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You’d think Mary was reading my mind about my New Year plans (no resolutions here, folks, just positive thoughts!) I was going to share what happened at the wonderful LERA meeting Saturday when this popped into my inbox. Which means I have another blog in the works! For now, let’s share the wisdom of Mary, the Muse Charmer. And isn’t that a lovely horse with Mary?  Mona

Can Your Thoughts Affect Your Sales?

Mary and Fortune

It’s an interesting notion. And I’m not going to go all Pollyanna and say that by thinking positive thoughts you’re going to hit all the lists. I’m also not going to say that your thoughts have no effect on your sales. Why? Because your thoughts affect everything you do.

Let’s pause for a moment. You’re a writer, and that means the stories you write come from your mind and heart. As an author, I know I fall in love with my characters. I find myself wrapped up in universes and world-building. It’s one of the reasons why I no longer really plot, because even if I do, the story takes an unexpected turn and I find myself wandering away from the set points. At some point and time I decided the heck with it and just began writing.

Which brings me back to the subject of how our thoughts affect sales. We can step away from our stories for a moment. Our moods affect so much. We can look at a bookshelf full of books on our “to be read” list or a folder in our e-reader and think that we want to read a book, we just don’t know which one. The same with movies, or the old question of what’s for dinner. You know you’re hungry or want to read but nothing seems to fit. It happens with writing, too.

Muddled thoughts create indecision. If our thoughts are laced with worry or fear we make certain decisions, like diving into that pint of ice cream we have in the freezer instead of making an actual meal or having a healthy snack. Those tiny actions, no matter how small, impact our writing, and yes, even our sales.

So how does this work? Let’s take the very common writer’s thought: my books aren’t good enough. We all have that thought from time to time. How can this thought affect our sales?

We write with the thought that our work isn’t good enough. This most likely means we’re not giving it our best. In the back of our mind we have the nagging belief that it doesn’t matter, we’ll never be like “big name author” that we perceive as writing so much better than we do. The book gets accepted and published by our publisher or we still self-publish it. When we go to promote we still have thoughts that the book isn’t good enough, readers aren’t going to like it, we’re not going to sell…and our actions tell that tale, too.

Our actions follow our thoughts by perhaps not being as proactive on social media. We don’t solicit for guest blog spots or make connections with our fellow writers like we should. We hold back.

When we do, our sales reflect this reality. And it all started with a thought.

That’s why it’s so important for writers to support themselves with good prosperity practices. A prosperity practice is a series of actions and thoughts that an individual does to support him or her with goals. It can be very powerful and can take whatever form that the person needs. Through a prosperity practice the thoughts that occasionally (they don’t ever really go away) plague us about our writing, the not good enough, won’t sell, won’t get on the lists, can be managed and dealt with without having them overwhelm our lives and our careers.

Our thoughts really can affect our sales because they affect what we do in the course of writing, selling, and marketing our books. Take some time to think about, or maybe even write down, some of the thoughts you have around your writing. Let them be as uplifting to you as your books are to your readers!

May the muse be with you.

Bio:

Want to learn more about prosperity practices? Join Mary in March for Prosperity Practices For Writers, a six week class beginning March 21. Learn about personal prosperity practices and how you can integrate them into your writing and your life to help support and energize you toward your financial goals! To register visit http://musecharmer.com/prosperity-practices/. There are deep discounts if you register before January 20.

Mary Calesto lives in the Ozarks with her partner and a menagerie of animals, including two spoiled horses, an opinionated parrot, a wiggly puppy, an office bunny, and the not-so-itty-bitty kitty committee.  She has written romance for over ten years under a few different pen names. These days, she spends time with her own writing and also uses her lengthy experience in publishing to coach authors as The Muse Charmer www.musecharmer.com . Her goal is to show authors the tools they need to reach their goals by working on the inner writer through a variety of techniques, plus help the outer writer with solid industry and craft advice.

