Six things I learned from five NaNoWriMo wins and one loss

I've published a number of books, none of which was written during NaNoWriMo. I have "won" NaNo five times, most recently this past November. That means that five different times, I wrote 50,000 words of a novel in 30 days. None of those has been published.

This year, my November total was 62,000 words. Today I'll write the final few paragraphs of the rough draft of that story, totaling out around 77,000 words, and I will not be publishing this book. That doesn't mean it was a waste of time, though. I learned some important things about myself, my writing process, and writing in general.

As I look back at the nine novels I've written in the past decade-plus, here are the top six things I've learned. Your mileage may vary, but there's truth in these lessons for every writer.

1. It is possible
My first NaNoWriMo, in 2005, taught me that I could actually complete a novel-length manuscript. It was brutal after the first week. By mid month I hated the story, hated the characters, felt a little lost in the plot. But I kept with it because I'd never written a complete novel before. 2005 taught me I could, if only I kept focused on daily goals and the idea of the ultimate product.

2. It never gets easier
I expected my second NaNoWriMo, the very next year, to be a breeze. After all, if I'd done it once. I could do it again. How charmingly naïve I was! That November was brutal. I wrote more than the previous year, but neither the story nor the writing were as good as before. And there was nothing easy about this year, my 9th novel and 5th NaNoWriMo. Every day requires discipline, hard work, focus. Even producing this year's very mediocre manuscript was brutal.

3. It's okay to quit
One year I managed about 12,000 words on a NaNo novel before quitting mid month. I hated quitting at the time. I always hate quitting. That year, I knew the story actually stunk, the book had no future, and I was only writing to try to get a NaNo Winner badge. To me, that was no longer a worthy goal, not when I had another story brewing in my mind that I really wanted to write. (That idea eventually turned into Semper.) Quitting NaNo that year allowed me to grow more than finishing the crappy novel would have.

4. A cheering section helps
Part of NaNo's strength is belonging to a community of people all struggling through the same brutal schedule toward a shared goal. Cheering each other on, meeting other writers--these things help when writing gets hard. This is true for me even when I'm writing on a more reasonable pace. Having a couple of trusted friends or critique partners to keep tabs on me and occasionally offer validation stokes the fading embers back into a blaze when necessary.

5. Crap makes for good fertilizer
After that first win in 2005, I waited six months and then read that novel back. I didn't hate it nearly as much as I had while writing it. In fact, it had a lot of promise. This year, I started with an idea and characters I loved. Somewhere along the way, in striving for word count and just to pound out the draft, my writing got weak. The characters got predictable. The plot became linear and shallow. It's crap. But crap can make great fertilizer, and the sheer effort of completing the story has enriched the original idea and deepened it to the point were I can build something really good from it, eventually.

6. This is not a race
When I slow down and take a year to write a first draft, that draft is nearly complete. By that I mean it includes subtle foreshadowing, rich symbolism, clever echoes and intricate interconnections, and characters that have some depth. It still needs revision, but it doesn't need to be thrown out and rewritten. When I write fast, I get what amounts to 70,000 words of detailed plot summary. This novel I'm finishing today has little foreshadowing, a whif of symbolism, some intricacy that happened mostly by accident, and characters whose depth rarely makes it to the page.

And I think that's the key: a gripping story in a complete fictional world with intricate politics and deep-seated social issues is there in my mind. It took NaNoWrimo to help me see that world and work through its details, but it will take me a year to put that world, that story, and those characters onto the page so a reader can see them the way that I do.

NaNoWriMo 2015: win number five

2005
2006
2007
2012
2015

Wrote over 53,000 words in November on a new story that I hope to finish in December. While the book will clearly need revision (a lot of the writing is loose), the story itself is pretty well set. I think it may end up being the first in a five-book YA adventure series.

My entire YA sci-fi post apocalyptic trilogy is free on Kindle July 23-25

Pretty straightforward post today. Semper, Forsada, and Freda are all free to download from the Amazon Kindle store July 23-25. My hope is that you will

• tell a bunch of friends!
• download them
• read them!
• rate them on Goodreads and/or Amazon

I also deeply, sincerely hope that you enjoy them.

That's it.

Why would I offer them free? I'd like to say that, like Bread & Puppet, I am a proponent of free art, but really I just want more people to read my stories. I like writing, and I like it when people like what I've written. I plan on writing more, and I hope people who read these books will look forward to the new stories I write. That's really it.

