My Life in Words Ophelia Kee Speaks |
"I can still hear you."
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 It's Friday. The beginning of a nice long weekend. Perhaps you need a good escape into the dream like the rest of us. So with that in mind, I wanted to give you a taste of Midnight Magic. Drake and Lorelai “I watched you fight. It was a thing of beauty. Jorund was a fool to challenge you even if you were drunk. Never had I seen anything like that.” Lorelai nodded. A small ghostly smile hinted around the corners of her mouth. Drake had lost his mind and slipped into the place he always went during a battle. Nothing had mattered except kicking Jorund’s ass. No swords, no knives, no weapons. Just his fists. He remembered how it felt when his knuckles smashed into the man’s ribs. Satisfying. He had never liked that asshole. He ran his mouth too much. “You broke his nose, his ribs, and three of his fingers on his left hand before his men pulled you off of him. One of the men who grabbed you had a broken foot for the effort.” Lorelai had never met him, and her first impression of him had come from a brutal drunken brawl in which he tried to beat another man to death. And she described it as a thing of beauty. Only Lorelai would have seen that disaster quite like that. She was perfect. The only woman who saw a fight near exactly as any man would. Sorry to tease like that, but the story had to get out so I could move on to this blog. Sometimes writing is seriously like that. The scene just needs a place to go. If they don't get out of my head, they crowd my mind, and it is difficult to concentrate. Other times it is quite necessary to deliberate over every word to ensure that it it crafts the detail of the scene so that the image for the reader is crystal clear. I don't know how other authors write. I have heard of things like story outlines and plot arcs, but these are things English majors and teachers know and understand, not me. Perhaps that is part of the analysis of writing rather than the art. Either way it feels a bit like Greek that I don't speak, and my fear that it would damage the process leads me away from that knowledge as surely as my lack of financial solvency leads me directly to Indie publishing.  That takes me to Draoithe. I am so excited! The Short Reads are on https://allauthor.com/. Check that out! Draoithe was on Topless Cowboy again this week. The series is on https://myadultplace.net/draoithe-a-pack-forms-by-ophelia-kee/ as well. The word spreads. If you have not stepped into the dream yet, what are you waiting for? A Pack Forms is free this weekend!  I'm supposed to be promoting the book coming out Jan. 30, 2020, Dream Therapy. There is like this whole science behind book promotion that I have been reading about. It boggles the mind sometimes. I mean I am sure that I am doing it wrong anyway, so that's okay. I will try again next week. It's Friday right? I mean, a girl is allowed a few mistakes. If not, I would not be human. My ability to write science fiction is not so great, so maybe I better not think about becoming a robot too much! Let's talk about something that actually matters for a minute. Reviews. Amazon sends emails to you asking you to review the stuff you buy. So does Kindle. Google asks you to add reviews to maps about places you have been. My plumber asked me to rate his service when he fixed the leaking faucet in my bathroom a couple of weeks ago. You probably blow most of them off. I You believe that it's a waste of time unless you are getting a free burger from Wendy's or a free six inch sub from Subway. Maybe you do the survey at Big Lots just to see if you win the gift card, but writing a review on a book seems less significant.   But as an Indie Author, reviews are incredibly difficult to get. Many of my books have been read many times and still no reviews. I have gotten feedback on a few of them directly from you all. I answer my facebook, twitter, etc... Heck, I even answer emails if you don't want others to know the question.
