Tag Archives: random musings

Vegan Schmegan.

I’m going to take a moment away from writing in this post. Kind of. Technically speaking, this topic ties into an idea for a book that I have, but I mostly want to focus on how unexpected life can be and how you never know where you’ll be a year, month, let alone a week from now.

Let’s go back to the beginning of this year. A good friend and coworker mentioned that, with the start of 2013, they were going to do a cleansing fast, which called for two weeks of going completely vegan in their diet. I remember goggling, shaking my head, and commenting on how I don’t think I could ever do vegan.

Fast forward five months later, and guess who has three browser tabs up for vegan recipes? This girl.

Yup, that’s right. The same girl who grew up on a farm, who paid for a chunk of her college education by auctioning beef cattle, whose family Sunday drives involved taking cows to the slaughterhouse, who subscribed to every Paleo blog she could find and considered eventually making “meat-za” (wherein the evil carby crust is replaced with meat, meat, and more meat)….is looking at vegan recipes. And eating vegan food. And has stopped drinking regular milk altogether and is stock piling boxes of Almond Dream. What the hell happened?

Well, when I skeptically eyed my friend and thought of mourning a lack of bacon in one’s life, I had no idea that I would soon be embarking on a relationship with someone who hadn’t had bacon in his life for years. He’s made it very clear to me that he doesn’t expect me to be vegan, too, unless I absolutely want to, but the thing is, I definitely want to try. I’m a far cry away from pulling it off, but I’ve been managing to work into my diet a lot more vegan options, usually pulling off at least one completely vegan meal a day.

I was reminded of that moment in January because that same friend to whom I stated I could never do vegan is now handing me recipes recently, and that’s what inspired this post, because I attempted one of them for my weekly Tuesday Vegan Dinner Night. Yup, weekly Vegan Dinner Night. No meat-za here.

It just really shows how much we can change and evolve in a short time. They always say that you shouldn’t do things for other people, and, while I can’t say I’m doing the vegan thing for myself, I know I’m doing it for us. And I’m loving it. I love having something to focus on; I love feeling accomplished when I’m able to really pull out a good vegan day. I love being so incredibly conscious of everything I eat now, too. That’s reflected in the way I write, too, always wanting to focus on something and pushing for it…even if there are some feta-related hiccups on the way.

There also might be a memoir in the making, tentatively titled “The Half-Way Vegan.” It’s what you get when you switch to almond milk in your coffee, but still brew it with CoCo Caramel Sea Salt…

I’m working on it, babe!

Rejection!

I received a rejection letter today. It wasn’t of a literary variety, though, more of a monetary one, but it did get my brain thinking about rejection letters in general. It’s been a while since I’ve received one in regard to my work, not because I’ve been churning out some brilliant stuff, but because I haven’t been churning out much of anything. Short stories have always been difficult for me and I intend to self-publish most of my novels; eventually I might find one I’ll want to send out to be more traditionally published, though. Still, most of the rejection letters I’ve received have been fairly cut and dry. “Thank you for your submission, but we feel this piece is not a good fit for our publication. Best of luck with you endeavors/submitting it elsewhere.” Pretty standard, not very helpful or critical, but gets the point across. Generally, they give the impression that it wasn’t really a bad story, but it wasn’t a great story. They give the impression that almost anyone who didn’t get accepted got pretty much the exact same letter.

Apparently, though, not all rejection letters are created equal. My experience is fairly small; I haven’t sent out much, I’m ashamed to admit. But sometimes, especially in the good old days, rejection letters can get kind of personal. Check out this post from Cristian Mihai that’s collected a bunch of “famous” rejection letters from well-known authors. It’s pretty interesting stuff, and it almost makes me wish I did get rejection letters a little more scathing, because it almost feels like then they actually kind of care a little bit, you know?

Any good rejection letter stories out there?

The Pacing of Plot.

As I plow forward in my desperate attempt to get this latest draft of Serpent in a Cage finished in time for a decent publication date, I find myself obsessing a little too much over certain details. I’ve been a trooper when it comes to pushing aside the doubts and striving forward, if only to finish the first draft and then worry about the details, but one of the issues has been weighing more prominently on my mind, and that is the topic of pace.

