S' Wonderful . . . .

My Celluloid giveaway on Goodreads is over, and I'm shocked: over 400 people entered! Yikes! Goodreads selected the three winners at random, so this morning I have three copies going out to three people I've never met before. Actual strangers who want to read my book! (I think it helps that it was free;)

Thanks to everyone who entered; that's a pretty nice thing to wake up to in the morning;)

Now Showing . . .

Celluloid is up and available! Woo hoo! Head on over to my e-store and check it out, and if you like the preview, pick yourself up a copy! And, if you like what you read, drop me a note; I love feedback:)

FYI: Yes, the image above is the cover I spent days working on. Needless to say, it is copyrighted, so don't steal it unless you attribute it to me. Thanks!

Preview . . .

Some people, when they get home from a long day at the office, like to flip on the tv. Some people sit in a bubble bath. Me, I turn on my laptop and spend two hours on Photoshop, coloring artwork for my next book cover;)

That's a little preview of the cover for "Celluloid"; the actual cover is designed to look like an old movie poster (I spent eight hours this past weekend working on it!) and has fighter planes and Nazis and the Hollywood sign, as well as the title smushed in there;) I'll post a preview of that when I'm a little closer to self-publishing; right now I'm entering the beta phase, and doing revisions. I'll keep y'all posted!

Old Hollywood Meets New Tech-worries . . .

When I write a book, I customarily have three copies of a manuscipt at any one time, for safety's sake: one on my laptop at home, one on my external hardrive, and one on my work computer. I try to keep all three up-to-date, so that if one fails, I have two others.

The last week, I've started to have issues with the external hardrive when it's attached to my laptop, but up to now I've been able to iron out the kinks. Today I'm looking a situation that makes me extremely nervous.

I wrote a lot on "Celluloid" over the weekend, around 40 pages, which represents hours and hours of writing and includes the climax of the story and a lot of other good stuff besides. At the end of yesterday, before turning off my laptop, I uploaded (I thought) the manuscript to my hardrive so I could back it up at work this morning. This morning, I find that the updated manuscript is not on my hardrive: it only includes what I wrote up to the weekend.

Now, there is a possibility that it simple didn't copy over, and the full manuscript still exists on my laptop at home. Or, the possibility exists that I have done a hugely boneheaded thing, and instead of backing up the newer version onto the external hardrive, I instead replaced the one on my laptop with the older version, thus deleting a chunk of the story.

In theory, I could rewrite. But I powerfully do not want to have to do this. I am terrified that I will have lost all this work, emotional work that I poured myself into. So, I am sitting here at the office, stuck for the next several hours with a sick feeling in the pit of my stomach, worried that when I get home and check my manuscript, it will be incomplete.

Cross your fingers for me, dear readers.

Celluloid . . .

Yep, so, completely out of the blue, I decided to start a new book this weekend. It was one of these ideas that hit me upside the head and I had to start writing it, and just a week later I have 150 pages done. It's really an homage to old Hollywood films from the '30's and '40's, and so far it has been SO MUCH FUN. At this rate, I should be done in another few weeks with the first draft.

If only someone would pay me to write for a living, I could have a pretty good time . . .

Drafty in Here . . .

My Puss in Boots tale is finished (the first draft, anyway). Yay! 275 pages, 142,000 words. I'm pretty happy with it, though it's still pretty rough; there are lots of things that need to be ironed out. I think any time you write a mystery, the first version is never quite as tight on details as it needs to be. The next drafts will get better. But, for now, I'm taking a much-needed breath. I'll probably dive back into one of the other books and start proof-reading that before going back to this one, so I can look at it with fresh eyes.

I had a lot of fun with this, and I hope my betas like it;)

A Little Down the Road . . .

I seem to be on a faery tale kick at the moment, reimagining classic stories. I took on Hansel and Gretel recently, and now I'm on to another tale I've had percolating for a few years: Puss in Boots. Yes; the Antonio Banderas film just came out. No; I haven't seen it. I had a yearning to write something less dire than some of my previous novels, something that would be fun and different and not about saving the world or getting across some Deep Message. I've had the original tales sitting in a folder for a while now, since I worked at the brokerage firm (which was back in '06), and I've wanted to attack this at some point. But, every idea must wait until it's ripe, and this one finally is.

