Author
Just a weekly update again this week. I am working on setting up the post for the Storytime Blog Hop next week, so this one is short. Also trying to make progress on my revision of Cipher. I haven’t finished Katherine Neville’s book, The Eight, yet, but I am about half-way through and it is quite good. But it does mean I don’t have a review for you yet. It will have to be next month.
Happy writing and reading, everyone!
Work is getting better. I did scheduling the Friday before last, and it really helped, so I spent a lot of time scheduling again this Friday, and things are starting to settle.
That means I am expecting my non-work time to begin to settle again, too, and I can get back to some of the things that I know are good for me. And I can get back to doing some writing in the evenings again, too. Which in this case, is revision. I am working on revising Cipher.
Technically, that is also my Camp NaNo goal and my general April goal, but I haven’t been doing it much, so, well, it hasn’t been happening. I’m in a bit of a rut, actually. But hopefully with the job solidifying, the reast can, too.
I have been watching TV lately. I watched The Irregulars, which I really liked, and I am almost to the end of Cursed. These are both on Netflix. On Amazon, I am watching Scott and Bailey, which I am really enjoying. I like that it is a little shorter than Cursed, even though I like them both. After Cursed, I am thinking about watching The Woman in White. I will see.
I’ve also been reading. I’m currently reading The Eight by Katherine Neville. It’s about a powerful, mystical chess set hidden over the years. I haven’t read The Da Vinci Code, but I suspect it’s similar to that. It’s not much of a surprise that I picked this one to read as the TV thing actually started with The Queen’s Gambit. I love chess, and I love France and Russia, so both that show and The Eight go into all three quite a bit.
Anyway, I guess this is a little longer than usual, and I don’t have much else to say. Next week, I hope I will be done with The Eight, so I can give it a proper review.
Until then, happy reading!
So, another long, tiring week at work, and not much done to show for it. But I will share the current covers anyway — these were made last year. Since this is an #IWSG post, it’s possible other people will see — these are just my very first attempts at this sort of thing, so feel free to offer any feedback and/or tell me which one(s) you like most.
The story is about a woman who is a funeral director whose husband has just died. She is preparing his body when something exceptional occurs. It’s not romance and there is a paranormal element. It’s connected to my Hazel Kanetzki series of cozy paranormal mysteries, but it is not a mystery itself.
Oh boy. This is a can of worms, isn’t it? Absolutely. I don’t deliberately add controversial topics, but they end up sneaking in because I mainly want to write what doesn’t exist yet. I love reading, but when I write, I want to write what I want to read but can’t find. And so that leads into what I personally and uniquely find missing, which, by definition means it’s not the usual.
And I have the problem where I like to read, and therefore write, in many different genres. At least, I have heard that is a problem. People searching on my name might run into drastically different stuff, so my Also Boughts are going to be a mess… Assuming I even get something finished.
My riskiest novel is one that has been set aside. It is a retelling of Snow White. The step-mother is only a few years older than Snow White, and the prince is her former lover who curses her, and unleashes insanity (basically the archetypal world warping everyone into archetypes — so it forces the step-mother into the evil stepmother role, for example). So all three of them are slowly going insane. It’s written in alternating first person from these three unreliable narrators. I want to get back to it at some point, but not sure when I will. Oh, and then there’s the idea (not even a first draft yet) of the sister of an abused girl who frames the abuser of serial killers and goes insane as she begins to become addicted to killing… Um, yeah. That one might never get written.
Even when I am in more mainstream genres, like the aforementioned cozy mysteries, I find myself wanting to play with the tropes and avoid the most common things (on the other hand, as far as tropes go, I love vampires, just not vampire romances, or at least not the typical brooding/protective male vampire with human female romances).
I think I am starting to ramble here, though, so I will leave you with these oh-so-amateur book covers!
INSECURE WRITER’S SUPPORT GROUP
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Ninja Captain Alex J. Cavanaugh
Twitter is @TheIWSG Hashtag: #IWSG
Thanks to our awesome co-hosts for the April 7 posting of the IWSG! PK Hrezo, Pat Garcia, SE White, Lisa Buie Collard, and Diane Burton!
My, how time passes. I am still living in the castle we built after the garden was completed, and people have come and gone. Family. I don’t remember getting married, but suddenly, I have grandparents and great-grandparents, what seems to be millions of cousins, and children and grandchildren of my own. I don’t even feel old enough to have grandchildren. Wasn’t it just yesterday that I was a bored teenager, chafing at the banality of my country life? And yet, as I speak of family, my mom is not here.
But Spot, the dog has family here, too, and the garden has changed over time. No longer the strict French garden I crafted the last time we spoke. There are still sculptured hedges and geometric patterns, but now there are overgrown areas with little niches for privacy, and a few areas where new wildflowers have sprung up. Yes, wildflowers, not weeds.
