Thanks!

25 Thursday Jul 2019

Posted by wyndes in A Precarious Magic, Self-publishing, Writing

Thanks to everyone who shared their auto-buy authors with me! I have to admit, I don’t think I discovered the magical author whose name is going to open a world of new readers to me via $10 worth of advertising, but I did find lots of people who I might be interested in reading, so that’s a nice thing. Although maybe not a good thing for my writing career purposes. Too much reading generally translates to not enough writing.

My current experiment is with voice recognition software. I was hoping that I could pick up the pace of my writing by eliminating a step between my brain and the end product. There are authors who swear by voice recognition, and claim that it makes their writing much faster. They can produce more because they’re talking to their computer instead of typing.

Ha.

An actual paragraph via voice recognition:

I was also hoping to work on my mailing list today Area reasonably stupid however answered me not want productive. When I was working on a precarious magic I stop looking at the computer in the end result with a couple paragraphs but I could not fight her at all. I had no idea what I was trying say. A triumph of technology.

And I think it’s really funny that the last line actually worked. Irony! So far I’ve tried the voice recognition in four different apps and they all seem to have their own unique quirks, but even if practice does make perfect, I don’t think voice recognition is going to be any kind of panacea of writing productivity for me. Oh, well.

I moved over to the garden house yesterday, and last night I got to have the windows open while I went to sleep. It’s been weeks since I was able to do that, and it was so lovely. Firefly season is mostly over, but there were still a few isolated sparks in the darkness and the sky was clear enough to see stars. It reminded me of all the great reasons to live in a van. In four days, it will be three years since I left my house. I feel like I ought to do a year-in-review post — how many places did I go? Cross-country both ways means that there were a lot of states involved. But I think I’ll save that post for Monday.

Meanwhile — again in the not-writing category — I’ve been playing some more with the fun ad-creation tool I discovered, www.bookbrush.com. My latest:

I made up a logo for myself a couple weeks ago when I was working on a mailing list email and needed something to put in the “logo” spot, but I actually quite like it. I honestly don’t think having a pretty Facebook cover on my almost non-existent business page is going to sell any books, but it still makes me smile so that counts for something.

And now, back to Fen. I got stuck on something silly — the word to describe an angry cat’s tail — so I started writing a blog post instead, but I am determined that today will be a day of many words, even if that means it turns into an evening or night of many words. But a snippet for the fun of it (with the usual caveats of draft, might not make it into the real book, la-di-dah, whatever)…

Fen glanced at him just as the kitten shimmered into view on his shoulder.
Its green eyes were glowing with a hard, red, extremely creepy light. It wasn’t the weird but natural glow of light reflecting off an animal’s eyes at night. It wasn’t even a normal, if authoritarian, stop-light red. This red was the deep, rich shade of fresh blood.
It screamed “Danger” like no color Fen had ever seen before.
“Oh, shit.” Fen barely had time to breath the words and take a nervous step backward before Ghost launched off of Luke’s shoulder.

Snippets and spoilers

25 Thursday Apr 2019

Posted by wyndes in A Precarious Magic, Food, Recipes, Seafood

≈ 6 Comments

I had grand intentions yesterday. I was going to do so many things, starting with writing 1000 words. I was going to do laundry, and take a shower, and walk the dogs, and go to a meditation class… Yep, just as soon as I wrote those 1000 words, I was going to do ALL the things.

Sigh.

When S got home from work, I was still mostly in my pajamas. No shower, no dog walks, no laundry, no meditation class. But darn close to 1000 words, each and every one of them a struggle.

I also hadn’t planned dinner or gone to the store, so it was time to make do with what we had. That included half a bag of seafood medley and some brown rice noodles. I was not inspired, but I knew that: a) if I didn’t use up the seafood medley, it would probably sit in S’s freezer forever and b) as long as I made it spicy enough, she’d eat it happily. So this recipe is mostly me thinking, “gotta use up the seafood, too lazy to do something serious with it, I’ll just cook it with red pepper flakes and it’ll be fine.” (Spoiler alert: It was more than fine.)

