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Transference – genesis of a short story

Posted in Amazon KDP, anecdotes, Australian writers, Danielle de Valera, Far North Coast of NSW, Fiction, fiction authors, Indie authors, Indie publishing, north coast of nsw, psychological stories, Short stories, the writing process, transference, tagged Danielle de Valera, deviant art, ejimac, far north coast of NSW, fractal artists, north coast of nsw, obsession, short stories, transference, writing process on December 12, 2014| Leave a Comment »

When the children were in high school, I found myself with a bit of time on my hands. I lived in a small country town, jobs were hard to get, so I decided to try to make some some money writing short stories. I was working in the dark. Although I’d written a novel and had a few articles published in newspapers, I didn’t write short stories; I’d always thought of myself as a long distance writer. Still, as they say (or used to say), Needs must when the devil drives. I tried the Women’s Weekly first, but I had no luck. I didn’t understand at that stage that you need to study the publication you’re aiming for to get a feel for both the style and the kind of content the editor likes.

With no luck there and the need for money still pressing, I turned my attention to the men’s magazines. Here I was lucky: my partner Gianni Cosatto bought a Penthouse every month. Strictly for the articles, you understand. For a year I clawed my way past crotches and garter belts every month and studied the particular likes of the then editor, Phil Abraham. He was publishing one story per issue, good quality stuff of around 5,000 words by such Australian luminaries as Susan Geason, Peter Corris, Roger Raftery, etc. After trying a few different stories on Phil, I finally struck it lucky with “Transference”, a 4,500 word story about a man who becomes obsessed with his wife after she leaves him, goes to a therapist for help and ends up becoming obsessed with the therapist.

It was my first ever published story, and a monument to the technique of studying the publication you’re aiming for. The money was considerable for those days, and caused us much excitement. We went straight out and bought a VCR and mainlined movies all through that summer. My mother, who lived with us, was still alive in those days, so she was able to enjoy the largesse—a fact that, even today, gives me pleasure.

Well, there you have it. There’s nothing dubious or smutty in “Transference”; Phil Abraham wasn’t that kind of editor. It’s light with a heavier undertone. It should make good holiday reading, and is available at:

https://www.smashwords.com/books/view/497498

http://www.amazon.com/dp/B00QUDR8OC

The beautiful image that forms the cover is by ejimac. You can see more of his stunning work at:

http://www.deviantart.com/browse/all/digitalart/fractals/?q=ejimac

Best wishes to you all for Christmas and the coming year,

Dani

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Trio: Three award-winning short stories

Posted in Amazon, anecdotes, Australian writers, chance, Danielle de Valera, delusional thinking, domestic violence, Far North Coast of NSW, Fiction, fiction authors, Indie authors, Indie publishing, mental illness, north coast of nsw, Short stories, Stories about domestic abuse, stories about pople facing death, tagged Danielle de Valera, delusional thinking, domestic abuse, far north coast of NSW, mental illness, north coast of nsw, people facing death, short stories on November 13, 2014| 2 Comments »

What with the remaining cat’s veterinary bills, things are a bit tough financially, but they used to be tougher back around the turn of the millenium. At that time the local paper, the Byron Shire Echo decided to hold a competition for a short story of less than 1,000 words. The winning entry would receive publication in the Echo and prize money of $1,000. Needless to say, I decided to have a go. To my absolute surprise, I was lucky enough to win with “A Happily Married Man’, which told the story of a young man who thinks he’s had a message from God to eliminate the man his wife has left him for.

That was in 1997.

Next year, I decided to try again. This time I wrote about a single mother who’s life is threatened by a jilted lover with a shotgun. I called it “The State of Grace”, to try to explain the sense of calm that came over the her in the end, after she realises she is going to die. I didn’t hold out much hope for the story, but they were judged blind and to my amazement, I managed to win again. Now that’s what I call luck. It kind of made up for all those years of rejections. (I sometimes wish I’d kept my rejection slips; I really could’ve papered a wall with them.)

That was in 1998.

