They’re almost here! Strangely, Incredibly Good and Remarkably Great are available to preorder on Audible. Buy them as a CD or a download. You can also find them on Scribd and several other audiobook sites. They’re out everywhere on March 10, 2020.
Share and comment below to be entered in my draw on March 10 for a canvas Owl Be Reading book tote, signed paperbacks or the big prize: a set of audiobooks.
Thanks for listening and sharing!
Strangely, Incredibly Good is a finalist in the Tale Flick Discovery Contest, where producers search for the book they want to turn into a movie. The winning author will win a chance to meet with producers to discuss their book being optioned as a movie. Even if Strangely, Incredibly Good doesn’t win that chance, it will gain lots of visibility in the industry with the help of your votes.
Please vote for the book to become a movie here on January 22, 2020. Voting starts 10 a.m. Pacific/ 1 p.m. EST and runs until 4 pm. Pacific on January the 24th, 2020. You can vote once. Tag a friend in these comments or tag them on my social media posts (my Instagram, my Facebook, or my Twitter or YouTube channel) and share my social media posts wherever you can. Every person who votes and tags someone will be entered in my draw – you get bonus entries for tagging/sharing! The draw is for signed copies of Strangely, Incredibly Good and Remarkably Great AND a direct message chat (or email interaction if you prefer) with me once I start learning about the optioning process, which I will share with you in our chat. If the book does end up becoming a movie, the winner of this draw will be the first fan to get a video chat live from the set (if possible) and some fun movie swag (t-shirts, hats etc.)! This fun draw will take place on January 29th, 2020.
Tale Flick is a company that describes itself as “bridging the literary world with the Film & TV realm.” Their unique online marketplace brings together the different parties that help turn written stories into Film/TV shows.
Strangely, Incredibly Good was one of 40 stories chosen from their database to take place in this book to film Discovery Competition.
A major power outage inconvenienced my family, but I’d do it all again for the togetherness.
“Oh, my God. You’ve got to be kidding me!” my husband Bill sprung out of bed at 5:30 a.m.
He fled downstairs to find the new solarium he and our 14-year-old daughter had recently installed lying on the grass in a sad heap of metal and plexiglass, along with several branches and other debris.
Bill had just built a beautiful deck for mounting the solarium, and he and our 14-year-old daughter had spent most of the previous weekend putting it up as a surprise for me. Now it was in pieces on our lawn.
November came in like a cunning thief this year, stealing our light, our heat, and, oh, the horror! our beloved Wi-Fi. Early on Friday November 1st, winds exceeding 100 km/hour felled trees and hydro poles, wiping out the power from one million Québec homes at the peak of the storm. Over the course of three days, 1000 Hydro-Québec workers toiled in rain and darkness, managing to restore power to most Québeckers by Sunday evening. A crew of 40 workers from Detroit flew in on Sunday to assist them, and workers from New Brunswick also helped.
About 294,000 Hydro-Québec customers including a little more than 6,000 clients in Montréal were still without electricity late Saturday afternoon. Montérégie, the Laurentians, and Chaudière-Appalaches remained the hardest-hit regions. We’re in the Montérégie area and our outage lasted until late Monday morning — 72 hours.
“We are in a situation that is the worst since the infamous 1998 Ice Storm,” Québec Premier Francois Legault said on Saturday.
“I guess we didn’t learn enough the first time, we need a refresher course,” I said, not realizing how right I was.
My husband Bill and I fell in love during the 1998 Ice Storm. I remember being impressed when I asked how he was managing without power and he said he was spending every day volunteering at a rescue center for those without it. My home hadn’t been affected, so I’d been lazing around my warm house drinking red wine with a friend’s Dad who needed a place to stay. Though we were not expected to work for a few days, my future husband’s altruism prompted me to get off my lazy butt, bundle up, go take one-of-a-kind Ice Storm photos and write relatable human-interest stories for our local paper. Everywhere I went, I found a renewed sense of community. Neighbors were coming together to support one another, in NDG where I lived, and across southern Québec and eastern Ontario.
Now here we were again 21 years later, in a similar situation but married, with a cellphone-loving teenager and three Netflix addicts in the house.Let’s be honest, aside from those few people who’ve discovered minimalism and maintained the lifestyle, we in the western world love our technological gadgets more than we like some people. Or maybe most people. I said let’s be honest.
