Welcome to the Future!

Today is the first day of a new year. The year behind has closed, and the year ahead awaits, a blank slate to write upon. It can be sort of scary to contemplate a whole year, knowing that every day I will be making choices that affect the contents of the rest of the year. Choices I make in January can mandate what choices will be available to me in November. It's also a lot awesome, knowing I have the power to make those choices!

In December I read 9 books containing 1218 pages. My year-long reading total was 210 books, most of them novels, containing 45,844 pages. I have to say that before this year my only experience with "Victorian Authors" was Charles Dickens. While I had read - or tried to read, some of his works in the past, I hadn't succeeded in finishing any of them and had written of all of the authors of the era as extremely wordy, inordinately fond of long words which have now fallen out of use, and utterly boring and depressing.

This year, thanks to the wonder of ebooks, I've been able to read a goodly chunk of the works of Mark Twain and H. G. Wells. Not all Victorian authors are of the same stamp. I finally understand why Mr. Twain is called a humorist. His observations of the human race and the manner of his sentence construction had me laughing out loud on more than one occasion. I love his fiction; his essays are entertaining, and his travelogues absorbing. I'm very much enjoying Mr. Wells' fiction. His guesses on where technology will take the human race in the future are entertaining. What is amazing is how many of his predictions have come true, and which things have largely not changed, as I look back on his looking forward. I'm not so fond of his political, philosophical, and religious writings (which are sometimes all mixed up in one essay), so I have to admit that I just skimmed them. He does use more words unfamiliar to me (and also unfamiliar to my nook's dictionary) than Mr. Twain does.

I didn't get a lot of work done this week, chiefly because my Dad was in the hospital from December 22-30, and our entire family's routine was disrupted as a result. However, he is home now, we had Christmas last night, and although there'll be a few more medical things for me to coordinate, things will be more or less back to normal.

My public goals for 2013 will keep me very busy this year, which hopefully will keep me out of trouble. I plan to publish seven books of my own. January should see the short story collection Bits and Bites published. I have four short novels planned that will be ebook only, whose titles will be announced later. I expect to publish the suspense novel Just a Name sometime in May, and the fantasy Mind Touch in the fall. I'm working on an updated website for myself.

In addition, I am the newsletter editor for my church congregation, and I might be working on the website for my writing association.

 

~Marie

Happy Christmas to All!

As a gift to all my readers, I would like to present you with a copy of my newest book, free. Monday December 24th, Tuesday December 25th, and Wednesday December 26th my book A Gigolo for Christmas will be available free to everyone. You can get it at Amazon.

If you don't happen to get a Kindle for Christmas, remember that you can get a free Kindle reading app for your computer, phone, or tablet, and you can still enjoy my book - free.

Much love to everyone, and have a safe and happy Christmas.

~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