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Steampunk Tales #4 is out – with “The Brass Pedestal”
Ahoy there, mates! Steampunk Tales, the penny dreadful for your iPhone, just launched its 4th issue. And within its digital pages, you will find a copy of my short story, “The Brass Pedestal”. It’s about family, metal corsets, clockwork earwigs, and how love can be a barrier to revenge. I had a great deal of fun with this particular story, as it has a hint of weird west to it, and features my favorite town name ever: Replication. Thanks to the folks at Steampunk Tales for including me in issue #4, too! Hoping to see much more of this type of publishing in the future.
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The Queen, the Knight, and Arthur
If you’ve followed either of my blogs, listened to my podcast, of likely talked to me for all of ten minutes, you’ve probably gathered that I have a thing for Arthuriana. My love of the genre is deep-seeded, having taken root somewhere in between watching The Sword in the Stone and receiving a book from my great aunt on the subject (I can’t seem to locate the book, but it had fabulous illustrations, including a brilliant one of Morgause holding up Mordred as a newborn amidst the rocky sea and churning waves). But it wasn’t until college that something really clicked with me, something started reverberating in my brain, in…
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Updates in a Nutshell: Publishing, Reading, and Writing
Well, enough has been going on in the last few weeks that I thought it might be helpful to make a fancy wee bullet list for organization’s sake! First up is a reading that I’ll be doing on December 10th with Jeff VanderMeer and Mur Lafferty at Chapel Hill Comics (which is both thrilling and awe-inspiring, since I get to read, um, my stuff next to their stuff!). Jeff was kind enough to invite me along. Following the readings will be a freeform storytelling session where we’ll work together on a story all live and junk! Makes me glad for all those years of improv and, also, quite thankful for…
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Writing can soothe the soul…
I recently had the pleasure of reading one of Lilith Saintcrow’s amazing entries about how writing can, indeed, save our lives. Since I have been revisiting in a book that did much to soothe my own soul, I wanted to tell you a little about it. If you follow me on Twitter, you’ll know that a little less than a year ago, my younger sister was diagnosed with cancer. Now, illness kind of runs in our family; mom’s had cancer and a series of other ailments, dad’s been fighting a mystery disease/heart disease and suffered a near-fatal staph infection the week before my wedding. And that heart surgery he had…
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Thoughts from a #dumbwriter
For every thing I learn about publishing, writing, and editing, there are about a dozen others that I’ve yet to figure out. No, I’m not an imbecile. (Though I sometimes walk into walls, I owe it mostly to my roving imagination and general lack of coordination.) I’m just a #dumbwriter. Over the last few years, I’ve been doing my best to get a full, bird’s eye view of Writing and How to Get Published in This Day and Age, but there are still instances where I just miss entire chunks of the geography. Those black holes on my map are where the #dumbwriter lives. Sometimes, it’s because I can be,…
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November approacheth…
And that means NaNoWriMo. You know, for years I avoided NaNoWriMo. I hated the idea, mostly, because people kept telling me to do it. I mean, damnit, I could write a book at my own pace and, by gods, I did. Ooh, the snark… But last year, right after I left my job, I found myself with a healthy amount of time and decided well, what the hell? Did I have anything to lose? No, not really. I had never really ramped up the writing, personally, always just sort of let loose when I wanted, never wrote to a schedule, etc. I mean, part of that was due to my…
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Coming out in Character
For Coming Out Day, 2009 Peter was “born” sometime in the second half of 1999, likely toward winter. I remember that first scene very vividly. I saw him wrapped in a brown cloak, his hands wrapped around a staff, a tuft of his sandy hair protruding from the hood. He was standing by enormous bronze gates, cast in the torchlight, keeping watch: yes, my first original protagonist of my first original (non-collaborative) novel, then titled, The Gatekeeper. He started out as the savior of the world and ended up its doombringer. Yes, much about Peter has changed in ten years, and since then his world has become home to The…
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Bright Star: The Beauty of Love, The Sensuality of Words
I don’t know what I was expecting in regards to Bright Star, though I suppose I thought it might irk me a bit, as biopics tend to do–especially when concerning authors. Far too often it seems directors need to sensationalize the stories, add sex and intrigue, muddle up the plot so the movie reads more like a Harlequin than a historical account. In some ways I’m one of the worst kinds of audience members to please in cases like this; I’ve read Andrew Motion’s Keats biography (upon which the film is based), I’ve read close to every Keats poem and a vast majority of his letters and criticism. I’m hard…
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A year ago…
A year ago I decided that I’d had enough of working full time in a career I didn’t love. It wasn’t that I was bad at it, it was that it left no time for two of the most important things in my life: my son and my creativity. Writing, if if happened at all, oscillated between utter ease and utter drudgery. My son was misbehaving so badly that weekends in our house were battle zones, and we longed for Monday just to get away. That’s no way to live if you can help it. I left because I knew I couldn’t be my genuine self–first a foremost a mother…
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Dear self-important new writers: STOP. You’re making us all look bad.
<rant> I wasn’t going to write about this, because frankly, I’m a new writer and I doubt there’s anything I really say that will be enlightening on the subject. Except I started thinking about how pissed off I am when I read excerpts of the pertinent emails and conversations. It’s not the professional writers’ responses that bother me so much, but the tone and self-importance of the new writers that makes me ill. Yeah, some of the established writers’ responses to Josh Olsen’s original piece have been a little, um, tough to read. But not every writer is going to turn n00bs away if they adhere to a code of…
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“Be patient, keep writing” and other things I tell myself.
Last night I finished chapter 20 of Peter of Windbourne, and am now approaching the part in the book in which a series of Very Bad Things happen. The draft is sitting at 101,122 words at this moment, with hopefully no more than five or six chapters remaining (generally my chapters hover between 4-5K). It’s a blind rewrite, as I’ve mentioned, so I’m giving myself some extra wiggle room. I know it’ll be edited down a bit next. I’ve got until November to get it done, because I’ve promised to do NaNoWriMo again this year. This chapter has been particularly difficult, mostly due to the influx of freelance work that’s…
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Becoming an atheist of the muse.
That’s it. I’m over it. I don’t believe in muses anymore. I’m sorry. Does that sound harsh? I know, we have such romantic notions about muses, how they lovingly whisper inspiration and buoy us along with creative power. But in the end, they’re just not worth the trouble. And you know what? They’re fickle, they’re never there when you want them to be, and you really can’t base a career on them. You’re silly to think that you can become a writer by relying on some magic alchemy. It’s not alchemy. It’s just work. That’s all there is. And sometimes, the work comes easy. But let’s face it: it’s you…
