Free Download - Mama Does Time by Deb Sharp

Free Download!!

Don't miss out on your chance for a free download of Mama Does Time by Deb Sharp on both Amazon.com and Barnes & Noble. This is the first book in the Mace Bauer series. And after you've read her book, you will most likely want to check out the others in the Mace Bauer series.

The free download will only be available thru the end of September. 

Dangerous: Writing while Reading, by Jess Lourey

What, if anything, do you read while writing? For me, usually nothing. I’m a full-time teacher and a mother of a 12 and a 9 year-old. I also have a wonderful boyfriend, serve on the national board of the Mystery Writers of America, am active in Tae Kwon Do, and volunteer in my community. When I add writing a novel on top of that, reading is usually the first thing that has to go. However, the young adult novel I’m working on at the moment requires a great deal of research. I find myself writing in fits and spurts, broken up by necessary reading, and it’s driving me crazy!!! I can’t meet my 2000-word-a-day minimum, and I feel like a humongous slacker.

So maybe this post is more about asking how you all make time for writing. I get asked that question regularly, of course. Every writer does. One time, a couple years ago, I half-jokingly (which=embarrassingly true) told a reporter that I have time to write novels because I don’t watch TV, have a social life, or shower on the weekends. That become the two-page, full-color headline for the article, over a photo of me with my 19-year-old cat in my arms: “I Don’t Have a Social Life and I Don’t Shower on Weekends.” This is how cat ladies are born, people. Shame combined with the realization that personal hygiene is negotiable.

Nowadays, when I teach creative writing for MWA-U and am asked how I make time for my writing, I gently correct my students. We all make time for what is important, I say, so the question is not how to make time for writing but how to make writing important to you.

That answer works great as long as you’re not under deadline, right? I need to get this YA novel done by September 1, the December book in my Murder-by-Month series by December 1, and I hope to have a magical realism novel completed by May 1, 2012. I had it all within my grasp, right up until I realized I had far more research to do for the YA novel than I had allotted time for. So I repeat: how do you make time for writing, especially when it requires researching?

On a profoundly unrelated note, last month, my publisher kindly put forth June Bug as a free ebook download. Tens of thousands of copies were downloaded, and even more exciting, the sales of the other five books skyrocketed. You know what else? The entire six-book e-series is still in the top 10,000 ranking for Amazon.com’s Kindle downloads, weeks after June Bug has returned to full price. Thank you to Midnight Ink for their brilliant support and inventiveness, and for allowing me this opportunity to reach a new group of readers.

And finally, this is my last post for Inkspot. I’m going to toot my own horn and say that starting this group blog was my idea a few years back, and it’s morphed into this amazing thing through the efforts of some of the best writers in the business. Thank you for your time and friendship, Inkspotters, and I’ll continue to follow your stories with great anticipation.

p.s. Breaking news!!! Thanks to an Amazon.com promotion and some more forward-thinking from my publisher, Knee High by the Fourth of July is a $1.99 Kindle download for this week only. Read on!

Cozy Fare?

Okay, first we have to talk about FREE STUFF.

In celebration of the recent release of my fifth Home Crafting Mystery, Wined and Died, you can enter to win a FREE Author Website ($900 value!) from the creative folks at Bizango Websites for Writers until July 29, 2011. The winner will also receive 2 years of FREE hosting. For more details and information on how to enter, please visit my Hearth Cricket blog.

Now, back to our regularly scheduled programming…

My books are billed as cozies, but I get kind of squirmy every time I say that. Not because I have any problem with cozies – love ‘em, actually – but because mine aren’t. Not really.

But they’re crafting mysteries. I was on a panel at Left Coast Crime once that discussed exactly this issue. One of the questions was, “Do the subjects of your books make them cozy?” The idea was that if you’re writing mysteries about crafts (me), antiques (Jane Cleland), or gardening (Rosemary Harris) then they must be cozies. Two panelists were unable to attend, and Reed Farrell Coleman stepped in to balance out the panel (because of the wine connection in his Moe Prager mysteries, I assume). It turned out that despite our subject matter and the fact that we were all considered cozy writers (well, all except for Reed), none of us particularly related to the cozy label.

