Catching up. Much, much catching up.

I confess, I have been derelict in my reading. All writers must read, and read a lot, both in and out of their genre. I've seen a lot of New Year's resolutions about reading outside your comfort zone and I think it's a great idea. I'm a firm believer that if a book is well-written, I want to read it, regardless of what category it falls into.

The holidays afforded me a few chances to read, mostly because I had a cold and didn't feel up to doing anything I was supposed to do. Then, of course, there were the two days I spent prepping for and undergoing a colonoscopy. 

I got a lot of reading done.

Here are my recommendations for anyone looking for a good 2015 story. Full disclosure here: these authors are my friends, but I only recommend books I like. The writing is good. You'll love them.

1. THE STONES OF KALDAAR by Tameri Etherton (click for Amazon link)
A fantasy that will take you to a fabulous new world, populated by a cast of characters who are engaging, intriguing, and keep you guessing as to their deepest motivations. The main character is everything Tameri promises - a kickass heroine struggling to do what's right. And of course there is a handsome rogue to steal her heart. Yes, it is Part 1 of a Trilogy, but I promise you the ending is satisfying enough to keep you filled until the next book comes out.

2. IDENTITY ISSUES by Claudia Whitsitt (click for Amazon link)
Samantha Stitsill is a familiar woman to us all. Life for her is a constant juggling act, of marriage and family and friends and career. She is also a bulldog when it comes to a mystery and won't stop until she has answers. There are also three books to this series, and you can bet I'll be reading them all!

3. SHIMMY FOR ME by DeAnna Cameron (click for Amazon link)
This is a novella, about a part-time administrative assistant, part-time belly dance studio owner who has a one-night stand with a smokin' hot guy, then finds out he may not have been the best choice to scratch her itch. The only way I can describe this story is delicious. Just read it. You won't regret it.

Anyone have any recommendations for me?

Oh what a tangled website we weave

You need a website.

If you are a writer, an artist, or a business owner, this has become a physical law. I was given this pearl of wisdom years ago, perhaps in the Jurassic Era, when I was just starting out, writing articles for Riding Magazine.

So I went looking for a website tool, and found one where my email account was - on Yahoo. They had something called PageBuilder, which was pretty easy to use, and more importantly, pretty easy to update.

I confess, I'm a tweaker. Just as I like to tweak my manuscripts before I send them out to agents/publishers, I also like to tweak my website as I think of cooler things to do with it. So I built my site with PageBuilder and played with it constantly, until...

Yahoo came out with a new, improved tool called SiteBuilder and stopped supporting PageBuilder. This meant, if I wanted to continue to fiddle around in my webpages, I had to convert to SiteBuilder, which was only a little less complicated than converting to, say, Islam.

Still, once I learned SiteBuilder, it was again easy to manipulate and I was happy in my playground, until...

Yahoo came out with a new, improved tool and stopped supporting SiteBuilder. You'll notice I'm not naming this tool, mostly because at that point, I snapped and refused to rehost anything to a new platform. I dug in my heels and continued to play in SiteBuilder, even though I had to reinstall it every time I wanted to edit anything, which is at least once a week, due to updating my newspaper column pages. I still enjoyed SiteBuilder, but I constantly worried about the day when I couldn't make it work anymore and my website was frozen forever, just like that face I used to make that Mom warned me about.

Enter Jeremy Lee James, riding to my rescue on Write Click Web Hosting. I've known Jeremy for a long time, from the Southern California Writer's Conferences, and knew he was a webmaster extraordinaire. I also knew 1) he charged, quite rightly, a fee for designing a website, and 2) I needed more control of my website than he might be able to grant me.

However, Jeremy's newest invention, Write Click Web Hosting, allows a user to create their own site using Wordpress. Now, you can do this yourself by just going to Wordpress, but he gives your website a more hack-proof security system and provides daily backups, all for a small monthly fee. Yahoo was already charging me a small monthly fee for all the work I was doing for them, so I thought I'd try it out.

Working with Jeremy was a very good experience, in that he was ever-so-patient with my occasional lapses into idiocy. He has a bunch of video tutorials explaining how to do things, and I'd kind of watch them, then try things on my own and screw up. It's how I roll. Jeremy was always on the other end of an email, explaining calmly how to back myself out of the latest mess.

Things were smooth until we got to the part where I'm almost ready to go online with the new site. I had pared down my pages, cleaned things up, but my new site looks very similar to my old site. Here's the thing: Jeremy is a very elegant, classy guy who thinks that websites should look elegant and classy. And mostly, I think he's right. So when he sent me the email saying, geez, did I really want my new website to look so much like my old one, meaning kinda goofy and casual and distinctly NOT elegant, my first response was, wow, maybe not...

Then I looked in the mirror and said, "Who are we kidding?"

I explained to him that, while I agree in theory, in practice I am not elegant. I am a humor writer, even in my mysteries. I need to be a little goofy and irreverent and casual. My website needs to reflect that sense of whimsy.

God love him, he understood my point, and agreed.

My new website is now up (http://gaylecarline.com) and ready to be picked apart by the rest of the world. I'm always looking for comments as to how I can make it better, so don't just placate me with kindness. But don't slap me, either.

