Tag Archives: Writing

#writerproblems (and #parentproblems): Brewing Trouble

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Back in the early 90s, when Wallace purchased The Wrong Trousers for Gromit, Batman faced a Phantasm, and the last Star Wars film consisted of an ewok and a girl facing a sorceress from I, Claudius, my uncle purchased a book that would challenge the comedic lobe of my wee mind.

Click here for more on this volume!

No, he didn’t get this book for me; he bought it for his parents, my grandparents, whom I’m pretty sure never cracked the cover. You can bet your boots my brothers and I did, though. I was fascinated by these bizarre animals and people with 1950s glasses and beehive hairdos. The puns were atrocious, the wordplay crazy. My favorite running series in all the collections, however, had little to do with language and aaaaaaall to do with the situation.

Yes, I now know this is based on an actual event.

How did Gary Larson come up with these combos? Every pairing seemed so outlandish, and yet I always laughed, even when I was small, because Little Me knew:

That’s a baaaad idea.

More Trouble Brewing

Even if you’re not a fan of forcefully brewing trouble, there’s no denying that we as writers thrive on trouble–aka, conflict. There’s got to be a struggle between person and nature, person and person, person and self. There’s a quest, an escape, a threat to overcome. Somewhere, whether in our world or in our imaginations, there must be something happening, ingredients to brew the trouble that make for a delicious story.

A recipe for disaster, if you will.

Recipes with ingredients only Gary Larson seems to come up with: poodles and falcons, sky divers and alligators, marching bands and migraine doctors. These are all common, everyday things in our world, but when mixed together the story–the conflict–is anything but ordinary.

~*~

Lord knows that as a parent of two Calvins and a Hobbes, my shelves are stacked with cookbooks of mayhem.

Probably THE best comic strip ever. Better even than Peanuts.
Yeah, I went there.

If you’ve never heard of Calvin and Hobbes, you MUST read them. Today.

Like now.

Calvin’s best friend is a tiger named Hobbes. To all the world, Hobbes is a stuffed animal, but to Calvin, he is the ultimate friend and ally in a boring world.

When Bo found his collections of Calvin and Hobbes comics, Blondie and the boys snatched them up and still haven’t let go. On the one hand, it’s exciting to see the kids so engaged with a character. Calvin deals with a lot of kid issues like bullies and school woes, but he also gets into some very grown-up topics like environmentalism and death.

On the other hand, Calvin is, well, something of a troublemaker.

This comic feels like some hilarious yet horrendous portent of days to come with Biff and Bash. (No, Blondie doesn’t get off the hook. Hobbes instigates just as often as he cautions.) Calvin can be rude, foolish, and downright diabolical, but I cannot stop loving him for one simple reason:

His imagination.

Calvin can take any thing, any place, any one, and create a universe of adventure.

He inspires Bash to be his own Stupendous Man, complete with sidekick (Bash’s wee Bumble, Captain Ice Cube).

He inspires Biff to find magic on the snowy slopes, even after losing two teeth in a sledding accident.

Calvin’s dad even inspires Bo’s parenting style.

We tell the same thing to our kids.

Yeah, I didn’t get to do much writing this summer, but I still consider the past few months well spent because I got to be a reader–no, that’s not the right word. A listener. I was blessed to listen and watch Biff, Bash, and Blondie work together to create hilarious adventures featuring Thomas the Tank Engine, Wall-E the trash bot, Optimus Prime, Lego Batman, the USS Enterprise, and more. Every plot point was preceded with a “How About ___?” and a “Yeah, and then ___!”. No villain’s ever truly villainous, and no hero’s ever truly perfect. Settings switch from Sodor to Cybertron to Gotham City and back again without characters ever missing a beat. I marvel at how their voices run through the story together, pulling each other along…and yes, sometimes one voice knocks another down, and I must end the story with a cliffhanger. They get so frustrated when their stories diverge with the same characters, and one wants the others to follow. I wish I had perfect motherly advice to give them, but considering my own experiences with collaborative writing went up in flames, all I can manage is a welp, kiddos, maybe you should just tell separate stories for a while.

And they do. Less excitedly, but they do.

Creative teamwork is a delicate thing, and I’m still very clumsy at helping it stay together. But after this summer I’m determined to keep trying because when together, my children imagined stories as magical as dandelion seeds flying through a northern wood.

When I am with my kiddos, there truly is treasure everywhere.

Do you have a favorite Calvin and Hobbes comic? Share it in the comments!

Did you miss my monthly newsletter? Read it here!

I’m also so very blessed to know amazing readers and writers in this blogging community. Ola shared some really helpful input on my YA fantasy novel, and Cath gave awesome thoughts on the opening lines of my newest publication, a western fantasy novella.

~STAY TUNED NEXT WEEK!~

I’ve got an indie author interview on the way, as well as a fun exploration into theme music. We also need to do some serious pondering of the fairy tale, and how two storytellers of film and page came together to build a country’s history out of…fairy tales?

Read on, share on, and write on, my friends!

My #western #fantasy #novella is #onsalenow for #99cents! Plus, #lessons learned in #worldbuilding for #writing #fiction: #AnEasyDeath by @RealCharlaine.

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Hello, everyone! At long, long, loooooong last, my novella “Night’s Tooth” is alive and kicking on Amazon!

Mississippi River Valley, 1870s. The white man wields rails and guns to bring law to the land. But there are more than wild animals hiding in the territories, and it will take more than guns to bring them down.

Sumac the bounty hunter needs no guns to hunt any bandit with a price on his head, even one as legendary and mysterious as Night’s Tooth. But Sumac didn’t count on other bounty hunters coming along as competition, nor did he expect hunters sharing his own magical gifts.

It’s one man against a gang and a mystery, all to protect a train that must cross the territories at all costs…

Inspired by classics like For a Few Dollars More and fantasy cult favorites like Highlander, “Night’s Tooth” is a western with a fantasy edge set in the Fallen Princeborn universe.

Once Biff, Bash, and Blondie are all in school, I hope to get “Night’s Tooth” on Draft 2 Digital so it’ll be available on other markets. Click here for an excerpt of the novella. The whole thing’s just 99 cents–easy on the wallet. 😉 Don’t forget to leave a review, too!

Like “Night’s Tooth,” Charlaine Harris’ An Easy Death is a mix of fantasy and western, but while my novella takes place during the “official” time period of the Wild West, Harris’ story is set in an altered, no-longer-United States. I picked up An Easy Death after reading SJ Higbee’s glowing recommendation, and after reading it I can see why Time magazine lists An Easy Death as one of its top 10 fantasy novels of 2018.

Let’s take a walk through the first two chapters and see how Harris builds this broken world.

In the morning I got Chrissie to cut off all my hair. Tarken and Martin would be tinkering with the truck, which was our livelihood….My neighbor Chrissie was not too bright, but I’d watched her trim her husband’s hair and beard as he sat on a stool outside their cabin. She’d done a good job. She sang as she worked, in her sweet, high voice, and she told me about her youngest one’s adventures with a frog in the creek.

I see a few key words in here that can make the imagination fill in some mighty big blanks. “Cabin,” for instance, isn’t a term for a home in an urban setting; therefore, we picture the two characters someplace rustic. A child playing with a frog in a nearby creek emphasizes the country-type of location here.

A truck tying to livelihood tells us we’re dealing with transporters of a sort–a cross-country kind of job. We should expect to see a lot of the story’s landscape with this narrator.

Chrissie and the narrator, Lizbeth, have a conversation on the second page. I’ve copied nearly the whole page here because, like Agatha Christie, Harris packs a lot of information in dialogue that only takes a few minutes to read. (Still, it’s a long passage to blog, so I’ll break it up a bit.)

“You heading out soon? I saw them farmers at Martin’s place, when I was coming back from the store.” Chrissie’s trousers had long tendrils of dark hair all over’em now. She’d have to brush’em.

“Yeah, we’re leaving as soon as it’s near dark.”

“Ain’t you scared?”

Sure, I was. “Of course not, the only ones should be scared are anyone who tries to get in our way.” I smiled.

“You’ll kill’em dead, bang, bang,” Chrissie said in a singsong voice.

“Yep. Bang, bang,” I agreed.

What have we learned? Lizbeth is leaving with some farmers, who must be riding in that truck, her livelihood. It’s Lizbeth’s job to kill anyone who tries to hinder them. Considering Chrissie’s innocent tone in describing this, killing people has become a mainstream profession, and by Lizbeth’s tone, we get the sense she knows what she’s doing…even if the job still scares her.

