Eight indie books you should look at!

Readers! Eight award winners in the 2012 eFestival of Words "Best of the Independent eBook Awards" have grouped together to offer you an amazing opportunity. They've reduced the prices of their award-winning novels to 99 cents for August 27 and 28th!

Whether you like to read mysteries, romance, horror, young adult, women's fiction, or fantasy, this group has it. Are you a writer yourself? Do you want to learn all about digitally publishing your next masterpiece? They've got you covered there too.

Get all eight award-winning ebooks for the price of one single paperback!

Award Winners

Best Mystery/Suspense: Dead is the New Black by Christine DeMaio-Rice
Best Non-Fiction: DIY/Self-Help: Let's Get Digital by David Gaughran
Best Horror: 61 A.D. by David McAfee
Best Romance: Deadly Obsession by Kristine Cayne
Best Young Adult: The Book of Lost Souls by Michelle Muto
Best Fantasy/Urban Fantasy and Best Novel: The Black God's War by Moses Siregar III
Best Chick Lit/Women's Lit: Carpe Bead'em by Tonya Kappes
Award for Best Twist ("I've Been Shyamalaned"): The Survival of Thomas Ford by John A.A. Logan

Here's a one-stop shopping link for your convenience: http://amzn.to/MO7qBY

Happy reading!

Adventures in willpower

Part of being a successful writer requires developing the discipline of sitting down to write, or putting "butt in chair" as some like to call it. With the internet at my fingertips, it's easy to become distracted. It starts out innocently enough -- I need to look up a word, a concept, a technology, select a name for a character -- and the next thing I know, I'm back on Facebook or reading an article about someone rescuing a puppy trapped in a sewer. This happens more times than I'd like to admit. When I looked at my calendar and realized that August is mostly over, I also realized the YEAR is mostly over. I'm only half as far into my current novel as I'd planned to be. I should've had the first draft completely done by now. I condemned myself for not being motivated to finish.

It occurred to me then that my lack of discipline has nothing to do with my motivation. I'm enjoying the story and the process of writing it. I want to finish. I want to start revising -- my favorite part of the process. I want to start a new book. My lack of discipline seems to be largely focused in this one area. How am I going to rein myself in when I have only myself to answer to? Ironically, the answer came in a tweet.

Someone tweeted about a book on willpower. I went to Amazon and looked it up, read some reviews of it, and ended up buying a Kindle book called The Willpower Instinct: How Self-Control Works, Why It Matters, and What You Can Do To Get More of It.  Unfortunately, it's $13 and NOT available to borrow from the KOLL, but it has great reviews, along with a long political discussion in the comments on the only 2-star review, which, of course, sucked me in because I HAVE NO WILLPOWER!

*ahem*

So I've read the first chapter, which discusses the three aspects of willpower the author calls "I won't, I will, and I want." Each chapter gives a technique for strengthening willpower. In the first chapter, he recommends starting with a 5-minute daily meditation to train the brain. Let's see how it goes. Wish me luck!

Opening scene - untitled SF novel

Here's the opening of a story I work on when I get writer's block on the Kinshield series. :)

Dr. Benjamin Sykes sat beside a hospital bed in room one in the Forsyth Labs' surgical ward with a notebook computer in front of him. The man who lay still, an anonymous victim of a car-pedestrian accident over a year ago, responded to neither Ben's presence nor the soft tapping of his fingers on the keyboard. Not yet. If all went well, he would awaken soon.
The patient was a Hispanic John Doe about Ben's age -- mid-thirties. Average-looking fellow with brown hair and eyes. No one had claimed him. The police had searched the missing persons reports for a man matching his description and came up empty.
For thirteen months, the man they'd nicknamed John W. Doe, the thirty-third such anonymous victim in 2024, had lain in a persistent vegetative state; he had normal reflex movements but demonstrated no higher cognitive function. The taxpayers had financed his medical treatment at the county hospital for twelve months, the government-mandated maximum limit for state-funded care of unidentified patients. The surgeon general declared that patients in this state for a year had only a .1% chance of recovering, and so the state opted to pay for a casket and grave plot rather than another day of care for the hapless victim. Minutes before they were going to administer a lethal injection to end this John Doe's life, Ben's boss, Dr. Pamela Forsyth, convinced some pencil-pusher high enough on the food chain to give Ben's radical new treatment a chance. That was three weeks ago, and the surgery had gone off without a hitch.
Now came the moment of truth.

What do you think? Interesting enough to keep reading, or should I work on the opening a bit more?