Fiction Beyond The Ordinary

The World in the Satin Bag: Interview w/ Chris Howard

2009-03-02T16:41:00.000-08:00

The World in the Satin Bag: Interview w/ Chris Howard

Local Amberlight Launch

2008-08-03T16:34:00.000-07:00

At last, some pix from the local Amberlight launch on 18th July, delayed by Real Life, plus forgetting to charge my own camera beforehand (ahem) then having to collect and get permission to use other people's pix. Some of these and more are also up on my Website,

http://members.optusnet.com.au/~sakelso/

just look for the link on the front page.

Author with flowers from family - books prominently displayed ...

End of the launch speech.

Author with mates at signing table

More mates at signing table (you may notice glasses, empty or full, as a recurring motif - the case of free champagne went in the first hour!)

My good local mate and wip reader Vreni with me

Seaborn in the wild contest

2008-07-21T19:27:00.000-07:00

Okay, it's officially open. Seaborn will be showing up on store shelves sometime this week, and I'm giving away a few things to those who send me pictures of the book on a store shelf.

(My email: chrishoward.author@gmail.com)

1. The first person to send me a picture of Seaborn in a store wins a 13 x 18 inch print of my watercolor, Syren Tears, or the digital scene painting, Sea Dragon, which is from Sea Throne, the sequel to Seaborn. Email me a pic and you choose which one you want me to send you.

Click the images for the large view:

Syren Tears (watercolor, 13x18 in. print) Sea Dragon (digital, 13x19 in. print)

2. The second person to send a pic wins the painting not selected above.

3, 4, and 5 pics of Seaborn in the wild, and you get smaller but equally cool art print.

Adulation, Fantasy, Creative Procrastination

2008-06-08T06:06:00.001-07:00

Ever had the feeling that something has passed you by? Or ever jumped on a bandwagon when it's a bit too late? Well there I was, working away on The Constant Tower when I decided to go youtubing. I spend waaay too much time on youtube sometimes. I'll admit first that I have always loved fantasy. Deep fantasy, painful fantasy where you feel the deepest part of your heart is being yanked out for some great and noble good. The soul pain in fantasy, the psychological pleasure of seeing beautiful noble people doing beautiful noble things, the sexual and warlike passion! Ah the joys of fantasy!

So when I happened upon some wonderful soul-feeding Final Fantasy videos --Wow!!! A forum/clique/enclave of creative folks who looooooove Final Fantasy capture videos from Final Fantasy games and use popular musical tracks to do a kinda theme and variation kinda thing. Often, they use the same songs..but wow, the subtle differences! So, okay, I was never into Final Fantasy but after watching sooo many of these videos yesterday I am a total fan. I wish I could get into playing video games and creting videos like these.

But, of course, I got to thinking. It's such a fine line for me to walk. I think I've mentioned somewhere else that I love beauty --especially male beauty. I could just stop and stare at beautiful men all day. Very close to loving the Creature more than the Creator, very close to falling into the sin of adulation and idolatry. So on the one hand the beauty, the heartfelt passion, the utter lack of restraint of the creator of these videos and the creator of these games....were just totally awe-inspiring and helpful in my losing my soul and restraints in my present WIP, The Constant Tower. For lack of a better word, I love the naked emotions of these videos. Heck, I love naked emotions period. Especially the painful emotions found in fantasy literature. But on the other hand, dangnabit, I am now in love with a couple pixellated character. There is a joy and a passion that touches the soul and can also taint the soul. And there is a joy and a passion that touches the spirit. I always try to get both soul and spirit in my stories. By which I mean, I want to talk about human pain, grief, longing, etc...but I also waht to talk about the human relationship to God. I would hate to write a purely soullish book. May God help me with this new book as He did with the other.

Anyway, for your enjoyment, here are some of my favorites. They're favorites mostly because they were done so well and because the tracks over the videos are some of my favorite songs and performers. (Don't waste too much of your time as I did, though.)

Final Fantasy The Way of Love Cher
Final Fantasy Don't cry Guns and Roses
Evanescence - Bring me to life
Final Fantasy The Way Clay Aiken
Final Fantasy Invisible Clay Aiken
Truly madly deeply
Truly Madly Deeply another creator

WisCon Pix

2008-06-01T18:58:00.001-07:00

Here's my list of publishable WisCon Pix: Below, the Gang of Four in a (fairly) presentable moment.

Our Fearless Editor hamming it up:

Our Other Fearless Editor when told to smile...

The Broad Universe Rapid Fire Reading line-up, with Lori in the middle, next to Moondancer Drake, in the hat. Sorry about size of pic, wasn't sure this wd. work. Next time they'll be larger, if I have hours to wait while they load.

Alas, no pix of the "Desert Saloooon", since I was laid up and cdn't do the usual Fearless Photographer circuit.

CFN

See, I get to take credit for that

2008-05-18T03:53:00.001-07:00

"See, I get to take credit for that."

That's one of my favorite author quotes.

In order for you to understand it, I guess I should tell you about the circumstances in which Edward Albee came to say it.

He was being interviewed by someone about one of his plays. The interviewer said, "Oh I love the way you brought in this myth and this religious allusion and this societal issue."

Sorry, I don't remember the specifics but you know what I mean. There are times when you write a book or a story and reviewers find such lovely things in it...things you had never consciously put into it. When I wrote Wind Follower I was aware of a few of the myths, social history, historical and political events I was addressing. But when the reviewers and critical text analysts got to it, wow!!!!! They saw such glories in my book.

Well, I suppose when notified of all the wonderful subtexts happening in my novel I remembered Edward Albee's words and said, "Actually, I wasn't even aware that that was in there, and I had no conscious plan to put it in the book. Thanks. I get to take credit for that."

I don't know about other folks but I was a lit major. I like analyzing stories in the larger context and I like being analyzed. Makes me feel valid. Some of my stories are thin, mind you and they have no resonance. But it's so wonderful when a story has all these layers and readers can see such interesting cultural, religious, and social issues in them.

Most writers tend to be pleased to see that their stories are rich enough to carry so many subtexts. When a reader finds stuff in a story that the writer didn't consciously put into the story, it shows the writer is A) listening to the universal unconscious B) allowing true creativity to flow through him and through his own experience of life C) taking part in the great creative communal conversation of his time, D) well-read and E) downright deep.

It is that odd writer who says, "no, my work is not that rich. My work doesn't connect to these primal, or cultural, or social issues. My work only goes to this area and I refuse to see in it what I myself did not put into it."

Who wants to write stories that don't resonate? Who wants to write stories that echo only what one consciously puts into them? What is the glory of a story that is utterly man-made and lacking the true spirit of the universal subconscious?

-C

The Thing About Living at The Beach

2008-05-14T13:21:00.000-07:00

The thing about living at the beach is that you have to actually LIVE at the beach. You have to go through the everyday-ness of life, while you're living 2 blocks from the beach.

I still have to get up and sit down at my desk and write my pages. I still have to go to work. I still have to cook dinner and wash laundry and scrub bathrooms and pull weeds (though the weeds are winning in the back-yard rose bed...) (And since it's really humid and takes everything a long time to dry out, the bathrooms have to be scrubbed a lot because that black stuff grows everywhere constantly--ugh!)

But the thing is--today (and Monday) I got to sit down at my desk after going out to walk along the beach. Not just along the beach, but actually in the water. I get to look at the birds (I really, really need to remember to look up those kildeer-like plover things) and the rocks and the shells and the sky. The wind blows my hair every which way, and the salt makes it stick like that. And I'm at The Beach.

No, I can't spend all day hanging out there, floating in the waves or digging in the sand--I could, I suppose, if I wanted to. Some Saturday could be available. But it's probably a good thing that I don't really have all day, because every time I spent all day at the beach in the past, I got sunburned. Badly, if it was pre-sunscreen days. Even these days, I'd get sunburned, even with the sunscreen, because I'm that susceptible to the sun. So, yeah. An hour or two, when the sun's on it's way down, or up--that's probably best. And then I can go home and clean up and eat sand-free supper.

I simply need to remember not to take it for granted. Remember to spend time there, walking on the sand or in the water, biking down the Seawall, floating on the waves.It's my happy place, in this town. My place to commune with nature and God and to just...be. Where's yours?

Clockwork Heart trailer

2008-05-14T05:42:00.000-07:00

I totally loved the trailer for Clockwork Heart by Dru Pagliasotti! Published by Juno Books.

Character artists

2008-04-26T09:20:00.000-07:00

X-posted from http://theophrast.us

How many of the characters in the stories you write are artists? Any kind of art. What do they do? How deep do you get into it as part of the story? Do you find—or think it's the case—that visual arts would be more difficult to portray in writing—or is it pretty much the same? Unless your character's a writer or poet—in which case, you can simply include some of their work to pull it off—or you're writing a graphic novel, it's tough to get the art across to the reader.

I have three different artsy characters in Seaborn. One who paints and draws, one who dances, one who's a composition major at a music college. I'd guess these abilities or interests help define a character. A dancer would certainly be athletic, someone who plays music, paints or draws might be thoughtful.

Book Publishing Timeline

2008-04-23T18:20:00.000-07:00

Or, What happens between the acceptance of your manuscript and the launch of your book from someone who barely knows what he’s talking about.

What does happen to your manuscript after the publisher accepts it? I've always been curious.

What follows is my documented ordering of the events, editing, extra work, writing, pitching, and other stuff an author has to do before one precious copy of the book hits the shelves in a bookstore.

Anyone writing for years and breaking into the published market, reading the blogs of authors, agents, editors, will have heard all the terms and processes, things like copyediting and ARCs (Advanced Reading Copies--books printed ahead of the release date specifically for book reviewers, sometimes handed out by the thousands at conventions like Book Expo America).

But I've never understood the order of the activities clearly. When a writer says his book's "gone into copyediting," where exactly is that in the process? How far along the road to release is it?

What I've done--and I'd love some feedback from those who know a lot more than I do--is mark the road with all the various things I've had to do, attend to, understand, agree to, and receive in order to get to that glorious release day...July 20, 2008. (Obviously some of the stuff in the timeline has not yet happened, so I'm guessing with the dates there).

Click the image below to view the readable version.

Here's what the process looks like from my perspective:

Wiscon

2008-04-22T09:30:00.001-07:00

It's that time again. Wiscon. THE feminist speculative fiction convention.

Several Juno folks will be attending.
Sylvia Kelso, author of Amberlight, will be there.

As will Chris Howard, author of the forthcoming Seaborn. Yeah, a novel about sea sirens. I really want to get this.

As will Lori Devoti another Juno author.

If you're there, look them up. Hopefully, they'll give us a detailed report of their time there.

-C

Shapeshifting anyone

2008-04-21T11:06:00.000-07:00

Juno Author Lori Devoti has made a great post on Shapeshifting Romance about the definition of shapeshifting. Check it out.

Orphaned copyrights -- so-called

2008-04-21T05:08:00.001-07:00

Call me paranoid and suspicious but this bit of legislation makes me raise my eyebrows. Will corporations be able to keep an orphaned "document" after they have done a "reasonable search" and been "unable" to find the creator of the work? Contact your senators and representatives.

http://www.copyright.gov/orphan/

strange author benefits

2008-04-19T05:32:00.000-07:00

One of the flakiest side-effects I've encountered since becoming a published author is the many many emails I receive from kids who pretty much want me to help them with their homework.

The email generally goes like this: "Dear Ms McDonnell, please I really need help. I have an assignment on writers (or an assignment on career day) due tomorrow and I need to do research on what it's like to do your job. Please, please, please, help."

There are also a few who mention that they have read Wind Follwer and were asked to analyze or review it. And could I please, please, possibly, tell them what my book's theme was all about?

Now, what do I, a former teaching assistant at a high school, think of all this?

I'll just say that I pretty much behave like a typical mom who sits down at her computer to writer her kid's term paper because heck, the thing is due today. (Okay, okay, once I wrote a paper so well that my son's college teacher suspected he had not written it and failed him for the class. I learned to write less writerly after that,) I simply can't help it...I'm a sucker for kids who bring in their homework late. Heck, I do a little procrastination myself. The only time I DO find myself getting a little annoyed is when the student is a graduate or undergraduate. I suspect because I'm thinking that by that time they should be able to think a little clearer about stuff and to at least attempt to analyze the book themselves. But even then I give them my help. I can only hope they really appreciate it.

Seaborn Book Trailer

2008-04-14T13:54:00.001-07:00

RIF needs your help

2008-04-13T15:39:00.000-07:00

Reading Is Fundamental, Inc. (RIF), founded in 1966, motivates children to read by working with them, their parents, and community members to make reading a fun and beneficial part of everyday life. RIF's highest priority is reaching underserved children from birth to age 8. Through community volunteers in every state and U.S. territory, RIF provides 4.6 million children with 16 million new, free books and literacy resources each year. For more information, and to access reading resources, visit RIF's website at www.RIF.org

From Carol H. Rasco, president and CEO, of Reading Is Fundamental (RIF):

"President Bush’s proposed budget calling for the elimination of Reading Is Fundamental’s (RIF) Inexpensive Book Distribution program would be devastating to the 4.6 million children and their families who receive free books and reading encouragement from RIF programs at nearly 20,000 locations throughout the U.S."

“Unless Congress reinstates $26 million in funding for this program, RIF will not be able to distribute 16 million books annually to the nation’s youngest and most at-risk children. RIF programs in schools, childcare centers, migrant programs, military bases, and other locations serve children from low-income families, children with disabilities, foster and homeless children, and children without access to libraries."

To find out how you can help, visit http://www.rif.org/get-involved/advocate/what/

Check out RIF’s third annual Program Excellence Honors .

Over at the juno blog

2008-04-12T15:45:00.000-07:00

There's a great definition of urban fantasy. It's over at the Juno Books blog and it's great.

Wars, small, great, undeclared, and recurrent

2008-04-07T07:06:00.000-07:00

Yesterday I stayed in bed all day and watched movies. I saw two movies I hadn't seen before. One was called Tomorrow (by writer Faulkner by way of director Horton Foote and actor Duvall) and the other was called Constantine with my lifelong crush Keanu Reeves. (In fact I have had such a jones for Keanu for such a long time that in Wind Follower I actually named my character Kaynu after him.)

Anyways, Constantine --despite Keanu's gorgeous self-- just had me rolling my eyes. Hey, I'm okay with folks fooling around with Christian theology but what a mish-mash it all was! I mean...he had to look into the eyes of a black cat in order to enter hell. What's that about?

"Tomorrow" on the other hand touched me -- although I think the actual Faulkner story would have touched me more. I can't help it. I'm a Black Jamaican but I have always had this fascination with poor white folks in Appalachia. Supposedly --at least this is what I pick up from the media-- these salt of the earth types would be the first to lynch me. I can watch movies about city sophisticates having all kinds of angst but the stories that really touch me are those about poor, country people, whatever culture they're from: China, poor white, Africa, Latin America, African-American.

So there I was watching it and reminding myself that I haven't seen The Apostle in a while when it suddenly dawned on me that all my stories are about wars. Wars, small, great, undeclared, and recurrent. In Wind Follower, my main characters thought the human war was over and they figured that as long as they avoided the spiritual war, the spirits would ignore them. In Constant Tower, there's a war of a different kind going on. And in Inheritance, wars also abound.

Of course all stories are about conflicts...and conflicts are another word for war. War against the self, war against nature, etc. Each author has her own opinion about what wars abound in this life. Romance writers concern themselves with the emotional wars at home and the wars between the sexes. Sometimes status and race are thrown in but for the most part, the characters in a romance story are dealing with their home culture and emotional inheritances and how their cultural inheritances conflict -- war with-- that of the one they have come to love. Other writers, on the other hand, deal with more political and social wars. And Christian fiction writers often deal with spiritual wars: the conflict between the self, the soul, and the spirit....and how that inner conflict is compounded when it encounters the world, the flesh, and the devil.

I totally believe that a great romance is the best kind of story possible. Why? Because it concerns itself with love --which is eternal and which changes the soul-- and with the creation of a new family/community while retaining the best of one's self and one's community. In Romances, relationships are ultra-important.

Now all this is tough for me to balance in a fantasy story which aims for action from the get-go. I, unfortunately, am fascinated by normal life --the normal life of the world we know, and the normal life of the fantasy world an author has created-- and what makes normal life tick. This means that even when I create a fantastical world, if I'm not careful I'll find myself wandering leisurely among the poor folk of that culture, ambling along the country lanes...and not pushing the plot along. Romance writers and Christian fiction writers are used to this kind of slice-of-life stuff. They are used to slow country rambles with subtle small conflicts and stressors. Most fantasy lovers, on the other hand, are more into Constantine-type stories. They want a lot more action upfront...like 30 pages of mucho drama, death, external warring. So I'm trying my best to get into that groove. What to do?

Work at figuring out how to work with cross-genres, maybe. Thank God I'm still growing as an author. I hope that whatever path my stories take -- the gentle ramble or the page-turning adventure-- that my fans will walk lovingly and patiently with me. Thank you all.

Antagonism or Antagonist?

2008-04-03T14:50:00.000-07:00

Theresa of Editorrent has been doing a series of posts on her blog about the origin and development of protagonists and antagonists. At its beginning, in Greek drama, the protagonist was simply the Main Character. And the antagonist was the thing that opposed the main character.

And the thing is, maybe the antagonist is a character, and maybe not. Maybe the antagonist is different characters at different times. Maybe the protagonist gets a turn at being the antagonist. Maybe the antagonist is something intangible like the weather, not a character at all.

