Bucket List Item Long Overdue-Christmas Novella

People have strange items on their bucket lists. I'm not talking about the "travel the world" or the "skydive." I mean, "write a Christmas novella."

Yes. That was an item on my bucket list. And I can now check it off.

This item was added to my list a few years ago. If one would go back through the archives of this blog, they would see that for many years, I challenged myself to read a certain number of Christmas books in the month of December. I haven't done it in a number of years, but I still remember how much I enjoyed reading Christmas stories.

This year I decided that instead of reading Christmas books, I would publish one. I enjoyed writing The Perfect Christmas Gift as much as I like reading Christmas fiction. It provided a good challenge to write short. It also, I think, made me a better writer.

It took a number of years for my life to line up with this dream of mine and I think that is an important lesson. No matter how much we want or plan to do the things on our bucket lists, some of them will only fit in certain seasons in our lives. Some require a little patience.

As you look at your bucket list, know that if you haven't kicked the bucket, then you still have time.

Stoking my Fire...Kindle Fire, that is

I got a Kindle Fire for Christmas.

Did I need one?

No.

Did I know how much I wanted one?

Not until I opened the box.

Did I realize how perfect it was for me?

I do now.

I had been eyeballing the Fire since it was launched, but every time I saw it, I quickly talked myself out of getting one. I didn’t need one. I have a Kindle (the one with the keyboard) and it works perfectly fine. I have a 4G smartphone with apps. I have an iPod and a MacBook Pro. Despite all this, my Fire fits perfectly into my life. I didn’t need another gadget, but through a happy accident, I found myself owning one. I’m completely in love.

Since I’m in love, I make sure my Fire is always near. I have been on a quest to find as many ways as possible to use my Fire. So for those who love you’re Kindle Fire as much as I do, here are some neat things I’ve found to do with mine.

• Music. I always have music going. Turning on the tunes is one of the first things I do in the morning. The Kindle Fire has decent sounding speakers and it also has an earphone jack. The lovely thing about the music feature is I can play music straight from my Amazon cloud when I’m on a wireless network.  I can also download my favorite MP3s to my Kindle

• Text-to-Speech. I’ve learned two cool things to do with Text-to-Speech. The first, which I can’t take credit for, is to turn the volume down on Text-to-Speech and knit while I’m reading the book. The pages turn automatically and I don’t have to put my knitting down (Thanks, Jan). The second is to send my latest writing project to my Fire and let the Text-to-Speech feature read it to me. This is a great trick if you have problems catching your mistakes in your writing. The old Kindle didn’t have this capability.

• Magazines. My library systems allows us to download digital version of many popular magazines, like The Writer and Poets & Writers, to a Kindle app called Zinio. I’m even more convinced that my library is the best use of my county texts ever! I also subscribed to Writer’s Digest through Amazon and the subscription includes a Kindle version. Sweet.

• Bible App. This one comes in handy when I’m teaching Sunday school. Not only do I have multiple version of the Bible at my fingertips, it also keeps track of the time, which is a bonus because the clock in my Sunday school classroom is a little wonky.

• Docs. As stated above, I can send my writing WIPs to my documents, but I can also send the patterns for my knitting WIPs to my Fire. It’s very convenient for carrying multiple patterns in the same way it carries multiple books. I don’t have to carry around paper patterns anymore and I don’t have to worry about what project I grab when I’m on the go. I have them all in my Fire. 

Help me make my Kindle Fire even more useful. What are some great uses for a Kindle Fire that you’ve discovered?

Free Thanksgiving Fiction and a Cyber Monday Sale

Thanksgiving is this week (I know, I can't believe it either). As a thanks to all of you, I'm offering a free Thanksgiving e-book, By Any Means. It's available on Smashwords and Goodreads, and Lord willing, it will be on Amazon before Thanksgiving (but I doubt it.) Enjoy!

Here is a great Cyber Monday deal. I am putting Love Simplified on sale. Get $1 off both the e-book and the paperback on Cyber Monday. It only lasts one day (or until Amazon updates their website). Books always make great gifts. Get one for the reader on your Christmas list...and get one for yourself, too.

Keywords and Smut

It’s been one week since my novel, Love Simplified, went live on Amazon Kindle. To all the kind souls who bought a copy, you should have a notification that the file has been updated. Why, ask? I had to update my keywords.

For those who don’t know about the Amazon Kindle Direct Publishing process, a part of uploading your novel is entering in up to seven keywords. Keywords are very similar to tags. They make it easier for people to search for my novel on Amazon.

Or they make put you in bad company.

When I first uploaded my novel, I didn’t use all seven of my keywords. I only used, in this order: Christian fiction, African American (my protagonist is African-American), reality TV, relationships and romance. I thought I had picked good keywords…until I saw the other books with those same keywords. Well, one keyword in particular.

Apparently, African American fiction is synonymous with smut. I am not a shy person and I don’t embarrass easily, but some of the other books with that keyword made me blush. And the covers! Oh, my. I really wish Amazon had a feature that filtered cover art. Call me sheltered, but I don’t want to see anything that makes me want to wash my eyes out with bleach.

And there was my baby, mixed in with all the smut. As soon as I realized it (last Friday night), I went in and changed my keywords. As much as I hate to admit it, I had to take the African American out. That seemed to be the culprit.  I did, however, try a new keyword: interracial relationships (there is a mixed couple in the book).

And that made it worse. I found my novel buried seven pages deep in more smut…now just interracial smut. So I went in and changed it again. No African American, no interracial, just Christian fiction, romance, relationships, dating, and reality TV. I have two more keywords I can enter, but I’m afraid.

The African American/smut connection makes me very sad. I would love to see some redemption come to that genre. I would love to read books with African American characters that aren’t half naked, crackheads, drugdealers or pastors sleeping with the members of his congregation. But that is for another post.

For now, I’ve changed my keywords and hopefully have escaped my bad company.