The free book deal is featured on Free Kindle Books & Tips July 23. Specifically here.

Free YA sci-fi books for Kindle

The third book in my YA post apocalyptic sci-fi trilogy, Freda, is free for Kindle at Amazon June 25 through 29. If you didn't know what to do for my birthday on Friday the 26th, then downloading the book, telling everyone you know, and reviewing it on Amazon would be fab.

Get it here: http://www.amazon.com/Freda-III-Eden-Peter-Dudley-ebook/dp/B00O9GAGXM/





More Free Books
The first two volumes in the trilogy, Semper and Forsada, will be free July 23-25.

Haiku Wednesday

This week's words are lump, nervous, puzzled

I haven't played Three Word Wednesday in... a very long time. Far too long.

---

nervous cat, puzzled
butt waggles, tail bristles, pounce!
carpet lump conquered

---

doctor prods the lump
nervous teen, puzzled parents

baby on the way

---

puzzled soldiers watch
roadside lump seen through binocs
nervous wives back home

Rereading a book I wrote four years ago, and a bear

Something drew me to open up the first chapter of Semper and reread it this morning. Having just completed writing the trilogy (which is discounted/free this week), I thought it would be fun to revisit the chapter that began the story.

Did I stay true to the original characters as I first introduced them? Did the first chapter, written four years ago, properly set up the full story of the trilogy?

I think so, if I can be my own judge. In fact, I did better than I expected.

In that first chapter, Dane at one point thinks to himself,

I do not want to be the one that brings home the epidemic that destroys all of civilization.

I didn't realize it at the time, but that one sentence holds a tremendous amount of both foreshadowing and irony.

Also, that first chapter ends with a question that is never explicitly answered but which is the perfect first question in a discussion guide for the series.

Maybe it's just that I was looking for connections as I read. Or maybe those connections were already in my subconscious, even before I'd detailed the quarter million words in the story. Or maybe it's just luck or coincidence. In any case, it's satisfying.

FREDA will be free on Kindle November 1 through 5. The first two books, Semper and Forsada, are just 99 cents to celebrate completion of the trilogy.

And here is a picture of a bear I took, not far from the actual physical location where that first chapter occurs.

Free and discounted books. What could be better?

I've just published Freda, the third book in my New Eden series. Early comments suggest this book might be the best of the three, which is gratifying for sure.

To celebrate this launch, I've discounted the first two in the series to just 99 cents for the next couple of weeks, and Freda itself will be free for Kindle November 1 through November 5. Here's how to get the books during this time:

ON KINDLE
All three are available on Amazon at the discounted price.

• SEMPER for 99 cents through November 5
• FORSADA for 99 cents through November 5
• FREDA for $2.99 but will be free November 1-5

ON OTHER E-READERS

Semper and Forsada are also available on other platforms. The price is $2.99, but you can use the coupon codes below to get them for 99 cents through November 5. These coupons work at Smashwords, but I'm not sure they work at places like Barnes & Noble, the iTunes store, or Powell's.

• SEMPER - use coupon code AW86A for 99c price
• FORSADA - use coupon code NE63V for 99c price
• FREDA - email me if you want a format other than Kindle. We can work something out.

I hope you enjoy it. If you do, please let me know. A rating and/or review on Goodreads always makes my day.

My new book has a print version and a cover

A trilogy is not an easy thing to create. This one took nearly five years, from first inkling of an idea to the proof copy of the third book in my hands. And that was after a good ten years writing novels that probably won't ever get published, publishing short stories, winning (and judging) flash fiction contests, writing a sports column, and a half decade working at a writers conference. So just getting to Sunset draws us to the lake took years, I guess. Then, nearly five more years to get to this point.

Two books published (not including this one). The third on the verge.

Below is the cover, another beautiful rendition by Wendy Russ. You can read the back cover copy if you click on the image and load it up big.

The book will be available in early October. If you want to be notified the day it's out, go and join my email list.

Let me know what you think in the comments, or on Twitter at @dudleypj.

Trilogy end game, and a huge THANK YOU to all you readers

In late 2009 I began the first plotting of the story that would become Semper, which I finished in mid 2011 and published in 2012. I followed it up with Forsada, published in 2013. Now, 18 months later, I am gathering feedback from beta readers for the final book in the trilogy, which I hope to launch in September.

