I was wondering if the giveaway of ‘Funnel Vision’ had gone live yet on Goodreads, and holy cow, has it ever! I’m grateful for the requests and look forward to sending the five books out when the giveaway period ends Jan. 30. The Goodreads gods determine the lucky winners in all giveaways.

Here’s more stormy fun. I’ve just uploaded to YouTube a video I did almost five years ago, featuring 10 years of storms packed into 10 minutes. There’s a smattering of hail, lightning, storm structure and tornadoes, including several time-lapse clips and music.

Book trailers are so much fun to make. It’s like the very best version of your book, or the idealized, one-minute version. Actually, if you really did it like Hollywood, you’d probably have multiples … one that emphasizes the action (this one kind of does), one that emphasizes the romance, one that emphasizes the emotional personal stories … you’re getting it. Anyway, here it is. The trailer includes several snippets from storm-chasing video I’ve shot over the years. I’ll be publishing Funnel Vision later this month.

… Or how I learned to stop worrying and love my novel

I used to review a lot of books, mostly for The Sun in Baltimore, a newspaper I worked for in the 1990s. I loved books, still do, and I was surrounded by smart, inspiring writers. Among them were richly talented critics and reporters who were or have become famous for their novels, including Stephen Hunter and Laura Lippman. For a few months, I was actually interim book review editor at The Sun, while the new editor was formulating his vision. I was handed that task – in addition to an editing job I was already doing – when I told my boss that being a book review editor was my dream job at the paper. It turns out, it wasn’t.

There was a huge backlog of books that hadn’t been considered and a tsunami of books pouring into the office. It was overwhelming, and I didn’t spend my time reading novels over hot cocoa and doughnuts. I spent my time organizing the deluge, prioritizing reviews, and saying no to publicity people. Despite what was probably considered, at the time, generous book-review space – space almost unheard of now in most newspapers – we probably reviewed less than 15 books each week, even including occasional roundup reviews of five or six titles. I wrote some of those, too.

From this experience, I understood that even books published by the big houses, even books written by people I’d actually heard of, wouldn’t necessarily get reviewed. Self-published books were simply never, ever considered for review, and for good reasons. One, there were too many “legitimate,” vetted books up for consideration; and two, most of the self-pubbed books were terrible.

Fast-forward to the last few years, when I worked at a newspaper in Florida and wrote about, among many other things, books and authors. We gave self-published books a mention, because there were so many local writers putting them out. Some of them were certainly worth the publicity they got; in fact, a few of them merited feature stories for their intriguing topics, interesting authors or writing pedigree. But the truth is, a lot of self-published books are still pretty bad. Some people publish in a vacuum, without doing their research, without the benefit of a critique group, without investing in good design, without understanding anything about the industry. They are, in their own eyes, Published Authors, a title I’ve long desired but wanted to get the hard way.

As my editor during an early internship told me a few thousand years ago, “Don’t you know? Every journalist has a novel in their bottom drawer.” I was one of them. The first one I wrote was pretty awful. The second one was fun and captured the zeitgeist of the time it was written, but I gave up too soon on publication after a handful of rejections. In the interim, I started chasing storms, and then, I started writing Funnel Vision, a novel about storm chasers.

I had tremendously valuable input from a critique group, and I got the novel into a state where I was ready to submit it to agents. I did. A lot. Some asked to see chapters. A few asked to see the whole thing. But no one said yes, and I grew weary of rejection, again. I believed in my novel, but it is a bit of a genre-bender – an adventure story with humor, drama and romance – and a novel like that seemed unlikely to find a home with a publisher who wants a shelf label, who wants a novel of a type that’s already been successful.

Despite my frustration, I still didn’t want to own the stigma of being self-published.

Then, as you know if you follow publishing, the world changed. It is changing, incredibly rapidly, and traditional publishing is going through a massive upheaval. E-books’ popularity is growing. There are some major self-publishing success stories. And while I didn’t think I’d be the next Hocking/Konrath/Locke, I finally decided that it might be time to give it a shot. Not only is publishing the Wild West; other books about storm chasers are out there – books I have studiously avoided reading – and I didn’t want the one I wrote five years ago to be irrelevant and overtaken before I even got it out into the world. Besides, as strange as it might sound, I had started writing a sequel.

So I set out upon one more revision. With fresh eyes, I added a couple of scenes. I found out even more about my characters. And I set the wheels in motion: cover, formatting, and all the fun aspects of becoming your own publisher. I believe in this book. Reading it again and again, as I have been in the final phases of getting it ready, I’m enjoying it, too.

I still have fears of being dismissed as part of the self-created slush pile, as some still see self-publishing. I cringed recently when I saw a bookstore employee venting on a Millions post denigrating self-publishing, saying, “Self-published authors are the bane of our existence.” I’m not a “hater” of the industry, as that column implied. I’m not naive. But I have my reasons for making this choice.

Why would a cynical book-critic type self-publish? I have a story to tell, a story I love. Time is ripping by, and the wheels of publishing turn slowly. While I still have fantasies of being the Published Author with the imprimatur of the Official Publishing House on my book, I know now it’s not the only way. And in the current publishing climate, it’s going to be even harder for me to find an Official Publishing House to accept my particular flavor of adult fiction.

I want my story to find readers who enjoy its world as much as I do. I hope they do. Look for Funnel Vision later this month.

Here’s one of the ways I earn a living these days: doing video profiles of people and businesses. I had the pleasure of interviewing Dr. Roxanne Guy of Brevard Plastic Surgery & Skin Treatment Center and seeing her at work in surgery, which was fascinating. This is the video we just posted.

