A Thought To Start the Day

Coffin Hop Blog Tour 2014

UPDATE: 10/24/14 8:15PM  My story for the Coffin Hop is now live, Ghost Liaison.

All right my little demons and ghouls, the time is nearly upon us to make like an imp and hop to the blogs of the Coffin Hop Blog Tour. All bloggers participating in the tour will be giving away goodies, so be sure to get in on the fun! The Coffin Hop runs October 24-31. From the rules:

Many members do multiple giveaways of everything from coffee and candy to Halloween themed swag, ebooks, signed copies, posters, artwork, etc etc etc.

Content of the bloggers participating will all be spine-tingling horror and other creepy goodness, whether in the form of new fiction or articles on appropriate themes. Please do visit the Coffin Hop site to see the list of participating bloggers, which will be posted on October 24. And if you’re thinking of getting in on the fun and want to be one of the bloggers, there’s still time to sign up, but only until the 24th.

For my part, I’ll have a page up shortly with my entry, and for the giveaway, I’m thinking either a Tarot reading (10-card Celtic Cross spread using your choice of decks from the ones I own listed here) or an ecopy of my soon-to-be-published book, Revenants Abroad, in the winner’s choice of format. Or maybe I’ll let the winner choose. If you’d like a little taste of the book ahead of time you can find a couple of character interviews of two of the main characters, Andrej and Neko, and some early material that was deleted from the book, that introduces Andrej and his assistant, Anne-Marie.

I’ll be posting a story for the Coffin Hop here in the next few days.

See you soon!

UPDATE 10-24-14 The story is posted, please check it out!

Say When

So, I quietly did Camp NaNoWriMo in April. I thought maybe without the fanfare of announcing I was doing it and worrying about write-ins and taking part in the community (although all those things are great, and a wonderful part of the experience of NaNoWriMo) I would be more focused on the writing and less on talking about it. It seems to a have worked.

What did I work on? The sequel to Revenants Abroad, tentatively titled The Age of Revenants. Is it finished? Hardly. Let’s call it a good start. It’s about as rough as you’d expect 50,000 words cranked out in haste over 30 days to be. But that’s all right, I needed to get some ideas down, and why not put them towards the goal? A couple of things are kind of going off on tangents so may get revised out later, or possibly saved for something else. But I’m pleased that I was able to get this much done. And let me tell you, it was not easy. It’s one reason I’ve been very quiet on Twitter over the last month. And I really had to make a push during the last weekend. So apologies for any crankiness. It’s an insane way to get some writing done, but I feel like I have no choice these days. Would that I could quit the dayjob and just write. I’m so close to handing in my notice I can’t even tell you.

It felt good to get some of this stuff down, but it seems like the more I write, the more ideas I get. I’ve become better about grabbing a pen and paper when I get those lines just as I’m drifting off to sleep, which seems to happen more and more. I suspect I’m not unique in this.

Now to finish RA, get a cover, and get it up at Amazon. I’ve decided to self-pub via KDP (Kindle Direct Publishing) as agents seem unanimous in their distaste for vampire stories these days. I think there’s still a market, so am taking it upon myself to publish it and see what happens. As I told my dear friend Bunny this morning, I’m taking steel wool to the last few pages, finishing up edits (caught a couple of doozy typos), then I’ll need to get a cover created, and maybe a couple more beta readers, and hopefully have it up for sale before the end of the summer. I have to be done with this so I can move on to the next one. I just haven’t figured out when to say “when.”

Don’t Let Anybody Squash You

Because first off, you’re not a bug.

We are a species that needs and wants to understand who we are. Sheep lice do not seem to share this longing, which is one reason why they write so little.

– Anne Lamott

I was dismayed this morning when another blogger mentioned that someone had tried to tell her she shouldn’t have written about a certain topic because it was too sad. The topic in question was an incident that had troubled and upset the writer, and as most of you who read this blog are also writers, you will understand what it feels like to need to say something because it is pressing on your heart.

What we write about is what comes from our core, things that move us. Sometimes those things are very sad, and they make us want to cry and wring our hands or shake our fists at the sky and scream “Why?!”

Our writing is us. And sometimes we are upset, and we sort things out by writing. It’s the equivalent of opening all the windows in our heads and airing out our brains, neatly stacking thoughts where they should go on the various synaptic pathways. Otherwise it’s just all going to lay around all over the place and eventually we’re going to trip over something and do a face-plant. Nothing good can come of that. We are not the kind of people who can simply bury our heads in the sand and pretend something’s not happening.

A writer without interest or sympathy for the foibles of his fellow man is not conceivable as a writer.

– Joseph Conrad

If we had no interest in the world and were content to live in a tiny bubble of our own making, untouched by other passengers on this voyage we wouldn’t be writing at all, because there would be nothing to say. There would be nothing to understand. Nothing would be happening.

