Book Cover Challenge

By Claire Booth

Of all the accounts and credit cards and license plates that populate my life, there is only one string of numbers that I actually have memorized. The one on my library card. 

My very well-used library card.

I can type it in five seconds flat. And I do, very frequently. I’m always reserving books online or checking them out at the quick self-serve kiosk at my local branch. When I’m there, I see teenagers doing their homework and reading graphic novels after school; retirees working on family history through the free genealogy database access; community groups using the meeting room; and best of all, small children balancing tall stacks of picture books that they insist they can handle by themselves.

So I was delighted this week when the Sacramento County Public Library challenged me on Twitter to post a book cover a day for seven days. It was a fun task that had me looking through my books in a way I haven’t in quite a while, purely as a form of visual art.

Here are my seven covers. What do you think of my choices? And what covers would you pick? 

 

 

Year of an Indie Writer: Week 5

by
Scott D. Parker

Sometimes life throws a curveball.

HEALTH ISSUES REVEAL…

Ideally, when we write, we writers would like nothing more than to isolate ourselves in a room and have little of the outside world invade our minds. That never happens. In fact, most of the time, outside things are banging around in my head, even when I’m in the zone. True, when I’m in that writing flow state, very little of the outside world invades my imagination, but it’s not an impenetrable wall.

In the mornings when I write, one rule I adhere to is never to check the news before I’ve got my daily writing accomplished. I’ve done it before, and nothing will kill your creativity—to say nothing of a valuable chunk of writing time—than to “just check the headlines” only to get sucked in. That part is mostly easy.

What isn’t easy is when life intrudes.

I had a physical a little over a week ago. When I left the doctor’s office, her words echoed in my head: “You’re in really good health.” Works for me. She ordered an EKG and, since I’d never had one, it would be the baseline for the future. Even then, the worse was having the nurse rip off the monitors from my chest. Remind me again why waxing is a good idea?

Well, imagine my surprise when the EKG was returned as abnormal. Say what? Well, that put an initial damper on my mood. Natch. But I did a remarkable mental feat: I didn’t worry. Sure, the proposed problem was listed and I looked it up, but then I stopped myself. There’s nothing worse for us non-medical professionals than to go down various rabbit holes on the internet looking up medical info. Let the professionals do it. I did.

I met the cardiologist. We talked. He listened. He shrugged. Sometimes the machines return an “abnormal” when, in fact, everything is fine. Such was my case. If you thought the grin on my face after leaving my regular doctor was big, you should have seen the one after leaving the cardiologist. I even blasted KISS all the way home.

Why do I bring this up? Because while I didn’t necessarily worry about that meeting with the cardiologist, it affected my writing.

JANUARY WORD COUNT

I’m not sure where I first learned writers keep track of word count, but I’ve done it for years, dating back to 2013. I enjoy having legacy information to review and compare. Basically, I have a spreadsheet. The various pieces of information I keep are the following: Actual words per day, Actual time per day (in minutes and converted to hours), Average word count per day (and per hour), Total words per month, and a rolling Average per Week. I also have a column with a common number: 1369. That’s the number of words per day a writer would need to reach in order to write 500,000 words per year. It also adds up daily and I compare my actual numbers to what I think of as the 500K Standard.

I only count fiction. Probably should include non-fiction (or at least do a separate spreadsheet), but I don’t. [Now that I think of it, that might be interesting, too.] By the end of January, I’ve only written 16,791 new fiction words. Pitiful by standards I’ve previous set. But, and here’s the key thing for us writers who rarely have a “boss” telling us what to do, that’s okay. Those were words I didn’t have outside of my brain on New Year’s Day. Just nod and resolve to make February more productive.

NEW STORIES…AND A LIGHT BULB MOMENT

I mentioned last week about the agility of being an indie writer. As such, my February publication is a pair of short stories featuring Detective Anne Chambers of the Houston Police Department. The title story, “Katrina Standoff,” appeared on David Cranmer’s Beat to a Pulp blog under another title. I paired it with a second story and published it yesterday.

 During the latter half of 2018, as books and stories I’ve written but not published piled up, I debated release schedule. This was before Dean Wesley Smith’s “No One Cares,” blog post. Nevertheless, I came up with the idea of publishing something every month. With two different pen names, the proposed idea was for “S.D. Parker” to get the odd numbered months and my full name fills the even-numbered month slot. So far in 2019, that’s the plan. Thus, “Katrina Standoff” is by Scott Dennis Parker. Click the cover to read the description.