I started by boiling some water for the rice noodles, while letting the seafood medley defrost for a few minutes. When the water boiled, I took it off the heat and tossed the rice noodles in. While they cooked, I preheated a frying pan for a minute, then melted a chunk of butter, maybe two tbsps, in it. When the butter bubbled, I added two cloves of chopped up garlic, a generous tsp of red pepper flakes, and a little kosher salt, and swirled it around. When it seemed nicely done — garlic browned a little, red pepper flakes smelling sizzled — I added the seafood. I let it cook for just about five minutes, during which time I drained and plated my pasta. Then I zested a lemon onto the seafood, added some paprika, squeezed a lemon half into it, and topped the rice noddles with it. I finished it by sprinkling on some chopped-up cilantro.

I called S in from the garden, but I started eating without waiting. It was a good thing she came promptly, because by the time I was two bites into mine, I knew that if I finished eating mine before she came in, I would start eating hers. It was so, so, so good. I think it was the paprika or maybe it was the lemon zest. But it was spicy and smoky and tangy and buttery and absolutely delicious.

I feel like there ought to be a writing metaphor there: something about flavors mixing or finding balance or maybe just the serendipity of using what comes to hand? But if there is, I can’t find it.

And I was going to post a snippet, but we’re in spoilers galore territory — of all the words I wrote in the past couple days, I don’t think I can share any of them without giving things away that might be more fun as surprises. Hmm… well, maybe tiny spoilers…

Fen felt like she’d stepped inside Sleeping Beauty’s castle. All they needed were some serious brambles with killer thorns to make the whole place a scene out of a nightmare.

She set her chin. “Come on, Luke. Give the ghost to Trevvi. I need your help.”

“Ghost?” Trevvi took a step back, hands raising in protest.

Luke lifted his hands away from his chest, pausing for a second with one finger moving as if gently disentangling tiny claws from his tunic. He extended his cupped hands to Trevvi. “Here.”

Trevvi stepped farther away. “What?”

“It’s a kitten,” Luke said. “An invisible kitten.”

Trevvi scowled. “Nitrogen narcosis. Your dive pattern must have malfunctioned.”

Nitrogen again. Fen really needed to learn more about chemistry. Or was it biology? Maybe it was both.

“I’m not hallucinating,” Luke replied. “Take it.”

“Miss?” Trevvi’s pleading look asked for her help.

Instead a corner of Fen’s mouth lifted. She tilted her head in the direction of Luke’s seemingly empty hands and said, “Really, take it.”

Reluctantly, as if unwillingly playing along with their delusions, Trevvi held out his right hand. Fen could see the exact moment when he felt the kitten as his eyes opened wider with shock before he hastily enclosed it in a nest of both hands. “What the hell,” he muttered, drawing it closer to his body.

“Exactly.” Fen grabbed Luke’s empty hand and drew him into the courtyard.

Had I mentioned the invisible kitten before? I almost — almost! — know what she’s doing now. In fact, I think I’m pretty close to knowing what the whole thing looks like now. I just need to find the words to share it. And I’m working hard on that, I swear. 43,000 words so I’m not quite at the end game, but I’m definitely in the murky middle.

Appreciation

18 Thursday Apr 2019

Posted by wyndes in A Precarious Magic, Randomness, Writing

≈ 4 Comments

a fluffy calico cat, with narrowed golden eyes, looking annoyed at being interrupted in her sunbathing — Vivi’s narrow-eyed look. She appreciates the sun, too.

In yoga the other day, the instructor said that we were entering the season of the sun, that the rain was nearly over and we might not see it again for months. That sounded fantastic to me. Go, sun, go! Yay, sunshine! More, more, more!

But when I was walking home from class, reveling in the feeling of warmth on my face, I realized the rain is what makes me appreciate the sun. In Florida, I take the sunshine for granted. Once in a while I notice a particularly nice day, but most nice days blend together. In fact, I’m more likely to be critical of those nice days. Oh, sure, it’s pleasant enough but 78 is a little warm, isn’t it? 56 is positively frigid!