I was getting ready to upload the closest thing I will have to any sort of New Year Resolution. First I wanted to do a bit of blog housekeeping, which includes checking my comments for any I might have missed, plus cleaning out the ever present Spam folder. As I was about to delete all unread, I noticed an exceptionally long message, much of which read like this:

{I have|I’ve} been {surfing|browsing} online more than {three|3|2|4} hours
today, yet I never found any interesting article like yours. {It’s|It is} pretty worth enough for me. {In my opinion|Personally|In my
view}, if all {webmasters|site owners|website owners|web owners} and bloggers made good content as you did, the {internet|net|web} will be {much more|a lot more}
useful than ever before.|
I {couldn’t|could not} {resist|refrain from} commenting.
{Very well|Perfectly|Well|Exceptionally well} written!|
{I will|I’ll} {right away|immediately} {take hold of|grab|clutch|grasp|seize|snatch} your {rss|rss feed} as I {can not|can’t} {in
finding|find|to find} your {email|e-mail} subscription {link|hyperlink}
or {newsletter|e-newsletter} service. Do {you have|you’ve} any?

This goes on seriously for several pages. Do you think it’s some sort of template for spam messages? Confusing to say the least!

This Spam leaves a weird taste in my mouth

This picture is from 2010, right now we’re bright sunshine and dry, some days are even above freezing. Not to say we won’t be back to way too deep in snow soon so I’m going to enjoy it while it lasts. AFTER I finish this scene I’ve been working on. I was about to let Gavin and Jess get it on but they need to clear up some unanswered questions. Sorry, guys, you’ll have to wait a little longer {{insert evil chuckle}}

For you who are snowbound and looking for some great writing advice and inspiration, Marketing For Romance Writers has started a wonderful marketing blog with advice on writing better, and getting ourselves noticed as authors. I see Kayelle Allen has answered some of my questions about Using You Tube to our greatest advantage. Come on over and check it out.

Tomorrow I’ll share some of the inspirations behind my 2014 life adjustments.

According to WordPress I’ve written over fifty blogs in 2013…that’s pretty good. They want me to share my states with you but is anyone really interested in how many comments I’ve had on the blog this year?

I didn’t think so.

One thing I would like to remember about 2013 is participation in a wonderful anthology with a group of extremely dedicated writers, all of us giving our time and talent to encourage donations to a very worthy cause…clean drinking water for everyone. Here in the US many of us take clean water for granted. You turn the knob, water comes out of the faucet. Easy-peasy. That water starts…where? From a city water treatment, or from a very deep well underground? Knowing where the water we drink and use for every day chores comes from helps a lot when we need to think about water conservation.

All of the stories in Of Words and Water pertain in some way to how water affects our life. It might be as simple as a cup of tea or as frightening as a flood, or a drought. None of the writers will receive any compensation for their work, and the anthology is free to download. We only ask for a donation to this very worth cause, Wateraid This link will take you to more information, as well as a further link to their website.

New Year’s Eve is nearly upon us. I’ll be spending it at home, thank you very much. But I’m setting up a long distance group party with some friends. If you’re going to be around and lonely or bored, come on over…the Internet has to be good for something other than pictures of cats!

I am a firm believer in events which bring together family and friends. Not so much in how those events are presented. Thanksgiving, for one example, was far from a gathering of Pilgrim and Indian in peaceful harmony. While it’s wonderful to get together it might be past time to stop teaching that whitewashed version of the first Thanksgiving.

Many bemoan Christmas itself is more of a commercial enterprise than a religious one. But the actual idea of the birth of Christ in the middle of winter is already skewing history. Choosing a day to celebrate His birth is wonderful. Tagging it to an existing celebration was a very clever idea. Turning either one into a greed fest seems to exemplify so much that is not in line with his teachings, and bothers most of us.

As a child I loved the tree, the decorating, the gathering of relatives I hadn’t seen possibly for years. The idea that we must have THE perfect gift on one specific day…not so much, especially not as time piles up on me and I realize all of us have way too much…stuff. The pressure builds and we end up either spending far more than we can afford or everyone gets a pair of gloves.

I LOVE Christmas music, and am likely to sing it at the top of my voice while driving long distances in the middle of summer. I like to gift people as I find the perfect item for them, though if I don’t send it off immediately it’s going to gather dust in the corner until found, generally during a holiday cleaning purge. In fact there are a couple of items hiding under the dust bunnies… Thing is, I love the fellowship and good feelings of Christmas, but not when they are a required attitude during a limited season.

When we moved from Southern California we left behind my husband’s family, and my own has been scattered to the four winds. Does this mean I love them less? No. My hounds have kept me from casual travel, and I find Skype good for exchanging smiles but woefully inadequate for exchanging hugs. Home For the Holidays takes on a whole new meaning when we can’t leave our own home base and instead must rely on these visual aids. Then I remember centuries past when information moved at the speed of a scrawled note. No, I wasn’t there. Or was I?

