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Pain

19
Oct 2011

I had dental surgery last week. I am not a happy camper, nor is my face. Throbbing is a sign of affection, right? Or was that infection…

I count myself lucky though, because experiencing pain gives me a chance to sympathize with my characters as I prepare for NaNoWriMo.

See, I want them to suffer. Their lives should hurt, they will bleed. Caroline (remember her?) is going to lose everything she holds dear and her entire life will turn sideways before she regains her sense of self. If she regains it at all. This novel is a lot about hurt, a lot about pain and fear and anguish and suffering.

Yes, my mouth hurts that much. Shut up.

In unrelated news, I’m trying to sit on a large exercise ball instead of a chair to help my back.* So far, I’ve found that I bounce around a lot but it I can’t get close enough to the table to make it work. Plus I think it is losing air and I’m getting lower and lower every day. I’m not impressed, but I do look ridiculous. That’s something, right?

*Kids, when you turn 30, your body begins to die in pieces. Teeth, back, knees. Might as well just accept your inevitable mortality, because there’s no avoiding it. Sigh.

 

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Blurgh

22
Aug 2011

We’ve contracted the first days of school plague around here, and that sucks. It is really bad when both parents get sick–who does all the stuff?

In the semi-hallucinatory state of all sick folk, I’ve been considering Waking Kiara, and how to best edit her from here. I’ve been through and through that book, adding and nudging things, and while I think it is a pretty good story now, I also think I need to bulk up the heart of it. It’s like one of those visible people with all the muscles and veins but no skin. The bones of the story are there, the basic mechanics of the world are there, but the pretties are still missing. The little quirks. The reason you’re supposed to care about the characters and what happens to them.

I need, in other words, to work on taking the story from an account to a novel that makes you feel like you’re there.

Right. How do you do that again?

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Here’s what happened

19
Jul 2011

The short version.

In 2005 I was a new mom to a very needy baby. In a desperate attempt to get out of the house, I decided to participate in National Novel Writing Month. It seemed crazy at the time, but after 30 days of frantic writing I had a little novel to show for it, my very first long piece of fiction. That novel went on to become Triple X, which was nominated for an Eppie award in 2008, much to my delight.

I wrote some more, and published some more, and writing started to look like something I could both do and enjoy doing. A blessed combination, if ever there was one.

In 2008, tragedy struck our household with a surprising force. I nearly died of Deep Vein Thrombosis and subsequent Pulmonary Embolisms. Three months later, we lost a beloved family member to cancer. To be honest, we didn’t cope well. Writing went well to the back burner as we just tried to regroup and survive.

Now here we are, 2011. Suddenly, stories reappeared in my head. I was sure I had given up the writing thing, mind you. But there I was, sitting in a tattooist’s chair, and BAM. Story idea. Big one.  At the same time, my website was hacked and summarily deleted. I’ve lost all my archives, all the blogging and writing I did in the past six years. The universe is telling me to start fresh, so here I am.

This time, I hope to keep going, past tragedies and any other surprises that might come my way. I don’t know what is next, but I’m excited to find out.

And that’s what happened.

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