By late Friday night, hour ten without power, the initial shock of the windswept solarium had worn off. A tree fell into our yard, sparking precariously on our backyard wires, but the rain put those sparks out. When we learned Hydro wasn’t going to be coming until at least Sunday afternoon, we sat together in our living room eating Subway sandwiches and staring at the fire. What were we going to do in the cold and the dark for days on end? It was too difficult to find my daughter’s Netflix And Don’t Touch Me pajama shirt, or my Charge My Phone And Feed Me shirt, but those would have been the perfect irony to wear during the outage. Instead, our daughter put on her pink unicorn onesie and hung battery-operated twinkle lights around her room. I took a photo. She wore a peaceful expression on her face, one I hadn’t seen in a while. It warmed my heart and my slightly frozen toes. Then I remembered: with my cell phone dying and little data left, I couldn’t “share” it with anyone. What was it going to be like, living without lights, heat or access to Wi-Fi for what could be days?
It ended up being a cold, inconvenient, beautiful time.
We were forced to spend hours together in our living room, trying to stay warm by the fire. That was also where I’d lit most of our candles, so we huddled on one sofa under blankets. Even though, thanks to an extension cord and a generous neighbor, we managed to get our Wi-Fi back up by Saturday, we still gathered every morning in that fire-lit room and spent our days there together. We played Scrabble by candlelight and our daughter won by using “Exuded” for 60 points. She lay on the floor in her unicorn onesie as we ate leftover Halloween candies and chatted about nothing and everything that matters. Meanwhile, Bill tried to glue our broken solarium back together by flashlight. At one point, I looked at him, working away in the darkness as we sat wrapped in blankets by the fire, and thought with a chuckle: all he needs is to pick up the fiddle and start playing like Michael Landon and we’ve become the Ingalls in Little House on the Prairie.
I had a lot of time — 72 hours in the damp, cold dark, in fact — to think about being alone, being together, and being alone-together. It’s become second nature for us to share private bits of our lives with near-strangers online every single day. But what, if anything, are we sharing with our family members?
It turns out alone-together isn’t a term I coined in the dark during a power outage: Killian Mullan from Oxford University and Stella Chatzitheochari from the University of Warwick used it in 2015 when they looked at time-use data from a nationally representative UK sample of around 5,000 children and their parents.
While they found the time that parents and children 8–16 spent together had increased by nine percent since 2000, alone-together time, which is time spent in the same house but not in the presence of one another, rose by 43% over the period of study, to 136 minutes per day in 2015.
Guess what most of us are doing in that alone-together time? We’re watching Netflix or YouTube or we’re scrolling our phones or tapping away on our tablets, sharing little bits our lives with the people we don’t live with. All while the people who’ve had our backs and hearts for decades are sitting beside or across from us.
I’m not saying it’s wrong or evil or that we’re bringing about the Apocalypse, I’m just saying we should at least pay attention to how often we’re alone with someone we haven’t even met as opposed to fully engaged with the people who love us.
Sometimes, sharing our lives with people outside of our family is good for the spirit. My daughter has an online pal in Holland and when I’m cooking dinner, she’s often up in her room Skyping with this friend. She’s learned lots about the country, the people, and they love encouraging one another in their pursuit of art.
Over the years, my readers have become my friends. I share a lot about my life with them because it feels like a give-and-get-back scenario. But I try not to let the time I spend on Instagram and Facebook interfere with family time. By 7 p.m., our usual suppertime, we all log off our devices, put our phones in the charger in the kitchen, and try to leave them there for the rest of the night. You’d think that four hours of family togetherness every night would be adequate but with television, homework and Skype or phone calls often interrupting those hours, it passes quickly and too often becomes alone-together time.
So I’ve decided to instigate a Family Game Night every Friday or Saturday night. Devices and television will be off for several hours. My family likes the idea, probably because they think I’m easy to beat. I’m studying the Scrabble Dictionary cover to cover, and I’m going to prove them wrong!
Michael J. Fox once said that, “Family isn’t an important thing. Family is everything.”It took no electricity for days, hanging out with my best friends by the fire for me to realize that, in this era where it seems we’re walking around with devices glued to our hands, family technology-free time is everything.
Oh, and my husband isn’t buying a fiddle, but he is working on fixing our solarium and getting it back up so we can soak in Spring’s early days there as a family. Close enough.