But in Arcata, 56 and sunny is charming and delightful. (So is 46 and sunny, for that matter.) I couldn’t tell you about 78 but I’m pretty sure if it came with sunny, I would find it glorious. And appreciation is — well, “good” seems far too bland, but that’s the word I want to use — appreciation is good. The act of appreciating makes life good. On a cold rainy day, appreciating the flowers brings pleasure into the day that I would have missed if I’d just walked on by those flowers. Hmm, now I want to post some flower pictures.

A pink flower, unknown variety — A random flower pic. One of the houses down the street has a fantastically overgrown garden. Right now, with multiple flowering plants almost obscuring the house and fence, it makes me think of fairy tales and portal stories.

Anyway, all that reminded me that I should appreciate the rain, too. But I’m really happy to have some sunny days. Yesterday, I was still staring at my computer at 7PM or so. I’d not come anywhere close to my Camp NaNo word count, but I also hadn’t even broken 1000 words and I was annoyed with myself. But I looked up and realized that it was a beautiful sunset and a full moon, so instead of continuing to stare at the computer, I took the dogs for a walk and breathed in the fresh air and was thankful for my life.

Ten more days to make real progress on Fen and then I’m going to Idaho. I know already that I can make all the promises in the world to myself about how I will write while I’m on the road and none of them will come true: traveling is simply not conducive to writing fiction for me. I can’t live in my imagination when the real world demands so much attention. But Val Kyr is shaping up to be an interesting place — if creepy — so I’m going to make the most of my time there for now.

A snippet:

Scattered lights didn’t penetrate the dark corners of the streets and the smoke hanging heavy in the air felt oppressive, but something about the city felt unreal, like a dream landscape. It wasn’t until they were walking alongside a canal and passed an empty flat boat gliding along the water that Fen realized it was the silence. There were no motors, of course — no cars, no trains, no trucks beeping as they backed up or electric hums from power lines — but there was also no music, none of the bells or splashing water or friendly cacophony of Syl Var.

“Is it always like this?” Luke asked Kaio, his tone muted as if he were reluctant to break the hush.

“Not always, no,” Kaio answered but he didn’t elucidate.

Fen wished he would. Maybe this was the Val Kyr equivalent of a Sunday morning? Even downtown Chicago felt oddly empty when the 9-5 workers had gone home. Or maybe Val Kyr, unlike Syl Var, lived on the same type of circadian time as human beings and it really was the middle of the night. Maybe in a few hours, the city would wake up — there’d be pastries baking and chickens crowing and the Val Kyrian equivalent of a newspaper delivery boy tossing the daily paper on people’s doorsteps.

The thought was encouraging, even though Fen was pretty sure Val Kyr wasn’t going to have any equivalent of a newspaper delivery boy. If they needed to distribute the news, they’d probably have little birds flying around warbling their messages.

Rough draft, of course; not edited; going to change before the final version. Maybe even going to change in the next twenty minutes — those last couple paragraphs are rough. But that’s where I’m living today!

Glorious sunshine

08 Friday Mar 2019

Posted by wyndes in A Precarious Magic, Randomness

≈ 9 Comments

My van is parked in S’s driveway, which means my view is basically of her street and sidewalk. Most of the days that I’ve been here, I’ve had a very good view of a great deal of rain. Today, however, it is gloriously sunny. Still chilly — there was frost on the ground this morning — but blue skies and sunshine. Everyone is appreciative, including the cat and all the many passersby. While I’m writing in the van, I’m an invisible audience to their interactions. It’s pretty entertaining, because wow, people are chatty with animals. A third of the population wandering by admires the cats and another third says hello to the dogs. It’s really quite charming.

Yesterday, I went to a meditation class, where the phrase that struck me, in the midst of the usual “follow your breath” and so on, was “open-hearted curiosity.” I don’t remember the context, but when I got home, I wrote it on my white board. I want to be approaching Fen with open-hearted curiosity. I want to see where the story takes me/her. So far that has not transformed into words flowing, however. I also downloaded an app to keep me off the internet, so that I would be forced to stare at my document instead of running away to read news stories and Facebook posts. My hour of internet-blocking netted me 73 words today; not a success, but I’m going to keep trying.

