Nope, I never forget. Life is, shall we say, full to bursting right now.

And what better day to post a contest than my first paid holiday in five years?

Let me explain what's going on. Or I could sum up:

Once a month I will post an orphaned first line here on LJ. All my LJ posts are mirrored on Goodreads, so you can find the line there as well. In comments--either here or on Goodreads--write the first paragraph of a story or the first stanza of a poem using that line. Easy peasy.

Anyone can enter. Anyone at all, friend, foe or interested stranger, newbie or professional.

You have one (1) week to come up with your entry. I will announce the winner and repost his or her winning entry.

There is more at stake here than covering yourself in glory on my blog. Oh yes, there is an actual prize involved. The winner each month will receive one of the portable fantasy map pendants I make.

Kinda like this one. Not this exact one, but you get the idea. I'll surprise you.


And the first line for this month is:

At midnight on her ninth birthday, Alison Marie was crowned Queen of the Nightlands.

Now go forth and write. I'm always delighted to see what people come up with.

Detailed rules behind the cut for those who missed them. ( Read more... )

Have fun!

Finishing two out of three priorities for a day isn't bad.

I did write. Hit 1k for the day, which was good. If I had a week off work, this book would be finished. Time is the issue, not plot or knowing what happens, or how to get to the end. It's all about the number of hours in a day.

Priority two was posting pendants in my Etsy shop. I got 12 up yesterday, with more to come. Photographing those suckers and getting a good picture is difficult. And everything in life takes longer than it should.

I did put a permanent link to the shop in the sidebar on the left. This is not going to become the pimp Etsy all the time blog, but selling a few of these would be good.

Now off to the dayjob, which doesn't pay near enough.

That title reflects perfectly what writing has been like all week.

This was a difficult week all around, physically exhausting and emotionally trying. To say it blew my focus all to hell is a major understatement.

But I still buy those stubborn bitch tiaras by the gross. After a half day of errands and necessary things, I shut myself off from the world and found that focus again. Took me awhile, but I ended the day with 1400 words. That is a really good day for me, a run out of story in my head day. The well refills overnight, but for today, I'm done.

I even have a rough, raw, out of context and totally subject to revision darling for the week. Behind a cut for the darling phobic. ( Read more... )

Gabe is still not having a good time. And it's about to get worse. Imagine that.

Tomorrow's priorities include more writing, a decent blog post, and posting pendants on Etsy.

Wish me luck.

Goodnight stars............

Sad alt-country songs are what this book wants for thinking music. I don't argue. I only work here.

I'm still dwelling in that place where I have to choose between posting here and writing. Writing wins, at least when the day job lets it win. The book keeps growing, new complications present themselves, and I still love this dark, twisted story with all the love.

Sentence of the week, out of context as always: Jumping at shadows wasn't unreasonable if the shadows concealed a monster.

And a rough, raw, totally out of context, subject to revision darling:
Conversations ground to a halt as Gabe followed Mr. Sung between tables and behind the counter. A glass bead curtain swayed and clattered as the two men passed through and into the narrow hall leading to the back.

Zao's office was bigger than Gabe expected, with a large polished mahogany desk, glass fronted curio cabinets full of porcelain figurines and a window overlooking a walled courtyard behind the shop. Photographs hung on the walls, scenes from a mountain village in China, and pictures of the family. One photo showed Zao as a younger man sitting with his wife and son, and a grey-haired man that had likely been Liang. A tiny, bright-eyed little girl leaned against Zao's knee, her small hand held securely in his.

The lacquered oval frame was draped in mourning crepe. Gabe looked away quickly, an unwitting intruder on Zao's private grief.

Gabe is so not having a good time. Neither is Delia, but for different reasons. But that, says their cruel creator, is as it should be. Tension, high stakes, and uncertainty drive the story forward.

And if I do it right, they also make the reader care. That is the name of the game. The fact that Gabe keeps making me cry is a good sign.

Lots of other things going on, but I have to leave for work now. The dayjob is truly a noose around my life.

Those of you home and writing full time? I envy you. A lot.

::vanishes in a cloud of pixel dust::

It takes longer each month to pick a winner. That's because the entries get better and better.

You guys rock. Each and every one of you.

So the winners for the April contest are:

Fiction kara_gnome

She wed a conjurer man in the spring of '21. He'd promised just enough of his soul to encase her in flesh, and she was wild to learn the foxtrot. After the ceremony she hovered before him, smoke and glow, dreaming of dancing and jazz and bobbing her hair, but instead of youth, he filled her with his old age and poor health. Years crashed on her, wrinkling and stooping her under their weight. She screamed in pain while he laughed at the stupidity of the dead and marveled at what a handsome man he was. When it was over, she bared yellow teeth at him in a parody of a smile; death held no fears, not for her, and not when it breathed so close again. This time, too, when she was a spirit again, she had a husband to visit. She'd foxtrot through his dreams and hover on the edges of his life. He seemed to understand what she planned for he paled. Her smile only widened, thin lips stretched thinner.

