Category: Writing

I created this for my author picture on my Amazon Author Central page:

This is what writing is all about, right? Peace and quiet. A blazing fire. The glow of a laptop–unromantic, but easier than trying to read my handwriting. A kitty purring contentedly nearby. An adult beverage nearby so I can purr contentedly. And plenty of time to just think.

The words should just flow, right?

Well, the artwork doesn’t lie, but it does stretch the truth…

• Fireplace: We don’t use it that much, and I don’t sit that close to it, but there is a fireplace in the living room where I work, so this is moderately accurate.
• Laptop:  Mine’s a Mac, but other than that, it’s accurate.
• Occasional adult beverage: Usually tea, occasionally spiked with something, never as fancy as the crystal in the artwork, but other than that, it’s accurate. Come to think of it, a mug of spiked tea might carry even more literary romance!
• Me: Not as young and not as skinny as my avatar. Hey, it’s the Internet.
• Cat: The cat in the artwork does look like one of our cats, but she’s not as young and not as skinny as her avatar either. The big problem accuracy-wise is that she never just sits there and observes. Either she’s not around at all, or she crawls into my lap, tries to squeeze under my arm in search of scritches, and/or walks over the keyboard. If you have a cat and a laptop, I’m sure you’re shocked–shocked–to hear this.
• Time: I work full-time and write when I can. What’s this “time” of which you speak?
• Peace and quiet: Here’s where accuracy goes right out the window. For one thing, when either cat does decide to play the crawl-all-over-us thing, our dogs get agitated, and I have to put down the laptop to restore order. For another thing, Mrs. Weaver is an interactive news junkie. When she’s keeping up with the news–either on TV or her tablet–she likes to interact with it. Usually by commenting on dumb things and yelling at the really dumb things.

So if the next story is slow in coming, I blame the news. And the dogs.

In my first post, I said I was sending my first two books to Amazon in the next few days. I guess that’s secret code for “I’m sending my first book to Amazon in a couple of months.”

I’ve been working on three smaller stories that I planned to publish separately, but one of my editors pointed out that the three stories worked better as a single book. That single book should be in Amazon in the next few days.

OK, that’s not quite true. The book’s in Amazon now, but I need to fix one minor detail: my name.

“D.R. Weaver” is my pen name. Actually, it’s one of my pen names. My original pen name–more on that in a later post–is Dreamweaver, but I didn’t want to use that on Amazon. I wasn’t sure if Adobe’s lawyers would like it, and I had no desire to find out.

So I went with Plan B: “Abbreviation of Dream As Initials” Weaver. D.R.M. Weaver was the most logical choice, but that was already taken. D.M. Weaver was next closest, and it didn’t seem to be taken when I checked several months ago, or so I thought. So I plugged D.M. Weaver into my Scrivener document. Eventually, that’s also what I plugged into the cover, this web site, and that’s what I plugged into the “author” and “publisher” fields when I submitted the book to Amazon this morning.

That was followed by a few hours of “Is it up yet? Is it up yet?” checking. One time, I got the bright idea to do a “D. M. Weaver” search on Amazon.

And got some other guy.

And he already has his Amazon author’s page, plus a couple of Kindle books published over the past couple of years.

Whoops.

Looks like “D. R. Weaver” is still free, so I’m fixing that as soon as Amazon allows me to make those edits.

So, uh, hello, I’m D. R. Weaver. Pleased to meet you!

Let’s see…domain name created: check.

Web site created: check.

Temporary home page created: check.

Temporary home page replaced with web site that doesn’t look like a time machine from 1995: check.

Introduce myself: er…OK.

I’m married with kids. I’ve been writing and posting stories on-line for over a decade. It’s an escape from work, and until now, that’s all it was.

Over the past few years, I’ve seen other authors put their stories on Amazon, Smashwords, and so forth. I never really considered going pro myself until the kids got to college. And then I looked at the bills and my paycheck, and one thing led to another….

I’m sending my first two books to Amazon in the next few days–more details coming soon!