Signs of the elusive "LJ" spotted in the wild

"Track that" by gosheshe, used under cc license

This past week, two guest posts of mine were published on the web. The first, appeared on Monday, May 6th on CJ Brightley's blog. CJ is a fellow author I have gotten to know on Google Plus. The post was on "Deciding What's Important"--where I talk about how I have navigated the often difficult landscape of publishing by making conscious choices and staying true to my goals and beliefs.

From the post:

Back then, [when I was just beginning to write] I bought into the myth of the muse and spent long swaths of time waiting for inspiration to strike, then attempting to capture whatever I felt I had been granted. In those days, I looked at revision as somehow sullying the process. The work I created reflected my immaturity. Fortunately, it will never see the light of day, having been destroyed in a house fire several years ago.

When I started to shift from art-as-hobby to art-as-profession, I also began to understand that inspiration was only a small part (perhaps even the least part) of the process. To use a musical analogy, I had to practice my scales in order to create beautiful music. The ‘scales’ were writing exercises and the discipline of regular work and multiple revisions.

 You can read the entire post here. 

The second post was published at Romance University. The post is named (with irony) The Secret to Marketing Success (is there is no secret.) From the article:

The statistics tell us that the vast majority of traditionally published books never earn out their advances. And advances for mid-list writers have gone down in recent years. What that confirms for me is that no one knows which books are going to catch the brass ring. Anyone who says they do is lying.

No one knows.

That includes agents, editors, marketing folks, sales forces, and book stores. But here’s the interesting thing: Authors operate as if there is a secret code and someone has the key. I see this at play in both traditionally published and indie published authors. They start blogs, pay for blog tours and giveaways, banner advertisements, join twitter and create facebook pages, tweet as their characters, pray for reviews (and sometimes pay for them), get sucked into hours on social media, and generally do all the things that pull them away from what they love best – writing.

You can read it in its entirety here. 

Thank you to CJ and the folks at RU for hosting me.

And stay tuned in the coming weeks for my #1000postparty in celebration of 1000 blogposts here at Once in a Blue Muse, as well as for the upcoming June 2nd release of my SF/Space Opera, DERELICT!