Monthly Archives: May 2023
Ever Wonder What $650 Worth of Handmade Sterling Jewelry Looks Like?
Now you know. I already sold the amethyst earrings and fossilized coral pendant so I’ll list everything that’s still available on my Belaurient Arts page. Once I have PayPal buttons I’ll add them, but in the meantime if you see something you like drop me an email and I’ll send you a PayPal invoice.
Mind you, at least four of those pendants are at least three years old (why they didn’t sell, I have no idea) and I redid the larimar pendant because it just wasn’t selling in its old setting. But I have hopes that many of these will sell in the next month or so and help me defray the costs of the HVAC repair. Not that I’m hinting or anything.
I also blocked out Act III of Crystal Blade while I was in the garage tonight so I have that going for me. Yes, I have an outline but it’s bare bones, just an indication of what should happen in each chapter. But now I have some scenes hammered out in my head, as well as a bunch of dialogue, and it was fun working out the big duel scene that serves as the climax. Well, come on, with a title like Crystal Blade and my history with the SFWA Musketeers (oh, wait, you probably didn’t know about that. Yeah, I fence along with all of my other activities), I had to put a sword fighting scene in the book. I do love swashbuckling, after all.
The Writer At Work In the Garage
Crystal Blade Episode 15: A Ball Is an Excellent Way To Make New Friends is now available at Vella. Go check it out.
As you know, Bob, when I’m not slaving over a hot computer during the day I’m usually out in the garage making jewelry, and I’m currently working on an exceptionally fun custom order. It’s a sterling pendant setting that will hold a large marquise cut (oval with pointed ends) rutilated quartz that’s been faceted. I get to use prongs for it and make my own double gallery setting with V-shaped prongs on each end to hold the points securely. It’s complex but the result should be gorgeous, plus this is excellent practice for me in using prong settings.
Which leads me to say that I would cheerfully shank someone for a real jeweler’s bench right now with the cutout and catch drawer because man, I am tired of dropping teeny things on the floor (like, oh, the bur container that came apart while I was bringing it down from a shelf and scattered the burs all over the floor. I still can’t find two of them and my curses are still ringing in Plano). Dropping things, BTW, is a regular occurrence in every silversmith’s life, which is why the cutout and the catch drawer/sling were developed in the first place. But my bench is a regular workbench from Harbor Freight with a particleboard top screwed into a metal frame so I can’t even make a cutout myself.
Oh, well. I can dream. And keep an eye on local sales groups to see if I can pick up a used one. In case anyone wants to buy me an early birthday present, this bench would be ideal. And in the meantime I’ll keep plugging away on my Harbor Freight table (and keep looking for those last two burs, goddammit…).
My Snot of a Muse Is Back
So, I have the kind of brain that hears a song or sees a picture and suddenly a love scene pops into my head, and then have to write an entire book just to use that scene. I swear, my Muse is cackling into her mojito right now.
An explanation: the combination of watching Queen Charlotte (the Bridgerton prequel) and hearing Loreena McKennit’s “Mummer’s Dance” has inspired my one and only quasi-Regency romance. No, I do not have a completion date on this because I need to finish Crystal Blade, then get to work on High Tide and Hurricane Warning (Olympic Cove 5 and 6) before OC fans riot (hi, Susan!). And because this is so far outside my wheelhouse, not to mention mixing and matching genres (I’m calling it a quasi-Regency paranormal romcom) I won’t be making it widely available. It’s going to be only for newsletter subscribers and members of my FB reader’s group. But I will be picking at this story when I can because my brain will not bloody well leave me alone until I promise to do something with it.
Oh, the story? When newly divorced librarian Amelia Barker takes a job managing an occult library in a grand old country house, the last thing she expects is to meet the ghost of a Regency duke.
Actually, no—the last thing she expects is for the ghostly Sir Robert Wycliff to be so damned charming and attractive. Amelia knows she should be helping him cross over, but she soon finds herself falling for him instead. If that wasn’t problematic enough, Amelia also needs to deal with an eccentric noblewoman-cum-relative, a neurospicy occult expert who may or may not be courting her, and issues with her overbearing ex-husband. As for Robert, he has his own problems that he needs to solve before he can be released from his current condition. Can Amelia and Robert find a path to a HEA that doesn’t require Amelia dying? Let’s find out.
