KittywampusAs many know, I’m participating in this year’s Clarion West Write-a-thon. Last week I let people choose the title of the story I’d write for the write-a-thon’s first week, and the people’s choice was “How Deep Is Red”.
So here’s a chunk from this morning’s writing so far. The story will be the sequel to “Sugar”, which is available in Eyes Like Sky and Coal and Moonlight. If you’re interested in getting to see the whole story, then I invite you to support me in the Write-a-thon! I’ll be sending a weekly e-mail that will include the stories that I write for the Write-a-thon over its six-week course, so for a small donation, you’ll be getting what I’d like to think of as high quality fiction. 🙂
Laurana used a bowl of mercury to watch her lover’s battle. The thick, silvery liquid showed the ships from above, a fat-bellied Tabatian merchant, and the two pirate ships, lean-lined and fanged with cannon, converging on it from either side, the wind behind them making them race forward.
Tiny toy ships. The name of the merchant was Saffron Butterfly The pirate ships bore no names, only figureheads of women, one with a flaming skull for a head, the other with bracelets and necklaces of snakes. Flame’s Kiss and The Serpent.
The liquid didn’t transmit sound. For that Laurana relied on imagination: the deep-throated boom of the guns, the crash of cannon balls, the shouts of despair and defiance.
The Kiss neared the merchant. Laurana leaned forward, trying to find Cristina among the mass of pirates: some readying spidery hooks and ropes, others with hackbuts raised and aimed, all braced for collison, another sound dependent on Laurana, whose mind rendered it down to the taste of salt on one’s lips from the relentless wind, the crash louder than anything one had ever heard. There. A purple bandana tied across orange curls. Cristina, swinging herself aboard the pirates’ prey.
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"(On the writing F&SF workshop) Wanted to crow and say thanks: the first story I wrote after taking your class was my very first sale. Coincidence? nah….thanks so much."
~K. Richardson
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WIP: Teaser from Poppy and Letitia
I finished up a story I’ve been wrestling with for the past week this afternoon. It’s for a game world, and it’s a fun one. I’m not sure why I had so much trouble with this one, but I rewrote the beginning four or five times, which is unprecedented for me.
Anyhow, here’s a chunk:
The book supplied a hand-colored map of the coastline. Letitita had not seen that many maps in her lifetime but she thought that this one might have some shortcomings. For one thing, the area they were heading into was a spot colored a vague green which turned out to be towering pines and cedars, shaly hills, and tiny streams inevitably at the bottom of steep-walled gullies full of blackberry brambles. It was lettered, the amount of lettering sparse in comparison to the amount of blank space provided, “Unexplored Forest,”
They were three days into changing that into “Partially Explored Forest” when they heard the screaming.
It called from off the road, among the trees, unseen but close from the volume, the sound of a horse crying out, and then a second echoing noise, like the harsh squeal of an enormous machine wheel. Poppy’s bow was out and in her hand, the other one pulling an arrow from its quiver, as she sprinted towards it; Letitia followed, pulling daggers from her belt as she went, but moving more cautiously than her mistress and therefore slower.
She arrived in time to see Poppy’s first arrow strike the monstrosity towering over the fallen unicorn, a mass of black fur and teeth and more than one head, protruding at awkward angles from around the main one with its ferocious canine grin. Every eye in the multitude it boasted burned bright as fire, red as madness.
The arrow extinguished one of that pair burning brightest and largest. The beast threw its head back, and the sound of that tortured clash came again, so loud that it throbbed in Letitia’s ears.
Daggers sang from her hands, thrown almost without thinking, thunk thunking into that glistening black snout. Annoying wounds at best, but another of Poppy’s arrows flew straight and true ““ had she really merely said she’d been “all right with the bow” when a girl? ““ putting out the other mad red glare, and as it died so did all the tinier ones, heads slumping awkward as it toppled, halfway over its fallen prey.
They circled it warily as they came up. The unicorn let out a tortured breath. Poppy made a hurt sound in her throat and started to step closer, but Letitia tugged her back.
“You can’t help it, boss,” she said. Her eyes welled with tears, obscuring the gaping belly wound, the entrails fanned out from a savage bite. “It’s hurt too bad.”
“I can put it out of its misery at least,” Poppy said. She tugged one of Letitia’s daggers free from the monster’s corpse, and moved towards the unicorn, speaking softly, calmingly, an ostler’s murmur, soothing and nonsensical, theretheremylove, theretheremypretty.
The gleaming ivory horn raised an inch from the ground as though in challenge, but was too weak to move further. She stroked her hand along the broad neck. Letitia held her breath.
“Move no further,” a voice said from behind them.