In 1999, Shelley Jackson of Lismore ran a fiction competition for women on the north coast of New South Wales. I was on a roll, so I tried again. The story I entered was called “The Sunflowers”. It was about a woman who’s been married for years to a husband who is physically abusive, but she won’t leave him. Finally, a particular incident involving gardening makes her decide to go. Again, I was lucky.

And there my remarkable streak of luck more or less ended. After that, I concentrated on writing novels and on getting stories published in magazines to improve my literary CV. In those days, you sent the publishers your novel extract by post, along with a pleading letter and what was called a literary CV. A good literary CV might sway editors in your favour. It seemed like a sensible idea to concentrate on this. As the song says, “Know when to fold’ em. Know when to walk away, Know when to run”.

Being only 1,000, 1,000 and 1,500 words respectively, the three stories described above were too short to publish separately on the web, so I’ve put them together in a bundle of 3,575 words called “Trio”. In the short story collection I’m hoping to put out in 2015, these three stories won’t run together as they do in “Trio”, but will appear separately in various places through the book. Anyone reading them to discover the fate of the four main characters in the collection (O’Neill, Johnson, Lawson and Star) needs to bear this in mind.

Trio” is FREE at Smashwords in three formats: EPUB, mobi (for Kindle) and pdf.

https://www.smashwords.com/books/view/492081

PS Many thanks to the people who’ve taken the trouble to review the stories I’ve put up so far. Reviews are necessary to sell anything on the web, so your kindness is very much appreciated.

A note on reviews:

Making life even more difficult for indie publishers, Amazon, the giant in this business, responsible for approximately 70% of all internet book sales, does not link its sites together where reviews are concerned. A review placed on the Australian Amazon site will not appear on the US Amazon site for the same book, or the UK’s —or any other Amazon site, for that matter. You would expect that one review would show up across all of Amazon’s sales sites, but it doesn’t. As it would be a dementing business for well wishers to copy and paste their reviews over all the sales sites, I would suggest placing your review where you think it will do the most good.

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Star’s Story – genesis of a short story

Posted in Amazon, anecdotes, Australian writers, Danielle de Valera, domestic violence, e-book frmatting, e-books, Far North Coast of NSW, Fiction, fiction authors, Fiction writers, hippies, Indie authors, Indie publishing, north coast of nsw, Publishing, Self-publishing, Short stories, the writing process, tagged abortion, Amazon KDP Select, anecdotes, domestic abuse, domestic violence, ebooks, far north coast of NSW, hippies, indie writers, life scripts, north coast of nsw, short stories, the writing process on September 28, 2014| 6 Comments »

Star’s Story—the genesis

Sometime around 2004, when I was on the Aged Pension and a more assured income, I had a little time to experiment. I wanted to see if I could get into Meanjin, the foremost literary journal in Australia. I had something of a knack for styles. If I could get hold of enough back copies of a magazine, say ten, I could usually nail down the style their story editor liked. I’d done it with Penthouse and the Women’s Weekly—why not Meanjin? Unfortunately, I could only afford to buy one copy; the pension doesn’t pay that well, and business wasn’t booming at that point in time.

I had always found the stories in Meanjin rather mystifying, and downright inaccessible at times, so I constructed a rather post-modern story with flashbacks and time jumps that weren’t always sequential. Should be inaccessible enough, I told myself. I ended up with a piece of around 3,000 words, which I called “No Through Road”.

I didn’t send it off to Meanjin straightaway, ah no. In my experience, the best way to pick up a little lucre was through competitions. I chose two which had well established writers as judges (one was Frank Moorhouse) and a first prize of $1,000AU. Even getting shortlisted in one those would help to get a more sympathetic reading from the editor of Meanjin.

I was lucky, though I never hit the jackpot. “Road” was shortlisted in the prestigious My Brother Jack short story competition in 2004 and in the equally prestigious Hal Porter in 2006. Right, I thought, now for Meanjin. So I sent the story off – in those days, you still sent manuscripts through the post – and waited. And waited. Eventually I got a lovely rejection letter from the ed, saying that although the piece had almost made it, they had decided not to take it up.

