Got A Short Story Published!

A short story of mine, "The Witch Bottle" has just been published in the Hero Lost anthology. This anthology, published by Dancing Lemur Press, brings together twelve authors of fantasy on the theme of lost heroes. Here's the blurb.

What if Death himself wanted to die? Can deliverance be found on a bloody battlefield? Could the gift of silvering become a prison for those who possessed it? Will an ancient warrior be forever the caretaker of a house of mystery?

Delving into the depths of the tortured hero, twelve authors explore the realms of fantasy in this enthralling and thought-provoking collection. Featuring the talents of Jen Chandler, L. Nahay, Renee Cheung, Roland Yeomans, Elizabeth Seckman, Olga Godim, Yvonne Ventresca, Ellen Jacobson, Sean McLachlan, Erika Beebe, Tyrean Martinson, and Sarah Foster.

Hand-picked by a panel of agents and authors, these twelve tales will take you into the heart of heroes who have fallen from grace. Join the journey and discover a hero's redemption!

You can get it at Amazon, Smashwords, and various other outlets. The ebook is $4.99 and the print paperback is $13.99.

Insecure Writer's Support Group: Writing Rules

Welcome to the Insecure Writer's Support Group, where on the first Wednesday of the month we vent our frustrations and fears to the world. This months' question is: "What writing rule do you wish you’d never heard?"

All of them. All rules can be broken. Can't write in dialect? Tell that to Irvine Welsh. Can't use adverbs? Tell that to J.K. Rowling. Can't kill off major characters over and over and over again until your readers scream for mercy? Tell that to George R.R. Martin.

Can't make a living writing? Tell that to me and thousands of other people.

There are no rules, only guidelines that can be bent if you figure out how to do it right. The idea of there being writing rules comes out of high school and college English classes, often taught by people who haven't written very much. Writers have to unlearn all this nonsense in order to get ahead. Author Dean Wesley Smith has done a brilliant series of blog posts called Killing the Sacred Cows of Publishing that's well worth reading. I don't agree with everything he says (otherwise there would be no point in my reading him) and I do think he overstates his case in a few places, but on the whole I think this blog series makes excellent reading for all beginning and mid-career writers.

Happy 2017!

Insecure Writer's Support Group: My Favorite Aspect of being a Writer

Welcome to the Insecure Writer's Support Group, where on the first Wednesday of the month we vent our feelings to a cold, uncaring world. The subject for this month is our favorite aspect of being a writer.

Well, it sure isn't the fame (haven't got any) or fortune (ha!) so it must be the self expression. I got started with writing in the 1990s back in the zine days, submitting travel articles to tiny little homemade magazines. I'd just come back from a year traveling across the Middle East and Asia and had a million stories to tell. The main story was that I went to lots of "scary" countries like Syria and Iran and had a great time meeting wonderful people. That became a thread in my writing that continues to this day.

My career has since shifted to mostly fiction, and the self expression continues. Whether I'm writing about a soldier on the Western Front or a scavenger in a post-apocalyptic wasteland or a guy on Skid Row in Tangier, there's a little bit of me in all my characters. What other job lets you do that?

Insecure Writer's Support Group: How Do You Know When Your Story Is Ready?

I’ve been slammed with a couple of ghostwriting assignments lately, not to mention releasing my novels about the refugee crisis and a western, so I haven’t blogged in a while. I can’t miss today, however, because it’s the first Wednesday of the month! That means it’s time for the Insecure Writer's Support Group, where we talk about writing and vent our frustrations to the world. This month’s topic is “How do you know when your story is ready?”

I find this impossible to answer. It’s related to another unanswerable question that’s commonly asked of writers: “Where do you get your ideas?” Stories come out of the void. Sure, we consciously form them, throw in clever little twists (or what we hope are clever little twists), literary references, products of our research, and all sorts of other things. If you ask me why I made a scene a certain way, I can probably answer you. But ask me why I wrote a story along a particular theme or in a particular genre and I’m stumped. Stories come from some hidden place inside, and that hidden place decides when it’s done.

So listen to your gut, fellow writers, it’s what’s actually doing most of the writing.

Insecure Writers Support Group: Time Management for Writers

Welcome to the Insecure Writers Support Group, where on the first Wednesday of every month we expose our foibles to a heartless world! This month's topic: How do you find the time to write in your busy day?

Well this is and isn't a problem for me. I'm a professional writer, so I get to write all day. I don't have another job to distract me and sap my energy. That said, I have obligations to family and friends that take time. Plus I want to have a bit of a life.

The real problem, however, is that there is never enough time for all the projects I want to do. For example, at this moment I have a full plate of freelance work, including two novels that I'm ghostwriting. That all takes time away from my own work. While I have a couple of my own books coming out this month, I'm not sure if I'll get more than one more before the end of the year. That book will almost certainly be the fourth installment in my Toxic World post-apocalyptic series. I wanted to get book 4 out my Trench Raiders WWI series out this year too, but that might not happen.

