Blast From The Past Blasts Into The Present

So every once in a while, I get sideswiped. Not often--it takes a lot to confuse me. But when something happens that shocks me, I get really shocked.

For example:

I got an email this weekend from an old friend I haven't heard from in years.  Turns out she'd gotten a hold of my first book (The Reckoning of Asphodel) and really liked it. So she bought the rest of them. Granted, that's enough to make me excited.  After all, we've all had dreams of going back to high school and having someone completely random tell you, "Yeah, I've read your book/seen your movie/danced to your album/been to one of your games." Right?

Well, she took it a bit further.  She had emailed me to inform me that having read my blog and my website and noting all the Preditors and Editors Readers Poll nominations I've gotten in the past, she thought she'd go vote for me this year.  And, when she didn't find my stuff on the Readers Poll yet, she nominated me.

So, allow me to announce the following:

Apostle of Asphodel, the concluding novel of my fantasy series The Asphodel Cycle, has been nominated for Best Sci Fi/Fantasy Novel of 2009.

Metamorphosis, the collection of my spec fic short stories published by Aspen Mountain Press, was nominated for Best Anthology.  Also, in a complete coincidence as best I can tell, the cover art by Renee George was nominated for Best Cover Art.

Breaking the Covenants, the first book of the Covenants gothic vampire romance series co-written with Canadian author Rob Graham, was nominated for Best Erotica.

And, strangely enough, I was nominated for Author of the Year.

This is my third year in a row with nominations in the P&E Readers Poll.  Last year, the second Asphodel book, The Gift of Redemption, placed in the Top Ten for Best Sci Fi/Fantasy Novel while its sequel Temptation of Asphodel placed in the Top Ten for Best Novel. So now all four Asphodel novels have been honored with readers' nominations on the P&E poll, which I find very exciting and gratifying. As I've been proofing the print galleys for Reckoning, I've allowed myself to get caught up in the editing side of things.  But this has changed my focus, quite properly, back to where it should be--the reader.

And I figure that if I'm entertaining someone who is reading my work, I must be doing something halfway right. 

So Oxford commas and serial adverb abuse aside, please let me thank you, the people who read my stories, for allowing me the very great privilege and honor of sharing my worlds with me. Hopefully, the stories I write in the future will get better.  Hopefully, I improve in my craft.  Hopefully, one day, I may actually get one of these stories right.  But until then, thank you for bearing with me as I follow the writers' path.

If you wanted to check out the 2009 Preditors and Editors Readers' Poll and maybe...you know...vote or something, follow this link.

I'm off to go shovel more snow from the driveway.  And thus does the mundane burst my little bubble.  Then, maybe some football and perhaps...the tiniest little amount of shameless begging for votes.

Not Sure What This Post Is About Yet...

...so I'll just wing it.

I've been working a lot today--not on anything new (as I should be) but on the print galleys for The Reckoning of Asphodel. My very first book in the Asphodel Cycle will be available soon in trade paperback.  As soon as I have more particulars (release date, et cetera) I'll let you know.

But right now, I find myself in a peculiar position.  I haven't really sat down and read the first book since right after it was released (August 10, 2007--here's the link). So today, as I'm going through the print galleys, my editorial ren pencil finger is itching like there's been poison ivy on my keyboard. You know what I really want?

I want to revise the whole darn thing.

Now I realize I can't do that.  Doesn't make me want to do it any less. I actually spent a few minutes trying to figure out how to hack into the adobe program and fix things myself. (Didn't take long to dissuade me; I can turn on my computer and that's about it.) It's amazing how much a writer's voice can change in such a relatively short period of time.  I've noticed this with some of the writers I edit, but I was almost traumatized by how much my own voice has matured.  I mean think about it--Reckoning  came out a little less than two and half years ago and to my eyes the narrative voice is almost unrecognizable.  Removing the high narrative style I chose by design for the books (mostly so I could mature it throughout the course of the books) the differences between then and now are staggering.

