Nancy Keim Comley Archives - Kerry Gans, Author

A Successful, Grateful Book Launch for The Witch of Zal

March 24, 2016 By Kerry Gans 6 Comments

After weeks of preparation and hours of angst, my book launch for The Witch of Zal passed in a flurry of pride, amazement, and celebration.

Like almost everything on the publishing journey, the book launch was a team effort. The people at the Doylestown Bookshop effortlessly took care of getting my books logged in, setting up extra tables for food and the TV monitor, and even came up trumps with plates and napkins (which I forgot). Everything about the setup looked great. (Thanks Rachel, Krisy, and Daniel!)

Even the food came from many hands. My mother made chocolate chip cookies, my friend J. Thomas Ross made dog-shaped cookies, and I bought rainbow-iced cupcakes (which I was told by several people were very good) from my local Shoprite.

I hauled the books and my essential items with me to Pennsylvania early in the day (I had other errands to attend to), and my husband arrived at the Bookshop with the perishables—cupcakes, water, and flower arrangement. The lovely rainbow flowers were done by Christine Keefer of Vintage Oceans, and she captured my vision of color and magic perfectly.

I sold my first book before I had even set up shop. I had one book up on a bookstand while I unloaded the swag, and a woman walked past and said, “That looks like the yellow brick road.” I replied, “It is.” And a sale was made to a fan of all things Oz.

After that, my friends and family poured into the shop and I was soon swamped with hugs and congratulations. My 6-year-old daughter must have thought her mommy was famous!

I kicked off my presentation with a speech thanking everyone who had helped me get to this place in my career—and the list was quite long. Getting published is a marathon of will, not just because the craft is so difficult, but because we live in a world that often does not value what writers do. We are so often told not to waste our time or some other version of “you shouldn’t bother.” I have been lucky enough to be surrounded by people who always told me “You can.” and I wanted to be sure to let them know how grateful I am that they are my tribe.

My book trailer played without a hitch, which was a minor miracle in itself. In fact, I played it several times throughout the night, as the crowd changed over, and the technology that had been giving me headaches for weeks performed like a champ. This reinforces the value of testing out the equipment beforehand. When I had tested it a few weeks prior, I was not happy with the result. This made me make two minor changes the day of the book launch, and those changes seem to have made all the difference. Always test the technology if you can!

I did a reading from The Witch of Zal. I read chapter 8 because I felt it would speak to my audience of mostly adult readers and writers. I still have not decided if I will read the same chapter to an audience with more children in it. I may want something with a little more humor and fun. But the audience at the book launch enjoyed the chapter, which made me happy.

Then I signed books, chatted with people, and basically celebrated! For all the nerves I’d had leading up to the day, the launch flew by and surrounded me with people who have cared about me and supported me throughout my life. I had everyone from my parents, to people who knew me in high school, to my writing friends, to my husband and daughter all at my side. I think the warmest memory for me was having my daughter literally at my side while I gave my speech and read my excerpt. She stood there beaming, smelling the flowers, and occasionally hugging my leg. While that was certainly not the way I had rehearsed my speeches, sharing my launch with her was a special kind of sweet. After all, The Witch of Zal is dedicated to her!

Author Kerry Gans with fan Donna Galanti

Kerry with friend & author Donna Galanti

Kerry and fan Jimmy

Author Kerry Gans signs a book for Ann Stolinski of Gemini Wordsmiths

Kerry and Ann Stolinsky

As I packed up, a woman and her two daughters came by (thank you, Nancy Keim Comley, for sending them back as you were leaving), and I made my last sale of the night.

In a blink of an eye, this long-dreamed of moment had passed, but it is one I will cherish for a lifetime.

I am so grateful for everyone who came out and who sent good wishes from afar. Getting to this point in publishing is hard, and you have all made it a little easier—and a lot more fun. Thank you so much.

Thanksgiving 2012

November 22, 2012 By Kerry Gans Leave a Comment

In our culture, it’s easy to not be grateful for what we have. We are constantly bombarded with the newest gadgets, bigger houses, more elaborate lifestyles. And even in our daily life, we wish some things were easier/better, or that we had what someone else has, or that a dream we held dear would come true.

It is so easy to lose sight of what we have.

Thanksgiving is, of course, a good time of year to look at our lives and be thankful for what we have. Coming so close on the heels of Hurricane Sandy, I am immensely thankful for the sturdy roof over our heads, the electricity running through our power lines, and the easy fulfillment of our basic necessities such as food and water and heat. We were so, so much luckier than so many of the people not so far from us.

