Nearly out for the count – Almost

Yesterday was one of those workdays. I got home thinking, “ok, so I didn’t get fired and no one died.” So it wasn’t all bad. I’ll be back tomorrow.

Genie and a polar bear

Just a quick note on inspiration. I think for writers it comes from just about everywhere. I don’t need much personally for my brain to take off on a tangent for a story. It’s actually harder for me to stay focused on one single story at a time to see it through ASAP because there are always a solid dozen or more constantly going through my head. And any little thing might set another story off.

For instance, just this morning I was driving to work, scanning radio stations when I heard these lyrics from a Christina Aguilera song:

I’m a genie in a bottle, baby
Gotta rub me the right way, honey
I’m a genie in a bottle, baby
Come, come, come and let me out

And bam! Another story was kick-started through my imagination. I just saw it. It joined the one from yesterday morning that got started from a dream I had about being chased by a huge polar bear through a Louisiana swamp over rickety old catwalks until I came to a dead end at a trailer where I burst into it and scared a woman speechless who was rocking her baby to sleep. Seeing her there surprised me and I stopped just long enough for the polar bear to catch me and he batted at me because he’d been wanting to play. Here I’d been running for my life and so frightened in my dream and he’d just wanted to play. Sheesh. Even in my dream, I was rolling my eyes.

Sometimes, I wish I had a little less inspiration.   …I know – be careful what you wish for…

Something my sister taught me

My sister is one of the best moms I know and she taught me the most important thing about raising children – though I don’t know if I can actually put it into words. It’s more of a lesson absorbed from example and understood in a way to change my life. Basically, she makes time for her kids. Sounds simple, doesn’t it? Yes, she has a very busy life, works full-time, and stays healthy with regular work-outs and no, she doesn’t have a nanny, a driver, a chauffeur or a personal shopper or assistant. But it’s not the “planned” or “quality vs quantity” time type of lesson. This lesson was all about choice. She chooses to do things with her kids when she really has other things on her plate that “must” get done. But she’s learned to separate the urgent from the important. The urgent will always be there, or immediately be replaced by another urgent. The important will grow up when we’re not looking, so quickly we’d swear the world was on fast forward and move away, leaving us with only memories to hold and not little hands.

See, that’s what she’s good at. Making memories. Her kids won’t remember the December she got all her Christmas shopping done early and the presents wrapped beautifully. They will remember the day they stayed home from school after it had snowed all night, and although she had planned on crossing a dozen more item of her holiday to do list, she took them sledding because, “Please mom? It’s perfect for it!” Made hot chocolate. Made a fire. Played a game. The only snow day that year. The only time it snowed enough to go sledding.

This was SO not me. I was an “urgent” person all the way. When the choice is there, urgent or important, sometimes it’s hard to see the important because the urgent screams and jumps up and down and just makes a god-awful fuss and often comes with a busybody ready to make you feel guilty if you haven’t done what you oh-my-god-just-have-to-do. Check email! Clean the car! Mop the kitchen!  And I might still be rushing around trying to put out those urgent fires 24/7 if it were not for my sister’s example.

I still slip into that sometimes. But now I work at balancing my life better. When my kids look back on their childhood, I want their memories to be more than, “Oh yeah, that was the time mom got all her papers filed and got the laundry washed, dried, folded and put away all in the same day.” Ha! Like they’d even remember that. Like I’D ever remember that.

I think one of the best blessings of life is having the opportunity to fill it will memories. This “child” lesson really did change my life. Not just with time and my children, but with every area. When there’s a choice of making a memory or crossing another thing off the list, I’m going to jump at the memory. Because my list is always there and always long. But an opportunity for a memory? It melts away as fast as a snowflake caught on your tongue. 

Those darn HEA’s

For those of you unfamiliar with acronyms related to the World of Romance Writers, that Happily Ever After. You know, like Cinderella or Sleeping Beauty – …and they lived happily ever after. Ok, today was one of those Mondays that leave the body tired and the brain drained, so tonight I’m going to cheat a little and paste a response to another blog I was surfing about why I love to read romances.