I love adverbs now. I really loved them then.  Dialogue tags make me gag a little now; not the case back in the day.  And comma addiction? I had it. Not so much anymore.

Hell, I even used the Oxford comma back then whereas now I would rather gnaw off my arm at the shoulder.

Strange.

A lot of these changes, I attribute to my editors. The common usage mistakes I made, they've trained out of me by this point. Every manuscript presents some other new quirk they have to strive to eliminate.  And now, as I work with the authors that I edit, I contribute this new-found knowledge to correct the same mistakes in their writing. 

Kind of whacked.

For example, lately I've been harping on my writers that separate their readers from the action by using sensing verbs.  "I saw someone do something" as opposed to "someone did something"--basically, making the action more pertinent by sinking the reader deeper into the narrative point of view.  The reader knows whose point of view they're reading; if the narrative states that "someone did something" it's assumed that the narrator saw that.

Yep. You guessed it.  "I saw" and "I felt" and "I heard" litter that story like confetti in Times Square on New Year's Day.

So this has made me think about the role of the editor in the writing process, and I've realized that there's a quite definite and traceable chain of editing which sifts from editor to writer to editor.  Quirks that I identify in my writers' work will, in turn, become quirks they self-identify in their manuscripts or, if they become editors too, in the work of the writers they critique or edit themselves.  These quirks are essentially what instigates the ever-progressing evolution of language.

That's probably why passive writing became passe, why the exclamation point was poo-pooed and the ceaseless argument over the Oxford comma was begun in the first place.

Makes the role of an editor seem a lot more important when you look at it that way, doesn't it?  I'm not saying this to give myself a big ol' pat on the back, but as an observation of the inconstancy of the English language. The rules we have now are not the same rules that Faulkner followed, or Wilde or Dickens or Austen.  Each age of literature was different from the one that preceded it, and the next one will kill off some of the contemporary and fashionable quirks we employ today--quirks that future writers and editors will call cumbersome and old-fashioned.

(Jst plz--not txtspk, I bg u.)

I'm hoping this will give me a little more perspective as I move into a new year of both editing and writing. I'm also hoping that on these upcoming manuscripts, I'll remember to keep my quirks to myself so my editor will stay off my back.

Vain hopes, but what the hey?  I have to use all the ellipses I can before they go out of style, editorialized into oblivion...

Oh The Weather Outside Is Frightful...

You know, I am a child of the South.  I am used to having two or three snows each year and the coldest day getting all the way down to freezing, maybe. But, I have always hated three things about the South: June, July and August.  100 degree days?  Not my style. I hate sweating.  So in an effort to avoid perspiration, mosquitoes as big as my arm and always-frizzed out hair from the humidity, I moved to Ohio.

And was promptly greeted by winter.

You'd think after fifteen years in Ohio, I'd be used to winter by now.  I'm not.  I don't mind snow; having had relatively few snow days when I was a kid (except for the winter of 77-78 when we were out of school from before Thanksgiving until after Valentine's Day AND were still in school on the Fourth of July) I kind of like snow.

I do NOT like single digit temperatures.  Not at all.

We had a little bit of snow last night--just enough to blanket the yards and cover the roads. It's so cold outside that salt doesn't melt the snow; it turns it into a big slick of ice.  You'd think the road crews around here would be smart enough to realize that but--oh, no. They keep salting the ice and it freezes almost instantly.  My husband is off in Columbus today doing his Micrsoft certification school and I am stuck here, watching an endless stream of salt trucks parade up and down the hill in front of the house, refreezing the ice slick that once was a road.

I could be a spectator sport.  I could run a betting pool. Just think about it.

"Hey, Bob, what odds are you going to give me on how long it's going to take the road department to figure out the ice isn't working?"

"It's supposed to snow again Tuesday, right?  Ummmm....I'll give you 3 to 1 odds they won't figure it out for a week."

