Someone has to be on the bestseller list, win the National Book Award, have the big movie deal. Did anyone working with me — agency, publishing team — tell me that a sumptuous advance was not something I should depend on or get used to? Did anyone in the publishing house take me under their wing and explain to me how the company made decisions about future book deals?
Did the publisher tap a more seasoned author on their list to mentor me, as many major corporations encourage within their companies? Did the MFA in writing program that I was part of, in any way, arm me with the knowledge to protect and advocate for myself in the publishing world? I donated large sums of money to organizations I cared about, and delighted in the feeling that I was making a real difference.
Did I pay off my student loans? No, though I made a few large payments. Did I set money aside for retirement? Right now, I had to suck the marrow out of life — and invest heavily in trying to build my author brand. And no one said I should be buying fancy cocktails.
That was all my choice, a combination of an almost manic pursuit of joie de vivre Fitzgerald would understand! I figured they had cracked the code — swag, website — and I just needed to follow suit. Despite making some poor choices, I did try very hard to do right by this unexpected reversal of fortunes.
The school where my husband taught had a financial planner that offered services to teachers, so we met with him and his partner, but it was obvious they only wanted to sell us life insurance. Our tax guy told us what to write off, but we had no idea what we were doing. No writer I knew had someone they trusted for financial advice, and our unconventional earnings made getting clear advice very difficult. I lived in Brooklyn, a borough of one of the most expensive cities in the world.
While I was buoyed by the very small, very occasional foreign book deal, this was it until there were more books in the pipeline. What could I have done differently? I could have opted to move to a city that was less expensive, certainly. I could have chosen not to quit my day job, but it would have been tough. I had five books under contract at once, plus the enormous task of building and maintaining an author brand. I had no idea and was not told upon entering the program how nearly impossible it is to find work as faculty in any college or university, regardless of how qualified you are.
I could have and now wish more than anything that I had paid off my student loans. I could have put myself on a strict budget — one that assumed I was never going to get big payouts as a writer again.
When the man who stole me away in the middle of the night decides to keep me for himself…I become his dirty little secret. A plaything starring in his every fantasy. Boogeyman The moment I laid eyes on Shelly, I knew she was a spoiled princess in need of a good spanking.
As Boogeyman's renown grows, he draws the attention of his city's powerful and deadly. A desperate fight for survival breaks out all across the city as minions of the Living God attack! Traumatized by memories of the terrible things that he experienced as a child in his bedroom, a young man returns home to confront his dark fears of a mysterious and monstrous entity that could be only a figment of his imagination--or something much more horrible.
In the summer of , the mutilated bodies of several missing girls begin to turn up in a small Maryland town.
The grisly evidence leads police to the terrifying assumption that a serial killer is on the loose in the quiet suburb. But soon a rumour begins to spread that the evil stalking local teens is not entirely human. For a once peaceful community trapped in the depths of paranoia and suspicion, it feels like a nightmare that will never end. They'll Never Be the Same. A compassionate and accessible guide for parents whose children have experienced traumatic or life-threatening events written by one of the foremost authorities on post-traumatic stress disorder PTSD in children and adolescents.
Horror Films of the s. John Kenneth Muir is back! This time, the author of the acclaimed Horror Films of the s turns his attention to films from the s. From horror franchises like Friday the 13th and Hellraiser to obscurities like The Children and The Boogens, Muir is our informative guide.
Muir introduces. A Dream So Dark. Still reeling from her recent battle and grounded until she graduates , Alice must abandon her friends to complete her mission: find The Heart and prevent. Once that was installed I could sit and watch the dozens of daily automated login attempts by hackers around the world trying to break into my site in order to hijack it into their botnets.
If you have a personal website it is very likely part of a botnet, or even part of a crypto-currency mining operation. For a small writer it makes little sense anymore. This is a bit frustrating — for both the reader and myself, but hey! Thus for the audience, continuity is fragmented. And of course, that workaround is only useful as you are publishing the book.
Later, when the whole book is available in Medium, the sequential releasing is no longer in effect. The other parts are hyperlinked to the earlier ones. The downside to that is that such unlisted stories are unavailable for generating income through the Members program of Medium.
Medium does provide a publication header on each story, that a reader can tap to get to the homepage of the publication, but I found it useful to add a standard footer image to each article as well, that provides the same function, as it is more useful — in my opinion — for the reader, after reading an article that they enjoyed, to be able to jump up to the homepage of the publication, rather than having to scroll up to the header.
I wanted something that was clearly setoff from my text in a different typeface, but not overshadog it in any way either. I realized that what I wanted was a font size and style much like that of the attribution found underneath images on Medium.
My solution was to do exactly that, only with a non-visible and diminutive image. I found a 1-pixel transparent gif and I place that where I want the notification to appear. Navigation was another problem. Thus, your menu structure is normally restricted to just a top-level list of sections or groupings, each of which can only have a single story, or a list of stories without any deeper structure — you can only have a collection of stories that share a tag, a single story, or a page of featured stories.
I place it just above the start of the text, underneath the title. I did this because my book has a structural flow, and not just a collection of articles. Being able to move back-and-forth between sections makes sense for the kind of book I am publishing, where the reader may want to refer to another part of the text for needed information.
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