All told, I will have worked on this trilogy for just under four years. Other than raising my children, I can't think of any other project that's taken me longer. (My wife, I am sure, could think of many around the house, but she's not writing this post.) The three published books will total over a quarter million words.

I found that writing a book is relatively easy, after you've done it four or five times. Writing a sequel, however, is hard. And writing the third and final book in a trilogy is very, very hard.

I know that many people have done this. They've even managed it, as I have, with a demanding full time job, a couple of kids, a home to maintain, and volunteer obligations. It's not like I am any Alison Levine or something (though I have been to Nepal). But I personally consider completing a trilogy a major accomplishment. I even think the books are pretty good.

Turns out a number of other people also think the books are pretty good. Recently both Semper and Forsada have received several new 4-star and 5-star ratings on Goodreads. At this moment, Semper enjoys 62 ratings averaging 4.15

Semper: rated highly on July 9, 2014

and Forsada has 20 ratings averaging 4.60.

Forsada: more stars but fewer ratings on July 9, 2014

My beta readers have given me some very useful feedback on the third book before final revisions, but generally they've liked it a lot. Here are a few of the comments that have come back in the last two weeks from these critiques:

"I thought it was another great read and a very good sequel to the other two books in the series. I particularly like the storytelling and the pace of the book towards the second half which really seemed to find its groove, flowed well, and kept the pace moving (that kept me on the edge of my seat). Really nice!"
-- R. S.

"I think it is a great 3rd installment. A few unexpected twists (in a good way)."
-- J. D.

"Overall, it was a satisfying end. There were some really beautiful moments, very clear visuals. The ending... was very nicely done."
-- J. H.

"Other than [the comments I gave] I thought that it was one of the best books I have ever read."
-- S. D.

It's stuff like this that propels an author through the grueling commitment of writing, revising, and publishing a book... or three.

So, a huge THANK YOU to everyone who's given my work a little of your very precious time, and a double THANK YOU to everyone who's taken the extra time to give me your thoughts. (Yes, even the guy who gave Semper a one-star rating and told me, "Peter, sorry, but I just couldn't get into this story." Seriously, thank you.

And finally, some ducklings.

the six keys to a breakthrough business blog post

I don't read a lot of business blogs. Business blogs are like cable TV: content gets created solely to fill empty bandwidth. This results in posts like Being on time can be improve punctuality or Lunch is your employees' most important midday meal.

(Note to self: Write those posts.)

Unlike cable TV, however, business blogs occasionally feature some incredibly insightful and thought-provoking ideas. Most of these ideas drown pointlessly in a sea of jargon, buzzwords, and passive voice. (Too many businesspeople learned communication in business school.)

Most of you know that I write novels. With writing, I've put in my 10,000 hours and then some. Surprisingly, that doesn't diminish the respect I get in my day job, where I run some of the biggest and most complex workplace giving and corporate volunteer programs in the country.

Being #1 five years in a row puts a guy in demand. Thus, as co-chair of the advisory council for the Charities @Work conference, I've written a few blog posts about employee engagement and what the millennial generation are looking for. I was a little surprised when these posts got picked up by more than one CSR news feed, and each link was tweeted or retweeted to over 60,000 Twitter users.

What drove that response? I think it was these six things:

1. Be interesting

Don't talk yourself into thinking your topic is interesting if it really isn't. Has it been done a hundred times before? Does it just rephrase something that's already commonly understood? Then for the love of all that is Strunk and White (see item #3 below), don't post it.

Your idea probably is not revolutionary. Revolutionary ideas are as rare as a Tea Party candidate on the Berkeley City Council. But every good idea has a twist; grab that and twist it harder. If you want to get people's attention and make them think different, go against conventional wisdom. If possible, refute conventional wisdom. Tell the reader they're wrong about something. Then tell them why.

2. Be accountable

Don't hide behind weak writing
and buzzwords. (I took this photo
in Nepal, by the way.)

Corporate-speak was invented so cowards could hide in a cloud of meaninglessness. Don't be a coward. Own your words. Write in first person. Saying "I" a lot in your blog posts does two things: First, it makes you mean what you say. Second, it tells the reader you mean what you say.

Use active voice. If you don't know what active voice is, read this excerpt by Stephen King, then read the book it came from.

