mizkit

Over on Magical Words, the group writing blog I’m a part of, we’re running a book give-away contest this week. Head on over to participate in my contest–for which the prize is a signed copy of one of my books, or a copy of “Hot Time in the Old Town Tonight”, the Old Races novella I wrote this summer which has only been available to subscribers. While the novella will be available again to buy in February, this is your one and only chance to possibly win it for free. (And I’ll also send the winner one of the Ireland 2010 calendars that I did, if you take the “Hot Time” option.)

The contest ends Wednesday, December 30th, and the winner will be announced New Year’s Eve.

Merry Christmas Eve, everybody!

annathepiper

Undone is the first of rachelcaine’s new series Outcast Season, the offshoot from the Weather Warden books, and as series starters go it’s not bad. We’re introduced to Cassiel, a djinn who’s forced into human shape–and, as a result, forced to work with the Wardens on whose power she depends to keep herself alive. But when the Warden assigned to work with her is killed along with his wife, she must turn to his brother instead to track down their killers. And all the while she has to cope with the unwelcome side effects of prolonged incarnation in human form.

The story’s not without flaws, most of which are repeatedly played too heavily: how much Cassiel hates being human, the cute child insisting on calling her Cassie despite being told repeatedly that she prefers to be called Cassiel, how the Wardens keep assuming that if something goes wrong it’s clearly Cassiel’s fault, how Cassiel being incarnated into human form is part of a Greater Plan(TM). Taken individually, none of these quibbles are too bad, but as a whole, for me as a reader, I could have liked all of them toned down just a tad.

Also: the token appearance of David and Jo at the very beginning of the story honestly detracted from the rest of the story for me, and it really felt like a question of “let’s put them in here just to prove to the reader that this is the same universe as Jo’s stories”, since David and Jo didn’t really provide any other plot relevance to the story–and we’re not even told why Cassiel, incarnated into human shape, is dumped on David and Jo to begin with. Lewis has far more pertinent reason to show up at the beginning, since he’s the one that lays it out to Cassiel how it’ll have to go if she expects the Wardens to work with her. But much as I’ve enjoyed David and Jo’s story over in the Weather Warden books, they just didn’t need to be in this one.

All this said? There’s still a good solid story here. I liked the edgy interaction between Cassiel and Luis, still very much too edgy to be a proper romance yet, and hopefully it’ll be a relationship that takes a while to develop. The Big Bad of the story intrigued me, as did the backstory there between the Big Bad and Cassiel herself. And yeah, I’ll be checking out Book Two. For this one, three stars.

Mirrored from annathepiper.org.

annathepiper

Michele Lee delivers a compact little horror story in Rot, a novella that goes into the ramifications of people in society being able to bring back loved ones from the dead–only in this case, rather than true resurrection, it’s the capturing of a living spirit inside an otherwise still-dead body. Yes, folks, this is a zombie story, but one where the zombies retain sentience for as long as their bodies retain enough physical cohesion for their brains to work.

And this opens up a host of unhappy results as nursing homes for the undead crop up as locations to dump your resurrected zombie loved ones when you no longer want them. Not to mention the myriad unpleasant excuses for reviving your loved ones to begin with, such as Patrick, a gay young man who’s brought back by his fundamentalist Christian parents who promise to put him back in his grave if he’ll “repent”.

With this as a background, the story’s protagonist, Dean, a watchman at one of these zombie retirement homes, discovers that certain ones of the residents are going unaccounted for–and as he’s moved to investigate, he discovers that these zombies, already rendered pretty much non-people by the sad circumstances of their existence, are helpless prey for even darker motivations than the ones that put them there to start with.

What circumstances give society the ability to create zombies is only glossed over, but really, that’s fine; this story is short enough that that really doesn’t need to be explained in depth. The focus is where it rightfully belongs, on Dean, on Patrick, and upon Amy, who is the latest of the zombies in the facility to go missing. Dean must bring himself to trust Patrick enough to take him out of the facility with him as he tracks Amy down, and the dynamic between the two is very nicely done indeed.

