Welcome to the website of Mindy Klasky, author of fifteen novels (including Fright Court, the As You Wish Series, the Glasswrights Series, Harlequin Special Editions, the Jane Madison Series, and Season of Sacrifice.)

Look around, read some blog posts, and click on other pages for more information about Mindy, her writing career and her editorial services.  If you would like to receive Mindy’s free quarterly electronic newsletter, sign up in the lower left corner of this page.

Thanks for coming by — and don’t hesitate to join in the conversation below!

My SFNovelist colleague, David B. Coe, has a great post up at SFNovelists today, asking readers and writers what they most look for in book promotion.  David discusses the (long and impressive) list of things he’s doing to launch his next book, THIEFTAKER, which will be a new book, in a new series, published under a new name (D.B. Jackson).  He concludes by asking people to talk about what book promotion works best for them.

Here’s the post:  http://www.sfnovelists.com/2012/05/23/a-post-in-which-you-tell-me-about-self-promotion/

I am dying to read responses to this post.  (Yes, I am, and so is Morgan Keyes, who will be launching a new book, in a new series, under a new name, in August…)

So, if you have one minute, go read about what David is doing (and prepare to be impressed!)  And then jot down just your responses about book promotion — what works for you, what doesn’t work for you.  You can help out a whole lot of your author friends!

(The SFNovelist site does not require registration, but if this is your first time posting, your comment will be temporarily held for approval by a human.)

Many, many, many thanks!

Mindy, hoping many of you will hop over to SFNovelists, even just this once

Hello there!  I’m back, I’m reasonably caught up on social media, my sleeves are rolled up to write, and…

What’s that?  You didn’t even realize I was gone.

::Pout::

Last week, we decided to take a little staycation – mostly, taking advantage of local sites that we never make the time to go to.  Except, at the end of the week, we also went to Williamsburg, so we had a bit of a vacation as well…

We started out with a bit of museuming, and some streaming-movie marathoning, and some reading days.  We traipsed through the main collection at the National Gallery of Art (focusing on Impressionism and Dutch painting) — it was fun to see old favorites and to realize that some of the Dutch paintings aren’t by Rembrandt anymore (they’ve been reattributed to his workshop – and I once wrote a mystery about that…)

We also went to see the Jefferson Bible at the National Museum of American History.  They had a small exhibit set up around this fascinating book — a version of the Bible (in Greek, French, German, and English), where Jefferson cut and pasted other copies to create a New Testament that contained *no* reference to the supernatural.  (Jesus was a good man, a teacher, and he delivered sermons, but he didn’t raise Lazarus from the dead, and he never transformed loaves and fishes.  And, um, he died.  The end.)

And we went to a lecture at the Newseum – Brian Stelter, from the New York Times, talking quite eloquently about new media.  I was nowhere near as well-spoken (nor had I thought about issues so clearly) when I was 21 years old.  At the Newseum, we also saw a collection of “books of freedom” – first (and other noteworthy) editions collected and donated to the museum.  All of the books had the theme of “freedom” — there were editions of Common Sense, and Areopagitica, and a number of others that I’d never heard of before.  The exhibit was most noteworthy for the *excellent* computerized presentation, which let viewers page through the delicate texts online.

And, at the Newseum, I bought my new favorite T-shirt:  Will Write for Food.

On the viewing (and consequent knitting) front, we watched the BBC miniseries THE STATE WITHIN.  I very much enjoyed Jason Isaacs performance (alas, poor AWAKE – you were cursed by our liking the show!)  I was most amused, though, by the perspective that the British writers had of US politics — especially the power of the Virginia governor.