I can't tell you how many times I check to see if someone has marked the stars and took the two seconds to write something only to see that no. Nothing. It's okay, I still love to hear from you and I want to answer the questions. That actually has led to me writing more books. But the reviews would be nice. You don't need to get carried away. Just a good read or two would do. I don't have money to buy reviews. I also am offended by that. If it's a good book, it will get reviews. Right? But sadly, no. It gets bought and read, but not reviewed. So I am not above begging here. Not just for myself but for all authors. Please, if you read, write reviews. Other readers need to see them, and your favorite authors need them. It's like a bit of Midnight Magic. Reviews not only help other readers decide if a book is quality or not, but it helps Kindle and Amazon decide if the book is worth offering to its readers. Everytime you leave a review of a book you loved, you give that book another chance to be loved again by a new reader. From my heart, to those of us who read, thank you for being kind and leaving a review. Enjoy the weekend, Be Careful! Happy reading, Ophelia Kee
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#indieauthors #writerslife #amwritingromance #RomanceReaders #paranormalromance   Did you follow the steps? Get your free copy of The Thread by subscribing, and then pick up A Pack Forms for FREE on Kindle. A Pack Forms will be free until midnight on Monday. The carriage must turn into a pumpkin at some point. Get your copy before time runs out!  If you start reading today, you might get caught up on what's going on in Draoithe just in time for Book Ten. Dream Therapy is on Pre-order and will release Jan. 30! Want to see the Book Trailer? It's live! Check it out. For all my Kindle Unlimited subscribers, the series is FREE! Read it all including the short reads!  Today, I am working on Synner and Sainte. It is the last novel to need its own book trailer. I have decided not to make the Book Trailers for the short reads at this time in order to focus on getting a Fireside read of The Thread finished and uploaded to YouTube and hopefully Instagram. I am also doing the first edit on Midnight Magic. It is a full length novel coming up in the series. I think it might be Book 22, maybe. But I thought Dross Rothstein needed to be explained. Especially since he shows up and makes a mess of things between Cerie and one very pissed off Demon Lord of Envy. Trust me when I say, you will like his story! Enough of the teasing. Sorry, I just get excited to share the saga.
Be Careful! Happy Reading, Ophelia Kee #indieauthors #writerslife #amwritingromance #RomanceReaders #paranormalromance   Everyone loves a good secret. Starting tomorrow, you can actually get two of my books for Free! But it will only last for the Martin Luther King Weekend. So get serious. Here's what you do. Step 1: Go to Opheliakee.com. When the subscribe pop up arrives on the screen, input your name and email. Then download your FREE pdf of The Thread.  Step 2: Read The Thread. It's a 45 minute quick read prologue intro for the characters in A Pack Forms. So you can read it pretty easily on your lunch break, on your commute, or maybe even before bed.  Step 3: This is critical! Between tonight at midnight and Monday at midnight, you need to click the link to A Pack Forms. It will redirect you to Amazon where you can download the book for free. You can read the entire novel for FREE! For my Kindle Unlimited Readers, all the books are always free. But I have to warn you, these books are addictive. It's so bad that I have good readers who have started asking questions that have led to the production of several short reads. Step into the dream, and begin your journey, and who knows? If you have a question that needs an answer that is not in the books, perhaps I will write the short read you need as well.  I feel I must shamelessly plug my upcoming novel, Dream Therapy. It is available for Pre-order now! It will be live Jan. 30, 2020. This novel sees the conclusion to Leon Vadim's story and gives the readers an inside look into the life of Jace Weda. But when Frank Grimes screws up, a new twist is added to the saga. Check it out! Enjoy the Freebies!
Be Careful! Happy reading, Ophelia Kee #indieauthors #writerslife #amwritingromance #RomanceReaders #paranormalromance  The YouTube channel got a bit of a facelift yesterday. I am basically using the channel to promote Draoithe the series. Right now all of the Book trailers are housed on YouTube, but I want to try something a bit different with a Fireside read. Keep watching for it. It should start going up in scenes.  I want to start the Fireside Reads with The Thread. This short read prologue book is on Kindle for $2.99. You can even buy the paperback for $10. But see, I never actually intended to sell it. If you visit Ophelia Kee and subscribe, you can simply download a Free pdf copy. So since I wanted to give it away free, I decided that it would be the one read that I would use to try out some of my ideas. It is currently pinned to the top of my Facebook page. It's also pinned to Pinterest. And I have tweeted it on Twitter. But what about the other social media platforms I use? Book trailers are not that long. The point is to create intrigue and hopefully lead people to want to know more about the books in the series. So they have a home on Pinterest and YouTube. Sadly, they don't meet the requirements for Instagram which had me kind of bummed. Both Instagram and YouTube needed a better face. So I have decided to attempt to create the Fireside readings of The Thread and give them away. I know that I can upload them to YouTube so they will for sure have a home there, but yesterday I found something that may allow me to put them on Instagram as well. So I am stoked that this might offer Draoithe to a wider audience.   So Fireside reads are going to be an actual thing! I hope you all will like it. But before I bow out and let you get back to your busy day, I feel that I must do a shameless plug for my latest novel, Dream Therapy. It is available for preorder now! It will be available to purchase as an Ebook and a paperback on Jan. 30, 2020. As always, it will be available on Kindle Unlimited as well. I hope you enjoy the twist with it. Be Careful!