All in all, it’s a tight little tale and worth checking out. Four stars.

Mirrored from annathepiper.org.

yhlee

It can hardly be a coincidence that no language on earth has ever produced the expression "As pretty as an airport."

Airports are ugly. Some are very ugly. Some attain a degree of ugliness that can only be the result of a special effort. This ugliness arises because airports are full of people who are tired, cross, and have just discovered that their luggage has landed in Murmansk (Murmansk airport is the only known exception to this otherwise infallible rule), and architects have on the whole tried to reflect this in their designs.

They have sought to highlight the tiredness and crossness motif with brutal shapes and nerve-jangling colors, to make effortless the business of separating the traveler forever from his or her luggage or loved ones, to confuse the traveler with arrows that appear to point at the windows, distant tie racks, or the constellation of Ursa Minor in the night sky, and wherever possible to expose the plumbing on the grounds that it is functional, and conceal the location of the departure gates, presumably on the grounds that they are not.

annathepiper

One of my fellow Drollerie authors, Meredith Holmes, unfortunately was in the hospital this week with a pulmonary embolism. So she was unable to participate in the Blog Tour this time around, and since she was scheduled to host Elisa Diehl, I’m going to take care of hosting Elisa’s post instead. Check it out, folks!

And also, stop by Meredith’s place and wish her well. ‘Cause hospitals are never fun, especially this close to Christmas.

Take it away, Elisa!

Read the rest of this entry »

Mirrored from angelakorrati.com.

mizkit

We have accomplished two weeks’ worth of going to the gym now. It was less difficult to get up at 7am this week, possibly because I was going to bed at Very Sensible Hours, but also possibly because I was slightly more used to it. But although for the rest of the year when the gym is open, it’s not open until noon, I still should really get up at 7 and go write until half eleven and then go to the gym to…weightlift, probably, because I suspect the pool will, for its opening hours, be full of screaming children. Actually, that’s fine. It’s the locker room being full of screaming children I’m less keen on. That, and the bitterness of having to share lanes with several other swimmers who are really bad at lane-sharing, since possibly everybody will be trying to get their laps in during the limited opening hours. (Not looking forward to January and the New Year’s Resolution group.)

On the plus side, though, we did learn that our regular cabbie starts work at 7am, so when gym hours go back to normal we’ll just have him get us. That’s nice, then. :)

Today was a busy day, although I didn’t get all that much writing done. Swam, went to the store, made coconut joys, wrote a little, made dinner, watched NCIS, made marshmallow creme in preparation for making fudge tomorrow…heck fire, no wonder I’m sleepy. Off to bed with me!

The Road Home: miles to Isengard: 16.4
ytd km swum: 50.5
ytd wordcount: 272,700

mizkit

[	Tags	|	industry essays, questions answered, writing	]
[	mood	|	contemplative	]

An LJ reader emailed me a writing question a few days ago, and gave me the all-clear to use its answer as a blog post, so I’m going to give it a shot. The question (and its surrounding commentary, which I thought was relevant) follows:

I know that some authors find rewriting easier (in some ways) than the initial creative process. Me, I can whip something out of nothing without breaking a sweat. But whenever I try to approach the highly necessary rewrite of my recent novella, I get almost immediately overwhelmed by the minutiae of things that need tending to. I am pulled this way and that, trying to keep track of the myriad of details that need to hover simultaneously in my forebrain–and I end up just fiddling with the niggling little grammar nits, polishing word choice, questioning whether that adverb is really necessary, and reassuring myself that all the independent clauses are safely sequestered within their parenthetical commas.

Consequently, the real work–that is, deleting scenes and rewriting the whole cloth of large sections–goes undone because of these distractions of questionable value. Sometimes, I think I might be better off deleting the damned thing and starting over from scratch.

So, my question: In your subsequent drafts, how do you keep the story from getting in the way of your rewriting?

( Answer behind the cut. )

(x-posted from the essential kit)