Goodreads is the largest reader community site in the world, with over thirteen million members. Goodreads was recently acquired by Amazon, creating worries that the site would change, but Amazon has said they do not intend to make changes. Users can track their reading, find or make book recommendations, and discuss what they’re reading. Goodreads lists self-published books as well as those from professional presses.
Goodreads reaches outside its own site, supplying reviews to Powell’s Books, USA Today, the Los Angeles Public Library, the Columbus Metropolitan Library, and Kobo, among others. It supplies lists of books to the popular website Listopia, such as “Best Books of 2012.”
Beyond that, however, Goodreads offers authors tools that they can use to promote books. Using Goodreads, you can create giveaways, post excerpts, and help Goodreads readers discover your books.
When someone joins Goodreads, they create a profile that shows their reading side. Your profile includes optional information such as a photo, location, date of birth, website, reading interests, and a brief bio. Fill it out but be aware that after you’ve added an author profile, the second profile will be what most people see, rather than this one.
Goodreads allows you to maintain lists of what you’ve read, what’s on your to-read list, and what you’re currently reading. Each of these is referred to as a shelf.
You also have a newsfeed, which is displayed on your Goodreads home page, and shows recent news from friends and authors you are following as a fan. You can see what Goodreads events they are attending, whose reviews they are following, when they rate, add, or review a book, and so forth.
As a writer, you can expand your basic profile by adding an author profile and joining the over sixty thousand authors participating in the Goodreads author program. How do you add an author profile? It’s simple. Find one of your books on Goodreads and look for the “Is this you?” link at the bottom. Click on that to claim the book. It will take a few days for Goodreads to confirm you are the author, but they will mail you when your profile has been updated.
Now that you’re a Goodreads author, you’ve got access to a dashboard of new and interesting tools. On the home page, click on “Visit your dashboard,” which should appear near the top on the righthand side. The page that opens up should have Author Dashboard up in the top righthand side under the Goodreads toolbar. You’ll see it displays stats like number of works, which is the number of works attributed to you, and the number of fans and friends.
That section may seem a little mystifying. What’s the difference between “added by unique users,” “fans,” and “friends”? When you are looking at someone’s profile, you can opt to become a fan or add them as a friend. (If they’re not a Goodreads author, the option to add them as a friend will not appear. Goodreads automatically creates pages for authors.) If you are friends with someone, both people have to have approved the relationship, and each will have their reviews and comments displayed in the other’s newsfeed. If you are a fan of someone, their reviews, comments and blog posts will appear in your newsfeed, but they will not see yours. Added by unique users does not affect your newsfeed at all but is the number of people who have added one or more of your works to one of their shelves.
You’ll see all of your works listed in the “My Books” section under your statistics, along with statistics for each, including the number of ratings, the average rating, the number of Goodreads reviews, how many people have it on their to-read shelf, and how many people have it on their currently-reading shelf. You can drill down on each listing: while I don’t believe you can currently add ebooks, you can edit the book’s information and see Goodreads statistics for how many people have added, rated, reviewed, or included that title on their “to-read” list.
Beneath that is your blog. I am still looking for an easy way to push a WordPress blog post to one’s Goodreads blog, but so far I haven’t found one. There are plenty of Goodreads related WordPress plugins (http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/tags/goodreads) but the majority of them allow you to display data from Goodreads on your site, such as a list of what you’re currently reading. Generally I mirror a few, but not all of my blog posts, here, because it’s a pain in the butt.
One of the most useful Goodreads Author Tools is their Giveaway system. Go to their giveaway page and you’ll see a wide variety of giveaways, which you can sort by which are ending soon, which are most requested, which are from popular authors, and what’s been recently listed. Goodreads makes it very easy to enter giveaways and allow requesters to add the book to their to-read shelf/. You can set the dates for the giveaway, as well as what countries it’s available in, if you don’t want the cost of shipping something overseas. It does not cost anything to list a giveaway, but be prepared to follow through. You cannot give away e-books as a giveaway, so you will have to bear the cost of shipping.
This is handy because Goodreads promotes the giveaways for you. Over 40,000 users sign up for giveaways on a daily basis, according to Goodreads, which means that mentions of your giveaway are appearing in the newsfeeds of their friends, as well as being accessible from the main giveaway page.
For the best experience, I suggest going through GoodRead’s Author Tutorial, as well as the abundance of other documentation they’ve provided. You’ll want to investigate groups as well as how to run an author Q&A. You can create trivia questions that drive interest in your book or publicize book signings and other promotional events. You may want to add some of its widgets to your blog or website or even pay to use its Self-Serve Advertising platform.
Prefer to opt for weekly interaction, advice, opportunities to ask questions, and access to the Chez Rambo Discord community and critique group? Check out Cat’s Patreon. Or sample her writing here.