I love romances for a list of reasons. But at the heart of my list is “and they lived happily ever after.” The ending everyone wants. The golden, glowing, I-know-I-can-touch-it-this-time-if-I-stand-on-my-tippy-tip-toes-and-stretch-a-little-further hope. The ideal my heart reaches for always regardless of the other lessons learned in real life. In a romance, no matter what happens, true love is not only possible, but WILL happen, WILL fight, WILL triumph. And most important, will last. I live in a very real world – don’t we all? I need that break, that glimpse into hope that keeps me grounded and encouraged. Because though I don’t see my ideals realized often – any ideals, not just “true love” – I still believe in them. But some days those beliefs get a terrific beating and a good romance – erotic, sweet, historical, paranormal, etc. is just the patching up I need for all those scrapes and bruises.

Finger cramps

Been writing today! Yay! Progress! Working on Connyn’s story – the next book in the Ilyrian Destiny series. He was introduced in Brooke’s Sanctuary, and if you haven’t met him, let’s just say he isn’t the most laid back and well-liked of the cousins. Not that he cares what they think. He has “issues” with the gods, the Elders and Prophets, his cousins-hell, with just about everybody.

Heir to the Third House, Connyn had never fully accepted the fact that Rordyc had been matched to a Mystic before him. With five Houses needing sons with Mystic blood to fulfill the prophecy, and only four full-blooded Mystic daughters known, the friction that had always underscored Connyn’s relationships with his “matched” cousins was increasing. Especially now that the women were finally being located.

Connyn held a special antagonism toward Rordyc, since he believed that, being older, he should have been given preference in the Matching Ritual. Rordyc had never completely trusted his cousin, even before he had discovered him researching how to negate a Guardian spell.

Oh yeah. Connyn doesn’t mind stirring things up to get what he wants. Question is, will he want what he gets?

What??!! There’s SEX in this book??

I’ve been reading a lot of book reviews lately for various authors who are published by Ellora’s Cave like me. I respect the fact that everyone has their own opinion and that there are people out there who will not care for either individual author styles or specific books. I’m also totally ok with opinions that are polar opposites of mine. But I’ve discovered I have a pet peeve about one certain element that seems to pop up in a surprising amount of reviews regarding books from Ellora’s Cave.

oxoxox

A reviewer can say any and everything about the style, characterization, storyline, etc. but it really irritates me when an erotic romance gets dinged for having too much sex in it. Here’s a hint – if you don’t want a lot of sex, and graphic sex at that, don’t pick up an erotic romance to read. Especially romances from Ellora’s Cave. Their webpage makes it abundantly clear that their books contain sex, sex and more sex! They even have a Sex Rating System on the home page where the “Sensuous” level (the one for the books with the lowest amount of sexual intensity) is  described as having love scenes that “are explicit and leave nothing to the imagination”. And if that doesn’t adequately caution a potential reader, the warnings on the excerpts, the themes (which include Gay/Lesbian and Ménage a Trois and More), titles of certain series (Exotika and Torrid Tarot) and the Got Sex? link on the side bar should be taken as a strong indication that these stories will have a LOT of sex, and graphic sex in them. If this doesn’t convince the would-be reader, they should check out the guidelines given to the authors themselves, which include instructions such as “The story must include abundant and explicit sex and sexual tension, starting early and continuing throughout. Sex scenes must be described in graphic detail and explicit wording, not delicate euphemisms or purple prose.” So why would a reviewer censure a book sold on this site for containing a lot of sex? Thus my pet peeve.

oxoxox

Tell readers in the review that the book contains a large amount of graphic sex. Point out flaws in the in the story, holes in the plot, dragging dialogue and plastic characters. But don’t criticize an author for using elements intrinsic to the genre they’re writing in. For me, that diminishes the entire review. That’s like knocking a Star Trek novel for having space ships in it, slamming on Stephen King for scaring the hell out of you with one of his thrillers, or getting upset that a sweet series romance has a happily ever after ending. And think, if a food critic condemned the chocolate cake because there was too much cake and chocolate in it, would you put much value in anything else he had to say?