Back to the misunderstandings we’ve all accepted as truths throughout our lives, we just might need to reexamine the concept of thirteen as an unlucky number. We have Triskaidekaphobia, or the fear of the number thirteen, supported by various legends. But thirteen is also considered a number of significance and good fortune in other cultures. Specifically, thirteen is the number between twelve and fourteen. The same as December 25 is the day chosen to celebrate the birth of Christ. And the day we would like to all gather in love. I’m going to try something really sneaky…let’s try that love thing for the rest of the year. What do you think?

My featured story here A Christmas Whimsy is one I wrote in my own spirit of Christmas sharing for my dog show and romance reading friends. I hope you enjoy it. And just for fun, a short contest. Winner gets the choice of either of my current books. Let’s make it simple, and silly. Ummm, oh, got it, I’ll use my late husband’s favorite extra credit question for his art students. What breed of dog has taken over my life for the last forty years?

Happiest of holidays to you, however you celebrate. You won’t find me sky clad this solstice but I send out a hug and best wishes to you and yours.

Hmmm, and low carb tip? Next time you bake a chicken try slicing up a daikon radish to drop around and inside the bird. You will not miss potatoes.

My mother used to say it was “Cold enough to freeze the horns off a brass billy goat”

Sounds pretty cold to me. Back…way back…when I was much younger I used to care for horses, and winters could be a real challenge. Especially when the waterlines froze. Horses drink a lot of water. I remember one time the very steep walkway between house and stable froze into a sheet of ice. We walked down the snowy hill for a couple of days!

Twenty years of living in Southern California can thin the blood, so when we moved to New Mexico in 2006 that first winter hit us hard. My husband more than myself since he was a California boy born and bred. Since he didn’t have to get up and go to work he could enjoy the snow from inside a well insulated house.

Whether we’re going to blame climate change or the storm furies (I’ve delved back into Jim Butcher’s The Furies of Calderon for some light reading) New Mexico winters have become very cold. Right now (7:15 PM, the weather app on my Droid shows me a projected low of 18 degrees and a current temperature of 11. Warmer and clear tomorrow except for the snow flurries. I’ve learned to use the redneck method of

Jason knows the best place when it’s cold

weather information. Send one of the dogs out. If they come in with snow on their backs, it’s snowing. If

they go out, do their business fast, and rush back in, it’s cold. Jason doesn’t have the ear fringing of the other Salukis so when he comes back in he asks for a brisk ear rub.

So how cold is it? Cold enough to keep me inside writing. So I guess that’s cold enough.

Yep, this is about NaNo, the National Novel Book in a month. Thousands try, only a few succeed. And all of us end up with sore wrists, sore elbows, and a fresh respect for those authors who do this every day. We also learn a lot about ourselves and our writing. Sure, some writers turn out thousands of words each day. Good words, well thought out and part of good books. So for them NaNo’s suggested goal of 1,667 words per day would be holding back their progress.

There are other writers, though, who worry over every word put on the page. They debate between mauve and lilac for the heroine’s scarf and rework the scenic descriptions until they exceed travelogue detail. For them, NaNo is writer torture, and probably not a road they could travel without great distress.

The MOST beautiful

Then we have those of use with vivid imaginations and what we know are wonderful story ideas. We’re convinced this is going to be the best and brightest and most exciting book ever. At least that we’ve ever written. And we’re willing to delve deep, write for long hours to reveal that book.

So we start the week before, plotting and planning. Fingers poised at the stroke of midnight November first, we begin the mad dash to accumulate words, piling scenes on top of scenes and in the process

Still looking good.

beginning to realize maybe we weren’t quite as ready as we thought we’d been to write that perfect book. But that’s okay, we’re keeping up our numbers and sticking with the scene plan. We’ll just need a bit of polish. We can handle this. We stock up on coffee and ignore the growing mountain of dishes at the side of the sink. December first seems further away than ever, yet not far enough since that last scene just went badly south.

Then somewhere along the way we come to the conclustion we’ve totally lost the thread of the book. Or

Death of a Plot Line

as happened to me, my macho Alpha maybe a bit too overbearing hero just plain did not fit. Not only that, but he has **gulp** feelings. Sure he’s been through ten kinds of misery in his life, but the thing is he has been through it and  he’s come out the other side stronger and more in touch with what really matters. Which is fabulous in real life and yeah he is going to be a knock your socks off great character. But all those nifty argument scenes already written are simply not going to work and there is no way this is going to be anything cohesive in the next five to ten days.