“Why are they going to New America?”

“The farmers? The part of Texas they live in got swallowed up by Mexico a few years ago. You remember?”

Chrissie looked dim. She shook her head.

“Anyway, the government down there has been telling the Texans that they’re not real Mexicans, and their land is forfeit.”

Chrissie looked even dimmer.

Their land is getting taken. So if they’ve got kin up north or anywhere, even in Dixie, they got to leave Mexico to have a chance.”

Dixie was so poor and so dangerous you’d have to be desperate to flee there.

What have we learned? America is weak enough that other countries like Mexico have taken control of its land. Notice Lizbeth doesn’t say “North America” or “United States,” but “New America” and “Dixie.” This isn’t the traditional 50 states of our reality.

Chrissie ran her fingers through the short hair on the left side of my head, and shook her head. “Anyone ever go to the HRE?” she asked.

“Chrissie,” I said. She bent around to meet my eyes.

“Oh, sorry, Lizbeth.” She began to work on the right side, following her own whim. I tried to remember if I’d ever seen her cut anyone’s hair besides Norton’s. “I forgot you don’t like them grigoris.”

No. I did not like magicians.

What have we learned? The HRE is not someplace you want to find yourself because–and this is the part that hooked me to the story–there’s magic in this world. Magicians are part of the normal fabric of society; not liked, maybe, but still, they are as normal as killing people to protect others fleeing the country.

So, over the course of two pages, we have a sense of narrator Lizbeth’s no-nonsense attitude thanks to her clipped prose and dialogue. We know her profession. We know she has some prejudices, and some inner conflicts. We know something of the world, though we don’t know why it is the way it is. All we know is that it’s dangerous, and people are desperate to flee from that danger. Harris successfully builds the world just enough that we can move forward without tripping on any exposition dumps.

A couple pages later we learn the term for Lizbeth’s profession.

I passed Rex Santino. “Easy death,” he said in his gruff way.

That’s what people wished gunnies. It made me feel good. I nodded back at him.

Not quite “gunslinger,” but it’s close enough to familiar terminology that readers get what Harris is going for. On this version of the North American continent, hired guns are a must for safe passage from one country to another. Connections like roads and rails, amenities like electricity and plumbing, they’re all as fickle as the law one finds from town to town.

We were on a good part of the road, one that hadn’t been broken. There were still stretches around like that. My mother had told me that once almost all the roads were smooth, and that when they cracked, they got repaired. It sounded like a fancy dream.
….

If the New America patrols stopped us, we’d be fine. People were legal cargo, and respectable people like this were even welcome in New America. But if bandits caught us, well, that was why Galilee and I were on duty. That was why the oldest brother had hired us to get the two families through the lawless land along the border between Texoma and New America.

What have we learned? When we consider how the roads were built to help unite a country, is it any surprise the roads are among the first things to rot in this fractured land? It’s also clear that the new countries don’t much care for watching each other’s borders, but will instead keep to their own; hence, the “lawless land.”

Chapter 1 ends with an ambush. All the gunnies but Lizbeth are killed, the truck destroyed. In Chapter 2, an injured Lizbeth tracks the bandits and farmers. She discovers the body of a teen girl along the way.

There must have been more gunfire after I’d been hit. She’d tried to run. Lots of families taught their girls to run, figuring that a bullet in the back was quicker than what waited for them after capture. My opinion, sometimes they were right.

What have we learned? The violence of the bandits tells us just how much human life is worth between the countries: absolutely nothing.

Lizbeth kills the bandits, rescues the remaining family members, and successfully escorts them to New America on foot. During this trek the farmers get to talking, which allows Lizbeth to think about historical context for the reader’s sake. (Last excerpt, promise)

“Since the president died, the world has gone to hell. God help us all,” Jeremiah said, and his brother nodded.

When people said “the president,” they meant the last elected president of the United States, Franklin Roosevelt. When he’d been assassinated in some city in Florida, before he could be sworn into office, the government had started down a slope that had gotten slicker and slicker…..After the white government had collapsed, the Indian tribes who could muster up a group of warriors had taken back the land that had been theirs….And bandits were everywhere, especially in Texoma, New America, and Dixie. I had heard that in Britannia, the area that had knelt to England, there was so much law that bandits were caught and hung quickly. The same for Canada, which had expanded to take in a lot of northern America. Canada had its horseback police, who were supposed to be crackerjack at their jobs. The Holy Russian Empire had a squad of grigoris and militia whose job it was to track highway robbers and kill them on the spot.

But in Texoma and New America, formal justice was scarce on the ground.

What have we learned? Ah, now we get the mother-load, for now we have a time frame to work with. FDR was indeed fired upon by Giuseppe Zangara in 1933. For those who don’t know, Franklin Delano Roosevelt took the helm of the United States during The Great Depression and remained in the presidency through much of World War Two. He’s the only president to have served more than two terms; in fact, the man had been voted to serve a fourth term when he died in 1945.

All the world was in flux in the 1930s. The aftermath of World War I, the rise of fascism and communism, the transformation of media and transportation….Life. Was. Changing. Just as a single assassination tipped Europe’s political scales into warfare in 1914, Harris shows us how the United States could have been broken by assassination in 1933. And when one considers the political climate of that time, are we really so surprised?

Now Harris doesn’t clearly state how much time has passed since FDR’s assassination, but when Lizbeth does meet two grigoris who want to hire her for a job, we learn a bit more about the Russian monarchy that escaped the communist uprising as well as magic’s role in this new world.

But that’s for you to discover in An Easy Death.

Click here for more info

When a writer sets out to cut history’s timeline and paste it somewhere new, she has the advantage of using some common history to give the reader context before guiding the reader into unfamiliar territory. It’s a tried and true method used by many to their advantage, and there’s no reason you shouldn’t, either. It all comes down to pacing–rather like helping a rambunctious kindergartner glue string on top of his fish picture. Sure, you can just squirt a HUGE glop of glue on the page and just slather it everywhere; it gets the job done, but then all you both see is the glue smears over his nice fish. If you carefully squirt teeny dots all along the string, the string will remain in its place, and the fish is no longer smeary.

…sorry, that’s quite a mom-metaphor there. Point is, you don’t want readers to see nothing but the exposition. You want it to blend into the story, right? So don’t slather that world-building everywhere, blurring what could be an amazing story. Bead it along, letting it glue together scenes of conversation, conflict, and discovery.

Thanks so much for reading! I do hope you enjoy “Night’s Tooth.”

~STAY TUNED NEXT WEEK!~

The kids will be in school!

I mean….

The kids will be in school.

(Honestly, it’s a mix of both.)

Anyway, September and the fall season await with more delightful author interviews, some studies of scary tales, a hunt for fun’n’freaky music, and hopefully some updates on my current WIPS–both novellas, both dark fantasy, and both spooooooookily inspired by Wisconsin’s North Woods.

Read on, share on, and write on, my friends!

#Author #Interview: #indieauthor @frank_prem discusses #writing #poetry & finding #inspiration in the #magical experiences of #childhood

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Happy Thursday, everyone! Summer school is winding down for the kids, which means August will be a month of Blondie, Biff, Bash, and I driving each other crazy–I mean, being creative together. 🙂 No matter what, though, I hope to keep writing here, finishing up my latest release (more on that at the end of this post!), and connecting with more of you beautiful souls! x

It’s been such an honor to connect with so many different authors from across the world. Today I am pleased to introduce you to Australian poet Frank Prem. Take it away, Frank!

Hi Jean, thanks for the opportunity to chat today.

I’m a writer of free verse poetry, for the most part, resident in a small town in Victoria (Australia). I’ve been writing and developing my approach to poetry for over forty years, now, and have recently become the Indie published author of two collections. The first – Small Town Kid – came out in December 2018, while the next – Devil in the Wind – was released in May 2019.

When I’m not actively pursuing writing and other authorly pursuits I work as a psychiatric nurse, here in the town, in a small long-term rehabilitation unit.

The town I live in – Beechworth – is a pretty little place of around 3,000 residents. We have a gold mining history dating back to the 1860s, and the township itself is very well preserved, with a lot of stone buildings hewn from the local honey granite (a warm, pinkish colour in the rock).

We have become a tourist town, with thousands of visitors passing through each year, and most of them making a beeline for the well known Beechworth Bakery (https://www.beechworthbakery.com.au/).

