This Surreal Life

At what point does my career start to feel real?

Couldn't tell you!

It still feels surreal to me, despite the fact things are happening.

I spent the morning today at Learning Ally, a non-profit that supplies audio books and textbooks to blind and dyslexic adults and children, reading my own Acknowledgements and giving a video interview.
Nothing is more humbling than stumbling over your own words as you record yourself speaking them - very humbling indeed.  I'd like to thank everyone there for being so friendly, and so supportive and nice all around!
I'll be sure to post any relative links here on the blog when they become available.

Still.
Bizarre.

In other news I got invited to a podcast interview on May 22nd at www.BookRadioStation.com.
There will be a link of the interview available if you are unable to make the 3:45 am (PST) and 6:45 am (EST) live podcast.  I'm debating changing the name of my blog to 'Can't Interview That Early Without Coffee' - nah. Maybe not. ;)

ALSO, I just received a 5 Star Review from one of Amazon's Top Reviewers. YAY! Here's the link if you'd like to check that out.
http://www.amazon.com/review/R2UJCLI37SAB6T/ref=cm_cr_dp_title?ie=UTF8&ASIN=1937957365&nodeID=283155&store=books

The reviews are coming in - so I'll be sure to post those here and in the list of links in the left column under the covers of my books!
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As always, time to write is getting harder and harder - but there's always tomorrow and a fresh pot of Joe. So there's hope yet.

Drink up!

The Bookscape Report Review of "Shut Up" by Anne Tibbets

The first review is in!
And it's a good one...!

http://thebookscapereport.blogspot.com/2012/04/review-shut-up.html

Guest Post on The Book Mermaid Blog

Hi all!

I did a Guest Post on The Book Mermaid Blog about coping with teen angst, entitled, "Angst You."

Here's the link!

http://thebookmermaid.blogspot.com/2012/04/angst-you-by-anne-tibbets.html

SHUT UP Featured on Families Matter Blog

Aaaannddd thus the PR/Marketing campaign begins...

This is pretty cool!

Here's the link: http://familiesmatter2us.blogspot.com/2012/04/ya-book-on-depression-author-anne.html

Check it out!

Much Ado, Much Ado

Wow.  Just wow.  I had one of those days.  One of the good ones you hope and pray won't off-set the balance of the universe and cause the following day to suck.

For one - the Goodreads.com SHUT UP giveaway started!  There are already over 50 people signed up.  Here's the link if you want to get in on the action.

http://www.goodreads.com/giveaway/show/24596-shut-up

Another piece of good news?
It looks like SHUT UP will indeed be included in the audio library for Learning Ally, a non-profit center for children and adults with learning disabilities, like dyslexia, and who are blind.  Not only are they including SHUT UP in their library of over 70,000 + titles, but there will be 300,000 + people who will have access to it.  ***SQUEEEE***

AND - to top it off - they want ME to record my Acknowledgements and give a little video interview.  EEK!
I hope this pimple forming on the side of my nose goes away by then! :)

PLUS!
One of the review bloggers I contacted happens to also be one of the organizers for the Orange County Children's Book Festival of September, 2012 - and she and I have a call scheduled for tomorrow so I can either set up a booth, or have an author's corner, so I can sell and sign books to the thousands of people who attend.  YIKES!

This is incredible!
What a fabulous, fabulous, fabulous day.

AND -
I even got an hour of writing done on the rewrite I've been working on.

WHAT A DAY!

Dear Tomorrow,
Please don't suck.
Yours Truly,
Anne

New Website

When smart people give you advice - you'd be wise to take it.

The advice I heard yesterday?

Have your own website under your actual name.  A cutesy blog title will not cut it.
Oops.

Therefore, I stayed up last night and activated www.AnneTibbets.com and have even set up a temporary site until a dear friend and computer whiz sets me up in style.
It's good to have good friends.

And it's good to listen to them when they give you sage advice.

Here's the link if you'd like to check it out: www.AnneTibbets.com

The To Do List From Hell

I am drowning in things to do.
Much ado about possibilities...though nothing significant has happened yet.

1) I'm waiting to hear from a certain company (who shall remain nameless until everything is "approved" and plans are solidified) who records books into audio books.  I hope this comes to fruition, because other than being completely cool, it's also for a good cause.  More when finalized.

2) Contacting reviewers.  One of the, let's say, challenges of publishing through a small imprint is creating awareness of your book.  One way to accomplish that is to contact reviewers and bloggers and hand out copies of your book like it was Halloween candy, in the hopes that it will be received well, and written about frequently.  I've spent the last few days querying bloggers and reviewers up the wahzoo, and have a few that have agreed to read it already.  More when they post.

