Tag Archives: fiction

‘Twilight’ Author Sends Classic Bronte Soaring to New ‘Heights’

Posted on by Posted in Publishing

Don’t bother lamenting that kids aren’t interested in the classics anymore. Apparently all it takes is the endorsement of a wildly popular author of sparkly vampire stories. Discovered via The Book Blog.

Teenage fans of Stephenie Meyer‘s Twilight series have sent Wuthering Heights – the favourite novel of the books’ hero and heroine – soaring to the top of the classics bestseller charts.

A new edition of the novel, repackaged in a similar style to Meyer’s Twilight books – black cover, white flower, tagline "love never dies" – was released in May this year, and has already sold more than 10,000 copies in the UK, nearly twice as many as the traditional Penguin Classic edition, making it Waterstone’s bestselling classic.

And the 75,000th word is…

Posted on by Posted in Publishing

…”hand.”

In my not-so-spare time, I have been working on a novel.

I’ve been writing for 1-to-2 hours per night for months, after a nearly year-long hiatus on the project while the duties of my day job spun my life into a 24/7 tech support spiral. I originally stopped working on it in May of 2008. I picked it up again almost exactly a year later after finding a new job that required me to spend less of my spare time working.

I actually began writing this novel while on vacation at Myrtle Beach in the early summer of 2004. At first it was a mere 1,500 word introduction to an idea without a direction. Really, I didn’t even have any characters at that point. I started with a simple description of a scene in my head. From there, the story just kind of grew on its own.

Tonight, that simple scene has produced words that form sentences, sentences that form paragraphs, paragraphs that form pages, and pages that form chapters, and chapters that form…well, 75,000 words. It’s a magic number in the world of novel writing. Everywhere you look online, you’ll see that 75,000 words is often the delimiter that defines the difference between a novella and a novel. Once you hit the 75,000 mark, you are writing a full-on novel.

To put it in perspective, what I have written so far is almost 2,000 fewer words than Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone.

That said, I am not done. I have begun the concluding arc in this tale, but there is much more left to do. One thing I can say at this point, though, is that I now have an expectation of approximately how long the first draft manuscript will be when completed.

And, yes, the 75,000th word in my novel really is the word “hand.”

Two Peas Launches Paperback edition of “Jennifer’s Plan”

Posted on by Posted in Publishing

Two Peas Publishing announces the paperback release of Don Meyer’s novel Jennifer’s Plan (ISBN: 978-0984077311). The book is available through amazon.com and other online retail outlets.

The novel is an action-oriented crime drama that follows Jennifer Cerriety as she fulfills her plan to seek retribution against a gang of roughnecks who commit unspeakable acts of violence against her and a man named Harold Seaweather.

Midwest Book Review gave the hardcover edition of Jennifer’s Plan five stars, calling it “a masterpiece of narrative storytelling and a highly recommended addition to community library collections and supplemental reading lists.”

Don Meyer is the author of three books, including Jennifer’s Plan, Winter Ghost, and the Vietnam War memoir The Protected Will Never Know.

Jennifer’s Plan is available for purchase by booksellers from Two Peas Publishing. It is available for retail purchase through Amazon.com, Don Meyer’s website, and other retail outlets.

To Publish or Self-Publish

Posted on by Posted in Publishing

Recently, while thinking about some work I’d done on a new
project I’m working on, I happened upon an article about writing a
novel in 100 days or less.

There’s a great amount of good advice in there, especially for the
first-time novelist. But along about the last 10 days of his process, I
started wondering how long ago the article was written, and why there’s
no mention of on-demand printing and self-publishing as options for the
first-timer.

In a little less than a decade, the Internet changed the world, in both the way we communicate and the way we conduct business, especially in the world of publishing.

Newspapers (particularly their classifieds) are struggling with the
freedom websites like CraigsList provide. People no longer have to pay
a person on the phone, who may or may not be able to spell, money to
print their ad for a single time in a product fewer and fewer people
are bothering to pick up.

Likewise, there once was a time when a writer could spend months or
even years of his life working on his craft, his masterpiece, and it
was up to an editor or an agent to determine whether the book was
“worth” the risk and cost of printing to the publisher, to try in
advance to guess how well it would sell.

The article above goes so far as to even suggest what type of bag to
carry around your printed manuscript in and things to do and think
about while you’re struggling to get your work represented by an agent
or accepted by a publisher.

These days, though, we have lulu.com, createspace.com, booksurge.com,
eBook/PDF-creation tools, and gigabytes upon gigabytes of cheap Web
space. Indeed, these days if you want to get your words out there for
the world to read, it’s much easier than relying on an agent or an
editor to decide for you whether the public will ever get the
opportunity.

Of course, easier opportunity still does not guarantee that the public will bite and read your work, and there is the expense of actually marketing your work to consider, which traditional publishers perform well.

Still, if you’re like me, you’re writing because it’s something you
like to do, and you’re publishing just because you want to get your
work out there, and not necessarily to make a living off it.

Back to work.

The Art of the Word Count

Posted on by Posted in Publishing

I am a meticulous word-counter.

It doesn’t matter how well I am telling a story–how poetic the prose or how professional and entertaining the narrative–if I haven’t written at least 1,000 words by the end of a two-hour session of pounding keys.

A thousand words isn’t a lot, but I imagine I’m slower at the craft than most, more careful in my first draft than many other wordsmiths, who spend a greater amount of time rewriting on the second and third times through than I.

Tonight I am pleased to announce that I wrote 1,230 words on a new narrative piece of fiction, and I feel good about it. Not only do I feel good about the word count, but I also feel good about the the story, and the characters, and the pace of the tale-telling.

It’s the kind of story I actually must force myself to slow down in the telling. Otherwise, I tend to skip over some narrative that is unimportant to me in my mind because I’ve already noted it in my head, but is important to the reader for a complete comprehension of the characters, the setting, and the circumstances.

If only I had more hours in the day to write, which is, unfortunately, no longer my day job.