspect, because schools don't bother to teach this stuff any more. (Don't get me started.)

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“There was something I was going to write about for my Indies Unlimited post this week,” I said to my daughter Kat. “Do you remember what it was?”

“Hmm. Maybe it was punctuation in dialogue,” she said.

“You’re right!” I said. “You were saying that your teachers never went over it in school.”

“Yeah,” she said. “We concentrated on learning the rules for writing essays, because that’s what kids need to know to pass the state-mandated tests.”

I interjected, “Which the kids need to do so the teachers can keep their jobs.”

“Exactly. And there’s no dialogue in an essay.”

“Gotcha,” I said. “So here’s how I think of it. Dialogue is a sentence inside a sentence.”

“I’m not sure what you mean,” she said. “I think you’ll need to give some examples.”

“I was just about to,” I replied. “Let’s use the phrase, ‘do you remember when.’”

She shrugged. “Sure. Whatever.”

“If you’re asking a question, the question mark goes inside the quotes: Do you remember when?” I said. “Same for an exclamation mark: I do remember when!”

“But what if the sentence inside the quotes ends with a period?” she asked.

“That’s a little trickier,” I said.

“I knew this was going to get complicated,” she muttered.

“Nah, it’s not that hard,” I said. “You just have to watch where your attribution is.”

“Your what?”

“Your ‘she said’ or ‘he said.’ If the attribution comes after the end of the sentence, like I’m doing right now, then you replace the period at the end of the sentence with a comma,” I explained. “And the comma stays inside the quotation marks.”

Then I said, “But if the attribution comes first, like in this paragraph, then the sentence inside the quotes gets a period at the end. And just like with the comma, the period goes inside the quotes.”

“And if there’s no attribution?”

“The stuff inside the quotes gets a period – like this.”

“Hmm.”

“And if,” I said, “your attribution comes in the middle of a sentence, you need to put a comma before the first close-quote mark.”

“I think I get all that,” she said. “But it’s punctuating the attribution that seems to trip up a lot of people.”

“That’s because they’re not thinking of dialogue as a sentence within a sentence,” I said. “The attribution frames the quote – it’s all one sentence. I’ve seen what you’re talking about, too; they hang the ‘he said’ or ‘she said’ out there as a separate sentence.”

“Yes, like this.” She said.

I said. “Or like this. But it’s wrong. You need to use a comma to tie the quote and the attribution together.”

“Okay. But there are times when you can end a quote without tying it into the next sentence.” She smirked at me.

“Wipe that smirk off your face, missy,” I said. “That second sentence of yours isn’t attribution – it’s a stage direction!”

“Yes!” she cried. “And now let’s talk about a pet peeve of mine, and it’s something I’ve caught you doing.”

“Oh,” I groaned, “I know where this is going.”

“See? See? You just did it again!” she crowed. “There is no way you could have groaned through that whole sentence!”

I hung my head in shame. “You’re absolutely right,” I said. “I should have put a period after ‘groaned’. That’s another reason why ‘said’ is the safest verb to use for attribution. It sure is a good thing you’re one of my beta readers, huh?”

"It's a good thing for you, yeah," she said, smirking.

(This post originally appeared at Indies Unlimited on September 13, 2013. Happy National Grammar Day!)

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These moments of bloggy dialogue are brought to you, as a public service, by Lynne Cantwell

"So how's your book doing?"

I read a blog post this past week in which the author complained about people who ask how your book is doing. The author of the post called out those people as incredibly rude, and the question as akin to asking a doctor or, hey, anybody else how much money they make.
Well, sure, it's rude. But people ask all sorts of rude questions in the name of "making small talk": "So when are you two getting married?...When are you going to have a baby?...Have you found a job yet?...Haven't you put on a little weight?" This is no different.

And too, the questioner might not be asking for sales numbers. They probably have another agenda entirely. Maybe they've thought about publishing their own work, and want to know whether they could make succeed -- or whether it's possible for anybody to succeed. Maybe they think you're dreaming too big and want to take you down a peg or two. And, hey, maybe they just want to know how you're doing in general. A simple, "It's doing well, thanks," with a quick change of subject, ought to be enough to put these boors off the scent. And if they continue to push for an answer, you can turn the tables and ask them how much they make. Muahaha.