The other things I am thankful for sound familiar, and that’s because these things should be the most important in our lives. I am thankful for my family. I have a wonderful, loving husband who supports my writing dreams and me in every way. I have a healthy, energetic, intelligent Toddler girl who can drive me up a wall but whom I love with all my heart. I am lucky enough to still have my parents, healthy and active. And my brother, who I fought like crazy with as a child, but who I am so proud to have as an ally in my life now. My extended family—sisters-in-law, nephews, nieces, mom-in-law, cousins, aunts and uncles—is warm and generous and I am grateful knowing that if I ever need them they will have my back.

I am thankful for my writing community, who have helped support and forward my dream—including all of my blog readers. My Author Chronicles pals have shared the burden of creating author platform, my Advanced Writing Workshop classmates help keep me laughing and energized, and my beta readers, Nancy Keim Comley, J. Thomas Ross, and Bob Drumm lift my writing to higher levels. Professional mentors (and friends) Jonathan Maberry, Marie Lamba, and Kathryn Craft have help sharpen my writing skills and keep me from giving up on this long journey.

I am thankful for my health and that of those I care about, for the opportunity to pursue my writing dream, and for the 3 mornings a week my Toddler is now in preschool so I can write!

Mostly, I am thankful for the love in my life.

Without love, the rest means nothing.

With love, I already have everything.

Happy Thanksgiving, everyone!

Patience Is A Writing Virtue

September 6, 2012 By Kerry Gans 1 Comment

After reading my Facebook post on completing my 2^nd round of developmental edits and beginning my polish edits, my best friend (not a writer) commented, “Geez, aren’t you ever allowed to FINISH a book?” I laughed and replied “After agent edits and publisher edits, yes!”

Still, her comment got me thinking. Of course I can finish a book—I have completed drafts of more than 16 novels. So getting from beginning to end of a book is not an issue for me. But finishing a book and completing a book are two different things.

Most of those 16+ novels will never see the light of day. And while I may poach themes and characters from them, even plot points, they will never be completed in their present form. Completing a book—making it shine in all facets—takes a whole slew of skills I didn’t have back then. Some are life experience skills and some are craft skills, including both techniques on the page and story theory, learned from thousands of hours of writing and reading.

But the most important skill I learned is patience.

It takes patience to complete a book. As a new writer, I’d finish a manuscript, give it a couple of proofreads, and it would be “done.” Of course, I was mostly writing for my own amusement back then, so the bar was set much lower. Now, with my sights set higher, that level of “done” would never cut it.

Now, instead of saying, “It’s good enough!” I ask myself, “Why isn’t this good enough?” In other words, I look for ways the novel can be stronger. Yes, I actively seek out ways to make more work for myself! I ask critique partners and beta readers and professional editors to poke all the holes in it they can so that I can fill them, learn from them, and raise my writing to the next level.

And that takes a lot of work. A lot of time. A lot of patience. To go back into your manuscript for 7+ revisions can make your head spin. You can get sick of your own novel. You can lose perspective and wonder if it’s any good at all. You can want to throw it in a drawer and move on to something else.

When I was a new (and young) writer, I never could have done what I am doing with my current WIPs. I never could have approached yet ANOTHER revision with eagerness and excitement. I never could have made myself stay up late, eyes like sandpaper, to edit this for the billionth time.

It takes patience to do that. Patience with my work (understanding that this process is not infinite, it will end), and patience with myself—allowing myself the mistakes I make, and learning from them.

The result? I am more excited about my current WIP (now in revision 7 and headed for query land next week) than I have ever been about any other work. Or rather, I am more realistically excited about it, since I now have also learned what goes into making a marketable book.

I said to my writing buddy Nancy Keim Comley the other day that this is the first manuscript I really feel has reached that professional bar. And it only took 16+ novels and 28 years to get here.

Patience. It’s a writing virtue.

Brainstorming: Inspiring odd connections

May 31, 2012 By Kerry Gans 7 Comments

I have never been one for brainstorming—just sitting down and pouring out ideas and random thoughts and then looking back to see what interesting connections my brain made. I don’t know why I haven’t done more of this in my writing life. I guess it doesn’t feel natural to me. It was never part of my writing process.

Not to say I have not done unconscious brainstorming. All writers do, because our brains never stop chewing over the details of the story we are working on. Once, while working on a novel, I struggled to explain why a character was acting the way she was. Suddenly, I said, “Well, of course, it’s because she’s his daughter.” Of course, she hadn’t been his daughter until that very second—or had she? Had my brain always known that, and it had only just then come to the surface? Looking back at the WIP, certainly all the hints and details were there to support her “new” parentage.

