the first conference of year is looming on the horizon. Love is Murder is this weekend, and this year I'm a published author. Last year, I was soon-to-be-pubbed, but this year it'll be subtly different.

I'm curious to see what the experience is like now that I have a bit of knowledge under my belt. I know I should use it as a HUGE marketing opportunity and pimp my product like crazy, but I'm always leery about doing that (and so dislike others who do that). So this will give me a…

... and sometimes I wonder if I'll be able to keep all the plates spinning in the air.

A bunch of stuff is ganging up on me. I can't believe I had a day off -- where did the time go?

I'm trying to help some writers organize a contest, I want to prep a book for submission, I'd like to review 4 other books I wrote and get those prepped, and of course there's about 3 books I'd like to write. This doesn't take into account things I HAVE to do: get my cover art request in, work on…

Yea! Finished another book today.

This one was very interesting. I tried to pay attention to the process as I was writing the book. That is, I tried to get a sense for what obstacles I felt while I was writing, what ideas I considered and discarded, etc. In short, I did a sort of 'metadata' about the book as I wrote the book.

I started on Nov. 26 and ended on January 15. I write a very clean first draft, and I don't anticipate major rewrites. Figure I'll need maybe…

One of the things I love about this Saturday Spotlight is that I learn a lot about my fellow authors. Take today's author. I had no idea N.D. had so many books out with so many publishers. Or that she was an accomplished painter. Or working on an archaelogy degree. She makes me feel like a slouch!

Here's her brief bio and you'll see what I mean:

N. D. Hansen-Hill was the author of 25 fantasy, science fiction, and horror novels until a year ago. That's when she began writing…

What do you think is the best way to get the word out about a release?

I'm tussling with this topic (it's at the top of my "Things to consider in 2008" List). I don't think there's a magic bullet, excuse the crime pun. I think it's going to be a matter of creating some interest in me, my topics, etc., and then launching assorted books out there and see what strikes a chord.

I suspect once I have a few books out, that might generate interest in my backlist and since I'm…

As I mentioned earlier, I'm going to have a Saturday Spotlight for authors I've come to know and whose work I've come to enjoy along my recent journey as a newly published author.

Thanks to the Internet and assorted Yahoo groups, I feel like I've come to know Jenyfer pretty well in the last year even though she's an American currently living in Cairo, Egypt with her husband and two children. In addition to being a mother, domestic goddess, and author, she also quilts and drinks a lot…

Don't you just love fresh starts?

I'm teaming up with some fellow authors and we're putting our heads together, trying to figure out how to get the word out about our books. To that end, I'm going to start doing a "Saturday Spotlight" here on my blog. I've asked some fellow authors to give me information about themselves and their books, and I'll post it here. Most of them write romantic suspense (heavy on the romance) not really 'crime fiction', which is why they aren't coming onto…