It’s mostly a quiet life, but very pleasant, all in all.

You may have noticed how much I love to share the music that inspires my writing. Do you also enjoy music to write, or do you require silence? If the former, would you like to recommend any favorites?

Yes, music is such a gift to us, Jean, and it has influenced my writing immesurable. In case you’re wondering, my personal taste always leads to me to find a wonderful voice – regardless of genre. The voice I have gravitated to most is that of Emmy Lou Harris, who is mostly known as a Country singer, but actually able to sing anything.

Oh my gosh, what a coincidence! She’s helped me write as well, especially with my fantasy novel Beauty’s Price.

I generally write in silence, but the music in language is quite critical to my work. My usual approach is to create a melody of some sort in my head and to sing my work (silently) line by line to try to imbue it with a sense of song. My often repeated mantra is that ‘rhyme should be invisible, while free verse should be sung’.

Beautifully said, Sir.

Have you ever gotten reader’s block with another poet or prose writer? How did you overcome it?

Yes I have, Jean. I’m a very poor reader of the work of other poets. I worry very much that I will get other work in my head and inadvertently plagiarise or otherwise stray from my own track.

With prose, I tend to return over and over to a few favourite writers as my mainstay, with a greater willingness to branch out and experiment with reading speculative fiction. In recent times, particularly space opera fiction. Bang-bang shoot-em-ups in the stars are a wonderful freedom for me, that is far enough from any realities down here on earth to be completely enjoyable.

I think with my general reading I am looking for inspiration in my own work. Recently I read the entire translated work of a French Philosopher named Gaston Bachelard, who died back in the 1960s.

He explored the phenomenology of poetry and poetics and used imagery in such a way that my imagination was fired and I could hardly read more than a couple of lines without having to put the book down and write a poem that his thoughts had triggered in mine. I ended up with around 800 new poems out of that experience.

That’s a hard act to follow, but I think I’m constantly looking for a similar experience when I read.

800 poems just from the course of studying one philosopher. That…wow. That, Sir, is an impressive exploration of language. What was an early experience where you learned that language had power?

I think I’ve always known it, Jean. As long as I can remember I have played with words, in my head and in my speech. Twisting and contorting words and finding their various meanings.

Playing with nuance and inflection and emphasis has always held pleasure for me.

An example comes from my secondary schooling when I didn’t want to complete a pretty boring essay that required a certain number of pages of work to be presented. Instead of completing the task in the usual way I, for some reason, submitted a poem. Correct number of pages, but very few words. I received a high mark (because poetry hadn’t been seen in my school since the previous century, I suspect), and have been writing poetry ever since.

Since you say you live with a fellow creative who’s a puppeteer, I just have to ask: do you write anything for the puppets to perform? This is a totally selfish question, I know, but when I was younger I used to write puppet plays and then perform them for the kindergartners at my elementary school. Loved every second of it. 

That’s a lovely story of your own, Jean. Thanks for sharing it.

Leanne my wife has been performing puppet shows in pre-schools and kindergarten centres for many years, on and off. We have spoken often of a show that would be aimed at older students or adults, using my voice to read the poetry of the show, while Leanne performed with the puppets.

That may be creeping closer as an option with my transition into the authoring field.

We have collaborated in other ways in the past however.

Now available on Amazon!

Leanne designed my first attempted foray into book production some years ago, and from time to time has put poems I’ve written into music.

If you (or readers) care to listen and read, this link will take you to the poem ‘Time Comes’, on my poetry blog. I recently resurrected the piece to commemorate my 3 year anniversary as a blogger.

This is a link to Leanne’s interpretation of the piece as a song, posted on Soundcloud. Well worth the listen, I think.

You are very, very concise with your word choices in your poetry, so much so that when you have a line longer than four words I sit up and take notice. (an observation made with “#Somme (8): two pennies up (for the ambulance)”). When would you say you discovered this concise style within yourself, and how do you nurture it today?

An excellent question that touches on an aspect of writing that I think about a lot.

My discovery has been gradual. When I look at early work, I have used long lines, almost paragraph, in style. I think I started to seriously challenge myself with this when I started reading poetry at the various open mic venues in Melbourne that were available to me for a few years when I was starting out. I found that long lines and blocks of text were difficult to read under the lights and in front of a microphone.

I began experimenting then with writing to mimic speech – nuance and inflection, pause and enjambment. SO much so that it is now my writing style and unique to me, as far as I know.

More, though. I believe this approach of using line breaks to emphasize small pauses and inflections, and stanza breaks for breathing are a way to assist young folk to read more fluently. I won’t take up space here to expound my thesis but I have written on the subject over at my author page. I’ll be interested in your thoughts.

Oooo, thank you kindly! I look forward to reading it.

Now, You’ve re-issued one collection of poems—Small Town Kid. It’s a journey through your childhood, reminiscent of Seamus Heaney’s District and Circle. Do you find this period of life to be a common ground between poets and readers, and if so, why do you think we never tire of walking such grounds?

The first attempt to publish Small Town Kid was a wonderful adventure in book design and creativity between Leanne and myself. Unfortunately, it was back in the dark ages of printing, and to achieve cost efficiency it was necessary to purchase hundreds of copies of the book. I wasn’t ready to market myself or my books in that way, so the attempt was put to sleep until Print On Demand presented itself as an option.

I have been quite amazed by the strength of positive reaction to Small Town Kid. It certainly seems to resonate with readers.

I wonder if the reason for this connection is not akin to my reasons for writing the collection in the first place.

When I had small children of my own, I would routinely talk about what I and my friends had done when we were young – the freedom to roam, unsupervised is the chief characteristic of those times, in my mind. My kids, however, didn’t believe my stories. They seemed to be simply too far-fetched to be true.

I realised that a whole era of childhood (the 1960s and 70s) had disappeared by the mid-1990s. We had begun to supervise our children. To deliver them to friends and to school, and to collect them afterwards. Television and hand-held devices had begun to dominate child-life.

Writing the stories down seemed to make them more legitimate, in some way.

What I find with readers is that if I read, for example, the long poem ‘Crackers’ about bonfire night preparation and execution, I will have a line of people, mainly men, who have a bonfire lit in their eyes as they want to share with me their own experience and memories.

I think it is the imagery combined with the voice-song of telling or reading that allows the reader to enter their own best memories of childhood, and I believe it is the recollection of childhood freedom that makes these stories so attractive.

If you could tell your younger writing self anything, what would it be?

Not to be in a hurry for fame and success. I’ve always been a person who wanted things to happen immediately. If I was pursuing my career, I should get the next promotion. If was writing a poem, surely it was a most worthy creation and should be published immediately.

Learning to let go of that kind of pressure, placed on myself by myself, has been a great lesson for me.

I’ve found that the gift of time has allowed me to mature and become a better person, a better worker, a better poet.

I completely understand. Not only do I see it whenever I look at an old draft–heck, the first draft of my novel was written in 2010–but I can feel the change in my own perspective thanks to the growing creative expressions of my children. They tire me out, my little B’s, but I wouldn’t want them any other way. Writing helps my soul breathe and my passion to stay alight; does writing energize or exhaust you, and why?

For me, writing is like breathing, so there is no real question of growing tired from it. I can take a day or two off from writing, but I don’t really like to. I enjoy this part of myself very much.

What is tiring is attempting to master the ancillary roles – being an Author. Mastering the myriad details of properly publishing paperback and e-book formats. Marketing (oh lord, how tiring marketing can be!)

All part of the deal, though, so no point in wailing.

What is energizing, though, and what I know has a direct and beneficial effect on the quality if my writing, is reader feedback.

A comment or conversation with a reader is stimulating. A positive review is absolutely exhilarating, and I want, immediately, to sit down and write the next thing. Bigger, better, more astounding . . .

You get the drift, I’m sure. I love my readers and reviewers and the effect they have on me as a writer.

You and me both, Sir. You and me both.

My deepest thanks to Frank for taking the time to talk to me! Here are his vitals so you can find more information on Frank Prem and his work.

Author Page: https://FrankPrem.com

Poetry Blog: https://frankprem.wordpress.com

Twitter: https://twitter.com/frank_prem

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/frankprem2

Small Town Kid is available on Amazon, Booktopia, Book Depository, and Barnes and Noble.

Devil in the Wind is available on Amazon, Booktopia, Book Depository, and Barnes and Noble.

~~STAY TUNED NEXT WEEK!~~

We’ll kick off August with the cover reveal to my new novella, “Night’s Tooth,” and a discussion of what makes the western so timeless.