And then we went on our tour of American history — Fort McHenry (where Francis Scott Key wrote the national anthem, well, the song that would become the national anthem in 1930…), and the Naval Academy in Annapolis, closely followed by our trip to Williamsburg, and a day each at Yorktown, Jamestown, and Shirley Plantation.  The theme of the trip, somewhat oddly, turned out to be the War of 1812.  I remembered little of it from my 4th grade history class, but it was a constant reference point along the way.  (OK, maybe it only seemed that way, because I knew more of the background of the other historical sites…)

For Yorktown and Jamestown, we only had time to go the National Park Service sites at each — that just means that we’ll have to make a return trip for the “living history” museums in those places.  Aw, shucks.

To cap off the wonderful week, we went to a Nationals baseball game.  They played the Orioles.  Nats won, and phenom pitcher Steven Strasburg (no, his tired arm is *not* a concern) hit his first career home run.  And the visiting fans were fun to have around (not the case with, ahem, some teams to our north…)

Fill in the gaps with sleeping in nearly every day, wonderful food, great conversation…  It’s sort of hard to get back into the swing of things!

One of the best things about writing is that I get to read.  Sometimes, I get to read ARCs (Advance Readers Copies) of books by my favorite authors.  Every once in a while, I get one of those ARCs that makes me jump up and down with excitement.  And once in a blue moon, I get an ARC by a favorite author that makes me jump up and down and then stay up all night, reading the book in one giant gulp.

That, dear reader, was my fate when I received an ARC of Garth Nix’s A Confusion of Princes.  The book is out in stores today, so you can join in the fun.

Here are the first two sentences:  “I have died three times, and three times been reborn, though I am not yet twenty in the old Earth years by which it is still the fashion to measure time.  This is the story of my three deaths, and my life between.”

OK.  How can you not read on, after that?!?

Confusion reminded me of the best of the space adventures that I loved as a kid.  It’s more sophisticated than the John Christopher books I adored, but it has that same sense of wonder, that same absolutely confident world-building.  The hero, thrice-dead Khemri, has some good traits and a lot of bad ones.  His unspoken assumptions permeate every sentence that he narrates, making us completely buy the world that he’s showing us.  Khemri’s changes in the novel make perfect sense given who he is and what he learns.

This is space opera at its YA best — I strongly recommend this book for readers of space opera, for readers of YA, for readers of good strong storytelling that sticks in the mind.

Buy links: Amazon   B&N

Mindy, so pleased to find good books to share

A recent article in Romance Writers Report discussed “under the bed” manuscripts (what I would call “trunked” manuscripts – as in, stored in a trunk).  The article pointed out that many authors are publishing their trunked works, using the wonders of Amazon, B&N, and other purveyors of ebooks to reach the audience that their treasured never-sold manuscripts had not yet found.

I have five trunked novels — two traditional fantasy, two category romance, and one mystery.  I’ve fiddled with one of the fantasy novels off and on over the years — it has some wonderful things going for it, but I’ve come to the conclusion that it’s plot is irrevocably broken.  I looked at the category romances recently, and they’re not ready for prime time — they’ve got decent category bones, but they’re too full of adjectives and adverbs in virtually every sentence.  They’d take a *lot* of line editing to make decent.  As for the mystery – the best thing about it is its title.  Enough said.

That leaves the other fantasy novel.  The first fantasy novel that I ever wrote.  I have two versions of it — one that I circulated via an agent for years and a shorter-by-20% version that resulted from an editor who was interested but ultimately left her job before I could finish my revisions.

Last night, I took a peek, to see if there’s anything salvageable there.)  The long version was as broken as I’d feared it would be.  Like the category romances, it suffered from way too many adjectives and adverbs.  It also had huge pacing problems — the first chapter was an interminable council meeting, where no fewer than twelve (12!) nobles are introduced, all to let us know that hey, we have to go to war.

I almost didn’t read the trimmed version.  But I did.

And you know what?  It isn’t terrible.

It isn’t publishable – not now, not in its current state.  But if I reworked it a bit…  If I emphasized that aspect…  If I trimmed more of that one…

This wouldn’t be a quick edit — there’s both structural and line work to be done.  But the novel wasn’t terrible.

I’ve got plenty of work on my plate for the next couple of months.  But after that?  Who knows?

