Gone to my Happy Place.

You may have noticed I haven't posted anything in quite a while. I've been off to my happy place--writing and finishing edits and revisions of my next novel, The Un-Familiar: A Tale of Cats and Gods. This is the sequel to Ye Gods! A Tale of Dogs and Demons. It's now off to the publisher for their editor to have a stab at, followed by any corrections and revisions they request, then layout and cover design, and all the other magic they do to come up with a finished product, ready to head out into the world...probably sometime in the spring of 2016. (YIPPEEEE!!)

With all the excitement and work of finalizing the manuscript, the blog has fallen by the wayside. I don't foresee posting regularly in the months ahead, either, as I begin plotting and outlining my next two novels (A Rattling of Bones, based on this short story; and Ye Goddess! A Tale of Girls and Gods, the final book in the Chupacabra Trilogy).

Will post news and updates on this page as it becomes available. In the meantime, you can "like" my author page on Facebook (Marina Melee by Lynne M. Hinkey) to see what I'm up to!

WRITERS AFLOAT: An Interview with Amy Biddle, Sailor and Author of "The Atheist's Prayer"

Welcome to "Waterblogged: Writers Afloat" -- interviews with sailors who write and writers who sail. Read how my talented and interesting guests have managed to blend writing, sailing, family, work, and their passion for life at sea into fascinating stories, best-selling books, and successful writing careers.

Today's Writer Afloat is Amy Biddle. Her debut novel, The Atheist's Prayer, is scheduled for release by Perfect Edge Books on February 28^th, and available for pre-order now on Amazon! Amy is also a book reviewer at Underground Book Reviews (http://www.undergroundbookreviews.com/)

 

Author Amy R. Biddle hard at work!

The Atheist's Prayer, available for pre-order NOW!

 

Welcome, Amy and thank you for taking time out of your busy schedule to chat with me. 

 

LYNNE: What came first, writing or sailing?

AMY: Writing, no contest. I’ve been writing since before I learned the alphabet. I used to read stories aloud from my scribbles. As for sailing, I’ve always loved the ocean but I grew up in the mountains and didn’t get many chances to get on the water until I was in high school.

LYNNE:  Tell us a little bit about how you came to both your sailing and writing life.

AMY:  When I was in high school, I enrolled in a semester-long alternative education program on a traditional, wooden schooner and it changed my life. I never thought I’d make a career out of it, but somehow I just couldn’t escape the pull of the ocean. I ended up going to college at Massachusetts Maritime Academy to get a license to work on big ships. My career has brought me to all corners of the globe, and has also afforded me the time to pursue my writing goals.

LYNNE:  When and where do you prefer to write?

AMY:  I travel so much there isn’t a particular when or where. My laptop goes with me wherever I go. In order to really get into a story, I need a few hours of alone time. I find a coffee shop, hole myself up in my room, or get comfortable in a hammock.

Most of The Atheist’s Prayer was written on boats. It started as a short story when I was working on a schooner and the rest of it I wrote on a research vessel. When I’m not traveling or working, I have an apartment in Cambridge, and I work at a desk in my room.

 

LYNNE:  Do you follow a schedule for writing? How do you juggle sailing, work, book reviews, and writing?

AMY:  For six months out of the year I spend every day on the bridge of a ship. Sometimes it’s hectic, and sometimes it’s excruciatingly slow. When I’m on watch I dream up crazy characters and impossible plot twists, then scribble notes on scraps of paper which eventually accumulate at the bottom of my dresser drawer. I used to spend a lot of time writing new material when I was at sea, but since I’ve gotten involved with Underground Book Reviews I can barely keep up with my reviews. Luckily, the two other co-founders, Brian and Katie, are able to pick up my slack when I’m at work.

The other six months out of the year I have all the free time in the world. If it weren’t for that time off, the first version of The Atheist’s Prayer would be sitting in draft form somewhere, unedited and forgotten.

 

LYNNE:  What's the most difficult part of being a writer afloat? The most rewarding?

AMY:  The biggest difficulty for me was breaking into the literary world without an English major or a single piece of published work. Underground Book Reviews helped immensely with that, but it was still a struggle.

Writing is my reward. When I’m on the ship, writing is my escape. When I’m off the ship, it’s my life. And of course, there’s community. Meeting other writers is a thrill. The people I work with at Underground Book Reviews helped me write The Atheist’s Prayer and have supported me through thick and thin. I wouldn’t be where I am today without their help.

LYNNE:  Tell us about The Atheist's Prayer and when and where readers can buy it.

