WRITING MY WAY THROUGH THE
DICTIONARY:
A is for Ameliorate
I
don’t know anyone who isn’t writing a book, who isn’t thinking about writing a
book, who hasn’t already written a book, or having written a book isn’t now
planning to write My Book, Part Two—Cash,
Check, or Charge. All of which is
wildly exciting—also bewildering. It’s a brave new book-writing world.
Guttenberg
would be proud—also bewildered, I bet.
I’ve
written a book—of course—well ten books, actually. One of which is a middle
grade, soft cover, work of historical fiction called MOONCALF. It’s literature. It contains no sex, drugs, wizards, or
rock and roll. I made $1.68 cents in royalties last month, and I’m competing
with 700,000 other titles in my category on Amazon. I have twenty-one EXCELLENT reviews on Amazon
and only one of them is my mother.
The
problem with everyone writing a book, including my poet house painter, is not
the competition, but it’s the sheer mathematical mass of the competition. It’s
like being one oat in a silo of oats or a jet liner at the bottom of the Indian
Ocean. Tricky. Very tricky to get noticed.
A
writer friend of mine suggested paying for and participating in a Book Blast to
ameliorate the trickiness of being
one book in the flood of one million plus titles published each year.
I
did this and wrote the check. Please
don’t ask me what a Book Blast is, because I still don’t know. I think it’s when your book title gets
tweeted by a trillion people hoping to win a free _________________ (fill in
the blank.)
It
was fun. I got lots of strangers wanting
to be my tweety friends and email pals.
I
also got promptly hacked, causing my new email, tweety friends to send me
messages alerting me to the hackage. They were very nice about the hundreds of
posts advertising weight loss products that appeared to be coming from my fat
bottom. They said, “Hey, you’ve been hacked. Fix that would you.” It wasn’t a
request.
My
book, MOONCALF, was not mentioned.
And
so, I ameliorated—a word meaning to make better or improve—the problem of
someone pretending to be me by changing all my passwords, ninety percent of
which I’ve promptly forgotten.
No
worries. I press on. My next book Healing
the Strandline (third in The
Strandline series) is a young
adult romantic prepper action adventure that will fit nicely into the already
over-crowded young adult romantic prepper action adventure genre.
To
ameliorate the potential of being crushed under the endless weight of vampires,
shape shifters, and death game players, I plan to keep my characters naked for
the entire book as they fly from spot to spot while hanging from their own personal
drones.
No,
I don’t.
Someone’s
probably already written that book.
Linda
(Better Now?) Zern