I've been building up my freelance career for more than a decade now and while I'm happy about where I've gotten, I can't help but notice that more and more my own projects are getting stuck on the back burner while I do my writing job.

Oh well!

Insecure Writer's Support Group: My First Piece of Writing as an Aspiring Writer

Welcome to the Insecure Writer's Support Group, where on the first Wednesday of every month we vent our anxieties to the world. This month's topic is our first piece of writing, which wasn't all that anxiety ridden for me.

I'm not sure how to answer this topic. My first published work came when I was still an archaeologist and had no intention of becoming the full-time writer I am today. On the other hand, when I decided to make a career change way back in 2001, I started writing for a newspaper in Tucson and now I can't remember what my first article was. I suppose I could look that up, but life's too short and I have writing to do!

So I'm going with my first published work from the mid 90s, when I dove headfirst into the second wave of the zine boom. A zine, for those who came into writing after the start of the Internet age, was a self-published or communally published small magazine. Mine was called Ichthyoelectroanalgesia, which as everyone knows means using an electric fish as a pain killer. You can read more about that wonderful word on my old blog.

My zine was entirely done by myself, using clip art for illustrations. I included travel articles and articles about archaeology, and even answered reader's questions. While it only lasted four issues, Ichthyoelectroanalgesia had a distribution of well over 100, a respectable figure for a zine although some of the more successful broke 1000. It had a cover price of $2 if I remember correctly, but few of the issues were paid for since the point of zines was to trade with other zinesters.

While I intended it as a hobby, the pure fun of writing and publishing got its hooks in me, and within a few years I decided to become a writer.

Insecure Writers Support Group: Making Readers Cry

Welcome to the Insecure Writers Support Group, where on the first Wednesday of every month we expose our foibles to a cruel world! The subject this month is a little more positive than usual: What's the best thing anyone has ever said about your writing?

For me, it's when someone said my writing made them cry. I blogged about it way back in 2008. Here's the post:

I've been busy editing my second fantasy novel these past few weeks. My first novel got rejected by an editor at a major publishing house, but she wants to see my second one. I sent out a panicked email to a couple of my writing newsgroups asking for critiques. It was kind of a tall order--read and critique a 87,000 word novel in less than a month. Nonetheless, seven people replied.

That's one of the great things about the writing community, most writers support one another. Oh, I've met some notable exceptions, usually writers who have recently become successful and have gotten a swelled head, but all in all we're a pretty supportive bunch.

The critiques were quite helpful. Besides catching some typos (you can never catch them all yourself) they had some good suggestions for fleshing out the supporting characters, and clearing up a few scenes. They were also very complimentary. One even said the nicest thing anyone has ever said about my writing--that one scene made her cry.

Wow. I've never been happy about making someone cry since breaking up with a certain deserving ex-girlfriend in college. The scene was designed to make the reader cry, but I didn't think it actually would.

I can only hope it will make the editor cry

NOTE: It didn't. That novel, like my first one, got rejected. I was at the beginning of my fiction writing career and didn't know as much as I do now. Hopefully I can now make readers cry more reliably than in those early days.

Insecure Writers Support Group: About to Lose A Contest

It's that time again, when the Insecure Writer's Support Group airs its angst to the world. I have two bits of angst myself. The first is that I've just come back from my writing retreat in Tangier to all the distractions and annoyances of regular daily life. In Tangier, since I had few distractions, I was hitting a daily goal of 4,000 words. Not a chance I can do that here, but I have to keep from getting discouraged.

The main discouragement is that my novel The Last Hotel Room, is not doing well over on Kindle Scout. This is an Amazon popularity contest where those books that get the most nominations are considered for a publishing contract. My book is 22 days into its 30 day voting period and it hasn't garnered enough votes to make it into the Hot & Trending column, which I suspect is what Amazon is really looking for.

Part of the reason I'm not doing well is that I'm truly craptastic at self-promotion. I'm also up against a lot of books in the "Literature and Fiction" category that are actually F/SF/H. There are separate categories for that, but people double tag their books to get more visibility. I can't do that too since my book doesn't fit into those categories. Ah, well!

If I don't win the contest at least the book will be out this month. It's ready to go.

Keep on writing!

Insecure Writers Support Group: Life Happens

It's time again for the Insecure Writers Support Group, where we vent our insecurities to the world!

Most of our insecurities have to do with not hitting our goals or, for the newbies among us, not even trying. I'm well past the "not trying hard enough" phase all writers start with, but I still regularly miss goals. Far too often, as I talked about last time, the need to do paying projects gets in the way of my fiction, which only pays once I get it out into the world. I'm willing to wait to see my money later, but try telling that to the supermarket!