More author interviews are on their way as well, plus a celebration of western soundtracks as I launch my first self-published story!

Read on, share on, and write on, my friends!

#Author #Interview: #indieauthor @anneclarewriter shares her love of #WW2 #history, #writing #music, and her beautiful #histfic #firstnovel

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Happy Thursday, lovely creatives! I’m so, so excited to introduce you to Anne Clare. Not only is she one of the kindest, gentlest souls I’ve been blessed to meet, but she is a deeply supportive reader, writer, and artist. Well, I should probably let her introduce herself first. Take it, Anne!

 Hi, all! I’m Anne. I live in the green, drizzly, Pacific Northwest of the U.S., but I spend a fair amount of time travelling the world via history books. I’m on the verge of celebrating the publication of my first WWII historical fiction novel. I write about writing and the real events of the tumultuous 1940s on my blog, thenaptimeauthor.wordpress.com. 

I’m also a wife, mother of three, organist and choir director, part-time teacher, and coffee addict. 

Like all marvelous writers, our love of storytelling is forged in the reading of our younger days. My favorite genre of choice was the cozy murder mystery: justice sought and earned while mayhem abounded in one British village after another. What kinds of stories did you enjoy during your formative years?

When I wasn’t trying to solve the mysteries of math class or painting play sets I enjoyed my fair share of Agatha Christie and other sleuth stories, too. I’ve always loved fantasy stories- Tolkein, Lewis and Terry Brooks were some of my first loves. I think it was in highschool when I first discovered Gail Carson Levine’s retold fairy tales and Harry Potter. Honestly, though, I just love a good story regardless of genre.

How true! It’s amazing how many cool stories we discover when we don’t limit ourselves to just a few authors. (Of course, it took college and those accursed required reading lists to help me learn that lesson, but I did learn it…mostly…) What’s the first book you read that sparked the fire of storytelling inside you?

Fairy tales played a big part of course- the earliest stories I “wrote” (i.e. dictated to my older cousin who knew HOW to write, and was kind enough to humor me)–

That’s the bestest kind of cousin, in my book. (ba dum CH!)

I know, right? So those stories were on thrilling topics like fairies, a city populated by talking dogs, and princesses. My first “novel,” started when I was twelve in spiral bound notebooks, was a portal fantasy with BIG nods to Lord of the Rings!

Aw, that’s just like Polly in Diana Wynne Jones’ Fire and Hemlock! I don’t recall liking Tolkien much as a kid, but I blame my sixth grade teacher’s reading of The Hobbit for that–ugh, what a horror. Are there any authors you disliked reading at first but have since grown into?

We read My Antonia in eighth grade- I didn’t like it at all. It was tedious and (spoiler!) the boy didn’t even get the girl in the end! Rereading it as an adult, I love it, in an emotionally teary sort of way. (Since having kids I’m such a sap…😊)

Ha! Heavens, don’t I know it. I bawled reading the end of DWJ’s Dogsbody. Any time something precious is lost, I’m in tears. Music has that power over my emotions too, when the mood is right. Plus, music can be a wonderful guide in the storytelling process. Do you have any favorite artists/composers you’d like to recommend? How do these folks inspire your writing?

I didn’t realize how heavily I depended on music for writing until our kitten, Mr. Meowgi, ate my headphones. I always have something playing in the background as I write. 

As I write in the 1940s, I would have thought period music would be my go-to. While I enjoy Glenn Miller and others from the era, while writing I gravitate more toward modern music that fits my mood. The first novel required songs like Lana Del Rey’s Born to Die and the Decemberists “Crane Wife” album- I don’t know why, they just worked! For some reason, the second book seems to go better with Brandie Carlisle and Johnny Cash.

SECOND NOVEL?! Wooooah woah, slow down, Me. Anne’s here to talk about her FIRST novel. One book at a time, right?

Eeeeee, I’m so excited!

Whom Shall I Fear? is set in World War II on two fronts: the battlefront as well as the home front. What first inspired you to create characters in this time?

I’ve always been fascinated by history, but hadn’t pursued much study of it- between teaching and momming, I was just too busy! Then, I had a dream set during World War II, which became the climax of my novel. I blame the fact that I was reading a lot of Agatha Christie, while reading The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe to my kids, and watching James Bond with my husband. All three had some WWII references which must have leaked into my subconscious. 

Poirot +
James Bond +
Narnia = a winning storytelling combination!

So, lots of World War II floating in your subconscious while you’re also reading and storing info in your consciousness. Oh, research…. I’m very much a “Google as I go” kind of gal, but you’ve been researching this period for quite some time. Can you share your process for researching as well as how you selected what information should be incorporated into the story and what information should stay on the notecards?

When I began this project, I was naiive enough to think that “Google as I go” would be all I needed. After all, I’d studied WWII, I knew the main events!

It didn’t take long to realize I knew nothing- or at least nothing close to the detail I’d need to do to pull off a convincing story. 

I started by searching my library. One of the first books that popped up was Winston Churchill’s Memoirs of the Second World War. I snagged it, figuring that he ought to know what he was talking about. It was the abridged version, so only 1700 pages and change. I hadn’t read a serious history book since college, and it was an undertaking, but I’ll say this for Mr. Churchill- his grand, sweeping style of prose made the history very readable.

Of course, the challenge with researching history is that there’s always a filter between you and the events. The individual perspective of the recorder, no matter how unbiased they try to be, is going to effect their narrative. Reading Churchill’s book first gave me a great start, because I had an outline of the major events, how and when they happened, and one perspective on them.

From there, I looked for as many sources from the era as I could. The BBC website has this wonderful archive called “The People’s War” where they invited people to send in their recollections of their life during the war.

Photo from the BBC

Reading first-hand accounts was fascinating, and helpful in shaping my setting. As one of my main characters was in the British infantry, I found books by infantrymen. When I needed broader books for troop movements so that my fellas got where they were supposed to when they were supposed to, I sought books that used original sources like divisional histories etc, and tried to compare more than one source. 

Culling information- well, that was another challenge.  It was hard to know where to cut, but sometimes it was unavoidable. For instance, I initially wanted to send my infantryman, James, to North Africa. It sounded like a fascinating place to include- the struggles over Tobruk, fighting against Rommel’s tanks, the battle of El Alamein… I researched military groups in the area and decided he could be part of the 8th Army, and then after Africa I could send him to Sicily and Italy and learn about even more unfamiliar places!

I kept on reading and discovered that none of this would fit with the rest of the timeline for the story. Also, the 8th Army that fought across North Africa was almost completely different from the 8th Army that went to Italy. Sigh.

It was hard to eliminate fascinating pieces of history, but in the end, the research had to serve the story. If the history doesn’t forward the characters or plot, it isn’t going to do what good historical fiction should- make history come alive to the reader. 

Now writing inside a well-known–hang on. By your very account here, there is still so much we never get a chance to learn about World War II, so I shouldn’t be calling it a “well-known period.” Let me back-track a wee bit and approach my question this way: in fantasy writing, storytellers create characters as well as the worlds they live in. In historical fiction, you’re creating characters that may or may not live alongside people who actually lived in your chosen period. What would you consider to be the ethics of writing about historical figures?

Ah, that’s tricky! I tried to avoid the issue as much as I could, particularly if the reflection on the historical person’s character might be…uncomplimentary. After all, it hardly seems fair to take a dig at someone who isn’t around to defend themselves, and, as I said before, there’s always the bias present of the person who’s recording their history. 

For the few historical figures who did make it into the final novel, I tried to deal with them as my characters would have in real life. 

The only real person who makes it “onstage” is Lord Woolton, for  a brief cameo, since one of my characters works for the Ministry of Food (responsible for rationing etc) of which Lord Woolton was the Minister until sometime in 1943. The history books described his oversized suit and his friendly voice over the wireless- these made it into the book. Otherwise I tried to keep him neutral- he was just present to help reveal something about one of MY characters.  

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On the negative end, I did feel the need to mention Lady Astor. The first female MP, she gained notoriety with the troops in Italy by calling them the “D-Day Dodgers.” (i.e. they were somehow shirking by fighting in Italy, rather than in France.) Naturally, the men were furious, and composed a catchy and uncomplimentary song about the incident. In the years since, there’s been some question of whether she acutally made the comment or whether it was a misunderstanding, but my protagonist in Italy wouldn’t have known that, so he reacts accordingly. 

