Tag Archives: Julia Tagliere

“It’s a Woman’s World” with Betty Liedtke and Dara Beevas

Sandy Hook[Below is what I had planned to post originally, prior to December 14th. It seems insensitive somehow for me to just post it and not pay my respects to those who lost their lives so tragically last week. So please, join me for just a moment, in a thoughtful moment of silence. RIP, little angels, you and your valiant protectors.

Thank you.]

I know, I know–another short post. You may be asking yourself, “What’s wrong with Julia? Is she sick?”

No, I’m not. It’s the holidays, and family is taking the front seat right now, as it should. So instead of a long post, I want to share with you instead the long-awaited, much-anticipated video of my most recent appearance on the “It’s A Woman’s World” show with two amazing and inspiring fellow writers, Betty Liedtke and Dara Beevas. If these two women don’t make you want to jump up and write RIGHT THIS MINUTE–well, don’t quit your day job just yet.

Enjoy!

How to Creatively Market Your E-Book [Interview with Wise, Ink]

wise inkHappy Monday, everyone!

I will get back to recapping 2012 here later this week, but today, I’m so excited to share with you an interview I did for the outstanding Wise, Ink blog, with Beaver’s Pond Press’ Dara Beevas, author of The Indie Author RevolutionWe had a marvelous chat via Skype about ways to market E-Books and had a lot of fun and laughs. The audio’s a little uneven, but Dara did an excellent recap in the accompanying post. Enjoy!

 

 

Widow Woman Trailer (New Version)


I hate being a perfectionist. I’d be so much better adjusted if I could just let things go at “good enough.” Sigh. I know, I know, I wrote that post last week about mistakes, etc., but that doesn’t mean that they don’t keep me awake at night once I discover them. And yes, I did spend an hour this morning combing through the original Word file for Widow Woman, looking for more goblins to torment both my waking and sleeping hours. Argh!

But this, at least, I think is better. The audio seems a little smoother, though it still suffers in the conversion and upload process (not tech-savvy enough to know how to fix that). There is a tiny bit of new content, too; let me know what you think.

Because I’m done. I swear, this time, I’m done.

2012: A Recap

58600_hourglassIt’s officially December now, so it’s safe to start playing Christmas music (although please, not the depressing variety), putting up decorations, and indulging in the traditional, alternately depressing-yet-satisfying hindsight-is-20/20 look back over the year about to end (and maybe the world, if you believe those Mayans).

So grab that mug of eggnog, cozy up in front of the fireplace, and enjoy a look back with me over 2012: It’s been a hell of a ride.

[The following post first appeared January 5, 2012.]

I confess: I’m a technophobe.

Or, perhaps more accurately, I’m techno-resistant, which frustrates my geek husband to no end, poor thing. Up until roughly three years ago, I’d never sent a text, I still did all of my writing longhand on legal pads, and I had no idea how to use a GPS. All right, I still don’t know how to use a GPS.

I used to resist out of fear that I would irreparably harm whatever gadget happened to be at hand by pressing the wrong button, because, as we all know, modern technology always comes with a well-camouflaged but easily-activated self-destruct button.

Now, however, I think I resist because even though, on a rational level, I know there are faster, easier (and cooler) ways to accomplish my goals through the skillful use of technology, spending the time to learn those skills really irritates the crap out of me. And then, by the time I’ve learned them, the technology has already morphed into yet another version, which I then have to learn all over again. I don’t want my phone to do 800 different things; I just want it to make my call, for cryin’ out loud.

Yeah. Not a geek. But I know I need to catch up with the rest of the 21st century, so I am trying, even if I’m ridiculously slow to adopt, which brings me to the subject of today’s post, my recent introduction to the Search and Refine feature in Word as an editing tool.

All right, all of you out there laughing at how backwards I am: off with you! I’m speaking to my people now, those who still fight the persistent fear that they can make their laptops explode just by pressing Ctrl + Alt + Delete one too many times. (You can’t, by the way. I checked it out.)

As you may remember from my last post, I recently started working with an editor, hereafter referred to as “C.” Just like “Q.” and “M.” in the Bond movies, she’s fun to work with but she uses fewer pyrotechnics. C. is helping me prepare my manuscript for publication this year. When I first met with her last spring, she recommended I read the book Write in Style, by Bobbie Christmas. I gamely purchased a copy, read the subtitle, “Using Your Word Processor and Other Techniques to Improve Your Writing,” and promptly buried the book under a stack of files on my desk. Word processor. Harumph.

The book remained buried until I sent C. my first 5 chapters. She inquired if I had used the Search and Replace feature on my manuscript yet, (referred to in said book). Of course I hadn’t; that would’ve involved learning what those other buttons on “the ribbon” do. [Who names these things, anyway?]

C., who probably had me pegged from the start as a techno-resistant arse, appealed to my practical side instead. She suggested that if I used that technique before having her make her first editing pass, it would save me money, since I wouldn’t be paying her to make all those refinements. Moved by her gesture of self-sacrifice, I plugged my nose and decided to give it a shot.