Eliminate jargon and buzzwords if at all possible. You can use jargon and buzzwords as convenient shorthand for well accepted concepts (like "employee engagement"), but like cliches they carry no weight. They're like the coworker who comes to lunch with the group but always seems to leave his wallet at the office. What a drag.

3. Be brief

Omit needless words.

4. Use data wisely

Remember back in #1 when you told the reader he was all wrong? Then you had to tell him why? Data is your answer.

Strip down data to its simplest form and display it in a way the reader can understand in a glance. In my intro I mentioned my workplace giving campaign has been #1 in the country five years in a row. Data, simplified and cited with a link. I could also present it as a graph (see the graph).

Make data understandable and clear.

Use bullet or numbered lists to present your most compelling points. People skim text, but they pay attention to lists, so use them wisely.

You can use your own data, as in my post on employee engagement where I cited research from my own programs, or other people's data. As long as it's real, true, and compelling, use it. Your own data is exclusive, and it tells the reader you not only know the topic but you research it in new and interesting ways. Using other people's data tells the reader you're an expert on the topic, up to date on current research. Always give proper credit if you use someone else's data, though, and get permission if you need it.

Finally, always be true to the data. Don't cherry-pick facts to make a point that isn't really provable. Then you're just lying to the reader, and that's morally and ethically wrong. If you don't have facts to back up what you're saying, you shouldn't say it. You probably shouldn't even believe it.

5. Focus

Don't throw everything into your
post. Focus on the job at hand.

I've found that someone with something really interesting to say often has a lot of interesting things to say. But no one will listen if they try to say it all at once. Writer's block hits me hardest when I'm trying to fit too much into a small space. Focus in on a single point and argue the hell out of it.

6. Be arrogant

There's a fine line between confidence and arrogance; what you're looking for is the voice of authority in your writing. Everything above supports this. If you're brief, write in first person, use active voice, stay focused, and back it all up with data, people will believe you, right? Maybe. But they want to know that you believe you. If you can't write a first draft full of arrogance, then you can't revise it to a final draft that sounds filled with confidence. If you can't write a first draft filled with arrogance, then perhaps you need to rethink your whole concept.

---

Do you have other tips for writing a good post for a business blog? I'd love to hear them in the comments... or you can join me at the Charities @Work conference in New York City April 3-4 to talk about this or my next blog post on the Charities @Work blog. Or tweet me at @dudleypj.

Be the first to review this item

The Bad Lie, my new kids book with a golf theme, is now available at Amazon. I haven't published the ebook yet (not sure if/when), but if you absolutely, positively must have an electronic copy for yourself, comment here or email me and let me know. I'm happy to send you a file, in the format you want.

All I ask in return is that you post an honest rating and review to the Amazon page or the Goodreads page. And, if you really like the book, tell others about it.

I'll send signed copies to a random selection of those who post a review to Amazon or Goodreads before February 1, 2014. Spread the word. Thanks!

Where to get it:

• The CreateSpace site
• Amazon
• My own web site (links to Amazon for purchase)

I'll have a new book out soon. You can get a free preview.

I have a new book coming out this week for kids in the 3rd to 6th grade range. It's about a kid who has to make some tough choices about friendship, honesty, and his future, all staged in a golf setting.

If you've read my other books, you know this new one is outside my usual audience, but it was fun to write. The idea popped up last spring when a colleague decried the dearth of good golf-themed books for kids. Yes, she really was upset by that. I did some research and had to agree. So I decided to write one.

I gag when I read sports stories that are all about the main character winning the game in the end to become the hero, and I'm bored with sports stories that focus too heavily on the sport itself. So when I sat down to come up with the right story, I thought about my own experience with golf.

I am not a golfer. I have hacked around in the past, and I still enjoy a round with friends from time to time. Years ago, a good friend who is a great golfer watched me hit a bucket of balls at the driving range. He finally shook his head and said, "You have a beautiful swing. I have no idea why you can't hit the ball straight."

So you can see why I had no interest in writing a story about the highly technical nuances of the sport. But golf is so much more than just the physical activity. Golf is a connection between friends, between family members, between the individual and nature. Golf is as much about the bonds we create while playing as it is about the competition. On the flip side, the game itself is one of personal skill, concentration, and integrity. It's a very introspective game, and it can also be a lonely game.

