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writing memes

Faerie Blood

Heart book meme

This is the second of the two memes I’ve been tagged on on Facebook recently, and this one came at me via fellow Here Be Magic author Sonya Clark. As with the previous meme post, I won’t outright tag people on this. But if you’re a fellow writer and want to jump in, feel free!

From Sonya’s post:

Amy Burgess tagged me to share a “heart” book and the story behind it.

This one’s almost too easy, really. Because even with five released books, to this day I continue to think of Faerie Blood as the Book of My Heart.

And not just because it’s my first released novel, either. Every author’s going to be partial to their first release.

I could say as well that Faerie Blood‘s notable for being the book I finished Nanowrimo with in 2003, which gives it extra heft in my affections. But that’s not really why it’s the Book of My Heart, either.

What makes Faerie Blood my Heart Book is that I’ve thrown so much of what I love into it.

Music, obviously. Elessir is an “unofficial” Elvis impersonator and Christopher is a bouzouki-playing Newfoundlander for music-fangirling reasons that will be obvious to anybody who knows me: i.e., that I’m a lifelong Elvis fangirl and that Great Big Sea remains my all-time favorite band. But not even just that. Multiple characters in Faerie Blood are musicians, and not for any reasons that are particularly relevant to the plot or the worldbuilding, but rather, just because I feel very deeply that making music is an important part of life.

This is also why there’s a scene in Faerie Blood in which Kendis and Christopher geek out a bit about bouzouki tuning, and another in which they just hang out together and play their instruments. The latter in particular has its origins leading straight back to Patrick O’Brian’s Master and Commander, and how much I simply adored that Aubrey and Maturin took the time out in between all the action to just hang out and play music together. That won my love as a reader, and that love hung out in the back of my writer brain until I was able to write a “characters hanging out and bonding over playing music” scene of my own.

Then there’s the Sidhe. I know it’s fashionable in the SF/F genre these days to dismiss elves as a cliche. I know there’s such a thing as the Our Elves are Better trope and the Screw You, Elves trope. I know there’s even an entire filk album called Everybody Hates Elves.

As y’all might guess, I do not count myself amongst that “everybody”. C.f. all my previous commentary about how Elfquest is such a formative influence on me.

Now, also obviously, Faerie Blood is only the first step into my Warder universe. And I’ve got a lot coming that I’m very eager to share with you, stories that will hopefully do for you as readers what they’ll do for me as a writer: deepen the universe, show you more about what’s going on, and give you more to love about it.

But really, Faerie Blood is what started it all. And for that, it’s the Book of My Heart.

August 17, 2016 by
Books

Influential authors meme

I got tagged on a couple of writer-related memes going around Facebook. I don’t do memes per se, including tagging people on them, as I’ve said before. But I will absolutely use them as an excuse to write up something here on this blog! First, there’s the Influential Authors meme, on which I got tagged by Shawna Reppert.

From her post:

The rules: Don’t take too long to think about it. List 15 authors (poets included) who have influenced you and who will always stick with you. List the first 15 you can identify in no more than 15 minutes. Tag at least 15 friends, including me, because I’m interested in seeing the authors my friends choose.

Let’s do this thing. These are not in any particular order.

  1. Barbara Michaels/Elizabeth Peters
  2. J.R.R. Tolkien
  3. Julie Czerneda
  4. Tanya Huff
  5. Doranna Durgin
  6. Anne McCaffrey
  7. Naomi Novik
  8. Rachel Caine
  9. Susanna Kearsley
  10. Wendy and Richard Pini
  11. A.C. Crispin
  12. Patricia Briggs
  13. Mercedes Lackey
  14. Terry Brooks
  15. Esther Friesner

And I know I am probably fudging on things to list the Pinis here, given that Elfquest is a comic book series, not a book series. But I take the liberty of including them because a) as I’ve mentioned before on this site, they are a huge influence on my perceptions of what elves ought to be like in my stories, and b) if you wanna really get technical, there are Elfquest stories in book form, so there. I do have all the Blood of Ten Chiefs anthologies, as well as the novelizations of the first three graphic novels!

