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Getting Through The Writing Drought
By virtue of the holiday season, I have been doing little else but crochet and cook these last few days, leading to a whopping 0 progress in fiction. I’m starting to get twitchy. It’s not that I don’t love the holidays, my family, tradition, all those things. It’s not that taking a break might, in fact, be a pretty good idea; it is more than that. I need a break, but I’m not willing to let it go without a good share of bitching and moaning. Since the youngest of ages, wandering around the playground clutching notebooks scrawled with imaginary worlds and adventures, I have sought out fiction as therapy.…
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Metrics, Mind-tricks, and Mayhem
This week I: Killed 30K in The Ward of the Rose Wrote 7K in The Ward of the Rose Decided I’m awesome and it’ll be no time before this career gets off the ground, then Decided that I’m not good with that much bravado; then Decided I pretty much suck, I’m doing it all wrong, and my stuff will never see the light of day, then… Decided, in light of what’s going on, I’m allowed a moment of crazy Fell in love with characters I hadn’t seen in a while Wanted to strangle some of the characters I hadn’t seen in a while Felt very grateful for having recorded the draft of The…
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Thoughts on Booklife Part I: The Pillars of Private Booklife
I had the pleasure of meeting Jeff VanderMeer last week and talk books, fiction, and inspiration. He also brought copies of Booklife and Finch. I haven’t yet jumped into Finch, but man, I’ve got to say, Booklife is the book I wish I had two years ago. I am envious of all the writers out there who have access to this book now, because they have so much essential information in one place. They won’t have to make as many stupid mistakes as I have, nor feel as aimless, floundering around trying to figure out what to do once the book is finished (or even begun, in some cases). No, I don’t mean to imply that Booklife is magic.…
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Renovating rooms, knocking down walls
I’m not going gung-ho with writing right now. I know it’s a bit of a fruitless endeavor, what with family and holidays and everything. As my lovely friend Jennifer said to me yesterday during coffee, “Just enjoy doing nothing for a while.” Yeah, I’m not good with doing nothing. Especially writing-wise. But hey, I’m pacing myself. Except characters just have minds of their own now, don’t they? The last three days I’ve been assaulted with bits and pieces of dialogue, scenes, sentences, and stories from The Ward of the Rose (taking a wee break from the followup to Queen of None, but still going to be writing more Arthuriana posts). For those…
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Loving Lancelot or, the Force of Character
I have to confess, I’ve never much liked Lancelot. I never got the whole thing with him, never understood why, time and again, he appears in book after book after book, film after film. And I swore, up and down I swore, that if I ever wrote Arthuriana that there would be absolutely no sign of Lancelot to speak of. No stupid Frenchman ruining everything. No pure, guiltless knight; no hunky posterboy. The only Lancelot I marginally liked was T.H. White’s… because he was terribly ugly. I can appreciate that sort of irony. (Of course, they couldn’t have kept that in Camelot. Had to go and make him all sexy…
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Arthur Re(du)x – Part One
I can’t say for sure, but I think the first time I ever saw something remotely Pre-Raphaelite was in elementary school upon visiting the Clark Art Institute in Williamstown, MA. It very well could have been this painting, though I’m not sure when it was acquired. Regardless, I remember returning from the museum on an absolute high, my mind alive with the images I’d seen and thrilling at the prospect of such visual imagination. Throughout college, I learned a great deal more about the Pre-Raphaelites, and they and their brotherhood (and sisterhood, et al) continued to crop up during my Arthurian studies. And the more I read of Arthur, the…
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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…