And I've been thinking about this idea. Especially about the one where the antagonist is different characters at different times.

I've had some editors tell me that stories should have three characters. The hero, the heroine and the villain. But wow, isn't this limiting?

In a romance, the hero and the heroine often act as antagonists for each other, driving the other on to change. Sometimes there's another villain, especially if there's another plot, as there would be in a fantasy romance or romantic fantasy. I like the idea, though, of floating the antagonist role around.

I actually haven't thought about this long enough for a real blog post. But I do find it very interesting, especially at the developing-the-story phase of writing. So. There it is.

Envelope-pushing

2008-03-28T06:55:00.000-07:00

Who came up with this metaphor of "envelopes"?...and of "pushing envelopes"? It's an interesting metaphor. Up there with, "thinking outside the box" and "broadening the mind" and all those other catch-phrases which imply, for us writers, the fooling around with cross-genre stories.

Well, I'm working away on my current Work-in-progress, Inheritance.

When I start a novel, my aim is always to make it fully totally myself. Not because I'm so unique but because there are so many African-American Christian folks with First World issues....and I want to do my part in contributing to the emerging genre fantasy stories made for and by us. I can think of Neil Gaiman's Anansi Boys, The Shadow Speaker by Nnedi, Tobias Buckell's Science Fiction novels Ragamuffin and Crystal Rain, Robert Fleming's Havoc After Dark...among a few but honestly, considering there are so many Black, Hispanic, Asian, Native American, and South east-Asian folks in the US, there really ought to be more contemporary fiction (of whatever genre) on bookshelves that speaks to these cultures. Add to the mix that some of these folks are very religious --Christian, Buddhist, African tribal, Taoist, Shintoist-- and the main religion in fantasy seems to be Wiccan or Druidic... well, there is a major envelope that needs pushing, I think.

So that's my main purpose in my stories: to be as real and as fully me as possible. To be brave and put as much of myself into a story, in spite of the fact that the reader might not be prepared for such a world. In Wind Follower I wanted to be as Christian, as folklorish, as First Peoples, as High fantasy as possible....to see what such a book would look like. Just enough of the Euro-fantasy world to make it fit into the envelope. But enough to push the envelope a bit.

So there I was working on Inheritance. Inheritance is a book I want to be as Christian, as demonic, and as erotic as possible. The same envelope pushing. I wanted a succubus but I wanted a succubus that was really connected to Christianity, a female demon whom you hated, a demon who so intoxicated the sense of my main (good and noble) character that he would be tempted to rape any woman to repeat that pleasure. In short, I wanted to take my succubus seriously and do a modern-day version of The Exorcist with Christians fighting demonic possession. IN ADDITION, --because I wanted to put all myself in this story-- I wanted to deal with sexual-woundedness and make the story erotically-charged. And of course, all this had to happen to a black female Christian character.

Wind Follower got certain Christians annoyed with me because of six small sex scenes. Would I be willing to include the sexuality and alienate those folks again? And then there were the core fantasy fans. Many fantasy readers really liked Wind Follower but others were upset at its Christian content. Was I willing again to challenge the separation of genres? Did I want to push another envelope when Wind Follower had yet to prove that folks actually would read a book with a pushed envelope?

And what if I wasn't skillful enough to bring that book to fruition? If one speaks to pentecostal Christians, Native American non-Christians, Native American Christians, or Christians from Latin America, Asia, etc....talk of demons, spirits, and possession is fairly common. The problem is that although the demonic is ever present in the fantasy genre, most fantasy writers don't really really believe in demons. Heck! Some American Christians don't even believe in demons. Not to the extent that other folks do.

I've gotten some interesting correspondence re Wind Follower. Folks telling me that it connected them to their life in the old country, or that it reminded them of stories their grandparents told, or that it was a book that "didn't seem like a made-up book" because stuff like that happened to them in their old villages or in some weird town in Louisiana. I like that phrase: "didn't seem like a made-up book." So, for some folks, Wind Follower felt intensely real.

So, back to Inheritance: Can I write it? Can I ride on that edge again and cause the story not to fall flat? And if I do have the skill to write a story that is totally paranormal and totally sexual and totally ethnic, do I have the fearlessness to actually write it? The effect of bad reviews of Wind Follower (there have been about five, I think, that I know of. Five out of 23 isn't so bad but hey)can really make an author pull back from pushing that envelope.

When I read the Bible, I don't see it telling me to abandon my sin-stained culture to take on the European sin-stained culture. It wants me to be myself, a Christian of African-American descent. But when I read American fantasy, I feel as if I am called to abandon that culture and take on Elvish and Wicca. By the year 2057, the majority of citizens in the United States will be non-white. (The growth will be fueled by Latin American immigrants and their children. Most of these immigrants are Roman Catholic, Evangelical and even mormon.) Will fantasy books continue to call us to worlds of vampires, elves, wiccans? Worlds that have little to do with us? (I can deal with shapeshifters because shapeshifters such as werewolves occur in many ethnic cultures. I'd like to see less European shapeshifters, though.)

I'm hoping that writers of color and that my little book Wind Follower will help to push the envelope a bit...to create space on those fantasy bookshelves for books that reflect the ethnic and religious differences of the America that we are becoming.

The Pedestal of Author

2008-03-26T05:29:00.000-07:00

Yesterday, I received a sweet little e-missive from a fellow author. In it, she lovingly but firmly told me about the concept of The Pedestal of Author. Backstory: I've gotten mostly good reviews on Wind Follower. When I have gotten bad reviews, I let it slide. Everyone has an opinion. When I get a really, really, really bad review....where the reviewer obviously hasn't written the book....well, I actually try to defend myself. Which is a no-no in writing circles, I'm told.

Anyway, the concept of The Pedestal of Author now has me thinking. What do I as an author think an author should be? What do I as an author expect my readers to think of me? What do I as a reader expect an author to be?

In some cultures certain kinds of vocation and work are considered important or honorable or "great." Nice job if you can get it. For instance, teachers are generally honored in many cultures. Doctors and Actors are honored in the United States.

In the black community, there is always so much pride and joy in great achievers. When I used to work in the high school I thought this pride in greatness was a bit dangerous. Kind of like an ethnic Cinderella Complex. Poor kids didn't want to be regular folks with normal jobs. They wanted to be famous rappers, great singers, sportscasters. It was as if their lives had been so bad that they only way they could overcome it would be to be in-your-face-famous with tons of bling, ho's, boy-toys, etc. I totally understand that. (And yeah, I'm actually cool with all those women wanting to hook up with Flavor Flav or Bret on VH1. You gotta do what you gotta do to get by. And hey, nice job if you can get it. But most people aren't gonna be famous. Fame is so important in our society. The nature of fame is that some folks simply are....and some folks aren't.

But I'm an author. Plodding work, a work of endurance, a work that revolves around ideas. I'm not particularly famous, though. Although you'd think from the way some folks in the hood behave, I'm the hottest thing since Vanilla Chai.

Hey, I don’t mind representing. What really makes my day at signings, etc is the love and appreciation my people have for me. They’re glad that I – a Black Woman– succeeded. If they are little old ladies, they ask where they can buy my book. When I tell them “from any bookstore!” they just smile and rejoice with me. Yes, I'm in a bookstore! When I say it's not self-published, it's from a traditional publisher, they really smile. When I say the book has so many religious stuff in it and so many racial stuff in it, but a secular publisher published it, they shout, "Praise the Lord! HE is able!" As a culture we have seen so many failures and struggles, that many of us still have a genuine joy and appreciation for those in our culture who have succeeded. Poor folks in the hood -- even the white ones-- love the idea that I'm an author.

Yeah, I’ll admit it. I get all teary-eyed when some Public Service Announcement pops up which states, “A black man created this…” “A black scientist discovered that…” And, yeah, I’m glad when I enter a room of little old Black ladies and they get teary-eyed over me.

Should we try to keep the mystique of Author Greatness? Do I OWE it to my people to behave like a real author, someone who symbolizes wisdom, persevereance, polish....and uh, maturity? If I DO try, how long can I keep up with it? Will I be able to be that other person long enough until it becomes second nature? When it become second-nature, will I become a pill, a know-it-all, or an object of pride and a help to all who know me?

Lord, help my people to continue to do great things. I'm trusting you to help me write this new WIP. Amen.

A Favorite Film: Die Hard

2008-03-25T03:18:00.000-07:00

I can't really call this post just "Favorite Film"; I don't really have one specific favorite. I have a loose, revolving Top Ten list. But I'm pretty sure that at least in the last fifteen years or so, this movie hasn't left the list, so I can definitely call it A favorite film.

It's not hard to say why I love it--I'm certainly not alone in that--but it isn't easy either. It just works on every level. I don't care if there are moments that are a little schmaltzy (when Al the cop kills Alexander Gudonov [RIP] at the end, for example). It simply is, in my opinion, one of the greatest film ever made.

Oh, yes, I hear you scoff. Die Hard is light entertainment. It's an action movie. It's not Citizen Kane or The Godfather (which is another that stays high up on my list. LOVE The Godfather with a passion.)

But why does a movie have to be deep to be great? (Besides, I don't agree. I think Die Hard has some very deep moments and meanings.) Die Hard shows us what film can do; not just a slow, quiet movie about someone's death, not a character study, but really what film can do: transport us. Show us things that even now, 20 years after the film's original release, still make our eyeballs pop from the sheer ecstatic audacity of it. It shows us what a good script, surefooted direction, and outstanding performances can create. Not a step is out of line in Die Hard, not a moment is wasted.

One of the reasons why I think the sequels failed to live up to the original (other than simply the truth, which is sequels almost never do live up--the exception of course being The Godfather Part II which is so good I want to cry) is they lack the claustrophobia of the first. Terrorists in the building. Hero in the building. Nobody else gets in or out of the building. The entire film takes place there--in an office setting so familiar to us all, rendered unrecognizeable by the violence. Yes, we have scenes right outside the building, but even then, the Nakitomi Tower looms in the background. We never forget for a second what's happening in there--even the film's many moments of levity don't allow it, as they carry that same claustrophobia (even if it's simply the tight walls of a closed mind.) It's the sheer perfect tension of the set-up that enables everyone else to concentrate on the rest of the job: entertaining us. And they do it with confidence and ease. It's a beautiful thing.

Last year when my stepdaughter came to visit, the hubs and I decided it was time to start her film education. She's old enough now to handle most R-rated films (with the exception of stuff like Fast Times, which we'll probably wait a little longer on) and frankly, she doesn't get to watch a lot of good movies in her house.

The first movie we picked to show her was Die Hard. She's a little older now than I was when I first saw it (in the theatre on its original release), so it seemed like a good time.

And wow, was that fun. Every once in a while I'd glance over at her and watch her, her eyes saucer-wide, glued to the screen, her mouth slightly open. She was completely enraptured; I think I could have thrown things at her and she wouldn't have noticed.

That's what a great movie can do. It can capture us and hold us so tightly that for those few hours we forget everything else. And that's why Die Hard is a great movie.

Big Bookstores versus Little Bookstores

2008-03-19T17:26:00.000-07:00

Big bookstores versus little bookstores

I’ve always had a soft spot in my heart for small bookstores. Well, let’s amend that. I USED to have a soft spot. Now I have a dilemma.

I live in a relatively small town with just two small bookshops. One handles all second-hand books; the other is a mixture of second-hand and new. When Master of Shadows was published, I approached the bookshop that handles the mixture to introduce my book and to arrange for a signing. I also gave them a flyer that listed where booksellers could order the book.

The signing was scheduled for mid-January when the local population swells with visitors from the cold north. A few days before the signing I received a phone call from the bookshop. They claimed they had been unable to get my books from Ingram, and they wanted to cancel the signing. Of course that meant I also had to call the local newspaper and ask the editor to put the article about the novel that would have been published just before the signing on hold.

When I e-mailed the publisher to find out about Ingram, I was told there would have been no problem rushing books to the bookshop for the signing, AND although there appeared to have been a computer glitch at Ingram a couple of weeks earlier, it had been fixed immediately and there were currently no problems.

I was determined to try again. I returned to the bookshop and arranged for another signing, this time scheduled for mid-February to correspond with Valentine’s Day. After all, MOS is a romantic fantasy. I also figured that gave me enough time to make sure the books would arrive for the signing and to get the news story rescheduled.

The owner of the bookshop confirmed that the new date would work, BUT I would have to supply the books. Yes, I would have to buy the books for the bookstore to sell, and we would split the profit – 60% for me, 40% for them!

I thought this had to be a fluke! After all, I wrote the book, I worked hard to find a publisher, and I am certainly willing to give publicizing the book my best shot. Was I now going to have to act in the capacity of a bookseller as well? What was the bookstore going to have to give up besides a place for me to sit and sign?

So I went to another small town nearby where there are a couple of bookshops. I ran into exactly the same problem. But they were a little more businesslike. They confessed that very few small bookshops have the capital to purchase a large quantity of books. They didn’t want to be stuck with books that might not sell.

I was stunned. This wasn‘t how it had worked with Barnes & Noble and Borders. The big chain bookstores didn’t expect me to buy the books for them.

In the end I cancelled all local book signings.

Fortunately the newspaper has printed the article about Master of Shadows. And I’ll be attending the Romantic Times Book Reviews Convention in Pittsburgh in April. They expect over a thousand attendees and the final Saturday there will be a Book Fair. Over 200 authors will be signing, including me!

But back to the beginning, and my dilemma with small bookshops – at least the local ones. They want authors to support them, but on the other hand, it appears they don’t always support their authors. I wonder, is my experience unique?

Fave Film: Rope

2008-03-18T13:27:00.000-07:00

So there I was...waiting for the schoolbus to arrive when I start playing around with the remote and what do I see? One of my favorite movies, Rope, is on at 5 pm Eastern Time. TCM Turner Classic Movies. Talk about the intense joy I feel. I LOOOOVE this movie

Ah the joys of favorite movies! If I try to figure out what I like about the movie, I guess I could talk about Aristotle and the three unities but dang, that's not it. Sure all the action is scrunched up in one little night in one little place but that's not really it. The entire film feels scrunched. The actors seem squeezed together to fit into the scene, the actors are flustered as they rush to fit all their words into Hitchcock's articial "one take" and there is all that panning and all that sooming into and stopping the camera onto the back of a suit to change the reel.

But what really gets me about this film -- and yes, I have a major Farley Granger crush and have had it all my life it seems-- is how jumpy and stressed the film makes the viewer. I've seen modern flicks try to tighten the screws on characters and make a film which leaves the viewer on the edge of his/her chair unable to breathe. DOA, Torque.

But somehow they don't quite work as this one does. Because what makes it really work, i think, is the relentlessness of it all. There is a deep desire in the viewer to let the bad guys get away with their crime. The minute they do it, we know their personalities will be the downfall of them. Guilt is gonna get one of them, arrogance the other. Even then, although they are utterly unheroic characters, we want them to ...get away unpunished. Because they are human.

But our desire is thwarted, and it's like watching one's friends do something stupid ....and one simply cannot stop them in time...or save them. This, i think, is one of the things that makes this story essentially Christian. Watching one guy make a really bad arrogant decision and watching his stressed-out wimpy friend be dragged along for the ride. ...and thinking...oh my god, oh my god, there is no way out for them now..... unless a miracle occurs. And all the time wanting the bad guys to succeed, not because they are such nice people, but because they are so like us sometimes...on a train with no turning back... and the only thing we can do is to beg and pray and hope that they get away with evil. Perverse joy, i know...but joy nevertheless.

Shameless Self-promotion

2008-03-08T06:38:00.001-08:00

Please check out the podcast of my story, Homecoming at the Borderlands Cafe over at Escape Pod. It takes about fifteen minutes to listen to. Please comment if you can. It's a story about race and religion in an alternate America.

-Carole McDonnell

Aging

2008-03-05T15:43:00.000-08:00

Okay so I'm almost 50. 48 years and three months old, exactly. And lately, I've found myself writing about older women characters. Interesting (to me at least) because I have always written about young characters.

I think we humans always identify with our young selves. It's natural. Our bodies betray us. Inside, we feel twenty...but outside we look....sixty, seventy. (Well, actually, my hubby tells me I look like I'm in my mid-30's. Is the guy sweet or what?)

Perhaps we write about young characters because the world has trained us to. After all, it's the young who do the great feats of derring-do. Or perhaps we're afraid of getting old or we just can't identify with old characters.

I suspect I'm writing about older women because I'm feeling my age. (still don't look it, though.) Whatever the reason I'm doing all these old fogey ladies, I find myself still writing about youngish male characters. And these young guys have crushes on these old fogey ladies? Is there a need for serious psycho-analysis here? Perhaps, perhaps not.

Latent pedophilia aside, I find that some adversarial pain-in-the-neck argumentative part of me (which actually is a very big part of me) wants to do something about the ageism I see on television. Subtle racism mixed with ageism(the non-sexy, grandmotherly, Aunt Jemima-ness of the black woman) and dang! we black women are put outside the romance pool a bit too early. (At least in the media, not real life.) Upshot: I end up writing books where the cute blonde white woman doesn't get the young guy and the older black woman goes off with him to the marriage bed. (It's always gotta be marriage. I'm a Christian, after all. No premarital sex, alas. Except maybe the night before the wedding, like I did in Wind Follower.)