I also hesitated to mention larger groups specifically. For instance, I mentioned the whole confusion over the make up of the 8th army above. To make sure that my group of infantrymen I follow in the story COULD have ended up where I sent them, I had to find a smaller group to “shadow” through the histories. I decided on the 2nd Battalion, Lancashire Fusiliers- they were at the battle of Monte Cassino, and other notable places. However, I don’t specifically mention them in the book- it felt presumptuous to tack my fictional men onto a group that really served in such dangerous places. 

In the end, one of my major goals in writing about this era is in homage to those who sacrificed and served. Anything that would detract from that or turn into me editorializing on a time I didn’t live through, I took out. 

An excellent plan to go by, I think.

Now, you used three different points of view to tell your story: your two protagonists as well as your antagonist. What were some challenges from writing with the villain and heroes’ points of view? What were some benefits?

As I mentioned, I was reading a lot of Agatha Christie when I started this book. She uses multiple points of view in her mysteries- sometimes to reveal, sometimes to misdirect. While my novel isn’t really a mystery, there are some of the same elements- mysterious strangers, tangled motivations, crimes of the past. I liked the flavor of the multiple points of view- how I could reveal clues to the questions from different perspectives and how I could have one character reveal information to the reader while keeping other characters in the dark.

The challenge is to create enough distinction between the perspectives so that the reader can “feel” the difference when they’re in a different character’s head. Also, I found myself tempted to head hop- to reveal information that the POV I was writing from couldn’t have known. I had to resist the temptation, and place my “reveals” carefully. 

A temptation that we all struggle with!

You and I both have kids who haven’t taken our sanity from us (yet). You know how I’m always on the look-out for tips on finding some sense of balance between writing and parenting. Care to share your advice?

I discovered that I can’t hold myself to someone else’s expectations for the amount of time or words I write. Every day is a new day- some will be productive author days. Others will be “clean up kid vomit and read stories to them” days. There’s no guilt in either one! 

And one final question…

Many thanks to you, Anne, and congratulations once more! Whom Shall I Fear will be available June 28th on Amazon.

1943

All that Sergeant James Milburn wants is to heal. Sent to finish his convalescence in a lonely village in the north of England, the friends he’s lost haunt his dreams. If he can only be declared fit for active service again, perhaps he can rejoin his surviving mates in the fight across Sicily and either protect them or die alongside them.

All that Evie Worther wants is purpose. War has reduced her family to an elderly matriarch and Charles, her controlling cousin, both determined to keep her safely tucked away in their family home. If she can somehow balance her sense of obligation to family with her desperate need to be of use, perhaps she can discover how she fits into her tumultuous world.

All that Charles Heatherington wants is his due.  Since his brother’s death, he is positioned to be the family’s heir with only one step left to make his future secure. If only he can keep the family matriarch happy, he can finally start living the easy life he is certain he deserves.

However, when James’s, Evie’s and Charles’s paths collide, a dark secret of the past is forced into the light, and everything that they have hoped and striven for is thrown into doubt.

Weaving in historical detail from World War II in Britain, Italy and Egypt, Whom Shall I Fear? follows their individual struggles with guilt and faith, love and family, and forces them to ask if the greatest threat they face is really from the enemy abroad.

Click here to pre-order on Amazon.

Stay tuned next week for a chat on world-building done right…and done horribly, horribly wrong.

Read on, share on, and write on, my friends!

#writing #music: @LudovicoEinaud

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From the Becoming shared last week, let us continue this journey into another realm. I discovered it while stumbling about–virtually, that is. (Though feel free to picture me tripping over rocks and logs in a forest if that helps.) YouTube was on shuffle as I dug through Wisconsin history to dig up curious reference points (like the Mormons torching their own houses in La Crosse before running on down to Texas) for my upcoming novelette “Night’s Tooth.” After yet another annoying drink ad, there was this wee chime, piano, and then violin…

Perhaps it’s the video of boys that connected me so quickly and so completely to this song. I see the parents desperately saving their son at the end, and my mind races to when I came so close to losing my own, each in different ways.

I had to learn more about this creator of narrative music.

Ludovico Einaudi is Italian born and bred; like me, his love of music is rooted down and in with his love of family. A scholarship to the Tanglewood Music Festival exposed him to the blossoming movement of American minimalism (a style developed in part by another favorite of mine, Philip Glass). He’s been composing music for stage and screen since the 1980s, but has also produced solo albums, the first–le Onde—being inspired by Virginia Woolf’s short stories.

How curious to listen to a man inspired by fiction to compose music while his music inspires me to compose fiction!

Here’s a lovely example of the minimalism present in one of his more recent albums, Elements.

(If this Video doesn’t work, I found another live Vid here.)

I’m so happy to have found a live version of this song for the visual of this minimalism. No orchestra here–just a piano, a violin, a cello, a guitar, and a percussionist. Yet with these few instruments, you feel the world about you fill with sound, trickle-slow, like water moving through a child’s crafted wall of river stones. This steady build fits beautifully with the rise of tension in a scene, or of a character’s resolve to face the darkness.

(If this video doesn’t work, here’s another go with a different upload.)

Like young Lucy opening a wardrobe door to another world, Einaudi’s “Primavera” welcomes us into another world of magic created by trills and arpeggios–fitting touches in a melody for a song entitled “Spring.” And because spring is not always a delicate season, Einaudi makes the wise choice of building the strings up at the 2:00 minute mark to send them cascading like a downpour upon us. They run up like lighting, the bass notes rumble as thunder, and we are left standing in the deluge until the harp arrives to soften the rainfall and crack the clouds.

Einaudi’s talent for building darker worlds can be found in another album, In a Time Lapse.

(In case this video doesn’t work where you are, try this one!)

It is another song that builds, yes, but there’s a menace this time. The relentless snare drum forces us forward on whether we wish to or not. At roughly 2:00 a violin cries out, a plea for…for what? A plea to listen, to change, to stop. There’s tragedy in that relentless march, and if we don’t escape, we will lose our hope. The lone piano that ends the song tells me…well. What it tells me and what it tells you may be two different things.

That’s one of the great beauties of narrative music: interpretation.

Music is a life-force. It moves our hearts to beat, our souls to breathe. May Einaudi’s compositions beat in your characters’ hearts and breathe across the fantasy-scapes of your worlds with all the magic of a thunderstorm on a summer’s eve.

Stay tuned for author interviews galore! We’re going to learn more about some beautiful historical fiction set in World War II, a cracking cozy mystery, and a series of Young Adult novels set in the cut-throat world of horse-racing.

(And, if I find the right bribe, we’ll hear all of “The Invention that Changed the Chicken World” told by the author herself!)

Read on, share on, and write on, my friends!

Even the smallest #mom wields the powerful #magic of #love. #celebrating #motherhood #writing #kidlit #writinglife

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“Why isn’t Huck Finn’s dad nice to him?” Blondie asks from  behind her beloved stuffed dog Sledgehammer.

Bo closed The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn and stared at the cover a good long moment before answering. “Some parents are not that nice, kiddo,” he says, and goes on to talk a bit about alcohol addiction.

I came in after her prayers as I always do to give her a hug and kiss goodnight. “I hope Huck gets away soon,” she says.

“He can’t have any adventures if he doesn’t.”

Blondie nods, then brightens. “I can’t wait until my birthday party!”

So it goes when talking to an almost-nine-year-old: from horrifying parents to birthday celebrations in the blink of a beautiful eye.

It struck me, then, how few stories I read during my own childhood that contained positive parent figures. There’s no parents in the Chronicles of Narnia that I recall. Ramona Quimby had a mom, I think…but she wasn’t a major character, or at the very least, memorable. Fairy tale parents are usually evil or inconsequential. Babysitter Club books are usually about girls solving their own problems without parental help (why else would a babysitter be around?). I don’t recall Nancy Drew having extensive scenes with her folks. Few of the detective novels I read had much of anything to do with family, come to think, unless you count Sherlock’s brother Mycroft. But that’s a brother, not a parent, and he only shows up twice.

Huh. No wonder Blondie’s reaction to Huck Finn sticks with me still: I didn’t have that kind of exposure to the Nasty Parent at her age. Even the evil stepmom of Cinderella doesn’t go on drunk binges and whip Cinderella with a belt. Huck Finn’s dad is nasty. Scary-nasty. The sort of nasty that’s talked about on the news or in a television series, not a kid’s book.