C. provided me with a list of overly used words that she regularly sees in her work, and I set out to search the first 5 chapters of my manuscript for those awful offenders. I was skeptical (after all, my work is perfect as is), but as I searched, and discovered, offender after offender, my attitude soon changed.

I found instance after instance of those pesky little words—words like “only,” “just,” and, the mother of all offenders with 224 appearances, “so.” In all fairness to me, however, the search did turn up “so” not only when it stood alone, but also when it appeared within other words and expressions, like “masochist,” “sophist,” and “son of a b—.”

My reactions as I searched and replaced veered from “Holy cow, what was I thinking when I wrote that?” to “What was I drinking then?” and, on at least one occasion, “Clearly, I wasn’t drinking enough!”

When I finally finished the process (and keep in mind, this was just the first 5 chapters), I was broken, a shell of my smug former self—and a true convert. When I read back over those 5 chapters, the difference shocked me. It wasn’t just better; it was radically, drastically better, and I felt like an idiot for not having used the feature sooner.

Thank you, Peanut Gallery, for not providing confirmation.

My point to all of this?  I have learned that technology is not the enemy.

Wait. No, I still kind of think that.

How about…the enemy and I have called a truce? My fellow techno-resistant lambs, if you don’t yet use the Search and Refine feature in your writing and editing, it’s a superb tool for showing you where every little weakness in your work is hiding. It can’t fix them for you, you still have to put in that work yourself, but it pinpoints them in a fast, easy way that makes the revision process so efficient, you wonder (as with most technology), how you survived before you discovered it.

So thanks, C., for the suggestion—I’m setting off on my next Search and Refine mission now with the next 5 chapters, and feeling like a Lean, Mean, Writing Machine.

Oh, wait—you’re right, I did gain some weight over the holiday. Guess I’ll have to settle for Mean Writing Machine now instead.

Things That Make You Go Argh!

Let’s talk about mistakes today. We all make them. No matter how we might try to convince ourselves, or those around us, of the contrary, every single man, woman, and child on this blessed planet has made, is possibly making at this moment, and will continue to make, mistakes. Some are big; some are small. Some are stupid; some are careless. Some arise from haste; some arise from a surplus of trust. But we all make them. The difference in how a mistake affects us, however, is determined largely by how we handle it.

One of my favorite mistake-handling moments comes from The Lion King’s Rafiki, bludgeoning Simba with his staff to illustrate his personal take on mistakes (the clip talks about the past, but you get the point): We can either run from mistakes—wham!—or we can learn from them. Lesson: Get hit hard enough, you learn how to duck.

I’ll repeat that, in case you missed it:

Don’t run from your mistakes; learn from them.

Owning up to making a mistake is a tough thing to do. That’s why so many of us tend to run away instead, try to hide the fact that we goofed up, did something wrong. We blame others—any available scapegoat we can find to avoid shouldering that blame ourselves. All too often, the only thing all that responsibility-dodging does is make matters exponentially worse than they would’ve been if we would’ve just admitted to having screwed up, right from the start.

Don’t believe me? Think about the last five or six political scandals—how much more would you have respected those individuals if they would’ve just come clean at the start, said, “Hey, I really messed up. I don’t know what I was thinking, but whatever it was, it was stupid. I am sorry I did it, and I will take the full consequences of my actions.” Wow, politicians behaving honorably in the face of a jumbo, career-destroying screw-up? Yeah, I know—you can tell I write fiction, can’t you?

Well, I’m not a politician. I’m a human being, just like everybody else on the planet, prone to mistakes and missteps. I do try to learn from them, though, to take setbacks and turn them into learning opportunities. Even if the learning took place too late to help me, at least I can use that knowledge to help other people avoid making the same mistakes.

The roughly two weeks since the launch party for Widow Woman have been full of excitement, revelations, and, to be frank, mistakes. There aren’t many things I feel I would do differently, but there are a few. Publishing a book is a crazy, tough journey, and I know that the days and months ahead are going to bring more revelations and probably uncover more mistakes I made. But I’m only human, I’m learning as I go along, and I will happily share those lessons with others out there hoping for a smoother ride.

In the meantime, let me pass along something my wonderful husband shared with me when I bumped face-to-face into one of those mistakes (Errors in my book; fixes on the horizon, but not there yet. Ouch, ouch, ouch. Mine to catch and I missed them.). Without skipping a beat, he reminded me that one of the identifying features that makes a first edition of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby so priceless is the presence of mistakes that were corrected in subsequent editions.

Yeah, that’s right. Those first editions are valuable because the mistakes are there.

Now, I would never, ever, ever, put myself in the same class as Fitzgerald, but I have to admit, I found the notion that we had first-edition mistakes in common extraordinarily comforting.

After all, we’re all first editions, aren’t we?