I hate to admit it cause as I said, I'm old now. But, I'm still wounded from seeing all those fifties, sixties, seventies films where black women weren't considered really beautiful. (yep, even in the 2000's. Remember last year when everyone kept saying two of the black women singers on American Idol were "plain.") As a writer, I want to see how much I can get away with. And, hey, (speculating here) maybe I'll affect the greater American culture so wonderfully that young guys of all colors will start lusting for older women of color instead of the cool icy "All-American" blonde ideal many have been trained to admire. Dare I believe that because of my influence (okay, and the influence of others like me) ten years from now Oprah will be considered the sex symbol and Michelle Pfeiffer and younger white starlets will all be catching up? Hey, one can dream.

My hubby says that the way I talk sometimes people will think I'm prejudiced against white folks. I'm not. My friends are mostly white. All my boyfriends were white. They were cute guys too. But the world would have a hard time believing that. Heck, they'd have a hard time thinking of Oprah as a sex symbol or a love interest. Yep, they'd hink it was fiction beyond the ordinary. -C

March is Personal Demonstravaganza Month!

2008-03-03T04:51:00.000-08:00

Yes, that's right. If you're looking for much actual content from me this month, you won't get it. Or rather, you will, but in a different way.

Because Personal Demons releases next month--less than thirty days from today!

And I'm having a bunch of contests and stuff!

Now, I will be holding another contest or two next month, after the book comes out. But right now we're working on advance stuff. So here's what you need to do to enter:

1. Do you have a review blog? Do you want a PDF ARC to review? Email me (staciakane AT gmail.com) and let me know! One review equals one entry.

2. Create an Amazon Listmania List and place the book on it. That's one entry. You get an additional half entry for placing books by any of the following authors on it:

Mark Henry
Caitlin Kittredge
Anton Strout
Richelle Mead
*or any Juno author

(Please, guys, keep the lists serious. I will be checking, because you'll be emailing me the link to your list. So if the list is called, say, "The List I Made to Win a Prize" it doesn't count. We're looking for urban fantasy, paranormal romance, that sort of thing.)

3. Tag the book on Amazon. Again, please be respectful with the tags. One tag, one entry. Click boxes for current tags and get half an entry each.

4. Preorder the book. From Amazon, from B&N, from your local independent, from wherever. One preorder, two entries.

5. Blog about the book. If you don't have a review blog, you can still mention it. Link to it. Talk about it. I'll be running excerpts from the book every Wednesday this month on my own blog, so hopefully you'll be able to formulate an opinion enough to genuinely tell your blog readers how much you're looking forward to it. One mention, one entry.

6. Belong to a forum where books are discussed? Mention my book. One mention, one entry.

The thing is, I realize this may sound like kind of an odd contest (though I'm really hoping it doesn't). But Juno/Wildside is a smaller publisher, and we're trying to get the word out any way we can.

Oh, and there is one big rule: NO SPAM. PLEASE don't start mentioning the book in odd or inappropriate places or clogging up comment threads on review sites or, especially, other writers' blogs. PLEASE. Your entries will be discarded if I find out about it. There are lots of ways to win and chances to win legitimately. Let's try not to piss people off. :-) (And no, I don't really think any of you would do that, but I did want to mention it for the record.)

So...what are the prizes? The prizes are many and varied!

*Two signed copies of Personal Demons
*One box of Cocktail Demons
*Six Personal Demons magnets

In other words, nine people will win prizes here, just for mentioning or helping to spotlight a book you hopefully would already want to mention!

I'll be doing a release-month contest as well, with even more prizes, including more signed books, Amazon gift cards, demon keyrings, more magnets and cocktail demons...all kinds of things. So this is certainly not your last chance to win! But this month is our last chance to build pre-release awareness of the book, so join in and have fun!

Email me your entries--links, or the copy&pasted relevent bits from your preorder receipt (I don't need or want your credit card info)--to Staciakane AT gmail.com. I should respond to tell you I got it within 24 hours. If I don't please email again!

Also, do you have a blog? Are you lazy, and so enjoy having guest bloggers because you don't have to come up with a topic of your own? Why not have me come blog at your place? I'm clean, and mildly entertaining. I will even blog on any topic of your choice (trust me there. I blogged about pigeon sex once because a blog reader wanted me to.) Email me! Then sit back and enjoy the day of rest.

the ethics of reviewing

2008-03-01T09:19:00.000-08:00

In one of his critical essays, C S Lewis pointed out some ethical dilemmas reviewers are apt to get involved in. For instance, a reviewer once slammed one of Lewis' book in a publication and months later, the editor of the publication gave Lewis the slammer's book saying something to the effect of "Turnabout is Fairplay." Lewis didn't think it was. He declined the opportunity to review. I suppose he could have been all noble and ethical and praised his enemy's writing....but what if he honestly didn't like the work? Wouldn't people think he was being retaliatory.

In the essay, Lewis also talked about the ethics of reviewing a friend. Almost as stressing as reviewing an enemy. Again, what if one honestly likes the work? Remember the big hullabulloo years back when it was discovered that several judges "knew" which manuscripts in contests were written by their friends? Quite the todo! Especially when the judges said, "But his (my friend's) manuscript was genuinely the best of the bunch. Ah, me! dilemmas! I remember reading a comment by John Updike in which he said something to the effect of, "I haven't got the ethical strength to pan a friend. Actually, let me restate that: I have the ethics not to pan a friend."

Another thing C S Lewis mentioned in the essay -- whose title truly escapes me but which I think was called "On reviewing"-- is that a reviewer should never review a genre he does not like. Now, it's not as easy as all that to figure out what one doesn't like. Some folks are very pernicketty about their genres. But in a day and time of sub-genres, cross-genres, mixed genres....well, there is bound to be some aspect of a story that simply bothers a reviewer. My question, should the reviewer continue reading the story if it doesn't suit his rigid notions of what he expected in the genre.

I recently received a review from a reviewer on Fantasy Forum where he stated he didn't like the first 150 pages of Wind Follower because it was romance. Why then did he read a paranormal romance? He also said it was too heavy-handedly Christian for a Christian novel. What does one do with a reviewer like this? Interestingly, he's the only one so far who thinks the book is heavy-handed. Neither feminists, atheist, academics or Christians have said this. Heck, the book has been read by a Yemeni-muslim, by several atheists, by narcissitic teenaged kids, by my angry-with-Christians-Orthodox neighbor and no one else saw the book as heavy-handed. So, what's going on?

But WF is not the only book that has gotten strange comments from so-called reviewers. So then, what are we to do? As artists, we value input and we are not going to say that only experts can review books properly....but it does make a person wonder.

I'll say that I'm a reviewer and I haven't always been the perfect reviewer either. I once slammed a book because the writer said something very snide about Christians. Other than the snideness the book was actually well-written. I also get pretty impatient with stories about blonde frontier types taming the west and claiming the land. But, like a fine wine, I've aged. Recently, I was reading a YA book where certain sexual issues just didn't sit right with my Christian conservative mindset. I told the editor of the publication I review for that I simply couldn't be fair to the book but there was no way I was going to slam it because my problem with the book was well....my problem. when I encounter a book or (God help me!) am in the middle of a book that I suddenly realize is not my cup of tea....well, I do the honest and ethical thing. I toss it aside and I keep my opinion to myself. After all, sometimes the problem isn't with the book...it's with the reader. And a good reviewer should be knowledgeable enough about himself, his tastes, his imperfections, and the state of the art... to fess up....instead of blaming the book. -C

Serendipity

2008-02-28T12:13:00.000-08:00

As a writer, I need to know all sorts of arcane stuff. When I'm writing fantasy, of course I get to make a lot of it up--but I have to have a bit of an idea where the stuff I'm making up comes from. However, fantasy isn't all I write.

I'm currently working on a historical novel set in WWII, in China and the Pacific. There's a LOT of research involved.

So, last night I had a banquet to go to. The fella is in higher education, and we got invited to the local Chamber of Commerce awards banquet. This year, it was held in an airplane museum, which is in large part a series of interconnected hangars full of vintage airplanes. Unheated hangars.

Now, we're on the coast of the Gulf of Mexico, so it's not like we battle a lot of snowstorms. Or even much in the way of cold weather. But when it's 60 F outside (or slightly below), and the inside isn't heated--that's just a little too cold to be sitting around eating dinner. It got cold in that hangar. But that's really not the point of this post.

See--there were all these old airplanes. I got a big kick out of wandering around looking at them. There was a B-17 bomber--the old Flying Fortress--those are some big birds. And an RAF Spitfire. There was a PBY Catalina "flying boat." And then I saw it. A plane with its wings folded up, almost making an A-frame over its long body. The EXACT plane flown by the hero in the book I'm working on.

I got all excited and went to walk around it, studied how the anchor bars holding the wings in their folded position were fastened on, looked at as many details as I could try to grab hold of.
Then, when I mentioned that it was THE plane, one of the ladies at our table mentioned that she was friends with one of the higher-ups at the museum, and could probably get me a close-up look at the cockpit, maybe even arrange for me to take pictures.

Serendipity happens like that. When you need a particular thing, so many times it just falls in your lap. I wasn't even looking for information when I went to this dinner. It just appeared.

Sometimes it's an opportunity. Sometimes it's information you need. Sometimes it's a person. What kind of wonderful thing has happened to you like that? Share your serendipity.

thinking of the magical negro

2008-02-25T06:59:00.001-08:00

Recently, I did an interview with Geralyn Beauchamp about her book, Time Masters: Book One, The Call.

Then, later, in yet another discussion among black specfic writers, I actually found myself defending the magical negro. Ah gee, how did that happen? Actually, it's not as if I defended that type of character. I just kinda excused white writers who use them. Yes, i do groan whenever this kind of character pops up in a book written by a white character. But I don't get...well...as bent out of shape as some of my black colleagues do.

Okay, okay, I've heard the arguments against these characters:
1) characters like these pretend to be making us minorities look like good people but it's just another way of dehumanizing us and taking away our individuality.

Yeah, yeah...

As I said to my black friends -- and I was resoundedly challenged and put down for this-- sometimes white writers are trying to do a quota thing. In an email recently with Sylvia Kelso, she mentioned that Connie Willis did not mention any black people in the novel Lincoln's Dreams. Sylvia thought a black character was needed. I, on the other hand, thought... heck, if there was no room for a black character in the story... why put a black character into the story?

And yet, I DO kinda have patience with white writers who feel they need to put a person of color into a book. I remember hearing a Jewish author talk about how annoying it was to see Jews pop up in books merely to "mean" something or to be a symbol. I have seen so many books in which black folks and Jewish folks and Hispanic folks are in books simply to "mean" something.

So there are two reasons for this Magical Negro inclusion bit:

One, a white writer needs to symbolize a triumphant, noble, suffering person...and who best to put in to "mean" this kind of thing but a black person or a Jewish person or a spiritual Native American tree-hugger?

Two, the white writer sometimes needs to put in a black person because the white writer wants to say something about racism. Okay, sometimes it's done badly. Sometimes we're stuck with a poor starving black child of a drug-addicted black mom and they are rescued by a liberal kind-hearted white person. That is the "we as whites are put on earth to raise up the blacks" mentality. Of course this kind of thing is offensive. The "take up the white man's burden" kind of liberality or the "take up the white female's burden" type of liberalness and feminism does make a minority woman of color (whether the white woman is "helping" an Iranian women wearing a hajib or a poor little suffering latina escaping to El Norte or a deluded innocent Christian woman who has been oppressed by the evil patriarchal Christian world or a poor little uneducated black woman with great faith).

But what if the white writer wanted to do something against racism? Stephen King, for instance, is from Maine. I have no doubt -- no doubt, whatsover-- that he does these magical negro types because he lives among folks in Maine who well....may or may know any real Negroes...and who may very well have racist ideas about us. (One day I'll tell you my story about a trip I had in New England. Right now, sufficeth to say, Stephen is probably doing a great job of enlightening certain folks.) I mean...some groups have actually benefitted by being shown as magical. I have yet to hear a gay person complain about the use of the magical gay person in movies, TV, and books. That magical, funny, quirky, witty, idiosyncratic, and just-so-cuddly eccentric magical gay person and the suffering, noble, triumphant gay person has done a lot for making homosexuality more acceptable in modern society. And I have no doubt that all those wise-cracking jolly fat women who roam television have also helped (in some weird way) the black cause. And I am sure that all those movies in which an illegal alien from Mexico is shown as a sweet-faced oppressed person...have colored our view of the immigration degate. So there is some kind of benefit in these portrayals. Heck, even if they can't see us as humans, they at least see us as objects of humor or pity.

But back to my point...reasons for possibly excusing the magical negro. There is the question of honoring a person. By which I mean...what if the white racist actually did come from some lily-white town and actually knew a lovely kind black or minority person who was a symbol of strength and peace. Folks, this kind of thing still happens in this country. This is what Geralyn mentioned in her interview. In her small little town in the west, she had a black teacher. There are black folks all over this country doing the magical negro stuff in their daily lives. (Okay, in real life, they probably are as weak as anyone else...but in their public life as the only black person in the middle of nowhere, they dang well are triumphanting nobly.) What do we do with a black writer who wants to honor such a person?

So, I dunno.... I'm still kinda on the fence when it comes to whether I actually think magical negroes are a totally bad thing. Or maybe I just think that white writers who use them are not so very bad. And honestly, I'm not gonna jump down the throats of any white writer who includes in her novel something that makes me cringe. Of course, I do kinda groan when I see how religious people are treated in books by secular writers. And I'm hoping that whether my books are overtly religious (as in Wind Follower) or subtly so, that those who read my books will finish the book saying, "I know now what a real black person is like. I know now what a real religious person acts like. I will never again indulge in stereotyping them...as magical people, as stupid-in-need-of-enlightenment people, or as evil people." IF I can do that, then I will have succeeded. -C

southern gothic

2008-02-25T04:41:00.001-08:00

Yesterday i saw Monster's Ball. I haven't seen that film in years. Totally had forgotten how Christian the thing is. It's up there with The Apostle, Tender Mercies, Come Early Morning, Miss Firecracker, and a few others as really great spiritual stuff happening in everyday working class settings.

Of course, there are sexual and racial issues in some of this stuff...and I'm not saying that all movies about southerners dealing with their spirituality is free from racism....but these truly are films that delve into grace, persevereance, soul-searching and Christian spirituality.

Of course there are other great films out there that deal with spirituality: A prayer for the Dying, Festen, and the like. And I have to see the film The Bad Lieutenant one of these days (weird sex scenes and all). But what I like about this Southern Gothic thing is the way the authors just unabashedly drop you into the characters' spiritual world. That takes a lotta balanced world-building. The screenwriter has to show a possibly unlikable character (to American viewers who seem to have been trained to judge the likeability of story characters), the writer has to show how the character's religiousness exists side-by-side with the characters' crappy sinful traits. This is often tough because religious readers/viewers are always ready to judge religious characters and reject them for either doctrinal or behavioral reasons. And it's also tough because non-religious people are always ready to see Christians as deluded evil hypocrites anyway. The writer might also have to put in some supernatural stuff into the novel. And all this has to be shown in a casual normal natural way.

I'm glad I saw it. It's inspiring me with my present Work-in-Progress, the novel presently called Inheritance. Am trusting God I can carry it off.

In praise of editors

2008-02-15T16:37:00.000-08:00

This in response to Carole’s comments about those mistakes in our books that we only notice when it's much too late ("Book Flaw Meme")

We all need editors (where would Thomas Wolfe have been without Maxwell Perkins?) and good ones, I think, are no longer easy to come by. To have the chance to work with a good one is a matter for much rejoicing. A month of hard slogging on the final draft of my latest young adult historical, in partnership with a skilled and astute editor at a small Canadian literary press, has left me tired but very grateful. I was equally pleased with Paula Guran’s thoughtful, unobtrusive copy-editing of Juno’s Sarsen Witch reissue.

Too often I pick up a book by a well-known author and find it riddled with typos. A recent winner of Canada’s prestigious Governor-General’s Award confused “lie” with “lay” – not once but twice. Clearly the copy-editor had nodded off at his/her desk. A friend reading a novel from a large and respected British publishing house counted something like forty mistakes in the first few chapters. She fired off an indignant letter to the publisher, enumerating the errors. The publisher, with typical British aplomb, wrote back to thank her for the corrections, and suggested that she let them know if she found any others. My friend’s response was, “Certainly – and my editing fee is….”

My first novel back in the eighties got caught up in the publisher’s change of ownership, when apparently there was no copy-editor. When I received the page proofs, I saw that almost every one of my typos had been faithfully reproduced, and a few more added for good measure. On the other hand, there’s the copy-editor from hell, who makes as many changes as possible in order to look productive. I had one of those, years ago. He or she felt compelled not only to correct my mistakes, but to completely change my style. (Fortunately the editor in charge intervened, and allowed me to change everything back.)

So this is a slightly belated Valentine to the good editors of this world – may their tribe increase!

Elegant Neurosis

2008-02-12T08:21:00.000-08:00

Balance, balance, balance!

Well, i'm only about 120 pages into Inheritance, The Claimed, or whatever it's going to be called. There I am writing along and sending sex scenes to Sylvia Kelso, the author of Amberlight and to Robert Fleming, the author of Fever in the Blood.

Both of them think the sex scene is cold. Well, ...uh...yeah. I tend to write third person novels very coldly. But also, I write sex scenes very coldly and distantly. Maybe it's cause I'm a little sexually cold myself. (Am just putting that out there but I don't think I am. At least I hope I'm not.) But the other problem, that Rob pointed out, was that I am putting too much of myself into the book.

