Saturday, March 30, 2013

Murder Mystery Party Games

I know I mentioned several times, one of my freelance clients hired me to write murder mystery party games. And I know I said in the last post that the next post will be dedicated to these games. You can find the games at mysterpartyfever.com

In the beginning, I had no idea what I was doing. First thing I did was hit the web and all I found were games and no help. Lucky for me, Toys R Us was having a sale on murder mystery party games so I bought one. And really that didn't help. Here I thought I had to write a play, and it is sort of like that but I don't write the actual dialogue but only provide the things to say.

Writing these games actually helped me be a more organized writer. Since when I start the game, I have a very basic idea and then I create the characters. Once the characters are done I create the backstory. Before even heading to the computer I write down who the victim is, who the killer is and why. And the game does not stray from this. I write all the clues on my computer once I have the characters all typed up. If you know, I rarely every plan anything out but since I have to with the games it kind as flowed to other parts of my writing world.

I wrote a few of the games on mysterypartyfever.com and they are Vampire Reunion a game where a group of high school friends are at a party and one of them dies and it looks like a vampire did it. Murder at the Chartalan is a 1920's gangster themed type of thing feautring Sal Scapone (and we all know who he is modeled after). The Emperor's Murder is a sci-fi theme murder mystery game that takes place on another planet. I also helped with The Birthday Killer which is about a killer who only kills on someone's birthday.

These are games that you print right from your home computer after you buy them. They come with everything you would need to have a good party.  I think it would be cool to throw one of these. So why not check out mysterypartyfever.com and throw a hell of a party!

Friday, March 22, 2013

Just Wanted to Share This

Stephen King is my idol. Okay I don't know if idol is right word but he is the one that inspired me to be a writer.  I know now that I can never be him but I can be me and well I am pretty damn interesting. So this is a little infographic that I got here. I want to share this because well it's Stephen King quotes about writing.

Thursday, March 21, 2013

Heart of a Goddess

Hello all, I know it has been days since I wrote but remember I am working on that project through oDesk (it is called mocksa) and I finished up another murder mystery game (the next post will be about the website I am writing the games for so keep your eyes peeled.) But today is about my third eBook to be offered through Amazon Kindle. Just a quick thing, I know I am not going to make gobs of money I do it because I want to put my name out there, building fame from the ground up. Okay so let's get to it.

Heart of a Goddess is not for the faint of heart it is a horror story with graphic violence. Here is the article I wrote for the company that rejected the story all about Heart of a Goddess:

Heart of a Goddess starts with a very lonely man, Leonard Alba, who in the middle of a snow storm finds the woman of his dreams. The story begins with an incredible whirlwind love story, fast love, passionate and hungry. But when Leonard discovers who the woman of his dreams really is, he will do anything to keep her because she is everything he could ever want in a woman.

The woman of his dreams turns out to be Morrigan. She is the Celtic goddess of the underworld, the queen of demons and shape shifters. At first Leonard does not believe her so she summons the demons from the underworld in their bedroom. And there is no question she is a goddess. Morrigan tells Leonard, there is only way that she can live and that is to eat a beating human heart.

At first, Leonard does not want to do this task but cunning Morrigan promises him something. Something he always wanted and that is to have someone forever. Morrigan says after she eats the heart, she can do a spell. A spell that she can only do once ever to make a mortal man immortal and this mortal man will reign the underworld with her. He is uneasy about finding a human but relents.

His first victim is a homeless man, Bill. Leonard knows Bill from the park where Bill hangs out quite a bit. Since it is a cold night, it takes Leonard no time to convince Bill to come back to his place for some food. Once Bill is there, Morrigan takes over and takes his heart.

Afterward Morrigan tells Leonard the heart he brought was old and she wasn’t strong enough to do the spell and she needs a younger heart. But something wonderful happens to Leonard. A big time movie director discovers Leonard’s unpublished novel and wants to make it a movie. Leonard attributes this good fortune to Morrigan and agrees to get her another heart.

He makes a huge mistake with his next sacrifice. He goes to the bar and seduces a woman, Kelcey. Unfortunately Kelcey is the mayor’s daughter and when she doesn’t return home and the last person anyone saw her with is Leonard, he now is in a world of trouble. Because she is important. The police first question Leonard then arrest him for the murder.

He claims he didn’t do it and he waits for his love Morrigan to come rescue him. Even though he took a lot of pictures of her, there are none at his apartment and she is no where to be found. Leonard knows he is innocent but no one else believes him. The evidence all points to Leonard.

Eventually, Leonard is sent to a maximum security mental institution where he meets another man who was also involved with Morrigan years before. The question becomes is Morrigan real and did she really do it or did Leonard really go insane and create the entire story because he was desperately lonely.

The story will make you wonder what is real and what is not.

Sunday, March 10, 2013

Popped the Self-Publishing Cherry

Well I did it, my husband and I made the book cover, I formatted the entire book and now my latest ebook, Heart of a Goddess  is live and for sale now on Amazon Kindle. I will talk more about the book on another day. Today I want to talk about the process of creating an ebook.

