SHE TOO didn't win but the judge liked us!

When SHE TOO was just an ebook, we (its four authors) entered it into the poetry category of a big competition for new self-published ebooks. Our feedback is just to hand.

We were told that books were evaluated on a scale of 1-5 with 1 meaning 'needs improvement' and 5 meaning 'outstanding'. We were also told that some categories, e.g. Plot and Story Appeal, wouldn't necessarily apply to poetry — but in our case they decided it did. Here are our excellent scores:

Structure, Organization, and Pacing: 4

Spelling, Punctuation, and Grammar: 5

Production Quality and Cover Design: 4

Plot and Story Appeal: 4

Character Appeal and Development: 5

Voice and Writing Style: 4

The judge suggested we might have done better to arrange the book into categories or sections, but in general the review was very favourable. Omitting the more detailed passages, this is the judge's commentary:

This is a lovely idea for a collection, and what a good description of "(Almost) Harmony"!

This feels like a wonderful conversation among a group of women, and sectioning could give some sense of the variety of subjects.

The combination of four poets was an interesting reading experience too. I found myself reading each poem and only then glancing at its poet, to see if I could guess! And I could. That shows the power of the individual voices within the whole. I began to see not just the themes within the collection but within each poet's collection, what intrigued and plagued her. I also started to notice individual poetic devices.

There's an intriguing undercurrent of anger and frustration about the alluring but intrusive bonds of family. I think this balances well against the expectation that these poems will be "nice poems from nice ladies". The shock of the "real" is that much more striking considering the soft expectation set up by the cover and the introduction. Very good!

— Judge, 2nd Annual Writer’s Digest Self-Published eBook Awards.


We didn't win or even get placed. In a huge field of strong contenders, that would actually have surprised us, though we took the view that 'you've gotta be in it to win it'. We learned a lot from the exercise of entering, though. It immediately threw us into enquiries about achieving professionalism and excellence in an unfamiliar field — and with very little time to spare before the entry deadline.  (I have been a small publisher in the past, but that was long before the advent of ebooks, which have different requirements.) 

I'm proud of what we achieved. It's a good book!

Announcement — SHE TOO Calendar. A great gift for yourself or another poetic soul.

A monthly calendar of your favourite pin-up poets and sample poems. Click on the pic to view and buy.

OR

Buy the book (over there in the right-hand side bar, see) and get a free one-page calendar as a gift (just the rudie-nudie photos as above!).

For details, click here.

Party time! Virtual book launch

'People who haven't seen me for a while sometimes ask, 'Are you still writing poetry?' To which the answer is always yes. It's how I've spent my life since the age of seven, through all other events and circumstances.

Occasionally I produce books of it and/or get published in literary journals or anthologies. I mostly play online these days, so the journals and anthologies are as often as not digital only, and now I'm branching out into ebooks of my work. 

First cab off the rank is actually a collaboration with three other women: Helen Patrice of Melbourne, who has been a  close friend for many years, and Delaina Miller of Kansas City, Missouri and Leigh Spencer of Tucson, Arizona, whom we've got to know online. We love each other's writing, so after we all participated in a month-long poem-a-day challenge earlier this year, Delaina suggested we combine the results.

It's been a heck of a project, time-consuming, exciting and challenging, and we've learnt heaps. As you may know, I was once an independent publisher of poetry; some of my books even got international awards. Creating an ebook is whole a different experience, with different requirements. But we did it!

The book is now available on Kindle, iBooks and Google Play. It is also available as a pdf file. It is 155 pages long and only costs $7.77 (USD).

We asked four poets of stature online (one a Kindle poetry best-seller) to write some blurbs for us. We received an embarrassment of riches — not just a few polite sentences but paragraphs of generous praise — and had to do some reluctant cutting. 

Obviously I am saying all this to convince you that you might like it even though it's poetry!  

We're having a virtual launch on facebook this coming weekend, where we'll answer questions, tell outrageous true stories, do a reading via YouTube (not yet available to the general public), run competitions and give away goodies as prizes.

But what if you can't come? Well you can still get the book, in whatever format suits you best, via the link here; look top right. Yes, it's the book called She Too, with purple cover and Venn diagram. (That's the back cover illustrated left.) There are various options to click on to buy it in your preferred format. 

Or you could go direct to Kindle, iBooks or Google Play and do a search — in which case you'll need to use the whole title: She Too: Four voices in (almost) harmony. I think doing it via the link here is easier.

Of course, if you happen to be on facebook but not connected to any of us there, you are still very welcome to join in the fun at the launch party. You can register for the event ahead of time, here.

Book Trailer

While you eagerly await the virtual launch of SHE TOO, why not entertain yourselves with our book trailer?

My Secret Perfectionism

Cross-posted from LiveJournal

Perfectionism's the enemy; I know that. It's what has us beat ourselves up, ignore our achievements, belittle our triumphs, give in to self-doubt. It tells us we're never good enough, no matter how hard we strive. It's mean, horrid and sly. It's what stops us enjoying our lives.

In every area but one I have got rid of perfectionism. Near enough IS good enough. I have taken on board the slogans of my domestic mentor FlyLady: "Progress, not perfection", "Housework imperfectly done still blesses your family". I apply the same attitude to my appearance, my business activities, my projects ... to everything except my writing.