Well, it wasn’t bad for a first time, and I’d only had one copy to study; I’d do better next time, I thought. Then the internet hit us, and I began to consider publishing on the web. I saw in it a way to obtain print copies of all my work to safeguard when I was gone. Better than leaving the manuscripts to moulder in the tin trunk, I figured. I live in the sub-tropics, it’s very humid, I was worried about how long they’d last. Maybe I could be discovered posthumously and the grandchildren would make a fortune. So probably goes the thinking of millions of indie writers.

To return to the point: I changed the title of the story from “No Through Road” to “Star’s Story” to make it easier for anyone following these stories on the web as they come out. Publishing serially like this, I think you need to remind readers of where you’re up to in the collection. Which I’ll publish next year. I also changed the point of view from 1st person to 3rd; the thing seemed just too confronting in 1st.

Because it’s only 3,000 words long, it’s FREE in three formats at Smashwords. (Amazon won’t let writers sell their stuff for free unless they join Amazon’s KDP Select, and then only for 5 days out of every 90.) I’d love some feedback on the cover, love it or hate it. I could also do with a couple of reviews of this story as it’s unlikely to garner anything favourable from the general population, it being so literary and post-modern, hem hem. The link is: https://www.smashwords.com/books/view/479505

Below is a recap of where we’re up to now in the collection:

Busting God

http://www.amazon.com/dp/B00J8ZIE8S

https://www.smashwords.com/books/view/416303

Remains to be Seen

http://www.amazon.com/dp/B00LNDWRM2

FREE at https://www.smashwords.com/books/view/454352

Stella by Starlight

http://www.amazon.com/dp/B00MTVVG9C

https://www.smashwords.com/books/view/467119

Star’s Story

FREE at: https://www.smashwords.com/books/view/479505

Only another seven stories to go.

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About “Remains to be Seen” – short story

Posted in Amazon KDP, Colonel David H Hackworth, Far North Coast of NSW, fathers, Fiction, fiction authors, Fiction writers, Indie authors, Indie publishing, north coast of nsw, post-traumatic stress disorder, Vietnam veterans, Vietnam war stories, war stories, tagged Colonel David Hackworth, far north coast of NSW, military short stories, post-traumatic stress disorder, PTSD, Vietnam veterans, Vietnam war stories, war stories on July 11, 2014| 4 Comments »

Australian soldiers in Vietnam

A long, long time ago when I was younger and my children were still in high school, my son fell in love with all things military. War was nothing new to me. I’d cut my teeth on WWII. My father went over the Kokoda Trial without a scratch – needless to say, he never said a word about it, except to my old Uncle Charlie, who’d been in the trenches in WWI.

With the star-struck son, it was different. I saw every Vietnam war movie ever made. I got to know the kinds of choppers used in Vietnam, and also in Korea — even what kinds of choppers the police were currently using to search for marihuana plantations in the hills in the northern rivers. I learned about post-traumatic stress disorder and what (and what not) to do about it. My son’s passion lasted around four years and fizzled out, thank heavens, before he was old enough to join the army. While it was still at tornado force, I bought him one Christmas a memoir by Colonel David H Hackworth (US Army), co-written with Julie Sherman and called About Face: The Odyssey of an American Warrior.

Hackworth was famous, and one of the most decorated soldiers who ever lived. Some people credited him with being the model for Colonel Kurtz, the role played by Marlon Brando in Francis Ford Coppola’s Apocalypse Now; others more reliably credited him with being the model for the gung ho commander of the helicopter unit immortalized in the movie by Robert Duvall. Hackworth did command a helicopter unit in Vietnam at one stage. His journey from all-American warrior (he lied about his age to get into the post-WWII occupying forces in Berlin at 15) to his public rejection of the Vietnam War in 1971 makes fascinating reading.

Unlike my son, I never fell in love with the military, but I did fall somewhat in love with Hackworth, and my little story “Remains to be Seen”, which was lucky enough to win the Ulitarra-Scheaffer Pen short story Award way back in 1993, is a kind of tribute to the man, although it is not about him. My formatting will always leave something to be desired, but the story (set half in the northern rivers, half in Vietnam) is now up on the web.

