You know those times when you randomly cross paths with someone and form an instant kinship? I’m always amazed by those events. I don’t know why I continue to be amazed by them because they happen so often, especially when I’m watching and waiting for them. But when they happen, I think it’s still the coolest thing on the planet. Coincidence? The Universe doing it’s thing? Karma? I don’t know what it is, what to call it, how it happens, or why it happens–I just know it’s really freakin’ cool!

Things with SparkPress continue to progress toward the September pub date for Echoes of War. Right now the manuscript is being proofed. The person doing the proofing emailed me early in the week with a question for me on a proposed edit she wanted to make. The proposed edit made perfect sense, so I told her to go ahead with it. That was the start of an email chain we’ve now had going back and forth about a myriad of topics.

Like me, she is a bibliophile and traveler with a tendency to land in Europe, so we’ve have plenty to chat about. She also had a history of working in IT and now enjoys her retirement getting paid to read books and integrating in some travel time. Here’s the best part: she’s a Mainer (pronounced Main-ah). Not a transplant like me, but a legit Mainer. Born there, grew up there, moved away, came back, and stayed.

At times I get mired in the tedium of writing novels. Editing makes me sometimes feel like my eyes are bleeding while my brain slides out one or both of my ears. While bleeding-eyeball deep in editing the last few weeks on another project, this week’s email exchanges have uplifted me in a way that had me charging full speed last night with editing only to get up early before the bill-paying job started to edit some more. I can’t say I would’ve been able to do that without the unexpected boost from crossing paths with a kindred spirit.

Look for those opportunities to connect with others. They’re just waiting for you to scoop them up!

Images licensed from Adobe Stock

Maine is Home. Period. Sure, I was born in Louisiana and grew up in the deep south, but since moving to Bangor in 2001, Maine took over my mind and heart. On this particular day, I’m physically in Florida, but my mind is still in Maine. I miss the snow. I miss the beauty of the landscape. And I miss the people. I have another couple of weeks here, and I’m always checking my calendar to see when my travels will bring me back north.

There are so many reasons I love living in Maine, snow being a big one, but the most prominent reason is her people. Yes, every place has its share of morons and jackasses, but I can easily look past those people, because in Maine the wonderful people there far outnumber the idiots.

Before Christmas I had ordered a couple of L.L. Bean gift cards online to be shipped to my UPS box. Cards were ordered. Cards were shipped. Cards didn’t arrive in time to be gifted when I was visiting my friends in Maine.

Since I’m nomadic, I have a friend grabbing my mail for me and letting me know if anything interesting arrives. One from Bean turned up finally. When I met up with her in Augusta a couple of weeks ago to hang out and get my mail before I left for FL, she handed me the Bean package.

“The guy at UPS said they put it in the wrong box, and the people that got it opened it then realized it wasn’t theirs. They taped it back up and returned it to the store, and the guy put it in your box. We don’t know if what you ordered is still in there.”

I shrugged and said I’d find out later when I opened it. I mean, there really wasn’t a need to get worked up about it in my mind. If someone took the time to re-tape the package and return it, I figured there was a good chance the gift cards were still in there. And if someone did take the gift cards and bothered to re-tape and return the package, well, they apparently needed the gift cards more than me.

I opened the envelope later and both gift cards were present. I silently thanked the kind Mainers that returned the cards and wished I’d known who they were so I could just give them the cards for their kindness and honesty.

Fast-forward to a couple of weeks later. I’m hanging out at my brother’s house this week, and he had an Amazon package arrive that had been poorly taped. My sister-in-law and I opened it to remove the item he’d purchased. Inside there were two other Amazon packages with addresses for MO, not FL. My guess was the packing folks tossed the smaller items on the top of the box, and they slid inside due to the poor tape job.

My sister-in-law and I talked over the options I’d thought about overnight. I could call FedEx, or leave a note on them at the door to be picked up, or take them to a FedEx place somewhere in the area. I’d figure it out. She had a better idea and took the two wayward packages that clearly weren’t making their Prime two-day delivery time to work with her where she could call FedEx to come pick them up and get them back on their way.