"That's a little steep? You sure about that?"

"Yep. 3 to 1; seven days."

"Done. Here's my g-note. I'll be back in a week--provided the dogs are ready to get hooked up to the sled.  Heck, I'll even buy you a beer; we can snowshoe to the Fairview."

*sigh*

You have to love sheer, dogged persistence in the face of meterological common sense.

My Mantra for 2010

"You must keep sending work out; you must never let a manuscript do nothing but eat its head off in a drawer. You send that work out again and again, while you're working on another one. If you have talent, you will receive some measure of success - but only if you persist." -- Isaac Asimov (1920 - 1992)

I very rarely bother to follow the advice of other writers.  Usually, it just annoys me; every writer's journey is different, after all.  Some got their lucky break because their wife pulled a manuscript out of a trash can; others got their break because of their family's connections; still others sent out manuscript after manuscript for decades until they finally hit upon the right combination of story-agent-editor-publisher and found themselves inexplicably at the top of the field.  But Asimov's advice is one that really resonates with me.

In a nutshell, he claims that persistence is the secret of success.  If there's one thing I've got, it's persistence.

Now granted--I have had some small measure of success. And yet--I dream of more, of bigger, of prolific production of quality manuscripts that entertain the majority of people who read it.  I find that lately in my work, I'm getting bolder--I'm exploring issues and relationships and conflicts that once had no place in my creative mind.  I, who was once inordinately fond of the tropes of genre fiction, am now looking for a way to break out of them.

And still, the weary round of submissions goes on.  Every time I hit "send," I'm sending a little bit of my soul out to be examined and judged.  Now that bit of soul is twisted, warped perhaps from my comfortable, familiar world of fantasies and romance and long-dead honor into something where faith is questionable, where romance is an obstacle and where fantasies grow darker and more intimate.  Am I doing the right thing?

Who knows?

It doesn't matter.  I'll still keep working on them, wrenching them into a condition where I can sit back and say, "I trust this story on its own. Let's see what it can do."

I woke up this morning infused with a new, stronger sense of purpose.  I feel empowered, like something is waiting just around the corner for me if I have the guts to reach out and take it for myself.  I went through my works in progress briefly, analyzing them, looking at them from glasses that are no longer rose-colored, but more of a steely grey.  And you know what?

I like what I'm seeing.

So aside from the Mythos  and Covenants books, I'm going to dedicate a great deal of my focus and attention on the darkest work I've ever written. Terella is my new pet, rising in all its onyx glory to push past my other work. I think I've finally matured enough to really explore the depths of that work and the ideological horror it emerges from.  It's time to give it the attention it deserves.

If Asimov is right--if persistence is what leads to success--then well, I've got that in abundance. All the trepidation I've always felt when submitting to agents or publishers has vanished.  Now I'm looking at it as a challenge and not the soul-sucking agony I've felt in the past.  While Deception is still alive and kicking on a few desks across the country, its successor will be polished and shined until it's like obsidian--shiny, stygian and sharp.  Then we'll see if my currect instinct about my work is correct--if I'm more suited to creating the darker side of speculative fiction than the heroic side.

Back to Ring Out 2009 and Ring In 2010

Yep! I'm back.

After taking a two-month sabbatical from my online presence in order to get a lot of work (and a grandbabies' first Christmas, house buying, lots of editing and submitting) out of the way, it's time for me to return to regular blogging.

And of course, I have a lot to talk about.

First off, the second book in the Covenants gothic vampire romance series I'm co-writing with Rob Graham is in our editor's hands and should be released through Aspen Mountain Press early in 2010. As soon as I have a release date for Warding the Covenants, I'll let you know.

