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Terry Odell's Blog
November 19, 2009
- So, the landscaping is finished. We did lose one nice sago palm along with the native shrubs, but a potential buyer won't know it's gone. It was a case of not pointing it out to the contractor when he took stock of what to do with our yard, so the crew simply looked at the overall result, not the specific individual pieces. Like our sago palm, there were valuable passages in my manuscript. ...
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November 18, 2009
- I'm over at Pen to Paper. And, despite much resistance, I've been guilted into joining Twitter. I'm one of the "Women to Watch" in the Nov/Dec issue of Orange Appeal. Link on my website. And NOWHERE TO HIDE has a release date: August 20, 1020. Curb Appeal: As I mentioned on Monday, we'd had enough comments that our house lacked any visibility from the street, and if buyers couldn't ...
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November 16, 2009
- Having been the recipient of countless rejection letters, it was strange to have to be on the sending side. I can appreciate what agents and editors have to deal with.If you've been following this blog, you know we've been dealing with selling our house in a very slow market. It's very easy to draw parallels to selling manuscripts. Our first agent was an acquaintance of hubby, and we decided to ...
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November 13, 2009
- Are you Triskaidekaphobic? Or just Paraskevidekatriaphobic?The first refers to a fear of the number 13. It's common enough, which is why hotels often don't have a 13th floor (but of course they do, it's simply labeled 14), and some airlines don't have a 13th row. This isn't a universal fear, however.In Italy, 17 is supposed to be an unlucky number. Tetraphobia, fear of the number 4 — ...
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November 12, 2009
- Our contract with our current Realtor expires in about 10 days, and it's time to move on. Thus, we've been interviewing Realtors. A tedious chore. Given the state of the market, they're all eager to have our listing, which means we have to weed the hype out of their presentations and figure out which one will work best for us.A while back, I compared selling a house to selling a manuscript. With ...
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November 9, 2009
- I met my goal, and as of Thursday night, Draft 1 of my mystery is complete. It came in at close to 96K, which is long. But it's done, and I am very pleased with the storyboard tracking method I used.I ended up with 32 chapters, which just so happens to be the number of squares on my board. I didn't really plan it that way; that's just how I'd originally set up the board based on space ...
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November 6, 2009
- I'll be one of about 20 authors signing books on Saturday. I know the majority of you aren't local, but this is our RWA chapter's annual event to raise money for the Adult Literacy League in Orlando. Twenty percent of the proceeds will be donated to the organization, thanks to Barnes & Noble. Literacy is near and dear to me, and I've been a volunteer for the Adult Literacy League for over a ...
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November 5, 2009
- Like countless other children, I was encouraged—with the fear that children all over the world might starve otherwise—to finish whatever my mother put on my plate. Most of the time, I liked her fare, but like countless other children, there were some things I found less palatable than others. Veggies often fell into this category. Still, we were expected to eat them. Not understanding how not ...
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November 4, 2009
- I've now reached the point in my mystery WIP where writing becomes a job. I'm close to the end. I had the revelation about where the "secret" that's been the focus of the book really is. I ran it past hubby over drinks, and he gave it a positive "that's good" as opposed to a grunted, "could work." So now I just have to wrap things up. The plotting is behind me. I've ...
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November 2, 2009
- I hope everyone is recovered from a surfeit of sugar, and remembered to switch clocks (or, if you're not where you switch your own clocks, that you remember that those who do are now an hour off.) It's November. We're looking forward to having Thanksgiving dinner with one of our daughters and her husband's family. They've got a time share not far from us, and have invited us to join them. Should ...
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October 29, 2009
- A question frequently asked of authors is how they do their research for their books. Answers are as varied as the books they write. Some might spend months doing research. Some have budgets that permit travel to research exotic locales. While I take advantage of any travel I do, I've yet to reach the point where I can write it off as a legitimate business expense, since I'm pretty sure the IRS ...
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October 26, 2009
- Where do those covers come from? People ask if authors design their own, or hire artists to create them. No, the publisher has an art department, and someone there is responsible for the cover. So far, all my publishers provide a questionnaire, and we fill in things like locale, time period, tone, theme, any special symbols, and character descriptions. The artists don't read the book. They are ...
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October 21, 2009
- Life is almost normal again. At least the routines are settling in. I enjoyed a leisurely second cup of coffee while I did some blog-hopping, catching up on all the sites I hadn't visited while I was away. Of course, as Murphy's Law would have it, I was about to shower and get back to reading the galleys for Nowhere to Hide when I got a call from a Realtor who wanted to show the house. In an ...
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October 20, 2009
- Today, I have a guest at Terry's Place, my Google blog. Sheila Deeth is talking about her experiences with self publishing. Since I didn't write it, I'm not going to copy it here, but if you're interested, you can find it here: http://terryodell.blogspot.com/
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October 16, 2009
- I've been out of town (Quebec City) all week. After turning in my revisions, I mentioned to my editor that I had originally written a different sort of ending for the book, and since she was having trouble with the way the current ending was going, I said I'd send it to her. Luckily, I had an old, old draft on my laptop with that first ending.I didn't want to spend TOO much of my 'vacation' ...
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