In other news I would also like to announce that as of today I have made my first $0.03 on Kindle Vella. I assume someone’s free tokens ran out and they had to buy some to keep reading. Huzzah!
All the Adulting
Crystal Blade Episode 14: Get Into the Groove is now available at Vella. You know the drill.
The nice young man from the HVAC company got here around 10 AM, which was enough time for me to dust and spray a little air freshener (I vacuumed everything yesterday). He immediately got to work, and a half hour later we had a laundry list of things that needed to be fixed (which I already knew from the checkup visit back in March).
First and foremost, there was a leak in the downstairs unit’s condenser coil and it had lost coolant. Apparently coolant costs $675/three pounds and we needed 2.5 pounds. You do the math. In addition to that he was going to do a leak check and use leak sealant to (hopefully) seal any leaks, then blow out the drainage from the drip pans.
Which are apparently plumbed into our sewage system—the PVC pipes that lead outside are only emergency overflows. I had no idea. He wound up blowing out about two gallons of gunk and our master bath sink drain (which is where the downstairs unit’s drip pain drains into—I am so damn glad that I cleaned the master bath yesterday) is now clean as a whistle and will drain perfectly. We’d had problems with that line since we moved in and I’d snaked it out multiple times, but apparently there was a lot of buildup in the line leading from the drip pan. Bless his heart, that couldn’t have been pleasant.
And yes, he did indeed find a leak in the coil and applied sealant, then added the replacement coolant. I gritted my teeth and proffered a credit card for the total. Downstairs is now at a civilized temperature and the inside humidity (it was 60% this morning) is dropping like a rock, which is a goodness.
In related news I now have to sell a buttload of books, jewelry, and book covers, and will take any editing jobs going. But hey, at least we’re comfortable.
Off To the Urgent Care We Go
Let’s just say that I woke up with an issue today that made me go, “Hmm…” and prompted a visit to the local Urgent Care, Just To Make Sure. They confirmed my diagnosis and prescribed the meds that I would need to treat the issue, sending the scrips over to the pharmacist at my local Walgreens.
Who filled the scrips, sent me a text saying they were ready, and closed a minute later. Whee. To make matters even more fun the HVAC guys will be here tomorrow some time between 9 and 11 AM so I won’t be able to pick up said meds until they’re done.
Now, I will not die without these meds. I won’t even be majorly inconvenienced without them (mainly because I already had some on hand). But come on, don’t send a text saying “Yeah, you can come get your pills” and close up shop ONE MINUTE LATER. That’s just amateurish.
In the meantime I’m bracing myself for the repair costs that will be coming our way tomorrow. I’m hoping that it won’t be that bad, but we already know that this system is on its way out and there may be more things that have gone wrong than just a gunked-up drain line. Oh, well. We’ll pay for it somehow.
Stupid AC System
Yesterday it was warm enough for us to turn on the downstairs AC unit so I flipped it on before heading into the garage to finish up a piece. I was in there maybe ten minutes, and when I came back into the house the unit had shut off and the downstairs thermostat was flashing an -AC error.
I informed Ramón who immediately did some research and found out that -AC meant the power had been shut off at the control panel up in the attic, most likely because the float valve (which senses the amount of water in the drip pan under the condenser) had triggered, or a fuse had blown. He went up there today and lo, the drip pan was completely full of water. Since we don’t have the equipment to blow out the drainage system he tried scooping it all out and we let the pan dry out, at which point the thermostat started working again. So we switched the A/C back on. Three minutes later it cut out again with the -AC code.
On one hand, this means we have to call our HVAC company out on Monday to come blow out the drainage system and get it working again, and we really, really didn’t need a major repair bill right now. On the other hand, at least we know what’s wrong and the outside unit is still functional, which is a relief because we were told we’d need to replace it sometime this year. Hopefully the drainage thing won’t be too terribly expensive.
In the meantime we’re letting the cool air drift down from upstairs to cool off the downstairs. It’s more than a bit stuffy down here, but the weather’s only in the mid-80’s at the moment so it’s livable. I grew up in Chicago during summers like this with only a window AC unit in the living room—if I could deal with it then, I can deal with it now.
Parsing Reviews
Crystal Blade Episode 13: Question Authority is now available at Vella. Go do the thing.
