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http://www.amazon.com/Between-Families-Karin-Mitchell-ebook/dp/B00P9J2TY2/ref=tmm_kin_swatch_0?_encoding=UTF8&qid=1450202941&sr=8-1

My Top 12 (mostly) Indie Books for EVERYONE on Your List!

For the holidays this year, I'm planning to give a lot of books. I want to support authors I've met and had be helpful to me over the past year or so, or books that I've found and loved or sometimes both.
Also, seriously... who needs more "stuff"? So buy a book.

Selling books is hard for many authors these days. Buying their books is a nice way to give a cool gift and support an artist.

Without further ado: My top 12 list of (mostly) Indie Books for EVERYONE on your list!
A link to buy each book is included. Happy Holidays!

12. Sci-Fi/Fantasy:
Sojourn: An Anthology of Speculative Fiction

 

This book started as a group of gamers and has turned into the #1 selling anthology of speculative fiction on Amazon. Plus, this is one of my awesome editor's projects and I love her.

 

11. For the dude on your list who loves music:
Cross Dog Blues

 I met this author at a small business Saturday and loved his book. It's told with a blues voice that conveys a tone that follows exactly with the story.

10. For the dude on your list who likes humor books:
The Pequod's Coffin

This book is a great chance to laugh and be entertained by the idiocy of corporate America.
9. For girls age 9-12 on your list:
Flexible Wings

A compassionate and kind-hearted approach to the social topics: adjusting to moving and making new friends, struggling with trying something new (swimming), living in a military family, enjoying a rich cultural identity.

 

8. For the lover of New Adult books on your list:
The Language of Flowers

This book deals with a similar girl to Seffra (although older) and does an absolutely stunning job with the language. It's honest and accurate and I loved it.

7. Book Club/Literary Fiction:
Yellow Crocus

The intertwining life of a slave and the child she helps raise. Strong female characters, conflict, morals.. unflinching honesty and beautiful writing.

6. Book Club/Literary Fiction:
(If it gets a slash, it gets 2 suggestions!)
The Pearl that Broke Its Shell

A cultural novel with unique women's stories of living in Kabul.

5. Nonfiction, Light-hearted:

I Work at a Public Library

 

A Light-hearted Wonderful Book by a Librarian who spends her days making the world a better place. No, really.

4. Memoir:
Hands of my father

I met this author at a small writing conference. The author is as fascinating, personable, and gregarious as any could be and his book reads so smoothly. A fascinating life!

3. Children's Picture Book:
Painting for Peace in Ferguson

Beautiful pictures with a rhythm to the words that follows the paintings that people did on boarded up windows amid the riots in Ferguson. I've read this approximately 1,000 times with my children and I love the words AND the pictures and the age-appropriate message that comes through.

2. Publishing:
Book Marketing is Dead

If you're interested in his book, you should totally check out his website. It's FULL of useful, nuts & bolts suggestions on improving your marketing.

1. Young Adult Memoir-style fiction:

Between Families

(obviously, it has to be my book, especially because I'm giving away all the rest of the old cover copies in preparation for the new cover. I'll be donating to child advocacy groups and individuals and colleges across the country until I run out.)

Check out the new cover! The new cover is only digital for now (and Derek Murphy made it for me,) but I'll post when a new cover is finalized after the 1st of the year.

 

Kirkus Review is in & reposted here

KIRKUS REVIEW

Mitchell’s debut novel follows a young girl through abuse and abandonment, and eventually to a residential treatment center, where the act of confronting herself may be her most difficult challenge yet.

Seffra Morgan loves her glamorous, charismatic, and fun mother, Linda, despite the fact that she’s a criminally negligent, violently abusive addict, sometimes leaving Seffra alone for days without food. Hunger is one of the most poignant themes of the book, haunting Seffra as she thinks, “The chance of having to sleep on a dirty hotel room floor was totally worth my mom’s attention and some good food.” After Linda permanently leaves Seffra on her own, the 12-year-old begins making desperate choices. After she survives a horrendous attack, she ends up in Castlerock, a residential treatment center that readers soon realize houses only the most traumatized and debilitated children. Mitchell articulates the details of child welfare services very well, depicting a realistic, well-meaning system of teachers, social workers, nurses, and law enforcement officials. The Castlerock treatment center offers the author an opportunity to introduce other children into the narrative, providing context for Seffra’s behavior and emphasizing the scope of child abuse. However, the novel’s biggest accomplishment is how it assumes Seffra’s point of view as she internalizes her trauma. She’s an exceptionally complex character who seeks her mother’s love while simultaneously expressing destructive anger. The two impulses are entwined at one point when she thinks, “My anger pushed away for a few moments and I felt the rush of my mother’s smell, and how much I loved her and I was sad with need and longing.” Mitchell subtly allows the character to develop and readers’ empathy will grow as they accompany her out of childhood and into adolescence.

