Craps Shoot

Years ago, when Jason Goes to Show and Tell was published (my picture book for children) I did a lot of book signings.  Some were fine, but every so often they were terrible.  I would sit alone at a table with a stack of books in front of me and wait for someone to come into a book store...and wait...and wait. On some of these occasions, I would sell one book and a couple of times, none at all.  Worse, customers would come up to me to ask where the Dr. Seuss or Disney books were located.

So when Wade and I decided to do book signings, I warned him that it was a "craps shoot", a roll of the dice on how well it would go.  On Wednesday we had a super signing, with many people stopping by to say hello and bye books. When it was done, the four authors participating had sold 26 books, which is phenomenal.

Today, Wade and I went to the Copper Rock North to sign books. I thought we had picked a good time but the coffee shop was almost empty and certainly the few people there were not interested in buying books. I did give a couple of them the card containing our Black Coffee Fiction blog site.  

Tim Meier came by and bought a book, as he should since he was mentioned twice, once in our introduction as the Fox Valley Technical College teacher who started us writing short stories and second in our acknowledgment of friends who helped along the way.  We enjoyed good conversation for almost an hour.  He said he would read the book and review it for Amazon.com. Reviews are a plus in selling books like ours.

After Tim left, Wade and I tallied up and realized that Tim's purchase had put us into the black.  We've recouped our initial cost in self-publishing the book. From now on we'll be earning a profit.

Yes, book signings are a craps shoot, but we're going to roll the dice one more time, just before Christmas. I will go ahead and set up another signing.  The date, time and location have yet to be determined, but it's our last chance because Wade and his family are moving to Arkansas in the new year.

The Social Media

Gary left early this morning and by noon was visiting his aunt at the hospital. Shirley fought the EMTS and the deputy because she said she did not want to go to the hospital, but once there, has been enjoying herself.  She lives alone in an old farmhouse far away from any other humans. Now she is in a busy hospital and is talking a blue streak to the nurses and doctors. She still has a battery of tests to find out what happened but for the time being she is in a good place. 

Gary's sister and aunt arrived this afternoon and intend to do a big cleaning job on that old house, something Shirley kept them from doing.  Gary warned them that they could clean but not to move any of her treasures. As one packrat to another, he is protecting her interests.

Nikki Kallio sent us this photo of the day Wade and I opened the box that held our first books. Have you ever seen two happier people?  

Nikki is working on her novel, too, and is recording her thoughts at More Purple Houses  http://morepurplehouses.blogspot.com along with this photo.

Susan Manzke's husband Bob took this photo at Don's Quality Market:

and put it on Facebook for all to see.

Wade covered that event in his blog It's a Long Way to the Top  http://wadepeterson.wordpress.com/

This afternoon, Wade revealed his latest story at Black Coffee Fiction http://blackcoffeefiction.blogspot.com

And finally, I began to use Twitter, something new for me.  You can follow me there at Colleen Sutherland@MathomGardens

Gary and I just finished a Skype conversation and agreed that he will take his laptop to the hospital tomorrow so I can talk to Shirley.

What we would do without the Internet?

More changes.

Gary's aunt Shirley is 92 years old.  She lives alone on the family farm in Illinois, a farm owned by the family for around 150 years.  Her two brothers are dead so she is the last of that generation.  She never married, so her family is her niece, nephew, great niece and great nephew, and they all live here in Wisconsin. They all make regular pilgrimages to help her with yard work and repairs. Every Wednesday and Sunday Gary's sister Kathe calls her to make sure she is OK.

That is, until last night.  Shirley didn't answer the telephone.  Everyone knew she was almost stone deaf and that she took naps whenever she felt like it.  So Kathe kept trying for a while then quit. She tried again this morning, but there was still no answer.

Kathe went to work and kept trying from there. Then she tried to call Shirley's neighbors to see if they could check on her.  No one answered there either.

Kathe called Gary to tell him she was worried and to see if he would keep trying to reach Shirley.  He called and let the phone ring 26 times.  No answer. I told Gary he had better have the sheriff's department check on the old gal.  He hesitated, but I said that's what you pay taxes for.  He and Kathe conferred and the decision was made.  They made the call.

This afternoon they learned a deputy broke down the door and found Shirley on the floor where she had been for two days. He called the EMTs but she was still able to complain when they said they were taking her to the hospital.  The last time she had been in a hospital was when she was born 92 years before.  She didn't want to go now. She is a tough old bird and can scare people but not this time. They forced her into the ambulance.

