Mountain Girl

Weekly Disclaimer Thing :  Writing, like all art, is a subjective experience.  Stuff that works for me won't necessarily work for you...though I hope it does, since I'd love for everyone to succeed.  Can never have enough books to read!  Either way, take these tips with the giant grain of salt needed to season it to your liking, since I could very well be talking out my ass. So, last week was a little bit about Fiddling, and the bare bones of my editing process.  This week will be...Outlining.  (Dun dun duuuuun!) I know people hate outlining.  It can be frustrating.  But you really should outline your stories.  Really.  Even if you're a born Pantser, you should still outline just a little bit.  It makes things so much faster . Which reminds me, I really need to re-outline my current WIP, since I'm getting lost in the middle. And that's the thing - the outline can change.  If you're in the middle of writ...

Trudie Rowland (c) Aug 8, 2017 Cherries, Cherries and...More Cherries! So, Hubs has a boss who lives near by, and he has a cherry tree in his yard.  He also doesn't have time/energy to pick the cherries, or know what to do with them, so for the low, low price of All The Cherry Pie He Can Eat, he lets me do it (I also get to keep whatever I make out of them, which this year is going to be mostly jam). This year, we got ~ 20L of cherries - again.  That was about the yield we got last year.  It's a lot of cherries.  I also used last year's pic, since the lighting was better (this year, everything's smoky and gross owing to forest fires out west). Now I have to pit them all, so that's going to be fun.   Last year it took me about a week solid, by myself, one at a time.  This year... Will probably be about the same, actually.  Which is going to be such fun, because by the time I'm done pitting and canning all of these, it's time for apple...

My first one!  Yay!  I did up a little graphic thing and everything.   The Weekly Disclaimer:   Writing, like all art, is a subjective experience.  Stuff that works for me won't necessarily work for you...though I hope it does, since I'd love for everyone to succeed.  Can never have enough books to read!  Either way, take these tips with the giant grain of salt needed to season it to your liking, since I could very well be talking out my ass. My Tip For This Week:   Write.  Just write it out.  Get the bare bones down, and when you come to the end, go back to the start and add in the flesh.  The details and the adjectives and the rewording of awkward sentences.  You get to do as many passes as you want. The other side of this is, of course, that you need to know when to stop obsessing over every phrase.  Otherwise, you'll never move on to the next bit and you'll get stuck fiddling with details tha...

Musings Firstly... I just want to say a huge, hearty THANK YOU to everyone who left a review on Release Day.  I don't know if I've adequately expressed my thanks, so all of you have it.  I sent out 20 copies on Booksprout and got 9 reviews over all - and they were all good!  I must be doing something right ;) So THANK YOU, again, those reviews made my day.  Hugs all around!  And as always: HERE is Tracked Down , $0.99 ebook and $10.99 Paperback.   And if you have an interest in Snowed In  and Smoked Out , they're available as well. And the Rest... Good reviews aside, I had a brief moment of self-pity wallowing the other day because someone bought and then returned one each of the first two books.  I know my stuff's not for everyone, but it's the first time this has happened since I released Snowed In  in Nov 2017.  So it smarts a little, even if I get it.   Bah.  No sense doing the spilled milk...

Hey, everyone!  It's time to show you the cover for Book Three of the Olsson's Pass Series - TRACKED DOWN. I hope you like it, and the book that will come attached to it! No pressure :P Anyway, first things first... The Giveaway It's my first one!  I have no idea what I'm doing!  Yay!  Here are the things! A signed copy of SNOWED IN: The Shifters of Olsson's Pass Book One, by Trudie Rowland (me) A $25 Amazon Gift Card A TrudieRowland.com tote bag in which to carry your stuff A bookmark, featuring Angel in wolf form A couple awesome stickers from Society6 I did everything through Rafflecopter, so you can find the giveaway HERE .  I'll be posting a link on the social medias too, for any of those interested :) Now onto.... The Book! PreOrder will be available as soon as it's live.  I'll update with links and stuff. *Live! You can PreOrder it here  for $0.99 USD until May 31st, 2018 About Tracked Down : In a n...

Camp NaNo 2018 Is...well, I'm about 13k behind, so that's how that's going.  Yay?  I'm not especially worried because the beautiful thing about self-publishing is that if my deadlines don't work, I can just change them to something that does...but I would like to get the rest of the book written in the next...holy fuck, nine days.  Okay, so it miiight take a little bit longer than that.  Blast.  But I'm still writing, and as long as I pull a few 3k word days out of my ass (read: every day between now and the 30th), I should be able to catch up.  Book Three is cooking along, no problems there...the delays are mostly life-based.  Kids refusing to nap, and other kids needing to be picked up from school...Almost getting hit by a car.  The usual.   Impending Giveaway/ARCs Stuff/Cover Reveal I'm still figuring out the ARC thing...I've got a BookSprout account (Yay!), so I'll put it up there...I'm also going to put together a si...