A heartbreaking story that gives voice to often overlooked children.

There was something steeping in my pot this morning. Something I was going to write or say or do but it seemingly evaporated in the series of small talk and now I'm not sure where I set it down. Was it a set of keys? Or maybe my glasses. That's it, I was missing my glasses that helped me see how specific it was.

It was perfectly spelled out in neat rows that let you see how great my idea was. It wasn't convoluted in a series of clauses, set aside and defined until you couldn't remember the meat. It had sharks teeth and the smell of a pipe smoked by the side of the crick. Not the creek, that's the wrong sound. It tastes wrong in my mouth. Not like cinnamon candy, stolen from a bowl I wasn't invited to touch.

Or the deep comfort of swirling snow, knit burgundy mittens holding a paper cup of coffee and breathing in all that steam while the snips of cold melt on my glasses. Was that why I couldn't see what I was going to write about? Was it the steam or was it the glasses? Was it just that I was so disorganized that I forgot it? Or maybe that the thing wasn't a thing you could see at all but only smell and sense needs waiting.

I'll wait. It will come back.

The truth behind Between Families

I was bullied as a kid. I'll probably never know why and I am certainly not unique in my experience but I still feel weird about it. Girls from my class would turn and hate me in a minute. No warning, no reason why. They dumped my desk, left it full of notes that said "bitch," pinched me as they walked down the aisles. Then in a second it would be over and I'd have friends again. When in the midst of an incident, I missed school, faking illness. They'd call at all hours of the day and night and hang up and then do it again, and again, and again. At the time it was unsettling and I'd get scared and cry. I'd take the phone off the hook and put it back on a couple of hours later.

The first time I considered suicide I was about 9 years old, I think. I think that because I remember holding a butter knife against the pale blue of the veins just under the skin of my wrist and wondering if I could cut them with that knife because I wasn't allowed to use sharp knives yet.

When I was 10, we moved to St. Louis and I lost all my outlets, all the things I felt good doing. I stopped swimming or dancing or doing gymnastics.

I lived in St. Louis for a long time. A lot of it was unhappy, isolated times in my life. My dad came out of the closet just before my freshman year of high school. This was in the days when many people still thought it was completely acceptable for a mob to attack a person with no other cause than that person's sexual orientation. And I had a dad, the most loved person in my life other than my mother, who could be a victim of this. And if he made it through that, there was still all the judging. People might think he was evil, or that I was.

I was young and I was scared. I kept it a secret for the first couple of years that I knew about him. I would fly to Chicago where he'd moved and have these great visits where I met all his fabulous new friends and went to gay restaurants and they were in awe of how collected I was about the whole thing. But that was a lie. It was a comfortable relief to be there, honest about my dad and happy and seeing that everyone was happy and okay.

It's easy to be collected about a thing when it sits neatly folded up in a compartment of your life, never to be seen by anyone who might judge it.

I did eventually tell people about my dad. And that actually went just fine. After years of worrying what the backlash would be for someone that clearly did not fit into their own skin the way mine misfit me, the result of my dad's homosexuality fell silently into a comfortable quirk about me. No one cared.

But the other problems of my family stayed tucked tightly away. Those continue to be required secrets. I did not share them then and I'm not allowed to share them now. Back then, I didn't fit in my skin. I was awkward. I looked around and saw friends who had great grades and ACT scores and SAT scored. I hadn't even figured out how to sign up and that I kept a secret along with all my others. I'm not sure how much of it was shame and how much of it was just my role to keep it together, but when I was 17, with college on the horizons, I couldn't keep it together any more.

