Joanna Celeste

I just discovered that several of my articles/reviews from Blogcritics were picked up by the Seattle Post Intelligencer and they have reprinted them! This has never happened before, and coupled with the number of places and people that posted my works on their FB, MySpace, tweeted, and generally spread the word, I was quite overwhelmed.

Here are the links to Seattle PI:

Adult Fairy Tale “The Crystal Scepter” by C.S. Lakin.

Jazz album “Wanderlust” by Cliff Hines.

Modern Retelling of Rapunzel “Rapunzel Untangled” by Cindy C. Bennett.

YA novel with mystery, suspense, and hints of magical realism “Being Henry David” by Cal Armistead.

YA/NA bittersweet romance, “The Sea of Tranquility” by Katja Millay.

An original article “Keeping Promises.. And Readers”.

I’ve had 51 publications in this year so far! That is more than double my entire career’s worth from 2000 to the end of 2012… and I had 13 publications in December, which is 64 total publications in ten weeks!

I’ve become a bit impersonal in my posts and I apologize. I threw out seeds to the wind, hoping for a flower or two, and instead I’ve got a wild garden–it’s beautiful, intense and unexpected, but the kind of thing I dreamed about in the back of my mind. I’ll write more personal posts soon… I’ve got promises to keep to authors, interviewees… and in fact, I have been asked to be interviewed myself, for How to Tell a Great Story, which is just awesome!

I’m working to catch up with the things I said I could do — back when I thought I could super-power my way through — and I’ll try to catch my breath and share more with you along the way. I’ve got promises to keep with you, too… and those are by far the most important. Thanks for bearing with me, and for all your support through this amazing ride.

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On December 27th, my friend Elisa Bonnin published her debut novel Arbiter, a YA Fantasy, through Vittoriosa Books. It is available on Amazon.com as a Kindle ebook, and at least for today it’s a free download. (Even if you don’t have a Kindle, you can read the book on a variety of devices, like the PC, MAC, Blackberry, Android, etc.)

Check it out at “Arbiter (Young Adult Blockbusters)”.

In her Acknowledgments, Elisa writes “This book could not have come about without the support of my family… my friends, particularly Lauryn, who put up with my insanity, and Joanna, who helped me edit the book and pointed out several truths that were hard to swallow.”

This is the first fiction novel that I’ve ever edited that has been published, and it’s the first time I have ever been acknowledged beyond having my name listed at the front along with the other editors (as has been the case with the anthologies I’ve contributed to). Usually my work as an editor is unacknowledged by default, something that happens behind the scenes and for which I can usually take little credit for the end result. (The best editor, like the film editor, should be invisible, and one would have to be a self-centered jerk to go around saying “Yes, in that passage there, I fixed a typo, and I was the one who said to put a bridge there.”)

In this case, though, I encouraged Elisa to submit the manuscript to a publisher and I edited the book, chapter by chapter, so I had a special attachment to the story. I told her she made me want to become an agent, to make sure work like this got published, even though I had yet to read the final version. That she got published, by an outside publisher, a couple of months after we finished the editing project, is so inspiring! It goes to show that all these fancy rules about the necessary platform and experience and publication credits are not always true.

I hope to do an interview with Elisa shortly, in terms of how she pitched the book (first in a series of five books), what her process of publication was like, and how she is promoting the book. I’ve downloaded the final version, which I’m excited to read in one sitting, and I’ll write a book review. (That may not happen for about two weeks, though, while I catch up on other work projects. In the meantime, I’ve pitched the review to E & K Family Book Review for publication.)

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The December issue of SPAWNews is all about promotion, and open to view by everyone: http://www.spawn.org/blog/?p=2326.

Here are links to my article/book review, posted now on my website:

My how-to article on overcoming shyness in promotion: http://joannaceleste.com/publications/how-to/overcoming-shyness-to-get-what-you-want-need/

My first published book review (for “Talk Up  Your Book: How to Sell Your Book Through Public Speaking, Interviews, Signings, Festivals, Conferences and More” by Patricia Fry): http://joannaceleste.com/book-reviews/nonfiction/talk-up-your-book-how-to-sell-your-book-through-public-speaking-interviews-signings-festivals-conferences-and-more-by-patricia-fry/

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I finished the three requisite love stories to wrap up my short story collection. They were approved, illustrated, and added to the collection.

This is the first time that I have successfully done love stories as an adult, where it is conceivable that I won’t rip them to shreds when I look back on them five years from now. I look forward to writing more.

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I had visited San Clemente as part of an SCBWI-LA group outing. While touring Casa Romantica, I found a display of local artwork from the San Clemente High School students and I was inspired to write two poems.

I wanted to let the students know they had inspired me, and to request permission to use a copy of their artwork on my site, so I had called the school and gotten the contact information for the art teacher so I could email him and ask him to pass on the message to his students.

As a result I struck up a correspondence with the two students who had inspired me. Through Tate Murphy, whose artwork (A Reflection of True Colors) had inspired my poem “The Colors in a Black and White World”, told me today that her English teacher somehow got an email about me and printed out my poem to share with the class.

The teacher had the whole class analyze my poem and apparently everyone loved it.

This has been a more rewarding experience than any of my previous publications. Like Mr. Gaiman said, as a writer I’ve sent out hundreds of messages-in-bottles and I almost never expect anything back. And wow!

First, I’ve never had much of a proper education in writing poetry. I started by rhyming things, playing with rhymes, then writing down thoughts that had their own sort of rhythm. I think my actual education in poetry is about two hours of looking up different words like “haiku” and “limerick”. So that an English class analyzed my poem and actually liked it is one of those things I never expected to happen.

The second thing is that (also harking back to Mr. Gaiman) I wrote this poem in about eight minutes because the artwork had a story that needed to be told, and I wrote it out of passion for the subject, not with any agenda to be properly versed or anything. I hardly edited it from the first draft. I emailed the art teacher to let the student know that her art had had that kind of impact, and I shared my poem so that the student would get to see what her message-in-a-bottle had resulted in.

These are the moments when all the hard work is worth it, and I am grateful to have lived to experience it. I’ll likely end up writing a story about it somewhere down the road.

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