I’m Heather, a novelist, mother, and one-time cell phone addict. The addiction lead to wrist pain and mild depression. Here’s how I snapped out of it, and how you can, too.
It’s not easy to admit this, but for two years, I was addicted to checking my cell phone for new texts or social media posts almost every half hour.
It turns out I’m not alone in this addiction. According to the latest International Data Corporation (IDC) data, 79% of adult smartphone users have their phones with them for 22 hours a day, and 80% of users check their phones within 15 minutes of waking up every day.
My reasons for falling into the addiction were simple. I work from home, and had my phone in front of me at my computer between 8:30 a.m. and 5:30 p.m. in case I got an urgent text or call from my teenage daughter or husband, or a family member in need.
As a novelist I have a set writing schedule. I usually write in the morning for four hours. I work with short breaks, getting up every now and then to stretch or pour myself a coffee. Since I manage to get books written and published on time and market them, and have done so for five years, I didn’t think I was the type to get addicted to social media, or at least, the act of checking social media for any new activity. Since I got my new phone in 2016, I have spent about a half hour every evening interacting on social media, and I was happy with that limit.
I didn’t realize I was going over that limit. A washroom break would lead to fifteen minutes on the phone. A quick check to see if “anything interesting” was happening with my friends on Twitter became a half hour trapped inside the Twittersphere. I would joke about cooking dinner while on Twitter — and burning it. My kid and husband were happy, and I was a successful author. I was managing to balance everything just fine. I didn’t think it was interfering with my life in a negative way.
It wasn’t until Apple introduced their new Screen Time feature in iOS 12 in the fall of 2018, and then Instagram added Your Activity to their app in 2019 that I started using the features and realizing just how many hours I spent on my phone. My phone screen time each day was four to five hours, and at my height of trying to gain new readers on Instagram, I was using Instagram for an hour a day!
Before I go into why I didn’t want to spend that much time on social media, let me say that I enjoy social media for both work and play. I have come to love many people I’ve met online; some have even become friends I’ve met in real life.
However, being on social media can be draining. It’s like being in a bar; sure, you can meet some cool new friends, but you also can’t control who’s going to come up to you, spill a drink on you and say something nasty. There’s also the whole “Look At My Amazing Life’ aspect of social media. To each their own, but after 10 years using social media for both work and pleasure, I’m moving into the phase of Living My Amazing Life instead of posting about it. I’m still using social media, but I’m vigilant about how I’m using it. I told a friend the other day that I try to make sure my posts educate, entertain or inspire. If what I’m about to post doesn’t do one of those three things, I stop posting.
When I think back to when I was at my happiest in life, it was when I was climbing the pine tree at the back of our cottage to spend time alone up in my tree fort. I’d chew Hubba Bubba gum and read Archie comics and write stories and poems. I’d look out at the lake and commune with nature. I then climbed down and went for a swim with my sister, or had a great conversation with my parents. I was most happy at about eleven years old, when cell phones didn’t exist.
There are so many trees to climb! ~Author Heather Grace Stewart
In early March while on vacation, I caught myself checking my phone several times in an hour, and I just got fed up with myself. Why couldn’t I focus on the moment I was living right then — a special family time — instead of what other people were doing? I wanted to find a way to feel eleven again, and I had a feeling it was just within my reach. I knew that if I wanted something to change, I had to make a drastic change. I unplugged from social media by taking every single social media app off my phone. When we got home, I started putting the phone in its charger in the kitchen, where I could still hear it if it rang, instead of in front of me at my desk.
On day one, I kept a journal of how I was feeling. It made me sick to my stomach to learn I was wanting to check my phone. I felt out of the loop. I felt disconnected. I felt angry that not using social media made me feel that way.
By the end of day two, however, I was feeling a sense of relief. I couldn’t believe how much more free time I had! By the end of March, I had finished my fifth novel and sent it to my agent.
After a month of using social media only on my desktop and only at a specific time each afternoon, I began to realize which app I loved the most (as Marie Kondo says, does it spark joy?) and decided to put Instagram back on my phone, but I allowed myself only 15 minutes a day with their Your Activity feature. My phone Screen Time is now down to 30 minutes a day, but that includes texting and calls and email for my work.
