Technical Difficulties – Revisited

Ok, so … maybe technical difficulties are not blessings in disguise, as I mused last week. Maybe they are exactly what they are – a big honking pain in the … neck. I was going to say neck. 

Yesterday I learned from a few readers (which is always good) that apparently my book was downloading “faulty.” A reader’s word, not mine. I like the word ‘faulty’ though. It’s very diplomatic, I think. Anyway, because of this faulty download, some readers were able to enjoy Pierced By Danger with no problems whatsoever. Others, it seems, were experiencing technical difficulties in the form of missing text. Parts of the story were just not there! Imagine my horror.

I don’t mind telling you that I spent most of the day yesterday awash in a puddle of tears. I don’t ever remember being so frustrated in my life. From my point of view, writing Pierced (the whole trilogy) came as easily as breathing to me. The story just seemed to flow out of me, as though it just couldn’t be contained anymore. And afterwards, I spent what seems like months editing and proofreading and perfecting, and having others edit and proofread in an effort to perfect before offering it to the world. It was (is) my baby. And offering it to the world is the biggest, toughest, most important thing I’ve ever done. And it’s been battered and roughed up now by technical difficulties.

The file was fixed. I spent over four hours last night tending to it and getting it re-uploaded to the KDP site, and was informed by one of those readers with missing text just a few hours ago that the new download is beautiful now. But I’m afraid that the damage may have already been done. Technical difficulties suck.

When the Page Goes Live

Last time I talked about the very real fear that grips your heart the first time you push the “publish” button. Man, that was scary. But just as scary, I have found, is the excruciating wait for the first few reviews to trickle in once the page goes live. All those terrifying thoughts that run through your head when you pull the trigger and push the button don’t just stop. Oh, no! They actually play over and over and over in your head, like an old vinyl record that skips. Whispering tauntingly into your ear, jeering and laughing at you. Making you just want to crawl back into bed and pull the covers up over your head until the laughter stops. And I really wish that I had an experienced, seasoned writer that I could go to and ask just one question:  Is it like this every time, with every book? Will I always feel this sense of inadequacy and incompetence? Will I always feel this terrified that what I’ve written might be complete crap? Will I always feel like I don’t know what the heck I’m doing, and that I’ll never amount to the writer I envision myself to be?

Ok, so maybe that was more than one question. But if there are any fellow writers out there, please feel free to drop me a line. I would sincerely love to hear from you.

Just Pulled the Trigger

So … what I just discovered is, if you are a first-time author and self-publishing on the Internet, it is an extremely terrifying experience to hit the “publish” button. All manner of scary, horrifying thoughts run through your mind in that instant. Things like:  ‘Oh my God, what have I just done?’ and ‘What if everything I’ve just published is complete and total crap!’ and ‘Fat lot of nerve I have calling myself a writer! Who the heck am I kidding?’ 

But even with all those disturbing thoughts chasing me down like rabid dogs, I hit the button anyway. I pulled the trigger. Good or bad, for better or worse, in typos and run-on sentences … I hit the “publish” button. And now I wait for the next 12 hours until my precious baby will finally be available for purchase on the Amazon website. The next agonizingly slow, torturously painful 12 hours.

Having never given birth myself, I can’t help but wonder which is worse….

Technical Difficulties

I’m not really great at blogging. Even though I have done it before. In all honesty, I do have another, pretty successful blog that I write with a friend, under a different name. So I’m used to doing this sort of thing as a collaborative effort, even down to choosing our weekly blog topics. It feels really strange to me to be blogging by myself, and I find myself really stressing over what to blog about.

I started this blog in anticipation of the release of my first novel – book one in my new romantic trilogy. I am self-publishing on Amazon, and I had intended to push the publish button yesterday so that Pierced By Danger would have the very romantic publishing date of Valentine’s Day. However, as the title of this entry suggests, I ran into some technical difficulties during the publishing process.

I’ll spare you the gory details but, suffice it to say that there were several hours of angst, followed by great relief upon hearing back from the good people on the wonderful KDP-support team. But the end result is that Pieced By Danger will be delayed a couple of days. And that’s ok. With everything else going on in my life right now – all the little details surrounding the book release, and all the exciting (and stressful) things going on in my real life at the moment – I’ve decided that a small delay in publishing is really no big deal. And “technical difficulties” are sometimes a blessing in disguise.

How I Fell in Love with Romance

Okay. So, I’ve just spent the last four months or so writing a story that completely took over my life. It was just supposed to be a single, stand alone story but, it somehow became a trilogy. The Pierced Trilogy, and book one – Pierced By Danger – will be published in the next two weeks. Yikes!

Writing, for me, started out as something I just wanted to try. I’d spent years (my whole life it seems) reading some truly wonderful romance novels. An obsession that began when I picked up my mother’s copy of Danielle Steel’s Daddy. I was just about to start high school at the time and I was instantly hooked. I had always been an avid reader but, up until that point, I had never read a true romance novel before.

Over the next few years, my mom and my grandmother and I formed our own little book club of sorts. We would each buy a different Danielle Steel to read and then take great pleasure in trading them until we had each read all three books. Then we would go to the store and buy three more and do it all over again. We eventually moved on to other authors and genres but, my love of romance was firmly rooted.

When my grandma passed away shortly after I married my husband, and my family members were cleaning out her apartment, I remember being really sad and disappointed when I learned they had thrown out her huge collection of books. Had I been able to help that day instead of at school taking a final, I would have insisted on keeping many of those old paperback romances we traded around.

Today, my favorite romance authors have names like Norah Wilson and Janice Maynard (and yes, E L James is a guilty pleasure!), and my favorite stories are on the spicy side. But it all began with Daddy by Danielle Steel. Which makes me ask the question … how did you fall in love with romance? Please leave me a comment and answer the question. I really want to know.