There’s outside evidence that I color slightly outside the cozy lines. There was that cozy author I asked to write a happy little blurb for one of my books who refused to be associated with it because it featured a stalker, a possible rapist, and an elderly woman was attacked. For a (very) brief moment there I felt like Hunter S.Thompson or Harry Crews. Another blurber was somewhat taken aback by the untraditionally fast pacing.

By the way, that thing about the pacing will make my writing buddies crazy, because they’re always telling me to speed things up. “But it’s a cozy, “ I say. Even if I only kinda, sorta mean it.

“What does it mean to know someone in the biblical sense?” is the opening line of Wined and Died, and it comes from an eleven-year-old girl. Throughout the series, serious issues like alcoholism, clinical depression, cancer, suicide, abuse – oh, and murder, helllooo – keep cropping up. In Wined and Died we’ve got us a little problem with some backwoods marywanna growers, drug dealing, and addiction.

Not terribly cozy fare, though it’s generously sprinkled with soap making, herb craft, gardening, how to make dandelion wine and ginger ale, information on mead, cooking, plenty of recipes, and, I hope, a bit of humor. There isn’t any explicit sex but two main characters are recently married, so there’s reference to their sex life. There was before the wedding, too. Wined and Died doesn’t have a lot of gore, but others in the series have had their share. Now that I think about it, the then acquisitions editor asked me to tone down the first page of the first Home Crafting Mystery because the description of the dead body was too graphic. (She was right, too – I totally went overboard on the ick factor.)

Yet middle school librarians stock my books. I rate them as PG 13 on Authors Den. At nearly all of my signings, at least one teenager buys a book, and I always tell the parents that there’s some mildly bad language and references to adult behavior. “Worse than television?” And I have to shake my head and offer them another molasses-oatmeal signing cookie.

So now I call my books contemporary cozies, because I guess that’s what they really are – a little faster, a teensy bit more edgy, not – as Robin put it in her recent post – “pink.” But they’re still about colonial home crafts, and that is cozy fare. Kinda sorta. Pretty much.

There are a lot of books out there that I’d call contemporary cozies. Or do you think “cozy” has been redefined over the last decade and that modifier is unnecessary?

E-xcited? by Jess Lourey

I never owned a security blanket as a child, but a book serves the same purpose for me as an adult. I love the feel, smell, and potential of a book in my hands. Would holding an ebook give me that same sense of comfort and safety? Maybe. It’s possible I’ll never know, though, because I am an o-reader: old-fashioned.

I no longer use paper to pay my bills, do most of my clothes shopping over a computer, and as a college professor, I teach 80% of my classes online. However, I prefer my eating, sleeping, and my reading to be tangible.

But as an author, I’m not blind to the future. On May 19, Amazon.com announced that their ebooks are now outselling print. According to this article, ebooks may not be ecologically sound, but they are convenient and appeal to the tool-loving monkey in most of us. Soon, photos with and personal messages from your favorite author will become part and parcel with your e-version of their book—consider it Author Signature 2.0. This writer even sees a future for professional editors to make the jump to ebook publishing with little or no start-up costs. Writing organizations are paying attention as well. On June 1, the Mystery Writers of America approved ebooks as valid for active status membership and is now examining the possibility of incorporating ebooks into the prestigious Edgar awards.

Anyone who tells you what the future of books looks like is guessing and hoping, but we know it’s changing. That is why I’m grateful to have a publisher who continues to position themselves in the future. I recently found out that June Bug is going to be a free Nook download and free Kindle download for the month of June! To those of you who have taken the technological leap to ebooks, cheers. If you have not yet checked out the series, now is a safe time to start. Please spread the word, and have a happy June.

*UPDATE: The Kindle version of June Bug should be available free within the next few hours; there seems to be a glitch in processing the update. The free Nook download of June Bug has jumped in sales rank from 360,801 to 1,571 in the last 24 hours! Turns out you can give this stuff away. :)