Now, that is one of my major issues as a writer. I tend to put all my soul and self into a novel. That is the blessing and the curse of my writing. An elementary teacher of mine, my french teacher, Mrs Meyerowitz, used to say that the blessing was the curse. So my blessing, and the beauty of my stories is that I put all my joy, pain, and idiosyncracies into my stories.

For instance: ever since my East-Indian half-sister told me my father liked her better because she was light-skinned, I have never been able to look into a mirror. (Trust me, you would not want to see what I look like now.) I gave this trait to Satha, my main female character in Wind Follower.

Another example: My father cheated on my mother relentlessly. Mercifully, she divorced him. I have such an issue with adultery it isn't sane. So what do i do with it? I give it to Loic, my main male character in Wind Follower. The kid hates his adulterous step-mother even more than his father does...and even his father calls him on it: "You carry my offense as if it were your own." (Something like that. I don't have the book with me.)

My issues about the death of my mother and my existential despair over my own health of course pops into the book in a couple of Satha's soliloquies...even her fear that the Creator or her husband would not abandon her.

So yeah....everything...and I mean EVERYTHING....that goes on in my spiritual, physical, familial, and psychological life ends up in my stories. That's what makes my stories beautiful, i think. Not the beauty of the words, but the honesty and the self-revealing of my soul.

But dang! When I'm writing these things, I have to be very careful. At a storytelling conference, I once heard a storyteller say, "Storytelling is my most elegant use of my neurosis." That's what I aim for....elegance. Yeah, I want my neurosis out there in the book. But I want them to be so wonderfully rendered (nice word that, like clarified oil out of gross fat) that only the purity of soul and the soul's need for God and clarity can shine forth.

So back to this sex scene and to inheritance/the claimed/whatever. I am writing a love story between a kid 27 year old bi-racial Chinese-Native American guy and a Jamaican-American dark-skinned woman who is 48. And I have to see if I a dark-skinned black woman can actually believe that this could happen. (Sure it has happened in real life...and I think it's kinda cute when some cute young thing develops a crush on me. But I never take it seriously...no matter how much the kid takes it seriously.) And that's the problem now. My female character has to take it seriously. She HAS to. She has to get rid of the familial and societal brainwashing and believe she can be loved.

And I have to believe it to. Or else the thing just won't work. The Bible says a true witness delivers souls. So as a Christian writer, I believe I am called to be a witness of what is true about the power of love, spiritual beauty and change. So, I have to make her journey neurotic and true....but also elegant.

Carl Brandon Society Recommended Books for 2008 Black History Month

2008-02-03T10:56:00.000-08:00

The Carl Brandon Society is a writing group dedicated to promoting science fiction, speculative fiction and fantasy written by people of color. Their list of recommended books for 2008 are as follows:

THE CARL BRANDON SOCIETY
recommends the following books for BLACK HISTORY MONTH:

• "So Long Been Dreaming: Postcolonial Science Fiction & Fantasy"
edited by Nalo Hopkinson and Uppinder Mehan

• "Parable of the Sower" by Octavia Butler
• "Dhalgren" by Samuel R. Delany

• "My Soul to Keep" by Tananarive Due

• "The Coyote Kings of the Space Age Bachelor Pad" by
Minister Faust
• "Mindscape" by Andrea Hairston

• "Wind Follower" by Carole McDonnell

• "Futureland" by Walter Mosley

• "The Shadow Speaker" by Nnedi Okorafor-Mbachu

• "Zahrah the Windseeker" by Nnedi Okorafor-Mbachu

And the 2005 CARL BRANDON SOCIETY AWARD Winners:

• PARALLAX AWARD given to works of speculative fiction created by a
person of color: "47" by Walter Mosley

• KINDRED AWARD given to any work of speculative fiction dealing with
issues of race and ethnicity; nominees may be of any racial or ethnic
group: "Stormwitch" by Susan Vaught

Book Flaw Meme

2008-02-03T05:57:00.000-08:00

Gabriel Garcia Marquez, one of my favorite writers, once stated that his book One Hundred Years of Solitude had 99 mistakes. Seeing my experience with Wind Follower, I can TOTALLY BELIEVE this.

Okay, unlike Marquez, I didn't forget I had killed off a character and have said character show up later. (I know better than to write: "All in the house were killed that night." Generalizing like that is just asking for trouble.)

Okay, I'll be the first to be painfully honest here....

I'm not talking about typos...Heck...that's not my fault. It's the copy-editor. Granted I should type and proof better but, well....

I'm talking about errors of continuity: Did I say it was night? If so, why, three paragraphs later, is the sun shining? I did this TWICE!!!

I'm talking memory lapses: Did I give the Third Wife brown hair at the beginning and make it red later on? I can only imagine what I did with eye color.

I'm talking unintentional humor because of bad editing and/or purple prose: "Standing in front of me, his fingers played upon my lips."

I'm talking about "the missing scene" which you should have written but simply didn't think of writing until the book had been published a year: I SOOO wish I had written a scene where Loic finds the body of a discarded decomposing newborn baby.

Now, who will I tag with this meme?

I think I'll tag Stacia Kane,
Greg Banks, moondancerdrake

Then tag three other people.

Embattled

2008-02-01T05:37:00.000-08:00

Well, am in the first part of my WIP Inheritance. (Which I might be calling "Til all these things be done") and once again my characters are embattled.

I have to speak a word about embattledness and the dangers of melodrama. I am a total believer that there are a few folks in life who are embattled on many sides, that there is always human darkness, demonic darkness, world issues that get in the way of folks living some kind of a good, happy, or sane life.

The depiction of these kind of characters can either lead to wonderful heroes (in fantasy) or melodrama (in mainstream novels). There's also the question of believability. One wants to push the envelope by holding a mirror up to life -- as some great writer once said-- but at the same time holding up that mirror may not work because some folks simply are not going to believe that all that crap can happen to one person.

Let's say one has had -- or one knows a person who has had-- a really tough life. Then one really has to choose what aspects of that life one will describe and what aspects one will leave out of the story. Or else it won't work for some folks who think you're just engaging in character torture.

I had a Wyoming pen-pal who said to me once, "I don't see why black folks talk about racism. It's as if they think no one has suffered. I've suffered too. I had a child out of wedlock. I was married to a drunk." I realized to my extreme surprise that she thought that the ONLY problem black folks had was racism. She didn't realize that some Black folks have had her problems as well but then race gets added into the mix. Racism is just hard for some folks to understand. I'll just say, "Imagine dealing with having to take one's mother off life support and then add racist doctors and racist social workers in the mix." OR add "Anti-Christian racist doctors." Trust me, folks, it's a trip!

Black writers have to write a story that gives a character the sorrows of regular life ...and at the same time has to slip into the story the sorrows that racism brings. I've read stories that seem to be about either one or the other but not both. And I've read stories that have both of these challenges. Add being a Christian to the mix, or being sickly...and well...folks don't realize you're telling all your heart and sharing your experiences of life. They think you're piling it on.

I suppose one could compartmentalize one's sorrows into different books but what's the use of that? Not that a writer writes to be known by all her readers, but she writes to explain something. And I want to write about being embattled.(With of course some religion and kinky sex thrown in. We're talking succubus, after all.)

Carole's body parts meme

2008-01-30T14:59:00.000-08:00

Her head and chin resting in her hands, her elbows on her knees, and tears streaming from her eyes and across her cheek, Molly remembered his cheek as he had elbowed her when he saw her eyeing the tear in Fabio's shirt. No, he had not taken it on the chin, telling her that he (k)needed her to love him alone..with all her heart, mind, body and soul. That would mean toeing the line.

(added this as a comment then realized it should've been a post.)
-C

Body parts meme

2008-01-30T06:56:00.000-08:00

I'm so close to completing The New Sirens--working title of the sequel to Seaborn, that I took time tonight to go back and look at notes from my writing/crit group for the early chapters. One of the sentences called out as "nice" in chapter one is,

She kicked higher, pulling Shelly by the hand, one foot bounding off Ochleros' arm, up to his shoulder where she set her feet down and leaned an elbow against the sea-demon's ear.

Forget about the context, sea-demons, who Ochleros or Shelly is, or whether this sentence is really "nice," and focus on the hand, foot, arm, shoulder, feet, elbow, and ear. That is a nice pile of body parts in one place, seven of them. I didn't do this on purpose, it came out in the action. She's in the water, kicking to a nice high, comfortable place--and as everyone knows, sea-demons just love to have their ears elbowed.

Okay, it's meme time:

How many body parts can you plausibly jam into a sentence without simply listing them? Internal parts as well. I for one would like to read a sentence with "lung," "earlobe," and "big toe" in it.

Not going to tag anyone. I'm going to x-post. Open to all. Leave a sentence in a comment here, or post it on your blog, journal, or wherever you soapbox.

DreamCast for Wind Follower

2008-01-26T07:47:00.001-08:00

Okay, deep in my heart I want Wind Follower to be a super CGI film, but if we decided to use a human cast instead of an animated one, here is my dreamcast for Wind Follower:

First up, the Pagatsu household.

Loic should be played by Takeshi Kaneshiro

Or James Duval who is of Vietnamese-French heritage and was in the Native American Film, The Doe Boy.

Both of them are good, I think. Except that perhaps they are a bit old for the part. And they aren't animated beings.

The actress Gina Pareno would be Jontay

Andy Lau would make a grea Taer.

Firmine Richards would make a great Monua

Now I have to find a dark-skinned black actress for Satha...although I really feel Jennifer Hudson would be a great Satha.

Personal Demons countdown

2008-01-14T06:19:00.000-08:00

A countdown timer for Stacia's next book:

Here's the code to copy and paste if you want to place this on your site:


<iframe scrolling="no" style="width:214px;height:314px;" frameborder="0" src="http://the0phrastus.typepad.com/countdownPersonalDemons.htm" marginheight="0" marginwidth="0"></iframe>

Stacia: I stuck the countdown script on my blog, but you can post it anywhere. You can find it here: http://the0phrastus.typepad.com/countdownPersonalDemons.htm

Top Ten Signals the Book is one of Mine (Sylvia Kelso)

2008-01-14T03:14:00.000-08:00

Top Ten Signals the Book is One of Mine (Sylvia Kelso)

1. Most often it’s written in first person, sometimes two or even three voices of same. I like first person for the potential to bias and limit the viewpoint, and even better, produce an unreliable narrator. I also like present tense, much to some readers' protests.

2. The characters are smart – all of them. (I get told this, so I hope it’s true.)

3. The hero has a Very Bad Time, not limited to lots of angst.

4. The fantasies, if not the SF, can often be tagged as moral Swords and Sorcery. The point isn’t having power so much handling it morally.

5. There are some literally explosive endings – volcanic eruptions, that kind of thing.

6. There are always politics, NOT intended as allegories of ours, and they’re complicated.

7. The land – or landscapes – are conspicuous, important, and beautiful.

8. The protagonist can be male or female, no apparent continued bias to either.

9. The style is also noticeable. Apparently you’ll either love or hate it. I don’t plan for that, it just happens.

10. There’s more than a dash of sex, not always straight, and the occasional dash of comedy.

Top ten signs a book was written by me (Chris Howard)

2008-01-10T18:42:00.000-08:00

Top ten signs a book was written by me (Chris Howard)

1. Half the book takes place underwater.

2. The other half is no more than three miles from the coast, on board a ship, close to the water, you get it.

3. There's at least one good line in ancient Greek ...têi kreagrai tôn orchipedôn helkoimên es abysson.

4. At least one of the families--the protag's or some other major characters'--is really messed up, capital D Dysfunctional--hell, capitalize all the letters.

5. Someone commits suicide--usually for a cause.

6. There's a brutal internal struggle going on--I love plot lines around characters fighting themselves, fighting some change in themselves.

7. Female protag. I haven't written a male protagonist in the last three novels.

8. Someone is brought back from the dead--sometimes many someones, sometimes many times, sometimes armies of them.

9. One of the characters is from the Azores. (I can't say why this is, some deep fascination with the islands, I'm thinking).

10. Aristotle is mentioned in a favorable light, if not all out gushed over. "Greatest hacker who ever lived, man."

Top tipoffs you're reading a Carole McDonnell story

2008-01-10T09:37:00.000-08:00

First person with strange narrative or third person with strange narrativeI tend to always write in the first person. Frankly, I'm scared of the third person narration. When I do it it feels flat and banal. I simply cannot write it straight. Plus...when I write in the third person, the characters seem distance. Unless I make the story a fairy-tale or very stylized.

Estranged Brothers/Family Outcast/In-law problems/Isolated from society, clan or casteYes, although I have no brothers. Brothers separated through ideology or family circumstances seem to abound. Seems something external to my own life has so affected my brain that this idea has become a part of my subconscious. I wonder if it was because I read King Lear and loved it so much. This occurred in my short story, Homecoming at the Borderlands Cafe (published in Jigsaw Nation) and in Wind Follower.

Very kind people/Moral TreacheryI suspect that like Blance Dubois, I live trusting in the kindness of people. I love kindness. But I also love moral treachery. Betraying friends. I can only think I was influenced by Tristan and Isolde, and by Wings of a Dove. Manners and societal issues are very important, especially etiquette. As Talking Heads sang, "I hate people when they're not polite."

An ill main character.Whether it's mental illness, physical illness, developmental delay...all my stories have at least one character with a life that has been thwarted by some grievous emotional or physical wound. My story Black is the color of my true love's hair, published in Fantastical Visions III has an Irish knight who is riding home from the Crusades who has been wounded by a sword...and the wound is incurable. My characters also cannot sleep.

Sexual issuesAh me! I think sex is so dang complicated. Sex used as a sleeping pill. Sex used as a means of comfort. Sex used to manipulate. I don't know if any of my characters have ever had any kind of sane sex. Relationships between older women and young men. Loic in Wind Follower had mother issues. In addition, most of my characters truly don't believe they are loved. Often, the love that another person has for them is all they really have.

Morbid introspection/Religion/Existentialism/WorldwearinessMy books always have some religious issue. Sometimes there are political issues fighting against it. Accompanying this religious atmosphere is often a heavy dose of morbid introspection. My characters are too honest with themselves about their temptation and sin.

Married protagonistsInterracial/intercultural marriage, odd combinations, or May-July relationshipsRomance is about finding the right and perfect person. Often one of my characters falls in love at first sight. In my story characters are always thinking of marriage. Marriage is the most romantic of journeys. Then there is life versus love. Can the love survive?

Hubby is white and I'm black so I guess that explains why I do interracial relationships. My characters don't fall into the typical physical ideal.

A challenge to my readersI can't help it. I don't like to think of myself as argumentative but I always have to get some political point into my books, and I totally don't care who it offends. Some sections in my books can make a reader angry or uncomfortable.

A poetic normalcyI love normal life. I like sincerity in stories about normal folks. I read a lot of memoirs and nonfiction and my narration feels like a normal person is narrating it. Yet the narration has to be lyrical and beautiful and poetic.

Religion, The Supernatural and GodThe supernatural is such an important part of my life. For some religion is all about dogma and doctrine but Biblical Christianity has a lot of supernatural stuff in it. Plus I'm Jamaican. The Jamaican and the Pentecostal mentality in me always has to make religion supernatural. My characters often need some supernatural event to help them out of their fix. They are also very aware of sin. Redemption and the love of God is very important. Even if religion isn't Christianity, I'd like to think that something in the book shows my relationship with my Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ.

Top Ten Signs a Book was Written by Me

2008-01-10T03:47:00.001-08:00

This is a little meme that's been going around, I got it from the Fangs Fur & Fey livejournal community (and posted this there too.)

I'd love to see my fellow Juno authors' Top Tens!

1. Third person. I'm not a fan of first person and don't write in it. My romances are, of course, written from third omniscient, but my urban fantasy is strictly from the heroine's POV.

2. Absent Families. Either they're dead or they're just a bunch of jerks, but not one heroine I've ever written has had a warm family relationship. Fathers often sell their kids out. Mothers are cruel and distant.

3. Everybody drinks like they're trying to keep up with Dean Martin. And they drink all sorts of things. The heroes might have a preference for Scotch, but basically, if you show a bottle of booze to a character in one of my books they'll drink it.

4. Twist endings. Not all of my books have them, but the large majority does. Either the villain's motives aren't what they seemed, or the guy we thought was the bad guy isn't. Even if it isn't a major plot point (it usually is), at some point we're going to be surprised.

5. Smoking. Yeah, I know. Not everyone smokes, but enough people do that it's safe to say if you pick up one of my books chances are somebody, some time, is going to smoke a cigarette.

6. Smooth dialogue, everybody is smart. Nobody is stupid (at least nobody we're supposed to like), not even the characters who never had an education. They may not know algebra but they have agile minds, and their dialogue tends to be quick and clean.

7. Manners/the man pays. Oh, yes. My characters use each others' last names regularly and often wait to be invited to use firsts. My men open doors, believe in "ladies first", prepare drinks, and always pay for meals (unless the heroine specifically does the inviting.) They get a little anal about it, too, sometimes. Even my poor uneducated men know how to treat a lady, and that's how they see them, too--as ladies.

8. Everybody has great sex. Like I said, my heroes believe in ladies first.

9. Heroes are dark/heroines are slim. Both personally and physically. I'm another one who just doesn't find blond men terribly appealing as a rule, so my heroes have dark hair and dark eyes. Most of them have Deep Secrets too, or if they don't they're just plain criminals. Also, my heroines tend not to be curvy. They're slim, small-breasted, probably not particularly tall, and average pretty.