Those are the very human elements of golf that drew me into this story. Jay, the main character, is a very good golfer for an 11 year old, but he's got real-kid problems. Parents recently divorced, peer pressure, the general stresses of growing up. He's faced with tough decisions that test his character and his relationships with his parents and his friends. Golf is central to so many part of his life, and when he's faced with losing that, it means more than just some game.

The book is scheduled to be available January 16 (print only), but recent crazy weather may push that out to the following week. In the meantime, I'm making free e-copies available to anyone who promises to post an honest review to Amazon or Goodreads by the end of January. Simply email me with the subject The Bad Lie Preview and let me know what e-reader you have, and I'll send you the file.

UPDATE 1/13/2014: The weather has indeed caused a delay. The book, originally scheduled to be available January 16, will now be available on or after January 22nd.

Lipsticking - my thoughts on writing and publishing

I have admitted in the past that I subscribe to a blog called Lipsticking, though I do not read every post that shows up in my inbox.

Today, one of their authors published an interview I did for her a few months back, about my experience with writing and publishing. Everything in it is totally up to date except the "what I'm working on now." That says I am about 10,000 words into the third book in the New Eden series, but today I'm actually done with the rough draft of that book. Everything else I say? Timeless and classic wisdom.

You should check it out.

And you should subscribe to the Lipsticking blog. There are some pretty smart and eloquent ladies over there.

Go read the interview now!

Sometimes my son hates having a writer for a parent.

Out at dinner the other night, my younger son finally got fed up.

"Sometimes I hate having a writer for a parent," he grumbled.

"Only sometimes?" I asked. I got all warm and fuzzy. Not just because I succeeded (again) in ruining my children's life, but also because he recognized and appreciated the word-nerd sarcasm I had just unleashed in a teachable moment disguised as humor.

See, I love to call out two ambiguities in particular, and he had just stumbled into one of them.

One is the misplaced modifier, as in

Ugly and ineffective, teachers shun corporal punishment as a disciplinary tool.

Okay, I admit the above sentence is actually unambiguous. But how often does the speaker really intend to call teachers ugly and ineffective, do you think? (Hmm. Maybe I should have used a different example.) Anyway, I usually just enjoy these gems quietly, without comment.

The other one I love is more than/less than, as in what my son had just said:

I like bread more than my brother.

Even within the context of our conversation, the ambiguity of this sentence gave me pause. Did he like bread more than he liked his brother? Or did he like bread more than his brother liked bread? This was a toss-up, so I asked him, and we got into a lengthy discussion of the possibilities of this construction.

A particular pet peeve of mine is the frequent misuse of "more than me" when "more than I" is intended. Take a simple example such as

You like fish more than me.

While it may be true that the listener prefers the company of fish to spending time with the speaker, usually the speaker means that the listener enjoys fish more than the speaker does. If that's the case, the speaker should have said

You like fish more than I.

(Kids especially hate this because it sounds awkward and stilted, so they think it's wrong.)

The simple test here is whether the sentence holds its proper meaning if you add the verb phrase at the end. As in:

You like fish more than I like fish.

If, however, you really mean that the listener prefers fish to you, then go ahead and use the object "me" here. And of course, You like fish more than me like fish makes no sense.

Besides providing a way to titillate grammarians, this rule can also come in handy when ambiguity is what you're looking for. For example, if you wish to tell someone who doesn't like cheese that you find them distasteful, you could say something like this:

I like cheese more than you.

The listener will heartily agree, thinking that you meant to recognize their dislike of cheese. But you and I both know you meant something different. And who could blame you? I also like cheese more than people who don't appreciate this grammatical concept.

And no, I never did find out whether my son liked bread more than he liked his brother.

And finally, because I had no photos of fish or cheese handy, here are some kittens I've shown before:

how to waste a lot of money self-publishing a book

PAID FOR, biatch.

Last night I updated my spreadsheet totting up sales and downloads of Semper and Forsada. It never takes me too long; these are not big numbers. But each book earns enough profit to pay my whiskey and Starbucks bills while I write the next book. And that makes me happy enough, for now.

Between the two titles, my name adorns over 16,000 books out in the wild. I'll gladly admit that more than 15,000 of those were free downloads. Which proves that you don't need to sell a lot of books to make a profit when you self-publish. (My publishing goals are modest; I'm sure I could sell far more if I invested in promotion, but my life is focused elsewhere right now.)

