A Moving Post

After much stress, long years of waiting, and an extremely long year of working my butt off (or at least several pounds of it), I'm able to write this post from my new writing room. We're not quite all moved in yet, but the majority of boxes are a cleared away and most of our things have found a new home.

Bobblehead Scorpius is happily posted at his new station and agreeing away as I type.
"Yes, yes, those are good words. Keep typing. Yes, there you go."

The desk that has been sitting unassembled in my garage for over a year now has finally been assembled and stained. Many of the posters I've been collecting for seven years have been framed and hung. All the little trinkets that used to be piled on or around my previous writing desk have found homes on my new bookshelves.

My TBR pile overflowed from the two stacks beside my bed to a short stack on my writing desk. I suppose that means I need to make more time for reading as well as writing because any further stacks will have to go on the floor down here.

I have a comfy chair for my desk, but not the lounging chair that I've been searching for that will eventually go in the corner. I seem to do better with marathon writing sessions when I can put my feet up and give my back a break.

All my hard cover books now reside on the big hallway bookshelf on the main level, but the paperbacks keep me company down here.

The silver cement floor I worked on late into one evening is nice and warm with our radiant heating. I had a rug down here for a day, but decided I liked the patterns on the floor better.

Now that I have my calming and quiet space all ready to go, it's time for some writing!

Actually End That Sucker

In preparing my responses for March on Author's Answer, we were given a question that I hadn't had much issue with lately: Have you ever wanted to rewrite the ending of another author's published book? I typed up my reply and sent it off thinking that I was quite glad of that particular fact. Then, given that the majority of the household has been unpacked to a functional degree, I decided that I deserved the long-awaited opportunity to attack a book from my towering TBR pile.


I sat down and read a book. It was amazing.


Not the book so much as allowing myself to sit down and just read, to get lost in the words and not worry about all the other things I could (possibly, should) be doing. It was relaxing. It's been a long time since I've done 'relaxing'. Even better, I was able to focus on the book for more than a page at a time and for more than five minutes at a time. I read several chapters in one sitting. This was all wonderful and good. I wasn't up to my usual book devouring read-it-in-a-day-or-two speed, but I did find the time, desire, and focus to sit down with it over the next several days.


Then, yesterday, I hit the end of the story. Hit. Like with a train. Just bam. The words ended.


Now, I thought to preserve my tenuous hold on sanity by picking up one of my favorite paranormal romance authors for this first foray into the return to reading for fun. I trusted this book to get me from point A to point B in an enjoyable fashion. Perhaps my downfall was choosing a book that included two stories, giving me no physical page gauge as to how far into the first story I was before the next one began. Thus, when I hit a page that ended halfway down in white space and the next one didn't contain the words Chapter Fourteen, I was inclined to throw the book at the wall.


I didn't. I was at a science tournament with my daughter and surrounded by students and that would have set a bad example. Had we been at an English tournament, I would have stood up and loudly exclaimed why. But alas, it was not appropriate at the time.


What was the problem? Well, this was a romance story, as I mentioned earlier. Generally they have fairly simple plots and the goal is for the two people (or whatever they happen to technically be) to acknowledge that they are happily in love. This was from an established series I've read much of. I know the world, the types of characters and pretty much what to expect, as these sort of books tend to get a little formulaic after awhile. But they're easy to get lost in, and so I enjoy them from time to time.


In this particular story, boy met girl. Boy is off conquering bad guys and girl joins him. Yay for strong female characters. Girl's siblings are involved in the fighting. There is a lot of focus on girl's siblings, their special linage, and how it may lead to conflict with boy's people. Girl has a job that puts her in danger and boy will have to come to grips with this even though it's against his nature. There is also a lot of build up regarding a conflict with meeting girl's parent's, particularly her mother who we're told will not like the boy at all and there will be major family tension. There is also the matter of the bad guys, one of whom will be after girl's brother with all sorts of promised evil intent until either the bother or the baddie are dead.


Where did we end? Boy and girl kill two of three bad guys, leaving the big bad to slink off and threaten them and girl's brother in perpetuity. The whole subplot regarding the special linage is left hanging. What will happen with her job, we never find out. Boy never meets the parents. All we get out of whole story is the couple in love. All the rest of what made the story interesting beyond the falling in love was left hanging. I could forgive the big bad slinking off knowing that he'll probably turn up later in the series, but the rest? No.


Which brings me to my point. If you're going to start subplots, finish them. Nothing leaves me more disappointed at the end of a book than it ending as if the author got tired of writing that particular story and just shipped it off to print as is.


Would I rewrite the ending of a published novel? Nah, I have my own novels to work on and endings to conquer. Hopefully they are more satisfying than the one I just read.


With that off my chest, check out this week's Author's Answer in which we delve into our writerly influences.

To be Published: Spring 2015 edition

We're finally all moved out of our old house and are busy unpacking into the new one. It's nice to finally be living in the place we've been working on for so long. If it weren't for all the boxes and wondering where stuff is, I'd say it's downright enjoyable.

My writing room has yet to be assembled, but that will come about shortly. We've only officially been here for three days and there are more important (gasp! I know) things to get set up, like our home business, bedrooms, and most importantly after a couple nights without them...curtains.

Now that I finally have a few minutes to breathe (seriously, we're talking minutes), I had time to take stock of what was in my submission inbox.