Happy reading, Ophelia Kee #indieauthors #writerslife #amwritingromance #RomanceReaders #paranormalromance  This morning I have uploaded the paperback versions of the short reads to Kindle. It takes a bit to get all of it done. I rarely sell the paperbacks, but there is something nice about holding the print copy of your book in your hand. It smells of paper, ink, and glue. It is the tangible evidence of the work that it took to create the story that I wrote. I have a bookcase filled with the paperback author copies of all my books that have been published to date. When the ones I uploaded come out in a day or so, I will be ordering three more. The excitement over that never seems to fade. I love being an Indie Author.  In the dream today, Book Trailers! The book trailer for Elementals is going live today on YouTube. I have also found a way to add it to the book description on Amazon. So if you get a chance to check it out, don't forget to hit like and subscribe on YouTube.  In other news in the dream today, More Book Trailers! The book trailer for Fire and a Gryphon is going live today on YouTube. I have added it to the book description on Amazon, too. So if you get a chance to check it out, don't forget to hit like and subscribe on YouTube.  I gotta get back to work. I found out about playlists on YouTube. I have no idea how they work, but that whole site just needs my help. Until you check out the blog again, Enjoy the dream and don't forget to set up your pre-order for Dream Therapy. It is coming! Jan. 30, 2020. Pick it up now and read it as soon as it comes out! Be Careful!
Happy reading, Ophelia Kee #indieauthors #writerslife #amwritingromance #RomanceReaders #paranormalromance
Enjoy your escape.
Be Careful! Happy reading, Ophelia Kee #indieauthors #writerslife #amwritingromance #RomanceReaders #paranormalromance  The story plays out in scenes in my mind like a movie on the silver screen. The characters live, breathe, eat, love, walk and talk. They have thoughts, personality, dreams of their own. I see it all as if through a magical omniscient camera lense. I must write it. As if I must create the script after the play has been performed so that the movie in my mind can be understood by the minds of others. This is writing for me.  Sometimes it is frenetic and crazed. I write like mad as the scenes flow. Other times I stare at the blank screen of the laptop wishing I could see the scene. When that happens, I edit other work I have already written, other scenes that have already played out. I add the details that make previously written scenes reappear in front of that mental camera as I saw them the very first time. I fine tune the manuscript so that it reads and creates the images. If it will make them for me, then those same words will make images like them for others. It won't be the same. No one else ever sees the stories as I see them, but they will see their own version. It will be even better for them. It will be a pure enjoyment. Readers love the words that form the images but do not have to labor to write them all down. I know this love of the story for I share it too! There has never been an author who was not first a reader.  It is January 11, 2020. I have been writing the series Draoithe since 2016. There are always scenes that just don't quite make it into the novels. They hang out in my Google Docs files claiming space as unfinished bits of narrative. I included some of them as bonus material at the end of Synner and Sainte. Some stuff has wound up on my website on From My Desk. There just always seem to be these random loose pages of material everywhere.  I swear if we did not live in a digital era, I could not write. The mess would drive me insane. Some of my google docs literally need to just be deleted as they make no sense. They are only cast off parts of scenes that had issues and needed to be reworked. Other bits of notes and research are recorded on random pages. Further cluttering my digital work space. So if you start seeing random stuff pop up on the webpage, check it out. I'm cleaning up.  Since it is a new year, new beginning, I have decided it is time to clean all of that up. Weaver's Tale was polished into a short read and published as a four part novella. Smoke of the Fire was polished and published as a three part short read. I have also polished up the scenes that were cut out of A Pack Forms due to its excessive length for a romance novel (Never take that advice by the way. Don't cut down the story just to suit someone else. If the story is 115,000 words and most romance is 70,000 the only question must be, Is this a damn good read? If the answer is yes, leave it.) and they are now affectionately known as The Thread. If you subscribe to my email list. I will give you a FREE copy of this 45 minute Quick Read. Still Waters is coming as well. Watch for it. To all the Kindle Unlimited Readers, thank you! When y'all pick up the series and read it all the way through, I know you thought it was good. As always if you ever have comments, or questions or if you see something wrong with one of my books (glaring typo or badly formatted) please let me know. I own all the rights to my work. I control all the publishing as well. If I can fix it, then you will have made the book that much better! If you have a bit of confusion about the story, I may be able to help with that too. One of the reviewers wrote that they hoped I would write a novel about the Ainglean as I wrote Synner and Sainte to explain some of the Netherworld. I did! But they aren't polished yet. Just know that they are coming.