AMY:  The Atheist’s Prayer is about an alcoholic mall Santa and a coke-dealing stripper who get tangled up with a fairy-worshiping suicide cult. It’s dark, and it’s funny, and I like to think that there’s some meaning underneath the crass humor.

It’s being published by Perfect Edge Books, an imprint of John Hunt Publishing. The authors at Perfect Edge are a fantastic bunch, and in fact two of them will be reading with me for an event at the Harvard Coop in Cambridge, MA on March 27th.

 

LYNNE:  What else have you written or are you working on now?

AMY:  I’ve been writing some short stories, but I’m not ready to start a new novel until after The Atheist’s Prayer comes out. I’m putting all my efforts into the book release and Underground Book Reviews. But the ideas for my next novel are always brewing…

 

LYNNE:  Do you have a favorite character that you've written, and why?

AMY:  I put a little bit of myself into every character I write, and I make sure none of them are perfect. I love them all in their own right. It might be easy for readers to choose a favorite, but not me.

 

LYNNE:  Who is your favorite author and why?

AMY:  I have a lot of favorite books, but Kurt Vonnegut is by far my favorite author. He gets you laughing and thinking at the same time. It’s an underrated talent.

 

LYNNE:  What inspires you, both in your writing and in your sailing?

AMY:  I’m inspired by the world around me. Wherever I am- at sea, in the car, at a party, on a hike- I’m thinking about how I’d capture that scene in writing. How do I capture the essence of the experience? A description of a bus stop from the point of view of a weary traveler might be dirty and overcrowded. From the point of view of someone on their way to meet the love of their life it might be bustling with life and excitement. Experience is so subjective. It’s not what you write about, but how you write about it that really makes the impact.

LYNNE:  Last question. Underground Book Reviews is a great showcase for new and emerging authors and gives you a great opportunity to get to know them and their experiences. Based on your reviews, interviews, and your own experience, what advice do you think new/emerging authors most need to hear?

 
AMY:  Passion, inspiration and obsession get a book written. Sweat, pain and perseverance get a book ready for publication. Editing is a bitch, but it’s also necessary. Be hungry for feedback, and be open to criticism. But in the end, remember that you are the master of your world. Consider advice with an open mind but don’t feel obligated to please everyone, because you won’t. Ever.

And learn how to sell yourself. Stand on that street corner and strut your stuff, because no one will notice you otherwise.

____________________________________________________________

I urge you all to run over to Amazon and order a copy of The Atheist's Prayer. It's a thoroughly enjoyable read that had me laughing out loud. Funny and poignant, The Atheist's Prayer is a fast-paced, comic exploration of belief, disbelief, gullibility, and faith. Biddle seamlessly blends the lunacy of a fairy-worshipping cult with a cast of quirky characters searching for answers, usually in all the wrong places. Written with style and humor, The Atheist's Prayer will pull you in, make you laugh and think, and want more. I'm eagerly awaiting Amy's next novel!

 

You can read more by and about Amy's life as a sailing writer at her blogs and website:

http://www.amyrbiddle.com/

http://www.undergroundbookreviews.com/

 

You can pre-order The Atheist's Prayer HERE.

 

You're Invited to a Launch Party!

You're all invited to a virtual party on December 17, 2013! It's the official Facebook virtual book launch party for author Normandie Fischer's Sailing Out of Darkness. This is a great opportunity to discover Normandie's writing, if you haven't already, as well as a number of other authors who are participating in the event.

I was lucky enough to have a sneak-preview of Sailing Out of Darkness in the pre-publication stages and can't wait for it to be available to all of you! Normandie is a fabulous writer (Becalmed is a favorite of mine) whose work will appeal to a wide range of readers, and especially to those with an affinity for the shore and sailing.

I'm also lucky to be included among the other authors she'll be featuring during the launch party, and will be giving away free copies (electronic and print) of Marina Melee, and 2 print copies of Ye Gods! (although that won't be available until it comes out on April 1.)

Normandie has posted the first "teaser" for the party here, with more to come. You can also learn more about her fascinating life and experiences living aboard Sea Venture, her books, and her thoughts on the writing life, both at sea and on land at her blog by clicking here. For those of you in the Beaufort, NC area, be sure to watch for a live launch party and book signings in your area!

I hope to "see" you all at the launch party!

WHAT MICHAEL PHELPS CAN TEACH US ABOUT WRITING SUCCESS

Today's Business-2-Community website has an article on strategies to reach one's goals: Achieving Goals: Five Important Lessons from Michael Phelps. We all know Phelps is the world's greatest swimmer and arguably the world's greatest athlete. What this article focuses on is how he got there, and how we can all follow his example to plan out a strategy for achieving our own goals, whether they're in the pool, at work, or at the keyboard writing a novel, poem, essay, or other masterpiece.