You may or may not remember, I originally wrote the story as an ebook. It was a freelance writing job I picked up. They rejected the story because they said I violated the contract by having adult content. The sex scenes( there are a few) are sparse and really just give a quick overview of the scene, most of them are just one sentence long. Really, way less steamy then any Harlequin. So I am thinking it was all about the gore factor. So now I had a story, I wrote specifically for an ebook so now what was I going to do.

I did some research and discovered Amazon Kindle Publishing is free to upload your book. You even get royalty payments. I had to put in my tax information last night. Amazon offers a free ebook to learn how to publish on Kindle. I followed the steps to the letter. But here is the problem I faced: Amazon recommends using Microsoft Word and I am all  about using  Corel Word Perfect. In Word Perfect you can use the MS Word workspace. Which works but there are some differences and it drove me crazy but eventually after a lot of yelling and vulgar threats to my computer I figured everything out, made sure I made a cheat- cheat and now I was ready to upload the book.

The one nice feature (and a bitch) at the same time is you can view your ebook before publishing on different platforms. The first three uploads were horrible, everything was off. So that means I had to go back to the original document and try to fix the problem. At one point, the entire format of the text was fucked beyond belief. Lucky I had the original in Word Perfect file. And that meant back to the formatting for Kindle. At least this time it worked out a lot faster. And on the fourth upload the book looked just like I wanted to. On the Apple platforms (either iPhone or Ipad, there are  white pages but it is the front of the book).

Once that was done, I had to choose my royalty. I am not going to go into this but if you decide to go this route read it for yourself and make your own decision. I enabled any feature for people to read my book and then submitted my book. You wait for about 12-18 hours and your book is ready to be sold.

I am not going to stop looking for publishers though. I still want to be published traditionally. Kindle offers me a place to put really long stories. Many magazines have a word limit and sometimes I go way over that word limit and with Kindle I can make it into a book.  For instance, I do have a full length poetry that I am looking for a print publisher. Because I want people to read my poetry book in the tub, at the beach, spill coffee on it, hell spill their dinner on it. Here are a couple of other perks for self-publishing on Amazon: if my book is sold, I make the money. I own the rights to story so just in case someone wants to make a movie, they have to pay me.

The positives of selling a story to third party: they do the formatting and create the book cover, they pay a flat fee outright (I made $20 for the one story and $25 for the other story.)

So with my chickadees may the sun smile and not let you freeze.

Tuesday, March 5, 2013

What's It Been a Week?

Has it been a week or more since I wrote? Yeah probably I've been busy with other things. And tomorrow I will be working on a pretty large project for freelancing which is going to pay pretty nicely, so I probably won't be writing on here too much. Just to let you know.

So what have I been doing?

Researching polymer clay techniques. I am addicted to clay now and I am working on complex canes. I made my first one today. Tommorrow I will slice them down and bake. I will probably will make one into a real necklace and the others I am going to sell on just a peice of hemp. I made some the other day which turned out okay.

Still working on my third ebook as in still working on the cover. My husband is helping out with the photoshop. All I'm supposed to do is create a drawing which I finally got around tonight and tell him how I want the cover. He found some pretty nifty fonts on the web that will fit nicely with the story.

Preparing poetry to sell on my store. Most of it is done but I still have to scan some sheets of paper in and print some sample poems and scan them in as well.

I went to visit my parents on Sunday they live in eastern Pennsylvania. Sunday morning came around and guess what there was snow on the roads so we waited until 11 am to leave and it is about a 4 hour trip there. Someone want to tell me why gas on the other end of the state is 20 cents cheaper. Anyway, once in the area, we stopped for WaWa coffee. MMMM I love WaWa coffee. Then we drove to see my mom. Then turned around and saw my dad.

Let me tell you about the crazy dog my dad has. He really is nuts but I wouldn't mind taking him home. His name is Rocky and he is a pug. Dad set up an air matteress for my husband and I. My daughter slept on the recliner couch. At this time Rocky is napping peacefully. My dad shuts off the light and dog runs wild. We are lying there then he pounces on the matteress. Rolls up and down the matteress and hops off. Then he comes back and chews on himself then leaves. Once more he rolls around the bed. Now he is really getting naughty. He crawls up my side and lays down for thirty seconds then jumps back off. He snorts in my face and runs off and brings a toy.

And now he is hopping to where my daughter is and hopping back down on our bed. I let him outside. When he comes back in, I give him a treat and he is much calmer and goes to sleep. Thank god. I think he was crazy for a good half hour if not more.

On Monday, we started back to home. First we took a lovely tour of Allentown because I didn't know how to get back on a road I knew. Lucky for us we found another WaWa and got more coffee and found a road I knew. We decided to stop at Roadside America, a really nifty roadside attraction off Interstate 78 at the Shartlesville exit. Inside is a huge miniature village with a lot of movng parts and of course many model trains.  It is really reasonable to visit. I have some pictures but they are still on my tablet and I didn't get around to putting them on my computer but I will post them forthright.

And that my friends is all there is to it. Until we meet each other again at the cow's funeral in Toronto.