For me, especially with fantasy novels, the pacing of a book can make or break it. If a story moves too slow, I lose interest in it. Sometimes, though, a story throws so much at you so quickly that you never really feel a connection. It’s definitely the latter that I’m worried about in SiaC. I’m about four chapters into it, and, in the first three chapters, there’s an awful lot of encounters. Some of those encounters are about to swing back around and turn into bigger plot points, but I’m worried that it’s almost too much at once. Will readers find it irritating to have my characters encounter someone, move on, encounter something else, move on again for another encounter before some it starts to tie together? I hope not, and I’m thinking if it does feel like too much, I can always go back and slow the pace down in the revision, with some other perspectives or whatever else might seem fitting.

That’s just the thing, though, these encounters and how I have them set up all seem fitting. It’s hard to tell from my own perspective. I know a great deal of my inspiration and my wanting to write in the first place is based heavily in video games, mostly role-playing ones such as Final Fantasy and Baldur’s Gate, where encounters are basically imperative to moving the plot forward. But I know a common mistake a lot of authors make is to introduce too many players too quickly, and the wealth of personalities in SiaC has been a common criticism in previous drafts.

Do you find yourself distracted when an author has a fairly quick succession of events to throw at you? Do you wish they’d sometimes slow down? How often do you feel they slow down too much? Just some questions rolling around in my brain. I’m throwing in a chapter from a different perspective, happening in the other part of the book, before returning to the busier point-of-views, so maybe that will help. Although that could also just completely interrupt a perfectly good, steady pace with the others! It’s all such a balancing act and I hope I can just manage to get it right…

Review: Kickboxing Geishas.

“I believe the costuming of today’s Japanese young women reveals, in a powerful way, how for many young Japanese females, Japan is a hard place to become a grown-up woman.”


“Kickboxing Geishas: How Modern Japanese Women are Changing their Nation” by Veronica Chambers

For me, Japan has always been an interesting country, and part of what makes it interesting is its constant evolution. Kickboxing Geishas is a look at one of its most recent evolutions: the rise of the modern woman in Japanese society. Granted, it’s a little more complex than just the movement from the Japanese woman as the quiet, subservient geisha stereotype to a powerful force in popular culture, politics, and economics, as well, and Veronica Chambers does an excellent job of taking a look at this shift in perspective through interviews and interactions with a variety of different people from many walks of life, some new and groundbreaking, others more traditional and expected.

Kickboxing Geishas is a really great read. As someone with an interest in both modern Japanese culture and its history, I did not exactly find it revealing or surprising, though there were some new things I’ll have to check out. But I did see it as a very good introspective on people in general, what motivates them, and how they can change their circumstances. Quite a few times, I wished Chambers would dig a little deeper than the surface, but it did make for a pretty quick read. I felt the writing could have been a little polished; perhaps it’s designed to be read much slower, but I felt that, many times, things I had just read were reiterated with only a few shifts in wording.

Despite any little niggling things I may have about this book, there’s no denying that the women that Chambers brings to the floor and the great comparisons she makes about this evolving culture and our own are incredibly insightful and inspiring. Considering that I picked up a book on 17th century Japanese literature soon after finishing Kickboxing Geishas, it’s definitely resparking my love of Japan, which is never a bad thing.

Books read: 5/100.

Switching It Up.

“The road to hell is paved with…blank pages,” I said yesterday and, this morning, for quite some time, I was staring right now that pathway to damnation. And the interesting thing is that I knew exactly what had lead me that way.

You see, I had quite a few things I needed to get done this morning before work, and very little time to do them in, so I had to stave off my usual morning rituals to try to put together a new one. It took a while for me to get into the swing of it, bumbling around like a ghost who’d lost its way, and it became strikingly obvious how much of a creature of habit I am. Most people are; heck, even one of my cats gets distraught now that my routine involves yoga, which he finds strange and, judging by his meows, a little terrifying. But I do find it interesting that, for a little while, anyway, when we deviate from an established path, part of our brain shut down a little and make it more difficult to function. It recognizes the actions as not the norm, and seems to have trouble catching up and reorganizing itself.