I told her about my recent event with the Bean gift cards, and before I got to the end, she jumped in and said “The cards were gone.”

“No! They were in there.”

She stopped walking. “There really ARE good people left.”

“Yes! A few, sometimes it seems, but, yes.”

“Glad it wasn’t a phone.”

“Oh. I found one of those at the end of my driveway last year, tracked down the owner, and brought it to him.”

“I have lost THREE phones and not one has been returned to me.”

“Well there are still kind people in this world.”

“They just all apparently live in the frozen tundra.”

I had to laugh. “That could be true.”

She was wrong of course. She was the one taking the packages to work to get them back in the mail to their correct owners. There are still kind people everywhere; it just seems like all the bullshit in our news feeds is determined to prove otherwise. I believe Maine is a special place that is also blessed with the kindest of souls. This is why most of the books I’ve written are set in Maine or reference Maine in some way and the focus is on the characters. Am I biased? Hell yes.

Image from Google Maps

I do believe I have developed a legitimate book addiction. I have always been able to walk into a Target, poke around looking at stuff, and walk out without purchasing a thing; however, lately I cannot walk past a bookstore without going in. Nor can I resist buying a book before leaving that bookstore.

Today I wandered around a few small towns in Mass. I’m a nomad and live wherever; wandering is my thing.

I have some bookstores in Boston on my list to check out, but that will happen another day. Today I was scoping out bookstores in Acton, Sudbury, and Concord. I will do book signing events in this area in the Fall with the release of Echoes of War, so I was poking around the bookstores to scope out prospects.

I went into three different stores and returned to my friends’ house with four books. That is on top of the four other print books I already have in my “To Be Read” queue. We won’t even talk about the number of books on my eReader in the electronic “To Be Read” queue. It’s a little embarrassing at this point–and I probably shouldn’t mention the eBook I just added to my Kindle wish list. Oh well.

Two of the stores I went to today carried current books, the third was an antiquarian shop that I still visited because, well, it is still a bookstore and my wee addiction brought me there.

When I was roaming Portland, Maine a few weeks back I went into a bookstore there called PRINT: A Bookstore. I absolutely adored this shop, and the people there were very friendly. I happened to be staying at a great little AirBNB just up the street from it, so I stopped in there a few times and only managed to buy two books–just two!

The image above is of one of the books I grabbed when in Portland that is a collection of SciFi and Fantasy short stories. I tend to avoid short stories because I always feel like I get sucked in, the story ends too quickly, and I end up feeling ripped off and annoyed. None of the stories in this collection have done that to me. I’m a bit over halfway through the book, and each story thus far has been extremely well written and ends with a resolution that leaves me satisfied, not irritated. One story had me laughing out loud in public earlier this week when I was reading while loitering in a lobby. This collection gets more bonus points just by having N. K. Jemisin’s name on it. Icing on the cake! After devouring her Broken Earth Trilogy, I’m inclined to buy anything with her name on it.

***

Here’s my confession: I’ve always been a bit intimidated to try to write a short story. My early attempts at it many years ago resulted in stories that absolutely suuuuuuuuucked. They ended up in the trash too.

My shortest novel thus far is 90K words. I’m a bit long-winded. Could I really compress what I have to say into something closer to 10K or even 20K words? I have had my doubts for years now. After reading the ones in this collection, I have the proof that not only can short stories be fun and fulfilling reads, but maybe I could pull it off. I have a SciFi trilogy to finish first, but I have tucked this little nugget into the back of my mind for now. Who knows what could happen next? It’s those little nuggets that turn into a five-book fantasy series or a SciFi trilogy!

Image from Amazon

Site Updates and Cover Art

If you have spent any time poking around on the website, you’ll have noticed some changes happening. Tabs have had some content updated such as the new cover art for the Burnt Mountain series. Only one more of those left to do, and that is currently in progress. Other cool photos from Adobe have been added, and the coolest of all, not from Adobe, is shown above.

