Tara Tyler talks publishing and books

Today I'm turning the blog over to the wonderful Tara Tyler! It's possible you've heard that she recently released a book: Broken Branch Falls!

Take it away Tara!



I love my Dr. Faerie Godmother, Rena. She grants me the gifts of laughter, sciency knowledge, and encouragement! That's my girl! (said more in a gangsta way, than a proud dad way).


And she gave me some great questions, made me dig deep!

Broken Branch Falls is your second book published through Curiosity Quills. Tell us how it was different writing and editing the second book. 

Writing it was way easier. Using a good outline of my scenes, I wrote BBF's first draft in Camp Nano (and completed it in less than 50k words! too short!). But it came together quickly and much more easily than PT. It was easier to edit as well - this story really jumped out at me. The biggest difference was the two very different editors who worked on my books. It made sense, though with the two different genres and age levels. I'm very happy with CQ.

How many books did you write before you published Pop Travel?
Before PT, I wrote a chick lit adventure (Jacks and Jills and Jezebels) and started a sequel for it. When I realized it wasn't going to make it, I put it aside. It was my experimental phase, in more ways than one! Hmm, chick lit is now NA so I may revisit those crazy girls and their many man-problems.

How has publishing not one, but two books changed your life?
Well, it's much more fun for me! Busy! Especially with two boys in HS (ie - approaching college!) Now, the pressure is on for me to get a full-time job (I currently sub and that ain't hay) Too bad there aren't a whole lot of full-time teaching jobs, but I'm hunting. In the meantime, I'm eager to get my writing more widely known with conferences - maybe I'll be able to contribute that way... It just takes so long!

What are the biggest differences between the release of Pop Travel, and the release of Broken Branch Falls?
The age difference, for one. Comparing the parties, I sold more BBF books and had more "strangers" buy than PT, but PT had more kindle sales and reviews, to give it a better looking start - though when I checked Amazon today, I found BBF on a top 100 list! Woot! It's all relative - audience, the amazon catagories, genre... I've had tons of support from family and friends (local and bloggy). Now, I just need to get the word out a little farther! and keep writing!

Any words of wisdom for the Pre-Published crowd? Any words of wisdom for people about to have a book come out?
I think it's about being ready - when you're really ready for the intimidating work and self-exposure (ha) of marketing and have that MS polished to a gleam - you will click with that one agent or publisher who has a true love and understanding of your work (and it only takes one) - or you will be brave enough and ready to work hard with the self-pub route. It's a ton of work and time and easy to get discouraged, but it's worth it. If it's your passion, you'll find a way to reach your goals!

Thanks again, Rena! I can't wait for everyone to read your cosmic tales!

(And don't forget to enter the giveaway below!)

BROKEN BRANCH FALLS (MG Fantasy)

by Tara Tyler
Release Date: June 24, 2014 (NOW!)
Publisher: Curiosity Quills

Gabe is an average fifteen-year-old goblin. He’s in the marching band, breezes through calculus, and gets picked on daily by the other kids at school, especially the ogres. But Gabe wants to break out of his nerdy stereotype and try other things. He has his eye on the new ogress at school. Though it’s against all beastly rules, there’s just something about her.

Gabe starts a fad of mingling with other species, forcing the High Council to step in and ruin things by threatening to destroy the school and split up Broken Branch Falls. With help from other outcast friends, Gabe sets out on a quest to save his town. They'll show 'em what different friends can do together!

Available at
B&N ~~~ Amazon
Add it to your GOODREADS list!

Tara Tyler has had a hand at everything from waitressing to rocket engineering. After living up and down the Eastern US, she now writes and teaches math in Ohio with her three active boys and Coach Husband. Currently, she has two series, The Cooper Chronicles (techno- thriller detective capers) and Beast World (MG fantasy) She's an adventure writer who believes every good story should have action, a moral, and a few laughs!

Twitter </ a>~~~ Facebook ~~~ Blog

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The Cooper Chronicles, Book One: POP TRAVEL
on sale this month for 99 cents!!

a Rafflecopter giveaway

Supers FLASH

Elizabeth Seckman is celebrating the release of her newest book: Bella's Point! To celebrate, she's hosting a blog challenge.

You can go here to sign up!

BUY IT HERE!

Bella's Point
A historical romance.
Bella has the spirit of Scarlet O'Hara and the heart of Melanie Wilkes. A former debutante surviving in the fallen South....

Isabella Troy Stanley is a divorced, slave freeing pariah surviving in the shattered post Civil War south the only way she knows how. She heads to a Yankee prison and buys herself a husband. 

Jack Byron is the former Troy plantation stable boy and object of young Bella’s affection. He rejected her then, and he’s still not sold on the idea of marrying her now. Sure, she’s pretty, but he remembers too well how even a glance in her direction got a man of his low standing ridden out of town. No, Jack’s more sensible now, not to mention he might still be betrothed to another woman.

It’s complicated.




Here's my entry into the blog challenge. Flash fiction featuring a super family:

It was the year 1865 when someone last mopped that floor.