Now why am I going off like this? Because here in the U.S. Mother’s Day approaches, and I want to celebrate the positive parent characters in children’s literature. Seriously, they exist! Like…um…oh! Ray Bradbury created a loving relationship between father and son in Something Wicked This Way Comes. Even Diana Wynne Jones, who had a miserable relationship with her own parents, could still create some flawed yet very loving parents in books like Archer’s Goon and The Ogre Downstairs.

Today, I’d like to look at one of the strongest moms in fantasy fiction, a widow with four young children, one of whom’s gravely ill.

I am, of course, talking about Mrs. Frisby.

Or Brisby, if you knew her by the Don Bluth film like I did.

For some reason the film adaptation of Mrs. Frisby and the Rats of NIMH named her Brisby. I’d like to think it’s because Hermione Baddeley, who voiced Auntie Shrew, really rattles your teeth whenever she shrilly hollers Mrs. Brisby’s name.

With all due respect to Robert C. O’Brien, the book moves with a much…quieter, calmer pace, I’ll say, than the Bluth film.

And, well, let’s face it: O’Brien doesn’t have any electro-magic wielded by rats voiced by the majestic Sir Derek Jacobi, let alone a soundtrack composed by the ever-wonderful James Horner.

Bluth’s version of Mrs. Brisby is a widow just like the Mrs. Frisby of the book, and both versions do have four children and one suffering from pneumonia. But unlike Mrs. Frisby of the book, Mrs. Brisby is constantly facing certain death in order to protect her kids. From standing in the bones of other mice to speak with the Great Owl…

…to running under the farmer wife’s feet in order to sedate Dragon, the barn cat that KILLED HER HUSBAND, Mrs. Brisby puts her life on the line time and again for her family. I can still remember the terror racing through my little-kid heart when the giant rat guard tries to electrocute Mrs. Brisby at the gate into the rose bush…

…or when the Brisby home begins sinking in the mud and all the kids inside are gasping for air.

(Oh yes, Bluth’s films are both awesome and TERRIFYING. Just ask MG author Celine Kiernan—she worked for him!)

But because I felt the terror then, and saw this little mommy mouse defy her fears to run into a moving tractor to disable it while the ceiling started to cave in around her sick son, because I felt the panic in her pulling rope after rope around her sinking house to keep her children from drowning—because I felt all the fear Mrs. Brisby experienced, the courage she also displayed resonated with me very, very deeply; it resonates with me still, thirty years later. In a story of mice and electro-magic rats, I saw motherhood in its purest form:

Love, fearless and boundless, strong and eternal.

May our own hands brave the fire to protect those who matter most.

What positive parent characters appear in your favorite stories? Please share so I can give Blondie something to look forward to…

I’ll be the first to admit the moms of my own fiction are, shall we say, some nasty pieces of work. Scope out my novel and free short stories on this site to find out more.

Read on, share on, and write on, my friends!

#writer, your body does not define your #writing voice: a response to the #YA #cancelculture among #readers and #authors

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Purity tests are the tools of fanatics, and the quest for purity ultimately becomes indistinguishable from the quest for power. 

Jennifer Senior, “Teen Fiction and the Perils of Cancel Culture”

There is a darkness creeping along the edges of Twitter. Like the Nothing from Neverending Story, it haunts authors with hushed whispers until it moves in swiftly with a power unmatched by any other.

It is the Cancel Culture.

I had not heard of cancel culture until last month, when debut YA author Kosoko Jackson pulled his book from publication because he was accused of being insensitive to the Muslim community. You can read the account here. Like article writer Jennifer Senior says, there’s a strong sense of irony that this YA author pulls his book after he and others demanded YA author Amélie Wen Zhao pull her book due to evoking “an offensive analogy to American slavery.” Click here for that article. (Oh, and here’s another article I found while editing this post that mentions yet another YA book mobbed by cancel culture.) This issue’s grown to such a point that PENAmerica recently held a panel featuring a diverse array of writers and critics to discuss the matter–click here for that, as it’s a thought-provoking read.

Whether you wade through all the articles or not, I really want you to see the quote from Jackson that speaks to this stormy state of YA Literature:

What Jackson’s case really demonstrates is just how narrow and untenable the rules for writing Y.A. literature are. In a tweet last May, Jackson himself more or less articulated them: “Stories about the civil rights movement should be written by black people. Stories of suffrage should be written by women. Ergo, stories about boys during life-changing times, like the AIDS epidemic, should be written by gay men. Why is this so hard to get?”

On the one hand, I LOVE the idea of bringing all the voices from all the walks of life onto the page. No one’s voice is worth less than another.

But while the cancel culture and purists may say they are fighting for diversity, their words come off more as calls for segregation.

Case in point: American Heart by Laura Moriarity. Initially her book was awarded a starred review from Kirkus…until cancel culture called for otherwise. Not only did Kirkus pull its star, it completely altered the review. Click here for a comparison of the two reviews. The New Yorker even did an editorial on “problematic” book reviews, (click here for that) and I think writer Ian Nolan’s conclusion on criticism is worth noting here:

…criticism exists in different flavors, but its defining feature is an individualism of response. That response can be wise or unwise, popular or unpopular. A reviewer can squander authority by seeming too often at odds with good judgment. But, without critical autonomy, the enterprise falls apart. The only reason to hire a critic, instead of giving a megaphone to the crowd, is that creative work—books most of all—isn’t processed as a collective. People make sense of art as individuals, and their experiences of the work differ individually, too. A reviewer speaks for somebody, even if he or she doesn’t speak for you.

Ian Nolan, “Kirkus Reviews and the Plight of the “Problematic” Book Review

In an age when people are supposedly only making books (and movies, as the bickering over Captain Marvel shows) for certain groups of people and NOT for the general public, I would like to ask this:

Why must my body define my voice?

I am a white woman born of two white parents in the Midwest. My parents both worked for protestant churches, and together barely made enough to make ends meet. Frugality was the name of the game no matter where we lived, be it a small farming town up north, or deep in Milwaukee’s North Side.

My father was born and raised in Milwaukee in a tumultuous time. White flight, housing discrimination, police brutality, and the Civil Rights movement all boiled over to overwhelm the inner city and scald it with the Milwaukee Riots. I can’t imagine how this affected my dad, seeing the death, the pain, the hundreds upon hundreds arrested in a war for equality. Maybe taking that Call to serve his childhood church in Milwaukee is answer enough.

Milwaukee has become infamous for being one of the most segregated cities of America. We saw it then, that first Sunday: even though the church is situated in a densely populated area, only a handful of elderly white people sat in the pews. Not a single resident of the church’s neighborhood attended. No one had tried to connect with the predominantly African American community. They had merely preached to their own.

I think Dad saw this and remembered the prejudice and anger that had poisoned his town so deeply in the 1960s. It would explain what he did next.

Juneteenth Day comes every 19th of June to celebrate the emancipation of slaves in 1865 in the last “holdout” state (Texas) after the Civil War. Dad reorganized the church’s annual outdoor picnic to be held in June as close to the 19th as he could get. He invited a gospel choir directed by a friend of his in a church from Milwaukee’s East Side, another struggling area. Then he reached out to the congregation’s few young members to form groups for canvassing the neighborhood, leaving flyers of invitation to the church’s outdoor service. With a mixture of words from the Bible and Civil Rights activists, Dad preached a message of Love, Equality, Justice, and Hope.

If I am to take this cancel culture to heart, then my father should not have worked to heal the old neighborhood. He was a middle-aged white man; therefore, he cannot possibly connect with those of a different color. He should have kept with his own kind. We should all only keep to our own kinds.

That mindset might help explain how Milwaukee was deemed “America’s Most Segregated City” in 2016.

Have we forgotten what it means to look beyond ourselves?

Have we forgotten what it means to have empathy?

em·pa·thy
[ˈempəTHē]
NOUN
the ability to understand and share the feelings of another.

Oxford Dictionaries

Why must my body define my voice?

Stories have a power completely, utterly unique: they can take a person born in one body, and transplant them into another. That body could be living three hundred years ago on the other side of the world, or three hundred years into the future buried deep beneath the earth, or even three thousand universes away. When we take the age-old writing lesson of “write what you know” and give it the Orwellian twist of “write only what you know,” we limit that power severely, dangerously.

When we limit that power, we limit our ability to empathize with one another. We lose our ability to connect with those beyond ourselves. We begin to turn away from the wealth of a diverse world, and huddle with our own kind.

No.

