Ah, my precious peeps - I've been so bad lately. Neglecting you for other pursuits, leaving you to wile away the lonely hours and days with mindless drivel - other than my own mindless drivel which you, inexplicably, seem to find amusing.
I beg your forgiveness and offer no excuses. Well, maybe one or two.
It's been a bit of the usual chaotic churn around here - working on the edits for Book 1 of my Phasms trilogy, trying to get Book 2 written and of course, swatting that pesky MUSE who likes to carpet bomb my brain with new story ideas at the exact time I need to be focused on existing WIPs.
Yeah - my muse teamed up with Kat Daemon's muse (you can follow Kat on twitter HERE - and you really should, she's hilarious) and the raunchy Valkyrie's brought home all sorts of distractions like:
And this:
And lot's of this:
So - can you really blame me from being distracted? Trying to keep her out of trouble is a full time job. And I already have TWO of those! Yeah! The writing thing and the other one. The one that actually requires my concentration and pays the bills. The one that makes me feel like:
But Prue (that Valkyrie muse of mine) doesn't care. She's just a hedonistic little tramp, looking to cause trouble. She even tried cornering the Norse God of Winter, Ull Myhr, and his friend Gunnar. Check it out on twitter HERE. Thanks to her antics, I've been officially labelled one of his Twitter Tormentors. At this rate, he may not make it to the wedding!
But - overall - it's been a pretty good couple of weeks. Nothing to rant about (like AT&T) and nothing to go all Glee! songbird about (like Whiskey). Just a good, solid, end of summer.
So - what have you been up to? Did you do anything special to mark the end of the season? Does it feel like fall where you are? Are your WIPS and other projects moving along?
To wrap things up, here's a little Sunday toonage to help your day. This song just makes my fingers twitch, ready to pound out some major WERDS!
I really wish I had sufficient PC skills to attach Robin Williams voice to that sentence, ala Good Morning Vietnam...
Yes, I know. It's shocking, it's 6 o'clock in the morning and I'm vertical, semi-dressed and almost in a good mood. Please, enjoy it while it lasts - it's like a cloud on a hot, dry day: it can disappear at any moment.
But while it's here, let me tell you that this week has been exceptional. Ex-Cep-Shun-All! A bit like...
Hmmm - senese a theme going on here? Might have been the gaggle of Marines that were hanging out in front of my office yesterday. Yes, God gifted me with Marines. Ooodles of them. They were scrumptious, yummy even! Tasty, like savory cupcakes without too much sweet frosting. MMMM, mmm, mmm.
Aw, there I go digressing again.
So, you ask, why was last week all "Good Morning, Vietnam," besides the fact it's one of my favorite movies of all time? Well, because it was a bit of good and bad, bitter and sweet.
First, work was tough. Really tough. I can't go into specifics cuz I need to keep my job until I sell millions of books and become rich, but it just was. Stupid problems that should never have occurred, abject failure to follow policy and a lot of whining and complaining. And that was just on the government side - let's not even get into the contractors!
But, writing was good. My muse, the Valkyrie, must have swallowed mushrooms or got laid or something. She was soaring all week, higher and higher, bringing back the good stardust and sprinkling on my head and hands. She was generous and effusive and before I knew it I had 26 pages of a new novel safely tucked away, another 13 pages on the almost new story, 40 pages of the first novel revised and a 4,000 word short story completed.
"Wait," you ask, "What do you mean a 'New Novel'? Weren't you already working on a new novel? And what's this 'almost new story'?"
Well, that's why I'm going all Adrian Cronauer on you... Let me try to explain.
1) Book One: I finished it around the first of the year, shopped it around, got some nibbles, got a request for full, got turned down, sent it to my friend and author Justine and got four pages of tiny, tiny font feedback so I could go fix it. Which is what I'm doing now and I'm about a third of the way.
2) Then came Book Two: I finished it a couple months ago, didn't shop it around, was working on revisions to it with my critique partner CP, stupidly entered PitMad on Twitter, got a request for partial, got a request for full, made CP madly finish her critique, dashed off all the corrections and sent it in. And am waiting for results. And went ahead and submitted to a few other folks cuz why the hell not, I'm a writer, that's what we do.
3) Short Story One: dashed off after dashing around the block with the dog one day. Submitted to about a dozen magazines, turned down by all but three, those three still pending. If they decline, I promise to publish here.
4) New story one, or "almost new story" was an idea I wanted to explore in a voice I hadn't used before. Girl after my own heart with much tequila, surfing, sex and general fun. The Pro-tag cusses like a sailor (gee, go figure) and eats like a teenage boy. She's smart, stubborn, OCD and will make you snort coffee out your nose. Yup. She's me - back in the day. Story was coming nicely and I new where it was going to go as well. Probably about 10% written.
5) Short Story Two: I'd been turning this around in my head since March, unsure how to actually get it started, but it finally found it's way out and I've sub'd to a small handful of magazine's to see if they are interested. It's pretty weird, which means it's pretty authentically me. It's not all snergly and there's almost no cussing, but it's still pretty "me."
