I am enough

June 26, 20143 Comments

MNO_OfficialPoster_High Remember a while back when I reviewed Moms’ Night Out? I went to see it again, this time with my mother-in-law, who’d had a very stressful day and needed a good laugh. I’m so glad she went with me, because we don’t see each other as often as I’d like and we had a ton of fun. We definitely need to do things like this more often.

Anyway, as we watched the movie, I got to thinking (a dangerous pastime, I know) about why I related so much to Allyson. I mean, I’ve been there – I stayed home with Bubbles till he was two and now that I only work part-time, I’m home alone with Cricket and Thumper two or three days a week.

It’s hard! It’s so hard. Like Allyson, I wanted to be a mom. Of course, I also wanted to be a world-famous author, but let’s just take this one dream at a time. Her reasons for wanting to be a mom are never mentioned – it’s simply her dream, and she’s lucky enough to be living it.

As for me…

Another writing challenge

June 25, 20143 Comments

Lipei, the woman for whom Vegin defied his parents
Artwork by Hazel Butler

Yes, I’m doing this on my blog again instead of on Facebook like I’m supposed to. That’s just the way I roll.

I’m a rebel, see. 😉

Okay, no I’m not – this will make its way to Facebook, probably a couple times over, even.

I was tagged by the lovely AFE Smith for this challenge, which is to share five facts about the main character of your book. Then, of course, you have to tag five more people, and so it goes.

Fun Facts About Vegin Martoka

Despite all spelling similarities to the word “vegan,” his name is pronounced differently. It rhymes with “bacon.”
Vegin is an idealist, but feels powerless to fix anything in his kingdom.
His love life, however, is another story. He fights for the right to marry the woman he loves instead of the woman his parents have chosen, and learns in the process that he’s more capable than he thinks.
He shares the same desire for change as his brother-in-law, but disagrees on how to accomplish that change. While Balil wants revolution, Vegin hopes for peaceful progress.
Though he counts himself a follower of Kiala (the deity worshipped in Lokana as the Great Mother), he remains skeptical of the truth he discovers in his father’s bequest.

I’m going to make this an open tag – if you’d like to participate, have at it! Then let me know so that I can read all about your characters. 🙂

Facing fear

June 24, 201417 Comments

100_2329 Once again, a Writing 101 challenge. Today’s topic: My worst fear.

I’m sure I’ve written about this before, but my worst fear is that I’ll die before my kids are grown up. My memories of my mom are fragmented; sometimes I remember things that don’t seem possible, and other times I recall things with crystal clarity.

But mostly, I don’t remember. I don’t remember very much about my childhood before my mom died. I would really, really hate for my kids to say the same. I’ve always worried about it, which is why I stayed at home with Bubbles the first two years of his life.

The only problem is that…

Love rocks

June 24, 2014Leave a comment

IMG_20140624_153931 We’ve been doing a lot of work on houses lately. Last weekend (not this past weekend, but the one before it, the weekend of Father’s Day) we painted our old house because our deal fell through and people who’d looked at it before thought it was too much work to fix (although what’s so hard about hiring someone to side it once you’ve bought it is beyond me).

Anyway, it’s a three-story house. We painted it in a single day.

Now you know why I’ve been so tired lately and so behind on so many things. I have a whole post (complete with pictures!) that I want to write on the topic, and maybe I’ll get it done in the next couple of days. But this isn’t about that.

This is actually about all the work we’ve been doing on our new house.

We haven’t done as much to the new place as we’d hoped to have done by now, primarily because we haven’t sold our old house yet. So far, we’ve connected to rural water (No more smelly well water! Yay!), we’ve replaced the water heater that crapped out on us at the end of April, we’ve installed a new washer and dryer, and Seymour has built a new bathroom down in our basement. It’s not quite functional yet, but we’ve been so busy that he hasn’t had time to finish working on it.

We also filled in an old well and two cisterns last fall, something we thought was a great idea. Now the kids can play in the yard without us worrying that they’ll fall through rotting boards and drown (seriously, that well was so deep that it took three full dump trucks full of sand to fill it up, and even then there was a dip in the yard that we had to fill with dirt).

There’s just one problem.

The 7/7/7 challenge!

June 23, 20143 Comments

Vegin
Artwork by Hazel Butler

The ever-lovely Will Macmillan Jones tagged me in the 7/7 challenge (or the 7/7/7 challenge – I’ve seen it both ways). It’s a new thing going around Facebook, where you go to the seventh page (or the seventeenth page or the seventy-seventh page) of your current WIP and share seven lines (or seven sentences, whichever you choose). Once finished, you tag seven others to complete the challenge.

