Category: My News

I’ve scheduled a book launch party for May 28 at 2 PM at Purple Crow Books in Hillsborough. If you’ve never been, it’s a very cozy spot. So far I’ve been unable to imagine what I will say, or which passage of Somewhere and Nowhere I will read, but I’m hoping it will become clear as…

My new book is here! Somewhere and Nowhere recounts my adventures riding my bike from New Jersey to Oregon with my friend Mary. Along the way, there were a lot of “life lessons” about balance and living in the present moment. I began writing a few years after the trip, in 2008. First I wrote…

This week I received my proofs from the printer! Other than the cover being a bit brighter than anticipated, they look like I hoped they would. But instead of being excited, I just feel mildly sick. Was I crazy to write such a personal memoir to share with the public? Have I failed to protect the…

I’ve finished the Short Guide to Self-Publishing that I first drafted ten years ago! The guide covers self-publishing a book without using a company or middleman to manage the process. You might choose to outsource a task to an expert (a copy editor or a cover designer, for example), and you’ll pay a printer to…

NaNoWriMo in February? I had a story idea this weekend, and I knew that if I waited until November, it might be gone. But without NaNoWriMo, I wondered, how would I stay on track? I love the camaraderie of NaNoWriMo, but I realized that what keeps me going is the bar chart. So I made myself…

Last week I attended the AWP (American Writers and Writing Programs) conference in Washington, DC. It was my first time at AWP, which was an overwhelming affair: six sessions each day with up to 35 choices, a monstrous book fair, evening meetups, and events throughout the city. The first day, I attended all six sessions,…

Last week, I uploaded Somewhere and Nowhere to my printer’s website. If all goes well (and I’m really hoping I had everything formatted correctly), it should be here in a few weeks. My dad is already at work designing ads for his Facebook feed. I found this one particularly amusing: I’ll post again when the…

I’ve been tying up loose ends. After ten years, I finally revisited the notes I’d made for A Short Guide to Self-Publishing. Once I had a draft manuscript, created in Word using font styles to make it easy to publish as an ebook, I decided to redo my other short guides to make them all consistent in appearance. There were…

Okay, it’s not really a friend. It’s my original Two Blue Books website. I read that Google will be prioritizing mobile-friendly sites in its search results, and it was the final kick in the pants I needed to create a new site. A friend helped me build the site in 2006, before the popularity of…

I recently designed my second book, Somewhere and Nowhere, using Adobe InDesign for page layout. I took notes so that I’d have a guide to follow next time. I am sharing them in the hope that they might be useful to other self-publishers.