Also, I finally went to yoga! I am lamentably out of shape. That’s not a surprise, actually — it’s been a long time since I managed any more exercise than a short walk with the dog. But there’s not going to be any side planks in my near future. Still, yoga’s like writing — the more I do, the easier it becomes. And I know that if I go regularly (at least for the couple of months that I’m going to be in Arcata), I’ll get better. Plus, it felt great, even though I was dropping into child’s pose every other minute. I still got to have the lovely ending meditative rest. And I would look up the actual spelling of the lovely ending meditative rest, but I’ve blocked the whole rest of the internet to force myself to work. So maybe later. And meanwhile, I should get back to the working part of the day.

But, per request, a snippet of Fen:

First things first. Fen needed to call a glider. She scanned the sky, searching for a moving shadow. She didn’t see one, but she waved anyway, arm moving wide across her body, a gesture as big as she could make it.
Then she stopped herself, feeling stupid. She’d just made herself invisible. How the hell was the glider going to spot her?
“Elfie, can you summon a glider?” she subvocalized.
There was a pause. Then Elfie responded, “A data access pattern should not summon a glider. It is not within the parameters of my function.”
“Uh-huh,” Fen said, voice dry. “We’re past that now. Answering my questions is your function, right? So I’m asking a question. Can you summon a glider?”
“I am capable of such a thing, yes.”
“Will you?”
There was a longer pause. Fen waited, beginning to muster her mental arguments. Gaelith had created Elfie to help Fen, Elfie was a non-traditional data access pattern for a reason, if Gaelith had intended Elfie to limit herself to merely providing information, surely she would have used a traditional design… but she didn’t need them.
“Yes,” Elfie said.
Fen let go of the breath she hadn’t realized she’d been holding.

No guarantees that will make it in the final book, of course. And it’s quite random, it’s just what I was working on today, so also unedited, etc. But I will stop with the excuses, it’s a snippet!

Arcata weather

25 Monday Feb 2019

Posted by wyndes in A Precarious Magic, Randomness, Writing, Zelda

≈ 10 Comments

I was warned that Arcata, the town where I’m planning on spending the next few months, was a chilly, gray, foggy sorta place. I’m not sure any level of warning would actually have prepared me, though. In defense of my weather shock, my weather app keeps sending me warnings. Severe Weather Advisory! Area Flood Watch! Flooding rain will cause hazardous travel. Hard Freeze Warning in effect. Etc. Nine warnings over the past few days, which I think probably means that this weather is not normal, despite the cold gray reputation.

As a result, my new favorite possession is my eggplant coat, which S refers to as my “puffy.” I call it an eggplant coat because I think it makes me look like a plump eggplant, but you know what? That is just fine. I am perfectly willing to look like a plump eggplant. I’ve become so attached to this coat that I start to feel anxious when it’s out of my sight.

Yesterday, I ventured out of the van exactly twice, both times to walk Zelda, both times in the pouring rain, because it really wasn’t possible to just wait for the rain to stop. Or rather I did wait for the rain to stop and finally gave up. Fortunately, I quite like hanging out in my tiny home listening to the rain. Poor Z does not like the way I’ve been walking her, though, because I’ve been carrying her from the van to the street and back again. She thinks it’s undignified and wiggles to get down, but I think muddy dog footprints all over my beds can only happen once in a while, not twice a day, many days in a row.

In more fun news, S took me roller-skating on Saturday night. I’ve never really been a roller-skater, although I ice-skated some as a kid. I wobbled a lot and never got so comfortable that it felt like flying, the way it looked for some skaters, but I had fun. The best part was watching the other skaters, though. Roller skaters tend to crouch and lean forward, but there were a couple people skating who were probably originally ice skaters: they had great posture and a totally different way of moving. If the roller skaters looked like they were flying, the ice skaters (on roller skates) looked like they were floating. I don’t know which I’d rather do, float or fly, but it did make me want to try ice-skating again.

