Productivity at its Finest

My marketing manager Mary and I got together today and made stuff happen! Let me tell you what we did...

First, we contacted all of the book bloggers who have copies of my novels (both Just Whistle and The Way Back) and asked how the reviews are coming along. I've already heard back from several of them; it sounds as though there will be quite a few reviews coming in this February.

Next, we created discussion questions for a February book club that will be meeting to discuss my favorite novel, Come and Go So Quickly. Eventually, these discussion questions will be published on my website, but it's pointless to do that now seeing as this book isn't scheduled for release until 2024. Who knows, though? Maybe I'll move up the date. It's just that Running and Kick It need to be released first, so there is a timeline involved.

After that, I posted some discussion questions for The Way Back on my website because I'd made discussion questions for The Way Back in January since my monthly book club met to talk about that. Now you have access to those prompts as well!

Around this time, I remembered that I wanted Mary's help in deciphering an email I received from a record label regarding the lyrics to Stephen Stills's song "Love the One You're With." It seems that no one knows how to go about asking for permission to use the lyrics, so Mary and I did some investigating and I contacted some people and now the ball is at least rolling a bit... It's weird, though. I've gotten permission for lyric usage several times before and this one is trickier than the others.

In requesting permission for song lyrics, I remembered that I wanted to rewrite a scene in Running Through the Words because HarperCollins will not get back to me about my request to use a quote from To Kill A Mockingbird. Whatever. I rewrote it and now it's even better than it was before and I won't need to pay HarperCollins to incorporate, "Don't you say hey to me, you ugly girl! You say good afternoon, Mrs. Dubose!"

We still have coffee to drink and time to kill, so then Mary and I decided to create some discussion questions for Just Whistle. That was fun! And then I posted the prompts on my website so if your book club is thinking of reading Just Whistle (you should), you guys will now have things to talk about.

That was my day. Now I'm going to do some more writing of my new book (new setting, new characters, great plot!) so it can be released in 2025... 😉