So I do appreciate the value of brainstorming, even though it is not something I find I can do well on my own. While I do not brainstorm alone, I love to brainstorm in a group or with another writer. My own ideas usually come at a slower pace, but when I have someone else to toss ideas at me willy-nilly my mind leaps to connect all the ideas. New ideas spring to my brain much faster than when I try to brainstorm on my own, and the conflation of two seemingly unconnectable ideas is a challenge I love to conquer.

The way the brain works is absolutely amazing. It fits seemingly random ideas and data together and forms flashes of brilliance, ideas that never seemed possible. I am currently reading Isaac Asimov’s short story Sucker Bait, where they have people called Mnemonics who are trained from childhood to remember everything, to gather any and all data they come across, with the idea that the human brain can and will make connections between data when computers will not–because no sane person would ever ask the computer to pair those particular pieces of data. This is what brainstorming does.

We did a brainstorming exercise in Jonathan Maberry’s Advanced Novel class last week, and my brain hurt afterward. Stretching my mind, breaking out of my comfort zones by thinking up ideas for genres I don’t usually write, and integrating numerous ideas from my fellow workshoppers exhilarated and exhausted me.

Of course, turning on the creativity spigot in class inevitably means my brain will be in overdrive my whole way home. I can’t just turn it off, and my 50-minute drive lends itself to a lot of thinking. This is why I continue to take this Advanced Novel class after all these years – the people stir my creativity, push me to go farther, higher, to be better than I was when I walked in the door.

It’s useful to know that brainstorming works for me in a collaborative setting. I get a thrill, a physical high, from bandying ideas about with people. It can be a tool I use when I need to break writer’s block.

And even better, fellow Author Chronicler Nancy Keim Comley and I are toying with the idea of writing a novel based on one of the ideas we brainstormed in class. We’re at the very start of the idea, and it may come to nothing, or may need to wait until other projects we’re working on are completed, but the energy generated by the brainstorming session will carry me through many hours of work—whether collaborative or alone.

Some people swear by brainstorming – how does it fit into your writing process?

Thanksgiving 2011

November 24, 2011 By Kerry Gans Leave a Comment

Since it’s Thanksgiving, I’m going to be completely cliché and talk about what I’m thankful for.

I’m not particularly thankful for the big dinner, because I don’t eat turkey or most of the trimmings, but I am thankful for the fact I have food to eat all year round.

I am very thankful for my family and my husband’s family, who are all warm, loving people who are supportive and are great role models for what family should mean.

I am most thankful for my immediate family—my husband and my daughter. I spent many years being lonely before I found my husband, and he changed my life for the better in more ways than I can count. His greatest gift to me was our baby girl, who lights up my days even when I’m not feeling so great, and who reminds me that laughter really is the best medicine.

But I also wanted to look at what I am thankful for in my writing career. So often I think we authors get so caught up in reaching the next level, we forget to look at where we are and how much we have already achieved to get there.

I am thankful for having wonderful teachers—authors like Jonathan Maberry and Marie Lamba who give me and others the benefit of their time and expertise.

I am thankful for the community of writers that I have found—supportive and welcoming and very, very helpful to all who show up with a sincere desire to write and improve their writing.

I am thankful for my writing friends, especially my Author Chronicles partners, who are always there to share the ups and downs of the journey.

I am thankful for the passion that has kept me writing for so many years. I feel that few people are able to pursue their real passion in a meaningful way, and so I am thankful for this.

I am thankful that my years of hard work have not been in vain. My writing is miles better than it was just a few years ago, and I continue to learn and improve every day.

Even though I am not yet published, when I look at where I am in my career, I can honestly say that I am closer than I have ever been. It no longer seems so pie-in-the-sky, but like an objective that can be met someday.

I am thankful for Donna Hanson Woolman, who walked 18 years of this writing journey with me before going on ahead. Even now, she walks with me every day.

I am thankful for my life, the opportunities I have had, and most importantly those who have loved me along the way and love me still. I would be nothing and nowhere without each and every one of you, and I am thankful for that every day—not just on Thanksgiving.

3…2…1…Blastoff!

June 16, 2011 By Kerry Gans Leave a Comment

I mentioned in an earlier post that I was joining a group blog called The Author Chronicles. We launched the blog the last week in May and have been thrilled with the results!