I'm having fun with it and stretching it quite a bit: it's told first-person from Puss' POV, and the language makes him sound like a cynical noir protagonist, which I really like. The biggest change is that it's set in the far future and Puss is genetically engineered to walk and talk. Otherwise, I'm sticking to the basic skeleton of the original story: Puss' owner dies and leaves him to his youngest son, and Puss sets about using his wiles to turn the kid into the manufactured Marquis de Carabas to impress the King and marry the Princess. Except with spaceships;)

I'll work on this for a while and see where it goes, but I'm having a blast with it . . . .

A Voice . . .

Principal recording for the "Outcast" audiobook was finished yesterday. You can't hear it, but that was a big sigh of relief I just let loose;)

Now that I'm on the other side of the experience, I can finally look back and reflect on what an undertaking it was. I'm not a professional VO artist, and while I had a good time recording my book, I'm not sure I would necessarily want to add VO to my repetoire. Even with the relative ease of reading my own words, which often eliminated potential errors in pronunciation and inflection, I still made numerous mistakes and did a lot of rerecording. If the chapter was particularly long or I decided, for schedule reasons, to record more than one chapter at a time, fatigue brought out even more errors. I can't even tell you the number of times I would simply stutter over a phrase, ruining a passage, or just plain read a sentence incorrectly so that it made no sense at all to the ear. Stop, cut section, rerecord. Each chapter took at least 45 minutes to record, sometimes much longer before I was satisfied. With 36 chapters, that represents more than a day's worth of recording.

A note about voices and dialects: good god, I did some questionable dialect work on this recording. Dialects are one of my specialties, and I'm usually pretty good at getting an accent to sound passably authentic. But, recording "Outcast" required me to snap very rapidly into and out of a lot of different accents, from Cockney to Deep South, to French to the twang of the West. And, in between, I had to snap back into my own voice, to read the narration. There were times I did this relatively well; Benjamin usually stays where he ought to be. There were other passages I struggled with, and overall I'm not terribly pleased with a lot of my dialect work on this recording. Poubelle in particular ranges all over the frigging map, her Cockney making it all the way to Australia by way of the South Bronx, stopping off in Canada a few times just for kicks. There was one day when I was particularly tired and feeling strung out, and I started to feel like all the characters were sounding like Jessie from "Toy Story". But, as much as I beat myself up for imprecision, I know my audience, made up of friends and family, probably won't wince too often, and will be far more forgiving than I.

All that being said, I'm still incredibly glad I decided to undertake this project. I started writing when I was in grade school, and one of my favorite teachers encouraged me not just to write, but let me read my stories aloud. I was already a burgeoning actor, and reading my own characters was exciting and incredibly fun. Now, years later, I remember that experience. The characters in "Outcast" are some of my favorite creations; I know I shouldn't show it, I should love all my characters equally, but damn if Jack, Ben, Jonah, Poubelle, Doc, and Jeremiah aren't some fantastic people I wouldn't mind hanging out with. And, there is something emotionally cathartic about taking characters I already care about deply and giving them a voice; they leap off the page now in a way they never did before. I could already hear them speak their words inside my head; it's kind of like letting everyone else inside my brain to hear what I hear when I'm writing something.

Now, I get to start burning CDs and putting together packaging. Next step: Holiday presents! I'm going to try to have a prototype done for when my sister visits at the end of the month, so I can send her home with hers. I'll take pics and post when I have them;)

I Will Sigh . . .

I listen to music often while I'm writing, and the last few books have been scored by Pandora Radio. It means I've made some interesting new discoveries, music I probably wouldn't have found through other means. The song above struck me so strongly I had to share it. You will sometimes hear writers say that a particular song describes a character or situation so perfectly, it is as if the songwriter crawled inside their head. Well, the "CS Lewis Song" is one of my characters. Lyrics by the incomparable author, sung and scored by Brooke Fraser.

Thanks; Have to Scream Now . . .

Nobody screams like Natalie Portman. Did you see Black Swan?