And it sucks. Big time and without any sugar coating. Coffee just doesn’t taste as good as it did last week, and that bottle of wine is looking a bit too tempting. Not only is the hero not a stock easy to visualize brawny tough guy. But the heroine’s past isn’t as traumatic as first planned…which might have been a bit (overwhelmingly!) over the top, but seemed like it would also be a good way to gain quick sympathy for her. Cheap shot? Yeah, probably but it sounded really good during plotting time.

So, here I am with 39,000 words which I could have faked into 50,000 or more but that would have been a waste of energy  not to

Yes, I can still see life in this story

mention a strain on already sore wrists, back, elbows…getting old isn’t nearly as bad as FEELING old. I put the story aside, thinking about where I’d wanted it to go and trying to find something to move forward with. Scenes start to rewrite themselves in my head, some changing only slightly, others jumping off the stage entirely to be used for some other story. I’ve known the ending of this book from the first time I framed it out so long ago. And I’ve known the beginning. It’s what happened it between that stopped me cold last month. But I think I’ve found a way to save what’s good and nurture it into a cohesive story. Which will give me something to do while the snow builds up outside and the temperature starts breaking records.

The Plot Shall Bloom Again

This is fun. Chris is going to share some writing advice for those of us who are coming down to the NaNo wire. How’s everyone doing, by the way? Eyes glazed over yet? Wrists sore and fingers numb? Whether you make that nebulous 50,000 words are not, if you’ve framed out a new story and given it a few walls, you’re a winner.

Take it away, Chris

Chris

Today I am going to talk a little bit about setting in a story.

In Fiction for Dummies, Randy Ingermanson and Peter Economy write “You are the god of the story world you create, and  you have complete control over everything that happens there. But this doesn’t mean that just anything can happen in your story world. Your story world needs to have an inner logic that drives it.”

The world you create must have scientific laws. (physics, chemistry). There must be conflict. There should be a good and evil.

Let’s examine the parts of our story world.

          There is the physical world. This world could be all water (Waterworld) or be a city as in most urban fantasy. The world will have geography and weather patterns. In Incendiary I have a hurricane hitting New Jersey. I once had someone call me out on it, but if you see how I use it, it isn’t like a hurricane in Florida. It jives with what they are when they reach us up in NJ.

          In your story world, there will be at least one cultural group. Maybe more depending on your genre and what the conflict of the story will be.

          Lastly, your story world needs a backdrop for the conflict. Is there a war going on? Think of the political climate or the religious climate. In Arthur Miller’s The Crucible the Salem Witch Trials are a key component.

          As a writer you want your story world to come alive in the reader’s mind.  You want to create a sense of place. Don’t waste a single word. Active descriptions not static. I’ve said it before.

          When describing anything that description should do double duty. It should keep the story moving and, more importantly, evoke an emotion in the reader. I forget this on the first draft.

          Weaving the descriptions into the rest of the story, making it seamless is most effective. Don’t stop the flow of the story. Don’t stop the action to describe what’s around. Think about two people fleeing from bad guys chasing them. They aren’t going to stop and notice the beautiful hydrangeas at one end of the parking lot. On the other hand, if those hydrangeas make the heroine sneeze therefore giving away the characters’ positions, then those flowers are significant.

          If it isn’t pertinent to the story, don’t describe it. If it doesn’t’ move the story ahead, then the reader doesn’t need to know. Is it important that her eyes are the blue of the sky after a rainstorm when someone is trying to kill her? Not unless the killer is targeting her because of those blue eyes.

          To recap, your story world need to have physical rules to follow. You need to incorporate at least one cultural group and the setting is the backdrop for the conflict.

          Thanks for stopping by today. For one lucky winner I have a pot full of chocolate. Leave a comment to be entered into the drawing.

 ***

Chris Redding lives in New Jersey with her husband, two sons, one dog and three rabbits.  She graduated from Penn State with a degree in journalism. When she isn’t writing, she works for her local hospital Her books are filled with romance, suspense and thrills. The above blog is an excerpt from a workshop

 Links:

Chris Redding Blog

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Buy Link:  Along Came Pauly

          Along Came Pauly, A contemporary romance about a dog that brings two people together who don’t want to be. She’s a vegetarian veterinarian who needs cash for a no-kill shelter. He’s the heir to a hot dog fortune who must give away money before he gains his inheritance. Sounds like a perfect match. It isn’t.