Houston, We Have a Problem

There has been a delay in the production process for Warrior Wisewoman 3, so we will have a new release date. A shipment of ARCs was lost en route from the printer. So in order to allow reviewers a chance to do their jobs before the anthology comes out, we are now looking at a release date of July or August. Realistically, it will probably be August.

Things like this happen, unfortunately. We will persevere regardless, and I will post the new release date when I have it. Remember I mentioned yesterday that Mercury was in retrograde? There may actually be something to that....

Rat Race

It's been a really hectic month, and now Mercury is in retrograde again. This is what it's like when you don't know whether you're coming or going.

Stories Three

Three unsold stories total. Two just went to the post office today. One got rejected tonight. Odd timing, that. It reminds me of the tarot card in the Robin Wood deck where Temperance is juggling three balls in the air at once, one foot on land and one in the water. In the game of publishing, you keep as many stories circulating at a time as you can, and hope one lands in a new home.

Marketing

I've been trying to work on marketing for the anthology. I've contacted three review bloggers and will look for more after this weekend (which is booked with a prior commitment.) I've dropped off two copies of the arc cover art, complete with ISBN numbers, to the two main indie bookstores in our area, and I'll be scanning the internet and yellow pages next week for any more I might find. I'm going to check on how cheaply I can get postcards or bookmarks or something of that nature, so I can drop them in strategic places around town. And one of the local indie bookstores happens to be owned by friends of mine who want to throw some kind of release party or at least do a table display for the anthology, so things are looking great so far.

It would be nice if artists of various types still had patrons, like they did back in Shakespeare's day. But there seem to be no patrons nowadays, or else the role of patron has been assumed by all of the readers out there, looking for a break from everyday life and willing to be swept away by fiction. So if it takes marketing to reach those readers, then marketing is the order of the day.

Originality, please (a rant)

I just went back and watched Merlin Season 1, Episode 7, Gates of Avalon, thanks to a heads-up from a friend who wondered what I thought of it. Dear one, I agree with you. Completely. This was a much longer rant, but I edited some of it out in favor of making my point a little more quickly.

Suffice it to say that even in folklore, fae of various ilk are not always the bad guys just by dint of being fae, any more than humans are all bad just by dint of being human. And yet, in so many TV shows and movies, people seem to use the same characters or races as villains time and again. It's the same problem I have with crows typically showing up in scenes with the bad guys, or heralding the arrival of same. What's with the stereotypes? Where's the original thinking? Just once I want to see the crows herald the arrival of the good guys--I dare someone to do this.

People have turned the vampire and werewolf stereotypes on their ears in plenty of TV and movies before now, and suddenly a whole bunch of people think vamps and weres are dead sexy (or in the case of vamps, sometimes dead and sexy.) I'd pay top dollar to see a movie with a human bad guy, a Sidhe hero and/or heroine who saves the day, and a whole flock of crows heralding the arrival of the Sidhe.

Time Warp

I love it when that happens. I started writing last night, and then came out of writer's flow/time warp maybe three or so hours and 1400 words later. It felt as though it had only been maybe 45 minutes to an hour, at most, but there were all these words that hadn't been on the page before. Nice.

Zen

I love the "Journey to Wild Divine: Wisdom Quest" game. It's been out for a number of years and I still love it just as much as I did when it first came out. I wish they'd make more like it. I played it for a few hours tonight, completely lost track of time, and was thrilled with my progress. Things I could not do very easily when I first tried to play the game back in 2007, I now can do in moments, even when it's a mixed energy event--which will make no sense to you if you've never played the game, so I guess I'd better explain, now that I've brought this up.

The game comes with a device that measures your heart rate, which of course changes according to your energy level, your breathing, etc. Finger sensors measure your physiological changes and the game responds accordingly. An energy event in the game is an exercise or task that requires you to either calm or raise your energy, and so a mixed energy event is when you must do those things alternately within the same exercise. When you first start out with the game, it can be difficult to manage the various exercises, depending on what your energy is like and how much control you have. The game includes instruction on breathing and meditation and all sorts of other things, and I'd heartily recommend it for anyone who's ever stressed out. Who knows--it might even help with writers' block, because it just loosens you up on several levels. It's amazing. (That, and the world and graphics they've created are simply visually stunning.) It's very fantasy-oriented, so of course I was already prepared to like it even before I actually tried it, at which point it proceeded to impress me like no other game has.