Poetry spacedlaw

She wed a conjurer man in the spring of '21;

He’d courted her, dissolving her world with a sleigh of hands,

Moving pictures and fluid fingers on her pale cold skin,

An absurd ocean of hard fought for bootleg liquor.

All smoke and mirrors, dreams and shadows, just as she needed

The last thing she wanted was a dose of reality.

Winners should either send a private LJ message with their mailing address or email me at jaimewrites at that gmail dot com place. That way I can send you a prize.

This is fun and I'm always amazed at what people come up with. I'd never have thought that line would inspire so much rhyming poetry.

All of you need to finish your stories and poems, and then send them out. Really and truly.

This month's contest!

Winner will be announced Monday morning.

You should enter now. Really. I'm not kidding.

Originally posted by alaneer at Help Us/LJ Support Planned Parenthood

April, come she will, to quote Simon and Garfunkel. That means it's time for this month's contest.

A slightly more poetic, lyrical first line this month. Since April is poetry month that seems only fitting.

The Cliff notes version of what's going on:

Once a month I will post an orphaned first line here on LJ. All my LJ posts are mirrored on Goodreads, so you can find the line there as well. In comments--either here or on Goodreads--write the first paragraph of a story or the first stanza of a poem using that line. Easy peasy.

Anyone can enter. Anyone at all, friend, foe or interested stranger.

You have one (1) week to come up with your entry. I will announce the winner and repost his or her winning entry.

There is more at stake here than covering yourself in glory on my blog. Oh yes, there is an actual prize involved. The winner each month will receive one of the portable fantasy map pendants I make.

Kinda like this one. Not this exact one, but you get the idea. I'll surprise you.


And the first line for this month is:

She wed a conjurer man in the spring of '21.

Now go forth and write. I'm always delighted to see what people come up with.

Detailed rules behind the cut for those who missed them. ( Read more... )

Have fun!

Thickets and tangles of barbed wire were one of the "features" of WWI. They slowed the ability of troops on either side to advance. And these tangles were death traps, both for the men who got caught and for anyone who tried to rescue them. Those who had to listen to trapped soldiers die lived in a different kind of hell.


A battlefield account:
"One night we heard a cry, the cry of one in excruciating pain; then all was quiet again. Someone in his death agony, we thought. But an hour later the cry came again. It never ceased the whole night. Nor the following night. Naked and inarticulate the cry persisted. We could not tell whether it came from the throat of German or Frenchman. It existed in its own right, an agonized indictment of heaven and earth. We thrust our fingers into our ears to stop its moan; but it was no good; the cry cut like a drill into our heads, dragging minutes into hours, hours into years. We withered and grew old between those cries.

"Later we learned that it was one of our own [German] men hanging on the wire. Nobody could do anything for him; two men had already tried to save him, only to be shot themselves. We prayed desperately for his death. He took so long about it, and if he went on much longer we should go mad. But on the third day his cries were stopped by death."

And stuffy and sneezey and spacey, which is what my head is. I could blame the cold meds, but that might not be all of it.

S is for sleep. Beautiful, can't get enough of it sleep.

S is for sore, which is what my ribs and stomach muscles are after coughing for three days, and S is for my skin, which hurts. (even if Marshall does give me the eye when I say my skin hurts...as does my hair)

But mostly S is for sick.

So I have this whole post mostly written on women characters. I will finish it and post, but that requires time I don't have right now. The time I do have goes toward The Book That Never Ends. (tm.)

Except it is hurtling toward the end, when I'm awake enough to write. And I put the right words and sentences in the right order--which I swear I will learn to do someday.

Anyway, part of my post on characters has to do with choices I made as a writer, including painting the women in the Delia books as creatures of their time. Dora is so not a 21st Century Girl. She is, however, historically correct.

For now I'm giving you a snippet, a rough raw darling I kind of love, that illustrates that point, and because I haven't posted one in awhile. More in a day or so when I have time.

Cross my heart and hope to spit.

( Read more... )

Lambaste Microsoft, lament ever upgrading to Windows 7 and language, often foul, as the internet dies again and again, and yet again.

Thus went the evening. Words were written along the way.

In the moments the connection stayed up, I discovered some beautiful photos of face powder compacts from around 1910. That was the research challenge for the evening, to make sure my memory matched history.

And it did, which was a highlight. So now Dora does pull her compact out of her purse and I'm not dwelling in the land of anachronism.

To bed before the internet dies again. That would make four times while I typed this.

I was going to do a J post today, for obvious reasons. I don't have time to post an entry everyday using every letter of the alphabet, but this one seemed like a given.

Instead, I took the little time I had after work and wrote more of my novel. So the short version of J is for Jaime, which is all you really need to know. Honest.

Jaime is ambitious, a perfectionist, and a professional smart-ass. Given the choice, she laughs. She was born poor and will probably die poor, being a writer and all.

Jaime discovered long ago she can disagree with people and not hate them.

J is for Jaime, who is going to bed now. She will likely dream of Sesame Street.

It seriously, no joke, just took me an hour to make this decision. I wasn't sure if anyone, other than Marshall, would want to run with this line. I was pleasantly surprised. This was a great set of entries. Thank you all.