Secondly, my ten book Greco-Roman mythology series, entitled (oddly enough) Mythos, has been bought by my great publisher at Aspen Mountain Press.  The first book, Bride of Death, is the story of the god of the Underworld, Hades, and his marriage to Persephone.  The second book, Daughter of the Sea, relates the myths surrounding Poseidon and Amphitrite.  For these books, I've gone back to the original classical sources--Homer, Hesiod, Ovid and so forth--to relate the actual myths in a modern narrative style. Fair warning--Greco-Roman mythology is all about sex, so while these are not straight-up eroticas per se they are fairly earthy. (In other words, each story has a sex scene. Caveat emptor--these are NOT good study guides for kids unless you want them really educated.)

Third, I finally broke down and submitted my Darkshifters two-book dark fantasy series to AMP. Despite a great deal of agent interest when I was submitting it last year, Darkshifter's Empath appears to be a better fit for e-publishing than traditional big house publishing.

Fourth, we're buying a new house! Hurray!  My husband and I found a 1930 American Foursquare house in Newark, Ohio. I really love it because of the Arts and Crafts style detailing on the house--stained glass, lovely woodwork, open floor plan and a huge...freaking...gorgeous...clawfoot tub that has been meticulously restored. We figure that restoring the house will be a long term labor of love--especially the kitchen which has four...count them--FOUR...cabinets in it.  Fortunately, most of the really expensive stuff (replacement windows, roof, gutters, hot water heater, AC, wiring et cetera) has already been done. The most wonderful thing about the house? THREE bay windows. My dream of having my writing desk tucked away into a bay window in a book-lined study? Fulfilled.  Hopefully, we'll be moving in soon; we're just waiting for the seller to square away his end of the deal.

Fifth, the babies' first Christmas was fabulous. I did all my Christmas shopping online this year--it's a lot easier to enjoy the holiday season if you don't have to knock a little old lady off the one toy left on the rack.  Although at 2 months and 6 months Keelynn and Aurora were too little to get into the whole Santa Claus expectation, they had a lot of fun playing with (and chewing on) their new toys.  My husband and I had a wonderful Christmas ourselves, and between holding the babies and watching my girls enjoy their daughters' excitement, we had a fabulous time.

At any rate, keep an eye out for lots of changes.  My website Shoot the Muse! will be undergoing major changes, as will this blog.  I expect to release a minimum of 14 novels and novellas in 2010 at this time and hope it'll be even more.  Deception Enters Stage Left is still out on submission and garnering enough interest to make me cautiously encouraged, and my editing desk is getting fuller and fuller. But, if Deception doesn't find an agent, I have Terella (my dark fantasy about an amnesiac god who leads a rebellion against her own temple) ready to go out on submission and Harlequin (the second book with the Deception characters) will be ready by October.  And who knows? Maybe some other idea will strike me in between now and then. And there is a rumor...just a rumor, mind you...that a second Asphodel series is in the works. I'll keep you informed.

So happy New Year to all of you--and may you acheive your goals for 2010~! I'll still be elf killing on this blog and shooting the muse on my website, with lots of new stories to keep you entertained. Best of good fortune!

This Post Is Not About Writing

No, it isn't. This post is about babies--my baby specifically, who is being evaluated in the OB triage unit of her hospital and may be about to deliver her baby. Wow. My baby is having a baby. What the hell is that all about?

It's so terrible to see your kids in pain. All parents know this. There's a horrible feeling of helplessness that accompanies it--there's something that Mom (or Dad) can't kiss and make it feel better. It's heartbreaking and exciting all at once. My daughter, who is bright and beautiful and clever, has no clue what awaits her with labor and delivery. I don't believe in sharing horror stories and she thinks she deals better with things just walking into it blind. She may be right; I don't know. I'm one of those weird people who wants to know EVERYTHING that will happen. When I had my artificial disc replacement surgery, I went to the website of the company that manufactured the disc and watched a video of an actual surgery in progress. *shrug* I was going to be unconscious while they performed the procedure, so it didn't frighten me. I wanted to know what would be happening to my body while I was asleep.

Yep. I am weird.