The change was like a light switched on in my life; one I hadn’t even realized had been off. It did take a few weeks, but I noticed that good friends began texting me or even (gasp!) calling more to catch up, instead of hearting my posts on Facebook, Twitter or Instagram. I had so much more free time, I was able to take up hot yoga, and that in itself has been life-altering. I’m spending more time cooking and enjoying it; I’m going for walks and spending quiet time just watching the birds in the new feeder in our backyard. I never bring my phone to the breakfast or dinner table anymore. My husband and daughter don’t either. The other night, we shared a big bag of Hubba Bubba gum while watching AGT together and pausing the show to tell each other stories. Then my husband pointed out we had a visitor, and together, we watched a skunk dig for grubs for fifteen minutes in our yard. We marveled at his technique and worried where our old cat was at the time. We put bets on whether he’d get skunked or not (he didn’t — he was happily asleep on a comfy chair on our front porch). To me, that time together was more interesting and weirdly bonding than anything I’ve seen on social media this year.
I still check the desktop versions of a few social media apps once every 24 hours for business purposes, but there’s no “crazy itch” to do so. It can wait.
I have so many trees to climb.
If you’re an indie author, chances are you spent most of your budget on your proofreader, editor, cover designer and maybe a branding expert. So, if funds are low, how are you going to afford to promote your book?
Have no fear, cheap ways are here, and I’ve tried them all.
I used these techniques and found within six months of trying them all that my monthly income had increased by 300 percent. They all took very little time to set up, and were worth the investment, because they brought me a profit. Before you try any of these, though, I caution you that they will only work if you had your book properly edited by a professional, your cover is eye-catching and designed by someone who recently took a course (cover trends change yearly!) and if you have a website, a Twitter account, and a Facebook Author page set up. Once you’ve done that, you can implement these techniques.
1. Tweet about your book. Use Booklinker.net to set up a universal link to Amazon, so that no matter what country your potential customer is from, it will lead them directly to their Amazon store. You can also add beautiful promotional photos to your tweet with using Canva.com
2. Ask any followers on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram to send you photos of themselves with your book. You can offer them a free copy of your next book, or if you aren’t sure when that’s going to happen, a complimentary second copy for their friend. Then post them on your most followed form of social media. Readers love interacting with authors, and this gives you lots of great, free photos to share around the web. You might want to set up a special folder in Pinterest just for these photos. You can integrate this idea with a Rafflecopter (Rafflecopter.com) which engages your Facebook and Twitter followers and gets you new readers to sign up for your mailing list. Mine was the most expensive technique on this list, but I got over 200 new and engaged subscribers in a few weeks.
3. Set up a Kindle Countdown Deal or Free Book Deal and then do a paid promotion to announce the deal via Bargain Booksy or its sister company Freebooksy for your first deal day, and for later days in the deal, Book Sends, Fussy Librarian or, for those in the UK, Book Hippo, which is free! I know, it seems wrong to put the book you spent so much time writing down to 0.99 or even free. I fought against the concept for months, but when I finally did a free book deal for my first book, and then advertised that it was free using Freebooksy, I made back all the money I’d spent having my second book professionally edited. You do need to spend some money in this business to make money. Once you leap and give it a try (baby steps at first, don’t break the bank!) you’ll be amazed at the results. You’ll have a higher ranking in the Amazon charts for a while, so more readers will learn about your book, buy it, sign up for your mailing list (especially if you’ve mentioned the mailing list at the end of your first and second book) and more reviews, which will result in even more sales. It takes time to build momentum, but it does all work like dominoes once you promote your first book for a low price, or free.
You needn’t put your book in Kindle Unlimited (exclusive to Kindle) just to get it free – there are ways around that so that you can put your books on Kobo, iBooks etc. – and everyone writes about this (price matching) so I won’t cover it here because it’s a long drawn out process. I am exclusive to Kindle and it’s working very well for me, but you can still put your book to $0 for a few months via price matching, and see if that results in more reviews and sales of your other books.
It’s all an experiment, and the industry is changing every month, and so I would suggest that you spend very little on these simple ideas and on any paid promotions at first, but do dip your toes in the water, and gauge how they perform for you over time. Then, if you’ve found success, use part of your profits to advertise some more.
Good luck, and don’t forget to keep on writing! Even just 50 words a day is better than nothing.
Heather
Heather Grace Stewart 