The lightbulb moment came to me while I was uploading the files to Kobo. Thinking ahead to the Calvin Carter series, I knew I needed to prep HELL DRAGON for 1 March...and if I knew that every odd-numbered month was going to be a Carter novel, why not just pre-publish them all? The benefits are many. I wouldn’t have to stop new writing every month to upload new files. The pre-orders would be live for months. When readers read the early books, they’ll be ready to immediately jump to the next book and pre-order. But most importantly: all the URLs would be live. No more opening up an old, published book, inserting the links, and then republishing them. I’ll have to do that for EMPTY COFFINS, but I aim to get the remaining five Carter novels ready for pre-order before 1 March. Why didn’t I think of that before?

LIKE BATMAN?

Forty years ago, Len Wein scripted a run on the Batman comic. They stand as among my favorites of all-time. So, I thought it would be fun to re-read and review them. This past Thursday, I posted the review of BATMAN 307. Here’s the link.

NEWSLETTER SECRET

I have a goal to increase my mailing list by at least 60 new members in 2019. That’s only 12 a month, but it’s a goal I think I can reach. Well, imagine my thrill when I counted up the new members...and the number was 24! Twenty-four new subscribers to my newsletter. As a thank-you gift, I sent them a secret link. At that link, I gave them the entire “Katrina Standoff” story. Again, the agility of being independent enables us writers to get creative in how we interact with each other and our readers.

Want to see the secret link? No problem. All you gotta do is subscribe. You never know what secret thing I’ll be offering in February.


Well, that’s about it for the week.

How did your week go?

Stop Telling Women How To Feel About Ted Bundy

What are you saying when you lecture women about Ted Bundy?

Last week I expressed concern with the inevitable return of the Ted Head. So it may come as a surprise that I'm deeply uncomfortable with the spate of articles, blogs, and social media posts wagging their fingers at women and girls who think Bundy is handsome or charming. I understand the compulsion, when I first stumbled into the hybristophilia community (looking for modern Ted Heads) my inability to understand attraction to serial killers and violent men colored my understanding of the women and girls who obsessively pined for them both romantically and sexually.

It's difficult to understand if one doesn't experience it, and since I don't, I had to work pretty hard at accepting the women and girls who write serial killer erotica and post collages with Jeffrey Dahmer and Ted Bundy surrounded by hearts as people who were even real, let alone worthy of my understanding. In my shock, I also discovered a deep curiosity. I dug deeper and tried to write about the phenomenon itself, and the women driving it, from a different point of view. What I found was - all the people wagging fingers at them, telling them they were sick, moralizing, and pushing them out of true crime communities only served to isolate them. In their isolation, they turn further into these communities and further from society. They don't talk to journalists because even the most open minded publications treat them as atrocity exhibitions. Many of these women see therapists, have "normal" romantic and sexual relationships, and in the current climate, where everyone is watching serial killer documentaries on Netflix, fit right in. Their sexual fascination with dangerous men is the only thing that sets them apart, but it's the thing that makes people flip out the most.

But who among us hasn't lusted for the "bad boy"? Are we judging the teenage girls who crush on Loki in The Avengers the way we're recoiling from our facebook friends commenting that, yeah, actually, Ted Bundy is kinda hot?

Our society romanticizes and dramatizes violence against women so cavalierly that we don't even notice how many of our favorite shows start every episode with a dead woman's body on the screen. We don't step back and wonder why so many true crime documentaries settle around traditionally  beautiful young women and girls as victims. We don't worry too much about the very real problem that women and girls are at more risk from the men in their lives than almost anything.

But we recoil at the idea that straight women might be attracted to dangerous men? Can we at least acknowledge that the moment a woman is attracted to a man she is attracted to someone who, statistically, has a damn good chance of being danger for her? Because when you raise women to accept that a ride home with a stranger may end in rape or murder, but also encourage us to date, marry, and love the same men offering those rides - you create a culture where at least some of us are going to be attracted to the devil we know.

No dangerous man is safer than Ted Bundy. Everyone knows exactly what he is capable of, everyone knows exactly how dangerous he is. And on top of that, the motherfucker is dead. He can be attractive, charming, and everything else because that particular dangerous man is no threat.

Is it any wonder some women find themselves pulled to that promise?


Now for the real talk: Ted Bundy was only able to kill women because women were told to be polite and help the clean cut guy with the cast. Because we still tell women not to trust their instincts, to give the guy a chance, to not be rude, to not be a bitch. So can we just agree that we won't police their feelings about whether Ted Bundy had a nice smile? That's not protection. That's harm.