Sarah Ettritch

Science Fiction, Fantasy, and Mystery Writer

Get Playing With Fire

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In my last post, I talked about rebooting my email list and giving away Playing With Fire, a prequel story to The Salbine Sisters, to subscribers.

The list is now open for business! If you’d like to subscribe, you can do so here:

Subscribe to the new list

As I said in the email I sent to readers on the old list informing them about the transition, I’ll stay in touch between releases, but I won’t bombard you with emails. You’ll get a “touching base” email about once a month, an email when I release a book, and I’ll also let you know when I’m running a discount on one of my books.

You’ll also receive a series of emails introducing you to me and my books. I send you six emails (I think) that talk about the Salbine world, how I started reading epic fantasy—that sort of thing.

For the around-once-a-month emails, I intend to talk about what I’m working on, how I’m progressing, stuff I think would be of interest to readers, etc. I’ll send the first monthly email in early April. They won’t be long emails.

That’s it for now. The novel I’m working on is progressing nicely. If I’m more than halfway through the first draft in early April, readers on my list will find out more about the novel. Generally I don’t talk about first drafts while I’m writing them, but I’ve decided to relax that policy on my list. It’s a little less public than my blog.

Have a wonderful weekend! 🙂

The Salbine Sisters Prequel

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The Salbine Sisters Prequel Story

In my Welcome to 2019 post, I mentioned that I’ve written a prequel story to The Salbine Sisters. I also said that I want to reboot my mailing list. When I started it, I promised subscribers that I would only send an email when I release a new book. I didn’t want to send readers emails they don’t want. But I’m not a prolific writer. I don’t release a book a month, or even a book every six months. Because of that, my subscribers might not hear from me for months, or maybe even a year.

Long gaps between emails isn’t ideal. It affects the deliverability of my emails. Plainly speaking, it means email services like GMail might decide not to deliver my email to someone, or to put it into their spam folder. Readers who want the emails might not receive them. Not emailing for a while also means that people might forget who I am, or even that they signed up for my list.

I’d like to send out a monthly email, even if it’s just to say, “Hi, remember me, here’s a link to someone else’s free book” or “Here’s some information about such-and-such that might interest you as a reader.” I can’t do that right now. It would break the promise I made to my subscribers.

If you’re on a few mailing lists, you’ll remember last year when the European GDPR rules came into effect and you received a bunch of “I need to make sure you really want to be on my list, so click here” emails. I didn’t do anything about my list at the time because I’ve always followed the rules. But because my list has been around for a while now, and because I’d like to send a monthly email, I’m going to ask readers on my list to re-subscribe.

(And here’s a detail you probably won’t care about: I’ll also be changing email service providers, which is where the new list will live.)

As part of this, I’m going to give away a prequel story to The Salbine Sisters to everyone who subscribes to the new list. I might eventually upload the story to the bookstores, but not for at least six months. For a while, the only way the story will be available will be by signing up for my list.

What’s the story about? Well, in The Salbine Sisters, Maddy has a conversation with her friend Rose about how she and Lillian ended up in bed together. Background info: Mistress Lillian is teaching Maddy how to draw fire. She warned Maddy that she might feel light-headed when she drew…

Excerpt

Maddy snorted as she pulled Rose away from the trees and up the path that led to the inner courtyard. She’d visit her other spots later; she preferred to be alone when she fed her furry friends. “I did more than sway.” Fortunately Lillian had been prepared. “I almost fainted, and would have ended up on the floor if the mistress hadn’t caught me.”

“Did she get angry?” Rose asked, her eyes wide.

“No. I grabbed onto her to steady myself.” Lillian’s rough robe had scratched her hands. “And I looked up at her, and she looked at me, and I don’t know why, but . . . I kissed her. Or she kissed me. Or we kissed each other. I don’t know, we just kissed.”

“Mistress Lillian!”

“Yes.” And they hadn’t stopped at one kiss. The lesson, the training room, everything had faded away as they’d melted into each other. They’d briefly come to their senses when they’d started to unbutton their robes and remembered where they were. “We ended up in my bedchamber, and that’s where we’ve ended up after every lesson since.”