She is now in a hospital bed. Tomorrow morning Gary will be be in Dixon checking on her and taking care of the farm.  He will repair the broken door, check on the water pumps, feed the cats. Decisions must be made. He doesn't know when he'll come back. It may be he'll spend much of the winter down there.

So that will be our winter.  Me holding down the fort here, him holding down the fort there.  And lots of driving between the Seymour and Dixon.

Book Signing at Don's

Years ago, back in the 1980s, I was part of a writing group we called the Quill Club.  Back then we women wrote our stories on typewriters and felt we were pretty cool because they were electric typewriters. We all had young children and a night out with good friends was a way to sanity. 

We gave each other encouragement and that led to some of us going on to bigger things. Betty became a reporter, then a weekly newspaper editor and then a magazine editor. She is still out there freelancing. Susan had a newspaper column that is still running thirty years later.  Her two romance novels were published.  I wrote a weekly newspaper column and that led to magazine work.  Others kept at it, too, but in time the Quill Club withered away. 

Tonight Wade and I had our first book signing, bringing Black Coffee Fiction, our collection of short stories to Don's Quality Market. Colette Bezio was there with the Witches of Castle Crabapple and Susan Manzke with her two collections from all those years of newspaper columns, Words in My Pocket One and Two.  (All the books are available at Amazon.com.)  

I didn't really know how many customers we would have for these self-published books. We were originally supposed to have our signing at Sissy's Treats and Treasures, but the ceiling fell down in the tea room.  All the publicity I had written placed us in time, Wednesday at 5:00 p.m. so we couldn't change that but we could change the place to Don's Quality Market, change the posters around town and put an especially big notice on the window at Sissy's.  

We set up in the lunch room adjacent to the bakery and waited to see what would happen. In only a few minutes our customers began to arrive and most of them were our old friends from the Quill Club who bought books and more books. Wade and I started with eight books but ran out. It was only luck that he'd brought some of the books that were meant for our next book signing on Saturday. (We've ordered more for that one.) He ran out to his car and brought them in.  The others were making a lot of sales, too. 

None of our Quill Club friends left after buying their books. It turned into a reunion.  We are now talking about reviving the group and even found some possible new members among others that came to talk to us.  We'll take another look at the idea after Christmas.  

We went home with money in our pockets and the thrill of knowing our words are out there.  

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This week I joined Twitter to help spread the word about our blogs and books.  My tag there is 

Colleen Sutherland@MathomGardens  

From the electric typewriter to a word processor to the computer to the Internet to social media, I keep on expanding my horizons.  

Winterizing

While I was working on my novel today, Gary was winterizing the house.

He removed  a window from the west bedroom and took it to the hardware store to have it repaired. When he broke the glass last winter, he replaced it with some Plexiglass he had on hand, but he didn't think that was adequate.

Then he began to cover all the windows that face west and north with plastic. That makes a big difference in this office and an even bigger difference in the bathroom. Without the plastic, we could use neither room after  December.

While he was doing that, I was working on the third draft of the novel. I have a stack of bits and pieces, sometimes a paragraph, sometimes a page, that I wrote over the years, descriptions of the characters, the scenery, or the action. I work them into the story as I go along. Today, it was a hike in the hills above Windemere in England's Lake District.

         The trail narrowed. The morning's rain had left it wet and slippery. Wet sheep piles were dissolving into the water. Ronna stopped to eat one of her pot pies. She was not particularly hungry, but she wanted to get it out of the way, one less thing to carry, and thought to eat the second, but reflected that the reason she was overweight was that she always ate any food that was available. She wrapped the second pie in the napkin and put it in her jacket pocket. The water bottle had a strap so she put that over her shoulder. There was a branch beside the trail, and she broke off enough of a stick to give her balance and went on, looking for the scenery the girl had promised. 
          But the wet spots turned to muddy spots, made up of dirt and little piles of marbled sheep feces. At times, the trail became a quagmire. Using her stick, she found the mud ankle deep, so she moved rocks so she could jump from one to another. The views were as promised, spectacular views of the lake through the V of the cut trees, downed for the trail. This was what Wordsworth had seen, for the most part, though sometimes a curve revealed the urban sprawl that was Windemere. When the trail became soupy, Ronna just walked on the grass to one side. The other side was a high stone wall, no doubt built two centuries before when the landlords decided to fence in the land to keep the sheep in and the farmers who once worked as sharecroppers out.  Families were thrown off the lands they had worked for generations.