So let’s talk about reviews. Unlike a lot of writers, I do read my reviews (mainly because I have to post links to a review on the relevant book’s page here). I try not to let the bad ones bother me because everyone is entitled to their opinion and my stuff isn’t going to appeal to everyone. More importantly, over the years I’ve gotten a fairly good handle on how to parse them.
Like in the case of Shifter Woods: Claw. So far it’s gotten three four-star reviews. All of the reviewers liked the story, they didn’t have anything negative to say about it, which *phew.* But the fact that the last and longest entry in the Esposito County Shifters series has only been getting four stars instead of five tells me that I screwed up somewhere.
And I think I know what I did wrong. The original plot of Claw was for the FMC Angela to have no idea what shifters were and to find out to her shock that she was half-shifter when she wound up in Esposito County. But when I was working on the outline I realized I would have to spend a lot of time on her coming to grips with her ancestry and learning about shifter culture for the story to make sense. There was no way I could cram all of that AND a romance into a novella. And the whole point of the Shifter Woods novellas was that they were novellas, meant to be read in an afternoon.
So I pivoted. Angela now knew about her shifter heritage but for Reasons™ had never shifter or interacted with other shifters. And even then I had to skip over a whole two weeks of activity in order to keep the story novella-length.
That … was a mistake. I should have just let the story be as long as it needed to be, cover the events of the intervening two weeks, and give it a richer, fuller feel (in my head there were coffee dates with the MMC Matt’s beta, there were goofy but sweet little interludes with Matt, and Angela coming to terms with her mother’s decision to eschew shifter culture). Even with my edits I missed the novella cutoff and turned Claw into a (very, very short) novel at 42,000 words; in hindsight it really should have been around 60K at the least. But I needed to get it out ASAP so I bit the bullet, and I think that’s why it’s only getting four stars instead of five.
The nice thing about being an indie author is that I can revisit this story at some point and add in those missing two weeks. Not now, mind you—I have to finish Crystal Blade and get to work on High Tide/Hurricane Warning (looking at you, Susan). But if I can carve out some time late in the year, I will see about revisiting Claw and expanding it the way it deserves.
I’m Going Wide. Again.
I have made a decision.
Last year, I enrolled most of my books in KU. It made sense at the time—my income from non-‘Zon outlets was okay but nothing to write home about, and I saw a five-fold spike in my book income when I went with KU. Plus I was getting exposed to a much larger reader group, which could only be a good thing.
Since September, however, my KU reads have been dropping steadily. Worse, various goings-on at Amazon have reduced the payout for KU page read, and it does not look like things are going to improve any time soon, if ever. You can read Kristine Kathryn Rusch’s excellent analysis of the Amazon situation for a more in-depth explanation, but the short version is: Amazon’s new CEO doesn’t care about books or readers, so KU payments are getting jacked around and the program is no longer worth it for a lot of authors.
I am one of them. I hope this doesn’t come as a surprise, but I do this job (and it is a job) for money. To quote Preeti Chhibber:
“The thing is that writing is actually work. We romanticize it, and it is a wonderful thing to get to do professionally, but it is work that makes a lot of money for a lot of people — just not the people who actually do the work.”
She was referring to the WGA strike but her words can be applied to indie authors as well. Much of our income is tied to big companies like Amazon, Barnes & Noble, et al because they have the ability to put our books in front of far more readers than we could reach on our own. And they have made a pretty penny on our work.
But when Amazon’s new CEO decides that books aren’t important, that attitude starts impacting KU payouts. And when an indie author is only making pennies a day on KU reads, there’s no reason to keep our books in KU anymore (in case you didn’t know, having a book in KU means that it can’t be available anywhere because it has to be exclusive to Amazon).
This is not me being greedy, by the way. I know that a lot of people think writers are rich, but we’re not. Most writers don’t actually make a living wage and the millionaire outliers are just that, outliers. The rest of us have to have day jobs, additional income streams, or an employed spouse to cover the bills.
Thing is, I would like my employed spouse to be able to retire someday, and the only way to do that is if I’m making enough money with my books to support us, since I love writing and will continue to write until I drop dead over my keyboard. This means I need to put my books where they have the best potential to be purchased by readers. And right now staying in KU, much as I hate disappointing readers who pay for it, is costing me that potential income.