10. Violence/stuff explodes/car chases/infernos. Oh how I love action. People in my books are always running, away from the crazy guy with the knife or the evil spirit they don't yet know how to defeat. They're in the car breaking laws as bad guys shoot at them or hordes of vampires chase them. Fire is everywhere. Houses catch fire, warehouses, corpses, heroes are fire demons who can burn stuff to a crisp just by thinking of it--now that I'm thinking of it, if something isn't burning yet in one of my books it's probably at least been foreshadowed. Just give it time. Everything burns.

I have also done a preliminary Stacia Kane website. It's here. If you have a minute, check it out. I think it's pretty blah, but as I said on livejournal last night, I really find GoDaddy's "Web Site Tonight" web builder to be difficult and painful to use. It's slow, it's not very customizeable...argh. Just a pain in the butt. So please be kind. :-)

In defense of romance

2008-01-05T06:38:00.001-08:00

I have a writer acquaintance... a good soul who is way more famous than I am...a good person... except that she doesn't think much of romance. She belittles it often and very often bewails the fact that people feel compelled to put a love story into a novel.

Well, I tend to think romance is important. All the divorces, all the broken-hearted children of divorce, all the grieving lonely folks out there....all attest to the importance of romance (or the lack of romance) in our lives. A good romance lightens the heart. A sour romance destroys the spirit -- usually temporarily, often permanently.

Romance novels are about the pairings between people. In heterosexual novels, they are about the creation of a family. Jane Austen wrote novels about marriageableness because she felt class, personal idiosyncracies, and intellect all must work together to create a good marriage. And why was Jane so interested in marriage? Ever read her life? Ever studied her flaky mother who had pretensions to gentility and who sent off all her children at birth until they were of age to return home? And didn't accept one particular son because he had a mental and physical defect, sending the kid off forever? Ah, of such a life is a romance writer born!

I write romance because all around me I see the effect of love and weird marital pairings. Generally, my characters are married and involved in very loving, very unhappy marriages. Being American, I was taught by television romance that marriages were either loving and happy or unloving and unhappy. But as I grew up I began to realize there was something very untrue about that. I was surrounded by loving unhappy marriages. People with sick spouses, insane spouses, sick children, sick parents, poor lives. The love and faithfulness they showed each other certainly wasn't mirrored often in the stories I saw on television. On television, people gave as reasons for their divorce: "I've fallen in love with someone else" or "my mother-in-law broke up my marriage" or "we married too young" or "I just couldn't take it (whatever it was) any longer" or "we were poor and that just destroyed our marriage."

Honestly, there were a few divorces in my neighborhood but folks just didn't divorce that quickly. Perhaps because they were poor, perhaps because they were very religious (Orthodox Jewish, Evangelical Christian, and Roman Catholic) but they just kinda endured and created an odd kind of deep enduring love. And it's that enduring that fascinates me. What is that deep part of the human soul that enables them to be faithful to someone throughout all kinds of adversity? Why does a woman stay with a drunk husband because she loves him? Why does a handsome gorgeous husband stay with a fat overweight sickly wife because he loves her? What is that love about? Even now, when I walk around my neighborhood and listen to old women whining about their old husbands, I'm amazed at how much love is present in such hard marriages.

I am also very interested in the decisions -- generally, the small decision that ultimately destroys a life...or makes that life harder than it should be. Young folks are always making bad decisions without quite realizing it. And women, alas, when they marry are often pulled into a strange weird ride by their husbands. That's what happens in Wind Follower. That's what happens in many marriages. You hitch your wagon to that horse (or star) or mule (or dull asteroid) and many people stick it out. Why?

I am also fascinated by inequalities in love. There is a french saying, "There is always one who kisses and one who turns the cheek." Loose translation: "one person often loves more than the other." What's that about? I'm still unsure if my character Satha is even in love with her husband Loic. But I am sure that Loic loves and adores her. Hey, I've seen enough instances of my poor female friends hooking up with rich guys simply because they can get a better life. And what's wrong with that? If a poor woman is pretty and has the opportunity to marry a rich adoring single guy...I say go for it. Not feminism, I know. But many of the feminists I know haven't been as poor or desperate as some of my hood friends who grew up without fathers or without a proper home.

That also dovetails nicely into stories about a character's need for an extended family (or not) affects marital choices. I grew up in an extended family, shunted from family member to family member after my father deserted my mother for another woman. What happened? I married into a large Irish clan. I had a choice between a guy with virtually no family and a guy from a large irish clan. Guess what I chose? Luckily I was lucky. My marriage is a good loving one, but I'd say that health issues etc has made it fall into the category of loving-but-hard marriages. Which I am beginning to see is very common.

So that's what I write about. Not that I believe a romance novel actually enlightens us about who or how we love. But at least, we examine it. And that's what romance is about, isn't it? The examination of love in its deepest most enduring aspects.

Juno Books widget update

2008-01-02T18:54:00.000-08:00

Here's a no-countdown version of the widget I posted here.

The directions for use are almost the same. A few differences: you can include a blurb in this version and this one uses the cover images from juno-books.com. This one's also a little narrower (180 pixels wide) so it can be used sidebars all over the Web.

1. Download the widget code here. (Right-click, Save Target As...)

2. Open the file up and change the book and link information to your own.

3. Save it someplace on the Web, someplace you can get to it from a web browser (For example, here on FBTO).

4. Change the "src=" link in the following IFrame code to the file you saved in Step 3, and place the IFram code in your blog, web page, anywhere, pass it around to all your blogging friends, readers, fans.

Here's the IFrame code:

Here's an example with Wind Follower:

Please post a comment here with questions--if you need help getting your book information, help with placing the widget code somewhere on the web. You can also email me with questions: chrishoward.author@gmail.com

Aiming High

2008-01-01T06:51:00.000-08:00

I'm going to sound awfully vain right now but hey....

I expected Wind Follower to be on a lot of best of lists. Now, part of this is normal writer expectation. When writing, most honest writers truly believe they have written the best book in the world. (Hey, you have to be conceited enough to survive in this publishing world.) The other part is that, well, I was a literature major in college. That's all I did. In fact I never took any writing classes. So reading all those wonderful literary works, one gets this idea in one's head that one day one will do a great work also.

Well, Wind Follower was on a few best of lists. A few. Several reviewers placed it in their top ten favorite books of all time. Some included it in their best of the year list. Some liked certain aspects of it.

But the resounding universal praise for it just isn't there. (Okay, I'm whining...and I know it.) One reason for this is that many people still haven't heard of it. Another reason is that the book, like all books, isn't to everyone's taste. Very few books, great or not, is liked by everyone. If one considers all the lists out there -- in this case, all the speculative fiction lists-- very few books are on ALL those lists.

At first I was feeling a bit forgotten, rejected and alone. But then I got sane. Or as sane as a writer can be. I'm a debut author, after all. I have to aim high. And herein lies the big decisions: Lord knows what aiming high actually entails. Many reviewers loved the originality of my setting. Question: should I aim for another original setting? Many reviewers loved the beauty of the language. Again, the same question: should I try to repeat that in my next work?

The search for the perfect reader, I'm beginning to realize, can be a self-denying self-thwarting search...especially for people-pleasers with rejection issues. What if I don't want to write another story like Wind Follower? At least not now? What if something grittier, less lovely, less fantastical calls me? What if something within me wants to write a book about sexual healing in contemporary time? Would those who love my original setting follow me into contemporary realms? Would those who love beautiful language want to hear harsh urban sounds? Would those who like its Christian elements turn against me if I write a book that is frankly very political and racial?

I've asked my hubby and friends who they believe my perfect readers might be. They tell me that all my stories are very heart-felt, barebones emotions, aching. They say that my core readers will be people who like to be taken on a devastating, but truthful, heart ride. There will be concentric circles and tangential circles filled with other kinds of fans: those who like Carole McDonnell stories when she writes about black issues, those who like Carole McDonnell stories when she writes high fantasy, those who like Carole McDonnell stories when she writes about religion, those who like Carole McDonnell stories even when she has a miserable noble failure. Etc, Etc. And there will be circles completely far from these circles: those who do not like Carole McDonnell stories at all.

The thing for me to do, however, is to write...and to see clear...and to create only those stories that God and my soul need me to write.

So...come what may, come new story -- whatever you are-- Onward. And welcome to those of you who will be my core fans. -C

Massa's Tools

2007-12-25T05:21:00.000-08:00

It was Audre Lorde who said something like, "We must use massa's tools to dismantle massa's house." Loose translation: We're in a world ruled by the aesthetics, languages, laws, etc of the imperialistic powers and we have to use those laws, aesthetics, languages, etc to show our minority truths. Or "fight fire with fire."

It's a bit like the African Proverb: As long as lions don't speak, only the hunters' stories will be heard.

Well, here I am: sitting at my computer and trying to see what tools I'll be using on my new WIP, Inheritance.

In Wind Follower, I tried my best to use high fantasy language to write about the heroic victims of imperialism. I tried to show those cultures who aren't normally considered worthy of mythic fantastical literature to a world that often only thinks fantasy literature as a European genre. In a world where dark-skinned black women are called "ho's", and looked down upon (I'm talking about you Martin Lawrence with your sheneneh, and you Eddie Murphy of Norbit fame), I wanted to show black women as being virginal, sought after (yeah, by non-black guys) and deeply loved. Of course I had other issues in Wind Follower too. Religion, primarily. I wanted to show how religion interweaves with folklore and popular worship and human interpretations and predilictions of the common man. Well, I think I kinda succeeded. For the nonce anyway. With every new book, an author has to learn how to write all over again.

So, now I'm into Inheritance and again all my minority and ethnic issues have popped up. This time my love for common people is really pushing me. It wants to be in the book. It wants to be raised to the status of high art. Kinda like the Grapes of Wrath of urban fantasy literature. I want to write about normal folks --white country folks, black folks-- in a weird spiritual and supernatural situation. Now, how am I gonna do that?

Which of Massa's tools should I use? I'd like to use urban street language or black folklore speak or white country talk. I'd like to attempt to raise the langauge of the book to a level of loveliness that is as beautiful and geographically/linguistically precise as high fantasy is to Celtic United Kingdom. But dang! Can I do it? And do I have to use folklore-rap-or country talk? How brave can I be? A part of me wants to use high langauge in upstate New York and among the urban streets. But would it work? I'm sure it could work...in the hands of a good writer. But dang, folks, how good a writer am I? And how much risk am I willing to take? And how weird am I willing to let the story be?

I went all out with Wind Follower and that was an exercise in bravery. I wanted to see if I could put all of my soul into a story. Sometimes I flinched when I realized that certain aspects of me may not fit into the story. Sex and religion. Feminism and a patriarchal God. Declaring my love of the imperialist's religion yet my dislike of the imperialists themselves and my dislike of spirits, clerics, shamans, priests and all who intervened between God and humans. Trust me: it was very brave to write about such things and not seem polemical, naive, a traitor-to-the-cause, an angry-black-woman, simple-bible-believing-black-woman-who-don't-know-no-better, or deluded. However, the book cohesed gracefully (if i do say so myself) and my bravery was rewarded with its publication. Can I walk out in faith again and do something utterly totally "me" again?

Juno Books Countdown Widget

2007-12-22T19:34:00.000-08:00

Here's something for the Juno Books authors with a future release date--that includes me! I like the idea of a graphical panel with links for pre-ordering, book info, and a countdown timer to the release date. So, I spent a couple hours goofing with javascript, images, styles, etc., and created the Juno Books Countdown Widget.

Here's what it looks like with Dru's book out in April:

I posted the code and directions on my blog. (http://the0phrastus.typepad.com/). Grab it, fill in the values for title, author, image URL, and a few links to Book Sense, Amazon, Barnes & Noble. Paste the code in your blog sidebar, any web page, and you're done.

Resolutions for 2008

2007-12-20T08:06:00.000-08:00

Well, it's that time of year again. And as they say, we writers have to plan and schedule our time. I don't even want to put all my scattered thoughts into a list. Might just overwhelm me but here goes:

1) The eunuch's wife -- A short story based on Joseph story in Bible. I've been thinking about this and it should be a very bittersweet story. Hey, I can't help it. I like a lot of the Biblical so-called bad guys.

2) The Gleaners -- Caribbean Harry Potter slavery story. Janet Lorimer gave me some ideas on this.

3) Inheritance -- novel May-August multiracial love story suspense psychological thriller. I have scenes for this one. Am about 68 pages into it but I've been doing other shorter pieces and just jumping around from project to project. I think it's cause I don't quite have the "voice" for this story yet. But nevertheless...am gonna finish it in 2008 (deo volente)

4) Daughters of Men -- novel based on Nephilim. Honestly! This story is all there. Already finished. Liked. Paul Witcover liked it. Dorchester almost bought it. It's just a mess and even Miss Paula says it needs a lotta work. Why can't I just finish it?

5) Exotic -- slipstream story for Subtle Edens. Have a great idea for a story about a woman's romantic daydreams. Prose poem pseudo-memoir.

6) Send letter to local community college telling them I'd like to teach creative writing there. Janet's ideas are really working in my brain. Just want to see if I can commit to doing this kinda thing. I so hate administration academic issues. How Sylvia does it I never know!

7) Buy a new house. Intend to do this with some money I intend to get from Wind Follower. Hey, maybe a movie deal. Who knows? With God all things are possible.

8) Sell or repair old house.

9) Lose 100 pounds -- Am presently avoiding wheat and trying to drink a lotta water. Who knows? Been 23 years since I was skinny. Back in the day doors would open by themselves as I approached. I was that cute!

10) learn to ride a bike -- hubby keeps telling me he would teach me. Twenty six years and still hasn't done so.

11) publish my non-fiction Bible study via Lulu. I'll still give the free download on my site but I'd like to see it as a book today.

12) Get and accept a ghostwriting job from my friend's agent. That would mean so much committment. But hey, the right job and the right client would be a trip. And hey, getting anywhere from $10,000 to $75,000 for a six month writing job is pretty swift.

Anyone else?

http://darkparables.blogspot.com/2007/12/resolution-for-2008.html

Balance

2007-12-17T09:00:00.000-08:00

So much of the writing craft is about balance, how much to tell the reader. There are many aspects of this balance: how many hints, how deep the info--too much and you give away the surprise, or you kill your suspense. I have been struggling with this very issue in the sequel to Seaborn, but I'm thinking of another aspect of balance.

How much do you write for the present, an audience of today but not tomorrow? How much history, cultural depth do you--or should you--fill your pages with? It's a question for genre, historic, contemporary, all kinds of lit--even purely made up worlds. Although there are differences with the last because a reader cannot know your world without you. Unlike our world--this world--21st Century Earth--where I can have two characters talking about a tyrant's downfall and have one say, "He'll most likely end up like Hitler."--and leave it at that. I don't need to explain. There are facts a storyteller can assume a reader will know, but it is that assumption that is the balance we have to deal with: can you assume that all audiences will know? Is the best bet to pick your audience and write to their level of understanding--their current level of understanding at this point in time?

3 o'clock this morning, Antisthenes by way of Aristotle got me thinking about this, because Ari assumed his audience would always know certain facts. In the Politics [around 1284a] there's a great line that goes something like, "...it's like the response from the lions in the parable of Antisthenes when the hares came before the assembly demanding equality." That's it. Aristotle didn't think it necessary to include the lion's response--not when every freakin' kid in the agora knew. But 2400 years later, not every freakin' kid is familiar with Antisthenes' work.

I'm going to spend some thought on this because it's definitely worth keeping in mind when mentioning historic events, cultural references, popular works, Buffy, Harry, Scotty, Freddy, Elmo--will you're readers two millennia away understand you without footnotes? Do they need to? Do all writers write for a certain time, a century, an era, but no more--beyond which they need analysts and historians rooting through the news and Net garbage to find out what the hell you were talking about?

Oh yeah. The lions asked the hares, "Where are your claws and teeth?"

USE YOUR WRITING EXPERIENCE TO GET A TEACHING JOB

2007-12-12T19:51:00.000-08:00

USE YOUR WRITING EXPERIENCE TO GET A TEACHING JOB

You just sold a novel. You may have some short-story sales under your belt, too. Or some articles. You’re about to have a second novel published, and you’re at work on a third. Did you ever think about teaching a “How to….” class?

I have only a Bachelor’s Degree, but because I’ve had a lot of things published, I was able to teach non-credit courses at Leeward Community College in Hawaii. I’m about to do the same in Arizona where I live now.

Most community colleges offer non-credit courses for interested adults. Pick up a catalog from your local college to find out what kinds of non-credit classes they offer. Pay special attention to any section on writing. Memoir writing is fairly popular in my community, but it’s not anything I’m particularly interested in doing or teaching. However, I can teach a class on how to write for children and teens, or how to write a novel, or how to write a short story. I can also teach a class on how to market what you write, although I never guarantee that my students will be published. Heck, I can’t even guarantee that I will get published.

The first thing I do is put together a portfolio with samples of my work. I have photocopied pages from some of my children’s stories and books, articles I’ve sold, and so on. I put each sample in a plastic sleeve and into a binder. I think a professional-looking presentation makes a difference.

I print out a list of my publishing credits to give to the college, but I also have a resume that gives other information, such as where I went to college, what degree I earned, and so on. I already know that the college will probably ask these questions.

Before I call the college to set up an interview appointment, I write up a course outline for each class I want to teach. For example, I plan to teach a class on how to market what you write. So I’m going to include everything from manuscript preparation to query and cover letters to submission packets to how one finds publishers to what records need to be kept, and so on.