 

Michael Phelps with his 2012 Olympic Gold Medals

The five lessons are:

 

1. Prepare for Success

2. Do Not Be Afraid to Announce Your Goals Publically
3. Work With Your Strengths and Weaknesses, Accentuating the Positives
4. Assemble a Team To Support You in Pursuing Your Goals
5. Never Give Up

Phelps began implementing these lessons as soon as he hit the pool at age 7. He prepared for his eventual success by putting in long, hard hours in the pool and in the gym. He didn't look for short cuts and he didn't settle for just being the best in his club, state, region, or in the U.S. He didn't settle for less than his goal and he put in all the years of work that entails. He announced his intentions publicly, setting himself up for spectacular failures and ridicule if he didn't continue to prepare and work to improve his weaknesses and enhance his strengths. Forget peer pressure. By announcing his intentions to "three-peat" or win the most golds in a single Olympics, or any of his other seemingly brash announcements, Phelps put the pressure on himself to not end up looking foolish. What great motivation that is!

 

Phelps also made sure he had a support team that was able to bring out the best in him, overcome the worst, and help him achieve his goals. That didn't mean surrounding himself with sycophants and cheerleaders. He stayed with the coach that pushed him, even when they butted heads, because he knew he needed discipline, not back patting. His friend and teammate Ryan Lochte was a threat to his standing and to his public announcements of his intentions. He used that competition to fuel his drive. And he had his mother's love, support, encouragement,. I'm sure some mornings, that included nagging him to get out of bed,  making sure he didn't give up because he was tired, sore, or just not feeling motivated that day, and in other ways, doing things that mothers do, even when we find them unpleasant (thanks, moms!) Most of all, no matter the obstacles, no matter the whispered wonderings if he still had "it" in him, Michael Phelps never quit, never gave up until he achieved all of his swimming goals.

As writers, we can apply these lessons, and emulate the role model Phelps provides, in our own endeavors.

Prepare for success. We have to work on our craft always. We can and should continue to improve, learn more, try new things, all with our eye on the ultimate prize of publishing works we're proud of, not just publishing for the sake of publishing. That means we have to plan out a multi-year, multi-decade strategy. We have to expect and learn from failure, from rejection. Great swimmers are made through years of practice and from losing a few races along the way. So are great writers. Very few of us can sit down at the computer and pump out a complete, finished, well-written novel on our first try. Be prepared to shove the first two or three attempts in a drawer, never to see the light of day again (unless of course it's to remind ourselves, molnths and years later, how far we've come!)

Don't be afraid to announce our goals publicly. Those first tenuous steps at sharing our work or our ambition to become a writer with other people are difficult. Will our friends and family mock us? Will they think we're crazy? How will we respond when someone asks, "What have you written?" and we have nothing but dozens of unpublished stories on our hard drives? But announcing our goals publicly, boldly stating, "I want to be a writer, poet, novelist," is the first step in turning our dream into a reality. "I want to write a novel, so first I have to practice, hone my skills, and make the time to write." Only then can we firmly plot out our next steps and move forward with our plan. Without this public announcement, we will have a difficult time building the support team needed and committing to the work and the sacrifices ahead as we pursue our dreams.

Work with our strengths and weaknesses, accentuating the positives. Knowing our weaknesses as writers helps us to overcome those. The critical point in this statement, however, is "accentuate the positives." Maybe it's something in the writer's psyche, but we do seem to focus on our weaknesses, wallow in them, fret over them, and often, let them silence us. We have to learn to see those weaknesses and address them, but then see through them to our strengths, and embrace and be emboldened by those. Vivid imagination? Use it. Traumatic childhood? Use it. Love affair with words? Embrace it. Accentuating the positives can get us through those rough days when we wonder why we're sitting at the computer, staring at an empty screen, or deleting pages and pages of sub-par work from the day before. We don't do those things because we can't write, we do those things because we know we can write better.

Assemble a team to support you in pursuing your goals. Using Phelps, or any outstanding athlete as an example, consider who has to be on your team. Yes, it's important to have a few cheerleaders around to help when morale sinks, but it's even more important to have a demanding coach who will bring out the best in us and give us an honest assessment of what we need to work on. Find a writing coach or partner in a local or online writing group, or take some classes. Find an editor who is both brutally honest and encouraging, as needed. Depending on your goals, your team might include an agent, a publisher, or magazine editors. And don't forget to include teammates--others who are going through what you are, who understand what it means to lock yourself in your room and give free rein to the voices in your head.  The Internet Writing Workshop is a great place to find all of these and start building a support team.

