29Sep/23

A New Cover for Run, Clarissa, Run

It’s been more than ten years since I first published Run, Clarissa, Run. A lot has changed since then, with me and with the world. So I decided it was time to re-edit the book, get a new cover, and… 

Well, we’ll see. 

Where I’ve been lately

When I published the book, I had big dreams of being a professional author. That didn’t quite pan out. 

At first, it sold reasonably well. According to many blogs and forums of the time, each book would sell that much better and your author career was just a matter of hard work and continuing to write. 

But, like a lot of authors from that time, I soon learned that wasn’t always the case. The next book sold slightly less, and the one after selling even fewer. 

That’s not to say I haven’t had some success. I’ve sold thousands of copies in total. I’ve gotten some great reviews. I’ve met some of my readers and loved the experience. 

But at the time my definition of “making” it as an author meant earning enough to quit my job and become a full-time author. And I never got close to that. 

I kept writing. I started blogs. I wrote newsletters. I paid editors to improve my books, graphic artists for cover art, and promotional companies to help sell my books. 

But eventually, I hit a wall, mentally. The amount of time I was putting into writing was leading me to burn out. The amount I was spending on various author services never equaled the amount of sales I was getting, making writing a very expensive hobby for a couple of years. Finally, watching my sales data, follower numbers, etc. was hurting my mental health. 

I had to stop. I took a six-month sabbatical from writing, which turned into several years of not writing. I focussed on other things, like learning Esperanto, Portuguese and Spanish. I stopped being a nurse and started teaching English online. I emigrated overseas. It’s been a busy time, to say the least. 

What’s coming

But now, I’m back. This time writing is definitely a hobby. I have a lot of other things that I want to do and I can’t spend nearly as much time. Nor can I afford to put out new books at the rate that I was publishing (4 per year). 

I’m starting by reworking some of my old books. I’ve been using technology, like Grammarly, to root out the remaining typos and grammar errors that still plague some of these books, despite multiple rounds of editing. I’m also considering new covers if I can either, 1)make a decent cover myself or 2) find something better that isn’t too expensive. 

I recently read the book Atomic Habits by James Clear. If you aren’t familiar with the book, I highly recommend it. The TL: DR is that making tiny (aka atomic level) changes over a long period of time can lead to amazing results. 

He gives the example of the British cycling team, which had a long losing streak when David Brailsford took over. Instead of focusing on “winning more races” which is a vague and hard-to-achieve goal, he went around the edges, looking for small changes they could make. They tested new equipment, new training schedules, and new strategies. If they could find a shifter that was slightly better than another brand, they started using it. If a different tire type was a millisecond faster, that was enough for them to switch. Over time they started winning more and more. 

And so that’s what I hope to do now. I hope that my latest round of edits is making my books one percent better. I hope the new covers are a tiny bit more catchy. Eventually, I hope to slowly resurrect my writing career.

The new Run, Clarissa, Run

I’ve started at the beginning, with my first book. I’ve re-read it, and I have found that overall it holds up pretty well. (In my opinion anyway.) 

I made some edits and changed some of the language. The tech stuff is hopelessly outdated, but that’s okay. It’s true to its time period. 

The ideas around gender are interesting. I said before that the book wasn’t autobiographic but it was cathartic. What I meant to say was that much of what I wrote about how the locals in the small town acted and reacted to Clarissa, were ideas and biases that I remember from growing up in a small town in Iowa in the 1970s and 1980s. I experienced a lot of the kinds of bullying that the character Clarissa, experiences. 

When I wrote the book in the 2000s and published it in the early 2010s, I worried that much of that was outdated. Sadly, since the Trump era and the MAGA movement, the old outdated gender views seem to have made a comeback, and much of the discrimination that Clarissa faced remains all too topical. 

So, in the end, I’ve kept the book mostly as is, minus a few errors and with some better formatting. 

You can check out the new Run, Clarissa, Run on Amazon now. 

17Jul/22

New Blog

This site crashed recently and I wasn’t able to get it back. So after several frustrating days of troubleshooting, I decided to start over. It’s time anyway. My life has changed so much in the last few years.

This will now be my personal page and devoted to a wide range of things that I do, with links to other pages as appropriate.

So who am I? I am a creative person with too much ADHD to be just one thing. I’m a writer, both creative and freelance. I am a language lover and learner. I am not a graphic designer, but I spend way too much time geeking around on Adobe software and I can handle most small jobs, so I can be a low price alternative to a designer for book formatting, photo touch ups, video editing, etc.