As I prepare the outline, I try to come up with exercises, too. For instance, for the class on marketing, I’ll have my students write a story synopsis, a query letter, and probably a cover letter, among other things.

Writing the outline helps me figure out what handouts I may need. Handouts might include sample query letters, or a manuscript that shows and tells the students how to correctly format a manuscript! The college where I’ll be teaching this summer has a policy regarding handouts. They don’t want to photocopy too many, so I need to be judicious.

As for textbooks, the non-credit program may frown on that extra expense. They may feel the students have to pay enough in tuition. That’s something you’ll need to find out at your initial interview.

Writing the outline also helps me figure out how long the course needs to be. I try to give myself enough time to teach each part of the course thoroughly, and time to answer all the questions that arise.

So that’s it. Once I have the course outlined, have my portfolio up to date, know what handouts I’ll need, and can at least make an educated guess about how long it’s going to take to teach the class, I’m ready to approach the college.

One nice thing about non-credit classes – the students are motivated adults. You won’t have to grade them or put anyone into time-out. You will get to share your experience and expertise and help others down the road to – hopefully – publication! And that’s a very satisfying feeling.

The visual side of writing

2007-12-09T12:47:00.000-08:00

Gail's post a few days back got me thinking about motivation and writing...and drawing.

I'm a visual sort of person--maybe we all are. In writing, I always "see" what's happening to my characters, I picture scenes, see the tension in the room through the posture, the space between two characters, the expressions on their faces. I see characters in action and I write what I see. Pretty much the way it works for me.

I have sketched scenes and characters for years, and it helps me in several ways:

Drawing scenes helps anchor the future plot, keeps the plot from straying. Drawing also helps keep the characters fresh. Characters grow during the story. They're rarely--or perhaps shouldn't be--unchanged when you reach the final chapter. An early character sketch can show characters smiling, untroubled by all the bad stuff your plot's going to hand them a moment later. It's good--it works for me anyway--to have character studies at key points in the story.

I also use character studies to keep them fresh in my mind. There's the old writing rule: don't go back and read or edit everything you write. Move forward or you may stall and never complete the book. For the most part I do write forward, but I do look back--mainly for motivation. I go back and re-read my work. A lot. I may read the first 3, 5, 10 chapters a hundred times before I've completed the book's first pass. When those chapters become unbearably dull through over-reading, I usually move on to the middle of the book. And this is where those early character studies help me. They're the inspiration to keep going without having to re-read anything. I don't have to read anything to get a fresh picture of the characters and how far they've come. I just browse the sketches.

I've been drawing and painting for years. I have no formal training. It's mainly just me goofing with a pencil or pen or brush. For a novel, I'll typically draw or paint fifty or sixty pieces, some not much more than quick character outlines in pen or pencil. Others just seem to require more effort, and need to be completed. Here's an example. Click the pic to see the detail view.

At last year's Boskone (Great F&SF convention in Boston every year), Wen Spencer led a room full of us through her sketches--which weren't much more than stick figures--but she didn't need more to show us swords swinging, blood flowing, characters falling, parrying desperately, biting, going in for the kill. With a few pages, she choreographed an entire fight scene. I thought this was brilliant, and reinforced my own views about all the good things a writer can get out of drawing.

It really works for me. What about you? Do you have good (or bad) experiences drawing your characters or scenes? Do you find them helpful?

Here's a quick sketch from a chapter at the end of my current work. It's sloppy, but that doesn't matter. I treat sketches like this as visual counterparts to the stuff in my writing journal. I write notes on them, names, what's going on, where the scene's taking place. It helps keep the scene in mind--even seven chapters away, because it's that scene--that sketch--that's leading me. In this form, the sketch is like a map. It shows me where I need to go.

Click the pic to see the detail view.

Waiting to hear

2007-12-07T09:10:00.000-08:00

Well, I've been working on short stories. Very hard to work on short stories when one is in novel mode but hey, I've got to get my 2 stories into an antho --any antho-- and the year's end is fast approaching. So am waiting to hear from some anthologies. So, please to enjoy...(at least the first couple of chapters) of my latest stories. The first is about a sistah fending off a demon:

HOUSEWARMING (with apologies to Dorothy Parker)

Of all the annoyances! And I’d have to notice him now, with a house full of guests. But of course, that’s the way they are! Hiding themselves away then bingo! This one must’ve hidden out in the attic as the real estate agent showed us around. Figured I wouldn’t go up there, and he was right. But if he thinks I’m a sucker or one who’s going to pity his plight or be afraid of him, he’s got another thing coming. Darn it! If it’s impromptu exorcism he wants, it’s impromptu exorcism he’ll get.
I can not believe it: this fool’s actually hanging around my dinner table like he was invited. This kinda thing just pisses a sistah off. Shouldn’t he have moved on to his eternal home, the invisible realm, the choir celestial? No! He’s got to hang here for.... how long has this dude been dead? Him and his see-through ectoplasmic self!

The second is called, SO FAR, and is about a parchment which tells the reader about his life and challenges him to repair an evil he's done.

In the mind of the universe, the events in this story occurred thousands of years ago. Even so, all the events have yet to happen because you are the chief player, and although you are free to do what you will, your actions are already foretold. Yes, I am speaking to you.
One day, as you – Destiny knows your name, therefore I will not speak it– walk through a marketplace (I will not tell you which), you will begin singing The Song of the Yellow River. You will sing this because you will have just completed a cruel deed and your mind and your body will need rest and the Song of The Yellow River has always soothed your mind ever since childhood.
The song will not be powerful enough to soothe your mind, however, because the crime you will have committed will be so great that your conscience will not be able to endure the memory of it. To further hide your mind from yourself, you will search among the vendors of the market place, looking for sweet, fermented, and spicy dainties, anything to excite your flesh and numb your soul.

I tend to write in different narrative styles, POV's, etc. Simply because whenever I write in third person past tense the story feels too distant to me. Anyways, hope you enjoy. And have a great weekend
-C

Finding One's Way

2007-12-05T15:20:00.000-08:00

I'm not the sort of writer who sits down at the desk/table with the germ of an idea and just wings her way through to the end. Not a "flier into the mist." I have to have a roadmap, I do.

But then, neither can I plot out exactly what scene goes into what chapter, or work out the back story of everyone in the town where my story takes place. I tend to figure out only as much as I have to know to get the job done--and much of the time I don't figure it out until I reach the point where I need it.

In other words, I have to work out the Big Picture before I can really get started with writing, but the Details come later. For instance, when I started writing The Eternal Rose, I knew that the Daryathi were taking Adarans (My heroine is Adaran) as slaves. But I didn't have a clue as to why. Not until the family paid a visit to Obed's cousin. Then it all came clear.

The story I'm currently working on--a romantic science fiction--or maybe a science-fiction romance--is going really slow because I keep having to stop and figure out all the details.
I did work on my world-building before I got started, but even if you know a lot of the whys and wherefores and most of the whats, the little things can still stump you. And sometimes, once you know all that stuff, you still have to figure out the HOW. My hero, a court-savvy, cynical, empire's-capital tough-guy, has to go to the frontier, where he's never been, to investigate troubles in the family business. And I keep thinking of ways he could do it better, and going back to fix it.

Lots of writers say that one should just keep driving for the finish, forget about editing and going back to fix--and for the most part, I do that. I certainly don't go back to polish. And I stick--mostly--to my outline. And I rarely go back more than a few paragraphs. A page at most. But if I decide my hero ought to go to the outer sectors disguised as a dandified bureaucrat with dyed-pink hair instead of wearing a scruffy spaceport tough, that's something I need to fix right away, or it will throw me off my stride. I'd rather fix it as I go than write multiple drafts. I hate multiple drafts. (I say that now, anyway. Watch. I'll probably have to write six drafts of this one poor story...I think I've written as many as two for one story, ever. I frequently have to go back and strip out a subplot, or explain things in my main plot, which means I go over the story a number of times, but they're not really new drafts...)

Anyway, I keep thinking this story is really giving me trouble--except I'm a page over my usual goals two days this week. Not bad...

Committing to the story and not to the words

2007-12-02T04:10:00.000-08:00

I'm currently trying to repair a story, The Gleaners, that's been in my computer for the past four years. I've asked my fellow Juno author, Janet Lorimer, the author of Master of Shadows, to help me whip this thing into shape. Cause the woman's an absolute expert on children's books.

Well, she told me a lot: basics I already knew, the basics I had forgotten, and a whole ton of stuff I hadn't known or imagined. So equipped with all this new knowledge, hopefully, I'll buckle down and get this thing done.

We writers, especially those of us who love poetry, or who came to literature by way of oral storytelling, often have a battle with the words in our stories. Words are a tool. They are meant to serve us and not to lead us around by the nose, and yet sometimes they take total control. I've found that Inspiration is often more about information than about the way the story is told. The muse often spills out story information in whatever voice it feels best. Then it's up to moi to consciously arrange the information. In addition, if my Voice has been affected by certain kinds of storytelling, then in the editing, I have to be very aware of the bad habits I've picked up.

The STORY needs to be told. The thing is to separate the story from its styling. The story can NOT be changed but the words can always be changed to suit the purposes of the story: theme, clarity, chronological order.

I battled that problem with Wind Follower. The King James Version of the Bible was always in my ear. Whether I wanted it to be or not, it kept leading my words around. What resulted was stilted writing. I had to wrestle those lovely poetic words to the ground and tell them that the story was the main thing, the story was the king, and they themselves were nothing but servants to the king. In addition, to knock the KJV stylings out of my mind, I read Native American rhetoric, slave narratives, and Chinese classical poetry (not in the original Chinese) and that helped a lot.

So how do I fix this problem with The Gleaners? I guess I have to put myself in a cold editorial mode. I've got to ask myself: "Woman, you want this story published or not? Do you want this thing hanging around your computer for another four years?"

Then, career questions aside, I've got to ask the story: "If I was telling this story in another style how would I write it? Could I describe this exact scene using different words?" That'll be tough, because already I hear myself saying: "But there is no other way to describe this. I feel the power of the words, I feel the joy of my story when I read this section." Note to self: Puhleze!!!!

So, Gleaners, prepare yourself: I'm about to whip you into shape.

Sell out? Ambassadorial? My People? The Other?

2007-11-29T09:25:00.000-08:00

Please excuse me for the post of this title. I just couldn't come up with an appropriate subject line.

By some weird confluence of cosmic racial thought floating through the ether, I found myself looking at three different takes on the same subject:

First Nnedi, author of Zahrah the Windseeker, asks if she is a sell-out.

Then Alan Schrager writes a post on AllAboutrace.com on his surprise that a black musician didn't know who Miles Davis is.

And I had posted a comment on aaopinion.blogspot.com in which I listed some multicultural writers. I wrote the list because when I went to the book-signing I was asked about other black writers -- as if I was a font of knowledge. So I decided to make a list to carry with me at different readings. I figure I'll also make a list of Christian writers also. One never knows.

Now, this leads to my point. The typical American writer is usually white and if religious, his/her religion doesn't show up blatantly in his/her book. Not to say the typical American writer isn't religious, just that they don't put a LOVE of GOD into all of their books.

So then, what are we atypicals to do? The typical writer doesn't really have to wonder what the OTHER thinks because he/she is not writing to the other. Oh sure, they will try not to create stereotypical characters but as Cindy Ward and Nisi Shawl, authors of Writing the Other have shown, even then the typicals blunder.

But to the main point: These three posts are asking the same questions: Where does my art belong? Where should it belong? How do I approach my art? Do I owe my readers or myself or the Other anything?

Let's face it, Nnedi's post does cut to the chase: Do people want to read a story about people from another culture? And should we write about folks from another culture?

An aside here: In a nation where supposedly "few" people read, reading can be quite a production. It's not like a rap song which even a country singer might hear and indulge in for 5 minutes. And it's not like a movie --only 2 hours, so we can once in a while peer into the lives of cultures unlike our own. (Okay, okay, most Americans don't really go to foreign movies. Except for maybe a Chinese martial arts film. Some folks even balk at English and Australian movies.)

Now, getting down to the immediate -- me-- I have been thinking about what kind of novel I want to write in the future. Notwithstanding the horrible scary fact that three stories are pushing at my brain, I still have some control about what I put in my novel and about A) how much I want to stand apart from the typical B) how much power I actually have to stand apart. After all, even if I choose to write a book that has no religion in it and that has no black folks in it, will someone actually buy a black book. I won't tell you how many times this kind of conversation goes on in black spec-fic circles and in Christian spec-fic circles.

Lately something happened that made me think. (Never a good thing, trust me.) First I've got to say that I'm a Christian and I like anthropology. To me the search for the true God can be seen in the folklore of all peoples. In Wind Follower, I set up a culture around a Bible verse: "The one wounded in the house of his friends." That created a culture in which hospitality was the highest moral value and betrayal of a friend the lowest.

Lately a story came to me which was trying to be a prequel for Wind Follower. I set out to world-build other culture around another Bible verse and around anthropology. But then, a couple of Christians had a problem with my book. Mostly because of the sex scenes and the violence. In short, I wasn't behaving like ONE OF US, but like ONE OF THEM.

There were other problems too. Stories with how the story was written. Stories about the "culture" in the book. It occurred to me that perhaps there were other issues at play. Christian and specfic and Black! Oh my! That was a stretch of the borderlands that many did not cross. So far, I've met Christians who loved the book and were willing to enter that borderland. I've met non-religious or anti-religious people who also loved the book and didn't mind the religious region they found themselves in. What can I say? I'm pretty ambassadorial? When I write, people from other cultures can identify with the folks they find in my narrative region. Of course, they can only identify if they actually bring themselves to read the thing.

And of course, they can only identify if I don't sell out.
Now I find myself asking, "What do I do? Do I write for the black women I know who only like mainstream stories?" "Do I write for non-Christians and leave the religious stuff aside?" Do I write for those who will read a book populated by no more than two black people? Who are my people? Will they claim me? And what if I sell-out? Who will claim me then?

Juno Authors across the web

2007-11-26T03:55:00.001-08:00

Here is a really great spotlight on Sylvia Kelso over at :
Moondancer Drake's Live Journal page

Sylvia's fantasy, THE MOVING WATER (BOOK 2 OF THE RIHANNAR CHRONICLES) - has been shortlisted in the fantasy novel division of the
Aurealis Awards recognising the achievements of Australian science fiction, fantasy and horror writers!

The full list is here.

And there's an interview with Carole McDonnell (moi) over at
Fantasy Magazine

Coming up short

2007-11-25T08:52:00.000-08:00

Back in the day -- about two years ago-- I made a vow which I'll call the 2-2-2-2 vow. The upshot of this vow is that EACH year I would always try to end up in 2 fiction anthologies, hook up with 2 printed journal/ezine magazine editors, publish 2 poems in a poetry anthology, and write 2 essays for non-fiction anthologies. Hey, I was a lit major. We valued anthologized stuff. Anyways, here it is... almost 2008 and I haven't finished any short fiction let alone gotten accepted in any anthology. I've come up short.

In my own defense -- I always have something to say in my own defense-- unlike Hemingway who said he wrote his best short stories when he was avoiding his longer novels, I simply cannot truly focus on perfecting a short story when I'm in novel-mode. Either the short story starts becoming a novel, or I just flitter back and forth through all my Works-in-progress or play a computer solitaire game.

So now I'm trying to catch up. And strangely, three Asian-themed stories have popped into my mind. And, yay, one of them is almost finished. It's called So Far and it's written in future tense, second person. It's lovely and I just have to fight my novelistic soul which wants to turn it into a prequel for Wind Follower. ::shaking head here::

Anyway, there I was...all psyched to begin the second short story which wanted to be a monologue and which I decided to name Villager Uncle Li. Yep, my Asian obsession again. (Lord knows when this obsession began. Maybe after I saw the Jet Li movie, Hero.
But I go to my friend's house and her son says to me, "Ever heard of
Herman Li? He's great! As good as Buckethead." So of course, being a gal who listens to music in order to write, I end up spending my thanksgiving listening to Herman Li who, amazingly looks like how I pictured my main character Loic in Wind Follower. I also loved the coincidence and synchronity. The upshot of all this is that I actually felt as if God was urging me to finish my stories. The short ones about gorgeous Asian guys anyway.

Which gets me thinking. How am I gonna pay back all those artists -- visual or musical-- who have inspired me?
Folks like Dwight Yoakam, Jackson Browne,and
Axl Rose.

Yes, yes...although so much of my writing comes from some erotic part in my mind, there are some women aritst out there I actually listen to when I write. I just can't think of them right now.

Sylvia and her other great hobby

2007-11-21T06:11:00.001-08:00

Over the past few months, I've gotten to know Sylvia Kelso, a fellow Juno Author and the author of Amberlight. At first glance, it would seem as if we have very little in common. The main commonality seems to be that both our books are so odd and hard-to-describe. Wind Follower is folkloric fantasy with a Christian multicultural twist and Amberlight is operatic literary feminist fantasy about a matriarchal society. She's in the Australia outback and I'm in an upstate New York suburban hood. I'm black and she's white. (Not that that should matter.) Anyways, we've been emailing back and forth.

We've discovered that we have a whole lotta stuff in common. For instance, we both are avid music lovers and we both play the violin. Okay, I USED to play the violin. That's Sylvia in the middle.

My computer is becoming filled up with photos of Ms Sylvia busking and arvoing and doing all kinds of folkie stuff in cafes, street festivals etc. The woman also fiddles around (::smile::) with moviemaker software. So, for your viewing pleasure.