Do not let others take your power away. There are countless worlds inside of you, filled with people of all cultures and creeds. You have every right to bring those people to the page.

No voice should be fettered by the body it’s born in.

I’m still pretty wound up about this, so if you feel like talking, add your comments below! If you’re new to my site, welcome! You are welcome to sign up for my newsletter, check out my free short stories, or pick up my first novel, which is free on Kindle Unlimited. Thanks for coming by!

Read on, share on, and write on, my friends!

#Whole30 #Writing Log: Day 10

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Free Fiction Has Come from the Wilds (3)

The good creamer is gone.

I am officially without my sugar.

I guess you could say that this is my REAL day 1 in Whole 30, buuuuut let’s not and say we did.

Don’t ask about the creamer-substitute.

~*~

Doing my best to emphasize laughter over fighting with Biff and Bash. Praying the boys take the laughs with them to school tomorrow and not the fighting.

~*~

Blondie drew me a Valentine of Nancy Drew and her “assistant” catching a ghost. I showed my Nancy Drew books with her, asked her if she wanted to read one, but she said no. It’s hard to sell a mystery to Blondie that has no talking dog as a sidekick.

Inked20190210_162149_LI

~*~

My use of creamer must have delayed the traditional Whole30 timeline, as explained in the first chapters of the book:

Day 1: No big deal/what have I done

Days 2-3: The hangover

Days 4-5: Kill all the things

Days 6-7: I just want to nap

Days 8-9: Nooooo! My pants are tighter!

Days 10-11: The hardest days

Days 12-15: I dream of…junk food?

Days 16-27: Tiger blood!

Day 21: I am so over this.

Days 22-25: The scale and mirror are calling…

Day 28: 28 is as good as 30…right?

Days 29-30: Holyoprahitsalmostoverwhatamigoingtoeatnow? (Yes, this is the actual heading.)

Day 31: Deep breathing, and maybe some wine.

I’m supposedly on “The Hardest Days,” but pretty sure my body’s on the “nap” stage. My brain’s three seconds behind everything. I’ve started this paragraph over four times now. I just want a glass of wine and to call it a night.

This doesn’t bode well for the next week.

Month.

Whatever we’re in.

~*~

Okay, need to leave you on a good note…a musical note!

The blues are the roots and the other musics are the fruits. Without the roots you have no fruits so it’s better keeping the roots alive because it means better fruits from now on.

–Willie Dixon

Came across this quote in my research of blues music and loved it. There is a feeling in blues music that just cannot be matched in other genres, at least not precisely. Maybe it’s this simplicity so many songs have, or that the notes and lyrics gut one so. It’s the kind of music that can warm you and make you cry all at once.

Quite a different feel from the fire and rage of The Who’s Quadrophenia, wouldn’t you say?

But it fits one of my WIPs in the best sort of way.

Now if my brain would just catch up to my body…

 

 

Don’t forget that my novel’s on sale all month! Tell your fantasy-lovin’ friends it’s loads of awesome for only 99 cents.

Free Fiction Has Come from the Wilds (2)

Read on, share on, and write on, my friends!

JeanLee-nameLogoBoxed

#Readers, Start the #NewYear With Amazing #Indie #Fiction #SerialReads. #Writers, Why Not Give #Serial #Writing on @_Channillo a Go?

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Ah, January 2019, you give me so much hope for the coming year! We must begin with stories, for of course we must. Whether you love to read or to write, you are here to experience a story.

Have I got the stories for you!

Not just my own fiction–I’ll get to that. No, I’d like to introduce you to some wonderful indie writers who have been publishing on Channillo, a subscription-based publishing platform stocked with hundreds of stories written by talented writers from around the world. A few Channillo writers have stopped by to share their stories as well as why they feel serialized fiction is awesome for readers and writers alike.

urban in motion (2)

Let’s start with some basics. Your name and title(s) on Channillo, please!

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 Jamie Seitz, Nick & Amy

Nick and Amy have been married for seventeen years which is a big deal because marriage is hard and messy and a fifty percent divorce rate and all.  Nick and Amy live with their three kids in the middle of the United States, in a place like Iowa or Ohio or some other smallish, flat state with too many vowels, growing corn and soybeans, making it basically indistinguishable from any of the other states around it and uninteresting to anyone that didn’t grow up there.  Nick is a procrastinator by nature which drives Amy crazy and Amy is spicy when she gets annoyed, which Nick adores.  Together they are every marriage still trying to keep it real after almost two decades together while dealing with the not-so-fun parts of everyday life.

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Ibrahim Oga, Vista of a Sisyphean Mind

Vista of a sisyphean mind series looks at the world in a unique perspective that is inspiring and motivating. The series is an exploration into the greatness of life.

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 Guenevere Lee, Leda and the Samurai 

Leda, a young woman who moved to Japan to escape her abusive family, is slowly adjusting to her new life. She’s learning Japanese, making friends, and enjoying the summer festivals. On the day of the famous Tanabata festival, she finds a small shrine – but when she steps out of the shrine, she steps into Edo Era Japan.

Trapped 400 years in Japan’s past, what follows is half fantasy, half historical fiction. Is her coming here an accident? Or does it have something to do with the sudden appearance of European ships off the coast? Leda must discover how she ended up in this situation, and how she can get back home – or if she even wants to go back.

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What made you choose publishing your work as a serial as opposed to a collection/novel?

Seitz: I do write novels in the traditional way, but writing Nick & Amy as a short story serial on Channillo gave me the opportunity to put something out every other week and get immediate feedback, which is not how writing a novel works.  It’s quite refreshing to show the world what I’ve been working on for a week, get a laugh or two, and then do it all over again, while working simultaneously on a novel project that no one will see for months.

Oga: I choose to publish my work as a serial because I don’t have a complete manuscript. It gives me to the opportunity to share the parts I have written and see how interested people are in the work. Also, the pressure to publish the next installment in the series is a good motivation to write. Writers love deadlines.

Lee: I wanted to write a serialization. I guess I was inspired by things like manga, which have contained stories within an overall larger arc – and can go on indefinitely. I was also romanticizing the turn of the century, where authors like Charles Dickens would publish their novels as serials, sometimes not even knowing the ending or how long it would be.

I like how flexible serialization is.

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I found this quote published in The Washington Post back in 2015, and I’d like you to comment on it:

Critics will undoubtedly moan that serialization would favor literature that’s heavy on cliffhangers and light on subtlety — and that it would corrupt more “serious” works. … Yet it requires the same characteristic any worthy novelist already seeks: momentum — a value that needn’t come at the expense of integrity.  -Hillary Kelly, “Bring Back the Serialized Novel”

Seitz: There is truth that serial literature requires a reason for the reader to keep coming back for more, and maybe it works best as a cliff hanger for many serial stories.  But at the heart of any story, a hard cover NYT Best Seller or an online serial, isn’t that exactly what every author is striving for?  Spinning a story so thrilling or hilarious or mind-blowing that their reader can’t stop turning the pages though it’s hours past their bedtime.

Lee: You can’t tell me that modern novels don’t rely on cliffhangers. Have you ever read a YA novel? Look, cliffhangers aren’t bad, tension is not bad, motivating your readers to read the next instalment by getting them emotionally invested in a character is not bad.

A novel is like a movie, it comes out all at once. A serial is like a TV shows, building anticipation for the next chapter every week.

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What benefits have arisen with plot, character development, and/or voice as you write a serial?

Seitz: I wanted to write Nick & Amy as a series of realistic fiction vignettes, every day funny stories about a regular married couple that don’t necessarily build on each other, but add another layer to the relationship with each new installment.  As a serial, it’s been a fun way to play with building strong character development little by little in Nick and Amy, exposing deeper aspects of their marriage, relationships, and personalities through whatever daily adventure I’m putting them through.

Lee: I can experiment a lot more. I can have story arcs that focus on one particular character, or do a fun story that really has nothing to do with the overall arc, but adds to the atmosphere and the tension in the story. I feel like I just have so much more liberty telling this story.

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What do you think draws readers to read serial (non)fiction?

Oga: Brevity. Our attention span is getting shorter as there are more and more things vying for it. People are drawn to serial works because the instalments are succinct. Serial successfully heighten pace and suspense. It enlightens and entertains long enough to hold the reader’s attention. It gives readers breaks between instalments to get them interested again. Each instalment starts strong, finishes strong, and creates suspense to intensify anticipation for the next.

People also like the participation in following a serial. Without the ability to read ahead, people are on the same page in terms of discussions of the work. Everyone tries to keep up with the reading in order to keep up with the conversations.