I attempted suicide.

I continue to this day to be ashamed of that. I'm honest about it to people. But ashamed.

It was important for me to do it. I got the help I needed and have never suffered from that debilitating depression since.

But sometimes when I go back to St. Louis, it's like the ghosts of those feelings lurk in the locations I used to frequent. The insecurity, the shame, the constant comparisons I used to do.

I know all these brilliant, accomplished people that I love and am proud of there. I see them and am awed by what they're doing with their lives. And if they came to Colorado and I got updated on their new strides, I'd hold them up a trophies. "Do you know who I know?" My friends are awesome.

But when I'm there, it feels different. It feel haunted by the 8 year old girl I was who was never good enough.

Seffra is more me than I realized when I was writing her. She was supposed to be for the kids I'd known in treatment centers. She was supposed to represent their struggle. She was not supposed to be me.

But nearly a year after the book's come out now, I can see how much her of her story is actually mine. The bullying, feeling out of place, dirty to men, the suicide-- those were me. Are me.

Especially when I go back to where it all still feels raw and vulnerable. I'm there to promote a book that has not been a copy-selling success.

The number of copies sold are the dirty secret of author's lives, I think. Most authors, most books, sell less than 1,000 copies. Mine hasn't yet reached 500 if we're talking paper copies. I've been the finalist of an international award but I'm still secretly terrified no one likes me. Such is the truth of vulnerability, of life.

And as my 8-year-old self and my 10-year-old self, and worst of all, my 17-year-old self go about life there, packed neatly away in my suitcase, I'm reminded in my life's most vulnerable ways of how hard it is to put yourself out there. I keep me tucked away and talk about my professional experience. I don't talk about my suicide attempt or my mom and her struggles. I hope people will like the story and it will be successful but it's financially a flop. And maybe that will be the case no matter what.

Maybe it's just hard to sell books. I certainly know statistically that's true. Or maybe audiences can smell the way I hold back. The formal nature of my lie of omission. And maybe it keeps me from connecting.

So here are the lessons I've learned since the book came out:

1. I need to be honest about my own vulnerability. Otherwise anxiety and insecurity will make me crazy. I'm no good at faking things. It comes out other ways.

2. I am happiest when I connect a lot to my husband and kids and when I ski and run and play soccer and write and work. St. Louis and I can only be distant friends. It's a fabulous city and I just can't.

3. Anything in life is better when you talk about it honestly to a friend. Thank you, Chris, my friend I talked through an entire breakfast with about book publishing and how NOT perfectly it's all going. This was after going to see Stevie Wonder live the night before. FYI, listening to Stevie Wonder live makes everything awesome always. I've tested it. It does.

4. Seffra is me in a reimagined life.

The final thing that made me feel amazing was coming home and at a work event where I met someone very high up in my organization who told me I was his hero. Literally used that word. He somehow knew a lot about the work I've been doing on this book. He has books ready and waiting for publishing, more connections than I do, more letters after his name than I have including the important PhD. And he bought a book from me. I'm wowed.

I'm going for a run now. Please buy a book here if you haven't and want to read about Seffra.

Art is not bleached

In the wee hours, before the light, after the dark has long since settled, when the couch feels alone and cold, I read and the light is too bright from a screen but my own ideas are too dark to leave in focus

So I let my legs chill themselves into the cold colorless leather and read about women in a dust storm who don’t know their husbands are testing an Atom bomb.

When I think I can sleep, I creep back to my bed. Let myself fall further into a new mattress, the luxury of life sinking into my hips. It is hours before the children will climb on top of me and compete for my kisses and I will fold them into me, one tucked into each arm and me smiling and kissing with stale breath they don’t yet complain about. But not yet,

Now I lay there thinking of the blank of the page. The false whiteness of bleach and the way it hides the fibers of reality. The way I’d like a pen to cut into those fibers, slice right in, into the depth where you can see layers. Then for my pen to morph into microscope so I could tease out the idea fibers, dark and hidden within and under the bleached page. Why is off-white unacceptable to my printer? Why does it look strange as a document. My shirts are never that color. I don’t bleach reality out of our lives. I hide in the fibers, and look for the strains of dark. Soap gets all the cleaner life needs to be.