And, by the way, please check out Amberlight! It's a great book. Poetic, powerful, literary, grand and operatic.

Born to be adored: my first wind follower booksigning

2007-11-17T15:08:00.000-08:00

Well, I just returned from my first book signing for Wind Follower. It was a "Calling all authors" thingey to celebrate the anniversary of the local Barnes and Noble.

Anyways, I learned a lot from this experience so here goes.

First thing I learned: Do NOT eat mackerel and coconut before a book signing. I don’t know what possessed me but I just had to make the stuff. (It’s called run-down, by the way and it’s a Jamaican delicacy.) One spends the entire time asking one’s sitting mate: Do I smell fishy? (And of course the honest ones alsways say, “yes, you do.” So I was constantly going to the bathroom to wash my hands.)

Second thing I learned: Do NOT trust your older son to bring the car up in time. Just don’t. All night partying etc just doesn’t give way to mom-trying-to-be famous. I had to take a cab to the signing. That kid owes me.

I enter and Nick Olivieri, the CRM who is coordinating the event, is busy moving things and arranging things. The guy is good, let me tell you. Props!

Well, I noticed – cause well I noticed– that the writer I was sitting beside had her amazon reviews all printed out in front of her. Immediately, I tapped Nick. (I got really good at tapping and nagging the poor guy but he was a sport.) Could he go online and go to my website for my reviews? Ten minutes later, he returns with printed copies of my online reviews.

Next thing that happens, a big vase of roses arrives for yours truly. My friends, Mike and Lisa had sent it. They are responsible for feeding the folks at a local army base around here. I was so happy and just felt super-loved. Hey, nobody else had a dozen roses in front of them.

These things go on forever and if the CRM is an easygoing guy he’ll give everyone two or three chances at the apple. The first time I went up I was wonderful the second time I was flustered. This leads to two bits of education.

Third thing I learned: Have two or more ways of presenting the book. I ended up going up three times. First time was amazing. A real high. Then a second woman went and she read from her book. I realized I hadn't read. So at the end of the first round I got up and said to the people: "Oops, forgot to read!" So I read one of my favorite chapters (not the prologue, which is mighty powerful.) Then on the second round, I spoke again and got nervous cause I had already said what I had to say the first go round. And, after shouting out to the store: "I hope no one here has any torture issues" I read the prologue.

Fourth thing I learned: When you’re nervous don’t tell everyone. Two of the other writers told me they didn’t know I was nervous until I said.

Fifth: Bring business cards, postcards, bookmarks. Okay, okay, I should’ve known this one.

Sixth thing: Create a mailing list made up of names culled from people you met at your last store visit. This co-writing team had tons of visitors. Maybe it was cause they were writing a childcare book for parents, who knows? But while the other eight writers were sitting around looking forlorn, these guys seemed to sell a lot of books. Strangely, though, this leads to

the seventh thing I learned: bond with the other authors. The two aforementioned writers ticked the rest of us off. Not because they had all those fans but because they kept to themselves before and after the event and basically acted as if they were the hottest thing since slice bread. At the end when all the writers were exchanging business cards (see above) and news of future events no one approached these superior biddies who were obviously so convinced they were big fish among unimportant small fry. One of the writers I met is in charge of a writers group tour and she's signed me up to go to the Newburgh signing in January.

Eight thing: bring out the microphone early. Enough said.

Ninth thing: Bring a digital camera. Now I have to wait for Nick to send me a couple of photos from his digital camera.

Tenth thing: Bring something to eat. Or bring money to buy something. Better yet: Bring a gopher. These things go on forever sometimes. Note to self: Older son owes you.

Eleventh thing: Don't be too humble. There was a very kind man there with us. His name was Ralph something or other. He is a professor emeritus from New York University and he self-published a book. But he never got up to speak. He kept saying he hated marketing. We chatted a lot. But I don't quite remember his last name. Not good. I don't even remember the name of his book. Interesting, uh?

Twelth thing: Tell the store about other books you were involved in. I totally forgot about the anthologies I was in: Fiction anthologies such as So Long Been Dreaming, edited by Nalo Hopkinson or Fantastical Visions III edited by William Horner or Nobody Passes: essays on gender and identity, edited by Matt/Mattilda Sycamore Bernstein. He's got a great blog over at Nobody passes blogspot Very painful blog, though. So don't go there unless you can deal with sexual pain. Anyway, the thing is I totally forgot that I could have mentioned these other books.

Thirteenth thing: Bring a written list of Juno Authors or other friends' books. The only other Juno Books I saw in the bookstore were Gail Dayton’s The Eternal Rose and Matt Cook’s Blood Magic. I looked for Amberlight by Sylvia Kelso and several others but couldn’t find them. But, of course, I had to depend on my memory for several names. But there's something else about a list. Folks kept asking me stuff as if I was a font of knowledge. Who were good Black crime fiction writers? I thought of my good friend, Robert Fleming. A great writer. Mentioned him, of course, because his name was at the top of my brain. Mentioned Brandon Massey. Cause I remembered his name. But I didn't mention Walter Moseley. Simply forgot he existed. Other folks asked who some great black spec fic writers were: I mentioned Nnedi and Zahrah the Windseeker. Got messed up on how to spell Nnedi's last name. Wasn't sure if her last book was The Shadow Speaker or The Shadow Seeker. Remembered Tobias Buckell's Ragamuffin and Crystal Rain when someone asked about Black Science Fiction writers. Mentioned Tananarive Due, Sheree Thomas, Nalo Hopkinson, Steven Barnes. But for the most part, I was a total blank. So next time I'm gonna have a publicity packet which includes names and titles of black spec fic writers, black crime writers, black christian writers, and Christian writers. Yep, I've got a month and a half until the Newburgh B&N reading so I've got a lot to do.

Anyways, at the end of the presentation, Nick decided he would have an autograph table. So those of us who were eligible for the benefit were asked to sign some of our books. I signed ten. He had ordered 30 and I think we sold five while I was there. The others will be divided and placed in the Fantasy, Romance, and African American sections. I suggested (Okay, so I'm pushy. I'll admit it.) that he turn Wind Follower face forward so black folks walking in the Fantasy section would see that there was a black character on the cover.) Anyway, I am now in four different sections of the bookstore. I almost asked him to put Wind Follower on one of the endcaps but that would've meant another author being removed. I'm pushy but I'm not selfish. So I let that one go.

Other writers at the reading were:

Carolyn Doggett Smith who has self-published nonfictions such as The Absentee American and Strangers at Home. About American children raised in other countries. The book she was selling is called The House of the Faun: A novel of Pompei. The book is available on amazon and at The house of the faun

There was also Drs Albert and Alvin Silbert, educators who have written a book called, When Bad Grades happen to good kids. The book is on amazon. Their website is Strong learning

Norma Lehmeier Hartie, who is the Grand Prize Winner of the 15th Annual Writer’s Digest International Self-Published Book Awards. Her book, Harmonious Environment, competed against 2,404 total entries this year in nine different categories. Harmonious Environment was also a finalist in ForeWord Magazine’s Home & Garden category and a finalist in the Nautilus book awards. Her blogsite is harmoniousenvironment blogspot

Tony Higgins, A Jamaican Welshman now living in NY whose book True Believer: a violent tale of love, Greed, and betrayal is about a cop who finds himself in a governmental conspiracy.

My friends, Dan (also my webmaster), my friend, Margaret, and Christine (who dressed me and photoed me on the book jacket) and my husband's boss, Craig Yoe .

All in all it was fun. And may I say, I was born to be adored. Yep, I’m a ham who just eats up attention. And honestly, I am so lovable... and I have a weird kind of fun-loving quality that is downright catching. So, yeah, I had to tone down all this wonderful personality to let others shine. This kind of thing can become addictive, though. -C

Intros, Second Printings and Stuff

2007-11-16T08:30:00.000-08:00

So, this is my introductory posting to the Juno authors' blog. Hi! (waving madly at everyone) My name is Gail, and I'm a bookaholic.

Oh, wait. This isn't a support group meeting--well, except in a nominal way. And honestly, I don't really want to be cured of my addiction. Even the fella has learned to put up with it, though he does get a bit exasperated when I'm reading while (sorta) watching television and I have to keep asking him what just happened. Or when he's talking to me mid-book, and I miss half (or more) of what he said. I love stories so much, I started making them up at an early age, and eventually got round to writing them down.

Anyway, I've been meaning to stop by here and post something for a while now, just hadn't got round to it, (my picture is also under the definition of 'procrastinate' in the dictionary) until our lovely Juno editor shared a bit of news with me this week that I really wanted to share with the rest of you. The Eternal Rose, by Gail Dayton, (that's me) has gone back for a second printing.

This means there will be lots and lots of books out there for y'all to pick up and read. Nobody has to go away hungry. :) Yes, Eternal Rose is the final book in a trilogy, but I think you can read it and enjoy it without having read the first two. Of course, if you read the first two books, it will give the third greater depth, but...

The book has magic, and gladiatorial-style trials-by-combat, and sex, and vengeance, and demons, and all kinds of fun stuff.

It's been a long and bumpy road to reach this point, and I am truly happy Juno has given me the chance to publish this book with them.

I'm going to work really hard to get back here and post at least once a month. If y'all want to drop by, I have a personal blog at Dreaming in Daylight where I post at least weekly--sometimes more often, if I'm feeling industrious (and not lost in too many books--the less I read, the more I do stuff like post blogs). I write about my walks on the beach, and the events I get to attend with the fella and sometimes I write about the writing. It's hard for me to write very much about that, because it's almost like--if I talk too much about it, all the fairy dust will get away and it will lose its magic. And that's what storytelling is to me--capturing the magic and getting it down on paper.

Speaking of which, I'd better get busy. I have revisions on my shaman-warrior princess story to put into the computer, and world building notes to type in for an SF story about psychic gene-altered people in space. I have them written out, but I want to put them in the computer so I have a couple of back-ups.

Y'all take care. And if you haven't read The Eternal Rose, why not?

A poem

2007-11-15T19:44:00.000-08:00

AVEBURY

There've been some delays, but at latest word The Sarsen Witch should be out in a couple of weeks. In the meantime, Carole's two poems have motivated me to post one of my own. "Avebury", written some years ago, was inspired by a visit to the megalithic sites in Wiltshire.

Ravaged giants rooted in primordial chalk
sleep now in this mild September light.
Where sheep crop the long grass among the stones
old gods, unvanquished, linger at the edge of sight.

What grand conceits our mutable histories have built
around these interrupted symmetries:
Druid temples, sepulchres, and altars
to esoteric Roman deities

like Terminus, the motionless god;
celestial observatories,
linchpins in the cosmic axle-tree,
the pivot-stones
around which the moon and stars and planets spin.

But look slantwise, at sundown,
and the stones are inhabited by familiar ghosts:
priestesses, shamans, warriors,
sentries vigilant at their posts

and dancers frozen in the first measures
of some vast pavane,
their obdurate, ungainly shapes
poised in timeless equilibrium.

Gnarled and twisted by eternities
of wind and weather
two stones like gossiping old women
lean their gaunt heads together,
their sly whispered commentaries lost
in the restless murmuring of the long grass.

In Love Again

2007-11-15T07:15:00.000-08:00

Well it's happened. I've fallen in love with Danny, my main character of my WIP, Inheritance.

I'm listening to:
Nancy Wilson's How Glad I am,
The Vogues' You're the One,
and Dwight Yoakam's The Heart That You Own
Yep, I've got it bad.

His name's Danny. He's real cute. Actually, no. He's not as cute as all that. I describe him as having a pleasant-but-non-descript face. I read somewhere that the face of a main character shouldn't be described too much. Something about reader identification and reader wishes and reader libido. Whoever said that -- sorry I forgot-- probably gave far better reasons than I could probably think of, but I think his/her assessment is pretty right on. Beauty and individual tastes vary so much. In my case, although my other WIP contains two absolutely beautiful men, I honestly like guys with pleasant non-descript faces.

Anyways, my past crushes aside, I'm glad this crush is kinda taking me over. I'm more likely to finish the novel that way. Of course hubby will have to live with this crush of mine.

I don't know how it is for other women writers but I become absolutely hard to live with whenever I fall in love with a main character. My hubby, Luke, was safe when I was writing Wind Follower because Loic (WF's main character) was based on my sweet teenage son...a kid I wanted to strangle every minute of the day. But Danny... Ah, Danny! He'll be a problem for the beloved husband.

Unfortunately, in creating a perfect male character for my female character I ALWAYS think about the guy's perfect sense of humor, his perfect body --yeah, Danny has a wonderful body-- his insightful understanding of the heroine. Dangerous thoughts all. Then the next thing I know: I'm falling in love with some guy literally created for a female character. And I begin whining and complaining at hubby and telling him all his flaws.

Mercifully, I am somewhat morbidly introspective. I can never quite delude myself into thinking that my nagging is part of the creative process. I get all guilt-ridden and upset with myself ...and yet, the crush remains. Prayers, emails from writer friends, long weepy phone conversations with friends about "what exactly constitutes a true love" --All of no avail. The crush --masturbatory and insane and narcissistic as it is-- tends to continue until I finish the story. Then miraculously, the love spell breaks.

That's when --I swear! This ALWAYS happens-- I realize the created character actually reminds me of my hubby. I say to him, "Sweetie, you're my true love!"

So, whether I know it or not. After Inheritance is accepted by a publisher and on book shelves, I'm going to realize in a blinding flash of spiritual light, that Danny has been living with me all along, that unreal imagined Danny is really the living-breathing Luke lying at night beside me in bed. And how wonderful that will be!

In the meantime, here are the latest Wind Follower doings:
A review at:
MindFlights

A post on Mirathon's blog

An interview in Fantasy Magazine

The First Person Point of View

2007-11-14T09:51:00.000-08:00

I have a short article titled "The First Person Point of View" in this month's issue of Vision - A Resource for Writers. This is the start of a series of lessons and experiences as I try to teach my kids to write fiction. Check out this one. Stay tuned for more.

http://www.lazette.net/vision/Vision42/Firstperson.htm

Don't Throw Anything Away

2007-11-13T20:13:00.000-08:00

“Don’t throw anything away.”

That was the best advice I took away with me from my very first writer’s convention. The speaker was a seasoned writer who shared a bad experience with his audience. Years before he’d written something – an article, a short story, something he hadn’t been able to sell, and he’d thrown it away, only to discover at a later date that he had a market for it. But…too late!

I was a raw beginner without enough written, let alone publishable, to throw away. But I took his words to heart, and I’ve never stopped being grateful for them.

Segue forward a few years. At that point I had sold a few children’s stories. I’d just written another story I thought was a lot of fun. I began my marketing efforts with one of the best paying magazines – Highlights for Children, a market to which I’d sold four children’s stories. (Another good piece of advice I’d picked up at a convention – always start at the top with the best paying markets and work your way down. You can always go down, but you can’t go up!) Highlights rejected my story as did every other children’s magazine I tried. Feeling thoroughly trounced I relegated the story to a drawer in my desk.

Time went by, but I couldn’t forget that little story in the drawer. I pulled it out, reread it, and decided maybe I should try telling the story from another point of view. I rewrote the story, and began my marketing efforts again. Still no luck. After a series of rejection slips, back in the drawer went the story.

More time went by. Now I had sold a couple of children’s books to Scholastic. One day I received a call from my agent at that time. Scholastic was looking for early chapter books. Did I have a manuscript that might work?

As soon as she told me what constituted an early chapter book, I said yes. (Here’s another good piece of advice I picked up from another writer: Say yes and worry about the details later. As in, “Can you write the Great American Novel?” Oh, absolutely, and pardon me while I go off somewhere and have a quiet panic attack.)

To be honest, I was thinking about that little children’s story that was probably less than 1000 words long. Somehow I needed to make it about 12,000 words, but I knew that I had a solid plot. I had a cute twist at the end, too, and with more characters and maybe a secondary plot to thread through the story….

Well, it got written and sent off to Scholastic. They loved it and bought it, and paid me a lot more than a magazine would pay for a short story.

“Don’t throw anything away.”

The first article I ever had published was paid for in copies. It was entitled “How To Make Breakfast Your Favorite Meal.” Years later, I came across a market –
Bestways Magazine – looking for food related articles. I dusted off the breakfast article, tweaked it here and there, and sent it to Bestways. They bought it and published it. A few years later, I rewrote about 25% of the article and sold it again – to a different market.

Don’t throw…. Well, you get my drift. As for Master of Shadows, the novel that Juno Books just published, I wrote it 15 years ago and couldn’t sell it because it wasn’t a standard romance. It went into a drawer, only to be pulled out about three years ago when I thought I had a possible new market. Unfortunately, although the editor loved it, the company went bankrupt before the book was published.

When I read Juno’s guidelines for their paranormal romances, I really had to argue with myself that sending them Master of Shadows would be a good thing. And when Paula e-mailed me to say that she liked what she’d read and wanted to buy the book, I almost fell off my chair. I remember staring at the monitor and pinching myself.

And maybe that’s why I have a big cupboard in my office with a lot of dusty boxes in it. You can guess what’s in those boxes and in the file cabinets. Because you just never know! And so I never throw anything – at least anything in my office – away!

Me and my daughter at World Fantasy 2007

2007-11-12T16:40:00.000-08:00

I'm totally wiped out, coming down with a cold. I slept horribly the whole time we were out there, and dragged through the days like a zombie. I did get some great pics though, which shows that even zombies can handle today's tech with little or no brain activity.

Click the pics to see them larger.