Let me start by recommending “Holidays with Dino” at Melbourne Civic Theatre, starring the incomparable Alfie Silva, who absolutely channels Dean Martin in this breezy, fun Christmas show. It’s a tribute to Dino and the TV hilarity of that era.

Alfie and his co-star Henry Caraballo, who’s a scream as Sammy Davis Jr., were kind enough to co-star in my hubby’s entry into the Sinatra/Drinking Made Easy cocktail competition. I filmed the video, and here it is. The drink, Come Fly With Me Ring-a-Ding-Ding, is really good, too!

The Melbourne Chamber Music Society has been described as a jewel. It brings top-notch performers from around the world to Brevard County, Florida, including the Juilliard String Quartet on Dec. 2. I had the opportunity to do a video profile of this group, which offers world-class music with a small-town atmosphere.

I’ve been busy shooting and editing videos and photos, and writing articles, too. So I need a break, and so do you. Here it is: an adorable video in which a GoPro camera was cleverly used to film a dog doggedly running and hanging on to a stick (by YouTube user Lorduss1). You might also call it a stick-cam. It’s a hoot. I love watching the pooch’s eyes move. I used my GoPro a lot to shoot video during the Art of Sand festival, both for time lapses (constructed from stills) and as a tractor-cam from the big machines that move the sand.

I was on the East Coast Monday while beastly tornadoes hit Oklahoma. You may have seen the video of chaser Andy Gabrielson’s car rolling over while chasing one of them. He says the steering locked up, but whatever happened, it happened while he was driving backward at high speed. I’d prefer not to be so close that I have to drive backward to get away from anything! Andy, fortunately, was not badly hurt. Here’s the TornadoVideos.net (Reed Timmer’s crew) video of the incredible tornado, and Andy’s car flipping (at about 1:40).

What did I see yesterday? A pleasant little rainbow over the Atlantic Ocean.

This is the sort of thing I chew on, questions about writing, when I really should be writing. But this is kind of bugging me.

“This” is the question of what to call a series of novels of indeterminate number. I will be coming out with a novel about storm chasers soon, and I’m in the middle of writing a sequel. I’m not sure if there will be a third novel, though I’m thinking about it. But I’d hate to label it a trilogy (or a duet, as I found in one instance) without being sure, and “series” is too prosaic. In addition to the title, I can call the first one “a storm chasing novel,” but it would be convenient to say it’s “Book One of” something. I don’t want to call it The Storm Chasers Chronicles or some variation thereof, because (a), there are already at least two novels with some permutation of “storm chasers” in the title (I haven’t read them, for fear of compromising my brain), and (b) “Chronicles” seems a little, well, grand.

“Chronicles” also doesn’t seem to fit the subject – a contemporary adventure with humor, drama and romance. I’m not saying “Chronicles” is pretentious, but it brings to mind any number of fantasy series that I once devoured. It sounds magical, historical, or epic. So what’s the alternative? “Series” is a snooze. “Stories” implies short stories. “Tales” – well, I think of something between Chaucer and Peter Rabbit. And then there’s “Saga.” “Twilight” is billed as a saga. I’m pretty sure most sagas should include Vikings or multigenerational family soap operas. By those standards, Charlaine Harris’ amusing Sookie Stackhouse novels should be a saga, because one of the major characters is a Viking vampire, but she circumnavigates convention (and has it three ways) by calling the books the Southern Vampire Mysteries. Talk about appealing to multiple genres, and that’s without even mentioning the hot sex scenes. “Mysteries” on its own is a convenient alternative to “Chronicles,” but it helps to have written a mystery.

Often series are marketed with their characters – i.e., “Book One of the John Smith Mysteries” or simply “A John Smith Mystery.” Then one must have a character to hang them on. I actually do have a central character who will travel from one novel to the next, but he shares the spotlight in the first novel, so I don’t think that works, either.

Novelists who cultivate famous characters don’t necessarily start out calling their novels after them. Ian Fleming’s first edition of “Casino Royale” doesn’t say “A James Bond Novel” on the cover. Instead, it displays a rather disconcerting array of girly hearts. (If you have one of these, by the way, it’s worth a freaking fortune.)

Should one make something up, the way Spike Lee calls his movies “A Spike Lee Joint” instead of “Film”? Maybe you can’t go wrong with “novels.” “Book One of the whatever novels.” Whatever “whatever” is. Enter creativity and a strong sense of identity. E.g. the Millennium Trilogy or The Lord of the Rings, which asserts that it is not a trilogy, but one massive book, and therefore not needful of silly appellations such as “trilogy” or “series.” Jasper Fforde chucks all convention with “First Among Sequels,” which is (to be excessively literal) not the first sequel but the fifth book in the clever series starring Thursday Next, and the American edition went ahead and put the character’s name on the cover above that original UK title.

There’s a lot of talk about how important marketing is these days, and I’m sure a good series name or gimmick is part of that, along with the ability to tell people which one comes first. A good book cover and tagline are great, too, but what it comes down to, I suspect, is writing a good book. Word will spread. And then you can worry a little more about what to call its successors.

Did you visit Art of Sand this year?  The festival ended today, amid beautiful weather. The sand sculptures will meet their end, soon, making the fest a real moment in time – if you weren’t there, you can’t re-create the experience. But I did capture a lot of it on video, and I’ll be posting at least a couple more videos in the next several days.

In the meantime, if you didn’t get a chance to scan all the QR codes and want to see the interviews with the sculptors – or videos like the corporate challenge time-lapse, below – you can check them out on the Art of Sand playlist on YouTube.