Not a wheelbarrow

My point is that you don't need a wheelbarrow full of cash to self publish a book, and I get really frustrated when I hear people spending thousands of dollars to do something I did for a couple hundred.

A writers group I know of, for example, expects to spend $10,000 to publish an anthology. They're not paying the authors; just the opposite: they're asking friends and family to chip in. It appears, from what I can discern, that the majority of this huge wheelbarrow of cash is going to the consultants who are helping the group self-publish their anthology.

Granted, they definitely need an editor. And they certainly need a cover designed. And they probably need a layout tech. I'm just having trouble adding that up to get to $10,000. Maybe they're planning one hell of a launch party.

Anyway, if you want to waste a ton of money self-publishing, just hire a consultant without understanding what, exactly, they're producing. Anyone who tells you that self-publishing is hard is probably trying to overcharge you, and anyone that tells you they can make your book successful for some fee is probably lying. There is no need to spend a bunch of money on consultants.

Meanwhile, I'm raking in the profits like the guy who cleans coins out of the fountain at the Motel 6 in Soledad. Admit it. You wish you were me.

Not sold out. Copies still available.
The third book will be out in the first half of 2014.

I have an email list. Sign up for it. In six months, I've sent exactly zero emails to this list. But I have two books coming out in the next six months, and you might miss them if you don't sign up. So go sign up now. Before you forget and stuff.

How I write my books, FREE BOOK GIVEAWAY, and what's is all about anyway?

I'll always remember my firsts with my first book. The first free download period (it's free today, too), my first sale, my first Amazon review, my first Amazon review from someone I didn't already know who lived in a different country, my first signed copy sale, my first author reading, the first high school book report about my book, my first one-star Goodreads rating, my first book blogger review (with the old cover!).

Today, another first: My first online author interview.

Michael was kind enough to download Semper during its most recent free run at Amazon, and to ask me to answer a few questions to be posted to his site. Questions about Semper, my writing process, etc. Questions I haven't really answered online before.

I'd be honored if you'd hop over to the interview, give it a quick read, and drop a comment.

While you're there, enter the rafflecopter for a free, signed copy of Semper.

Free kindle downloads this week - YA scifi and adventure, and why they're free

Free September 17-18
Get it here!

I don't promote my books much even though they are, in fact, awesome. I don't write for a living. I make my living raising hundreds of millions of dollars for charity. (Hey, it pays the bills. Don't judge me.)

So when I give my books away for free, it's not because I'm hoping to leverage some discoverability bump into a higher sales ranking. It's because I genuinely want people to read and enjoy them.

Why charge anything at all, you ask? Why not just post a PDF on my web site and make it always free for everyone all the time? Great question. I have two reasons, though others exist:

First, I have costs to recoup. Cover design was the biggest. Factor in my Starbucks and whiskey bills, and all the red pens I emptied in revisions, and pretty soon you're talking real money. (Especially the whiskey.) My day job pays me well, but not so well that budget be damned.

Free September 19-20
Get it here!

Second, I insist that my work has value. Even though I don't care much about the money, I do care deeply about the value. So I assign a price that I think reflects that value from the consumer's perspective. People then buy the book, or they don't. And, from time to time, I give it away without asking for any payment.

Some people and publishers think of free downloads as lost sales, or as a cost of marketing. Me? I look at them as donations to people who like to read good stories. I hope you will download these books and read them. And I really, really hope you enjoy them.

If you do, consider the value you received without needing to pay anything. And if you feel so inclined, head back to Amazon and/or Goodreads and give the book an honest rating. Because really, that's my secret reason for giving these away. Nothing makes me happier than a new rating.

I now have a new regret. RIP Chris.

The clever and dashing Richard Levangie recently invited me to answer 25 questions (no, it's not yet posted because I haven't finished yet). One of those questions was, "What is your greatest regret?"

Don't worry, no spoilers here; you'll have to wait for the surprise and delight when the 25 questions piece is eventually posted.

But today I learned some news that gave me a new answer to that question.

We've all heard the story (legend?) of the young man who, one evening in San Francisco, was so depressed that he decided to end his life. Before walking the few miles from his hotel to the Golden Gate Bridge, he made a pact with himself that if one person--just one person--smiled at him, he would not jump. Long story short, he jumped. Different tellings of this story result in the young man surviving the fall or not, but that's never the point. The point is that we all have a hidden superpower: the ability to save or change someone's life with simple kindness. In this case, a smile that dozens of people failed to give.

