I was on a tour of steamy Central America recently, traveling to ancient Mayan archaeology sites and present-day Mayan towns in El Salvador, Honduras, Guatemala, and Belize. Did you know that Guatemala has 37 volcanoes? It’s okay, I didn’t either. Over the centuries, tens of thousands of Guatemalans have been killed and whole towns leveled by earthquakes. Three of those volcanoes are still active on a daily basis. Below is a photo I took of a steam and ash eruption from Fuego, the “fire volcano” near Antigua.

But I digress, as I inevitably do. Decades ago, when I was in screenwriting school, I wrote a romantic adventure screenplay that I titled Call of the Jaguar. It takes place largely in Guatemala. The story is about a woman, Rachel McCarthy, who, on her 40^th birthday, finally gives in to the mounting evidence that her materialistic husband, Brad, has been cheating on her. For years. After confronting her husband and his lover with a birthday cake and a knife and making the front page of the local news, Rachel goes off the deep end and decides to search for the man she should have married, the lover from the Peace Corps days of her youth. Patrick is now an archaeologist working on a secret location in rural Guatemala, which is in the midst of a civil war.

I’m not telling the rest of the story here, but of course, as I am at heart a suspense writer, things go terribly wrong on Rachel’s quest to find Patrick. Although I had spent time in Yucatan, Mexico, among the Mayan population, I had never visited Guatemala until this recent trip, and I wrote this screenplay long ago, pre-Wikipedia and other easily accessible internet sites. And like all authors, I live in fear that I totally invented the history of the civil war in Guatemala. After all, we only know what we read or hear, and the version we get is often totally different from the experience of the actual people involved. And we writers tend to be an insecure lot. Personally, I always tense up when someone opens a conversation with “I read your book.” Yikes, what’s coming next? (Please tell me I’m not the only apprehensive author.)

So it was with some trepidation that on my Central American tour, I quizzed our trip leader, a Guatemalan, about the civil war in Guatemala, which thankfully has been over for many years now. What was I going to do if I got it all wrong? Rewrite the whole dang screenplay? Sometimes it’s best not to ask, but if I totally screwed up, I was prepared to fall back on the “it’s fiction !” excuse.

But lo and behold, I somehow magically got the basics correct: federal troops vs rebels (federales and insurgentes in my story), with the federales siding with big landowners to take land and rights away from the common people (many of which are Mayan). Halleluiah! I must have had some idea of what I was writing about when I crafted Call of the Jaguar.

How sweet and how reassuring to be vindicated! I’ve had readers email me to say I made a mistake in one book or another, only to find out that the reader didn’t understand all the possibilities. Speaking of earthquakes, one of those readers wrote to me to say that the earthquake in the opening of my romantic suspense, Shaken, was all wrong. Earthquakes, she wrote, never ripple through the earth, but shake violently. Guess what, dear reader, depending on your surface location and the depth and position of the epicenter of an earthquake, the tremors you feel may roll through the ground like the incoming tide, shake the surroundings until they crack or fall, or simply slip sideways with single booming noise and resulting swaying after the slip. (I’ve had the joy of experiencing all three types.)

But I’m digressing again. I never came close to selling the screenplay version of Call of the Jaguar. (Hey, it’s really, really hard to sell screenplays!)

So I eventually turned the story into a novella, which I now give away on Amazon and elsewhere. My character, Rachel McCarthy, has quite the adventure among the Mayan ruins in Guatemala. And I had a good, hot, steamy time exploring ancient pyramids in the jungle, too.

I’m sure I got many other aspects wrong in Call of the Jaguar, but hey, it’s fiction!

I want to write. That’s what I really want to do every day. Butt in the chair, fingers on the keyboard—write.

That’s what leads, in fits, starts and detours, to the finished product, be it novel or short story. Then it’s navigating through all the wickets to get the book published. But after that, I can’t just sit there and hope the book sells itself.

Marketing. Translated as doing whatever I can to make sure readers know the book is out there.

Back in the old days, before ebooks and indie/self-publishing altered the landscape, there was sort of a formula. I say sort of because it really didn’t work well.

My first nine books were published by big New York publishers. Their marketing strategy, if you could call it that, was “throw spaghetti at the wall.” If it sticks, well, it might be working.

My first novel, Kindred Crimes, got a better-than-average jump off the published writer diving board because I won a contest for the best unpublished private eye novel. That got me attention, reviews, award nominations.

The way things worked back then, I scheduled book events at local bookstores and hit most of the mystery bookstores in the western United States. I went to mystery conventions such as Bouchercon and Left Coast Crime, meeting readers, other writers, and selling a few books. All of this was on my own dime, of course.

I did have a few small book tours, mostly on the West Coast, on the publisher’s dime. The publicists booked me into upscale hotels. Nice, but I’d rather they spent less money on the hotel and sent me to more cities. At one point I suggested an East Coast excursion, because they had mystery bookstores there, too. The answer was no. Since my books were set in California, how could they possibly appeal to readers in the eastern part of the country or the Midwest? Go figure.

Then I got dropped by the New York publisher and went with a small California press. I still did my own marketing, as I always had. Over the years most of the mystery bookstores closed. I scheduled events at local bookstores when I could. A lot of the local bookstores closed. I remember someone I worked with in San Francisco asking me if my books were available on Amazon. Yes, they were. They were also available at the big downtown bookstore four blocks away. That bookstore is no longer there.

We were in the era of buy it online. Then came ebooks. A lot of big publishers thought that was a passing fad. They were wrong. I’m glad I got back the rights to those first nine books right before that, because I spent a lot of time and money converting those novels to ebooks and I sell a lot of them. The small publisher also closed and I got back the rights to those books as well.

Along with all of this came social media and using the Internet to connect with readers. In these days of self-publishing, readers have so many choices. I contribute to blogs, like this one, and sometimes do guest blogs. My fellow writer D. Z. Church and I send out a newsletter each month. I tried Twitter once and hated it. Couldn’t see the point of that, or some of the other platforms. As for Facebook, it seems most of my “friends” are other writers, mystery fans, as well as a few longtime friends and relatives. I have a personal page for pictures of my cats and the like. And an author page, where I post notices.

Advertising. I’ve done some of that in the past, but not much. Recently I did something different. I participated in the Five-Day Author Ad Profit Challenge, which is free, sponsored by the Author Ad School, which costs money. The Challenge is, well, challenging. I’ve been up to my eyeballs in categories and keywords and have been rethinking blurbs and hooks. I’ve learned a lot and hope it will be useful in building sales.

Maybe when I throw the spaghetti at the wall, I’ll hit the target.