(And I have to say – I was astonished by how many of the sentences were still absolutely, completely, 100% familiar, 15 years after I last read them.  I really poured my heart and soul into this work once upon a time, fighting to make it the very best novel I could write.  That required a lot of revisions, word by painstaking word…)

Mindy, musing (which usually only happens when she reaches the final quarter of a work in progress…)

Several people have forwarded flyers promoting an event at the American Women Writers National Museum, saying that I’ll be appearing on an 11:30 panel.

Alas, I will NOT be at the panel – I had agreed to the event when it was scheduled on a different date, but when the organizer needed to reschedule, I could not make the new date.  I’m sorry that the information was not updated in the museum’s publicity.

For those of you who do attend, though, you’re in for a treat – Jeri Smith-Ready, Jagi Lamplighter, and Brenda Clough are sure to have great things to say, especially on a panel moderated by Colleen Cahill!

Mindy, chagrined

I’m over at Magical Words today, writing about how I disguise my inner introvert when I have to take her out in public:

http://www.magicalwords.net/mindy-klasky/incognito-introvert/

Stop by and comment (and share your own experiences as an introvert or extrovert or someone in between!)

Mindy, ducking back into writing…

After two days of poking and prodding and trying to come up with the perfect first sentence for PLEASANT VALLEY, I have it:  It’s not my fault.

Yeah.  It’s only four words.  But when Ashley said them to me, I suddenly understood exactly how to start this thing.

Pardon me.  I’m off to write…

Mindy, already out the door

This morning, I woke up about an hour late — and only because Mark had come into the bedroom to get his iPad before heading downstairs.  I was annoyed that he was so noisy getting the silly thing — didn’t he realize that it was Sunday, and I could sleep in?

Except it wasn’t Sunday.  It was Monday.

And I couldn’t sleep in.  I needed to be out of the house in less than 40 minutes.

Suffice to say, I made it out of the house (and even managed to make lunch, empty the dishwasher, and pull together the things I needed while out of the house…)  But the entire day has felt a bit distant — swathed in cotton, if you will.

Which doesn’t bode well for my afternoon, wherein I plan to start writing the first chapter of PLEASANT VALLEY.

These are the times that caffeine is made for, no?

Mindy, sipping apricot-vanilla white tea as she types (and contemplating making the very warm, very purrful kitty move…)

I’m stringing together the outline for a new book, in a new genre (contemporary YA, with no paranormal element), temporarily called PLEASANT VALLEY, USA.  As with all books, this one cries out for some basic research, so that I can define the parameters of the story.

In the past week, I’ve researched the following items (in no particular order):

• Shakespeare’s Midsummer Night’s Dream
• Timeline of the Columbine shootings
• Process for procuring production rights of plays through Samuel French
• Acclaimed college baseball programs
  
• Pink slime
• Daily calendar of my local high school
• Composition of mustard gas
• Arthur Miller’s The Crucible
• Composition of chlorine gas
• Cheesy videos of invitations to prom
• Timeline of Hitler’s rise in Germany
• Gazetteer entries for towns and cities named Irondale
• About a million other details that aren’t coming to mind as I type this.

The vast majority of these dribs and drabs won’t make it into the final book, of course.  But each new website is helping me to figure out the parameters of my story, the nature of my characters, the style of their story.

I love research.  I love how reading one page sends me haring off after another.  I love how ideas circle back on each other, how I eventually find linkages that I never anticipated.  This is why I loved being a librarian, why I looked forward to my days on the reference desk.

I’m going to have fun writing this one.  If the FBI doesn’t stop by to arrest me, first…

Mindy, wondering just how many searches it takes to generate “official” interest

I’m over at SFNovelists today, writing about my decision to write a novella, after years of writing novels.  Check out my post!

http://www.sfnovelists.com/2012/05/01/call-me-a-rebel-or-my-life-as-a-novella-ist/

Mindy, wearing many hats!