Well, that's OK. It's right and good to be a perfectionist as a poet, to get every poem as good as I can. That's what art's about, isn't it? You know you can't ever get it perfect but you come as close as you damn well can. Yes, I think that's legitimate in a poem — to agonise over the placement of a comma, to pore over the Thesaurus hunting the exact right word.

The trouble is, it extends to publications one produces.

As any of you who are also my friends on facebook must have noticed, any minute now (well, first weekend in September) I and three poet friends are launching a collaborative collection called SHE TOO.

We have done all the work ourselves, and it's a heck of a business collaborating internationally. One night recently I was up until 2.40am to help iron out, across cyberspace, an unexpected last-minute problem. Yesterday morning I left the computer to go get breakfast, only to find when I returned that my colleague in America had been waiting for my further input before she could finally go home from work.

We've done it and we're proud of it. It's available in pdf, Kindle and epub. We have prizes and party favours for people who attend our virtual launch. We've been given wonderful blurb comments from poets of some standing in the online poetic community. We've thrashed out thorny issues without ego getting in the way, and are better friends than ever. And, being great admirers of each other's work, we think the content is wonderful.

We've had to learn and implement those requirements for ebooks which differ from printed books. (Some material we're used to seeing as introductory goes at the end instead of the beginning. There is no back cover; text that would belong there goes in the preliminary pages.) There's been some trial and error about all this, but we finally figured it out.

The book is already available on Amazon and iBooks and is about to be on Google Play.

What an achievement, eh?

And now, all of a sudden, I'm in a blue funk. I think I should have rewritten one of my poems before it went to press — only I didn't spot where I could make a particular improvement until just now. I think we should have kept our longest blurb comment in full instead of judiciously cutting, and used it as a Foreword. Only there's already such a lot of introductory stuff, which is why we decided not to do it that way. I noticed a word left out, too late to put it back in. Of course, it's only the word "a", and it's not in a poem but only in a bit of suff at the end of the book, telling people how to rate it on Amazon.

I rationalise, yet these tiny things loom suddenly as huge imperfections. I am spilling this here so as not to rush to the private facebook group where we four authors/publishers communicate about the book and say it there. My poor collaborators! Imagine how they would feel. I'm the oldest, supposedly the wise crone, and I've acted as the editor for this volume. They think I know my stuff. How demoralising if I were now to go into doubt and angst, now when they are allowing themselves to relax just a little at last. No, we have to keep our spirits high for this launch party. I can't do that.

It's the urge to tinker and tweak and gild the lily, and fix what ain't broke. I know it is. But it's too late; the book is out in the world.

Well actually, there still would be time to call it in, alter it, put it out again ... but it's not me doing that part of the operations. I'm not the geek. The geek has done it twice for me already. She hasn't complained but reassured; all the same, I think I have to let go now and just writhe and gnash quietly over here, out of sight.

I so want it to be perfect! And you know, it never can be. The creation of a book is often likened to birthing a baby. Well, babies aren't perfect. They're unique, with variations that are not flaws but marks of individuality.

Fear of other people's judgment: that's what it is. The awful waiting for people to pronounce upon this creation which contains our life blood and parts of our souls. But there — the others are good. My deficiencies will get lost amongst all that good stuff; will never even be noticed. I tell myself.

I'd like to fix that poem....

SHE TOO — an exciting collaboration

I've got a new book coming out! Not all by myself, though. WE have a new book coming out! Four of us: Helen Patrice, Leigh Spencer, Delaina Miller and me. Four friends, four poets, "four voices in (almost) harmony" as our subtitle says.

How did that come about? Thisaway:

Back in 1988 Helen read my poem "Universe Cat" and sent me a fan letter.  It was my first ever, and included a cat poem of her own. Touched, I replied. Shortly afterwards I met her at a writers' gathering. and that was the start of a long friendship. By now we have total permission to call each other on our shit, insult each other outrageously, demand to know intimate details of what's going on with each other (and get answered honestly), and request — and receive — all kinds of help or rescue at a moment's notice.

In 2008 Leigh and Delaina both attended a workshop at the University of Arizona and, as Leigh tells it, bonded afterwards over a 99 cent bean and cheese burrito the size of a football. That both were poets and feminists no doubt helped.

In 2009 Leigh and I both participated in one of the September poem-a-day challenges John Hewitt used to run at his Writers' Resource Centre website. I was enraptured by her writing, and at one point felt moved to hunt her up on facebook and make a friend request, accompanied by the message, 'I love a woman who isn't afraid to say "fuck" in a poem'. Then John Hewitt started the facebook group Free Verse for Fun and made both Leigh and me co-administrators.

Helen asked if I knew any online poetry groups worth joining, so I added her to that one. She agreed that the members are the real deal as poets, not the "bunch of wankers" she'd found elsewhere, and entered in with cries of relief. And at some point Delaina joined too, and we started taking notice of her words. We discovered we're all very much on the same wavelength. We're mad about each other, and about each other's poetry.

John Hewitt doesn't do the September challenge any more, but there are various April challenges in conjunction with National Poetry Month in the US (which, online, has become international). This year, after we all participated, and shared the results on facebook as well, Delaina suggested we join forces to produce a book of our April poems for 2014.

So we did, and it's been a lot of work — which has taken place in great harmony, all contributing according to our strengths.

We're starting to get it up on various ebook sites and are planning the virtual launch, with all sorts of goodies to give away to those who buy the book then.

Stay tuned for date and details!