But things do happen: to us, because of us, around us. And we are AWARE of those things, and they have an effect on us, whether good or bad. And no one has the right to tell you what you should or should not write.

Because after all, you are not a bug.

Anne McCaffrey, RIP

I would get this news at the library. Don’t want to break down and cry here. I loved her Dragonriders of Pern series, which I read as a teen. I am so sorry that she never saw the planned tv series come to fruition in her lifetime.  An amazing fantasy writer, I think I still have my copies of her books. Her Web site is here. According to Locus Magazine she passed away yesterday:

SFWA Grand Master Anne McCaffrey, 85, died November 21, 2011 of a massive stroke at home in Ireland.

 

Goodbye, dear lady.

Happy Birthday to Mary Shelley

Born Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin, creator of “Frankenstein,” wife of Percy Bysshe Shelley, on the anniversary of her birth on August 30, 1797, I thought today would be a good day to mention there are no less than eight new dramatic adaptations of her novel in the works, one is even a television series.  Some sound more promising than others. Guillermo del Toro and Tim Burton are two big names involved each with his own project. Burton is apparently doing a stop-motion update of his 1984 “Frankenweenie.” Let’s think good thoughts.

Mary also gave us “The Last Man” in 1826, which as far as I know was the first apocalyptic novel, in which the world is wiped out by a plague. Shelley claimed as the basis for the story that she discovered prophecies of the Cumaean Sibyl painted on leaves in a cave near Naples. The story is set at the end of the 21st century. I sure hope it’s not prophetic.

It certainly would be interesting to get Mary Shelley together with other female science fiction writers of our own time: Ursula K. Le Guin, Joanna Russ, Alice B. Sheldon (aka James Tiptree, Jr.), Anne McCaffrey, etc. What a dinner party that would be.

Thought for the day

Write. No amount of self-inflicted misery, altered states, black pullovers or being publicly obnoxious will ever add up to your being a writer. Writers write. On you go. — A. L. Kennedy

Get out your reading lists and a pencil…

Because I’m about to add to those lists. Thanks to The Book Bench (the books section of The New Yorker magazine) and Random House’s twitter feed, I just skipped through a slideshow of books over at The Guardian that are now all on my “To-read” list.

Barbara Comyns, author of 'The Vet's Daughter'

There are modern books, and one from H.G. Wells, and lots in between. They’re calling them the “10 Best Neglected Literary Classics.” Interesting how so many of them feature young women living with dreary, oppressive old fathers, being crushed under the weight of duty and the general dullness of life. I can’t embed the slide show here, but go check it out, it’s short and sweet and definitely got some gems in there.

In Celebration of Writers

As you guys know, I like to celebrate writers’ birthdays. Usually the dates sneak up on me and I end up putting together a very short blog post about them to commemorate their birth. I’ve looked online before for comprehensive lists of authors’ birthdays, but never managed to find one I liked. I was going to start one of my own, but a last search today finally brought up what I think is probably the best one I’ve found. Library Booklists and Bibliographies has an extensive listing of authors’ dates of birth, arranged by month, and then by day. They also have some other very intriguing lists: Fiction Set in Maine, Drowned Towns in Fiction, Golf in Crime Fiction, the amusing-sounding Murder By Toaster: Mysteries With Surprisingly Lethal Weapons, among others. Interestingly, I’ve been working on a short story that features a drowned town. Hopefully now I can do something for some of my favorite authors’ birthdays in time to write up slightly better tributes to them. Anyway, take a look. There’s lots of good information that could spark something.

As it happens, today is the birthday of not only Edward St. John Gorey, godfather of goth, with his Gashleycrumb Tinies, but also poet Edna St. Vincent Millay. In keeping with the sometimes ghoulish feel of my blog, I chose this poem of Ms. Millay’s to share with you:

The Little Ghost

I knew her for a little ghost
That in my garden walked;
The wall is high—higher than most—
And the green gate was locked.

And yet I did not think of that
Till after she was gone—
I knew her by the broad white hat,
All ruffled, she had on.

By the dear ruffles round her feet,
By her small hands that hung
In their lace mitts, austere and sweet,
Her gown’s white folds among.

I watched to see if she would stay,
What she would do—and oh!
She looked as if she liked the way
I let my garden grow!

She bent above my favourite mint
With conscious garden grace,
She smiled and smiled—there was no hint
Of sadness in her face.

She held her gown on either side
To let her slippers show,
And up the walk she went with pride,
The way great ladies go.

And where the wall is built in new
And is of ivy bare
She paused—then opened and passed through
A gate that once was there.

Neil Gaiman at the Sydney Opera House

Confused? Gaiman and opera? Fear not. Neil gave a reading from one of his own previously unreleased stories with musical accompaniment. If you’ve got five minutes, it’s definitely worth a look and listen.

I wasn’t able to embed the video, they apparently don’t allow that (guess they want you to go to their site and read all the ads). Click on the picture to go to the site.