3) For the first time in my career, someone (that I did not already know!) has expressed interest in the movie rights to SHUT UP.  This does not mean it's going to happen - but the mere fact that somebody (that I didn't already know!) contacted me OUT OF THE BLUE and expressed interest is a new and extremely flattering, and exciting experience.  I would love nothing more than to see SHUT UP as a movie.  After more people have read it, I may even post my Dream Team Cast List, that every writer, whether they admit it or not, creates in their own mind.

4) Writing and revising.  Somewhere in the midst of all this emailing, researching, and more emailing, I am responsible for a rewrite on another project, and someplace in between all of the above aforementioned distactions, I am about half way done with the first draft of the rewrite - though I'm not sure where the energy is coming from.

5) I met today with the editor for THE BEAST REIGN, the sequel to Smashwords.com Best Selling YA Fantasy, THE BEAST CALL.  No news when or how this will land...but I have to do the rewrites and corrections on this too - and heaven only knows when I have time to get THAT done!

6) The paranormal mystery Work-in-Progress still haunts me! I had a dream about it the other night and it's KILLING ME that I don't have time to work on it right now.  But I have very valid and exciting reasons for distraction, so it's all good.

7) No sick kids allowed! Never mind the fact I am still nursing a serious head cold and one kid was kept home today with a low grade fever. Ack - I'm sorry you have a fever - but I just need to send this one emai- wha? You're hungry? **sigh**

8) My pool!  My poor, poor, ancient in-ground pool had a crack in it.  One of the many issues with living in earthquake territory.  So I have had workers, jackhammers, and all sorts of household distractions (like a dog that hasn't had a walk in a week!) to pull me away from what needs to be done.

9) Food.  If nobody in my family ate, I'd have much more time.  But there's all this cooking, and cleaning up afterwards, and then cooking again, and cleaning up afterwards - it consumes HOURS out of my day and I don't have hours to spare!
Really, I don't!

10) There is no #10, but it seemed silly to be so close and not have one.

Ok all, pardon me while I go back to the grind.
It's hard to know where to start!!

FREE Copies of SHUT UP to Bloggers

I have started the process of contacting book bloggers regarding reviews of SHUT UP.

If you are a book blogger, and would like a FREE paperback of SHUT UP, please email me at AnneTibbetsAuthor[at]gmail[dot]com and give me your address, and I will get it to you!

Those requesting electronic copies should email me as well, and include which format you need.

Spread the word!

Press Releases for SHUT UP by Anne Tibbets

Here's the link for the press release on SHUT UP.
Check it out!

http://www.free-press-release.com/news-author-uses-personal-experience-to-write-book-about-childhood-depression-1334718133.html

And here's another one!

http://www.i-newswire.com/author-uses-personal-experience/170254

And here's the third!

http://www.pr.com/press-release/406397

Dear Self, Your Readers are Not You

I don't think it's a secret to anyone that I've got two different versions of THE LINE floating around several different agencies, awaiting for literary agents to read it for consideration of representation.

I know it's an unwritten rule that a writer should not blog about the submission process while IN the submission process, so I plan of being a bit generic and vague in this post, please forgive me.

For one thing, I'm working on some revisions suggested by one of the agent's who had read it, and I'm learning quite a bit about myself, my process, my likes and dislikes, my weaknesses, and my strengths.

One thing I've noticed about myself is my hatred of conclusions.  I recently read THE SHINING by Stephen King, who is a GOD of FICTION, and yet, I still found myself skimming the last fifty pages because I wanted to get to the end and find out what happened.  I even knew the ending (!), having read it before as a teenager, and yet I STILL... (flip, flip, flip - backstory, description, don't care, don't care, AH, here we go, something is HAPPENING! Oh goody, dialogue, let's re-start here!).  And I do the same thing in my own work.  Things near the end happen fast!  So fast, that the reader might not even be ready for what comes next.

I HATE slow endings.  I hate reading slow endings, but to everyone else in the universe who knows anything about quality work, it's not a slow ending - it's just an ending.  I need to stop throwing my issues with "boring" endings into my work, because it's starting to work against me.

Dear Self,
It's not slow, it's just not lightning speed.  Deal.