It’s FREE in three formats at Smashwords:

https://www.smashwords.com/books/view/454352 and it should be free on Amazon KDP, but so far they’re insisting on charging 99c for it. If you’ve got a dollar to spare, that’s at: http://www.amazon.com/dp/B00LNDWRM2

NB This is a good place to encourage anyone who likes the work to put up a review. Remember, it doesn’t have to be a contender for the Pulitzer Prize. Just 50 words will do, and (hopefully) a reasonable number of stars 🙂

Hackworth spent some of his later years in Australia, living in Brisbane and later in the country not far from here – another reason for my fascination, perhaps, though I suspect the real reason is that I just have a penchant for warriors. He died at the age of 74. The cause of his death is cited in some reports as bladder cancer, one of the many forms of cancer occurring with increasing frequency among Vietnam veterans exposed to the defoliants called Agents Orange and Blue.

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Houseboating on the Tweed River

Posted in aging, anecdotes, Birdwing Cafe. Tumbulgum, Far North Coast of NSW, Fiction writers, Indie authors, north coast of nsw, travel, true stories, tagged Birdwing Cafe. Tumbulgum, Danielle de Valera, houseboating, houseboats, Margaret Olley, Tweed River on May 29, 2014| 2 Comments »

Astrologers tell me I was born with the moon in Pisces, which is supposed to explain my fondness for water and the fragile state of my mental health. Well, who knows? Anyway, perhaps that’s why I fell in love many years ago with the idea of a trip on a houseboat — not that I’m an intrepid sailor; I don’t know port from starboard, and though I can stay afloat in calm water, I can’t swim for nuts.

When it came my turn to organise the biennial get-together of a few old Ag Scientists and spouses (the operative word here is old; if you want to be politically correct elderly), I wondered what I would do. I live in a broom cupboard three hundred metres from the Pacific Ocean. Eight of us couldn’t stay there. What to do? Then I remembered my houseboat dream. l made enquiries. T’was possble: The rental for 4 days and nights was a little over $200 per person. This amount can be a lot or a little, depending on the state of your finances.

Off we went.

The first night one of my girlfriends and I spent a lot of time wandering the boat while everyone else slept. We were trying to uncover the source of various odd noises. Were we dragging the anchor? What was that strange banging noise we could hear upstairs? Had we dropped the anchor too short and the nose of the boat was slowly being pulled under the water as the tide rose? (My particular favourite.) Etc. etc. Eventually exhaustion overcame us and we slept. To put it in buddhist terms, we “wore the experience out, and so were able to relinquish it.” Whatever.

We had a bit of an accident on our first morning out. In attempting to get from the houseboat to the dinghy, one of our number fell into the river. But we fished him out and dried him off and gave him a cup of tea. Soon he was as good as new.

More adventures befell us. With me as navigator and our Fallen in the Water (FITW) skipper, we managed to run aground later on that day. Well, of course, what were you expecting? I have zero skills as a nav. In my defence I have to say that when we reached the point where we had to choose one waterway or the other, the green bouys I was following appeared equally relevant — or irrelevant, depending on how you were looking at it. It was just bad luck that decided me to tell our intrepid skipper to go right (starboard?) instead of left (port)?

“We need to rock the boat from side to side,” our FITW skipper told us. So we rushed to the upper deck and ran en masse from one side of the boat to the other while he revved the engine below. We were lucky: We were able tto reverse off the sandbank without having to submit to the shame of being towed off, or whatever it is they do under those circumstances.

We managed to get into and out of the dinghy without further mishaps.

Here we’re returning from lunch at the Tumbulgum Pub; I’m the one in the orange pullover, clinging white-knuckled to the gunwale. Note to those in the Northern Rivers: The food at the pub was OK, but if you want ambience and nice food, skip the pub and go the the little Birdwing Cafe down the road.