Tolkien is on this list for reasons which are similarly obvious to anybody who knows anything about my personal history as a reader as well as a writer; noting him among my influences for worldbuilding as well as language geekery. Likewise Barbara Michaels/Elizabeth Peters, who is a formative influence on what I like in leading men in a story, and the level of romance and suspense I want.

Anne McCaffrey’s influence on me cannot be understated–I did, after all, spend years in Pern fandom, both offline and online. And I still have a lot of Pern fanfic on my hard drive, as well as all my surviving roleplay logs from PernMUSH. All that time I put in playing F’hlan, bronze Tzornth’s rider, and his daughter Mehlani was character practice, you guys!

Julie Czerneda and Tanya Huff are both on this list on general “I want to write like them when I grow up” grounds. I love Czerneda’s worldbuilding and rich portrayals of alien species. And Huff’s here because a) she is awesome, b) she’s a fellow Great Big Sea fan and HOW CAN I NOT LOVE THAT, and c) she was my initial introduction to how you can have queer people in a story and not have the fact that they are queer be full of OHNOEZ DRAMA!

That said, Lackey is on this list because she actually beat Huff to the punch in alerting me that you can, in fact, have queer people in a story. Shoutout to all my fellow readers of my generation who were gutted by Vanyel. Second shoutout to all my MUSH-playing pals who wanted to get a Valdemar MUSH going, and could not.

Doranna Durgin is here because before she wrote paranormal romance, she wrote a lot of fantasy, and her earliest fantasies are among my favorite of her books. Her urban fantasy as well. To this day her A Feral Darkness ranks very, very high on the list of pinnacles to which I aspire when I wing out urban fantasy of my own.

Novik is here because good lord I love me some Temeraire, and in particular I love her handling of the dragons in her world as characters in their own right. I love her dragons even more than I loved the dragons in the Pern books. She is a glorious example of how to write non-humanoid characters.

Rachel Caine is on this list because I would gleefully sacrifice a few pounds of flesh to gain her ability at pacing.

Kearsley is kind of an extension of the influence of Michaels/Peters. I deeply admire Kearsley’s pacing, though hers is much different from Caine’s; while Caine pretty much sets a plotline on fire right out of the gate, Kearsley takes more time and gives you a lot more atmosphere. I love Kearsley’s way with building atmosphere, as well as her skill at setting up relationships that eventually charm my socks off. The Shadowy Horses, I am looking straight at you.

A.C. Crispin, gods rest her, is here because her glorious Han Solo backstory trilogy, even if it’s relegated to non-canon status along with the rest of the Star Wars EU, was everything I ever wanted in Han Solo backstory. The new forthcoming movie is going to have a REAL high bar to clear to top her stories, I’m just sayin’.

Patricia Briggs is here for reasons very similar to Durgin–in that I found her before she turned to urban fantasy and in many ways I actually prefer her earlier fantasy novels. What I like about her in particular is how she set up secondary world fantasies that nonetheless were very relatable to contemporary eyes. She’s arguably some of the influence on how I wrote the Rebels of Adalonia books.

Terry Brooks has to get props for being some of the earliest high fantasy I ever read, since I found him at the same era of my childhood when I found Tolkien. And some of my earliest surviving writing has a lot more to do with Brooks than Tolkien! And unlike a few other high fantasy authors of the era (e.g., Eddings), I actually still periodically hunt down Brooks novels I haven’t read yet. I’m still working my way through his setup of the backstory for the Shannara world.

Last but not least, Esther Friesner is here as another early influence on my urban fantasy and in particular on my portrayal of elves. In particular, her books New York by Knight and Elf Defense had early resonance on my budding writing brain!

***

So there ya go. As I said, I don’t usually tag people on these things, but if you’re a fellow writer and you want to play too, go for it! And drop a link in the comments to your own post, so anybody who finds mine can find yours.

