Rudderless in a Rainstorm …

… Or, How I Cross-Blogged for Kindle Scout

For the first time, here at wellpilgrim.wordpress.com, the following words aren’t mine. This is a guest blog from a fellow author, and I hope you can muster some eleventh-hour support for his KindleScout campaign. — MD

By Steve Vernon

I contacted Kindle Scout winning author Monte Dutton upon a Kindle Scout board over at Amazon. It seemed that he was looking to cross-blog with fellow Kindle Scout authors and/or would-be authors, such as me.

So I took a look at the whole situation.

First off, I was intrigued because Monte – who has the same first name as one of my favorite western movies, Monte Walsh, either the Lee Marvin version or the Tom Selleck version, but only because Keith Carradine did such a great job of riding Jack Palance’s pony – had successfully placed not one, but two novels in Kindle Scout. His novel Crazy of Natural Causes, had already been published by Kindle Scout, and he had a second Kindle Scout novel, Forgive Us Our Trespasses, due out imminently, which is a fancy of way of say any minute now, soon as they get around to it.

Clearly this dude knew what he was talking about so I was eager to take him up on his offer – so right off the bat I played hard to get.

“Great, Monte,” I said to him, via my Twitter – and yes, even tough guys like me know how to Twitter, at least until the birds chase us out of the trees. “Why don’t you send me a blog talking about your experiences with Kindle Scout and I’ll send you something imminently.”

I’m not saying I was cool about it.

That’s right – I went all bunny-in-the-headlights and forgot what I was doing and tried to weasel out at the last minute when I really ought to have known better in the first place.

In my excuse, I had just got home from a night shift at my job as a cubicle dust bunny, and I knew from my work schedule that I was due in back at the office first thing in the morning, and I wasn’t thinking all that clearly in the first place – but then, this morning, I woke up at about five in the morning and slapped myself a few times just on the principle of it and wrote this blog.

You have to also remember that this is my second-to-last day on Kindle Scout and I have been writing a blog entry a day over at my own blog, Yours in Storytelling, and by this point, I was feeling more than just a little bit punchy.

Just imagine somebody sitting at the crossroads of Rocky Balboa’s “Yo Adrian!” and Sally Fields’ “They like me, they really like me.” and throw that mental image into a blender for two or three days, and you’ll be about halfway towards the punch drunk and dizzy that I was feeling.

So I have been talking about my Kindle Scout campaign for my novel, Kelpie Dreams, for the last 28 days or so, and I have ridden way past filibuster territory, and I am entering the my-god-won’t-that-fella-ever-stop-talking stage of things.

So let me tell you about Kelpie Dreams.

Kelpie Dreams is a full-length, paranormal shoot-em-up romance written for the sort of folks who wouldn’t necessarily be caught dead reading a romance. It tells the tale of Lady Macbeth – a high school librarian, ex-assassin and part-time kelpie — whose mother wanted to name her Hemorrhoid at birth. Now she has to take on a Sea Hag – eight legs of Godzilla-ugly poured into a bucket full of meanness – with the help of a one-woman army named Rhonda, a 200-year-old Sea Captain, and a hunky lighthouse keeper who won’t admit that he’s dead, as well. Kelpie Dreams is a funny, action-packed paranormal romance novel for folks who hate to read romance novels.

The Kindle Scout campaign for this novel ends on March 4, 2016 – so I have clearly left the writing of this blog to sometime way past the last minute or so – but, all the same, I hope that some of you folks who have been following Monte’s blog page will see fit to take a look at my excerpt, and if it sounds like a book that you might sort of almost like a little bit, maybe if you squinted … then maybe you’d even consider nominating Kelpie Dreams.

Whatever you decide to do, I want to thank you for reading this far. Right now I have got to run and grab myself a bite of breakfast before grabbing the bus to work to get back to my all-important cubicle, dust bunny doings.

KELPIE DREAMS campaign page – https://kindlescout.amazon.com/p/2BN2D6VXZUK60

YOURS IN STORYTELLING blog – https://stevevernonstoryteller.wordpress.com/

STEVE VERNON’S Twitter – https://twitter.com/StephenVernon