Cover Art

Cover art for Warrior Wisewoman III is here!

Proofs Are Here!

Proofs for Warrior Wisewoman III are here, and I've gone over mine. Very little needed correction--just one detail, in fact. So, for those who haven't gone through this process before, it might be helpful if I mention what a proof is.

The way I understand it--and I could be a little off base, as this is my first time--the proof is, basically, the equivalent of an ARC, or advanced reader copy. That, or maybe the proof is followed by the ARC, one of the two. It's a non-bound copy of the book as it (mostly) will appear once published, and it's here that we get our last chance to make any necessary corrections before the real thing is produced. This particular proof arrived in the form of a PDF file, and all I have to do to make corrections is send a separate email to my editor to let her know what needs to be done. Actually, I've already done that, so now I just need to verify that she received my email, and...poof! Magic can happen.

So...we have proofs. We have a release date (June 1). We have ISBN numbers I can give to all the buyers at the local bookstores. This is happening. Woohoo!

Mapping the Journey

On a philosophical note, I would say that truth, peace and serenity are things we never seem to see enough of in this life. We are given endless advice to seek it, but relatively few instructions for how that can be done. To me, truth, peace and serenity are about coming into a closer connection with oneself. I also think that peace can spread, just as anger and fear can spread. The more people who discover who and what they truly are, and the more people who find their personal bliss and live in that energy, the more peace and serenity we'll have on this planet. And ultimately, it's not about what's outside us, but what's inside us that really matters. What we need are better tools for looking within.

This is one reason I love writing so much, why I can't live without it. Even though words are often inadequate to really express what we mean, what we feel, what we know, it is also through words that we try to communicate with others, words that we use to define our world and give form to things that are otherwise intangible. Language is limited, and unfortunately, it can be easily misunderstood. But it can also be a tool by which we come to truly know ourselves. People say that life is a journey for which we have no map. I disagree. I think we all know far more than we believe we know. I have read back through some of my earlier novels and stories and find myself struck by all the things I apparently knew on a much deeper level than my conscious mind could comprehend at the time of the writing. The symbology and resonances for things that I've only recently begun to recognize were all right there in my writing, the whole time, for years and years. Truth, I'm finding, is far more amazing than anything I once thought was fiction.

The Sun is Shining

Yay, spring! We did have one interesting day in which we had rain, hail, and sunshine all in one day, not to mention a rainbow that I apparently missed. This is why they say that if you don't like the weather in Boise, you should wait five minutes. (I have to admit, however, that this doesn't really apply in the summertime.) But enough about the whacky weather.

The forecast for the new novella is equally promising. It's urban fantasy, 1st person POV, and going pretty well so far. If I had to make a guess, I'd say I'm more than halfway through the planned story arc, and I have a word count budget of 40,000 words to play with. Right now we're sitting at close to 12,000 words. The minimum necessary is around 17,500, so we'll see how that plays out. The last novella I wrote came out at around 25,000.

The thing I'm liking most about this new novella is the main character's voice. I sometimes have a little difficulty getting the female lead's voice right at first, and they usually require some rewriting, but this time, it's coming through loud and clear. That's a good sign.

No Excuses in a Small City

The Boise Speculative Fiction writers have declared March "no excuses writing" month, or NEW. This means we who are participating post to the loop every day with our page totals, whether that's editing or fresh pages, and if our total is zero, it's zero, and we don't get to say why. I'm actually pretty happy with my totals so far, and of course it means I'll have pages to present to the Moxie this weekend at our crit group meeting.

The only hairy thing that happens is when you write something and then find out you have to scrap part or all of it because it isn't working for the plot. Take this new novella I'm working on. Two pages into the third chapter, I had a conversation with the Huz that involved the fact that a large paranormal conference would probably not be held in Boise, ID. His contention was that Boise is not a conference destination. Hmph. How many urban fantasy writers write stories set in their home cities? Many. I could name at least five or six right off the top of my head, right now. But they all live in bigger cities, and my poor little city just isn't quite big enough for the situation I wanted to describe. (C'mon, Boise, prove me wrong. Hold a big conference here, I dare you!) So I had to lose most of my first two pages for this chapter and take my characters out of town to a bigger city for the conference. The Huz suggested Sin City. Ultimately, I decided on something still bigger than Boise but a little closer to home. Now I'm back on track. But I hate having to scrap pages based on the fact that my home city doesn't quite measure up to size.

