_ I attended my first Willamette Writer conference August, 2011, went to Jane Friedman's workshop on e-publishing, decided to give up trying to get the NY publishing gods to buy at least one of the six books I've written, and went the e-publishing route. I discovered BookBaby (www.Bookbaby.com) at the conference and used them for conversion and cover art. I like the job they did, and they are very easy to work with. So far self-publishing has been a rewarding experience, and I like the artistic control it offers. (About the same time I saw the PBS documentary on Woody Allen and how he has always maintained artistic control over all his projects. I thought, well, I can, too, with self-publishing.) I now follow Dick Lutz's column in the WW newsletter with avid interest. I follow Jane Friedman on her web site: www.JaneFriedman.com. She offers good, prolific advice. And my writer friend, Valerie Wilcox, (www.ValerieWilcoxWrites.com)who told be about the e-publishing workshops in the first place, supplies me with endless lists of web sites to check out. After listening to Jane Friedman, my head turned away from books in print to digital books. It was like an epiphany. For Christmas I bought my husband a Kindle Fire (fabulous little electronic device, of course, I use it) and myself an Ipod. Yes, I read books on an Ipod. But you can also download digital books to your PC through free aps. I'm on a roll. I'm not looking back.

 

One very hard thing for a writer to do is focus. From all I've read about how other writers approach writing, Anne Lamott's Bird by Bird comes to mind, it is often daunting to have that computer screen stare you in the face, the keyboard waiting for your nimble fingers to dance across the keys spewing forth an outrageously brilliant work of literature. When this happens to me -- yes, I have been known to jump up and down, get a cup of tea, file my finger nails, check emails. But many times I tell myself, "Just write something. Anything. Just write something. You can always delete it later." It might only be one paragraph, it might not fit the plot or make any sense, but it gets me off dead center, breaks the log jam, and I can continue on with the story. It seems like I have to overcome the inertia to get the fingers moving across the keys. Just writing something.