My husband and I talked about what art is. This is one of my favorite topics, art. I used to cringe at the association of writing with art. Art is out of my league. I’m not good enough, talented enough, cool enough to sit with the adult artists on the cool grass, a broken picnic table bench, splinters and sunburns our companions. The artists and I were once not conforming enough to sit at the cool blue Formica bench tables in the high school cafeteria. We dropped out, didn’t we? I guess I didn’t. I went on to college and so did they, but still, we’re still not at the same table. Weren’t then, aren’t now. But nod to each other in halls.

These days, I’m less skittish of the idea of art as words. I don’t make that cut yet, but I know the Haven Kimmels and the Barbara Kingsolvers and the Isabel Allendes are in the cool club, the cool grass, the cool breeze is between their toes, it comes through their pens, taps out in keystrokes with a rhythm and cadence of clacking, dancing fingers.

And what makes an artist then? My husband says the difference between enjoying a medium (songpaintingsculpturewriting) and it being art is in the darkness. Art doesn’t give into the darkness all the time but neither does it shy away from its realities. It’s not bleached.

It’s selective. It can seek to draw out the light but it does not bleach it out, does not seek to erase it, more to sun itself on a picnic bench. The songs of Michael Franti make me think of this. How we can make something wonderful that calls us all to be in light and let the sun burn the love onto our skin. Or it can be just another dance song, poppy, pixy-twit sweet and light. We like it. We down the sugar, but it’s bleached out white sugar. Not the rawness with browns and grays mixed into off-white.

Letting thoughts wander until you swoop them up into pages

I like shopping for things online even though it doesn't get me out of standing in line. In the mountains where we live, the post office does not generally deliver to homes. Which means we all have PO boxes and elicit a certain amount of scrutiny from retailers and banks and also have to stand in line for all our packages that don't fit in our letter-sized PO boxes. It's annoying but it's also a nice time for my mind to wander.

In stores, I find my need to pay attention to everything exhausting. I get overstimulated from an hour of shopping because I simply must look at EVERYTHING and everyone in the store. This is tenfold more difficult if either, much less, both of my children are with me as then I must also be vigilant for their locations and that's no mean feat. It means that in addition to the lay of the store and its contents and sales and customers, I also keep track of my kids and within 15 minutes I need a margarita.

But online, I can focus on just searching for what I want and then the line at the post office is time for my thoughts to be free. I don't have to focus them, they can wander. And I love wandering thoughts. My time to have thoughts and decide which ones are precious enough to wrap up in a cloth and hold dear to me as a babe is as precious to me as writing. But I have to wrap them up and convert them to something or they get jumbled up together. I write to do that. And that's been undone lately. I haven't been in a routine.

Our lives are in total transition. It confounds any attempt at routine, our life right now. I just started a new job as the Disabilities Services Coordinator for the college where I was working as an instructor. It's awesome but a big job with a lot of details to chase. I make more details in the interest of sustainability and doing things right. Damn me! My husband is starting a new job as the director of a small non profit that provides advocates for victims of assault. My oldest son is about to turn 5 and starts Kindergarten on Wednesday. My younger son is 2 1/2 now and starting at Montessori next month.

Thankfully we finally bought a 2nd car so that's helping with this business of 4 jobs and two school changes and soccer practice and soccer coaching and OH MY! How do normal people do this stuff?

I've spent at least $150 on school supplies. I thought things were supposed to get cheaper with the kids going to school but oy! It ebbs and flows and the increase in income always seems to come along just when we need it. So life's good.

Still, I have floater ideas that need time and key strokes and editing to tie them up and make them take shape so I can figure out how to hold them and which ones to keep and which to release and which should be upcycled to something I can craft into a book. Did I say book?

It's time. I said all along that when my oldest started school, that's when I'd work on the 2nd book. So that's this week right? I'll get the whole book done this week right? No? No. But I'm preparing. I've been consuming books like I'm about to go on a diet, which in a way, I am. I don't usually read while I'm writing so I suppose doing all this reading is preparation. I hope I get my voice just right. I hope the bundles of baby-sweet thoughts make their way across dreams, swaddled up tight and warm and delivered to my arms where I can turn them over to you. You know, after sucking the goop out of their noses;)