But there's a better answer, and it relates to the other point the author of that blog post made about the way she felt, now that she had a book out in the public eye. Before publication of her first novel, she says, she could write three or four books a year (although she wouldn't necessarily release all of them). Last year, she wrote two -- and she second-guessed herself all the way, because she kept thinking about how people would react to what she was writing.

My flippant response is that the quickest and best cure for second-guessing yourself about your second published novel is to publish it, already. Because then when someone asks you, "How's your book doing?" you can respond the way I always do: "Which one?" Then I tell them I have eight novels out, and they should look me up on Amazon.

That usually shuts them up. Because that's when it dawns on them that I'm serious about writing. I'm not just a one-book wonder; I'm in it for the long haul. That's worth some respect.

But the blogger's observation about her own changed perception might go a long way toward explaining why second books -- and second songs, and second just-about-anything-else creative -- sometimes don't measure up to the first one. Sure, there's the time factor. First-time novelists (or songwriters or whatever) have years and years to perfect their work. They have nothing but time to nurture the novel -- putting it through multiple drafts, tweaking it here and there -- until it satisfies their vision. The second book is often, in comparison, rushed. The secret about the author's talent is out, and somebody -- the agent, the editor, fans -- is pestering her for the next book. That puts pressure on the author to turn out something new, and to do it faster, perhaps, than she is comfortable with. Sure, the author cares just as much that the work is as perfect as it can be. But it's not going to be exactly like the first book that everyone loved so much, because why would anybody write the same book twice? So inevitably, someone will be disappointed.

But that's from the point of view of the fans, really. This blog post was interesting to me because it's from the point of view of the author. And the key word from my preceding paragraph is "secret." Up until the moment of publication -- or the moment the ARCs go out to reviewers -- the author has been writing only to please herself. The writer makes changes to the book based on her own feelings about the work -- about what she wants to say and how she wants to say it. Now, she knows there's a wider audience out there. Other people are going to judge her work. With Book 2, she's no longer writing to please herself; she's writing to please others.

Which is why my flippant response is also the correct one: just publish the damned thing already. And that requires turning off your internal worrywart even when you're writing the first draft. Ignore the editor and agent (if you have one); ignore the reviews (even the good ones); ignore the fans who want more. Yes, you will have to feed the beast. But the only way to feed the beast the good stuff is to keep writing to please yourself.

Donna Tartt's newest book, The Goldfinch, was released to rave reviews a few months ago. It's her first new work in eleven years, and only the third novel she's had published in her whole 30-year career. She's obviously a slow writer, but I suspect the real reason it takes her ten years to get a new book out is that she won't publish 'til she's satisfied. She's writing to please herself, and it seems to be working pretty well for her.

In the Brave New World of Indie Publishing, you're responsible for your own career. Don't feel like you have to release X novels in X months to stay in the public eye, and don't feel like you have to please everybody with Book 2 or 3 or 4. Stay true to your own vision. Keep writing to please yourself.

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I'm on tour with Crosswind starting Wednesday. The tour dates are up on the "Tour Dates" tab. See you there!

The post-series cleanup.

I cleaned the house last weekend.  I dusted and vacuumed my bedroom, including the bookcases; I scoured the soap scum off the bathroom sink and used window cleaner on the mirror; I even dusted my desk behind my computer, kind of.  I also mended a pair of slacks.  The weekend before that, I got caught up on the bills.  This past week, I blocked two shawls that I’d knitted, finished a third, and made progress on yet another knitting project.

Why is this a big deal, you ask?  Don’t normal people do this stuff all the time? Ah, but you see, I’m not a normal person.  I’m a writer.

It seems like I’ve been on deadline since before the end of 2012.  I’ve been writing and editing like crazy, meeting my self-imposed deadlines for publishing the fifth and final book in my urban fantasy series.  Even after Annealed went live on Amazon in May, I had blog posts for the book launch tour to write, and then I started packing for Alaska.  When I got back from vacation, the tour began.  In short, it’s been one thing after another, and so real-life maintenance kind of slipped.