Secondly, internal dialogue.  If you read a lot, or are a writer, you know what this is...This is the characters thoughts and feelings that are described on the page.  In playwriting, where I first learned my craft, internal dialogue is 99% implied.  You read the dialogue, you critique the scene, you break it down, then you figure out what the character REALLY meant when they said, 'yada, yada, yada.'  It doesn't work that way in fiction.  In fiction, particularly in YA, you have to kind of spell it out because nobody goes back, critiques a scene and then takes the time to interpret what the character is really feeling when they said, 'yada, yada, yada.'  They read, and move on.  Read, and move on.  You kinda have to spoon feed them, giving them just enough without giving them so much that they choke.  Make sense?  I intellectually know this in my core, but apparently old habits die hard, because nobody else but playwrites read dialogue the same way I do.  I just assume everybody gets the implication of the line, but in truth, they don't.

Dear Self,
Spell it out, Anne.  Spell it out.

Thirdly, there's world building.  Particularly in Fantasy, Sci-Fi or Dystopian, this is critically important.  If the reader doesn't understand how the world works, what it looks like, and feels as if they are transported to another world, it's not going to jive, or hold any depth of meaning for the reader.  AGAIN - this is a flaw of mine, and I can pinpoint the origin in the same location.  Playwriting.

SCENE: Anne's office.
(Messy.  Cluttered papers.  3x5 cards on the wall with vague plot points held up with scotch tape.  A dying plant.)

In a play, that's it. That's all you get!  The rest is for the set designer and art director to fill in the blanks.  But nobody is reading a book and analyzing why Anne's plant is dying (ie. she's not good with living things as much as she is with the written word), or why she has vague plot points held up with scotch tape (ie. she's worried about the paint, and finds that too much detail on a 3x5 card is too limiting).  The reader just sees the mess and keeps reading, sometimes missing the point of what the setting is, if it's not explained in detail.

My fault again for assuming every reader must be just like me, reading what's in between the lines, when they're not - or the between lines are ones only I can see!  And I'm not saying my way is the best way, because obviously, it's not - otherwise I'd be repped by a lit agent already.

Dear Self,
You have to explain why things ARE the way they ARE - other people care about this and are not like you, who would read the first paragraph of description, get bored, and skip over the rest.

Writing, for me, is a constant lesson on how to improve myself and my craft.  I'm forever analyzing.  Which can obviously, work against me at times.  I'm hoping by correcting these particular points some of the agents will take interest in my work.

You know how everyone advises writers to "write for themselves."
Yeah.
That's not exactly working for me.  Because apparently, I'm weird.

Comments on SHUT UP

Twelve-year-old Mary is running away from home.  She's sick of her school, her friends, and her family, especially her big sister, Gwen.  But this is not just the story of a girl with a case of adolescent angst.  It is all of us who ever experienced the fear of what fresh hell the next hour will bring, deep hatred of ourselves, despair, and the very real possibility that we will spend the rest of our lives with echoes of "You're stupid, you're ugly, shut up!" haunting our hearts, minds and spirits.  There is physical violence and there is the hidden violence that poisons families and corrupts the soul and is as much a danger to a human life as any weapon of destruction. 

     Anne Tibbets tells a fast-paced, page-turning suspense story about this kind of violence, and it has you rooting for Mary from the opening page.  Shut Up is one of the most vivid and absorbing stories I've ever read about the torments of the adolescent heart and the dangers of navigating those years.

– Christine Wiltz, author of The Last Madam and Glass House.

Announcements!!!

Now available in paperback! My new YA contemporary SHUT UP.

http://www.amazon.com/Shut-Up-Anne-Tibbets/dp/1937957365/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1334540129&sr=8-1

ALSO -

Smashwords.com Best Seller THE BEAST CALL - now available as a paperback!

http://www.amazon.com/The-Beast-Call-Anne-Tibbets/dp/1937957357/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1334540396&sr=8-1

MIA

I'm going MIA for the next week.
No writing.
No work.
No nothing.

I need a brain cleanse.
I'll be back to work in seven days.

Try not to have withdrawals. ;)

The Hand That Feeds You...

They say writing is re-writing.  Which is, by the way, completely true.  Most of a writer's life is spent re-writing, and the actual writing part usually only takes place during the first draft and outline stages of a book.  The rest of your time is spent trying to figure out how to rewrite the first draft (and second, and third) to make it the best it can be, and then changing it to suit what your "people" (ie. agents, editors, etc.) think will make it better.  It's all good! In my opinion, if you have the right people, your work, will  indeed, improve with all this re-writing.

I don't dislike re-writing - in fact, I rather enjoy it, but there comes a certain point when you become so used to reading your work a particular way, that when notes and critiques are given, the necessary changes may be hard to see.