What is it about our brains (or, well, some of our brains, anyway. I’m sure some people can change things in the blink of an eye and not be in the least bit phased) that has difficulty breaking from a habit? They even say it takes 30 days to truly break a habit, and, even then, I’m a little skeptical. Eventually, my routine this morning worked, I got some stuff done (though admittedly not as much as I’d have liked!), and everything’s good. But why did it take at least half an hour to start being effective?

Do you feel you’re a creature of habit? How do you feel when you try something different? Or are you one of those magnificent bastards who can adapt to anything with alacrity and skill?

I’m…definitely not the latter, ha!

Faster, Pussycat, Kill, Kill!

Quite often, especially lately, especially in the insanity that is being upper management for retail during the hoilday season, I find myself wishing on thing more than others. I wish I could be a faster writer.

At the start of this year, when I really started to cling to the idea of self-publishing and really dive right in, my goal was to publish two books. With the idea of a collection of short stories to begin with, I was on a good, strong path, having published Bowlful of Bunnies about halfway through the year. I had several books in the works, and one was nearly halfway done, so it seemed like it would all fall into place that I might be able to finish a draft by November and get things edited and published before December 31st, easy peasy.

…mmm, well, turns out, not so much. I shouldn’t be surprised that I’m sitting here at the start of December with no second book in sight. Bowlful of Bunnies is the amalgamation of stories from as far back as eight years ago (though there was some new stuff in there, too); I’ve been working Serpent in a Cage for nearly ten years. I’ve started and restarted and restarted again too many books to count. Though I certainly have the imagination to think of several new books a year, I do not have the writing prowess to write several new books a year.

Nothing’s wrong with that, of course. Some people just aren’t quick writers. I still published a book this year. I’m going to shoot for two again next year, but if I’m just a book a year kind of author, that okay. The slightly frustrating part for me is just that I have so many books inside my head, but they come out at a snail’s pace and it’s all going to bottle-neck pretty soon here…

What are some of your tips, if you have any, for more speedy word wrangling? Are you a speedy writer, or a more languid wordsmith? When do you feel the words really fly for you, or do just let it go with the turtle-paced flow more often than not?

Either way, I have two days off right now, so here’s top hoping maybe I can push it a little bit further past my usual page-a-day. Wish me luck, and happy writing!

Because I should post something….

Sometimes, you just don’t know what to write.

I mean, as far as blog posts go. When it comes to writing books, I have more ideas than I know how to handle. Short stories can be a little more challenging, but I’ve got a handful of ideas there, too. But blog posts, especially when you haven’t been spending a lot of time hopping around the blogosphere and doing the whole connecting with other writers things, can be damn difficult. Luckily, there’s always the approach of writing about not knowing what to write about to fall back on.

There was the possibility of a Thanksgiving post, but I felt it got a little too maudlin. This year, it was a pretty strange Thanksgiving for me. It’s always a tricky time for me; it was on Thanksgiving that my fiance proposed to me, so sometimes it’s difficult to grapple with the idea of being thankful in light of his passing away almost three years ago. Add that to the fact that my roommate’s sister got engaged this Thanksgiving, and it’s a whole melting pot of really strange emotions. I never thought I’d be grateful to be working the crazy post-Thanksgiving retail chaos, but it probably served as a good distraction from getting too depressed.

It wasn’t the most cheerful post, so I decided to skip it, despite having it mostly typed out. Instead, then, the much more cheering topic of the difficulty of topics, an oldie but goodie. I’ve always liked the irony of the fact that my go-to topic for when I can’t think of a topic is how I can’t think of a topic.

Do you have a go-to topic for when you’re feeling a little uninspired for blog posts?

And, while we’re on the topic of inspiration, I just picked up three fresh new notebooks recently. Right now, I’m enjoying their pristine, untarnished immaculateness, but I know I’m going to want to start filling them with words soon. Any suggestions or inspirations? I’d love to hear some ideas or challenges.

Oh, Here It Goes Again.

So, I’ve taken a little bit of a break from writing and from the blog to have some well-spent time with a friend, which I have a feeling I’ll be doing a lot of on the weekends if this new schedule that gives me Sundays off stays consistent. From what I hear, this is typical for the position I’m going to be taking a different store, so I’m pretty stoked about that. While there’s more work and demands and probably a likelihood of having to more on any given week, a certain regularity to when I’ll need to be there will be kind of nice. I’m definitely excited for it…

…but I’m also excited that it’s Monday and I have at least the week to try to get back into the swing of writing and get some work done there, too. It’s definitely going to be an exciting week on that front; I got a letter from Amazon regarding my first royalty check coming through, which should happen any time this week, so I can officially say I’m a published, paid, professional writer. Booyah.

