Blizzards, King & Outlines

Hope everyone is enjoying their holiday season!

Here in Oklahoma, we had a “for real” blizzard on Christmas Eve. I’ve never seen a storm like this here. It was exciting! I felt terrible for all the people stranded and waiting on rescue for hours, but watching the wind whip all that snow into massive, swirly shapes was awe-inspiring from my living room. We lit a fire and ate yummy leftover Italian Beef and Vegetable Soup.

Homemade soup, snow and a fireplace and I’m a happy lady!

We had a family gathering that night, but my husband drove to get his mother from work and called from her house to say we were going nowhere. If visibility is down enough to scare my husband with his big four-wheel drive, then it’s bad. So we ate soup and let the kids talk us into opening their gifts early. (They always do anyway. )

It was actually one of the nicest holidays. I set aside the incredible stress of this past year and just enjoyed my kids. Oh, and the book my husband bought me for Christmas!

I read until my eyes ached. This book is massive! 

For the first half, I felt pulled back into the excitement I had as a teen reading The Stand. I’m also not feeling so badly about all the characters I had in Dweller on the Threshold.  Believe me, Stephen King takes the award for the most characters to follow in a story.  I must find his words on this book-must know how long it took to write.  If he had charts or if this just poured from his head like magic. (I’m betting on the magic thing with him. )

I’m in the 700s and the story isn’t close to winding down!

I’m not picking it back up until tonight though.  Since we still have snow on the roads, it’s unlikely they’ll want to show my house so I’m burrowing in to wrestle the outline for YA#2 in shape.  I’ve been sketching scenes like mad and right now, the book has that sort of all-over-the-place-mad-excitement feel to it.  The organized half of my brain, the part that fights the more dominant half constantly, is slamming down its proverbial foot today.  Must get notes and scenes in line.  Which means…

PLOT BOARD TIME!

Man, I love this part of the process.  I have some of the best scenes planned for this book.  My biggest problem? I still don’t have an opening scene I can’t live without.  I’ve sketched three different scenarios, but none are hitting me with the impact of the first scene in book #1.

I’m hoping the magic plot board will set that straight over then next couple of days. 

And last, check out the FANTASTIC Wonder Woman icon to your right.  I got that from the lovely Karen Mahoney.  I have a feeling she and I spent our childhood in similar fashion-glued to every Wonder Woman episode that came on TV. I even told a relative I planned to be Wonder Woman when I grew up. 

That icon will be staying up because I’m determined that 2010 is going to be my year.

Solstice Fun and Writing Goals for 2010

Today is the winter solstice, but my family celebrated yesterday.

I had a fantastic time with them. We decorated some more, baked tons of cookies and the day was filled with much music and laughter.  The stress my family has been under has gone on so long, I hadn’t realized how good it would be for them to just let the worry go for a while.

Think we’ll carry this outlook through the rest of December. 

I’ve decided my writing will go somewhere in 2010 and I’ve set goals to finish two YAs and one adult UF. The YA books are pretty solid in my mind and I’m still trying to decide on the UF.  I’d love to write book two in Beri’s series but I may start another series instead.  Ambitious goals, I know, but the YAs aren’t as long and I have a feeling I’ll race through them because I’m just too excited about them. Seriously love these sisters and their stories!

So, over the holidays, I have a guest blog to write, ROD entries to read and since book #2 in my YA trilogy is going fairly well, I may dive into the roughdraft. I’d planned to start my daily word goal after the holidays, but I really can’t wait. The hubby mentioned I’ve been getting that glazed look. 

It comes from disappearing into other worlds.

But I’m also going to spend some true quality time with the kiddos. Maybe even play some Zelda with my son.  Will probably blog here and there, but it will be sporadic until January.

Happy Holidays and stay warm!

Author Websites

I know the holidays have people busy, but I’d love to see some comments on how you guys feel about specific themed websites.  I want to do a proper author website, but I’m very interested in creating two separate ones.  One will have Norse mythological art, a glossary of terms and possibly, the Poetic Edda itself since I use it quite heavily in my Wyrd Sisters Trilogy for young adults.  I also want it to have a youthful feeling, be slightly sexy and very mysterious.  (I’ve been collecting art links, so if you come across anything that sounds like it would fit, feel free to send me a link.)

My other one will have a mix of mythologies since Dweller on the Threshold is actually a mesh of several. I cover Greek and Norse but it’s also peppered with a heavy dose of theosophy. The Dweller is a very scary creature. Since the book references centuries of mass murderers, this website will not have a youthful feeling. And with Beri being a warrior, I’d like it to center pretty heavily around her. In fact, I had linked to a wonderful image of a warrior woman with two knives, but the link is dead and she’s gone. Grr!  

