And Baby Makes Three

The first draft is done!

I like having a printed copy to read and mark up.

With sporadic royalty payments from Amazon, I've maybe made fifty bucks so far on the first book.

I finished the second book, "Blood on the Snow" almost two years ago. I pick up the printed manuscript from time to time; I keep finding typos, bad punctuation and things that need revising. And that was after re-doing the last 10-15% of the first draft.

All of which pretty much means that I can write, I guess, but I can't market for shit.

Plugging Away

I've been working full-time and, as I'm finding out, it's pretty difficult to get motivated to do any writing. I spend much of my day working on a computer, whether it is writing legal papers or researching them. To come home and look at the same word-processing screen is, well, kind of sucky.

But still. I do some.

What I'm not good at is marketing. The Hidden Witness sells about a copy a month from Amazon. I did a "free promotion day" through Amazon and about a hundred copies were snapped up, but they didn't lead to any increased sales. (All you buggers who took advantage of it and then couldn't be troubled to at least drop a nice review, thanks for nothing.)

I'm into the fourth revision of Blood on the Snow. It's kind of depressing, in a way, to pick it up and find typos and crazy phrasing. But that's why I let it sit for months and then go back to it, so I read with fresh eyes and I see what is there, not what I think is there.

And I've been working on first draft of the sequel to Blood on the Snow. That's probably about 60% finished, maybe more, maybe less. This one has more detail about Lena's life and her surroundings. I've also tried to make it seem that she has an active career/job, in that she's working on several things at the same time. Most lawyers with an active practice have a lot of open cases and matters and I expect that most private investigators do, as well. Whether the extra stuff is fluff or necessary detail, well, I'll leave that up to my readers. If I ever have any for it.

Anywho: Happy New Year!

Free Day

For today only, The Hidden Witness is free for Kindles from Amazon. Or it should be, if I didn't screw it up.

Consider it a reverse birthday present.

UPDATE: I'm not certain that it is working. Ah, well.

W00T!!

I'm not a writer. Oh, I've written stuff, mostly for my own amusement. Wrote a mystery novel, once. I even had an agent for that one, but no dice, chum. So awhile back, I just threw it up on Amazon Kindle's list just for shits and grins.

I'm horrible at selling myself. It just doesn't feel right to me. I can go argue a client's position and I'm pretty good at that. But when it comes to bragging on myself, I suck. Not like "Dirt Devil" suck, or even "Dyson" suck, but in "open up the air lock on Galactica" suck. During job interviews, when I'm asked "why should I hire you", I have to really restrain myself from shrugging and saying "you could do worse."

Did I tell you that I suck at selling myself?

So anyway, I was doing my bank statement when I saw that Amazon sent me just a skosh over ten bucks. Royalty payments. For that book. Which works out to a wage of, what, two cents an hour for writing it? (300 years ago, that'd be good money, I bet.)

But still, I'm a little bit tickled about it.

Hidden Witness

This is a completed work, you can find a link to buy it on the right side of this blog. I'm posting the first chapter as a teaser.

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Chapter 1

The house was in a ritzy area of McLean, Virginia. It was a townhouse, but that word doesn't begin to describe a place that costs ten times or more than mine. Toss in the wall around the place, the gate with an armed guard, and the private police patrols; you have a place that might be called "Money!" instead of the pseudo-French name that it carried. The guard didn't jump to attention when I drove up, but he didn't open fire, either. Being invited has its advantages.

The invitation was delivered by a uniformed messenger, but he didn't refuse the tip I offered. The invitation itself rode in a buff-colored envelope. It read: Mrs. Frederick Soweby respectfully requests your presence at eleven AM tomorrow. Keeping the invitation company was a set of directions and ten one hundred dollar bills that looked as if they had come directly from the presses. I wasn't overly thrilled to see the messenger, he came damn early and I had a hangover. The sight of all that green cheered me right up.