WIPpet Wednesday: "One More Push"

     Hello, WIPpeters! And a Happy Thanksgiving Eve to my friends in the US. Belated wishes to you
out there in Canada. As for the rest of you ... do you have a Thanksgiving or similar holiday where you live? (*blushes apologetically for my xenocentric public school education*)

     I'm trying to get back in to the WIPpet swing. I really am! And so, for my last WIPpet post in November I'm showcasing eleven sentences from my current WIP, Not Alone.

***

     No matter what happened, it had to end soon. Either she would die, or she would evict the child from her womb. There would be no more waiting. Mee-Kyong gritted her teeth, grunting from the effort. Sweating from the exertion, Mee-Kyong barely had time to inhale before she needed to bear down again. Her skin burned. She clenched her eyes shut, and with one more push, she stretched wider than she thought was physically possible. Another small push*, almost an afterthought, brought her child into the world. Soft fuzzy down covered near translucent eyelids. Perfectly formed nails tipped the end of ten wrinkle fingers. Pang’s child was a boy.

***

     Now, I really doubt any of you actually noticed this is only ten sentences, not eleven. But for the sake of transparency, I should tell you I ended up deleting the last sentence. Feel free to come up with your own conjectures, or else just thank me now.

*virtual cookies to whomever can help me come up with an appropriate synonym for push here

Blog Love: Huge thanks to K L Schwengel for hosting the WIPpet Wednesday blog hop, where authors post snippets from the current Works In Progress!

Random Fact: My longest labor lasted about 81 hours.

"What's In A Name" Contest

     My next novel, Not Alone, is just as suspenseful as The Beloved Daughter, but it also has a romantic component. That's where you come in! Tell me about a real-life romance you know (could be yours!). Do you have grandparents who have been married for 72 years and still slow dance in the living room with bare feet every evening? Did your spouse pull off some amazing wedding or proposal surprise that still makes you smile? Did your next-door neighbor marry his junior high sweetheart? I want to hear those stories!

Rules: 

1. This is an exclusive contest for newsletter subscribers. Not a subscriber? Just add your email to the upper-right sidebar, or go to alanaterry.com/newsletter.
2. Tell your story in the comments section below.
3. Choose your names for the two characters in Not Alone. (Don't use real names without permission!) If you'd like to honor a couple that's truly in love but they want to keep their privacy, you can come up with names that start with the same letter of their real names. Of course you can use your name if you'd like (as long as you have your partner's ok as well.) Include your choice of names in the comments section.
4. If your story is selected as the winner, the names you chose will be used in Not Alone, and I'll send you either a free paperback copy when the book is released (USA only - ebook for international winners) or an advanced PFD pre-publication!

For more about Not Alone, check out the book trailer!  *** Just released ***

WIPpet Wednesday: Christening Book 2

     I'm so glad it's Wednesday. Know why? Because you WIPpeters are some of my all-time favorite
online buddies, and I've been waiting all week to share some great news with you! Ok, maybe I shouldn't call it news. Developments is a better choice. Here's some new developments.

     I'm working on my followup novel to The Beloved Daughter. But most of you know that already. What you DON'T know ... is that IT HAS A NAME!! My next novel will be called Not Alone. I have such high visions and hopes for the book and for what's to come after it's printed. In fact, as we speak I'm in the planning stages of starting a small Kickstart campaign in August so people can preorder copies (yes, I'm even doing international shipping because I love my WIPpet friends so much!).

     Anyway, in addition to working on some of my pre-pub promo for Not Alone (the baby has a NAME everybody!), I've been working on something else really fun called The Beloved Daughter: Bonus Materials. See, after I ran my Amazon free promotional period for The Beloved Daughter, a lot of people read it and then downloaded my special-needs memoir, A Boy Named Silas. The blaring message these readers were sending me was, "We don't just want to read your novels. We want to know about you, too." Who wouldn't be flattered by that?

     So I started working on a Bonus Materials ebook. Just picture a DVD. If The Beloved Daughter was the movie, this new ebook would be the bonus disc. So far I have character studies on each of the characters, outtakes (scenes I took out, with author commentary), sneak peaks (the first chapter of Not Alone, the NOW-NAMED followup to The Beloved Daughter), and my favorite part - Becoming Beloved: A Mini Memoir. In this section, I talk about my experiences writing The Beloved Daughter through to my post-publication depression last spring. I hope to show my readers that even though I write really heavy fiction, I also have what might pass in some spheres as a sense of humor. (Who would have thought, given what I write about, right?)

     So... after that long introduction, today's WIP is from my all-time favorite chapter in The Beloved Daughter: Bonus Materials. It's in the mini memoir section, and the chapter is called... well, we'll get to that in a minute.

***

     During the first month of its publication, The Beloved Daughter got only five-star reviews on amazon. You can imagine what it did to my ego reading phrases like riveting and heart-wrenching, HIGHLY RECOMMENDED (in all caps for emphasis), page turner, and couldn’t put it down.

     I’d check my review page every hour (although my husband might argue it was more often than that), and whenever a new review popped up I’d make some kind of meek comment like, “Got another five-star today.” I even remember at one point thinking something along the lines of, Wow, I didn’t know my novel was that good. 

     Can you tell I needed some humbling?

     My first four-star review came a month after The Beloved Daughter was published. I should have been ready for it. But I wasn’t.

***

     Ok, so the chapter this WIPpet appears in is called "Reviewers’ Curse (or The Day My Best Friend Only Gave Me Four Stars)." So my chapter title (and subtitle) plus the nine sentences above, make a total of ten - perfect for a WIPpet post on July 10th!

     Anyway, you'll have to read the Bonus Materials when it comes out to hear the outcome of this fateful day, but I'll give enough of a spoiler to let you know that my former best friend remains my current best friend, and that I no longer stalk my amazon review page.

     (Very often.)

***

Blog Love: Thanks to K. L. Schwengel from My Random Muse for the WIPpet fun.

Random Fact: My very favorite bonus features from a movie is the deleted scenes from Rat Race.

Straw Poll: Like I mentioned, I'm getting kickstart campaign ready in preparation for Not Alone's release. Could you anonymously click on what you're most likely to do once that campaign is up and running? (No commitments, I'm just wanting a general feel to help me gauge where to set my fundraising goal.)

When Alana starts here kickstart campaign for "Not Alone," I'd be most likely to:
	1. Pay $5 in exchange for the ebook when it's released.
	2. Pay $20 in exchange for the paperback when it's released (USA).
	3. Pay $35 in exchange for the paperback when it's released (non-USA).
	4. Pay even more because I'm filthy rich and would love to support Alana's writing.
	5. Wait until the book is released and think about buying it then (no hard feelings).
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