With my daughter, though, I was reasonably sure how her late pregnancy and labor would go and I purposely avoided relating the stories of my labor with her. Why? Because it was HORRIBLE. Things have changed though *since my day now that I'm apparently old enough to be a grandmother* and she won't have to endure 30 plus hours of non-progressing labor without pain medications.

Thank God.

So right now, I'm alone in this waiting room. There's a stupid late night television show on the tube that no one is watching and I'm here busily typing away on my computer. It's one way to spend the time, I suppose. I'm sure I'll post something later, an update at least. If I sit in this waiting room for hours there's no telling WHAT I might post. It could be a verra verra eeeeeeenteresting night.

A Rare Day Off

Wow. What am I going to do today?

My editor's desk is cleared for the month and I have promised myself to take the rest of October off. I need to let the Greco-Roman mythology novella rest for a day or so before I revise it. Harlequin is percolating. Plague is stuck. I'm getting ready to go to Tennessee on Wednesday and then stay with my daughter until after the baby gets here.

So what am I going to do today?

Shannon is asleep; he worked overnight on a build. There's nothing on TV, unless you count the Scariest Places on Earth marathon on SyFy. (What a ridiculous name. SyFy. Marketing department-FAIL.) I've spent the last hour or so looking through real estate listings because I will find our new house soon and hopefully will be in it by Christmas.

Which, of course, is all dependent upon when the baby gets here. Have I told you her name yet? No? Audrey and her husband Wes decided on the name Aurora Elizabeth. *looks innocent* I have nothing to do with my granddaughter being named after the Greco-Roman goddess of the dawn. Honest.

Yeah, I wouldn't believe me either.

So both my granddaughters have unusual names, which I'm thankful for. Meredith and her husband Brian named their daughter Keelynn Shea. *This name I really didn't have anything to do with, but I love it.* With a name like Celina, how could I not appreciate having an unusual name? After all, my parents unwittingly named me after the Greek goddess of the moon.

See? Some things are just fated.

So, what should I do today?

If I'm blogging about it, then I already have my answer. Nothing. I'm taking the day off! I may go to the bookstore and get Jacqueline Carey's new book Namaah's Kiss. That way, I can occupy at least a couple of hours of my time tonight.

Maybe things will be more interesting later on this week.

New Plotline Brewing

Arrrrrrrgh!

Why won't the muses let me finish one story before dragging me ass-backwards into another? I'm getting kind of fascinated with urban fantasy and I'm looking for some directions in the genre that are different than a lot of the urban fantasy currently out there. Of course, there would be a romantic subplot--because I like writing romantic subplots--but for the most part, I want to write an urban fantasy with serious fantasy and horror influences.

I thought I'd start with a twenty-first century version of the plague and eliminate about 95% of the world population right off the bat--like in the first half of the first chapter. Why the plague, you ask?

*shrug*

Why not? It's my opinion that the right strain of an existing virus--the right mutation, if you will--could decimate the world population in days. Besides, I need to get rid of a bunch of people. The survivors would, of a necessity, be the hardiest of the human race. So, I'm thinking surviving the plague would enhance the inherent psychic abilities these last people possess.

Naturally, I have this Armageddon/Apacolyptic kind of plot resolution in mind. *evil grin* Oh yeah, it'll be evil. If I can torture my characters, why write? Temporary working title? Plague.

Duh.

I'm going to try to hit 25k by Sunday. We'll see if I can do it. I'm almost done with the first mythology novella for Aspen Mountain Press. I should be able to clean that up and get it to my editor fairly soon. And all of this, of course, is contingent upon Harlequin leaving me alone long enough to work on something else.

We shall see.

At any rate, I did manage to get the final versions of two books done this week and have two new submissions to work on for AMP, so we'll see how well I can balance editing and writing over the next few days. As long as Audrey (my daughter) doesn't go into labor before then, I'm off to Kentucky to stay with her until the baby is born next week.