Being objective about my work has ALWAYS been the hard part for me, because I understand perfectly well WHY the characters reacted the way they did, or WHY the plot twists that certain direction.  It makes perfect sense to me!  So, when I get a note that would change one of these choices that I have purposefully made, I can see why some writers may resist.

An agent recently told me that after reading some writers work, and the agent sends a critique of said work, explaining either why she didn't like it, or why she did, and what could make it better, that the writers become quite defensive and resistant and sometimes, outright hostile in the face of criticism.

Here's my open letter to them:
DUDE! If you think it's hard getting a critique from an agent or an editor, a human being who actually reads and sells and critiques books for a living, try reading some of the critiques from people who don't do that for a living, (ie. GoodReads.com) and THEN tell me what the agent or editor said is not valid.  They are only trying to HELP you!  If you don't listen, your book will either a) never get represented, b) never get sold to a publisher, c) get really really bad reviews, d) won't sell.  This is the harsh truth, Mr. and Ms. Writer.  You have to listen to the "people" trying to help you...And why?  Because you are not objective about your own work.  It's a fact!  So listen to the smart people, take their advice, and be thankful, and gracious, and shut up and smile.
The End.

I just don't get people sometimes...

10,000 Page Views!

WOOT!

I have the best fans ever!
Thanks to all who helped today!
You're the best!

SHUT UP by Anne Tibbets

AVAILABLE ON AMAZON.COM in PAPERBACK, AND ON ALL E-READER DEVICES
VIA PREMIER DIGITAL PUBLISHING

SHUT UP
 YA Contemporary Novella

Mary's older sister, Gwen, has royally screwed up her life.  Not only is Gwen pregnant at seventeen, but she's also decided to marry The Creep who knocked her up.
Now Mary is powerless to stop her family from imploding.  Her parents are freaking out, and to top it off The Creep has a gross fascination with Mary while Gwen enjoys teasing her to tears for sport.
Despite her brother's advice to shut up, Mary can't keep her trap closed and manages to piss off Mom so much it comes to blows.
Mary doesn't know what to do, and all her attempts to get help are rejected.  When she finally plans her escape, she fails to consider how it could destroy them all.

SHUT UP in Paperback

SHUT UP on iBooks

SHUT UP on Kindle

SHUT UP on Nook and NookColor

Race to 10,000 Hits

Hi folks!  I'm a writer of young adult books and I'm thanking you for helping to fulfill a personal goal of mine, which is to reach 10,000 hits on my blog!

THANKS!

Links to my books on the left! ;) 

Where's the Carpool Lane? Can I Speed this Up?

Only 1,700 words written today, but for good reason.  I had to write a scene where my heroine goes to the library to research old periodicals (sounds exciting, eh?) and I had to do a bit of research, because sadly - most of my personal research is via Dr. Google, and I have not used microfilm since college.  Terrible! I am ashamed!  But by the time I got to that part of the work, I realized I had to pick up my kids from school, so my trip to the city library to research what it's like to do research (huh?) will have to wait until school hours tomorrow.  So I wrote the skeleton of the scene, and left the guts out for filling in later.  The good news is, I'm trucking along.  But, I'm also hitting that dreaded "middle" section of the book when I always slooooww waaaaayyyy dooowwwwnnn - and I'm trying desperately not to fall victim to my familiar traps.

In the meantime, trucking...

Rolling, Rolling, Rolling...

Okay, maybe I'm dating myself, but there's an old western song from an old, old, old, (did I mention it was old?) TV show (and possibly even before that) called 'Rawhide.'

Rollin, rollin', rollin'
Keep them doggies rollin'...

Anyway, when I think about my progress today, that's what comes to mind.

I made the critical error of reading a bit of what I'd written on Friday, very late last night, and before I knew it, it was after midnight, and I wasn't even done polishing.

Big no no.

Not only was I so zombified today I barely passed as awake, but my brain was a pile of doo doo.  Two cups of coffee, a full lunch complete with half a chicken breast and rice (hello protein and carb hit!) and then a desperate Diet Coke at 3 pm, and I was still dead - then I gave up trying to write, read for a half hour, and BOOM - dropped 2,500 words without breaking a sweat.

I have to say, this first draft is proving to be fun, and easy - so far.
I hope it lasts.  I'm at 16,000 words so far, and considering I just started last week, this is huge.

But, for now, I'm just going to suck down my 3rd cup of coffee (ok, maybe a half cup because it's late) and feed my kids dinner so I can pass out on the couch at 8.

Zzzzzzz.