Well, that might be an exaggeration, but the house was a wreck—not an actual super-villain-smack-down wreck—but two kids and one husband sure made a mess.

I’d say it’s because they’re all supers, but my neighbor has two kids, too. She says her favorite cleaning method is to whip out a hose and spray down the kids and the family dog. And her kids never accidentally bring home genetically modified bugs—cast offs from an actual super-villain-smack-down.

“Honey, have you seen the PALEO transponder?”

“Have you seen the dishes, dear?” I called back.

He leaned around the corner. “The what?”

I turned away from him and flipped the transponder to silent, but it never failed. If I tried to talk distribution of domestic chores, there’d be an All Call. Life was predictable, if occasionally cruel. I slid the beeper into my pocket and picked up the magazine like I’d been reading it. I hadn’t read one in years. Emergency in North Carolina. Super plot in Argentina. Emergency in the bathroom—it was all the same. Divert disaster and clean up. I did as much crime busting as my husband, and he still managed to go play golf and poker with the guys. Why was I the one stuck cooking dinner and vacuuming? Was there something in super powers that prevented the male of the species from noticing things like full diapers and dirty dishes.

“Dishes, you know, flat, porcelain utilized by most people to holding food prior to consumption. When left unwatched for mere seconds, they bread into mountains covered in partially eaten food. Often the only evidence of teenaged inhabitants—ring a bell?”

His solemn face grew longer as he tried to fathom what would come next. “Are you suggesting that my work is somehow less important than doing the dishes?”

“Are you suggesting that you don’t remember how you were going to ‘step up more’ and ‘take on more of the housework’?” I crossed my arms and cocked my head at him.

He swallowed. “Well, I just meant that—uh, I would—um. You know, I think I hear the locator beeping. Maybe I should take it to Bob to have him see what’s wrong.”

He turned to walk away, but I teleported in front of him. “Oh no you don’t. ‘You cook, I’ll do dishes,’ were those not your exact words?”

“Sweetie, that was years ago—before the meltdown in California.”

“Oh, so Super Villains plotting against humanity is some sort of excuse to get out of doing the dishes?”

He swallowed. “Do you hear yourself?”

“I asked for a maid, and you said—“

“Not the maid again. Honey, we can’t have a maid. She might figure out our secret identities.”

I tossed him my phone. He caught it with one hand, perplexed. I ground my fists into my hips. “You tell PALEO, they’re one hero down until the dishes are done. They have enough pencil pushers, I just want someone to do dishes and vacuum once a week. We save the world. I want a maid.”

I checked the transponder, and sure enough, it was already beeping. His eyes lit up. “Honey, we have to—“

“Get PALEO on the line.” I pointed at the stack of dishes. “I’m lifting off, and if those aren’t done before I get home, I’m going to burn the house to the ground.”

I stalked towards the door, but I heard Jessica slink into the kitchen. “Does she mean it?”

My husband’s voice held the proper amount of fear. “I’m afraid she does. You’d better clean up your room just to be sure, sweetie.”

Jessica gasped then whispered, “Poor villain, he’s never seen Mom mad like that.”

I stepped onto the front stoop and took to the sky. To emphasize my point, I hit the area with a super sonic boom.

Forbidden Love

Today I’m going over an old manuscript. And not just any manuscript, the manuscript Liz with Aliens told me to not give up on or she’d hunt me down with a pointy stick until I got it published (I don't forget that sort of thing). I’ve written this story several times. Sweet Mother of Mountains, I have lived this story (well, not in the I-followed-the-fae-through-the-portal literally sense, but the laid awake at night hoping and dreaming about it).

This is a good representation of my Portal Feels.

The only problem: It’s a story with portals. Confession, when Glados said “Now you’re thinking in portals,” I laughed. Portals are my very favorite subtype of fantasy. Person from our world goes and has adventure in another world. I never stopped thinking in portals. As a kid, I dreamed and wished that I’d cross under a rainbow, or find a magic wardrobe (I didn’t even really know what those were because we didn’t have them in the US). The premise for most of the media I consumed as a child was “Young person finds way into magical world, has adventure, gains self esteem, and returns to this world a better stronger person.” Unicorns featured prominently.

Portals are my first love. So it’s no surprise that I have a portal story (an epic quadrilogy, to be exact).

It’s also no surprise that my story hasn’t really been the top of my “Polish this up and send it off to agents” list because I always try to keep market in mind.

It’s a portal story. At the end of the day, no agent is going to want to pick up a portal story because they are universally panned in the world of publishing. There are so many, after all. And what makes mine so special--that's actually a long story, but it starts with a jewish girl from a small town. Oh, wait, that's not what they mean. They mean how is it different from all the other portal stories. 

Did I mention the MC is Jewish? right, religious representation isn't enough because it's a freaking portal story. 

Sigh.

There are so many portal stories, that I’ve been sitting on this manuscript for almost two years. It’s just been rotting away on my hard drive. There’s a part of me that says that’s where it should stay, but the little girl inside me who dreamed about catching rainbows so she could go to where the unicorns live wants to pull this story out and take it for another ride.

