A brief interlude and long post while I try to catch up

 Hi, there! Long time no post, eh?

My apologies. For being enormously busy, I've felt like there wasn't much for me to talk about, until now. So let's get down to it...what's happening?

This Saturday, I'm having a Very Peri Sale online. That's right, my Peri Minneopa Mysteries are on sale. The first book in the series, Freezer Burn, is yours to grab for free. The other four books (yes, ALL FOUR) are 99 cents apiece. Five books for $3.96! I'm pretty sure you can't order anything from Starbucks for under $4, unless it's a coffee, plain and tall.

But that's not all in the online world...

I'm performing an experiment with IngramSpark. I'm packaging all of the Dragon Shadows Trilogy as one e-book, PLUS adding a bonus short story with it, for $7.99. I know what you're thinking. Those books are currently 99 cents on Amazon for Kindle. Why would anyone pay almost $8 for all three, even if there is an exclusive short story included?

I'm going to tell you a secret: I'm planning to raise the Amazon prices. That 99-cent-deal was to try to hook as many readers and get as many online "deals of the day" as I could. Now it's time to up the price and charge what they're worth.

The plan is to release the trilogy on May 16, but we'll see if I get the short story completed.

Here in the physical realm, things are happening, too.

On Friday, May 19th, I will be the breakfast speaker at the California Federation of Women's Clubs Convention, being held at the Doubletree by Hilton by the OC Airport. I'm honing my speech (in my head) every 20 minutes or so. I hardly ever speak from notes--I find that even when I write them all out, I don't look down at them.

Once I am finished speaking and selling books, I hop in my car, pick up my horse trainer and drive to Scottsdale, AZ where I compete at the AQHA Level 1 West Championships. Dhani will already be there. We get there on Friday, ride Saturday, drive home on Sunday. This gives me about a half-a-day to prepare my house for my guests to arrive and spend a week going to Disneyland. They will be here from Monday until Saturday, where the hubby will take them to the airport because I'll be...

In Yorba Linda, at the Expressions event. Music, a food truck, and vendors--and I'm the only author. I usually sell anywhere from 12 to 24 books in this 4-hour block of time. Why do you need to buy your paperback directly from me? Because I discount it and autograph it. There, you have no more arguments.

But I'm not done. In June, I'm at the Placentia Shop Small Boutique at the Placentia Round Table Women's Club. I did this event in December, had a lot of fun, and sold a lot of books. I'm looking forward to it!

If all that sounds busy, it is. I have lists of lists, to check off what to do on what day to keep me organized for each thing. In the meantime, there's been one extra item added to my calendar:

I have to get a biopsy.

I've had dots in my left breast for a couple of years now. The doctors monitor them every 6 months. At my last mammogram, the tech said if they still haven't grown, I can go back to yearly mammograms. She left the room to consult with the radiologist.

You know it's not good when the radiologist follows her back into your exam room. My dots had grown.

There's a large probability that they are benign. If they are not, there's a 99.99% probability that it's completely curable. I'm currently waiting for them to call and schedule the biopsy which doesn't sound like fun but they promise me will be "almost" painless. I do wish one of the shots they'll give me is bourbon. I feel like I have Schrodinger's breast. Until the biopsy is done and results are in, I have cancer and I don't have cancer. No one ever asked the cat how he liked being in that box, but I know how he feels.

I wasn't going to mention the whole biopsy thing at all, but you're going to hear about it one way or another, as in, "Whew, I dodged a bullet," or "Hey, could you just take a deep breath with me and tell me it's all okay." I might as well let you know that if you're talking to me and I look distracted, I might be picturing myself in a box with a cat.

At the moment, I can't worry about it. I got too much to do.

If you're in the area, come by and see me at my booth. If you're far away, do check out my online happenings. And take good care of yourself.

What should be the writer's goal?

I've been trying for years to find a critique group that works for me. I admit, I may not have been trying as hard as I could. After all, I get a lot of mileage out of my two yearly writer's conferences, and I have writer friends who like being my beta readers. Still, I keep hearing of people who are in these fabulous writing groups and I can't help but long for that sense of cameraderie.

This week, I saw a meeting advertised in my Meetup.com group - I don't know why I'd never seen it before, but it struck me that it was a good time and good night for my schedule. I printed off copies of my first chapter and headed to the coffee house.

One aside before I get into the story I'm telling: I've been losing a little more weight and feeling a little happier about my size, so I wore a silk blouse I haven't worn in a long time because it fit so nicely. When I got to the coffee house, I found it has two rooms, the small room where you order stuff, then the big room with lots of tables that's kind of an enclosed patio. The order room was so insanely hot that by the time I got my tea, let's just say I was moist. I quickly moved into the bigger, cooler room, met the people in the group, sat down at the table and - suddenly smelled an odor. A human odor. The garlicky smell of body odor. So my first thought is, OMG-IS-THAT-ME? Did I somehow wear a silently stinky blouse to this gig, a blouse whose odor was released as soon as heat hit it? Not a good first impression. I'm OH-SO-HAPPY to report it wasn't me, but I spent most of the evening sitting as quietly and as downwind as possible.

Now that I've given you TMI, here's what I really wanted to talk about: I mostly liked this group. They had a lot of good writing, some good critiques, and were very welcoming. Then something happened that, while it didn't turn me off, left me with some serious headscratching.

A couple of the women at the table shared the same ethnic background. As one of the women passed around her work to be read, she apologized for the cultural bent of the piece and told all the newcomers that the rest of the group "puts up with her" cultural references. Here's the thing - I didn't find any of her references particularly obtuse or confusing. I understood it, to the point of asking if I had missed something.

"Well, they have *this style furnishings* in their home," the other woman replied. "And the way the mother said *that line of dialogue*." (I'm using the *'d phrases to avoid discussing the exact ethnicity.)

Um, okay. The decor was cultural. But the mother sounded like almost any mother I know, even me. The theme she had written about was universal. I felt like I got it, got what the piece was saying, and they were trying to tell me I couldn't have gotten it because I wasn't of that culture.

So my question is this: should a writer invite all readers into their cultural world and investigate issues that are common to everyone, or should a writer limit their work to readers who know their culture and can step in line with the characters?