And a special thank you to lnhammer and kara_gnome for all the signal boosting. You guys rock.

Poetry winner is mechaieh

Gilbert hated
being the Cactus Kid:
his sister was the Rose Queen,
his brothers the Toreador of Thorns
and the Viscount of Vines.
It was cringingly clear
that Gil had been an afterplot --
no room for him to be rooted
within the family fairytale.

Prose winner is samhenderson

Gilbert hating being The Cactus Kid. With an Algebra unit test first thing in the morning he didn’t have time to pull out the needles before school, and they caught painful and prickly on his shirt and khakis as he struggled with factoring and equations that seemed to stretch into infinity on the paper. During the ten minute break between periods two and three he ducked into the boy’s restroom by the temporary buildings – it was dank and always damp, so less popular than they new tiled bathrooms by the cafeteria. Unbuttoning his shirt, he grimaced at the thick, glossy needles sprouting where chest hair should be, and reached for his tweezers. Having a family curse was a bitch.

Winners should send me a mailing address to jaimewrites at that gmail dot com place or via private message on LJ.

And all of you should finish these stories and send them out. There's more than one way to win.

Only one day left to enter this month's contest! Winners will be announced on Friday morning before I leave for work.

Enter now or be forced to wait another month. You know you don't want to wait.

Waiting is hard.

...when I was posting chapters of the Reasons book, to be known from now on as A Hidden War, to the OWW, I got major shit from people about men in this society carrying swords.

Now this book is set in 1870 in an American south that never knew a civil war. With a titled aristocracy that bears a strong resemblance to the plantation owners of the Old South, etc. etc. etc.

But I digress. The point is that people gave me grief because having the men in the aristocracy carry swords was too...feudal and medieval. Would never happen. I was flat, dead wrong.

Except I knew I wasn't wrong. And now I have proof in the form of photographs of Civil War soldiers from both the Union and the Confederacy. ( Read more... ) I love it when history proves me right.

March marches on and it's time for a contest again. This month's first line is vastly different than last month, but variety is the spice of life and all that.

And you never know what will spark a story or a poem in someone. Never ever.

The Cliff notes version of what's going on:

Once a month I will post an orphaned first line here on LJ. All my LJ posts are mirrored on Goodreads, so you can find the line there as well. In comments--either here or on Goodreads--write the first paragraph of a story or the first stanza of a poem using that line. Easy peasy.

Anyone can enter. Anyone at all, friend, foe or interested stranger.

You have one (1) week to come up with your entry. I will announce the winner and repost his or her winning entry.

There is more at stake here than covering yourself in glory on my blog. Oh yes, there is an actual prize involved. The winner each month will receive one of the portable fantasy map pendants I make.

Kinda like this one. Not this exact one, but you get the idea. I'll surprise you.


And the first line for this month is:

Gilbert hated being The Cactus Kid.

Now go forth and write. I'm always delighted to see what people come up with.

Detailed rules behind the cut for those who missed them. ( Read more... )

Have fun!

Yeah, this is all still new and shiny to me. I tend to get excited when Real Writer(tm.) stuff happens.

The most marvelous M. K. Hobson interviewed me for her new series Three Questions Make An Interview.

And while I refuse to confirm or deny that I might have been too drunk to answer more than three questions, I will say that Mary's questions are a lot of fun. Her questions are thoughtful as well, which makes for better answers. I even got to talk about poetry.

You can find me being opinionated over here.

Throne of the Crescent Moon by Saladin Ahmed

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


4.5 stars I would have given it 5, but the last 40 pages or so seemed a little too rushed as it hurdled toward the end. That was my perception anyway. Others may not agree.

All in all, this was a great read, with excellent worldbuilding, atmosphere I could taste and smell and feel, and characters I could believe in.

Throne of the Crescent Moon would have earned five stars from me solely for its portrayal of older characters if not for those last 40 pages. It's not often that I read a book where characters with a long history, established relationships and experience carry the book. These are not fresh faced kids stumbling through their first adventure. They're tired, weary, ready for a little peace in the years left to them, but they don't walk away. And the older characters aren't the stereotypical wise man or wise woman who offers advice from the sidelines while the youngsters put their lives on the line.

Old folks as competent, heroic people and essential for saving the world. I loved that.

This book is being praised for the adventure, the setting and using a culture not often seen in fantasy novels. It deserves every scrap of that praise, but what will stick with me are the people Saladin Ahmed wrote about. The deepness of their friendship and love for one another is what I will remember when I think of Throne of the Crescent Moon.

A truly good book. Go forth and read.



View all my reviews

Forget shamrocks, the wearing of green, little men hording pots of gold and green beer (okay, keep the beer) and cut right to the important aspects of March 17th.

That's right, today is Marshall's birthday, a much better reason to celebrate! I suggest skipping the corned beef and cabbage and going straight for Italian food, maybe with a little wine. Then top the evening off with German chocolate cake and a movie. Doesn't that sound like a lot more fun than filling fountains with lime Jello?

I knew it would. ;)

Happy Birthday to my partner in crime and life. This will be the best year ever.