A little less than a decade ago I began making new friends all over the world through blogging, then facebook, then twitter. I credit four online writing blogs for most of these ongoing and surprisingly close friendships: Miss Snark, Nathan Bransford, Clarity of Night, and Evil Editor. A few of these friends I've met in person, but many remain, like Mante Te'o's girlfriend, elusively ethereal.

Some of these friends and I see each other online every day. With others, I cross paths somewhat like the Earth crosses paths with certain comets, tangentially but very close during those brief times. About four years ago I had one of those brief encounters with an online writer friend. I was in Alexandria, Virginia for work, and she lived in Maryland, so we were hoping to meet in DC for coffee one morning. At the last minute her schedule changed, and we couldn't make it work. But we talked on the phone for a half hour that morning, the one and only time we communicated by voice. During that call, she shared some personal issues she was facing, and she asked if I knew anyone who could help. Unfortunately, I didn't, at least not directly. We agreed to follow up in the ensuing weeks, and now I can't remember if that ever happened.

And that's my new regret.

Because after today's news, I feel that somehow, in some way, I should have paid more attention. I should have been more aggressive in looking for ways I could have helped her. She needed so much more than just a smile to save her, and maybe I could have done nothing to prevent her eventual suicide. But maybe I could have. Even though today's news is nearly a year old, it's new to me and it crushes my heart to know she was hurting so deeply for so long.

I am so sorry, Chris.

The non-poet poet's best friend

Today I took a break from work and revisited not only the light verse on this blog but also the 60 or so poems I put on a private blog a couple years back. I expected to find a collection of amateurish, embarrassingly lame attempts. What I encountered, however, was a delightful olio of wit, cleverness, and wordplay, spiced up with a few dashes of powerful imagery.

At first, I loved what I was reading. I wrote that! I remember that! Ha ha, yeah, brilliant!

Then, I got real sad. Why? Because I haven't written more than two or three poems in two years. And reading those tickled me so much that I think it's a shame I stopped.

I used to carry a rhyming dictionary to and from work every day. Once or twice a week, I'd take it out on the train and use it to kick-start some goofball poem. Over the years, my old rhyming dictionary became so tattered and brittle that it eventually fell apart, so I replaced it with this pocket one (pictured).

But after a year or so, I stopped carrying that. I got caught up in writing my novels. I lost touch with the playful poet that I so much enjoyed reading today.

Just now, I dug the rhyming dictionary out from behind some Dave Barry and Bloom County books on our bookshelf. I'm moving it to my work bag next to my journal. And when I get a couple dozen more poems together, I'll clean them all up into an anthology.

After that, I might revisit my Unlucky 26 (a non-published POD version pictured here). The children of Marrow Moor really deserve to have their stories shared with the world so other children won't suffer the same gruesome fates.

When I pick up that rhyming dictionary, I feel like I'm reconnecting with an old friend. The kind that, when you go out for coffee, just sits and listens to your stories, and when you get stuck, he comes up with exactly the right word that sends you spinning off onto a whole set of new stories.

I have more than 12,000 people NOT on my email list. You could be one of them!

Good thing I make my living in fundraising because I'm really bad at this book promotion thing.

I published Semper over a year ago, and with nearly 12,000 copies in circulation I am only now setting up a real email list. Maybe that's why Forsada (the sequel to Semper) has only 1,900 copies out in its fourth month.

See the entry form over there on the blog's right rail? You can sign up there.

When my list gets to 100 people, I'll give away a signed copy of Forsada to a random subscriber. Already have Forsada? I'll give you a signed copy of my next book if you prefer.

When my list gets to 500 people, I'll give away two more signed copies and a $25 gift card (either Amazon or Starbucks, your choice).

I'll give one additional entry into these drawings to anyone who tweets or posts this to facebook. Two additional entries for a Goodreads or Amazon rating. One more for a text review on Goodreads; one more for a text review on Amazon. If you blog your review, that's two more.

Please sign up. I don't send much email. And I'll never give out anyone's email address. I'll use it to announce new releases, appearances, and contests I have. I won't post blog updates; if you want to follow the blog, there's a feedburner over there as well.