And there is a little cottage surrounded by a copse of birch trees. The Elder lives there. I don’t know when he showed up or how long he has been there, but he writes in a ledger every day, making note of the changes and the things that have remained the same. And now, it is time for me to talk to him because I think he knows our own traditions better than I do, and I’ve received an offer for the garden and the land. I don’t want to sell. We’ve made this place our own, but it’s true, there are starting to be some struggles. The young ones want to make everything modern. The grandparents don’t want to change anything at all. We need to find a way to move forward without giving up what makes this us. We need to know which traditions to keep and which to let go.
But when I get to the Elder’s cottage, I find the door open and the room empty. Oh, there’s a bed and covers, a well-stocked kitchen, no sign of hurried packing . . . and yet, there is no Elder. I make my way to the back porch, where I know he likes to swing on the porch swing, but nope, not there either. Is he out in the garden? I am about to leave when I come face to face with the door. The entrance door, but now, the exit door. And it has a mirror on it. I see my face: old, wrinkled, with a twinkle in the eye. And I understand. There never was an Elder. I am the Elder.
I return to the main room and take out a large black binder. In it are all the comments I’ve made over time. I know now that I’m the one who has to decide: this is a tradition we are keeping. This is an area where we can modernize. Ethics and family are of utmost concern. After that are the little idiosyncrasies that seem purposeless to the newer generation, but that I know links us together. That is their purpose.
Everything else can go, but these, this is how we do things in Heritage Park.
The End.
So this week has been all about the covers. Last week-end, during my stream, I finished XIX – The Sun and realized, wow, that means I only have two left before the Majors are done. And since I’d already been adjusting the covers I made previously, I decided to go ahead and start making covers for the Major collection. Obviously, I will also need to revise them and format them, and in other ways make the stories themselves good enough for publication, but since March is covers month, well, there you go.
But I am still getting feedback on the covers for the Hazel Kanetzki short story, so here are the four I made for the title Grief’s Thorn. To be honest, these are definitely not my favorites, but hopefully will show my process of learning.
So, there you go. Next week, I will have the next Tarot flash fiction piece up! Have a great week, everyone!
This week was another difficult week. My routines are slipping a bit and it’s been harder to get up, so that kind of affects the whole day, even if I am feeling more compfortable with the new job. Writing focus has still been revision, which is going, but slowly. I am on page 61 of 339 at this time. I did however post the next three covers on the Holly Lisle forums, so here they are for you as well.
Tell me what you think, and I’ll get the next ones up next week. Happy writing, all!
This week was a difficult week, to be sure. I got a promotion (yay!) and this was the first week of the new job, so lots of anxiety, new-job uncertainty, feeling “stupid”, etc. And in the middle of it, I finally finished the final touches for my covers for the prequel (but more of a side story, rather than lead-in) to the Hazel series. It’s an introduction to the main character, her reasons for not being interested in romance, and to her ability to get a picture out of a trance after being around dead bodies. But, unlike the other stories in this series, it is NOT a mystery, so might not bring in readers to the series and could possibly appeal to the WRONG readers, and not appeal to the RIGHT ones. Anyway, it’s a story that can stand on its own, so I am going to publish it soon-ish (hopefully within the year) after getting more feedback on the covers and then working on the copy, and then all the administrative tasks involved in putting a book up, which are still slow-going for me since I haven’t done it much.
But that all brings me to the main point of this post:
I’d like to share these covers with you and get your thoughts. I realize they are not my best, but they will improve, and it will give you an inside look at what I’ve been working on.
So there you have them! Please let me know your thoughts on these covers. And until next week, happy reading!
So, contrary to expectations, the last week of February has been the week that I finally got into my revision, even though of course it was supposed to be my focus for the month overall. And March, I am getting back to covers, so by the time you read this, hopefully, I will have started that. I don’t have much to do with them, though, so I should still be able to get some revision in as well. I just started, but so far, the revision is going well.
I also started a new day job, so my schedule has changed, and I am planning on making more of an effort to add walking and yoga to my daily routine. We will see how it goes.
And, as this is the first Monday of the month, that means it is Insecure Writers Support Group day!
This is a good question for March because I am also hoping to integrate more reading into my schedule, particularly at night. I have not been reading as much as I like to. But typically, it goes the other way. I used to read much more broadly than I do now. These days, I tend to default to easier reading, mostly cozy mysteries. I do write cozy mysteries, of course, but I also write in lots of other genres. And sometimes, when I read a book in a different genre, it will inspire me to write something in that genre as well.
