Friday, August 12, 2011

WILD TURKEYS



My guest is award winning thriller-suspense-romance writer, Jo Robertson  She’s also a member of one my favorite groups, The Romance Bandits. 


Jo’s debut novel, THE WATCHER, won Romance Writers of America's 2006 Golden Heart Award for romantic suspense.


Jo is here to talk about wild turkeys…






Did your mind go straight to Wild Turkey Bourbon at the title of today's blog? Well, I'm not talking about that kind of wild turkey today. I'm talking about the feathered friend kind.

Sort of.

On the way to the dentist recently I nearly hit two wild turkeys with my car as they dashed across the street. The environmentalists in our town have done a good job of preserving creek and wooded areas, so I wasn't surprised to see the birds skitter across the four-lane road.

But seeing them me think about how writers are a bit like wild turkeys – they often stand out in crowds, mainly because their minds always seem to be somewhere else.

Writers think a lot. They think about thinking. It's called metacognition, and a writer metacognates all the time. If she did it in grade school, educators called her "easily distracted." In high school or college, she was "flighty," and in the work place, "unfocused."

In reality, writers are anything but distracted, flighty or unfocused. We wouldn't survive long in this industry if we were.

But we are free thinkers, letting our minds – conscious and subconscious alike – roam freely, snagging here and there on an idea, a phrase, a character, a scene, moving on , trolling deep waters or shallow pools. Hence, we may seem out of step with the people around us.

Our ideas and inspiration come from everywhere, skittering through our creative minds like those wild turkeys.

Photo Credit: Henry Zeman
Not only are we wild turkeys in our disparate ideas and stories, but we're like them in the venues we choose to publish through. We're all struggling to find a place in the publishing industry.

The truth is that the way we look at books, purchase them, and collect them is in the throes of significant change, and publishers of all kinds – the NY Big Six, small presses, e-publishers and digital first – are all scrambling to see what's going to happen to the book publishing industry.

It's not so much that digital publishing has increased significantly.  Electronic books still account for only about 15-20-% of the market, which leaves a good 80% to the print business. It's more how quickly digital publishing has increased – exponentially. And it's got everyone wondering what the future holds.

The one point all seem to agree on is we need writers! Writers of all kinds. Writers who think inside and outside the box, those who march in step with their fellow writers and those who march out of step to some weird meter in their heads.                                           

My journey into publishing began with the purchase of my Kindle in December. The moment I held that baby in my hands, I felt like I'd birthed another child. And I knew I'd never give it up. I also knew I'd never purchase another print book again unless it was a gift for someone without an e-reader or was unavailable electronically.

When I realized that the New York publishers weren't excited about my Golden Heart winning manuscript or my Daphne-winning story – too much romance, too little romance, not enough suspense, too much suspense, all of which I translated into "Where can we place your book on the shelf in the brick and mortar bookstore?" – I realized I needed to find a much bigger store.

A virtual bookstore. Digital publishing provides shelf upon shelf for the reader to pick among, and tons of tags, descriptors, and categories for them.

Deciding to take my career into my own hands, to move at my own pace, was a seminal moment for me. I like the control I have, choosing my own genres, setting my own pace.

Once I made the leap to indie publishing, I felt like one of those wild turkeys tripping across the road – free, but a wee bit scared I might get mowed down by a speeding car!

Now that The Watcher is in print and available soon electronically, I feel my wild turkey has come home to roost.


How about you, readers? What large or small decision have you made that felt wonderfully liberating or frighteningly scary? Share the deets.

Inquiring minds want to know!


The Watcher--Available now.

THE WATCHER Forensic psychiatrist Kate Myers believes the killer of two teenage girls in Bigler County, California, is the same man who savagely murdered her twin sister over fifteen years ago. Working on sheer tenacity, she sets out to prove it. Deputy Sheriff Ben Slater hides his personal pain behind the job, but Kate's arrival knocks his world on its axis. He wants to believe her wild theory, but the idea of a serial killer with this pathology is bizarre. Together they work to find a killer whose roots began in a small town in Bigler County, but whose violence spread across the nation. A Janus-like killer, more monster than man, fixates on Kate and wants nothing more than to kill her again. Excerpt

BUY: Available in print on Amazon  Available as e-book, August 19th. 

Like many writers, I penned my first story at a young age.  However, a family and a teaching career put my writing dreams on hold until my Advanced Placement seniors conned me into writing my first complete manuscript.  That story, which subsequently won RWA's Golden Heart Award in 2006, was THE WATCHER.

From the moment I put my fingers to the keyboard, the
barrier between my brain and the paper lifted, the story flew from my mind, and I fell in love with everything about the process of writing.

Raised as an Army brat, I lived in Germany as a child, Northern Virginia, Oklahoma, Kentucky, Idaho, and Utah before finally settling in Northern California.  Whenever I visit my sister in Virginia or my brothers in North Carolina and Florida, upon returning home I remember again why I love Northern California, home of the ancient redwoods, the fecund forests and the rugged Pacific Coastline.

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