How does that read?  I never know until months later.  At any rate, as of today I have 34,858 words.  By the end of the month, I should have a 60,000+ word novel.

By the end of the day, the windows were covered and we were completely winterized.

New Goals

After thinking about yesterdays post, I realized I have been procrastinating on the books I mentioned and others, too.  Though I was able to finish Black Coffee Fiction with Wade, that is because of the constant deadlines of finishing short stories by the end of each week.  I had no deadlines on the books so they remained half finished.

Today I stopped off at Sissy's to talk to Sandy and Francine who are taking over the coffee shop from Donna and Pat.  They said they hoped I could arrange another book signing after they re-open.  This afternoon I reviewed all my projects.

The first is a novel that takes place in Great Britain from the northern part of Scotland down to London.  The working title is Going Down from Gairloch. It isn't the easiest of the bunch to finish up, but it is the best. I'm on the third and possibly final draft.  Today I finished editing Chapter 11.  Five more chapters to go, then I will turn it over to a couple of readers to see if the novel has a good flow. If it doesn't require another edit, it goes to press and should be in print form by the first of the year.

Next I will re-edit Yesterday's Secrets, Tomorrow's Promises.  It is already an e-book at Amazon.com but I want to do a quit re-edit and put my name on it.  That should take less than a week.  I hope to have a print version by mid-January.

Then comes Love Through the Decades, a series of short stories following the life of one woman through short stories in different points of view. I want that ready by February.

There are several other books I can work on after those.

I am working on a series of short stories about depressing Christmases.  I love Christmas but there are so many that don't,  so a few years ago, I began to write about them.  "The Rapture", the first story in Black Coffee Fiction is such a story. There are many more to come.

The Glen Valley Compact is a mystery I wrote during NaNoWriMo.  Though they liked the characters, my critique group told me they were able to figure out "whodunnit" by the third chapter. I should be able to fix that if I really work on it.

Finally, there are all the non-fiction books I could write.  Using this blog and newspaper columns I wrote, I could write a book about my Jake, our wonderful Australian shepherd, long gone but always remembered; travelogues about my trips to China, New Zealand and Australia; memories of childhood on a Wisconsin farm.

I have enough projects to keep me going for decades and I am already 68.  Best get hopping.

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Check out the last two posts at Black Coffee Fiction http://blackcoffeefiction.blogspot.com
Bettyann Moore did a two part short story that is worth reading.  I knew her when she was editor of a publication like that.  

Changes

A couple of weeks ago, the ceiling at Sissy's Treats & Treasures fell in. No one was in there, no one was hurt, but it meant a change in our plans.  Susan, Colette, Wade and I were supposed to have a book signing there this Wednesday, November 14.

No ceiling, no book signing we figured and arranged to move the event to Don's Quality Market. There's a small lunch room/coffee shop near the entrance and next to the bakery.  Coffee and cookies would be served while we sell our books.

I notified all the radio, television, Internet and newspaper media where I had sent press releases.  Susan made a note in her newspaper column of the change.  On Friday, I walked all over town to find the thirty or so posters I had put up and tacked on a bright yellow sticker that said "Moved to Don's Market".

I just came home from fixing the final poster to get a phone call from Pat at Sissy's.  She told me that the repairs are done.  They are re-opening on Tuesday. Did we still want the book signing there?

I surveyed the other three authors and we agreed to stay at Don's.  It is simply too late to change course yet again.  I let Pat know but told her I would do my best to get another book into print as soon as possible.  I have three that are very near ready.  The first is a romance that I wrote years ago.  It's already an amazon.com e-book written under the name Trisha Northland, Yesterday's Secrets, Tomorrow's Romances. I could easily bring that to print though I would first like to make a few corrections. I could get that done in about a week, I think.

I wrote a series of rather odd stories about love that I published in our Black Coffee Fiction blog http://blackcoffeefiction.blogspot.com over the past year. I could publish those stories as Love Through the Decades.  It would only take a couple of weeks to do that. I thought I should publish that before Valentine's Day.

Or I could finish the other novel I am currently working on during NaNoWriMo.  I planned on having that done by the end of the month.  But there would be the final edit and corrections before that is ready plus I will want a friend to read the thing to make sure I've made no glaring mistakes.  I don't foresee that being done until the end of January.

So what should I do? Set the last one aside and work on the first or the second? Whichever, there will be another book signing at Sissy's by the New Year.