On the writing front, I’ve been flailing. I joined a FB group for writers of Humboldt County, hoping I might find some real-world writing partners here, to help keep me accountable and maybe meet up with me at a cafe now and again to help my motivation. I didn’t go to their Sunday meeting, though, because it was pouring. Maybe next week. Meanwhile, I added a new note to my white board: Trust the reader. I think part of why I’m flailing in Fen is that I feel like I need to explain things that you will have forgotten and remind you of things that have already gone by and anytime a writer has to “explain”, a story is stuck. Maybe Fen 2 is going to have to start with a note that says “reread the previous book” but one of my other white board notes says, “skip the boring parts, the reader will thank you,” and I am going to try very hard this week to follow that advice. Last week, I was stuck in a boring part and got nowhere, so this week I’m just going to glide right over it. Or try, anyway. I might fall flat on my face. But if I do, I will get up, dust myself off, and think about Badonald’s for later. Or maybe a nap.

Zelda on the beach — Before the rain began, we had one quick trip to the beach. Z would have stayed and played, but it was COLD! We saw the ocean, took a picture, then headed back to the warmth of the car.

Per request…

08 Monday Oct 2018

Posted by wyndes in A Precarious Magic, Writing

≈ 9 Comments

Alice asked, I’m delivering. 🙂

Zelda looking incredibly awkward

In the live version of this photo, Zelda is shaking herself off after having gotten wet in the splash from the ocean. But somehow the picture that the computer decided should represent the entire series of photos is this one, where she looks… well, ridiculous, to be honest. My dog is not often ungainly, but she is definitely charmingly ungainly here.

And the other thing that Alice asked for:

Fuck.

The eyes of the dead fish staring up at her looked reproachful.

Fen scowled down at it. In her runaway days, she’d gone dumpster diving, chowing down on half-eaten burgers without even blinking. Food was food when you were hungry.

But she wasn’t hungry enough for eyes.

“Does your fish displease you, love?” The queen gestured to the platter in front of them. “Shall you try something else? The sea cucumber is delightful this evening.”

Fen averted her gaze from the platter and plastered a smile on her face. “No, no, this is fine, thank you.”

The platter contained… creatures. Snails in their shells; open flat shells holding gray slimy goop; white tubes with dangling tentacles; slices of a bumpy yellow flesh that looked squishy; curved pink bodies with teeny tiny legs and antennae.

Sea bugs, basically.

Even eyes were better than eating sea bugs.

When Fen had been invited to the formal banquet celebrating the opening night of the Great Council, she’d pictured something medieval—gray stone walls and long wooden tables with the queen on her throne at the head of the room. Or maybe she’d been imagining Hogwarts. Either way, she’d been impossibly far from the truth.

Instead she sat under the star-sprinkled twilight sky, in a garden lit by thousands of tiny floating lights. Tables were placed under the trees, in nooks and alcoves created by hanging vines and waterfalls, while winding paths led from one grove to the next. People flowed along the paths, waiters in blue and silver with platters of food hoisted high scurrying between the strolling Sia Maran elite in their most glorious attire. In the background, music played, tendrils of melody winding around the rhythm of waves.

And behind them, in a view that Fen was trying hard not to think about, the ocean loomed, up, up and up. It would have been beautiful — it was beautiful — except that nothing at all seemed to separate the garden from the overwhelming weight of seawater next to it.

The water wasn’t the worst part, though.

The company was as terrifying, and much closer. Somehow, she’d wound up seated between Her Royal Majesty, Queen Ellinora of Syl Var, and the Lady Cyntha, Mother of House Del Mar.

The queen wasn’t so bad, apart from being, you know, a queen. But Lady Cyntha was beautiful and elegant and powerful and stern. And she called Fen, ‘Lady Felicia.’

Lady Felicia!

Sitting next to Lady Cyntha while staring at a dead fish felt a lot like a bad dream, the kind where you were naked in math class and desperately needed to pee but couldn’t find a toilet. Oh, and you’d forgotten to study for the final exam that was happening at exactly that moment.

“Breathe,” a voice—chocolate and honey, warm and smooth, the sound resonating deep within her bones—whispered in her ear as Kaio leaned forward and refilled her goblet.

Obediently, Fen took a breath.

And then she frowned at him. What was he doing here?

I would say, “Your wish is my command,” but you know, I think we both probably wish that I was writing a lot faster! So that would be a lie. But I hope the snippet is at least evidence that Fen will be back someday soon!