I got more work to do. Enjoy your Saturday! Be Careful! Happy reading, Ophelia Kee  I do have a Twitter account. I set it up when I set up all of my other social media accounts for the books. My blog is shared there everyday. But I was doing it all wrong. It was another thing I had to learn as an Indie Writer. I have been a long time Facebook user, but Twitter was something I only used to play games on my phone. So I needed to get smarter. I tried writing a tweet or two, but nothing really happened. It's the hashtags that mess with me. If you use twitter, you know what these things are and why they matter and what to add as a hashtag. I did not get it. .I tried putting them on things, but got nowhere. I was still doing it wrong. This will seem insignificant , but... It is important to write these hashtags on Twitter so that they go green. (it's sort of like a blue link) This seems very childish to some of you. So laugh. It is funny how much I don't know and how seriously detailed the nuance really has to be for me to begin to grasp some of the concepts. "The Lightbulb Effect!" (That moment when you feel like a cartoon character that has had the lightbulb of enlightenment switched on above your head.) I stumbled over a blog article from Writing Cooperative that gave me a better clue about how to use these hashtags, but I had not yet figured out about the need for green alien light. So like a small child with a page full of stickers, I started putting these lovely hashtags on things. (They are stuck on things and will now require goo gone to remove them, but I think I will leave them like the rock band posters from my youth that I left up on my walls when I left for college.I wonder whatever happened to them. Mom probably.) But they did not work. I was disappointed in the marred images. It was not until days later when I typed one into twitter and it glowed an iridescent green color, that I knew I was on to something. #indieauthors this is how it must be. #indie authors does nothing. Add the green goo from a little blue bird and voila, it lives. So I will try it again. This time I hope with better results. Hard work does pay off. Sometimes it is the tiniest of insignificant details that make all the difference. #amwritingromance  By now if you have read to this point and laughed at me, I am glad I made you smile. But you probably opened this expecting news from Draoithe. So, I feel I must add a shameless plug for my latest novel coming out on Jan, 30. It is available for preorder now. In this book, Leon Vadim finds a nurse he can play doctor with. Jace falls for a deaf woman, but when the slimy contractor tries to rape her, a blood demon feels the need for a human host. Possession is a bit complicated, but it might just be the only way for Frank Grimes to keep breathing! HEA and NC! Wicked wild romance! Enjoy a good book this weekend!
Be Careful! Happy reading, Ophelia Kee
On October 25, 2019 I finally figured out keywords. (Thank you Dave Chesson and Publisher Rocket at Kindlepreneur!) I had purchased Publisher Rocket months earlier, but had not had time to learn how to use it or see what the information could do for me. That purchase had led me to Awesome Gang where I started doing some book promotion. (They are like super awesome, literally.) But October 25 was the day it all changed, and being an Indie Author became real. I sold books to people who were not my family and friends. I started earning royalties on Oct 26. To all of you who set that in motion, Thank you!
I will get better at the whole craft of Indie Writing. I still am not sure about the twitter hashtags. And Instagram makes my head hurt a bit. But I am going to try it.
#IndieWritingLife #Amwriting Be Careful! Happy reading, Ophelia Kee  You read that right! I published two book trailers last night. Please Check them out on YouTube! It may not be much of an accomplishment to most, but as an Indie Author, I have to do it all, so I feel I must take some pride in the accomplishment. I hope you will happily share in my success. Thanks for the support! The Ruiri Complete Book Trailer and Light And Dark Magic Book Trailer are both live on Pinterest and Amazon.
I want to hint again at Filth and Death the novel that will publish in February as Book 11 in the main series and also another short read Smoke of the Fire. Be Careful! Happy Reading, Ophelia Kee #LivinganIndieLife |
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