So, the book I'm writing right now has me SO INCREDIBLY FRUSTRATED at the moment. I'm not sure what's gone wrong, but the train jumped the track somewhere and it's just careening through the dirt and tearing up the grass right now. I know where it ultimately needs to go, but I've created a situation that is like a ridiculous mobius strip and I can't seem to solve it.

I do this sometimes in my writing; create impossible situations that I force my characters to find a way out of. They always do; they are way more resourceful than I am, even on my best day. But this is one of those times when I just KNOW I've done something crititcally wrong somewhere along the way, and the narrative is grinding to a halt. The characters, usually quick and intelligent, are quacking at each other. Nothing is happening; it is all just standing still, and I'm not sure how far back I have to go in the writing to fix this. It's pretty clear I can't move forward.

Grrrrrrrr. What plot point do I give up? What dramatic moment needs to go away? Where did this crazy yarn-tangle start? Why can't I stop posing questions to myself???

In the realm of world-pressing matters, this ranks pretty low. But, it kept me up last night, and it promises to do the same tonight until I get that crucial "aha!" moment I've been searching for.

Let's hope it hits me in the shower tonight, or something . . . .

Breadcrumbs . . .

In the interim between writing the first draft of Sins of the Father and going back to editing Outcast, I'm spending a little time on my first YA novel, a retelling of the Hansel and Gretel story. Mine is dark, of course, and my Hansel and Gretel are sixteen. The witch in the woods isn't the villain; there are far scarier things waiting in the dark. I'm enjoying it so far; we'll see where it goes . . . .

In the Cave . . .

I've been pretty entrenched lately with the book, and fairly unavailable for anything else. I always reach this point in writing something, where the story takes off full of action, and starts to write itself. I end up feeling as though I'm hurrying to transcribe it, like a historian sitting on a battlefield and scribbling away as the bullets fly. Sorry if I've been a little absent from the blog; I promise to return to much more interesting posts soon;)

Anna of Winter Hollow is published!

My second self-published novel is finally available today! Yay!!!! My first, A Real Boy, is available here (plug,plug;)

This was actually written back in 2005, and was the first novel I started shopping to agents. After numerous rejections and vast rewrites, I decided to go through CreateSpace once again and self-publish it. There is something to be said of the experience of holding your book, printed and bound, and reading it somewhere other than a computer-screen. A pretty powerful experience, I gotta say.

CreateSpace does make you do all the legwork, however. As opposed to a publisher, who will format your manuscript, design your cover, and sometimes even take your author photo, self-publishing means you need to do all that middle-man stuff, and it can be pretty time-consuming. It's nice, though, to have complete control over the appearance of the finished producct, and know that you made it look that way.

Now, for a little description (in case you might be interested in reading it!):

It is Anna’s sixteenth birthday, and she is just beginning to realize that her world is not as it seems. First there is the shocking discovery that the man she loved and mourned as her father was not, in fact, her father at all. Then there is her uncle’s butler Jeffries: quiet, pale, and rather frightening, Anna has always kept her distance from him. But after increasingly odd occurrences surrounding him, she forces him to reveal that he is not an average English servant, staid and retiring, but something much stranger and more exotic: a creature named Anselem who has been guarding Anna and her family for her entire life. In a brutal and terrifying moment her entire world is turned upside down and she is thrust into the Realms of Faery with Anselem and her brother and sister, fleeing from assassins and trying to avoid capture by her real father: none other than the Ruler of the Unseelie Court, King Oberon himself.
Plunged into a frightening world and beginning to realize powers she never knew she had, guided by the unpredictable but strangely compelling warrior Anselem, Anna begins to transform from a girl at home in corsets and crinolines to a Princess fighting for her life and the future of those she loves. On a chessboard ruled by the dark Oberon and the dangerous Titania, will Anna be able to survive the struggle for power and succession in a dark court boiling with lies and deadly intrigues? When the chrysalis opens, who will she find inside: a Victorian girl, a half-fae Princess, or someone she has not even begun to imagine?

Please take a look, and if it sounds interesting, give it a read. Then, let me know what you think; I love feedback, even if you hated it (but, you'd better tell me why!)