Anyway, I love the way my critique partner, Rachel Vincent, has put her dual writing personalities together on one website–it’s absolutely gorgeous too. Have you seen it? http://www.rachelvincent.com 

 I’m still pulling together ideas for what I plan to do. In the meantime, I’ll still be mostly here. And Livejournal. And Facebook. And Twitter.  (Will probably be dumping the Myspace-too many viruses on that ridiculous social network.)

Ozark Communes, Snake Pits & Books

I used to spend a lot of time entertaining fellow OKRWA members with stories of my family.  I didn’t have a usual upbringing–my father was on a search for knowledge. Mostly spiritual.  So, we moved a lot and met a lot of different people from a lot of different faiths.  Even spent 2 1/2 years on this kind of commune in the Ozark mountains around the time I was going through puberty. 

Now… puberty on a commune is not a story I thought to write down, but it did have its moments-including the time we were trying to earn enough to get away and had two entire families share a one bedroom apartment over a summer.  I was 12 and the other family had a seventeen year-old guy.

What usually happens to a girl around 12?

And can you imagine that happening in an apartment with nine people and one bathroom? In the middle of the night? With a mother who believes in squealing and sharing any and all information?

Yes, I showed the first signs of womanhood and everyone got together for freaking midnight coffee. The 17 year-old boy teased me unmercifully for years.

So, over the years, I collected stories.  And I told them aloud at gatherings.  I shared the Pentecostal Holiness grandfather stories (Some of that is here on the blog.) and then the quite opposite liberal stories of my family’s search for something very different after growing up in holy roller tent revivals. <G>

Soon, authors in the group like Sharon Sala, were insisting I put the stories into a book. Sala called us the Redneck Steal Magnolias. LOL! I didn’t take that as a compliment at first, but it kind of stuck.  Why yes, we were so bored on that commune, we shot bottle rockets at each other out of canoes. Why yes, someone had the bright idea to raise chickens, got bored and let them loose. Crazy things roosted outside my bedroom window–the roosters chased us all when we went outside. We had to dodge them to get to the bus. And yes, that bus ride down the mountain took forever and I’m pretty sure quite a few girls lost their virginity in the back.

Then there was the snake pit. My father built this organic garden out of tires, trucked in a ton of rabbit poo and then let it become the scariest snake pit on the face of the earth. Even the roosters avoided that part of the yard.

And through it all,  this lonely girl discovered books.  One of the ladies gave her a box of books–mostly romances. She would pack a picnic basket of food, go far into the woods to escape a rapidly growing out of control situation and spend her days at an abandoned housing site next to bushes of wild blackberries. She’d hide there all day to read and turn the pages blue with blackberry juice.  Book after book.  Escaping into one fantasy after another.

It wasn’t long before she ran out of books to read.

And that’s when she started writing her own.

Interested In Foretold?

Follow the legs to The Deadline Dames! Today, I posted a short excerpt of my young adult novel currently out on submission with my agent, Miriam Kriss. 

A Sunday Ramble-Old Manuscripts

I finally got some holiday decorating done. I’m behind this year.  Plus, I’ve decided to take a break from the job hunt until the new year.  It’s a peace of mind thing more than anything else because this year has held a few too many personal disappointments and I want to enjoy some holiday time with my family and work on the second in my YA trilogy.  (Still hoping for some good writing news before Christmas, though. Can’t quite set that one aside. <g>)

I’ve been looking at old finished manuscripts and there are a couple of early books that should have never been written to the end. Still can’t believe I got such personalized rejects on those–can’t believe I ever sent them out.  LOL!

But I also have a few early books that have promise. I’ve realized I hadn’t developed rewriting skills with those and while the work will be hard, I may rewrite a couple. One is a romantic suspense about  high school best friends who reconnect and there’s a creepy bad guy and one is a paranormal about a cat shifter.  Still iffy on that one since my CP is known for her werecats.  In my book, the curse came from a group of Vikings who invaded where they shouldn’t have. (Yeah, yeah, that Norse stuff sneaks into a lot of my books.)

What’s sad is there is one manuscript that could be cool if I came up with a lot of updated ideas.  My heroine was a computer hacker for the government and she was recruited after putting them through a wild goose chase through Northern Ireland as a teenager.  She came from a family with a Catholic father and a Protestant mother who abandoned her and she’d found a place to belong in the hacker world.  But both the background and the computer programs I used are out of date, so the research would be intense.

I do have a VERY exciting idea for another young adult novel. This would be a stand alone-something I haven’t written in a long time. It will be emotionally dark, a tear jerker, but it’s another of those goose bump ideas, so I gotta write it. I really enjoy writing for teenagers. That could have a lot to do with having a wonderful teenage daughter who has fascinating friends. I get such a kick out of them.

I’ll be blogging at the Deadline Dames this Wednesday and I have an upcoming guest blog I’ve agreed to do.  Still going back and forth on topics for both, so if anyone has ideas, feel free to share.