Day of Gratitude

I am thankful for my family who loves me. I am thankful for a daughter who values education and had the courage to make the difficult and informed decision to go back to school and finish her education. I am thankful that that same daughter values honesty more, and upon realizing that formal education was not for her, decided not to make herself and everyone around her miserable. I am thankful for friends who understand my physical limitations and care about me anyway. I am thankful for my parents who contribute to my career by allowing me to live in their home rent-free.

I am thankful for having a netbook with a long battery life, especially when the power goes out and I have work to do. I am thankful for a car that takes us where we need to go. I am thankful for Shen Hart, who founded Literary+ just when I needed more help with marketing. I am thankful for people who are willing to pitch in and work together to help a single member of the group succeed. There are many peer groups who will drag everyone down to the same level, but very few that will work together to build everyone up. I am thankful for my nook, because it makes it possible for me to read thick books with my increasingly arthritic hands and wrists.

I am thankful to the Lord for giving me a good imagination I can use to write books with, and a talent for using computers that has made the rest of my publishing journey possible.

I am thankful for all of my teachers at Chandler-Gilbert Community College for helping me learn what I needed and for accommodating my increasing special needs as I worked toward graduation. I learned a lot even from the really…shall we say…unique individuals with whom I did not particularly agree. I am thankful to the US government for funding the Pell Grant program, and not restricting it to young poor people, because this is how I funded my education.

~Marie

Cyber Monday Free Book

I just wanted to remind everyone that my new book, A Gigolo for Christmas, will be free all day today, Monday, November 26, in celebration of Cyber Monday. While you're online doing your Christmas shopping, drop by and pick up this free Kindle book for yourself! You can get it here.

~Marie

Free Gigolo, One Day Only!

I just wanted to let everyone know that my new book, A Gigolo for Christmas, will be free all day Monday, November 26, in celebration of Cyber Monday. While you're online doing your Christmas shopping, drop by and pick up this free Kindle book for yourself! You can get it here.

~Marie

A Gigolo for Christmas

Surprise! I bet you didn't expect another new book so soon after The Siege of Kwennjurat was released. I'll bet a lot of my friends are also very surprised that I would release a book with the word "Gigolo" in the title, too.

I've been working quietly yet frantically on this in the background, hoping to have it ready before Thanksgiving, because it would be pretty stupid to publish a Christmas story at any other time of the year. If I hadn't made the deadline, the poor thing would have had to wait a whole year to be published, and I didn't want that to  happen. This is a lot of why I've spent most of November being very, very behind on my NaNoWriMo word count.

A Gigolo for Christmas is a very sweet little romance novella being offered, at least for now, as a Kindle-only ebook. Here's what the back cover would say, if ebooks had back covers:

Shelia Everett couldn’t have imagined a worse company Christmas party. By the end of the evening she was unemployed and homeless. Fortunately her boss’ date, Anders Adamson was willing to help her repair the damage. He even offered to help her get a job at his escort service.

 

What’s a good girl to do when she discovers she’s fallen in love with a gigolo?

 

I'm posting this on my blog on the day before Thanksgiving, so that you know about it, but aren't bothered by it while you're spending time with your family tomorrow. Or maybe you want to download it today, and read it on that long car drive home from Grandma's place after Thanksgiving dinner.

You can buy A Gigolo for Christmas here, or borrow it if you're an Amazon Select member.

~Marie

P. S. Amazon seems to be having a problem getting the cover image up on their site, but be patient and don't let the apparent lack of cover deter you from purchasing - I'm working on the problem as we speak.  ~AMJ

P.P.S. Amazon got whatever the problem was taken care of, and the cover is up now. Hooray!  ~AMJ

I Know You Said No

The word no is a negative. It means, well, no. It expresses disagreement with something someone else said or did. It is a shorthand word that, depending on the context, can substitute for an entire sentence. No can mean anything from a refusal to cooperate (“Will you take out the trash?” “No.”), a negative reply to a query (“Did you remember to put gas in the car?” “No.”), or a plea to someone to stop what they’re doing (a child screaming “No!” as Mom takes them out into the hall during a church service).

The word know implies knowledge. If you know something, it is a piece of knowledge stored in your brain for some period of time.

Remember which one to use this way: the word know is the first half of the word knowledge. The word no is a very short and simple word. If you want to tell your kids no, then keep it short and simple.

~Marie

The Maid Made the Bed

Made is the past tense of make. I can make something in the future, I can be making it now, or, once it is finished, I can proudly say that I made it.

The word maid had old roots in the word maiden, which refers to a young, unmarried female. In the days when people lived in huge houses and had live-in domestic servants, the word maid took on a new meaning as the job title of the young, unmarried women who cleaned the house. An old maid is an older, unmarried woman. In both maid and old maid, the term usually refers to a woman who has never been married, rather than a widow or divorcee, and is presumed to still be a virgin. Yes, I know that often does not apply today, but language is not good at keeping up with the times. I’m discussing language here, not current sexual practices.

Today, the word maid usually refers to a person, male or female, who works at cleaning other people’s houses. They are typically not live-in, but work either for themselves or for an agency, and clean several homes in a day’s work.

Remember the difference between made and maid this way: Make and made both end in an “e”. At my house “I” am the maid…and both of those words have an “i” in them.