Finally, never give up. Critiquers will rip our work apart. Rejections will come. Each time we write something, we'll think we're at the top of our game. Until we read it a few weeks or months later. As I learned working in sales, a goal isn't a place to stop, it's a place to start. Once we've achieved our initial goal, it's time to up the ante. Try harder, shoot for more. If we get rejections, we'll improve what we wrote. If we get published, we'll write something even better next time. We'll never give up.

Sadly, we won't be able to follow Phelps's 12,000 calorie/day diet as we pursue our sedentary sport of writing, but at least we can follow his lessons for swimming success to achieve our own writing goals.

Write on!
 

 

The Sunshine Blogger Award

Cindy Dwyer, at A Reason to Write, nominated Waterblogged for the Sunshine Blogger Award. Thanks, Cindy! A fellow IWW member and author, Cindy and I are at a similar position with our current manuscripts: the dreaded query stage! If you read her blog, you'll see what a talented and funny writer she is. I'm certain her hysterical memoir of growing up in a "mixed" (Irish and Italian) family, My Roots are Showing, will find an agent soon.

On to the award...



Like many of the blogging awards circulating, this is a "chain award" where, when you're nominated, you answer some questions and pass the award on to other bloggers (the award calls for 10, but I'm not much for details, so I'll leave it at "other bloggers"). Some brilliant blogger (Cindy Brown at Everyday Underwear) came up with an option to accept the "Do Not Do a Damn Thing, I just like your blog"  award, giving all of us a way to let our favorite bloggers know we're fans without making them feel obligated to continue the chain. That option is available for my nominees (listed below, after I answer the award's 8 questions).

1. What is your favorite Christmas/festive movie?
Easy! Christmas Story. Ralphie's adventures take me back to my own childhood, where I too lived more in my imagination than in the real world. From the BB gun to the tongue-on-the-flagpole, I know that childhood. I lived it. I can (and do) watch that movie repeatedly from Thanksgiving day (a tradition in our house) through Christmas.


2. What is your favorite flower?
Frangipani, aka Plumeria. I love the flower and the tree both, and perhaps even more, I love the caterpillar that eats the toxic leaves: the frangipani worm. 

(Frangipani. Photo from Wikipedia)

3. What is your favorite non-alcoholic beverage?
I'm afraid I don't understand the question. Non-alcoholic beverage? I suppose the tonic that goes into my G&T, although by itself, it's pretty nasty stuff.

4. What is your passion?
Swimming! If you have any doubts, scroll down a bit to read my post on "Swimmers' Bliss"--far superior to a mere runners' high.

5. What is your favorite time of year?
Summer time, summer time, sum-sum-summer time! Or, at least when I'm anywhere above about 25 degrees N latitude. Below that, in the Caribbean, winter, with the balmy 80 degree days and chilly 70 degree nights.

6. What is your favorite time of day?
Afternoon. I'm neither a morning person nor a night person. I ease into my day, peak in the middle, then fade off to bed at a fairly early hour. When other people are having their post-lunch crash, I'm wired and ready to go! Before and after that, though...eh. I wake up early (5:30 a.m., thanks to the cat) and while I don't mind that, I don't want to do anything but drink coffee, check email, and catch up on the news until about 8. Bedtime is about 9:30, but then I read for 30-60 minutes, so usually about 10 p.m.

7. What is your favorite physical activity?
Swimming. Again, I'll refer you to my post on Swimmers' Bliss!

8. What is your favorite vacation?
Anywhere and everywhere. I love to travel, meet new people, and explore new places. Everywhere and everyone has a story and I love learning those. While I prefer island life and warmer climes for living, I'm perfectly happy to travel to anywhere.

And now the fun part. I get to nominate some other bloggers who have brought sunshine into my life. And they are:

1. Cheese Will Set You Free, the diary of Chester Crump.

2. Margaret and Helen

3. Kathryn Magendie, Writing from My Mountain Cove

4.  Writing on Board, by Normandie Ward Fischer


As I mentioned earlier, I’m giving these bloggers the option of accepting either the Sunshine Blogger Award or The Don’t Do A Damn Thing Award…I Just Like Your Blog, a brainchild of Cindy Brown over at Everyday Underwear. If you accept the Sunshine Award, answer the questions and pass it along to (ten/some) other brilliant bloggers. If you’d prefer The Don’t Do A Damn Thing Award, well I think you can figure it out from there.