“Mistress Lillian?”

“Will you stop saying that, please?”

“Sorry,” Rose murmured. “You’ve certainly kept it quiet.”

“As I said, I wasn’t sure what the mistress wanted.”

“You, obviously.” Rose grinned, then yelped when Maddy playfully slapped her arm. “Though are you sure you’re not part of some experiment?”

She hoped not.

“I didn’t think Mistress Lillian had,” Rose lowered her voice, “those sorts of needs.”

Maddy could personally vouch that she did.

“But she does like to do experiments, or so I’ve heard,” Rose added.

“Maybe she does.” She’d heard the same, and wished she could hear it from Lillian herself. “But I’m not part of an experiment.”

Rose grunted, looking unconvinced. “What do you think will happen, now that everyone knows?”

“I don’t know.” She paused. “I hope she’ll still see me.”

Rose stopped and faced her. “You like her! As more than a friend, I mean.”

Maddy nodded. “But I don’t know how she feels.” She bit her lip. “Do you think I’m foolish?”

“No. You can’t control who you like in that way.”

“Oh, so if I could control it, then you’d think I’m foolish,” Maddy said ruefully.

“I didn’t say that,” Rose said with a laugh, slipping her arm through Maddy’s again. “I just hope the mistress likes you in the same way you like her.”

She fervently hoped so, too. Her next lesson should be interesting—though it could turn out to be disappointing and humiliating if Lillian made it clear that she’d return to her own chambers when it finished.

End of Excerpt

That scene from The Salbine Sisters is the inspiration for the prequel story. Called Playing With Fire, it’s a more detailed account of how Maddy and Lillian ended up in bed together. Here’s the blurb:

After devoting herself to the goddess Salbine for three years, Sister Maddy of the Salbine Order is ready to take the next step to becoming a true sister. Maddy is excited about learning how to manipulate the elements of fire, air, water, and earth, but her excitement turns to dismay when she finds out who will tutor her: Mistress Lillian, a powerful mage who has no time for initiates. Maddy arrives at her first lesson expecting to be shouted at for the most trivial of mistakes.

Maddy survives her lesson and expects the next one to follow a similar pattern, but she couldn’t be more wrong. By the end of her second lesson, Maddy is playing with fire in more ways than one.

If you’re on my mailing list, you’ll receive an email, hopefully by mid-February, that will tell you about the email reboot and where to subscribe to the new list. As soon as you re-subscribe, you’ll receive the story. If you’re not on my mailing list but you’d like to subscribe, you can do so here (you’ll go on the old list and receive the email everyone else will receive about re-subscribing), or you can wait until the new list is ready to receive subscribers. I’ll post here when it’s open for business.

Right now I’m preparing the eBook files and setting up the new list. The novel I’m writing is also trucking along okay.

Enjoy your weekend!

2018: The Year of Change. Hello, 2019!

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I wrote my last blog post all the way back on August 17th. I ended it by saying, “Life is settling down, so I’ll finally get back to writing.” Oh, how I wish! If only I were able to travel back in time and tell my earlier self, “Enjoy the next couple of months, because major shit is about to hit the fan.”

Once again, I’m reminded of the famous quote by John Lennon: Life is what happens to you while you’re making other plans.

I’ll look back on 2018 as a year of significant changes, some good, some terrible, some planned, some thrust upon me.

After I wrote that post, I did start to write again, but I found it difficult to get back into the creative groove. Creativity is like a muscle. If you don’t use it, it atrophies. I had several false starts; stories I began but abandoned. But finally, around the end of September, I felt the magic again. I started another novel and was in my creative zone.

In my last post about moving from Toronto to Kingston, I said one of the reasons we moved was to be closer to my parents. When my father turned 80 in November, we spent the day with them. He was in fine form, and we had a great time.

Four days later he was dead.

My father’s sudden death certainly took the wind out of my sails. But life wasn’t finished with me just yet. Eighteen months earlier, my sisters and I had noticed that my mother was having problems with her memory. We approached my parents about it back then, but the conversation wasn’t welcomed, and so we backed off.