~Marie

One to a Customer

The word soul refers to something which not all of the human race even believes in. Those who do believe in it usually think of a soul as the spirit which animates our body in life, and occasionally haunts our surroundings after death. Many believe that the soul passes to another plane of existence after death. However this blog is not a place to debate philosophy or belief systems, it is a place to learn about writers, writing, and the words that make books possible.

The word sole has several meanings, ranging from only (as in the family’s sole supporter), through a fish (the sole was delicious), to the bottom of your shoe (I need to take my boots in to have the soles repaired).

Keep them separate by remembering that a soul is all about “U”, and if it’s not about “U”, then the word doesn’t have a “u” in it.

~Marie

Resolution Update: November

My goals for this year began as:

• Graduate from college. (Accomplished)
• Write a new manuscript, something I haven't had time to do since I started college. (Accomplished)
• Take a vacation someplace out of Arizona. (Accomplished)
• Hug my daughter every day. (In Progress)
• Learn how to make book trailers and post them to YouTube. (Accomplished!)

As I continue through the year, my evolving list of goals reads:

• Hug my daughter every day. (Still in Progress, with modifications)
• Support my daughter as she takes her turn at college. (Accomplished)
• Finish editing The Siege of Kwennjurat and get it published. (Accomplished)
• Reformat all ebooks so they look better. (Accomplished)

The hugs were temporarily stopped during October, as we realized we were passing the flu back and forth. Now that we're recovered enough to consider ourselves no longer contagious, they have resumed.

Happily, The Siege of Kwennjurat was released on October 24th. Of course, if you read my blog, you already know this, because I've talked about nothing else all month. I've been working in this world for sixteen years, and was rather happy to be done with it at last. During most of that time, I have had a hand drawn and colored map of the Ten Kingdoms hanging above my desk. Even though the book was available for sale slightly before the 24th, I had decided to take the map down on the 24th, as a private celebration of the completion of my work in that world, and a symbol to myself that goals can be accomplished, even when they take a long time to materialize.

On the 22nd, I had a dream. Book ideas often come to me through dreams, and the vivid scenes that are the seed for the novel usually remains largely unchanged through the writing process. In this dream, I saw two people meeting in a shadowy place, and speaking in low tones. I recognized one of them immediately as a character from Kwennjurat. From their conversation, I soon realized that the other person had been mentioned in the books, but didn't have a large role. I had thought the second person was dead. They are not dead. I have left my map up. Research and plotting is already underway. There will, apparently, be a third book in the Kwennjurat Chronicles, even though most of the action in the third book will not be in the Ten Kingdoms. Hang on to your hats, this is going to be an interesting ride!

I have two trailers up on YouTube, and ideas are coming for other video projects including but not limited to book trailers. My video camera had other ideas. It apparently decided it didn't have any further interest in living, so further forays into video are temporarily delayed until I see enough books to replace the video camera -- or find the money someplace else.

I always have more than one book project under construction, and at any given time they're in different stages of being written, edited, and prepared for publication. Right now, I have a romantic novella that hopefully will be out around thanksgiving. It's a Christmas themed story, so if it misses its deadline it will have to wait a full year. Because of its length, I plan to release it in ebook only, and for at least the first several months, it will be in Amazon's lending program, which means Kindle only. The title is A Gigolo for Christmas. Yes, you heard right, A M Jenner is writing a book with the word "gigolo" in the title. You'll have to get the book and read it to see if my standards have actually slipped. I've also got a short story collection that hopefully will be out around the first of the year named Bits and Bites. By the end of next year, I hope to have the suspense novel Just a Name, and the fantasy Mind Touch published as well, so there's lots of good news and new books in the pipeline for my devoted fans -- all ten of you. (That's a joke - I hope I have more than ten fans.)

On the handcrafting front, I hauled out my daughter's knitting looms and started a shawl, but that project got derailed because of the dollhouse project I'm involved in. It began as an idea to make a miniature bookshop to use as a set for photo shoots for my website, but has evolved into simply a project to build a miniature bookshop dollhouse with a flat above the shop. Each of the floors has been constructed. My mom is planning on finishing and furnishing the flat, and I'm working on the bookshop. So far, I have built the stairs to go upstairs with, laid down hardwood flooring, painted, and polished it, painted the walls in the office at the back of the shop, and I'm working on creating the wainscoting for the front of the shop. I'm not going to post any pictures until it's finished, though. I'm making it on a budget in half-scale, which means I get to make the doors and windows and everything else completely by hand, because purchasing dollhouse things in half-scale is beyond my budget. Plus, it's fun to figure out how to create it and make it look good when my construction materials are mostly found items already in my craft supplies.

I only finished reading seven books this month, but my page total is 4367. 

~Marie

Holly's Besieged on the Farm

Holly must have wanted a copy of The Siege of Kwennjurat very bad, because she practically stalked me on all the websites my tour took me to. Her efforts have paid off, and she won the ebook!

Holly, drop me an email and let me know if you want it for Kindle (.mobi), Nook  (.epub), or as a PDF.

The Goodreads giveaway is also concluded, and of the 219 people who wanted a copy, I'd like to congratulate the five people who won. I can't list their names here because that's against the rules, but I'd like them to know that I'm mailing out those books this afternoon.

Congratulations, and thanks again to everyone who helped make my pre-release give-away and my blog tour a success!

~Marie