I'm happy to announce that my novel, A Broken Race has found a publisher. I'm waiting to meet with the editor in a couple weeks before I make any official announcements. However, it is nice to be able to say (albeit vaguely) that it certainly does have a prospective publication home.

Healer, previously published with Acidic Fiction, has been selected to be included in their upcoming anthology: Acidic Fiction #1: Corrosive Chronicles

Taking A Breather, after a long wait, is slated for publication in February/March Stupefying Stories.

Late is slated for publication in April with Bards and Sages.

The Spell is slated for publication in April with Saturday Night Reader.

Beyond the fact that we'll be leaving the -4 degree temperatures behind, I'm quite looking forward to Spring.

Book Memories

I was fortunate to have a mother who loved to read. But not to me. It was during answering this week's Author's Answer question that I realized that while I was always surrounded by books as a child, they weren't mine.

I have no memory of books for children. Not of my parents reading them too me or a bookshelf or even few of them floating around in my toy cupboard. Yes, I had a toy cupboard. In the kitchen, no less. Bedrooms where for sleeping and waiting for your father to come home when you were naughty. They weren't for playing in.

In fact, while I remember learning to read, because we did that in school, not in preschool like kids do these days, it was reading the spines of my mother's massive mystery book collection at home that I recall actually reading. Once they were read, they were 'done'. My mother wasn't a big re-reader. After all, these were mystery books and once she knew who did it, that was that. Even worse, she couldn't even wait to find out who did it, so she would always read that last three or four pages first and then read the book to find out how the detective put the clues together to figure it out. That has never made sense to me. Appreciating all the little nuances you missed the first time is what re-reading a book is for. Sheesh.

A book got read and then put on the shelf. After that, it didn't matter what happened to it, other than the fact that it was still there in case one of her friends might stop by and want to borrow something to read. That left things wide open to my little organizational tendencies. I spent entire afternoons organizing them by author, or by color, or by how old they were. Did you know that a couple hundred books propped open on the floor also makes a really fun hamster trail? They do. Just don't let the hamster start chewing on the books. It makes parents angry.

Occasionally, as I got older, I'd skim a page here and there and so I started reading Watership Down, a raunchy pirate romance, The Witch of Blackbird Pond, and The Crystal Cave. You may have noticed, none of those were mysteries. That's probably why they stuck out to me and begged to be skimmed. I have no idea how those anomalies ended up on my mother's bookshelves because our weekly trip to the local bookstore always ended up in the same aisle. Mystery. And we couldn't leave with just one book, no, there would be two or three. While I didn't learn to read from my parents, I did learn that reading a lot was perfectly acceptable.

Thank goodness for school libraries and those scholastic book fairs. Remember when everyone got a free book at the book fair? That was my favorite part of school: Free books. Now those book fairs are all about selling erasers and bookmarks and every variety of pencil you can think of. Yes, kids still buy books. Occasionally. I spent several years working at the book fair during my children's elementary years, and I can tell you, given the choice between spending a five bucks on a book or getting two pencils, a puppy pencil sharpener, an eraser that looks like a cell phone, and a bookmark, they'll go for the handful of crap nearly every time. What do they use that bookmark for? I have no idea. We can hope its for their library books, but it's probably because it had a cute kitten on it.

When I did start reading voraciously in my later elementary years, I first went to mystery, because, surprise, that's what I thought I was supposed to like. I joined my mother on the weekly trip to the bookstore, and came home with two or three books of my own. Ask for a new pair of jeans from the store (as opposed to the 'denim' ones my mom made for me) and there was no way in hell I was getting a yes, but ask for a couple books, and there's no argument. Priorities.

Mystery quickly gave way to horror, fantasy and sci-fi, and I've been there ever since. Would I let my kids read the stuff I was reading in middle school? That would be a huge no. I don't recall my mother ever questioning my reading choices or even paying attention to what pages I was stuck between. We didn't talk about what we were reading. We just read. Separately. Preferably in different rooms where we didn't distract one another. Books were for getting lost in.

I do attempt to be a slightly more attentive parent when it comes to what my kids are entertaining themselves with. We sometimes even curl up on the couch and read our books silently together in the same room. Do I succeed in protecting them from reading things that are socially unacceptable for their age? Probably not, but I do at least make an effort and we do talk about what they're reading. They have bookshelves filled with books of their own, and I read to them every night until they were old enough to read for themselves. All in all, I'm going to call it a victory.

Slowly working on that resolution

It's just one word: WRITE. You'd think it would be easy. Well, no. I think next year the one word resolution needs to be TIME. Even so, I'm happy to report that I've made time to get two shorts from my 'in progress' file edited and out into submissions along with returning a few rejections back into the playing field. One novel is still out there, the other is waiting for either time to self publish or other submitting options to open up.

The house is coming along. Flooring is almost all in, just waiting on a small bit of carpeting. We opted out of carpet for the most part. Countertops are coming next week. A little painting to do yet. Mostly it's all just little finishing stuff and waiting for the last couple subcontractors to wrap up their work so we can get inspections. The end is near, thank goodness.

And in an attempt to not be as far behind with blog posts: This week on Author's Answer, we discussed what genres we don't like to read.

Hope you're all having a wonderful week!