With a little help from our friends, we got to the Tweed River Art Gallery to see the new installation: a recreation of some of the rooms in recently-deceased artist Margaret Olley’s terrace house in Sydney. Olley was famous for her house, which was a mix of objets d’art, paintings and clutter.

It was a good trip. The weather held fine, the Tweed lived up to expectations — it’s a beautiful river and there was very little traffic on it while we were there. Evenings as the boat swung at anchor, the stars seemed to wheel slowly across the night sky, and the moon slipped in and out of view in the windows of the room where I was sleeping.

If you’ve never had a trip on a houseboat, think about trying it sometime. It’s different.

[Photos of the Tweed and the “Kalinda” by Dr Martin Playne. ]

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And Now for Something Completely Different

Posted in Australian writers, books about prison, Canadian prisons, Canadian writers, Carol Middleton, e-book frmatting, e-books, Ed Griffin, Editing, Far North Coast of NSW, Fiction, fiction authors, Fiction writers, Indie authors, Indie publishing, inmates, jail, Kindle, MagnifiCat the novel, north coast of nsw, prison, prison reform, prisoners, Publishing, Self-publishing, Short stories, social media, the novel, Writing, tagged Australian writers, Busting God, Danielle de Valera, e-books, Ed Griffin, Fiction, indie authors, Indie publishing, MagnifiCat the novel, short stories, Writers on May 19, 2014| 7 Comments »

A few days ago I was surprised to receive an email from Carol Middleton, an Australian award-winning writer, and a reviewer for the prestigious Australian Book Review. In the email Carol invited me to join the Writing Process Blog Tour, in which writers are invited to reply to four questions about their writing process and then pass the baton on to another writer/s.

Many thanks to Carol for inviting me to contribute to this tour, which in its construction is like a chain letter but nice. You can see Carol’s Writing-Process Blog published Monday 12th at http://carolmiddleton.com.au/wordpress

Here goes.

What am I working on?

Having put my first novel out on Amazon and Smashwords last year, I decided to try to get myself a bigger presence on the web by putting up a short story a month in 2014. Being the digital klutz that I am, it took me three months to learn enough to put up my first story Busting God, now available at: www.amazon.com/dp/B00J8ZIE8S. I’m now working on formatting my second story Remains to be Seen, which follows the fortunes of Busting God’s hero as he tries to recover from the post-traumatic stress caused by his participation in the Vietnam War.

I’m a tortoise, very slow at everything I do, and not very comfortable on the web. However, I’ve decided that having a higher profile there will help my novels eventually, so I’m nailed to the cross of formatting these twelve short stories for the remainder of 2014.

How does my work differ from others of its genre?

How to answer this question? My short stories were published in such diverse places, ranging from Penthouse to Aurealis to the Australian Women’s Weekly. Each time I adapted my basic writing style to suit the market — I was a single parent and I needed the money. My only novel published so far is MagnifiCat: www.amazon.com/dp/B00H0ORWQY — a strange little animal fantasy about a family of cats who find themselves on the poverty line in a small country town in New South Wales, Australia. In it I aimed to produce a kind of Wind in the Willows for adults. To what extent I succeeded is hard to gauge. The novel’s definitely not satire; it’s more like a fairy tale for adults, with an underlying heavy core that makes it adult fiction, though I plan to release a children’s version of it in 2015, minus the alcohol and the angst.

Why do I write what I do?

In my case there are two answers to this. The short stories were written either for money — publication or competition money — or to add to my literary CV. In the novels, however, I get to please myself. And I notice that what comes though in all of them (I have another four in various stage of development) is a desire to nail down a particular time and place that’s now long gone. You could say I’m obsessed with transience, and writing about these places is my way of trying to keep them alive in people’s memories after they’ve disappeared under the bulldozer of progress. My Queensland novel is set in Brisbane in the early 1960s; MagnifiCat is set in Byron Shire in the mid-1980s, and somewhere in the dim future, should I live that long, I’d like to write a novel set in Brisbane during WWII. It’s as if I’m saying to readers, Remember how it was. Don’t forget this.

How does my writing process work?

