Congrats, Kim!

I have been remiss in my blogging duties, but frankly I have been having quite a difficult time writing at all. My job sucks most of my energy, and after leaving at nearly 9 last night and waking up at 4 this morning to go back and start all over again, creativity is the first thing to go.

I just wanted to pop on to say a BIG congratulations to Kim Bowman on the opening of her new blog, and on the scheduled release of her title "Wayward Soul." Hop on over to her blog and read the blurb, then enter her contest! And check out Elaina Lee's work on that cover, woah! I've only sneaked peaks at the early stages of the story, but I think Elaina did an amazing job of capturing the mood.

Astraea Press, a sweet romance publisher, is open for submissions and Kim's title will be one of the first to launch with it. So excited for the girls behind the scenes over there setting up the stage for opening day!

Holidays, Shmolidays: The Holiday Swag Edition, and I make a cover!

I'm not one for holidays... well, except for Halloween. And Christmas, I guess. But being nonreligious myself, and living with a Buddhist, this time of year becomes a celebration of togetherness, good tidings and changing seasons.

And, oh yeah... gift giving.

Materialistic, I am not. Accepting gifts makes me very uncomfortable. Second only to giving gifts. I am the world's worst gift-giver. So I was quite pleased with myself when I settled on a handful of gifts we could both benefit from, and this has become a tradition of ours. (Somewhat. Except when I bought him a guitar last Christmas, I have no desire to play. Not that I don't get anything out of watching him play, though...) Tools, because what man would refuse power tools? We're getting into building things now, another story altogether, and I won't say "no" to a hand-made dining table if he wants to make me one. Also picked up some dharma books, which I really should read myself.

And for me? I received a bundle of Adobe programs, including the one I wanted most... Photoshop! Why did I want Photoshop?

Well, not so I could do this:Okay, yeah, so I could do that.

I've been busy this last week with a seven hour drive south (think warm beaches!) to my grandmother's for Christmas. I love my grandmother, but the woman stays up until 3 in the morning and then wakes up at 7. I hope I have her energy when I'm her age, but right now, I need my 8 hours of sleep. Though her schedule has infected me with a little bit of insomnia.

Tomorrow (5 a.m., urgh) we're back on the road for a seven hour drive north to see the BF's family... think beaches-covered-in-snow, thank you, East Coast Blizzard of 2010!

Dreaming up inspiration

I was always envious of people, writers in particular, who claim to have found inspiration for their stories in their dreams.

I envy them for two reasons. For one, it seems ideal -- go to sleep, a function you normally do in the evening anyway, and wake up with a storyline. The second reason is, I very very rarely have coherent dreams.

A small sampling of my dreams from over the years:
- I was a gummy worm, and I was trying to get from one end of a table to another
- I was a shrub observing the dream, but I was also Will Smith, and I was getting married behind my apartments
- From my old dream journal: I'm running paper towels across campus with my brother and sister. I'm late for my Japanese test, so I keep telling them to hurry. My brother is whining because he says the paper towels he's carrying are too heavy. I tell him to be quiet, he's only carrying 19. I'm carrying 12, according to numbers that are supposedly on the bag. I give my sister my key so she can get in the room, and tell her to call my (now ex)boyfriend and give it to him so he can give it to me later.

But every once in a while, I have a very lucid, very coherent dream.

This is a dream from September. Soren is a character I've been working on for a long time.

Soren and I are in the bell tower of a church, hundreds of feet in the air. He wants me to stay with him forever, to become like him. We climb the rafters of the church with ease, though the construction makes no sense, it is like a ladder to get to the top of the tower. When we reach the top, Soren wraps his arms around me so that I can see nothing. I feel myself wobbling, terrified of heights as I am. He promises he will never let me go. Slowly I am able to open my eyes, and the first thing I see is the strong jaw of my fictional hero, strawberry-blond hair pulled back into a ponytail. He looks more ethereal than human. I become aware of my surroundings, which looks all too real. The air is crisp and cool in my nose, and I can smell the wood from a fireplace burning down in the streets below. The fog rolls back, and the first thing I see to my left down on the ground is a cemetery. Even from this height I can see individual grave stones. I see the lights from houses, and everything is so beautiful. I am so aware of the warm body holding me. I have never been loved this much by a man before.

Soren tells me this can all be mine, if only I would become a vampire like him.

The daylight begins to roll in, and the dream feels more like a dream.

We fly down through the rafters again to make it back into the church before Soren is harmed by the sunlight. We don't make it too far, for our feet hit a platform that was constructed during the night over the hole we climbed up through. I yell at him to go, but he cannot. Fortunately we do find our way around, but by this time the sun is up and we can see that the church is now occupied by construction workers building a city inside. We roll and we hide through the streets around the church. The sunlight doesn't seem to be having a physical effect, but more of a psychological effect on Soren.