If Boise ever decides to host a decent-sized paranormal conference in the future, I'll expect the Huz to eat his words....

Recycling

I just read an opinion that made me think, and you'll see the irony of that in a moment. The opinion I read was about how so many fantasy authors nowadays are recycling old folk and fairy tales in their fiction. Well, okay. Yes, we are. However, the contention was that such things are entertaining but do not make a reader think. That made me think. Why is it that fantasy is so often perceived as being for entertainment only? Why do people assume that none of it is real? People who have had encounters with ghosts or other paranormal phenomena would argue that it is very real! Some of it has even been documented, with evidence that cannot be explained in any other way. We have so many paranormal research teams out there now proving and gathering evidence in a scientific manner that I'm surprised that so many people can still think it's all just a bunch of hooey. We trust entirely too much to our limited five senses. We make assumptions. We feel safe and grounded in reality. And then, sooner or later, something happens that, hopefully, makes us think "what if."

And indeed, what if? Not what if vampires and werewolves do exist, per se, but what if there really is more out there than "meets the eye?" Notice the use of one of those limited five senses again. There's more to sight than looking through your peepers. If you read my blog posts from November, you can see where I stated that I could feel that something was about to happen with my writing, and also in October about how I felt the "rightness" of my submission to a particular market. The market I referred to then is the market that bought my first story, and so here online is an example of precognition, in real time. Or one could choose to believe that I'm just a good guesser. No biggie either way; the world's not going to end if I'm wrong. But what if I'm right?

I write primarily fantasy. And I do indeed recycle old folk and faery tales. But when I write, I mine them for the grain of truth (or maybe the huge nugget of truth) in them. I take that and I polish it, and I hold it up so it can hopefully be a mirror in which readers can maybe see themselves, if they choose. I try to touch on the deeper human emotions, on the human condition, on how our lives intersect with wonder and with the divine. Never, ever, is my fiction just about entertainment only. It never has been. I hope it entertains. If it doesn't entertain, I haven't done my job. But if it only entertains and doesn't make you think, then I haven't done my job either. Warning to those who might read my stuff in the future: it's not fluff. Look at it again in a different light and see whether some of it doesn't put chills down your spine. It did mine. Not bad, for a bit of recycling, and very Green.

Old Characters, and New

It's now been since fall/winter of 2008 that I rewrote the Brenna book, "The Ninth Wave," the last time. In its current form, it's been being marketed for a year now. When I left off to work on shorter fiction last year, I had about a third of the second Brenna book, "Brigid's Forge," written, but in working on all my new projects, including the nonfiction, I left BF alone for a while. This morning I wrote a new scene for it for the first time in quite a while. Once I got going, it wasn't too hard; I still have the sense of Brenna's voice. It's good to be writing her again, as though she were an old friend with whom I'm reconnecting.

I also have this new novella taking form in my head; time to make an outline (yes, outline--gasp!) and see just where this character arc wants to go. I'm thinking the novella could be the opener to a novel series, again Urban Fantasy, but in 1st person POV this time. As with most of what I write, it involves Sidhe characters, but this time the narrator is...well...I can't tell you. Secrecy and hiding until the right moment--that's the ticket. But if I do it right, it ought to be reasonably different from what's out there--to a point. Different and familiar, old and new at the same time; can I write an intriguing enough paradox? We'll see. If I can't, it's no big deal, because at novella length, I'm not risking as much time on this. If I can, then the novella will lead into a new novel project for me with these new characters, and again, we'll see.

Word of Mouth

I've said it before, and I'll say it again; it's all about connections. Every author, no matter how well known, depends on connections and word-of-mouth in order to gain an audience. Publishers depend on this as well. Without people reading books and spreading the news about them, there would be no bestsellers, much less any kind of sales whatsoever. Add to that the tight financial situation with which our economy is still struggling, and it takes more than the most valiant effort for those less well known to make it. But make it we can, through connections. One to one, two to four, four to eight, and onward into infinity. Let's spread some word and build some connections, so not just one of us, but all of us can not only survive, but thrive.