I'm going to end this post with links to websites of a few of the many authors I like, so you can see how their sites support their genres.

Andrew Peterson - thriller writer. His site points you exactly where you need to be at all times, kind of like you're the sniper's bullet.

Michele Scott - mysteries, women's lit, let's just say multi-genre. Her website is being redone, but even the temporary page gives you an idea of who she is.

Alexandra Sokoloff - horror, suspense, paranormal, creepy (her books, not her). You know you're not getting "light and fluffy" when you click on this link.

Christina Dodd - romance. Okay, I've never read a single thing she's written, but I love this website. I want to live there. Don't kvetch at me, I'm not a romance reader, unless you count DeAnna Cameron's The Belly Dancer, which is mostly historical fiction and really cool.

**OH, and for the record, I am NOT being paid or recompensed in ANY way for recommending Write Click Web Hosting. It's just something I'm using with a great deal of satisfaction. And none of the authors mentioned have ever done a darn thing for me in exchange for mentioning their books and websites. I'm just a giver.

Does the shoe fit?

Before you read today's post, go to Murderati and read Toni McGee Causey's post, about trying to do things in our lives that don't fit our fundamental natures. By the way, if you write, and especially if you write mysteries, you should be tuning into the Murderati blog every day. It's a great group of authors with interesting things to say.

Today, Toni is describing a meeting with her friend who has become a vegan and looks great; Toni wonders if it's just that easy, but in the end decides it's not who she is. Being a vegan doesn't "fit" her.

This started me thinking about characters, on the stage, screen and page, and how we complain when they are not real, not fully dimensional human beings. In other words, they do/say things that don't "fit" them. I struggle in my own writing, between trying to make a character do and say the things I need for the plot and keeping them true to the personality I've given them. I'm afraid, if I take a misstep, readers will call me on it. Mean readers.

This is possibly why Peri is 50 years old and not 30. In my youth, I tried on a lot of things that didn't fit me - scuba diving, skiing, marriages to the wrong men. By my late forties, I was finally wise enough to decline suggestions to go skydiving and river rafting, because I knew what I liked, and neither tossing myself from an airplane nor being tossed into white water did it for me. At 50, Peri knows what fits her. She likes running and old movies and her independence… although life does intervene to make her question her choices.

By juxtaposition, I'd like you to take a look at a book I just read, The Belly Dancer by DeAnna Cameron. I don't normally read romances, but not only is DeAnna a friend of mine, the cover and jacket blurb was so intriguing that I had to have a copy. Her protagonist is a young girl, a new wife, who is desperate to join the elite Victorian society of Chicago. But what she thinks she wants doesn't fit her. I liked the story, even when I wanted to shake Dora by the shoulders and tell her to stay away from those awful society women. The story rings true, even while the character is being false (to herself). BTW, good job, DeAnna!

I'd love to hear your thoughts on the subject. Do you prefer a main character who is still trying to figure out what they want in life and is tossed about by the storyline, or do you want your protagonist to be the stable one in the story, the person you can count on when everything else seems to be falling apart?

Perhaps some of you can even extend this discussion on your own blogs… we'll make a chain post!

The Butterfly effect, Part 2

Can we be frank? I've gotten a Butterfly Award and two Premio Dardos ("Prize Darts") Awards, and when I look around to see who to pass them on to, I see that everyone I read is getting multiple Butterflies and Darts. Are we supposed to be passing them around within the group to build interest in each other's blogs somehow, or are we supposed to be cross-pollinating, introducing ourselves to new people?

Seriously, I can't tell.

So here's what I'm going to do: First, I'm going to try to insert that pretty Butterfly picture into this post. Pray for me - here goes nothing -

See anything? Me neither. Damn.

Never mind, let's go to the next step. If I read every interesting blog out there, I'd never eat, sleep or write, and forget riding my horses. But here's who I read regularly: The Life of a Publisher, A Newbie's Guide to Publishing, Alexandra Sokoloff, Morgan Mandel, Writely So, and Write First Clean Later. These lovely people have been showered with blog awards from myself and others. Please keep visiting them, and comment often. We all get lonely.

Here are some blogs I've recently discovered by looking at Blogger's "Blogs of Note". I don't know if they need any more followers, and they're not all about writing, BUT they are either pretty, or fascinating, or helpful in some way. Check them out if you've got the time and the inkling:

Book Flap (indy bookstore in Menlo Park, CA)

The One-Minute Writer (quick writing prompts to get your fingers and brain moving)

The Book Design Review (reviews/discussions about book covers - fascinating)

Editorial Anonymous (real-life lessons on what not to do)

Query Shark (same as E.A. for query letters)

Detectives Beyond Borders (international crime)

Poem of the Week (well, yea, what it sounds like)

Cheerful Scoop (good news when you need it)

Synch-ro-ni-zing (beautiful photos)

If It's Hip It's Here (cutting edge products - this was giving me story ideas)

I'll try to alert these folks to their Butterflies, but mostly I just want to spread the seeds of information around and keep us all from inbreeding ideas. Enjoy.

Now that I've spread my Butterfly's wings - have I had any effect on the atmosphere?>