August 16, 2016 by
Writing

Seven things about my writing

Earlier this year there was a writing meme going around Facebook, and fellow writer and NIWA member M.M. Justus tagged me on it. So since this was a question that I felt deserved longer consideration than I could easily give on a Facebook post, I decided to blog about it instead. Here then are seven things about my writing, in no particular order:

  1. My friend and reader Pauline wanted to know about the motivations and inspiration for the Warder universe–not how the first two books are set in Seattle, but rather, how I decided to make everything fit together the way it does. Good question!

    The overall structure of the universe is pretty easy to trace through my own reading habits. There are Sidhe because I’ve always loved elves and stories about them. There are Warders because they are the main way I’m giving human characters a chance at holding their own against non-human characters, in magical terms–and because a lot of people will relate better to human characters than they will to non-human ones.

  2. The Rebels of Adalonia books have their origin in the first two full novels I ever wrote, which happened to both be called The Starblade of Radmynn–because this was in high school and I sucked at thinking of titles back then. At some point I will probably make downloadable versions of these available, just for giggles and grins. Because if Jim Hines can expose his first manuscript to the world, then so can I!

  3. My sister Becky wanted to know whether I had any plans to ever feature sentient nonhumans in my work–by which she meant a) protagonists, not supporting characters, and b) specifically non-humanoid, as opposed to characters like Kendis or Elessir or Faanshi or any of my other characters who are technically not human, but who still fall into the ‘humanoid’ bucket anyway by virtue of being elves or elf-blooded. Becky added that it’d be neat if they had telepathic capabilities, which one presumes they’d need in order to communicate with any humans in the cast.

    This is an excellent question. I do not actually have any current plans to feature non-humanoid characters as protagonists, but it is not out of the question. And once I finally get around to finishing Child of Ocean, Child of Stars, I can at least say that there’s an alien race in that story whose natural form is jellyfish-like. (They’re shapeshifters.)

  4. A lot of how I construct a story, whether at the level of a scene or at the bigger picture level of the plot, can be traced straight back to my history of playing on MUSHes. To this day, when I’m trying to figure out how characters interact with one another, it’s very similar to how I roleplayed scenes with others on those games. Only now, it’s more along the lines of “I’m roleplaying with myself”. Which is still entertaining, but in different ways.

    Relatedly, while I’ve always wanted to be a writer, what finally got me seriously thinking about it as an adult was how people on the games I played started telling me that reading my character actions was like reading a novel. Particularly when I started stringing the logs of my RP together by giving them intros to fit them into the ongoing “story” of what was going on with my characters.

  5. I like to say in my official author bio that I was writing fanfic before I even knew what fanfic was, and I ain’t kidding. Among the things I can remember writing in school (and which I do not, unfortunately, retain full copies of) were fanfic for Battlestar Galactica (the original), Indiana Jones (in which I was writing about the son of Indy and Marion, and that got a full trilogy out of me), and the Thundercats. The latter complete with an OC half-human Mary Sue because OF COURSE I DID. I had plans at one point to try to write Battle of the Planets fic, too, but that never actually got off the ground. And I’ve got some Elfquest fanfic that dates from just before I started on Two Moons MUSH, too.

    It is therefore hardly surprising that I hurled myself with great abandon into MUSHing, since when you got right down to it, that was real-time, multi-person, interactive fanfic.

  6. In addition to Riddle of the Golden Dragon, recently resurrected on angelahighland.com, I have three other surviving short pieces from my high school/early college days. Two of these are arguably YA, although I’d written them before I knew what that genre was. The third is “The Sea Prince”, another of my early short pieces that I’m pretty sure is set in the same universe as the Rebels of Adalonia books. I will be adding these to my Short Stories page soon!

    I have a few other never-completed ideas from that era of my writing that I may be resurrecting as well. Particularly a story called “Cages”, which I may be adapting for the Warder universe, and a story called The Last Singer for the Rebels of Adalonia universe.