Oh, and next week is my birthday, too. Whoop-di-doo.

So you folks get back to writing and I'll do the same. Au revoir!

Long Time, No See

Gee--sorry, folks. Real life and my parents' internet-free zone have kept me out of the loop for weeks now. Add to that heinous editing deadlines, a new manuscript that just won't shut up and the kids and you'll understand my recipe for blogging disaster.

I'll try not to let it happen again. I promise.

At any rate, it's been kind of difficult to get my head on straight lately. To begin with, Harlequin, the sequel to my urban fantasy Deception Enters Stage Left, is cranking along at supersonic speed. Last week, I wrote almost 50,000 words on the manuscript and am seriously looking at closing the first draft out within days. Naturally, because I overwrite like a check fraud fanatic, that first draft is probably going to close out at 125k plus.

Because I can edit the heck out of anything, I'm thinking I'll be able to trim at least twenty-five thousand adverbs, dialogue tags and unnecessary scenes out of it. I'm really liking the story. I'm starting to play with some new theories about where to take my spec fic work. I'm getting more drawn to fantasy worlds that are shared with our own--without getting caught up in the tropes of urban fantasy per se.

Let's put it this way: anyone who saw the movie Magic when it first came out probably came away with an active dislike of ventriloquist dummies. (I know I did.) Creepy little clown dolls? Not a big favorite since Poltergeist. Now I'm trying to do the same thing for all of those harlequin masks hanging on walls all over the world--save with a lot of commedia dell'Arte influence and a healthy dose of the American theater world to make it more fun.

And, of course, I'm spending a lot of time torturing my characters. That makes everything worthwhile.

Fifteen Minutes of Sunshine

Yep, so I'm taking my medicine.

I was actually prescribed--PRESCRIBED--fifteen minutes of sunshine per day. Now that it's pleasant outside and not nine hundred degree celsius, I'm actually going to obey my physician and leave my dungeon for a quarter of an hour everyday and sit in the sun.

I figure I can make myself productive and use the time to blog regularly. After all, I've not exactly been faithful to Elf Killing as of late; the Other Hobbies have been taking up most of my time.

Other Hobbies at this point would be editing.

Remember how happy I was last year when I got to the point that I could write full time? How excited I was that I could spend all day every day at my computer zipping out stories? Well, I got sidetracked into editing. Don't get me wrong: I like editing. I like seeing how other writers' stories come together. I like helping to make those stories a little bit better in between the writer and the reader. It's fascinating work.

*Is it my imagination, or is it getting hot out here???*

I just never thought it would be so time consuming. I read quickly--abnormally quickly. Gone With The Wind is an afternoon's recreation for me. The Harry Potter books go down like bon-bons. Editing, however, is a bit more than reading quickly. It's grammar books open on the table, looking up grammatical constructions and then coming up with a way to fix a problem. It's continuity plotlines growing on paper beside the laptop, so I can make sure that all the plots and subplots are resolved. It's a lot of note taking: what works, what doesn't, what needs to be changed and what should stay the same because it's awesome. Every pretty little white manuscript that comes my way ends up bleeding like the slow guy at the running of the bulls in Spain.

*is that a trickle of sweat? That can't be healthy.*

But the greatest thing about being an editor? It's making my writing much cleaner. I'm finding fewer mistakes in my own work now, and writing cleaner means writing quicker. What could be more awesome than that? Every writer searches for a way to make the process faster and better. I think I've stumbled on the secret. Editing frequently makes me a better writer.

*has it been fifteen minutes yet? it's awfully bright out here*

So anyway, I'm watching the hummingbirds dive bomb at the feeder. They seem to be distressed that a human is sitting so close to their food source. If they knew that I was the one that fills the darn thing, do you think they'd be a little more polite?

Well, there you go. Fifteen minutes of sunshine aka dialy blog session. Dang, it's warm out here. I can't wait until winter comes so I can be unhealthy and comfortable in my dungeon.