Before I get started: Alice, you made all this happen! We wouldn't have made it to Saratoga Springs without your perseverance, patience, low-sleep driving skills, scrupulous tile-bleaching, and tolerance of my bad behavior. Thank you.

World Fantasy 2007 was simply amazing. I didn't know what to expect. This is a professional and "serious reader" conference with editors and agents and authors running around, lunching, doing business in the halls. I hardly saw Paula Guran, had a five minute chat with her and Matt Cook (Blood Magic), and then she was gone, off presumably doing the things editors do at these kinds of get togethers. When I did see her later, she looked too busy to stop and talk.

I took my daughter Chloe along with me on this one, and we had a good time tracking down her favorite authors, Scott Westerfeld, Holly Black, Cassandra Clare, Garth Nix, (some of mine, too), and getting them to sign books--which all were happy to do.

We sat in on quite a few panels, but I think these were the best:

How a Book Cover is Chosen. Irene Gallo, Jacob Weisman, Tom Kidd, Lou Anders, John Picacio.
The Best Fantasy Worlds. Kathleen Woodbury, Delia Sherman, Joel Champetier, Charlaine Harris
Ghosts and Revenants Down Under. Garth Nix, Jack Dann, Robert Hood, Kaaron Warren, Deborah Biancotti

Reading: Young Adult Writers group reading. Holly Black, Cassie Clare, Sarah Beth Durst, Tiffany Trent.

I'll stop here to point out that Delia Sherman is amazing, and Charlaine Harris is hilarious, but even Charlaine couldn't compete with the Aussies.

The Australian authors were the funniest group there, ranging all over the fantastic map with Australian themes for stories, poisonous insects and snakes, isolation as a fundamental influencer in Australian lit, and they even broke out in song with Garth Nix leading several lines of Waltzing Mathilda.

We hit the autograph session late Friday and got a few more pics. I met Maria Lima, and Chloe scouted out the authors she wanted sigs from.

Fantasy Worlds, Book Covers

Australian authors, YA Reading

The main reception area / me and Lois McMaster Bujold in front of the Prime Books table. (Wow!)

Jim Frenkel of Tor and Craig Shaw Gardner / Chloe with Sarah Beth Durst

Chloe getting (another) autograph from Bruce Coville, and then from Tamora Pierce.

Chloe with Holly Black, and a little later getting Cassandra Clare's autograph.

Chloe and Scott Westerfeld, and Garth Nix signing Sabriel for Chloe.

I am going to do my best to get to World Fantasy 2008 in Calgary. Hope to see you there.

Two Poems

2007-11-12T05:51:00.000-08:00

Well, I'm working on my WIP, Inheritance and decided to drop the paranormal (kinda) altogether. ::rolls eyes:: There go some nano-numbers. Anyway, I want a gently magically realistic interracial love story. Yep, am aiming for gentle and sweet. ::smile:: Now, for those of you who didn't know I was a poet, here are two poems:

POEM #1: SNOW WHITE (This is one of a series of poems all based around fairy tale characters)

I do not like the name: Snow White.
No one could be that pure.
But, accepting it, let us move on.
Such purity,
existing in a world as political as a castle,
could be daunting, unnerving.
And for a beautiful queen,
learned in intrigue,
reared in flattery,
such purity would not only be daunting,
but also an affront.

I am thinking of a girl I met in college,
an idealist at twenty,
who wrote untouched,
undiminished,
unbroken songs,
about white unicorns.

This girl was hard to stomach.
And not that I spent hours
in front of mirrors--
but simply looking into the mirror of her songs
showed how diminished,
broken and unwhole
my songs were.

This is not to say
I side with the queen.
Only that I understand.

POEM #2: I FEAR MY MOTHER WILL

I fear my mother will,
upon her death, become omnipresent;
all-knowing, all-powerful.
I shall be in my lover's house
safeguarded - I think-
from the eyes of my husband.
I shall be about to come
when just at the wrong time
in that pervasive darkness,
my mother's invisible right hand
will make itself known.
And a voice - hers: I will recognize it-
will demand
that I rise up and go home.
She will pull the blanket protectively,
over my naked breasts
And I,
embarrassed, and mother-beaten,
will retrieve my clothes from the floor
and go home.

A web site for Seaborn

2007-11-11T11:30:00.000-08:00

I've just started goofing with a web site (a page or two really) for my novel Seaborn. It won't be in stores for months, but I figure I can't be too early for some things. Got to start building a presence and momentum now. As far as domain names, Seaborn.com was taken, but I've picked up SeabornBook.com, SeabornOnline.com, NineCities.com, and SaltwaterWitch.com, and I'll probably alias them all to one.

Anyway, I'd love it if you took a look at my first pass and commented here on what you think. If you click the pic on the left, you'll see a screenshot of the site. Click the link below to see the latest--which may or may not have changed:

http://the0phrastus.typepad.com/saltwater_witch/index2.html

One of the things I'm particularly interested in knowing is how it appears in different browsers. I'm checking with IE7 and FF2, but I don't have Safari, Opera or others. Let me know how it looks Safari (and iPhone) users!

Seaborn cover art by Tim Lantz

2007-11-11T10:52:00.000-08:00

See more of Tim Lantz's work at the gallery page at Juno Books. I absolutely love it. What do you think? See a little bit larger pic on Tim Lantz's dA page: http://archeon.deviantart.com/art/Seaborn-68259916 (I've already ordered prints) or http://stygiandarkness.com/

Or you can click the pic to see it larger.

Wind Follower December Book Tour

2007-11-09T10:58:00.002-08:00

Well, Folks, the Wind Follower tour has begun. I feel so blessed. Most new books aren't helped along like this when they enter the world. But to have a blog tour! It just makes my heart leap with joy. I owe these folks mucho.

So far, it's been great. A few bloggers had problem with the sex in the story, some with instances of violence, some with the writing style. Some don't think my Characters are very "good" or they think the ending is depressing. But hey, if we use that criteria Abraham, David and all those Bible heroes are also evil. And the end of the Bible would have to be depressing cause in that also only a remnant of the people of earth are saved. I can only say that Loic's religion is one based on "a faithful acceptance of God's love for him", not on how "good" or noble or well-behaved he is. As for my character Satha being unladylike, I can only say that when you marry into a culture different than you own, you incorporate the extreme aspects of those cultures. Someone who converts to one religion from another is often more religious than those born into it. As for the sex scenes, honestly, there is nothing even vaguely lustful about the sex scenes in Wind Follower. The various sex scenes show a fearful manipulative teenager trying to get a woman pregnant so she'll stay with him, a rape, sex between two life-wounded people trying to put their shattered lives together, and the Abraham-Hagar sex scene as it probably was.

I celebrate humanity. What can I say?

Anyways, check out the interview at Shades of Romance . There'll be a review sometime during the month on Shades of Romance Blog

The folks involved in the Christian Fiction Review Blog will be posting stuff from Dec 2 - Dec 8. So if something isn't up on their respective sites yet, it will be up later.

Christian Fiction Review Blog
Cathischatter.blogspot.com/
Disturbing The Universe: Reviews And Rants
Queen of Convolution
The Lost Genre Guild
The land of my sojourn
virtualbooktourdenet/
http://gracebridges.blogspot.com/
http://afrankreview.blogspot.com/
http://blog.lostgenreguild.com/
http://disturbingreviews.blogspot.com/2007/12/windfollower-art-loic.html
http://virtualbooktourdenet.blogspot.com/2007/12/interview-with-carole-mcdonnell.html

The Writers of Color Blog Tour participants are:
East of Mars
Greg Banks
Rachel Lindley
Moondancer Drake's blog

Other interviews and reviews --from folks not in the tour-- can be found here:
http://otter.covblogs.com/archives/022531.html
http://longandshortreviews.blogspot.com/2007/07/review-wind-follower-not-yet-released.html
http://www.publishersweekly.com/article/CA6478173.html?q=carole+mcdonnell+wind+follower
http://mindflights.com/Forum/viewtopic.php?t=512

Info on this tour also found at these sites:
Dark parables
Carole Mcdonnell Blog
Fiction beyond the ordinary blog

I do it in public...

2007-11-01T03:31:00.000-07:00

Where do I write? In public.

My local Panera Bread, mainly (that's me: the guy with the 2-day shadow, hunting and pecking on a laptop near the window, drinking a large coffee at 7:30 most mornings - pull up a chair and set a spell). I've also "done time" and cranked out the pages in such notable locales as Caribou Coffee, Tim Horton's (curse you, delicious-yet-sugary Tim Bits!!) and humble ol' McDonalds.

I'm not sure why, but the constant ebb and flow of people, the gentle buzz of conversation and the welcoming smiles of the dimpled, shockingly awake counter girls always gets my sluggish creative juices flowing. The deadline I'm under each and every morning (I have to leave for work at 8:45, whether I've written my required 3-6 pages or not) keeps me focused.

I am, in fact, writing this in that selfsame Panera right this moment, in preparation for my departure for the World Fantasy convention in New York. Hope I don't wreck my car this time.

So, allow me to send out a huge shout-out to my "peeps" in the early morning java and bagel biz - yo, Desiree, Tammy and even that scary guy with the hedgehog hair, lazy-crazy eye and soul patch in Tim Horton's - you'll never know how much of you has made it into my books... somewhere.

I write in the attic

2007-10-31T13:45:00.001-07:00

Here's my writing space. (Click the pic to see it larger). The attic's finished, with floor and ceiling and windows, and it's my hideaway where I can sit and think and listen to music and write. I did clean up a bit before shooting the old wooden desk. I'm a slob. I almost always write on the computer, longhand in my journal. I also paint here most of the time (watercolors and digital, see my blog for the portfolio). I cleaned, but left some of the junk, trinkets, the heavy concrete book toting toad who guards my library--four big bookcases off to the left of the shot. He's the greenish guy with a book under one arm in the back left, weighs about 80 pounds. I also threw in the SEABORN street sign I just picked up--that isn't normally on the desk. I just haven't hung it up yet. That's my podcasting stuff on the right, mic and mixer. Maps and other junk on the walls. That's about it.

Writing, Rejection, Uncertainty, Time

2007-10-30T13:13:00.000-07:00

Here are a few things I know about writing and getting published, but only if you catch me in an optimistic mood. (Otherwise, I'll deny ever writing this). I have never felt more certain about the writing path on which I've found myself--never more certain of the steps I am taking. With some careful contemplation, chin scratching, thoughtful "hmmmm" noises, I have broken it into four main points, Writing, Rejection, Uncertainty, and Time (WRUT?)

Here's what I think I know:

Writing

That age-old pro writer advice to "keep writing" turns out to be absolutely true. I have been writing fiction since high school in the late '70s. It took me--off and on--thirty-five years to get my first story published. (Yeah, I'm a slow learner). Here's what I think: I stepped over some word or story threshold a while back, around 2003, and I said to myself, "ἐξαίφνης"--exaiphnês--"Suddenly!"--you know, like Platonists seeing the Forms after their intense fifty-year graduate studies. Okay, never mind. Let's keep moving. Somehow I just knew that I had finally written enough to feel right with what I was writing, all that writing over the years paid off, writing isn't the word-brawl it used to be, words flow more freely from my fingertips to the keyboard. Writing isn't easy--and probably won't ever be, but I don’t struggle as much with plotting, sentence structure, dialogue, words. What I write is never right the first time; it just feels closer to right than ever, and I'm a better self-editor than I've ever been. Because I write--write all the time. I completed SEABORN in January and since then, I have written three short stories, completed an 85k word YA fantasy SALTWATER WITCH (going to my agent next week). And I'm over 60k words into THE NEW SIRENS, sequel to SEABORN. NaNoWriMo, it's not just for November anymore.

Rejection

Get rejected early, get rejected often. Get used to it. It sucks but it's going to happen a lot. I used to keep a folder with all my rejection letters, but gave up after I broke the 100-reject mark. It's nothing personal, and I even think it has more to do with mood and what music the editor's/agent's assistant is listening to at that moment, how high in the stack your manuscript is, how high the stack is, than anything else--especially if you feel that you're over the above writing threshold. That a writer "ought to be" published makes no difference. We all ought to be published. It just doesn't work that way.

I can't remember my first rejection letter, but I know it was a form reject, and it was in 1980. I do remember a rejection a year later from Andrew Offutt, then editing a fantasy anthology called Swords Against Darkness (Charles de Lint's first professional sale was in this anthology). Here's a scan of the letter Mr. Offutt sent me, rejecting my story (I can't remember the title), and here's one of the first posts I made on http://theophrast.us about that early rejection experience. I have great rejection letters from Jennifer Jackson, Rachel Vater, and others, real letters that gave me real hope. Rejection can be good.

Uncertainty

Good writing is rejected every day, some small fraction of everything going through the post never makes it to its destination, butterflies are flapping their wings somewhere, causing all kinds of bad shit to happen to your manuscript, your query letter, your chapters--and agents and editors are the busiest people on the planet, and they have moods and attention spans like everyone else. They also have incredible talent for finding talent. We know this because there are successful writers out there--obviously--and some agent found them, some editor took a chance, some publishing house--big NYC firms and small presses--invested in them, wrote up contracts for those authors to sign, cut checks, spent marketing dollars on them, paid artists for cover art, paid type designers and cover designers and copy editors, blogged about the whole thing, went to cons and introduced their authors to other authors and industry insiders. We know this stuff happens. It's just difficult to know how or when it will happen. Uncertainty.
Writing, rejection and uncertainty can all be tied together and developed, handled, manipulated by you the writer to some extent. On the other hand, you can't do anything about time. Don't even attempt it. Time always has the upper hand because it's never ours, but someone else's.

Time

I think it's the only thing you can't do anything about. Everything takes time, and in publishing, double everything. Learn patience--that's from me, the slow learner. I can't tell you how many times I've been writing a letter or about to write a letter--nice ones, mind you, fingers are on the keyboard, passion in my soul...and that's when I get something in the mail or email from the editor or agent, and in every case I've thought "whew!" I'm glad I didn't finish that email. Be lazy when it comes to following up on anything you send to an agent or editor. Wait it out and you will be rewarded.

There's my take on it. There's always another book to write. WRUT. Write on.

The bronze age revisited

2007-10-30T11:55:00.001-07:00

While I was writing my fantasy novel The Sarsen Witch, I didn’t think of it as a romance, so much as a prehistoric adventure about the intersection of the Neolithic and Bronze Age worlds, and the building of Stonehenge. In re-reading, though, I realized that the template I’d borrowed, in a setting millennia earlier than the Arthurian legends or the story of Tristan and Iseult, was the archetypal romantic triangle of king, king’s wife, and king’s friend. Ricca, the Wessex warrior chieftain, is a flawed and barbaric Arthur; Gwi, the bronze-smith, his trusted friend; Naeri, the woman they both love; and Daui, the vengeful kinsman who would destroy them all.

Now, after many years, The Sarsen Witch is coming back into print. In the dramatic cover by Tim Lantz, Naeri appears as she does in the first pages of the book – “chapped lips, windburned face, lean hard-muscled body … a creature spare and strong and hardy as the gorse”.

On a trip to England in 1990 I traveled through Wiltshire, retracing the path of Naeri’s adventures in the megalithic world of Avebury and Stonehenge. You can find some of my experiences on that trip in the archives at http://eileen-kernaghan.blogspot.com

National Novel Writing Month

2007-10-29T15:54:00.000-07:00

Ah, lucky Carole, to have her novel out and be working on her next book! I, on the other hand, am still neck-deep in line editing as I fix a few loose gears and weak springs in Clockwork Heart.

I need to move quickly on the edit, though, because I'll be participating in National Novel Writing Month over November, and that takes a lot of time. I've been participating in NaNoWriMo since 2002; in fact, Clockwork Heart was my 2004 NaNoWriMo novel!

You can find me under DrDru at the NaNoWriMo site, and here's my personal update page, which describes previous novels I've written for NaNoWriMo. I haven't entered any information about my 2007 novel, yet. I will, I will! Soon. Tonight. I promise. It's going to be Indian-flavored weird fantasy in honor of the trip I'm taking to India in December....

So if you're a novelist or thinking about becoming a novelist, and you're not already signed up for NaNoWriMo, come join the fun! The goal is to write 50,000 words in one month, but there's no prize if you make it and no penalty if you don't. Why not try?

Hope I'll see you there!

Wind Follower book trailer

2007-10-28T13:02:00.001-07:00

Okay, don't laugh. I've been working on a book trailer for Wind Follower ever since Sylvia Kelso, one of Juno's authors showed me hers. She did a really wonderful trailer for her book, Amberlight. So I'm still learning how to use Windows Movie Maker. Nevertheless I posted it to youtube.

Anyways, Click here to go to youtube to see the Wind Follower trailer.

And
click here to go to youtube to see Sylvia's trailer for Amberlight

Juno Books

2007-10-28T12:21:00.000-07:00

This blog is a team blog written by the authors whose books are published by Juno Books.

Don't know what Juno Books is?

Then pay the site a visit:

http://www.juno-books.com/

Juno Books is a small traditional press which publishes speculative fiction -- fantasy-- with a focus on the female. Strong kickassitude women. Not sidekicks, not the hero's girlfriend, not a victim. A heroine in her own right?

Read about adventurous quests, dark secrets, light humor, deep desires, high imagination, mystery, metaphysics, magic, myth...swept into the past, taken to a timeless otherworld, set in the future, or happening right now. Juno publishes books that go beyond the ordinary and take the reader with them.

If you want to see a sample of some of our writers, please visit
http://www.juno-books.com/downloads.html