Then along came New Story. THE story. It started with a single, completely out of context line as I was laying in bed the other night. I mean, the sentence could have gone anywhere, or nowhere. But between thinking it as I dozed off and waking up the next morning, the story had formed and was just dying to escape. I wrote the first chapter during lunch at work that day. And it kept coming. It's still clamoring at the tips of my fingers, begging to get out. It's AMAZING too! ROAR!
I can't wait to sub it out, 'cuz I have confidence this one is going places. And it's so damn fun to write - I even get to make up words and lot's of other cool things. I can't tell you much, but it's a mash-up of genres and the feedback so far is GOOD! This is the one that had me crawling out of bed three times last night to add a line here, a paragraph there. I finally decided to just leave the damn computer on so I wouldn't have to wait for it, thereby risking the precious WERDS that were trying to make it out of my head.
So, there you go. That's the sort of week it takes to make me feel this way. Not so hard to understand, right? I think, with that, I'm gonna take The Terrorist for a walk, so I can get back to writing.
Peace out, Ya'll! Here's your Saturday Tunes - make it a good one!
Well, I know - I'm supposed to be writing about something this morning. I thought I had a topic lined up last night, but the Valkyrie (aka: my muse) got pissed and chased it away. So: Crap. What to write about. Here I sit, broken hearted. Tried to write, couldn't get started. Hah! Not what you expected, was it? Yeah - I try stupid stuff sometimes to get things flowing. Actually, my entire second manuscript started by thinking (and echoing in words) that annoying habit of hitting the same key on a piano over and over, with a half-second pause in between. Yeah - I started it like this: One... Two... One... Two...
And before I knew it, I was off to the races. It always intrigues me, the things that get our writing glands juiced up and ready for keyboard kombat... I frequently ask other writers how they came up with an idea, what made them start, how did they get the first few sentences on paper. We all have different methods and means, but in the end, it comes down to just sitting your ass in a chair and WRITING. If I were going to be completely honest (which I am, to a fault and without much tact), the actual verbal vomit part comes easy. Once I get going, once I pick up the trail my muse has left me, I can ramble on for hundreds, thousands of words. Part of it may be for total shit, part of it may only make sense to a crack smoking toad, but part of it will always be worth keeping. It's the space between the words that matters - the thoughts and images and questions drawn out by whatever I spewed like... Well, the only 'spew' analogies I can think of are too gross and disgusting for this early on a Saturday morning. Sometimes it works - sometimes it doesn't. The point is, it gets me writing SOMETHING. Which beats staring at a blank screen.
Why yes, this is a little gratuitous Depp action. What the fuck is wrong with that?
So, something I write may start like this:
"When Donny left, it was pretty much expected that Andie would fall apart. Really, really fall apart. They’d been together since college. Almost four years. They were talking about getting married. At least, she was talking about it. He would just listen, nodding his head while studiously not commenting. So when he left, when he packed his things while she was at work and moved out without even leaving a note; she went a little nuts."
And before long (but with several edits) becomes this:
"It’s the little things in life that make the biggest difference. Being five-minutes late for the job interview. Missing the other guy’s car by two inches. A quarter teaspoon too much salt in the soup. Big things are easier to detect, easier to plan for. Easier to accept.
It’s the overwhelming force of the larger events that makes them more recognizable. You know something big is going to or has happened, so you allow yourself the time and the space to cope with them. But the little things? No freakin’ way. They just pile up, like grains of rice or flakes of snow, until the whole thing breaks lose and tears up your life as it plummets down the slope.
So, when Donny left, it was pretty much expected that Andie would fall apart. Really, really fall apart. They’d been together since college. Almost four years. They were talking about getting married. At least, she was talking about it. He would just listen, nodding his head while studiously not commenting. So when he left, when he packed his things while she was at work and moved out without even leaving a note; she went a little nuts.
She pulled the few things he left into a pile in the back yard, added all the pictures and mementos of their time together, dumped the oil from one of the Tiki torches on top and threw the match. She danced the shandy around the blaze, tipping back the bottle of Fireball until she was good and drunk, then passed out on the grass as the embers blew softly all around her.
Yeah. She was pissed."
See how that works? You start with the tiniest, most obscure thread. You embellish, adding, subtracting, playing around with placement, tense, voice and other 'craft' tools and before you know it, you have a whole new story in the works! And as eager as I am to watch Johnny Depp, or Christian Bale or drink Scotch and dream about Johnny Depp or Christian Bale; I'm a writer. I gots to write. I get real bitchy when I don't. And my muse get's all pouty. Trust me - that's not a pretty sight!
Oh, and by the way, on my search for the perfect gifs for this post, I was horribly maimed and assaulted by A FULL PAGE OF TAYLOR FUCKING SWIFT gifs! GUH - my eyes! My eyes! They're burning!!!!