After my father died, we came to understand how much he’d been doing for her. Her cognitive abilities had declined more than we’d thought, and she was diagnosed with dementia in December. One of my friends said it’s as if I’ve lost both my parents. Not quite, but it feels that way sometimes.

We’re spending a lot of time supporting my mother until she can move into a retirement home, which should happen soon.

Right after my father died, I was worried that I wouldn’t be able to write for a while. When I had some quiet time to myself after his celebration of life, I realized that it was important for me to start and finish a story. I hadn’t done so in at least eighteen months, perhaps longer. I released Their Last Hope in February of last year, but I’d completed it much earlier. It has the dubious distinction of being the story that took the longest for me to publish.

I needed to start and finish something to show myself that I could still do it. A novel wouldn’t make sense because it takes months to write one. So I put the novel I’d been writing aside and started a short story. And I finished it! I wrote the damn thing and had a good time doing it.

The story is a prequel to The Salbine Sisters. I’ll talk more about it in my next post. I’ve completed the first draft and will edit it next week. I’ll also pick up the novel I’d started, the one that was going well until the anvil was dropped on my head in November. I’m about 10,000 words in so I can’t say for sure that I’ll finish it, but I have a good feeling about it.

My Plans for 2019

I’ll definitely release the prequel story to The Salbine Sisters. If you’re on my mailing list, you’ll get it for free. In fact, I probably won’t make it available at the bookstores for a while.

I hope to release the novel I’m writing in 2019. January will be a bit of an odd month until my mother is settled, but after that, I should be able to write regularly.

I’d like to write a few short stories this year, but I’m not going to pressure myself.

I’d like to at least start another novel, but one that will be released under a pen name. I have ideas I’d like to try that I’d rather do under another name. The name won’t be a secret. It will be there to say, “Hey, this might not be like my other books. Specifically, there might not be a lesbian character in sight.”

But honestly, if I can release the Salbine Sisters prequel and the novel I’m writing, I’ll be happy. I’m not going to pressure myself to do more than that. Anything else will be gravy.

I want to give my website a facelift. It’s not a priority, but I’ve been wanting to do it for a while.

Finally, I’m going to reboot my mailing list. Part of that will be the prequel story. More details in an upcoming post.

Conclusion

For me, life at the beginning of 2019 looks very different from life at the beginning of 2018. My surroundings have changed (good), and I’ve suffered significant loss (bad). I’m hoping 2019 will be less of a roller coaster ride.

I’m looking forward to continuing the novel, releasing The Salbine Sisters prequel, and connecting with my readers a little more.

I’ll post again in a week or two.

All the best for 2019. Have a great weekend!

Move House. Check.

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So long, Toronto. Hello, Kingston. In my first post of 2018, I said the following:

We’re leaving Toronto. We have to declutter our house, do a major renovation and lots of touch-ups, stage the house, and sell it. Assuming it sells, we’ll then have to find somewhere to live in the destination city, pack, and move.

We’d lived in our Toronto house for 15 years, and before that, we’d rented a house. Moving out when you rent is easier than moving out when you own. Decluttering is optional. Renovations aren’t required. You don’t have a house to sell.

We were naïve. We didn’t realize how much work it would be, and thank god for our real estate agent, who kept us on track. Otherwise we’d probably still be in Toronto, still decluttering.

Phase One: Prepare the House

In January, we started preparing the house. I estimate that we got rid of about 70% of our furniture and possessions. Much of it was old, and we were brutal when it came to stuff we were hanging on to, “just in case.” We recycled, donated, and gave stuff to friends/family whenever possible. Everything else was junked.

We had a major renovation to do: replacing all the floors in the house except the bathroom. Gathering quotes takes time. It’s an important job, so we wanted to be careful. You don’t want new floors to look crappy. It took us a month to select a company. We chose well, but the house was pretty much unlivable for a week when the old floors were being ripped out and the new ones nailed in.

New floor!

We also had a long list of handyman-type jobs. It’s surprising how many little irritations we’d put up with over the years: cupboards that didn’t latch properly, closet doors that dragged when opened and closed, etc. We found a great handyman who spent a couple of weeks at our place fixing stuff.