What motivates my reading choice? I like to discover new things, but I also like to continue reading something I have started to love. It seems once I get into a series, I just want to keep reading that series. And then, I also like to read the work of other writers I know, or new writers I haven’t heard of. When I was a teacher, I tried to read the books my students read. But in general, I read pretty much everything. It just hasn’t been in the forefront of my mind lately, which is why I want to get back to it.
INSECURE WRITER’S SUPPORT GROUP
FOUNDED BY
Ninja Captain Alex J. Cavanaugh
Twitter is @TheIWSG Hashtag: #IWSG
The awesome co-hosts for the March 3 posting of the IWSG are Sarah – The Faux Fountain Pen Jacqui Murray, Chemist Ken, Victoria Marie Lees, Natalie Aguirre, and JQ Rose!
So, maybe I’ve let myself go a little. I mean, a lush garden is wonderful, and I love all greenery, but the weeds are all mixed in with the plants, and it’s getting a little unmanageable. Yes, I said it, weeds. Yes, I know I always said there wasn’t such a thing. I know I said all plants were valuable, and that there were no weeds, only wildflowers. But I can kind of see your point — maybe there are some plants that want to strangle the life out of others, and it’s getting a little unbalanced with all these super-dominant plants. Maybe some kind of order would be good.
There’s also the matter of the animals. I love the deer and the rabbits, but they keep eating the plants and defecating all over. So, that’s the first step. I need to build a fence. It pains me to cut down the trees: I hear their screams as my blade whacks into their skin. But I need wood for the wall, and there isn’t enough loose wood around. It needs to be tall enough that the deer can’t jump over. After I cut the trees, I make the wood into boards and construct the fence. Obviously, I need a gate; I don’t want to imprison myself here.
When the fence surrounds the garden, and a gate allows entrance and exit, I know I need to turn my attention to the plants. I’ve been avoiding this. It was once my nature to just want to nourish them all, to just let them grow wild. But now, things have changed. It is overgrown and unruly, from my lack of discipline. While it hurt to cut down the trees, it feels just as wrong, at first, to want to shape these plants into my own image. But once I get started, I begin to find the ways to tame the wildness without oppression. And always I am rewarded, not just by the beauty of the sculpted shapes, but also by the sudden exuberance expressed by the plants. It’s as though they have been waiting for this, for someone to give them shape, purpose, structure.
Maybe they didn’t want to run wild.
When I am done, I have neatly trimmed hedges in exact geometric patterns. I have bursts of color in just the right place. Complimentary colors balancing each other: blue and orange, purple and yellow, and here and there bright red blooms against the dark green leaves. There are paths for walking and fountains for melody and stone benches for resting. Fragrant flowers are far from each other so the different smells don’t intermingle or overpower. Everything has a purpose and reason, and it is beautiful in its symmetry and order. And far from stifling growth through unnatural oppression, this new order has made the garden flourish in a different way than it did before. So, welcome to my garden. May it bring you peace and calm, and a sense of balance and rightness with the world. All is as it should be.
The End.
So, I realize it has been a few weeks since I have posted a weekly update. Sorry about that. New habits are hard to establish sometimes, and I plain just forgot about it. But that is no reason to throw it all out, so here I am.
This week was a good week. The big issue was that I ran out of paper. I didn’t realize I was so close to being out because I thought I had some new paper somewhere. Turns out, nope, I didn’t. I was going to continue/restart my revision of Cipher with Holly Lisle’s How To Revise Your Novel (Affiliate link), but it involves printing out your manuscript and as I was about to add paper, well… Anyway, so I printed off the first 50 pages and have ordered paper, which I will get on Saturday of next week. So February is looking like it is NOT going to be revision week. I will continue with the website work.
The book I am reviewing this month is The Likeness by Tana French. I really need to reread it. It is gripping and intense. The story is a murder investigation through undercover work. The main character is a detective who, because her appearance is so strikingly similar to the victim’s, goes undercover as the victim, pretending that she is not really dead, so that the suspects might give themselves away and she can find out who killed her double.
It has very believable training, and explores the nature of identity: how much is internal and how much is what our actions are. How memory plays into it. But it is not a literary novel; it is mainstream suspense. I was so engrossed in the story that it colored everything in my life, and I felt I was really there, even when I wasn’t reading. The description was realistic and yet totally alien to anything I’ve ever done. That combination was obsessive.
This is the second book in the Dublin Murder Squad series, but the books are only very loosely connected. There was one small event in this book that recalled the previous book, In the Woods, which is also a great novel (but which I don’t remember at all, unfortunately — I guess I need to reread that one, too!), but otherwise, the plots were completely different and unrelated.
The main thing I took from The Likeness is a deep questioning of who I am as a person, and how much of that depends on my actions, my beliefs, and my memories. Who are we really?
Have you explored questions of identity? Has a book ever made you question yourself? How do you continue to define and create your authentic self?