  7. A lot of writers swear by Scrivener, but when it comes to writing tools, I’m pretty basic. I use Word as my word processor of choice. I use Excel to track my word counts on novels, as well as to track my indie sales. Everything else? TextEdit in Mac OS, or whatever else I have handy to edit text files. Pretty much all of my worldbuilding data goes into basic text files.

    What’s in those text files? Character notes (loosely structured along the same lines as the character apps I used to have to fill out when applying for Feature Characters or special backgrounds on MUSHes). Language notes. Cast lists. Timelines (both for the story proper and for any important backstory–the backstory timeline for the Rebels of Adalonia trilogy is HUGE). Family trees. Technology and cultural notes. And anything else that seems like I ought to write it down so I can remember it.

    All of this at some point would probably make an excellent wiki, and there’s a non-zero chance I might actually put one up, as much for my own amusement as for the benefit of anybody who might want to know more about the details of how my worlds work. If you’re one of those people, let me know!

And there’s that then. As always, I don’t bother to tag others on writing memes. But if you feel like playing along, by all means, do so! And drop a comment on this post so people can come over and see what you’ve got to share.

July 17, 2015 by
Short Pieces

Because Shawna Reppert tagged me, have an excerpt

I was tagged on Facebook by Shawna Reppert to post seven lines from page seven of a work in progress, so here y’all go. I am taking the liberty of interpreting “lines” as “paragraphs”, otherwise you barely get a taste of what this is about.

Here are seven paragraphs from most of page seven and a little of page eight of the still-untitled story about a psychic who must help a man solve the murder of his Warder sister.

***

“And I need more. I need to know what killed Edie, and where it is. You’re the only person I’ve found who can tell me that, Ms. Breckenridge. Will you help me?”

Much as I hated it, I felt myself start to tremble. The vision, brief as it had been, had hit me worse than any I could remember in the last five years; my knees were shaky, and my vision had hazed around its edges. Nor did it help that Taggart was still broadcasting emotions right into my skull, as if those deep blue eyes of his had locked onto me, like lasers. “No,” I croaked. “No. You’re going to go all vigilante, I’m not having any part of it!” His hands started to snap towards me, and I added, jerking back from his reach, “And if you lay a finger on me, I swear to God I will kick you right in the balls!”

He froze in place, and I didn’t even need the torrent out of his mind to read his desperation and regret. “I’m sorry! Okay, okay, I’ll go to the police. Promise! But I need something to take to them. Help me, Ms. Breckenridge. Please.”

“Mr. Taggart, I’m very sorry about your sister.” My voice was rising, growing shriller, but I didn’t care. Long experience was already warning me I had a devil of a headache on the way, and I wanted this man gone before it struck. “But you can’t know what you’re asking. Another vision like that will be a railroad spike right through my goddamn head, and I cannot afford to be unconscious when I have a shop to run!”

“After hours, then. Let me hire you. I’ll pay you triple whatever you usually charge your clients!”

Now it was my turn to freeze. No matter what beating my entire nervous system might take from seeking out the vision he was begging for, no matter how much I wanted to pick him bodily up and throw him right out the door, I couldn’t afford to turn him away. Not if he was bringing money into it. I was making more than you’d expect in an economic downturn—even when they couldn’t afford it, especially when they couldn’t afford it, people still sought me out for the comfort they thought I could provide. But all that really meant was that I barely kept ahead of my bills. Never mind perks like health insurance, or fixing the faulty plumbing in my tiny apartment above the shop, or eating regular, healthy meals more than once or twice a week.

Triple my usual rate wasn’t much, in the grand scheme of things. But it was enough to pay next month’s rent.

***

And there you have it. I don’t tag people on these things, but if you’re a fellow writer and you want to play, join in! And drop a comment on this post so anyone who reads me can come over and see your excerpt too!

July 16, 2015 by