I’m still running my Autumn Anthology contest, though I realized that ‘anthology’ was spelled wrong in the title of that particular post, which probably doesn’t help my street cred too much. That’s okay, though; I’m embracing my laziness about actually fixing it. There’s also been an exciting change! I will be accepting all of your short stories and poetry fit for a thrills and chills Halloween-esque anthology! Honestly, as I told the Writing Poetry Group on Facebook, I’m surprised I didn’t think of poetry. I think I’d love to accept any images, too, especially for a potential cover. So, send me your stories, your poems, your artwork or photography for consideration! You have until September 30th to submit! I can’t wait to see what you come up with, and be sure to share the contest with your friends, too!

Other than that, I’ll be plugging away at Serpent in a Cage, reading a lot (as usual!), and trying to get a grasp on what I want to do for NaNoWriMo. I really want to be proactive and go out to the get-togethers they were holding last year in Naperville that I was too shy or spastic or busy to attend last year. This is definitely going to be the year I finish NaNo! I am determined. Besides, it’ll be good to have a finished draft just in case it looks like neither the anthology or SiaC are coming out by the end of 2012 (since I did that whole ‘going to publish two books this year’ plan and everything). I know there’s another round of RoW80 starting soon, so I’ll have to access my goals there, too.

I’m also looking forward to catching up with everyone and their blogs, but if I’ve missed something good and interesting over the weekend, let me know! How’s everyone getting on? I can’t wait to get to work this week.

Question Time!

So, I’ve seen this on a few blogs. No one tagged me for this, but I wanted to do it anyway. So there. It’s a collection of questions about you as a writer and your latest work in progress, so I thought I’d spend a little idle time and answer there, whether anyone’s interested or not. Because I love these things. Here we go!

What is the working title of your book?
Serpent in a Cage (potentially with The Asyentai Chronicles or The Age of Return involved in there, too)

Where did the idea come from for the book?
Sometimes, when you’ve been working on a book for as long as I’ve been working on Serpent in a Cage, it’s hard to pinpoint exactly when inspiration struck. The first draft, which was completely and entirely different and nothing like the current incarnation except for the presence of I think two characters (out of a very large cast!), was written when I was in sixth grade, but it was such a different tale then that I don’t even know if I could count it. But, in my mind, the world that SiaC opens up to the world started when I was ten years old, in a memory that’s as vivid with meaning as it is hazy with detail. I hold in my mind traipsing around Mission Creek Woodland Park in Mt. Pleasant, Michigan, pretending to be characters from the DragonLance book series, when all of a sudden, the characters started to change a little and become slightly different, and they grew from there into the vast world of Aryneth…A world of my own, a world yet unknown, a world that has stuck with me ever since and hopefully will for a very, very long time.

What genre does your book fall under?
Serpent in a Cage is definitely a fantasy novel, which is still hard for me to unabashedly admit since college tried to get it through my head that genre fiction is bad. I’m tempted to talk about how it’s more character driven with fantastical elements, and that’s true, but, I’m going to put down my foot, toss back my head, and proclaim, “Yup. It’s fantasy. Deal with it.”

Which actors would you choose to play your characters in a movie rendition?
Since the cast of Serpent in a Cage is so large, it would be hard to cast most of them, so I’ll stick with the three main ones. I know, visually, the only ones I have in mind for Locke Mandrake Battarack and Gilferen Allok are models who have questionable acting skills, though one of the Phelps twins could do a good run as Gilferen. For Auferrix Ferrore, I can’t help thinking Frida Pinto would be glorious if it turned out that we can rough her up a bit and make her more bad-ass.

What is the one-sentence synopsis of your book?
A plot to save a captured princess should be easy enough, but the Battaracks are about to discover a world that goes much, much deeper than they would have ever expected.

Will your book be self-published or represented by an agency?
Self-published, baby! I always imagined myself trying to traditionally publish the Aryneth series, but now the thought is almost anathema, unless any publishers just happened to want to take it over because it’s doing so awesomely, lol, /dreaming.