This is the cover art for the Sept 10 release, Echoes of War, book one in the Echoes trilogy. I’m super excited by the cover art and can’t wait to hold this book in my hands once I start getting ARCs (Advance Reader Copies) printed sometime in the spring.

With the new year starting next week (and me trying not to crap myself over how quickly 2018 flew by) and thus the start of the 2019 rodeo that begins as well, I’m doing my best to remain calm (hint: at times I’m quite successful, other times I can be found in the fetal position).

Next up for Echoes

Editing the full manuscript with the SparkPress editor, manuscript approval, full book cover art approval, print proof approval, ARC prints, and lots of publicity work mixed in and probably stuff I’m missing. If I can get the ARCs in time, I’ll start doing promotional events. One event on the list for April, pending ARCs, is the Bangor Comic and Toy Con – going as a vendor, not a spectator!

This is all to be done while wrapping up my final six months of working in Baltimore before I leave the country for my sabbatical in July. The next several months will be an absolute blur. Heck, the last several months have been a blur. Or perhaps I just need to have my eyes checked–lots of things blurring lately.

I hope everyone survived the holidays with only minor injuries and/or ailments. The same wish holds true for making it past New Year’s Day (unless you celebrate the Chinese New Year then you’ll have to wait a bit longer). I have spent this week in Maine and will spend next week in Mass. The nomadic life adventure continues, and it’s a hoot!

As promised, a little background on the new domain name. Firstly, kudos to my friend Jen that helped me pull together some domain names which ultimately turned into the new site. I did not give her an easy task.

The Burnt Mountain site was great for the time that I needed it, but honestly, it was a short-sighted creation. The only reason it ended up being called Burnt Mountain Books was because I was well into the second book by the time I started goofing around with a website, hence the plural. Had no idea at the time it would turn into a five-book series. I also didn’t know where things would go from there. The Monster Within released in 2013. It’s now 2018. Five fantasy books later and the first sci fi book will release in 2019, I think we can agree that it’s been a busy run!

What’s in a domain name?

I am more than a writer. I have a lot of creative outlets. Some of those outlets, I do well (painting with acrylics), some of them I utterly suck (wood working) but I still enjoy doing them. This is the real reason for the new website being something other than Cheryl Campbell Writer or Author or whatever. I wanted it to go broader than only my writing. I don’t have a link on the site up yet for the other creative stuff I do, but that will come in time. I’m still living on the road, so I don’t have access to the photos of various paintings and other projects I’ve done over the years.

So that was Jen’s task. I have lots of stuff I do and other things coming, so what the heck do I call the new website that I know I need but no clue what to name it. Jen and I were having dinner chatting this over. She threw things out to me, and I looked up the names to see if they were available. By the time we were done, I had four domain names written on a recycled napkin (recycled in that it was from recycled material, not fished out of the rubbish bin and used as a note pad).

I sat on that list for a bit to “feel” my way around them and see which one resonated the best. You already know the one I picked. The soup part is a double meaning. With the mix of creative outlets, sounds like a soup to me. Plus, as a Campbell, I have carried the nickname of Soup around for a while.

Jen’s reward for helping me pick the names was a huge thank you, and I did give her the pen back that I borrowed to take notes on the napkin. She’s been one of my early readers turned test reader from the beginning, so I’d already named a character after her in the first sci fi book. Bonus points, that character survives book one. Extra bonus points, that character reappears in the second sci fi book. Extra extra bonus points, that character survives the second book too!!!  Read my work and you’ll understand why this is a major accomplishment for one of my characters. 😉

Quickie Publishing Update

The name of the sci fi book has changed per recommendation of the publisher. Forgotten Echoes is now Echoes of War. Me likey! 🙂 So you’ll see that name referenced now on the website. I finished the first draft of the second Echoes book last week. That one is sitting off to the side, unnamed, for a while to mellow while I play with some other things I’m doing as part of that creative soup.

image from sxc.hu