Well, I've fallen a few days behind in my word counts...I haven't stopped writing (except on the weekend, when I took a couple days off as Burnout Prevention), but yesterday was a doozy of a day.  Whole bunch of irritating things happened, one on top of another...and then I almost got hit by a car.  It was one of those "if I hadn't had STOP AND LOOK ingrained in me at a very young age, I'd be dead right now" moments. And, most frustrating, it happened at a crosswalk , in a province where pedestrians have right of way at all times .  And yeah, some unrelated douche canoe had parked too close to my side of the crosswalk, blocking not just my line of sight but the line of sight of the approaching vehicles, but that's why I stop and look.  The guy who just blew through the crosswalk wasn't even looking, was going way too fast (and had deliberately accelerated too, since half a block up the road is a controlled intersection, so he was going way too fast...

I have a new logo!  I'm quite proud of it, since I have the graphic design skills of a dead squid.  It's nice and simple and looks good on a shirt, so I think I'll keep it around for a while. Camp NaNoWriMo 2018: Well, it's now April. This year is going waaaay too fast. Anyway, I decided (somewhat last minute) to use Camp NaNoWriMo this month to write Book Three.  I already had an outline written out, just need to fill in the blank pages of the chapters now.  It's day four and I'm...actually pretty much on track, as long as I make my word goals for today.  If I exceed them, even better. I'm gonna need some tea... But, the story is progressing nicely.  Covers and blurb are actually done and don't suck, so that's nice.  I'll reveal them closer towards the end of the month. Other Things: Once the book is mostly done I'm going to be running an ARC sign up for those that want.  My first one!  Hopefully it'll go smoothly....

Spring is finally in the air... One of the theoretical downsides about living in the Rockies is that spring is usually late - the snow doesn't go completely until it's pretty much May, and even then it doesn't really get warm until the middle of June.  So no garden for me until May 24th weekend at the earliest, and even then I still have to watch out for sudden and random frosts. Even so, it's been above freezing for the past few days.  The snow is melting.  The prescribed burns are...burning, so everything smells of camping and wood smoke, and it's nice.  The goddamn elk will be moving out of the neighbourhood soon (well, not the pregnant ones...those we get the honor of running from until the end of June, when the calving is over). As for myself, I've finally  gotten the better part of an outline for Book Three.  I know I say 'finally' as though everyone's been waiting for years* and years, when it's really only been a month since the las...

Yay! I just love the full spread covers, they're fun. Anyway, if you like the weight and feel of a more traditional medium for reading, I've uploaded both Smoked Out  and Snowed In  as paperbacks! They're available on Amazon.com and other marketplaces.

Well, I'm down to the last 20k +/- of Book Two.  Sweeet!  I took the last couple days off the writing push - I didn't want to burn myself out.  Burn out doesn't get books finished. So, for this week: Chapters 15, 16, 17 and hopefully 18...if I keep up the 3-4k/day pace then I might get 19 and 20 in there, and then it's just a matter of editing and formatting in Scriviner, cover tweaking and... Book Two will be done. Now, that's barring things like the kiddies getting sick (again), or me.  Or whatever.  But it's possible, and rather exciting, and I can't wait to share it with all of you. Incidentally, if you want to subscribe to my newsletter so I can update everyone at once, click HERE . In the mean time, if you haven't read Snowed In , now's the time!  It's on Amazon, as both ebook and paperback . Book Two's Current Word Count: 66 500/85 000 

Sick kid home from school means word counts are likely to...not be good this week.  They were already kind of sucky last week on account of a sick author not feeling like doing anything, so now I'm worried about my deadlines. Granted, my deadlines are self-imposed, and if I really wanted to I could just move them...but that's not how you teach yourself to follow deadlines.  On the upside, once I get into the editing/formatting stage, I'll show everyone the cover in the hopes that whets everyone's appetite. In other news, my experiments in caffeine reduction have...not worked.  Seems my dependency on it is integral to me not being a complete cranky pants whacko in the mornings.  I did  replace most (some) of my soda intake with tea, though.  Still caffeine, but healthier all around in other ways.  Also took up a martial art again in an effort to get exercise, which means my Saturday's are shot, but also means that - even after two weeks - I'm starti...

So, Book Two is halfway done.  Yay! This means I'm 42k words in.  Plus or minus, since I'm not sure of the exact total it'll end up at, but I'm looking at 85k words so...yeah. Little longer than Book One, but not actually by that much, if you think about it.  I just hope people actually like it :) I don't have a set-in-stone release date, though.  This is largely because I'm sort of flying by the seat of my pants when it comes to this whole 'self-publishing' thing.  I'm learning an awful lot, but really - only one book to my name right now.  Hopefully four by the end of the year.  We'll see. Just have to keep on writing... In any event, I've been fiddling with my newsletter and making it pretty.  Sign up is HERE , for those that want in.  Sorry, I don't have an incentive novella for you (yet), but that's in the works too and I'll let everyone know when it's up and ready to go.