I write first draft material in the morning, while I still have some contact with my unconscious. Editing, a completely different process requiring a different part of the brain, I can do any time. I never work after dark unless I have an editing job or a manuscript appraisal for another writer and the deadline is looming.

To me, producing first-draft material is like digging semi-precious stones out of the ground, while editing is like polishing those stones into something people might find beautiful or useful. Basically, I want my writing to entertain, to make people happy. At the risk of sounding overly ambitious (or merely quaint), I’d like it to give people hope. Life can be tough sometimes.

The writer I’ve asked to continue the Writing Process Blog Tour on Monday 26th is Ed Griffin, a Canadian novelist and prison reformer. Ed taught creative writing in prisons for many years. He blogs at:

prisonuncensored.wordpress.com

Check him out on Monday 26th.

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About ‘Busting God’ (short story)

Posted in Agents, aging, Amazon KDP, Australian humour, Australian writers, e-books, Far North Coast of NSW, Fiction, fiction authors, Fiction writers, Humour, Indie authors, Indie publishing, Kindle, Self-publishing, Short stories, Writing, tagged dealers, dealing, drug busts, drugs, heroin, norht coast of nsw, short stories about drugs, undercover agents, undercover narcotics agents on May 11, 2014| 2 Comments »

A long, long time ago, back in the early ‘90s, I had my first short story published in a national magazine. My children and I were over the moon: the money (AU$1,500) was astronomical in those days. A few years later, I decided to see if I could crack the same market again—after all, $1,500 never goes astray.

I’d just read Narc! Inside the Australian Bureau of Narcotics by Bernard Delaney, who was a senior investigator in the narcotics bureau for some years before becoming Commander for the Southern Region of Australia. So I wrote this 5,000 word short story about an undercover narcotics agent, basing the procedures on Delaney’s book. After the usual eight drafts, I submitted it to the editor who’d accepted my previous story. My timing was bad. A week after I submitted the story, the magazine was sued for defamation. In the chaos that ensued, ‘Busting God’ went nowhere. I put it away and concentrated on the next draft of my Brisbane novel. Some twenty years later, I sent the story to an Australian magazine called Blue Crow, edited by Andrew Scobie, who accepted it enthusiastically.

Now that I‘ve decided to put all my work up online before I fall off the perch (it seems safer than wrapping it in ‘fireproof’ material and putting it in the tin trunk, but I might be wrong), I gave the story yet another draft and put it up on Amazon and Smashwords. In brief, it’s the story of an aging undercover agent who, along with his long-time Vietnam buddy Baby Johnson, is sent to the Northern Rivers of New South Wales to bust a heroin dealer everyone up there calls God because he’s so big. Apart from successfully running God to earth, the major conflict in the story takes place in the hero’s head. Will he stay in law enforcement or get out before his slowing reflexes get him killed? That’s the main idea behind the story, and the idea that leads to the next story I’m putting up in three weeks time, this time for free, called ‘Remains to be Seen’. As part of my plan to try to save the work before I drop off the perch, I plan to put up another eleven stories on the web this year, half of them for sale, half for free. This one has a price on it, but I chose the lowest price both sales sites would allow.

‘Busting God’ is one of the three favourite stories I’ve written; there’s a lot of tongue-in-cheek humour. It’s also the first thing I’ve ever formatted. Being the digital klutz that I am (oh yes, I am — see my previous post on this subject at: https://danielledevalera.wordpress.com/2013/09/17/for-all-you-luddites-out-there/, formatting that story took me a long time and I’m so chuffed that I managed to do it. I was further encouraged by fellow writer C S McClellan, who did the you-beaut cover for me. Thank you so much, Connie; designing an ebook cover is way out of my league.

If you’ve got a moment or so, pop over and take a look at ‘Busting God’. You can read about 30% for free at either:

https://www.smashwords.com/books/view/416303

or www.amazon.com/dp/B00J8ZIE8S

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Happy Chinese New Year of the Horse!