The construction foreman finds Soren and captures him. I go to him and I bare him my neck. I tell him to feed from me so that he can heal. He refuses and says with the suns effects, he cannot and would never bite me. His fangs will not descend.

It is with this feeling of defeat that I wake up.

And then last night, I had another realistic dream, that got me out of bed to make coffee in the wee hours of the morning because I just couldn't shake it.

I dreamt that I had been offered a three-book contract with the publisher I'm aiming for, and I dreamt through the book I had written for them. It wasn't a particularly engaging story at all, not one I'm going to write anyway. Some erotic wolf shifter series which actually did have a plot, conflict and even resolution. It's more the inspiration that I needed to get back into writing now that I'm on my vacation for the next month. (Well, they call it vacation, even though I'm not paid for it!)

Just waiting for my muse to catch up!

Alpha Heroes - Pictoral Inspiration, Part 1

When I think "alpha hero," about fifty percent of the time, I think of this guy:






Oh, to have myself thrown over those strong, Viking shoulders....



All right, I'm a simple creature. My weakness is Swedish metal guitarists. Or any nationality of heavy metal musicians, really.

Not that I'd run off with one. I just like to look.

I blame it on being brought up listening to Slayer.

Holidays, shmolidays Part I

I wrote a long post about how I don't celebrate most mainstream American and religious holidays. I don't even celebrate my birthday. The conclusion of the post was that I personally find Thanksgiving a holiday of hypocritical origins, bombarded from infancy with the false image of pilgrims and Indians coming together in harmony (that same Native American tribe was displaced by the English settlers not 20 years after "thanksgiving," then warred with them thirty years after that--turns out the Wampanoag potentially feasted with the English in the first place to ally with them in war against a rival tribe).

As I get older, though, I have learned to appreciate the last Thursday in November as a celebration of family, friends and harvest. Though I don't eat meat, and am a firm believer in ahimsa, I'm on board with the idea of family gathering in revelry.

And really, any holiday where pumpkin pie plays a leading role is just fine by me.

NaNoWriMo: The Wall

Only at 2500 words and it's already November 7. And I have no idea what I'm doing with my story.

But hey, first love scene down! I needed to get some words in today, so I decided to write something interesting -- at the end of this scene, the heroine learns that the "hero" knows more than he's letting on.

Not much of an update, but I'm not feeling this "write as much as you can" thing I'm making myself do.

NaNoWriMo: Day One-ish

Well, technically Day 2, since today is November 2.

Have you ever studied so hard for a test that by the morning of the exam, you know the content inside-out. You know it so well that you could practically teach the curriculum to your peers, write a textbook about it, and for sure, pass the test.

Until of course, you sit down at your desk, with the exam in front of you, and you go completely blank. The problems look familiar, but you have no idea where to start. No point of reference, so you panic, and...

Well, eventually it comes back to you. Hopefully before the class period is over.

I spent the week leading up to November plotting.*

*Renee's Plotting: Thinking about the story a lot, researching random but potentially relevant things on Wikipedia mostly, taking few, if any notes. Most importantly, listening to music to set the mood, then getting distracted by one particular album and listening to the whole thing through without giving any thought to why she was listening to it in the first place. Then finally opening up a Word document and scribbling down a few random thoughts about her characters and what she wants to do to them.

Right, so I spent that week doing what I call plotting and other people might call not doing anything at all. But honestly, I spent a lot of time thinking about what I was going to write come November 1. I had (in my head) most of what I wanted to happen planned.

Then on November 1, I looked back over my "notes." I listened to the songs I had queued up. And I felt... nothing. So I played the music louder, which did nothing but anger my partner who doesn't care for my music too much.

I decided that damn it, I was going to write something even if it didn't lead to anything. And I did. And it sucked, but whatever. Five hundred words on a page, and I was done for the evening.

Thankfully, I got back into a groove today with my original plot idea when I made one major change that I'm really nervous about. I changed the perspective of the story from the intended third-person to first-person. This cuts out oh... two other perspectives, for sure, but once I had started writing using the word "I," the words literally fell onto the pages. Well, appeared on the screen, since the screen is upright and things cannot fall horizontally.

So I guess to keep myself accountable (that's what this whole blogging thing is about, isn't it?), I'm going to post my daily word count, total word count, and favorite lines from what I've done so far. I'm going to start from today though, since yesterday's literary vomit is going to sit and simmer until I find something better to do with it. And it also helps me with the awkward conclusions to blog posts, if you hadn't noticed... closing isn't one of my strong points.

November 2
Daily WC: 1,523
Total WC: 1,523
Favorite line: "...if she hadn’t been crying, some might have considered her pretty. She was crying because when I lifted my hand to touch my face, my cheeks, my lips and chin, she did the same."