We painted the entire house, including the basement. Well, not us, but a paint crew. When I say “we” in this post, I mean the workers we hired.

We replaced some of the light fixtures.

We fixed up and painted the front porch.

We had the house inspected, to see if there were any problems we weren’t aware of.

This took us from January to early May, and life was never normal. At least one hired worker was in the house pretty much every day.

Phase Two: Sell the House

We had met with the real estate agent in February and were shooting to list the house around May 1. We missed the target by about two weeks. The house went up for sale on May 15. Because it was being staged, we had to move most of our stuff to storage.

As I said earlier, it was a good thing the agent was checking in with us to see where we were in the plan. He made sure things were moving along.

We did an offer day, meaning that we showed the house for a week and then accepted offers on a specific day. We boarded the cats for the week. We felt it would be less stressful for them and us. We didn’t have to worry about them getting out when strangers were in the house. It also let us remove all signs of pets.

We had more than 50 people through the house during the week. Our lives consisted of leaving the house, coming back, leaving the house, coming back, etc.

On the offer day, we had a good number of offers, and we accepted one. House sold.

Can we relax yet? Not quite. Now we have to find somewhere to live in the destination city: Kingston.

Phase Three: Find Somewhere to Live in Kingston

Why Kingston? We’d visited it a few times and liked it, it’s not too big or small, it’s situated within day-trip distance of three urban centres (Toronto, Ottawa, and Montreal), and most importantly for us right now, it’s within day-trip distance of my parents.

Once again, we were naïve. We figured we’d make appointments to view apartments (we wanted to rent for at least the first year, in case we don’t like living in Kingston), sign a lease, and move.

We didn’t know how tight the rental market is in Kingston, or how difficult it would be to find an apartment that didn’t look like it needed major renovations and/or a serious clean. We could have signed a lease on that first trip, if we were willing to accept promises that “the carpets will be cleaned,” “a new paint job will cover the stains on the walls,” etc. Call use cynical, but we weren’t willing to sign a lease on the promise that an apartment would get a makeover before we moved in.

We returned to Toronto discouraged.

On our second trip, we saw more of the same. We decided to consider condos and houses for rent. Things started to look up. We really liked one house, but the rent was a bit more than we wanted to pay. We could afford it, but we weren’t sure we wanted to pay it.

We returned to Toronto discouraged.

But…we kept thinking about the house we liked. We planned to go back to Kingston and keep looking, but after two trips of appointments being cancelled on us because units were rented before we got to see them, apartments that looked like a bomb had hit them, plain old fatigue, and just wanting to get on with it, we decided to check whether the house we liked (with the high rent) was still available. It was, and the landlord knocked $100 off the rent for us. We took it—and breathed a sigh of relief.

Phase Four: Move

This was the easiest phase. Because of all the preparation work and moving our stuff into storage for staging, 80% of our packing was already done. We packed the rest, and the day before the house closed, we junked the furniture we weren’t taking with us.

We boarded the cats for two nights while we stayed in an Airbnb. The house closed with no problems, and the next morning we picked up the cats and headed down the 401.

Out of the Groove

From January to July, life was turned upside down. I haven’t written a word this year. I was overly optimistic to think that with everything going on, I’d be able to write. It just wasn’t possible with all the renovations, the stress, and the admin/paperwork related to moving. I couldn’t get into a writing groove.

They say that moving is a major life stressor, and it is. Add to that renovations and decluttering, and I was shocked when I had my annual physical and my blood pressure was okay LOL.

I’m sitting in my new office now. My goal for August is to get back into some type of routine, so that’s what I’m trying to do. 

Conclusion

Life is settling down, so I’ll finally get back to writing.

Selling a house and moving is time consuming and stressful.

If anyone in Toronto wants recommendations for flooring, a great handyman, or a great junk guy, contact me and I’ll tell you who we used. We weren’t as thrilled with the paint job, but that’s a long story. Ask me privately.