It’s Greek to me

Ok, I just couldn’t resist another line from Shakespeare. This one I love in it’s context in Julius Caesar. But that’s not what this post is about. I just started Edith Wharton’s The Age of Innocence and I am really enjoying her use of words. It’s not a book to just whip through though. Tonight I’m tired, so I’m not going to comment much, but I just wanted to share a paragraph that made me laugh – because it reminded me of some students I teach who grew up speaking one language at home, spoke another language at school, moved to the United States and are now learning in English and I’m trying to teach them Shakespeare. Sometimes I feel like I’m swimming through layers of language barriers and by the time the student “understands,” it’s not at all what I started out saying.

From chapter one of The Age of Innocence:

“…an unalterable and unquestioned law of the musical world required that the German text of French operas sung by Swedish artists should be translated into Italian for the clearer understanding of English-speaking audiences.” 

Method or just madness?

There’s a great discussion going on over at Romancing the Blog about symbolism and it got me thinking about why I write. To entertain? To get across a message? To get my name out there and become rich and famous?  – ok, be right back, LMAO at that last one… (whew!) Ok, where was I? Oh yes, why do I write.

Good question and one which honestly, I haven’t given a lot of thought to. I just simply do. Always have. It’s a part of me. Could I live without it? Absolutely. Would I be living my life fully without writing. Absolutely not. If I go for too long without writing something, I start to itch inside. A restlessness under my skin. A mental caging that’s only set free on paper.

At the moment, due to where life is for me right now, most of the time I live with this feeling as a dull ache – like the kind of headache that isn’t incapacitating, just there. Because presently, I can’t get enough aspirin (i.e. time) in the chunks I need it to completely satisfy and salve this ache. The last time I felt a full relief was after three solid days of hiding and writing – taking only small breaks for sleeping and eating. Any working full-time (not writing) single moms of small children out there I’m sure can tell you that those kinds of “chunk times” are few, few, few and far between.

And no matter what anyone says, writing takes a hell of a lot of time. Time, time, time. Time to think. Time to dream. Time to organize. Time to sort. Time to dig. Time to let the characters wander around my brain so I can get to know them, understand them, hear what they have to say. Time to sit in front of a computer and figure out how to get the story in my head into coherent sentences so a reader NOT inside my head can “get it”. Time to take a four-dimensional Picasso “looking” story of emotion, motivation, passion, belief, impulse and impetus and mold it into finite words without losing the heart and soul of the story that keeps me awake when I’m too tired to stand and my eyes are burning from staring at a screen. And this is before a single word is typed. Then there’s the cutting, expanding, condensing, time-line checking, word over-use catching, character verifying, sequence inspection, plot tightening – god! It goes on forever! Yet it drives me. Sometimes not what I want to do. But always a need inside to do.

And I wonder, why couldn’t I “itch” to sing? Then I could just pop over to an American Idol audition, win the competition and be happy.

Touch

I reached out

 

Touched your skin

Warmed my fingers

Clear to my heart

Sun on a frozen land

Bringing life, hope

The vague promise of tomorrow

Fades in the joy of today

Here, love lives

Thrives

Fills hollows

Chases shadows

Lets me breathe

Makes me believe

Touch me

Run your hands over my body

Beneath the heat of your caress

Feel my heart

Beat in expectation

            In pleasure

                        In love

I reached out

Touched you

Brushed eternity

Nothing like a breath of frozen air

Cold days. Very cold days here. When I’m out in the weather going to work, picking up kids, or running errands and the biting wind is trying to snap my nose and fingertips off – it’s hard to understand what could be so bad about global warming. (Ok, not really – no howling emails please!) But since it looks like I’m going to be freezing my ass off for a while, I decided to make a list of things this kind of cold is good for. And after about an hour of staring at a blank piece of paper (can you tell I’d rather live in the tropics – sans bugs the size of my fist?), I finally came up with these:

1. hot coffee, hot tea, hot chocolate (love hot drinks, but don’t to drink them during hot weather)
2. window designs made by Jack Frost
3. icicles sparkling against a bright blue sky
4. the looks on my kids’ faces when it starts to snow
5. when I’m outside exercising and I finally start to get warm and quit feeling like my jacket and sweats are full of ice cubes
6. scooting over close to my boyfriend under a soft, warm blanket when the rest of the house is still morning cold

So that’s my list for the moment. As the months go on, I could probably add some more. Maybe. Or I might just start dreaming of the spring thaw, green grass and afternoons at the pool.