Give you one guess which WIP I’m going to quote from. 😀

From the newly-revised page seven, here’s a snippet from The Lokana Chronicles, in which the prince, Vegin, receives a history lesson from his tutor, Surat:

“Garedon was a widower early in life,” Surat began. “The loss of his wife devastated him, for they’d been very much in love. But when the pain of losing her began to fade, loneliness replaced it, and he sought companionship in the less reputable quarters of the city.

“One day, Misranna caught his eye. Garedon was immediately infatuated, and soon he was sneaking off to see her at all hours of the day and night. His father threatened to imprison him for disregarding his responsibilities, but the young prince ignored him.”

Vegin found himself wishing he’d known his great-grandfather. It took guts to stand up to one’s parents so publicly, and he wasn’t sure he’d have had the stomach for it. “So what happened?”

Okay, so this is nine sentences, but I couldn’t very well stop after the first line of that paragraph, and nine lines isn’t so much, is it? Actually, I guess it’s only eight lines (but nine sentences). So see? It’s okay.

And now for the tagging bit! I’ll tag AFE Smith, Kate Jack, MT McGuire, Tricia Drammeh, and Emily McKeon. I know this is a Facebook thing, but I couldn’t resist sharing this with you, too. 🙂

Need a new book? Check these out!

June 23, 2014June 25, 2014Leave a comment

The Summer Reads Blog Tour is here again, and this time the guest is the hilarious Will Macmillan Jones, Comedy Goon of the Alliance of Worldbuilders! To see which books he recommends, scroll down. And don’t forget to head over to host Lisa L. Wiedmeier’s blog, where you can enter to win a whole bunch of fantastic prizes!

Summer Reads Blog Tour – Week Four
Welcome Will Macmillan Jones!

Well, week four of the Summer Reads Blog Tour brings us a dear friend and fellow author, Will Macmillan Jones. Will’s the comedic act in our group with his dry sense of humor, I can’t help but smile when I read his posts or chat away in a lively conversation.

Will Macmillan Jones live in Wales, a lovely green, verdant land with a rich cultural heritage. He does his best to support this heritage by drinking the local beer and shouting loud encouragement whenever International Rugby is on the TV. A fifty something lover of blues, rock and jazz he has just fulfilled a lifetime ambition by filling an entire wall of his home office with (full) bookcases.

His major comic fantasy series, released by Safkhet Publishing, can be found at: www.thebannedunderground.com and information on his other work and stuff in general at…

The death of Corn Carnival

June 22, 20148 Comments

Yes, this really exists, and yes, it appears every year.

Wait, what? No more Corn Carnival?

This must be a joke.

But no, the City ran out of money. For whatever reason, the businesses who call the Brook home decided not to donate time or money to make the annual celebration a success. The ladies who sponsor the quilt raffle have all passed on to that great quilting bee in the sky and, while their spirits may be sewing for eternity, that doesn’t put quilts up for raffle prizes here in the land of the living.

No more kettle corn. No more funnel cakes. No more mini donuts.

And now, a word from our sponsor…

June 21, 2014June 20, 201413 Comments

Elaborate parapets flank the gable of King’s College Chapel, Cambridge. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Today’s Writing 101 task (okay, fine, it’s really Thursday’s task) is to grab the nearest book, turn to page 29, and use the first word that jumps off the page at you to inspire your post. I grabbed Land of Midnight Days by Katrina Jack and the first word to really jump out at me was the word parapet. With that in mind, here is my letter to a parapet:

Dear Parapet…

Inside

June 20, 2014August 22, 20143 Comments

So today’s Photo Friday theme is inside. But inside what? Well, how about inside the universe? No? Okay, then feast your eyes on the inside of this pretty, pretty flower:

2014-06-08 14.14.47-2

We have this bush in our yard that looks a lot like a lilac bush but, as far as I can tell, it’s not a lilac bush. It smells glorious, though, and when it was blooming a couple weeks back, I had to snap a few quick pictures. This fly sure was happy that night. 🙂

Don’t forget to check out Charnele’s inside post, and have a great weekend! I’ll be back…uh…sometime to finish catching up on my Writing 101 posts (Only yesterday’s and today’s to go – woo!) and fill you in on all the craziness from the past week. Stay cool out there!

A belated find

June 19, 201410 Comments

Looking less tired already!

The challenge for Day Thirteen of Writing 101 is to write about something you’ve found, in contrast to Day Four’s challenge to write about a loss. For day four, I wrote about my loss of sleep. Today I think I’ll write about how I found it again.

It’s only just happened, see. Ever since my surgery in January, I’ve been having more trouble than normal sleeping – getting to sleep and then staying that way. I thought it was just because of the hot flashes, because they’ve been awful, and worse since I stopped taking hormone therapy in April. It wasn’t working as well as I thought it should, so I decided to try a different doctor.

The only hang-up?