How long did it take you to write the first draft of your manuscript?
The ‘first draft’ in its completed form took me probably about four years to write, from the time I sat down with the new approach and dedicated myself to finishing it. I believe it was completed sometime in 2009 or 2010, and I started to revise it in 2011, only to discover I wanted to completely rewrite it. I’m still working on the second draft, though it’s going quite well. These dates are mostly just guesses; I’m feeling too lazy to look into the actualities of it.

What other books would you compare this story to within your genre?
Oof. That’s a tough one, since I try my best to keep myself from being comparable to other tales in this genre. I want it to be more like A Song of Ice and Fire, a big sweeping epic, but it’s not (yet). I suppose I could compare it to The Wheel of Time in that there’s the unlikely hero, the big prophesies, etc, etc, but again, I wanted to break the mold with Serpent in a Cage in that the first book is really a pretty simple tale, and it’s not a sweeping epic, though it will be…eventually. In that respect, I’d almost compare it to The Hobbit, in that it’s the little bit that starts up a much bigger thing later on. The style and the structure, though, I think, still lends an awful lot to the DragonLance books that originally inspired it so many years ago.

Who or What inspired you to write this book?
You can tell that there have been a great many books to inspire me along this path, and that this book is a long time in the making. But if I had to attribute this book to any one source of inspiration, I would have to say my father. It was through his own love of books, passed down to his eager, starry-eyed daughter, that I was able to discover and embrace this incredible power to create. Thanks, Dad.

What else about your book might pique the reader’s interest?
Besides the fact that it’s awesome? Aryneth to me is a complete world, fully realized and exceptionally detailed, and I should like to think that it’s a world people will enjoy getting lost in. The characters are all unique, but relateable, on several levels. They’re regular people, in a fantastical world, in an extraordinary situation. To me, that’s what fantasy is all about, and I really hope I’m able to accomplish that feeling of wonder and relateability through Serpent in a Cage and the subsequent epic to follow.

I’m not going to tag anyone for the questions because no one tagged me. I’ll just leave it to whoever wants to talk about their upcoming works to tackle if they so desire!

I am going to take a moment, though, to thank my newest subscribers, Chris Martin and Patti Niehoff! Thanks so much for following!

And So It Settles…

Have you ever gotten caught up in a whirlwind of activities and then, finally, when the wind stopped and the dust settled, you were left standing there, not sure what to do with yourself without that driving force of chaos propelling you in every direction at breakneck speed? Yeah. That’s kind of where I’m at right now. I’m back from an incredible trip from Michigan, straight back into the chaos of work (which isn’t going anywhere), and into a few days where I might actually have (gasp!) time to write. I know there’s some comments on my last post I want to get to, a potential anthology I want to kickstart, and there’s the whole promoting Bowlful of Bunnies in paperback thing to get to. The apartment is a mess, I still need to do laundry, and my cats are clinging to me like they thought I was gone for a year and was never coming back.

So where the heck do I begin?

And I answer, “Good question, L. Good question,” and decide that the best place to start is simply by admitting I have no idea where to start back in on things. I know I want to start. I feel like I’ve abandoned this poor blog for lack of time and that, despite having written several pages on several projects on the train (I love the train), my writing had suffered, as well. Neither of these are true, but you still get that feeling of guilt, like the feeling coming over me right now as one of my cats looks up at me and plaintively meows for my attention with a soulful look of “but you were gone!” to try to sway me away from the keyboard to pet him. Yes, I was gone, but now I’m back, and there’s plenty of time for pets right now.

Getting back into the swing of my writing can be like that. Take it easy, ease into it, do what you can. Most of all, don’t feel guilty when I head into work later this afternoon and think, “Crap, I didn’t get this, that, or the other thing done and I won’t have time for it tomorrow, either…” Because I’ll have time for it eventually. I’ll get to all that eventually. I might even get to it sooner rather than later.

I’m really glad to be back into the swing of things, even if I don’t quite have the rhythm back yet.

I also haven’t had a chance to welcome and thank artlesspoems and Patrick Latter for subscribing to the blog. So hello! And thank you! welcome aboard!