So why do I feel so guilty working on a portal story?

What about you guys? How do you feel when you are in love with an unmarketable idea? Do you chase it down and watch it bloom, or have you mastered the cold places in your heart and put your zombie-unicorn-portal-dystopian into the morgue where all the publishing peeps says it belongs?

Hobbies are healthy, some are even low in calories!

Briefly, I'd just like to mention that hobbies are healthy. I know a lot of people say things like "writing is my hobby," but I'm here to say, that might not be enough.

I know plenty of people who love their jobs. I also know plenty of people who are writing with the hope of having writing become their job. If you're writing to become a paid writer, you need other hobbies because your writing has crossed a magic barrier: your writing has become a second job.

Think about it. Yes, it is a passion. No, I couldn't stop even if someone ordered me to. But if  you had a second job that you were passionate about--say making blankets for the homeless, or sewing dresses for needy girls who just want to have one storybook moment in their life--you wouldn't consider your second, yet very passionate, job to be your hobby. It would just be another thing that you do. You'd still find time to tend a garden, or play golf with friends, maybe sail or relax on the lake.

When we write, we are passionate about it, but sometimes, we write to the exclusion of all else. Don't do this. Relax, enjoy the summer around you. It may be that I am particularly guilty of this right now, so this warning is more about me getting out to smell the roses than me admonishing all you lovely people to remember to do other things with your time besides hole up and write books.

With that being said, I think I'll go walk around the garden before jumping back into the writing cave.

This is not the Insecure Writer's Support Group Post You were expecting.

Insecure Writer's Support Group posts on the first Wednesday of every Month. If you don't know what I'm talking about, visit the ninja captain Alex and hop on the Linky.

This month's co-hosts are Krista McLaughlin, Kim Van Sickler, Heather Gardner, and Hart Johnson!

Okay, I had a whole Insecure Writer’s Support Group Post all lined up (even clocking in under the prescribed 300 words—please, I can’t even sneeze in under 300 words), but you know what? Screw it. I’m going to tell you what I’m really insecure about right now:

Commas.

Yeah, you heard me right. I don’t use commas well.

It all started twenty years ago (Yeah, you know you’re old when you can start stories like that—Oh, and Crap, I’m old! I Can start stories with “two decades ago…”). Right, so two decades ago, I signed up for a correspondence course. A writing course. I’ll even admit that it was the first—AND LAST—fiction writing class that I ever took. It may have colored my opinion a bit. I should maybe try another, you know, just in case the one from twenty years ago was anomalous, but I digress. Twenty years ago, I was told that I used too many commas.

Specifically, I was told that I “clearly did not understand the proper use of a comma.” 

Granted, I probably was somewhat lacking in that particular aspect of punctuation (you should see my dire lack of hyphenation now!). Regardless, I was mocked. I was not yet twenty, but the correspondence teacher didn’t know that. It was a college level course after all, ergo, I was a college student. He mocked my comma usage, and from that moment on, the comma had EXACTLY one use: to join independent clauses with a conjunction. That. Is. IT. For years—DECADES even.

Fast forward to some of my earlier work. One nameless reader of my early work once quipped “What did commas ever do to you?” Well, they were the vehicle of my humiliation, so nothing personal comma. Don’t expect to find yourself unnecessarily inserted into my sentences.

I’ve been informed that commas come where you would take a breath if you were reading aloud.

Let’s face it: some of us are longer winded than others.

I’ve been informed that commas are only for lists.

Commas are for separating ideas.

Commas are for lists, but never use them on the third, or serial comma. It is confusing.

Commas are for dependent clauses, but not independent ones--as if emancipation of a clause mandated its comma usage.

Commas are to ensure the unsplit nature of infinitives.

Commas are poorly utilized in the English Language.

After two decades of bumbling around and studying this grand language of ours,  I now have opinions on commas. And because I am insecure about them, I will now foist them upon you. Remember, I had to be mocked into this tacit list. Ignore at your own risk, but by no means should you take my word for it.

The oxford comma is—in my opinion—non-negotiable. Use it. It will clarify numerous issues, including, but not limited to, whether JFK and Stalin were strippers. 

Use a comma before the conjunction joining two independent clauses.

A comma is appropriate to set apart a prepositional phrase, particularly at the beginning of a sentence, but it is, on occasion, discretional.

A comma is always appropriate following dialogue that precedes a dialogue tag. It is also appropriate prior to dialogue when a period would be awkward.

If you have an aside—an interjection, per se—consider the ‘m’ dash instead of a parenthetical comma.

Utilize commas at your discretion when joining a dependent clause to an independent clause.This one will take finesse and, dare I say, discretion.

Which brings me nicely to my last comma rule: if you can break the two clauses with a period, do so. There is nothing finer in the English language, than the finality of a period. End. Stop. (bonus points if you have a bloody clue what an end stop refers to).

So, what about you? Have any hard and fast rules on punctuation? And just so as we’re clear, I’m serious about that Oxford comma.