Sometimes, though, life just gets in the way. I'm writing this while recovering from the flu. Needless to say, my wordcount hasn't been very good the past couple of days. This isn't helped by some paying projects I need to finish. Ah yes, the fiction always seems to be the thing that gets stuck on the back burner!

But we shouldn't be too hard on ourselves. Life happens. Sometimes you just can't get everything you want to do done. Real writers, the people who are in for the long haul, will bounce back from this. I've had to do this several times. As long as my word count next week is good, I won't bang my head against the wall for missing the mark this week.

Something to remember the next time life gets in the way.

Insecure Writer's Support Group: What, it's February Already!!!???

Welcome to another post from the Insecure Writer's Support Group, where once a month we poor suffering writers air our insecurities to the world. This is the second post for this year, and that brings me to this month's insecurity.

Yep, all those New Year's resolutions have been delayed a month. January was filled with freelance work. I needed the money, folks, and my own projects had to go on the back burner. Besides a bunch of stuff for Upwork clients, I was also doing the edits for my next book from Osprey Publishing, an illustrated history of the Apache Wars, due out in the summer. Those edits took so much of my time that I didn't even get to blog last week.

I did get to do some work on The Last Hotel Room, a novel set in contemporary Tangier. I didn't finish it like I had planned, but it's almost there. Now that February is upon us and I have a lot of big freelance projects behind me, I'll be able to finish that and start, Emergency Transmission, the fourth in my Toxic World series of post-apocalyptic novels.

Now hopefully I can catch up and finish all my plans for 2016 by December 31. . .

So how did your January go?

Insecure Writer's Support Group: Learning to Market

Sana Sayeeda! That's Happy New Year in Arabic. Even though the Muslim new year was a couple of months ago, I heard this said a lot in Tangier this week. We were on on our fourth annual "let's avoid Christmas" trip to Morocco. Now I'm back and ready for a new year of challenges!

My biggest challenge this year will be learning how to market my work. I've built up an inventory of 13 fiction titles so now that I have something to sell, I need to figure out how to sell it. Marketing is most definitely NOT my strong suit so any advice would be most welcome.

Right now my plans are pretty basic. I'm starting a newsletter with free fiction and travel articles, and of course info on any new releases. The first issue will be out in a couple of weeks. You can sign up here. I'll also be more active on my Twitter and Facebook accounts and of course keeping up this blog. The big project will be some promotions coming up next month, which I'll be sending out to various newsletters and websites that list ebook promos.

There will be plenty of writing this year too, because nothing promotes your work like coming out with more books! There will be new books in both the Toxic World and Trench Raiders series, as well as a couple of novellas, the Tangier novel I've been talking about, and a few more goodies.

Beyond doing those things, I'm pretty much out of marketing ideas. Anyone have any techniques that have worked?

Insecure Writer's Support Group: Switching Genres

Here we are at another Insecure Writer's Support Group, where we air out our collective writerly angst to the world!

Today my topic is switching genres. I've done it before, having written science fiction, fantasy, horror, action/adventure, and western. For my latest book I'm switching genres again.

This time, though, it's a bigger leap. The Last Hotel Room is set in contemporary Tangier and takes on contemporary issues. It isn't speculative fiction like so many of my works. A marketer would probably label it as "literary" although I don't think that's a term an author should use on oneself.

I'm about halfway through the first draft and it's an interesting experience writing about a place where I often visit and dealing with issues that touch me like the refugee crisis. It's also a challenge to write a novel without any gun fights, magic, or spaceships! Whether or not it will work as a novel is still in question. It's also unclear if my readers will follow me that far from my usual path.

That's OK, I'm still writing plenty of the other stuff in 2016!

Insecure Writers Support Group: Newsletter Nerves

Hello fellow IWSG members! This is my first post in our monthly communal ventilation of fears so I’m still a little curious what it’s all about. I’m working on a different project than usual right now—I’m starting an author’s newsletter! I’ve never done one before so I’m a bit overwhelmed by the whole thing. I’d love to get some feedback from fellow writers who do one, and fellow readers who subscribe to them.

Here’s my plan. I want the newsletter to be something more than just periodic announcements of my new releases and instead to be something people will read for the content. So what I’m going to do is include a travel article and a short story with every issue. Regular readers of this blog know how much I travel! The newsletter will, of course, mention any new releases and each issue will include a coupon for a free or discounted book. I’m figuring on having it come out monthly via Mailchimp.

So. . . what do you think? Anything I should add or take out? What has worked for you in your own newsletter? Besides adding a link from my blog and in the back matter of my books, how else can I advertise it? (And what if no one signs up?) Any suggestions for layout? I’m clueless when it comes to design so any tips will be much appreciated! Also. . .I need a name! "Sean's newsletter" sounds lame. Any suggestions?