Okay, it didn’t just “kind of” slip.

He looks like he's suffering, doesn't he?

Recently, in a Facebook writers’ group, we talked about all the things we do to delay when we’re not feeling the writing thing.  Cleaning was pretty high on the list of chores we’d rather tackle than a tough scene.  (I’ve been known to use cleaning the litter box as an avoidance tactic. There – my dirty little secret has been revealed.)  But it seems to me that the opposite is true, as well: if the writing is going well or a deadline is looming, the dishes mount in the sink, the dust bunnies increase exponentially, and the poor kitties suffer with a gross litter box.

Then the deadline passes, the book is done and the launch is history, and gradually we reawaken to real life again.  We realize with a guilty start all the things we’ve been neglecting – cleaning, family, friends.  And so we can whip ourselves into a frenzy in an effort to make up for the time we’ve supposedly lost.  As I’ve been doing for the past couple of weeks.

But you know what?  I didn’t really lose anything.  In the space of six months, I wrote two novels and published a third.  It’s not that I didn’t want to clean the house…. Well, okay, maybe I didn’t, but that’s not the reason why it didn’t get done.  It’s because I had different priorities.  I did something most people don’t do: I wrote books.

THIS regal being requires a human with better priorities.

It occurs to me that the mad frenzy of the past few weeks – the cleaning, the mending, and so on – might be a preemptive strike against the next guilt attack.  Because, you see, I’ve started the research for the next series, and I’ve even made some preliminary notes.  If I work it right, I can have the first book out by the holidays. (You heard it here first!)

But I think this time, I might schedule “real-life catch-up” days as well as writing days.  Poor Mr. Wommy and the Lady Morgana deserve a clean litter box, even on days when the writing muse does strike.

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Thanks to everybody who downloaded Fissured this weekend, and a special, extremely heartfelt thanks to those who bought the rest of the series at the same time. You're all my new best friends.

And if you've made your way here for the first time -- welcome! I don't usually resort to posting pictures of the cats, but it does happen occasionally.

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These moments of industrious blogginess are brought to you, as a public service, by Lynne Cantwell. 

The Indie Unlimited Oasis.

It was sometime in April. I was parched and past sweating, crossing the vast indie publishing desert on my virtual hands and knees, when a message appeared before me. Maybe it was on Twitter; maybe it was on Facebook. In any case, it didn’t look like a mirage – although who can say, really, with mirages? What criteria can you use, except your own senses? And I knew from experience that sensory input is not to be trusted in such a situation; until you get on top of a mirage, it looks solid enough. 

My heat-addled brain drifted back to the summer days of my childhood, driving with my parents along an endless ribbon of highway. With a child’s naivete, I believed in the puddles of water on the road before us, perfectly reflecting the sky above. Alas, as we reached them, they shimmered into nothingness. Baffled, I turned to my parents. “Where did the puddle go?” I asked, and they told me it had been a mirage.

So you never know, I told myself now. This message could be another of those mirages so common to the indie desert: a come-on for a contest with a steep entrance fee in the fine print*; or a guest post that disappears into the ether with the blog’s makeover; or any one of a number of other opportunities that appear marvelous on the surface, but that evaporate when you get too close.

I dithered. The merciless sun climbed higher in the sky. At length, I decided it was either pursue or perish. With my last bit of strength, I clicked the link – and discovered the oasis that is Indies Unlimited. 

It was not a mirage! It was real, and solid, and packed with useful information and advice. I wandered through the posts in amazement. Whole new worlds opened before me – like-fests and book promos and Animoto. 

And the people seemed to appreciate my input, even when I admitted I had no interest in Pinterest. And they were funny. 

So when the Evil Mastermind offered me free gruel if I’d stay, well, my answer was easy. Head back out into that trackless desert – that barren waste – alone? I think not.

*Fine print: This might be a slight over-dramatization of my experience. Your mileage may vary. Offer good only on the planet Earth. Do not operate motor vehicle with windshield shade in place. Happy birthday, Indies Unlimited!

 

A version of this article first appeared on Indies Unlimited on October 2, 2012.

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