Long story short, I’ve turned off all of my KU automatic renewals. Once books finish their current KU cycle I will be uploading them to Smashwords/D2D and going wide. I’m letting you know this so that if you want to read one of my books while it’s still in KU, you can. Here’s the schedule of when each book finishes its current KU cycle. I’ll be uploading them to Smashwords/D2D that day and they should be available on B&N, Kobo, Apple, Google Play, and other platforms a few days later:
- All books in the Hidden Empire series: 5/18/23
- All books in the Two Thrones and Olympic Cove series: 5/20/23
- Stealing Dmitri: 5/20/23
- Trickster: 6/21/23
- A Theory of Crystal: 6/21/23
- Crystal Shard: 6/24/23
- Behind the Iron Cross: 7/3/23
One bright side—I have authorized my books to be available in Kobo Plus, which is pretty much the same thing as Kindle Unlimited except that my books don’t have to be exclusive to Kobo. And I suspect a lot of indie authors who are tired of the KU rollercoaster will be doing the same thing. If Amazon decides to shut down KU at some point, you should be able to sign up for Kobo Plus and find many of your favorite authors there.
In conclusion, I would like to thank everyone who’s read my books in KU over the past year. I appreciate your patronage so very much and I’m sorry if this puts a crimp in your future reading plans. Hopefully Kobo Plus turns out to be as successful as KU was for the first few years and will provide you with as much reading material as you desire.
And now, if you’ll excuse me, I need to start reformatting a lot of books.
The State of the Writer, May 2023 Edition
Crystal Blade Episode 12: On Wednesdays We Wear Pink is live over at Kindle Vella. And may I say that it was fun writing an Uskelan episode of Mean Girls.
In other writing news I’m getting close to the end of Crystal Blade, which is nice because I am genuinely itching to get to work on High Tide (Olympic Cove 5) and To Love a Wild Swan (Hidden Empire 3). Remember, the goal for 2023 is to finish the Olympic Cove series and it’s already May so I really need to get stepping on High Tide and Hurricane Warning. Also, when I’m finished with Blade I’ll upload all of the episodes in a swath so that people can read them for a month while I’m prepping it for publication. Because I’m nice like that.
I’m also plugging along on Goddess of the Nile, the Hidden Empire novella that will only be available to newsletter subscribers. Considering that it follows the adventures of both Louisa and Henry AND Fyodora and Callum as they try to reunite a reincarnated warrior with his water goddess love while in Cairo, I’m hoping that it will prove enticing enough to get more people to sign up to my newsletter. We’ll see.
As if that wasn’t enough to have me running around like a headless chicken, I also need to get started on some short stories if I ever want my Patreon to get off the damned ground. I have *counts* four series going at the moment so you would think I’m spoiled for choice when it comes to short story plots. I could write about a day in the life of a queen trying to juggle ruling, her new twins, and her loving husband, I could do a prequel story for Fyodora (God knows she’s had enough erotic adventures over the centuries), and I could write about any of the groups on Olympic Cove. I’ve already done a Paladins of Crystal novella for Paladins of Crystal and am working on a separate PC academy romance for Vella, but I’m sure I could come up with a prequel story about Crystal’s life back in Towanda or one of the Buff Lords and how they got chosen to be a royal paladin.
All I need is time. That’s turning into a common theme with me, isn’t it?
Happy Book Birthday to Rosanna Leo!
Rosanna Leo’s awesome new paranormal romance Darke Music (Darke Paranormal Investigations 2) is now available!
She’s no stranger to ghosts. But love? That’s a mystery.
Historian Susannah Darke is no stranger to haunted houses. As one of a trio of ghost-hunting sisters, she’s had plenty of experience investigating the paranormal. When an opportunity arises to explore a haunted opera school in Toronto, she jumps at the chance, even though she once had her own frightening brush with its resident ghosts.
Noah Bellamy is the dean of the Asch Institute of Opera, and a former opera singer himself. He was once a student at the Asch and is well-acquainted with its boisterous spirits. But when the activity worsens, threatening one of his star students, he knows he has to take action.
The fact that Susannah and Noah have been hooking up for the past year complicates things, but they agreed long ago to keep things casual. As long as they both remember their boundaries, the investigation should go smoothly.
When the paranormal activity begins to target them personally, it becomes harder not to seek comfort in each other’s arms. For the first time ever, Susannah and Noah have to decide if it’s worth taking a chance on love.
The ghosts present a huge challenge, but battling their personal demons may be even harder.
Nicola Cameron Writes 