Our posts on Balticon45 and the 2011 Philadelphia Writers’ Conference (Overview, Closing Panel, and Photos) generated a ton of traffic, and we are pleased to see that a lot of those readers have stuck around. We’re keeping up with our weekly Tuesday posts, which will rotate through the five writers in the group. We’ve established our Top Picks Thursday feature, which is a roundup of links we found interesting and helpful throughout the week, and we hope to add interviews and guest bloggers to the lineup in the near future.

Although adding another blog to my already jam-packed schedule may seem insane, I believe this was a wise move. The Author Chronicles has driven traffic to my website and to this blog as well. I also love working with fellow writers Nancy Keim Comley, Gwendolyn Huber, J. Thomas Ross, and Matt Q. McGovern. Their voices are fresh and their enthusiasm is catching!

I look forward to continuing to grow The Author Chronicles readership, to bringing our readers useful and engaging content, and to applying those same lessons here at The Goose’s Quill. I also look forward to figuring out how to insert pictures properly into a blog post and how to make the number 8 followed by a ) not automatically turn into a smilie face. 8)

I am enjoying my new adventure, and invite you to come along. If you haven’t checked out today’s Top Picks Thursday, you’re missing some great links!

My writing supporters

March 7, 2009 By Kerry Gans 3 Comments

This week, Nathan Bransford had positivity week, a week where he focused on the good things going on in publishing, and thereby talked many an author down from their individual ledges.

All this positivity got me thinking about the good stuff in my life. Sure, there are things to complain about, and things that are frustrating, and things I just plain old don’t understand, but all in all, things are good. We as humans tend to focus on the bad, and forget the good.

So here’s my good—the people in my life. The list starts with my friends, who have always accepted me for the eccentric that I am, and encouraged the strangeness that is my writing. Of course, these friends have hobbies including Civil War re-enactments and Cowboy Shooting, so maybe they were just glad I accepted their idiosyncrasies, too!

The writing community in Doylestown, PA, really launched me into the “serious” part of my career. Only after I got involved there did I think of myself as a “real” writer, someone who could do this well and successfully. I have taken many workshops there, including and most especially workshops run by Jonathan Maberry, which have increased both my craft and my understanding of the business of writing.

Classmates from those groups have become part and parcel of a network of up-and-coming writers, and we share the knowledge we gain with each other as we explore this world of publishing together—in particular, Nancy Keim Comley, Tiffany Schmidt, and Matt McGovern.

Through Jonathan’s inaugural Master Class program, I met friends and colleagues who still amaze and energize me: Jerry Waxler, Keith Strunk, Don Lafferty, and Jeanette Juryea.

The peer critique group I’m in at the Doylestown Library has also been a boon. Not only do I get great feedback from a variety of viewpoints, but I also met my two The Egyptian Enigma co-authors there. Jim Kempner and Jeff Pero have helped launch me into an entirely new adventure, which has so far been a wild and enlightening ride!

My family, glad to say, has also been a great support to me. My parents never pushed me or my brother to be something other than what we were. For a very non-girlie girl like me, that was a blessing. Pressure from society to conform is bad enough, without adding family pressure to it. My parents encouraged my talents and comforted me in my failures, and suffered through many a young (translate: bad) story. And my little brother? Well, now that we’ve grown out of the wanting to kill each other stage, I find he’s a pretty cool guy, who I know will always have my back if I need him.

Then there is my wonderful husband. He suffers in silence while I type away on my computer instead of paying attention to him. He works hard so I can write all day instead of having a day job. He fetches me books from the library, and tries to help fix computer issues that I cannot. He reads my drafts, nitpicks my grammar, and tells me honestly when something is no good. He loves me and encourages my dream, and I know how rare that is.

Last, but not least, is my best friend Donna Hanson Woolman. I met her at age 14, and we shared a passion for writing that bound us together. We wrote many very “young” novels, some of which may yet mature into published novels. Our synergy was legendary (our phone bills will attest to the length of our discussions), and for eighteen years we wrote together. Six years ago, I lost her to cancer, but she taught me one last lesson I will never forget. On her deathbed, she said to me, “I’m so lucky.” I didn’t understand how she could feel that way, and she explained, “To have so many people who love me.”

So, that is why, when speaking of the positive things in my writing life, I am not talking about book deals or word counts or best-seller lists. I am talking about the people in my life, because without them, none of it would matter. I can live a full and complete life without publishing a single word. My life would be empty without the people who love me.

I am so lucky.

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