What I've Learned
by Jo Bissell
Two years ago I started my
journey towards becoming a independent author. I knew as soon as I set my mind
to the project of writing a full length paranormal romance novel that I was
going to take it through to publication. How was I so confident? Because prior
to starting the project, back when I was dabbling in fanfiction, short stories,
and WattPad I encountered other Indie Authors in various stages of their
journeys, and I knew I wanted to join them. Unlike many writers, I never had
any intention or interest in pursuing a “traditional” route and as I wrote on
what has now become Beyond the Reach of Judgement I focused on creating
something I personally would enjoy reading and something I would be proud to
share with other readers, whether that turned out to be one or one million.
Beyond the Reach of Judgement
now exists as an actual completed project available to the masses. I've got six
unique reviews and some excellent reader feedback. While I will continue to
share this project with the world, I feel a huge sense of pride and
accomplishment just getting it to this point. And I've learned a great deal so
far. Here's some thoughts for those considering the leap:
Dream big but work hard: everyone whom has every written anything original
with the intent to let others read it, has had that moment when they feel they
are pure genius and they will find instantaneous accolades and review the
second their words are available to the public.
Then you come to realize that even if your book was that good (and it's
probably not) you still have to find people to read it before anyone will care.
And I thought writing the thing was the difficult part. So wrong. Finding
readers, especially with a limited budget and time, is not an easy task. It
just as much, if not more, research, planning, and effort as writing.
Write, rewrite, and
rewrite again BEFORE you share with anyone: my first rough draft was barely 50K words. As above, I thought it was
pure genius...until I reread it. Then I sat back and wondered what happened to
all the things I thought I had written. Where was the magic? After crying over
my keyboard a while about all that time wasted, I finally dove back into the
project with renewed passion to capture what I previously thought I had
written. Several rewrites with new scenes and expanded scenes, I had created
something I felt I would enjoy reading.
Be grateful for all
feedback, even the less than positive feedback: my first beta-reader tore my manuscript apart. My
first reaction was to delete the email and forgot her name. Instead, I left it
alone for a few days, and sat down to review the feedback. In retrospect, her
feedback was brilliant and without it, I would likely have published that early
draft and been very disappointed with the wave of negative feedback which would
have likely echoed that of my early beta-readers. That being said, I did not
blindly accept all advice, but I did consider each piece of feedback carefully.
Even now that my Beyond the Reach of Judgement is published, I make a habit to
evaluating each review, positive or negative for usable feedback which will
help me in future endeavors. Someone took time to first of all read my words,
then cared enough about those words, to evaluate them. How awesome is that?
Don't forget to write: it's so easy to get distracted, especially with the
amazing amount of resources available and all the pressure to get involved in
things like blogging, social media, and other forms of marketing even before
you've finished the project. I know for a fact that I wasted and continue to
waste at least two hours a week that I
should be writing, falling down rabbit holes of internet advice with what
starts as good intentions and ends as a missed opportunity. I now block out
specific times which are for writing only and separate block of time for
researching and marketing.
Bask in your success: you wrote a book! It's available on the internet!
People you've never met are reading it. That's a pretty cool thing. End of
story.
Beyond the Reach of Judgement
Jo Bissell
Genre: paranormal romance; paranormal tragedy
ASIN: B00JNUJ810
Number of pages: 294
Word Count: 76K
Cover Artist: Char Adlesperger
at Wicked Cover Designs
Book Description:
“Did we leave any sin out?” she replied with a forced weak laugh.
“No. Between the two of us, I think we have managed to cover them all,” he mumbled as that uncomfortable lump in his gut returned.
Julien Rene Durant was once a good man. Born in France, he took the oath as a Jesuit Priest in the 1600s. He dedicated his life to spreading the Gospel. Now, he was a monster surviving off the blood of others; killing for survival even as he wished for nothing other than for his own extinction. After almost four centuries of guilt and hopelessness, he encounters someone who might just be able to rescue the good man trapped within the monster, but will his judgements deny him a second chance?
Mary Ruth Jacobson-Ryan is nothing special; a small town girl stuck in a rut. Married to the local Iraq and Afghanistan War Veteran and town hero who turned out not to be the perfect guy she fell in love with before the war, she is desperate for a way out. When things turn from bad to worse, she runs with plans to never look back. She quickly finds, however, that her search for a better future may lead her down a path with no future at all.
Book Trailer: http://youtu.be/D-BSsXjx0v8
Amazon Print Copy Nook Kobo
Excerpt
4:
Agent Samantha Wolf reviewed the surveillance
video for the fifth time that hour. Frustrated, she rewound the tape and played
it a sixth time. Her sources had verified that the woman was indeed the one for
which she searched, but her case ended there. The tape remained her only hard
evidence. There must be something in it she had missed. She needed something
new, anything new. Her only angle thus far had been the black Porsche. Only a
few people in the entire state owned that exact make, model, and trim in that
color, all of which she had questioned personally.
Sighing, she opened her notes
and flipped through the pages. There was no body. She almost always had a body.
If not a body, she had a victim with a story and a trail of clues leading straight
to her undead perpetrator. She had no body, no victim, and only a dried up
trail of black sports cars to work from. Why did she agree to a missing person’s
case? There was absolutely zero evidence to support anything other than a human
had taken the girl from that street corner. This case was not even in her
jurisdiction.