Bad File Management & A Lonely Magic

26 Thursday Jul 2018

Posted by wyndes in A Lonely Magic, A Precarious Magic, Cover design, Self-publishing, WIP

≈ 15 Comments

I started work on A Precarious Balance, sequel to A Lonely Magic, last week. I didn’t get very far, partially because I kept getting distracted by Grace, but also because I was flailing a bit. I’ve got lots of notes, and there were things I’d already written that I wanted to re-use, so I compiled everything into a Scrivener file and got started. But as I tried to write, I was having a tough time finding Fen’s voice.

I finally decided two days ago that I needed to re-read the book again and refresh my memory on all the details, not just the ones that I’d put into my notes.

I didn’t like it.

That was a weird experience. I don’t always like what I’ve written (understatement, yes), but I LOVED writing A Lonely Magic. It was so much fun and I liked being in Fen’s head so much, and her adventures were so surprising, and such a beautiful blend of things I enjoy, science and adventure and fantasy and romance. But four years later, I’m re-reading and I didn’t like her at all. She’s bland and a little whiny and annoying.

And then, at about the halfway mark, I read the line, “Her own reputation had been shot to hell even before she dropped out and she hadn’t given fuck one.” and the “fuck” was startlingly out-of-place. It wasn’t the first time she’d used the word, but it was pretty close. And I realized that the version I was reading — which was in Vellum, which is the software I use to create ebooks — was the version I had once-upon-a-time tried to delete all the swear words from.

I wrote about it at the time. I was tired of getting negative reviews about Fen’s swearing so I tried to edit it into a “clean” version, and I realized partway through that Fen’s cursing is part of her, that it didn’t work to clean up her language, and I stopped. It REALLY doesn’t work to clean up Fen’s language. She goes from a character who is internally tough, a fighter despite her relative level of helplessness, to a… well, leaf in the wind.

In the hotel room scene, Swearing-Fen is stuck because she’s considered her options and she can’t find a way out but you know that she’s still fighting, even if it’s only in her head. (She never swears aloud in that scene, it’s all in her inner dialogue.) In the same scene, Clean-Fen is stuck and she’s passive and helpless about it. She’s going along with what other people are deciding for her future because she’s got no choice. Losing her inner obscenities takes her from edgy and angry to blandly accepting. She is not an interesting character to me when she’s being bland.

Largely, I think, that’s a good realization to have. I can’t write a book with Clean Fen. She is not someone I want to spend the next six months with. But it was not at all a happy realization to discover that the version in Vellum was the bland version. That means that the one available online is also the bland version. I know that because I only have one Vellum file and it has the latest cover. But oh, what a screw-up. I suppose it doesn’t matter terribly if I publish another version online, but these were non-trivial edits. They changed the flavor of the story. I don’t even know how long that’s the version that’s been available. Sigh.

The good news, I guess, is that it doesn’t really sell much — 100 copies in the past 12 months — so not many readers are going to know or care. Yay for being an unsuccessful author, I guess?

It is interesting, though, as a writer, to discover how such a seemingly minor change can become so important. One of my favorite occupations is playing with ideas for book covers. I’ve got probably at least a dozen designs for A Lonely Magic that I’ve toyed with — it’s literally been published with at least five or six different covers, but I’ve got a bunch more that haven’t seen the light of day — but I’ve never been satisfied, because somehow I’ve never found one that conveys the feel of the book to me. Maybe that’s because I don’t really know how the book feels?

I do know that the last time I read the book, which was in a print edition just a few months ago, I laughed when I got to the ending. Despite all the reviews that criticized the cliffhanger ending, I never believed it ended in a cliffhanger, not once. Fen found family, she found magic, she’s in a safe place, she knows who wanted to kill her, she’s defeated the bad guy — what the hell is a cliffhanger about that? Except it’s totally a cliffhanger, because when I was reading it with the perspective of time, I ended it really, really wanting to know what happens next. Everything with Malik is interesting and even though he’s the bad guy, and his resolution technically doesn’t matter, I absolutely want Fen to figure out how he’s bound and how to get him unbound.

A few of the many covers for ALM that I’ve made and never used. Which one looks most like the story to you?

Sample cover for A Lonely Magic