Lee: I think people like the anticipation. They like being rewarded every week with a new instalment. They like to wonder between instalments about what’s going to happen next. It’s a kind of interactive way to read a novel.

What advice do you have for fellow writers who want to give serialization a go?

As with anything artistic: just do it. If you don’t like it, or it fails, you have nothing to lose. It’s all experience that will help you with your next project.

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Do you receive any reader feedback on your writing as it’s posted? What do you do with those reader comments?

Oga: Comments are important. Good or bad, they reveal how readers perceive my work. I cherish comments a lot because they help me better understand my expression of thought and plots. Comments help answer a lot of questions for me. Did my work inspired the emotions I hoped to raise? Did it enlighten the reader as I’d hoped? What is the reader expecting in the next installments? Is my work gripping enough?

I use comments to write better.

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What advice do you have for fellow writers who want to give serialization a go?

Seitz: Give it a try!  Serial fiction certainly wasn’t in my wheelhouse, but it’s helped me grow as an author, forcing me to work harder at making a story tight, concise, and well done in less time and in less words.  It’s sharpened my skills as a writer and it’s been a fun learning curve.  It certainly helps to do some planning beforehand to decide what you want the series to look like, but beyond that the freedom it gives you makes the writing rewarding.  It helps to find it a good home for your serial, like Channillo, where the diversity of material, styles and authors is celebrated and embraced.

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Many thanks to my fellow Channillo writers for their time! It’s important for us to challenge our writerly selves, just as it’s vital to expand our reading horizons. Channillo gives the opportunity for both. I do hope you’ll check them out…and perhaps my own book, too, nudge nudge. 😉

I’ve also got the latest edition of my newsletter available for viewing! If you haven’t yet, please subscribe here.

Okay, that’s enough self-promotion. Be sure to tune in this month for another author interview, some thrilling music, and, of course, storytelling.

Read on, share on, and write on, my friends!

#writing #music: #TheWho

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A rare gift comes to the writer when the story and its mixed tape of music ka-chunk and transform. No longer is the music merely the writer’s atmosphere, her source of ambience while storytelling. Oh no. The music is the heroine. The music is the villain. The music is the tension. The music is the scene.

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This happened to me during 2010’s National Novel Writing Month when I first began drafting Fallen Princeborn: Stolen. At the time I was only using instrumental music for storytelling, while  music like The Who’s Quadrophenia helped me survive the piles of grading in my dropbox. The month had barely started, so I was early in the story of Charlotte and her sister leaving their abusive family in the Dakotas for Wisconsin. Their coach bus breaks down in the middle of nowhere. Another peculiar bus appears with far-too-friendly good Samaritans, and despite Charlotte’s suspicions, she gets on, too.

And….now what?

I tried magical feathers. I tried mysterious goo in the axles. How could I get Charlotte and her sister to the Wall if I can’t make this frickin’ Samaritan trap–I mean, bus–have a plausible reason (for humans, anyway) to break down near the farmland by the Wall? I shoved the story aside and opened up a batch of essays. In the midst of telling the umpteenth student to please remember her thesis statement in the introduction, The Who’s “The Real Me” came on…

…and I saw it.

I saw the scene. I saw it all, frame by frame like a movie trailer. I knew what had to happen:  utilize the shapeshifters’ gifts,  the song to feel Charlotte’s fear race like a heartbeat.

For this song, I realized, embodies Charlotte.

The percussion, guitar, and style of singing are defiant to the point of raging. The song demands anyone, everyone, to look past the surface and see the pain, confusion, and ambition to be.  

In this snippet of the story, though, it is Charlotte who does the seeing. Only she sees the bus driver’s inhumane ability, and realizes they’re all trapped. I could feel all this when I first drafted the scene with the song on repeat in 2010.

Eight years later, little’s changed.

~*~ From Fallen Princeborn: Stolen ~*~

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Charlotte bites back the snark and hides in her headphones again. She starts “The Real
Me,” thinking, The bus SMELLS old and gross, but nothing FEELS old and gross. Give me two seconds and I’d be out cold, it’s so damn comfortable.…
…
At least food has settled Anna down. Now she’s content to walk that quarter from Uncle Mattie up and down the fingers of her right hand. Then flips to her left. The quarter continues its deliberate tumble from pinky to ring to middle to forefinger to thumb and back again. Up and down. Then down and up.
Like practicing scales on a piano, observes Charlotte.
“Nice moves.” Studchin’s face betrays a lack of skills with a napkin.
“Thanks. My uncle taught me.”
Charlotte does a quick passenger check: Potential Homicidal Maniac sits as far from Anna as possible. Twitchy is de-threading his own coat. Mumbles starts singing “Lizzy likes locked things.” The Sweenils argue over who won that Waters Meet Bingo tournament. Mr. Smith sings too softly for her to hear.

Black feathers fly across their window. Violet flashes, a cackle rumbles.
Charlotte spins ’round and stares at the back of the bus.
Jamie is gone.
“Where is he?”
Anna bats those damn glitter-lashes at Studchin one more time before asking, “Who?” Slurp.
“The crazy acne boy with the bags. Where is he?”
Anna opens another cake. “Probably bathroom. Why, wanna ask for his number?”
“What’s this about numbers?” Studchin’s breath reeks of mouse turds and sugar. “Cuz I’ve got one, if you want it.” |Charlotte’s chest burns beneath the pendant. It’s burning like hell, she’s going to pass out— “Can you see the real me, can ya? Can ya?”
What the—? Who the—? Who has the audacity to sing a Who song OVER The Who? Charlotte swivels around in her seat, trying to locate the source. Not Studchin, he wouldn’t know good music if a chorus of show girls sang it from a Jacuzzi of custard. Not his bandmates and, thank god, not Mumbles. Potential Homicidal Maniac? Nope. Dead silent, head still.
It’s Mr. Smith, singing right along with Roger. But how can he hear what she’s listening to on her headphones, from that far up front? Charlotte shakes her head and stares at the back of Burly Man’s head. He stares right back at her from the rearview mirror. Not even the Sweenils notice him singing. No one but Charlotte, always Charlotte.
“Charlie?” Slu-urp. “What’s going on?”
“Shut it.”
“Char—”
“Can you see, can you see the real me?”
“SHUT IT.” To Anna or to Mr. Smith—Charlotte doesn’t care. Get away from my music, my head, my sister. Get away.
Ash-wind pulls on Charlotte’s nose. Black, green, black, green, black: the raven’s circling again. Get AWAY!
“Can you see the real me, Preacher?”
“I mean it, where is that Jamie guy?”
“I don’t know, Charlie. Why do you care?”
“Dude, what is up with your sister?” Studchin to Anna.
“Can you see the real me, Doctor?”
Ash chokes, feathers fly, song deafens, eyes glitter— “Can you see the
real me, Mother?”
Charlotte sees Mr. Smith’s fingers drum along in perfect sync with the song.
And he stares right back. His teeth are painted, ablaze in his smile.
“Can you see the real me me me me me me?”
The raven strikes.

~*~*~*~

Of course, using a song in a story is one thing. Getting permission to use that song is another matter entirely, as I explain in “Days of Walkmans Past.” 

I hope you take deeper look at Fallen Princeborn: Stolen on Amazon, and perhaps grab a copy to keep! Click here for paperback, or here for the e-book. Please don’t forget to leave a review on Goodreads or Amazon, too!

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Blondie the Skeleton helps me say thank you!

My deepest thanks to all fellow writers and readers who have been sharing my stories and thoughts on craft. No matter how much I beat myself up for not writing enough, reading enough, living enough, you step up and share my words and make every struggle matter. Folks, these are writers well worth sharing, reading, and befriending, I promise you.

Historical Smexy Romance Writer Shehanne Moore

Family Drama & Mystery Writer James Cudney

Short Fiction Writer Cath Humphris

Short Fiction Writer Sally Cronin

Young Adult Fantasy Writer Laurel Wanrow

Poet & Photographer Sue Vincent

Fantasy Writer Michael Dellert

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In the meantime, I’ve signed up for NaNoWriMo for the first time in years. It’s time to rewrite the third novel of the Fallen Princeborn Omnibus. I promise you even more mystery and mayhem, perhaps even a murder or two in the dank Pits dark and deep…

Are you joining thirty days and nights of literary abandon? Let me know so we can be writing buddies!

Read on, share on, and write on, my friends!