Where Did February Go?

I don't know how we got from the 12th to the 21st so quickly. This month has seemed to fly by. I mentioned that edits for the short story that will be in the anthology are finished. On the first of the month, I also submitted a romantic fairytale novella, a retelling of Rumplestiltskin, to a different anthology. It didn't make that anthology, but I received word that it may be considered further on its own, so that's a perfectly good outcome at this stage of the game.

Now I'm working on a new novella and I'm also continuing work on the second Brenna Callahan novel. Tomorrow is the first day I've had in a while where I didn't have any specific commitments, so I'm hoping to spend the time getting in some good hands-to-keyboard time.

Why Choose

I've spent enough time trying to figure out what to write next that I have decided not to choose. I have some short stories I can finish. I have about a third of the second Brenna Callahan urban fantasy finished and would love to pick up where I left off. I have over 45,000 words written on the nonfiction project, and I add to that whenever the time feels right for addressing the various subjects in it. I have the seed of another novella-length urban fantasy that I think will be a lot of fun. I have no way to know which to work on based purely on what I think might sell, so I'm not going to choose. I'm going to work on all of it, whenever and however I feel like doing, until I finish one of the projects. Then I'll keep doing the same thing with the others. If a new idea strikes me in the meantime, I'll explore that option as well.

The only thing likely to change this plan is if a publisher makes an offer on one of the novels, and then my attention will of course go to that, and to its sequels.

In other news, I've received edits for the soon-to-be-published short story and done the necessary tweaking. It's great to know that careful editing is being done; that's what ensures a quality work.

Today Is That Day

I got the email yesterday, and six words into it, I knew. "We are pleased to inform you...". That was about the point at which I stopped reading and started screaming. I knew eventually the odds had to turn in my favor, and that day has finally come.

I could tell you about how I started whooping and yelling, then ran downstairs to tell my family what had happened. I could tell you about how my jumping up and down and screaming alarmed the dog so much that she alternated between barking at me and licking my face. I could tell you how my knees gave out and I sat down on the kitchen floor, then burst into tears. But none of that would be adequate to explain just what it feels like to be able to say the following, finally, after 26 years of trying, hoping, and waiting:

One of my short stories, "The Truth One Sees," has been accepted for publication. It will appear in the Warrior Wisewoman III anthology, to be released this spring. I'll post a release date and any other pertinent info when I have it.

One Wait or Another

I sent a short story off to an online magazine and have been watching it move up the queue. It's something to do while waiting to hear from another submission that's been in play for a long time now. The first venue might still take a while to get back to me, although it could happen at any time, while this latest one will get back to me very, very quickly. As in less than 24 hours. I have no idea what will be decided regarding this more recent submission/venue, but checking the submissions tracker gives me something else to be excited or worried about while waiting for the results of the previous submission.

In other words, if I keep enough irons in the fire at the same time, I can spread my nervous anticipation around between them, instead of feeling like everything's riding on just one person, just one decision. I knew there was a really good reason I have three short stories on the market at the same time. This way, I can't sell my only cow for a handful of magic beans. Instead, I could potentially get three handfuls....

Little Red Laptop

I got it for Christmas, and it's awesome. It weighs less than 2 pounds and fits perfectly into the little laptop bag I found at Ross for $12.99. It isn't technically new, but it's close to new and more importantly, it's exactly what I wanted. In the past couple of weeks, I've found that I love its grab-and-go portability, so much easier than my other laptop, which weighs as much as a newborn child and is a lot less convenient to carry. The little red one also has an amazing feature--it has about six hours of battery power before it needs to be recharged, which makes it perfect for me while I'm running errands or taking children to their various away-from-home activities. It's been to the YMCA, a local coffee shop, a bookstore, and my last Moxie meeting. It's no more inconvenient to carry than a purse, and weighs so little that I can hang the purse and the laptop case from the same shoulder and not feel like my arm's going to come off.

I splurged and ordered an ergo travel keyboard for it, and this Kat is still on the hunt for the perfect mouse. Otherwise, all systems are definitely go--or at least, on the go.