In My Words: Kimberly Burton Allen, Writer

That's a wrap! Welllllllll...not quite the California we have in mind... We said goodbye to nearly a full house of guests at the bed and breakfast yesterday morning and by 11:30 AM, Chris, Sydney and I were on the road to California. Swarm of starlings in Carlisle, PA A Pantera on the Long Island Expressway! #70sflashback The first day's drive west is always the most stressful as it encompasses the maniacal Long Island Expressway (driving experience apparently optional, merge expertise nonexistent), Belt Parkway traffic and I-95 through New Jersey (self-explanatory to anyone who has ever driven it). I think my blood pressure finally started to drop when we hit the Penna Pike, I-76 West.  Forget the bed. I like being smashed into this tiny space. Sydney eschews her comfy bed in the back of the Outback in favor of wedging herself into the space between my yoga bag and the retractable screen, and sleeps without so much as putting her head up until...

Celebrating Chris's birthday On the penultimate day of our cross country trip home, we stopped on the western edge of NJ to stay with our friends Gregory Anne and Mark. Mark runs a large estate comprising 400 acres, quite a bit of which is farmed. At this time of year, of course, all the fields are fallow. And full of game. Sydney: Oh Oh Oh My God. Let me the heck off this leash, I have WORK to do!!! There's something moving in there... And when she couldn't beg a trip outside (no way was she being let off the lead; she'd chase something into the next county), she was camped in front of the lovely French doors staring at the Great Outdoors. All over her face: Can I live here forever? Just wait, we told her. We're almost home. So the following day, on the first sunny day since we left California, we drove the final few hours to Southampton, arriving early afternoon. After we unloaded the car, I walked Sydney on a lead the perimeter of the back garde...

Spotty Internet service and good company have interrupted my good intentions to post a daily update. When we say that we have on six or seven occasions driven between California and Long Island, Chris and I often get asked whether we have taken the “blue roads” – those highways “off the beaten track” to explore the small towns and lesser-known byways of this great country. Wind farm outside of Palm Springs And the answer has been, for the most part, no. On our way from Southampton to Laguna Beach, we are eager to get there…and on the way home, we need to get back. So generally we don’t stray too much from the main roads when travelling from one coast to the other. This trip, however, has been somewhat different. For a start, because we routed through Palm Springs, we chose to take a route that wound us up through Yucca Valley but then were forced to detour through the Mojave Desert Preserve , through undulating waves of Joshua trees before connecting with I-15 just wes...

Doing my best to channel Steinbeck's "Travels With Charley" here. Under the heading of "What I Did on My Summer (winter) Vacation" -- Chris and I adopted a dog. The thinking was that if we found our next dog while we were on sabbatical in California, we'd have some time to bond and train and accustom it to us before we returned to New York and the usual madness of bed and breakfast life was underway. So with this in mind, we again drove cross country so that we'd be able to transport a dog back without the potential trauma of air travel. So six weeks ago today, we adopted four-year-old Sydney from a rescue in Baja California, Mexico, and she is a love. She's some form of mixed breed incorporating--possibly--Australian Shepherd, Nova Scotia Duck Tolling Retriever, Pointer, and who knows what else. She's little--24 pounds--about 16 inches at the shoulder. She's continually on the prowl for lizards and things she can flush out of the ...

This week I met a delightful woman who is a fellow writer of the same vintage as I am – i.e., we both worked when writing still paid (for example: HuffPost expects writers to contribute for free ) and midlist authors weren’t being dropped  by the Big Five publishers as they acquired smaller houses. We were reminiscing about back in the day--gaaah, that makes me feel old!--when we sent print queries via snail mail (don't forget your SASE!) to agents and waited weeks, sometimes months, for a reply. I was recounting the story of seeking an agent for Blood Exposure , the first of my novels.  Organized (compulsive?) as I am, I diligently tracked every query with a spreadsheet and saved every response. I used to segregate the responses in categories – Request for Full MS, Request for Partial MS, Rejection, Handwritten (getting a handwritten comment was almost as good as getting a request for a partial), Rejection, Form Letter. Far and away, the thickest file ...

Print-on-demand (POD) technology and, especially Amazon.com, has changed book royalty reporting and payment dramatically. A Butler's Life was first published by Frederic C. Beil Publisher , and as in most traditional publishing practices, I received a royalty statement twice a year, roughly three months after the end of the reporting period, to allow for returns by bookstores to be deducted from your sales. Bookstores, that pay roughly half the list price to begin with, are also given the option of returning unsold titles at little or no penalty. So if Barnes & Noble orders six of your title and after a set amount of time determines that your book isn't likely to sell out, they cut their stock losses and ship your book back. What is Amazon.com greatest at? Data collection. So being able to generate a report that tracks sales, borrows, etc. is a no-brainer to them and doesn't require three months of sorting through invoices to tabulate. Amazon Kindle, which represen...

I wrote last about decluttering with an aim to opening up some literal as well as mental space in my life. Well, things are progressing. After much research, I managed to find a vinyl collector for the majority of Dad's old jazz albums. Armed with a special turntable that records straight into a computer music file, I spent a whole weekend copying some early folk and contemporary trad jazz that will never be sold on iTunes or found on YouTube. It was a rainy weekend, perfect for soaking up the memories that bubbled up in me as I sang along with the old music. Then I catalogued and uploaded the tracts to my iPod, packed up one hundred pounds of vinyl record albums, and shipped them to Tennessee. On tax day. It was, quite literally, a weight off my mind. Next up? A doll collection. I was never the sort of child who played with dolls. But I spent my college years working at Disneyland in the gift shops in Fantasyland. I became friendly with Elyse, the Doyenne of the Doll Departm...