Posted in Amazon KDP, Book designers, Courage, e-books, Far North Coast of NSW, Fiction, Fiction writers, Happy Chinese New Year, Indie authors, Indie publishing, Kindle, New Year, Self-publishing, Short stories, struggling writers, Writing, tagged Chinese New Year, e-book formatting, indie writers, Kindle, short stories, Smashwords, Word documents, Year of the Horse on February 1, 2014| 4 Comments »

I’m one of those people who believes in everything and nothing, so don’t take it amiss that I share a few thoughts with you at the beginning of this Year of the Wooden Horse. The book I’ve got on Chinese astrology (someone less able than I to accommodate ambivalence gave it to me) says horses always look terrific, have plenty of sex appeal and know how to dress, but that they’re also hotheaded, hotblooded and impatient. In the years when I was younger and used to give Chinese New Year’s Eve parties, there must have been a few horses among the crowd. If there were, I don’t remember them, so I can’t pass judgment on the accuracy of the book, but we sure had a lot of fun passing it around and guffawing at the descriptions.

But I digress. What I’m really here for is to wish all those who read this post the best of luck in the coming year. If, like me, you’re just starting out on the digital journey, my commiserations.

My goal, this year, is to release a dozen short stories, roughly one a month, ranging in length from 4,000 to 9,000 words, half of which are set in the Northern Rivers of New South Wales, Australia, an area I’ve lived in for the past thirty years and am still desperately in love with. I’m lucky enough to have a friend I met through this blog who is designing the first cover, but after that, I’ll be on my own in the formatting of both cover and story text.

Just how I’m going to manage, I have absolutely no idea. Designing the Smashwords versions of the stories won’t present many problems, thanks to the beautifully clear instructions in Mark Coker’s (Mark is CEO of Smashwords) Style Guide, obtainable free on the internet. Designing a Kindle version, however, is going to be more difficult. Both Smashwords and Kindle Direct Publishing (KDP) offer simple, pain-free translations of documents from Word to Kindle, but what I’ve seen of the results doesn’t enchant me. However, whether I’ll ever be able to learn enough digitally to do better remains to be seen.

In short, just learning enough to put up those dozen stories in one form or another is my goal for the year. Wish me luck, everyone – and if anyone wants to tell me their goals for this Year of the Horse, I’m a good listener.

Good luck to you all!

Dani

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Thoughts at Christmas

Posted in Christmas trees, Indie authors, struggling writers, tagged Christmas, Christmas trees, Happy New Year on December 23, 2013| 3 Comments »

Christmas is here again, whether we like it or not. And whether we like it or not, it’s wise to remember it will soon be over – as will most other things. So hold your loved ones near to you, tell them you love them. Cherish the good times, don’t dwell on the bad. And remember that kindness is like water in the desert to a stranger – to anyone, really. We all need kindness.

Have a safe and happy New Year, everyone!

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A Drop in the Digital Ocean

Posted in Amazon, Australian animals, Australian humour, Australian writers, cat lovers, cats, e-books, Fiction, fiction authors, Humour, Indie authors, Indie publishing, Internet, Kindle, MagnifiCat the novel, Publishing, Self-publishing, struggling writers, talking animals, the novel, Writing, tagged animal lovers, Animals, Australian animals, Australian writers, books about Australia, cat books, cat lovers, Cats, mi on December 8, 2013| 8 Comments »

Anyone taking a casual look at the novel I’ve just put up on the web might be forgiven for thinking I need therapy.

But though the cats have the spotlight, many other Australian animals feature in this fantasy for adults — a porcupine policeman, a python bank manager, a kangaroo in the milk delivery business, etc. etc.

Aside from all the animals, though, that slide, hop, glide through this novel, and despite my determinedly lighthearted approach, the book’s theme of life below the poverty line gives it gravitas. It’s not as innocuous as it seems.

But enuff about the novel. Maybe it’s merely a drop in the digital ocean, but because I’m such a klutz digitally, I’m just happy to have survived the experience of getting it up there.

Take a look. It’s available in both e and print form. It’s certainly unusual.

http://www.amazon.com/dp/B00H0ORWQY

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