Looking over at the photo of
her husband in uniform sitting on the nightstand in her hotel room, she shook
her head and pulled the frame closer. She was not doing this because it was her
job, she was doing this because it was the right thing to do for her fellow
officer, and a good friend of her husband. If it was her husband missing, she
hoped a friend would do the same for her. In fact, Jonathan Ryan had done that
for her. By sending her the letter cataloging her husband’s last moments, and
the happier times prior to those moments, including photos and comments from
his other friends, he had given her something she felt she needed to return.
She was determined to find his missing wife. He deserved that, and she had the
training and the resources to do it.
Reading over her notes, she
tried desperately to connect the dots. She flipped through the profiles of the
eight Porsche drivers she had questioned recently. Of the eight, two were women,
and five had verified alibis. Mr. William Durand of Kansas City, MO remained
the only man whom had yet to prove his whereabouts that evening. His address
was mere blocks away from the location where Ms. Ryan had last been seen, but
other than her gut feeling about him, she had no other real evidence against
him. The car and the address hardly proved anything other than his wealth.
When she had visited Magdalen
Durant, as she had called herself, Wolf had no idea at the time that the girl
she was investigating for unrelated reasons, would become the same woman she so
desperately wanted to find now. If only she had opened the email from Jonathan
sooner, instead of allowing it to drift further down her inbox until she had
all but forgotten about it. As soon as she read Jonathan’s desperate plea for
help and opened the picture of the exact girl she had interviewed a few days
prior, she regretted her decision. Had she had this information during the
interview, she imagined it would have ended very differently.
Instead of just some random
female who had flagged the alerts she had in place with the hospital as part of
her ongoing investigation into mysterious deaths from extreme blood loss, she
was Mary Ruth Jacobson-Ryan, wife of her dead husband’s best friend, and recent
missing person case to which she had unofficially assigned herself. She assumed
it to be coincidence. All of her other victims had been prostitutes. It seemed
now to be one of her stranger cases, actually; dead, bloodless prostitutes
found with slit wrists in motel rooms around the city every three to four
weeks.
It took the local authorities
years to see the pattern and wonder if they were connected. Everyone involved
in the individual cases attributed the deaths to suicide and rightly so, based
on the obvious evidence. But to her experienced eyes, it had to be vampiric in
nature. Nothing else she had encountered could drain a human dry in such an
exact way, not even suicide via wrist slitting in a bathtub.
Turning to her notes again,
she read through the details regarding her interview with Ms. Durant/Mrs. Ryan.
As she scanned them, her eyes stopped.
“Scarring to a wound
consistent with previous suicide attempt by exsanguination via laceration of
the radial artery at the wrist.”
While this detail had been
important when Wolf had been focused on her bloodless prostitute case, somehow
she had forgotten it when she realized she had missed her chance to confront
Jonathan Ryan’s missing wife.
Looking over at her calendar,
she noted, for the first time, that the highlighted days had come and gone with
no dead girl found in a motel bathtub. Furthermore, the woman’s arrival at the
hospital correlated with that timeline perfectly.
What if she wasn’t working two
different cases? What if Mary Ruth Jacobson-Ryan was the latest victim of her
prostitute-preying predator? She did disappear from a street corner well known
for such activity. It could be possible that she had fallen victim in the same
way the others had.
Thinking back to her interview
with Mrs. Ryan, she tried to understand if indeed she had experienced and
survived an attack by a vampire, why she would not have said anything about the
attack during their exchange. So many questions swirled through the agent’s
mind - Did she not remember? Did she not care? Did she not think she would be
believed? Was she being coerced into silence? If so, how and why? Why had she
been allowed to live when so many others had died? How had she escaped?
Samantha’s thoughts drifted to
the possibility that Mr. Durand could be one of the immortals she usually
investigated. He definitely had a certain air about him - the difficult-to-place
accent, the large amount of wealth for a man no one had seemed to have heard
of, and a bit of arrogance when speaking with the law that she had encountered
with her other vampires of significant age and experience. She remembered him
being attractive and healthy in appearance at the time she had met him, meaning
if he were indeed vampire, he had probably fed recently, but not too recently,
judging by the whites of his eyes and the paleness of his skin.
Making a note to get more
security footage from Mr. Durand’s building to determine if he ever left during
daylight hours, she grabbed her folder that contained the details of the
prostitute case. Pulling out the map showing the locations of the victims’
bodies and their last known locations prior to their deaths, she located the
loft building in which Mr. Durand lived.
“Aha!” she exclaimed as she
noticed the building’s location, centrally located among the mess of dots. Her
suspicions increased, and now the evidence started to support them.
About the Author:
Jo Bissell started writing in middle school with fantasy stories inspired by books such as The Hobbit, and in fact once turned in a journal project written entirely in Dwarfish Ruins. She then explored fanfiction and short speculative fiction writing. Now, after many years of study, she spends most of her time working as a full time physician caring for hospitalized adults. When she is not writing or doctoring, she enjoys reading, watching movies, traveling, archery, thrift store shopping, and snowboarding. She currently resides in the Iowa City, IA area with her husband and two cats.
Beyond the Reach of Judgement is Jo Bissell’s first original novel which evolved out of a 2012 National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo) project. She also has a short speculative fiction piece, His Eyes, available for Kindle. Future planned novels include a sequel to Beyond the Reach of Judgement, other works of urban fantasy and paranormal romances, and a science fiction novel. She continues to participate in NaNoWriMo.
Amazon Author Page: http://amzn.com/e/B00CEDZWHM
Goodreads Author Page: http://www.goodreads.com/JoBissell
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1 comment:
Thank you so much for the chance to post a guest blog. It was fun and I appreciate the the time and effort on your part to help me share this novel. ~Jo
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