Another Type of Move

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I mentioned in my last post that we’re moving house. I did another type of move over the past couple of weeks. I moved all my websites to another host.

Skip down to the next section if you don’t care about technical stuff and hosting

There are two parts to having a website. First, the domain. The domain of this website is sarahettritch.com. The second part is where to keep your website files. They have to be stored on a computer that acts as a server. The server is often referred to as a host.

If you know how to do it, you can use your own computer as a server, but some ISPs don’t allow it, and it’s more convenient to use a hosting company.

I was with the same hosting company for quite a while. I loved the support, and the hosting was reliable. I wrote the last two sentences in the past tense because over the past few months, the support hasn’t been as good. Also, my sites have experienced problems and been down a few times, sometimes for hours.

Two things changed at the hosting company. It hired a bunch of support people and split support into level 1 and level 2 support. I haven’t had a great experience with the level 1 support.

The second thing that changed is that the hosting company has automated a bunch of things, which is great when the automation works. But when it doesn’t, it breaks sites. And that’s what’s been happening to my sites. That’s also the reason I’ve had to deal with support more than usual over the past few months.

The straw that broke the camel’s back was when I woke up one morning and found a few automated emails in my Inbox from the hosting company, saying that my SSL certificates had been renewed. There were two problems with this. The SSL certificates weren’t due to be renewed. Also, one of my sites was now down.

I contacted support and the first answer I got didn’t make sense, and frankly if the support person had taken the time to do a simple check, he would have known it couldn’t be causing the problem. So when I replied to that effect (politely and diplomatically!), they fixed it, but I never got a good explanation as to why it happened, and it was the sort of thing that shouldn’t have happened out of the blue to a site that was working.

So, support wasn’t as good, and my trust in the robustness of the hosting decreased. It didn’t help that I was receiving daily emails from Google telling me that there was something wrong with my RSS feeds, and then another email saying, “It’s okay, they’re working now,” followed by another email saying they weren’t working again.

I decided it was time to look for another host. I’ve moved all my sites to Siteground (affiliate link), and I’m no longer getting daily emails from Google. My sites are up 99.9% of the time once again. Also, I’ve used Siteground’s support twice and they’ve fixed both problems within 10 minutes. It helps that they have live chat (at the other host, it was email support only).

Decluttering websites

Just as when you move house, moving websites is a good time to declutter. I looked at every website I had and decided which to keep and which to let go.

This site obviously made the cut! So did Self-Publishing Adventure, though I haven’t updated it in a long time and only moved it because it’s still a good source of information for people thinking about self-publishing. But I’m not sure I’ll keep it. I didn’t want to get hung up on making a decision about it, so I’ve moved it for now.

I moved a couple of other sites, but it’s the two sites I didn’t move that I want to let you know about.

I didn’t move Canadian Lesfic. In 2014, six of us started the site with a lot of enthusiasm. But then, as often happens, life got busy. We stopped blogging, and we hadn’t updated the site in a while. I contacted the other admins and explained that I was changing hosts and I’d be happy to move the site, but did it make sense? We agreed that it didn’t, so I quietly turned off the lights. If you go to the domain, you’ll see a parked page.

I also let go of Online Lesbian Fiction. I started the site back when I was posting Rymellan stories to rymellanstories.com. I linked to (legally) free lesbian fiction. In the early years, authors would contact me quite frequently to link to their sites. But then the eBook revolution happened, and most authors upload free fiction to Amazon and other bookstores. I hadn’t posted to the site since May 2017. I was receiving only 1-2 requests a year, and some of them were for links that weren’t lesbian fiction. So once again, it was time to let the site go. For now, the domain onlinelesbianfiction.com redirects to the lesbian fiction page on this site. I’m thinking about what else I could do with the domain.

As for rymellanstories.com, it will soon redirect to the Rymellan Series page on this site. I’ve wanted to do that for years, but it was the main domain on my hosting account. That’s no longer true at Siteground.

Moves always bring change. I wish moving house was as fast and simple as moving web hosts!

Have a great weekend!

