Yes, I spent the first few weeks of my summer vacation working on the sequel to The Orange Slipknot. I got a lot done, reworking some parts, improving the last half of my synopsis which I work from, and struggling to clarify a few uncertainties in the timeline of my plot. I wish I could say it's done but I haven't touched it since.

A writer, like anyone else, must prioritize in order to make the most efficient use of time. I must accept the fact that, working in a school, I have much less time for writing projects than I did over 12 years ago when I wrote the book as a mostly stay-at-home mom. It has been very hard for me to learn to write in small chunks of time, governed by the clock. And when I must choose between marketing my book and working on the sequel, I usually choose marketing. After all, if people haven't read the book, what use is a sequel?

Many of my summer days involved several hours of Internet research for lists of phone numbers: book stores, gift stores, feed stores, and western stores, in Nevada and surrounding areas. Then several more hours were spent on phone calls. (Good thing we have unlimited long distance!) Fortunately, I also made many trips to the post office with piles of packages.

I finally got some photos of the Hadley Ranch at Carlin (Maggie Creek), which for the most part is the location I pictured in my mind for much of the story. We enjoy going to Elko on Labor Day weekend for the big stock horse show and this time I remembered my camera. Going over, the sun was in the wrong place, so we decided to try to get pictures coming home. In the afternoon there was a huge dust storm, but I got some pictures that weren't too bad. I added them to the Powerpoint slideshow I have prepared for possible use in author talks.

I haven’t blogged for awhile. Actually, I took a break from book stuff for a month or so, other than a few phone calls and emails. To tell you the truth, the book was starting to feel like my slave-driver; I felt guilty any time I was not spending my spare time on selling or thinking about the sequel to The Orange Slipknot (my summer project). I had been hitting the marketing aspect pretty hard, so I decided to just relax, do other things in my spare time, and hopefully let all those contacts bear fruit.

I enjoy reading about how the brain works; I recently read something interesting about how to increase your creativity. Work on your project for awhile, then leave it for an hour, or a few days, go do something else. Relax, do something different and enjoyable, don’t think about your project. Meanwhile, your brain will be working on solutions, and next thing you know, ideas will come to you.

My school job will turn to summer vacation in another week, and I plan to spend a good part of my summer working on the sequel. I haven’t worked on it for a few months, devoting my spare time instead to marketing. So I am now rereading what I had written; I will then leave it alone for a few days before starting to work on it. I will trust my brain to be working on it in the background, kind of like my computer is working in the background as I type, updating my anti-virus system. Hopefully when I am ready to bring up that “program” (the sequel), my brain will provide me with the updates it’s been working on. It’s worth a try, and I like this idea better than forcing myself to work on a project so hard that it seems like a chore.

Meanwhile, I have been spending more time seeing grandkids, reading, surfing the Web, playing the piano, visiting with friends on the phone, riding horses, yard work, watching TV (mostly news and horsey stuff), and chatting with my horsey Internet friends. I took a vacation from working on my book so that when my REAL vacation starts, I’ll be ready to get back to work. That’s kind of a paradox, isn’t it?

It's sure exciting to hear kids making frequent comments to me at school about how far they are along in the book, how much they like it, and wondering when the next one will be out. I did a book talk at school, complete with a newspaper reporter who did a nice job with several photos in the paper. Then I did a talk at the middle school for three classes--about 100 kids. Next Saturday I do two talks in Elko, at a bookstore and the library.

Another printing wrinkle...literally. Some books of the second printing turned out to have wrinkles (indentations) on the covers and some had a few blank pages; about a third of the books had to be returned. So many things can go wrong.

I spend hours every week on the internet, finding lists of email or fax contacts for schools and libraries, state by state. Reviews are starting to come in. It's always scary to start reading someone's review of my book, just as it was scary to open that newspaper and see what the article looked like. I don't enjoy being in the spotlight; I felt horribly self-conscious about the article. But so far I have been fortunate in that all my publicity has been positive and tastefully done.

The next big push after getting out numerous press releases was to get copies of the book placed in Elko, Nevada before the big Cowboy Poetry Gathering this last week in January. I spent over a week making phone calls and emailing stores and libraries, then decided to just take a half-day and make the two-hour drive so I could make deliveries and hopefully sew up a few locations by a personal contact. This was my husband's first exposure to making book sales; I think we were both taken aback by the enthusiastic response of those I talked to. Of course, the book's Elko setting and buckaroo theme makes it a natural choice in northern Nevada. I left almost 60 books in Elko, and a third that many in Battle Mountain.