Mixed Bag: Their Last Hope, Reader News, And More

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Their Last Hope

Their Last Hope is on its way. It’s already available at Amazon (print and ebook), Smashwords, and Google Play, but I’m waiting for it to show up at Kobo, Apple, and Barnes & Noble before I send out the new releases email. If you want to grab the book now, buy links are here.

I almost didn’t upload the files this week. I had planned to do it on Wednesday, but instead I was in a dentist’s chair for an hour and forty-five minutes having the first stage of a root canal done. I wasn’t sure how I’d feel yesterday. I felt fine, so I went ahead and uploaded everything. If I hadn’t felt great, I would have pushed publication to Monday.

I’ve mentioned before (I think in a new releases email, but maybe here) that Amazon always sets the publication date to the day before the files were uploaded, so the Amazon page says the book was published on January 24th.

When I checked the Google Play page this morning, it says the book was published on December 17, 2017. Considering that I hadn’t generated any ebook files at that point, it certainly wasn’t published on that date. I assigned an ISBN to the book on December 15th, so I’m wondering if the book record made it into Bowker’s database on December 17th, and that’s the date Google Play is using.

Anyway, if you’re on my new releases list, expect an email sometime within the next few days.

Bookstore News

Here’s some bookstore news, in case you haven’t heard. You can now buy audiobooks at Google Play. I’m not sure where they’re sourcing the books from, so the selection probably isn’t as good as Audible’s. But it’s early days.

Microsoft opened an ebookstore not too long ago, and without much fanfare. It’s not open to indie authors at the moment, but that could change. (BTW, Microsoft Edge is a pretty good EPUB reader. I used to check the EPUB versions of my books with Adobe Digital Editions, but now I use Edge).

Apple is no longer going to call its bookstore iBooks. It’ll just be Books. Some publishing pundits have taken this as a sign that Apple will be paying more attention to its bookstore and perhaps making more of an effort to take on Amazon, but it’s crystal ball talk right now.

Smashwords is planning to revamp its store this year. It did a cosmetic facelift to the site a few years back. I think the changes will be more substantial this time, but we’ll have to wait and see.

Goodreads Giveaway Changes

And here’s news about Goodreads giveaways. If you regularly use Goodreads, you might already know that the giveaway program has changed.

In the beginning, an author or publisher could only give away print books on Goodreads. Giveaways were free. They no longer are, and they’re quite expensive. There are two tiers. A standard giveaway will cost $119, and a premium giveaway will cost $599. As part of this, indie authors can now give away Kindle books (previously only traditional publishers could do so).

A premium giveaway provides featured placement on the giveaway page. Not sure that’s worth an extra $400+.

There are changes for readers, too. Entering a giveaway will automatically add the book to your want-to-read list.

I used to do Goodreads giveaways, but I stopped. It’s expensive for me to give away print books (due to Canadian postal costs), and I saw little benefit from doing them. The idea is to get exposure for your book and maybe a couple of reviews. But that’s only effective if the book gets into a target reader’s hands.

Many readers enter every giveaway without considering whether the book is right for them, so there’s a high probability that someone will win who isn’t in your target audience. That can be especially true for books that have LGBT main characters. Also, many winners don’t review the books (I suspect many turn around and sell them).

I would definitely NOT pay to give away books to an untargeted audience. I might as well throw my money out the window.

I’m guessing that this will reduce the number of giveaways at Goodreads, especially from indie authors.

Also, giveaways will now be open to US residents only (at least initially).

From what I’ve read, readers don’t like the book being automatically added to their want-to-read lists. So nobody is really all that happy about these changes, but we’ll see how it plays out.

If you’re interested in reading the official announcement, it’s here.

Other Giveaway Ideas

I would like to do a giveaway here, but with something other than a book. Why? Because doing a giveaway of a book does nothing for readers who already have the book. That means people who support me by buying my books are left out. So I’m thinking about what I can give away instead. If you have any ideas, I’d love to hear them (leave a comment or contact me here).

Have a great weekend! 🙂

Sarah Ettritch is a participant in the Amazon Services LLC Associates Program, an affiliate advertising program designed to provide a means for sites to earn advertising fees by advertising and linking to amazon.com.