Now I can back off the heavy-duty selling a bit and have a more regular life again while the books find their way into the hands of the public. I notified the Institute of Children's Literature that one of their graduates had sold her first book, so they wrote back, requesting details. I also started putting together photos for a slide show for possible presentations--finding and selecting old pictures, scanning them onto the computer, fixing them up in Adobe Photoshop, organizing them, teaching myself how to put them into Microsoft Powerpoint which I know nothing about, and planning the talk that would accompany them. These two projects took me back through 10-15 years of memories as I retraced the steps that led to publication of my book.

And yes, I have been working on the sequel. Just as with The Orange Slipknot, much of my "writing" involves mulling over possibilities for character and plot development, so much of what I call "writing time" has nothing to do with actually adding more words to the story. I "write" while getting ready for work, while spending a half-hour every morning at crosswalk duty, while cooking, eating, cleaning house, or driving. I even work on my story when I'm awake in the night and can't get back to sleep.

The boxes of books finally arrived! Just in the nick of time for me to get the prepaid autographed copies out in the mail. One last glitch almost cost an extra day--UPS had recorded my address wrong, and the poor UPS lady spent 45 minutes going up and down my road, looking for that non-existent number, and going door-to-door trying to locate me. I thanked her profusely and offered her a tip for her efforts but she refused it.

I forced myself to wait to open the boxes until my husband got home so we could share the big moment. He took pictures of me and my boxes and books spread all over the couch, which I immediately emailed to family and close friends. Holding my book in my hands was an absolutely wonderful feeling.

What a whirlwind of activity the last few weeks have been! I think I went to the post office about 8 days in a row with book orders. Getting them out just in time for Christmas resulted in many local sales, including several stores that carried them. Hearing great comments on the book prompted me to add a "Readers Say…" page to my website. To my surprise, I found that many adults loved the book too, so I guess it's not just for kids. I sent my first press release to our local newspaper and a week later my article appeared.

By Christmas day my company was gone and I was free to work on book projects--next was more press releases. Thanks to the internet, I was able to easily find email links to newspapers in many cities. I began with Nevada, then neighboring states in the Great Basin area. I tweaked the headline and a few sentences to hopefully make it eye-catching and relevant to other locations. I also researched and worked on some other promotional ideas.

I got several good days of work in on the sequel to The Orange Slipknot. (One reader already asked when the next book would be out!) Mostly I needed to reread and rework material I had written previously, but as often happens when writing, I had a couple of serendipity moments where new ideas popped into my head. I think I may be about halfway done with it now. I would like to think that perhaps that means I could be done by the time school is out, but who knows. I am so thankful for my two-week Christmas break. It has truly been a working vacation though.

Never count your chickens before they actually hatch. Things do not always go as planned, and I'm sure this won't be the last time...the books that were supposedly "in the mail" to my publisher turned out to be not in the mail, not even printed. So then a last minute change of printer resulted in several more weeks of delay and lost opportunities to sell books at an event and on a trip, but they will actually arrive in a couple of days now.

Meanwhile, I have been distributing flyers and bookmarks and talking up my book. I've used my unplanned extra time to get over being sick, visit grandkids, make my Christmas plans, and work on another writing project. I hope to use my two-week vacation from my job at school to resume work on the sequel to The Orange Slipknot, which I haven't touched in months.

When my books arrive this week, I will spend that evening autographing and stuffing books into prepared mailers which I will take to the post office the next day. Hopefully all prepaid orders will arrive by Christmas! Then I will begin my new job of selling books. I have stores to visit and press releases to send out. I will need to devise a way to keep track of my business transactions. Writers must also become small business managers!

The last few weeks have been a whirlwind of activity...scores of emails arranging last minute changes and details...many decisions to be made about ordering, printing, shipping, autographing, and delivering books. Every time I thought about updating my blog, I told myself, "...but not until I do this, this and that!" All these must be fit into a life already busy with my daily job, piano students, shopping, projects and responsibilities at home, grandchildren, and weekend activities such as house painting, horse activities, and a three-day trip to California to visit family. But in a few days my first box of books will arrive! I can hardly believe it.

If my box arrives on time, I will be selling books at a local pre-Christmas craft sale next weekend, along with the framed photos and cards I make with Bible verses on local photos I have taken. This week my spare time will be taken up with putting together my photos. The following week I will probably start visiting local stores and calling or emailing other stores and libraries. This weekend I have been printing up bookmarks and flyers I have designed. How could I ever have managed without email, Microsoft Word, and Adobe Photoshop? The computer is surely a marvelous tool, along with home printers, digital cameras, scanners and copy machines. How different things would have been if I had published my book ten or twelve years ago, before I entered the digital world.

One thing I have been trying to show in this blog is that writing books involves much more than just writing a good story. I am very glad that over the years, I have spent many hours reading up on book marketing. I had some idea of what to expect, but actually doing it is a real challenge.