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. 🙂

Home at twelve

June 18, 2014Leave a comment

The Writing 101’s Day 11 challenge is to write about where you lived when you were twelve. I’ve covered the age of twelve, and revisiting my childhood home, in other posts, but this one is different. As I began thinking about my old house, lots of things came back to me, and I’ve tried to capture a few of them here.

SCAN0038 When I was twelve, I lived in a two-story red house on the corner of Pine Street and Main. The local Pioneer was across the street to the north, and we had a huge back yard. At least, I thought it was huge. Then again, I thought the house was huge, too. Trees filled the yard, and flower beds existed in various states of decay. They weren’t the only things in that state.

If I close my eyes, I can still see the white linoleum that was always dirty near the front door and the peeling wallpaper of the dining room. I can still see the sun glaring off the screen of our old RCA TV (’80s vintage, of course). I can still see the colorful patchwork of carpet hidden by all the crap that littered my room and the kitten posters on my seafoam green bedroom walls.

00000001 My mom hated that color – she wanted me to pick something a shade darker, but I loved it. It was better than the ugly shade of blue that matched my parents’ bedroom, and a heck of a lot better than the Pepto Bismol pink…

Next up on the Summer Reads Blog Tour is…

June 17, 2014June 25, 20141 Comment

Once again, I’ve got some great book recommendations to share with you. To find out more about the Summer Reads Blog Tour, check out Lisa L. Wiedmeier’s blog, original home of the following post.

Now, without further ado, here’s this week’s guest, Carrie Fetzer!

Summer Reads Blog Tour – Week Three

Welcome Carrie Fetzer!

This week it’s our beloved Carrie’s turn to share her favorite reads with you. I can’t tell you how grateful I am to have her come into my life and support me the way she has. Last November, I half jokingly put it out on the page that I needed a page administrator, and our lovely Carrie messaged me! Not only did she volunteer, but she’s run with it wholeheartedly.

She’s done an amazing job with keeping the conversation going, and filled a huge gap for me when I needed it most. This was supposed to just be a temporary position, but Carrie wanted to stay on! The best part of having her admin my page?

Photo Friday: The best friends edition

June 6, 2014August 22, 20149 Comments

Well, Friday certainly snuck up on me this week. I’m still trying to catch up on all the blogging fun I’ve been so lucky to be a part of this week, and I completely forgot about choosing a theme for this week’s Photo Friday post. Whoops.

As I was trying to decide what to post, I remembered that it’s my best friend Jenny’s birthday today. After wishing her well a couple different places, I decided that friendship would be the perfect theme and, since I have a bunch of pictures of my friends and me over the years already posted, why not collect them all in one post?

So, in no particular order, below I give you a dozen pictures of my besties and me over the years, from high school, through college, and beyond. I hope you enjoy my little picspam…

Writing 101: The tunes

June 4, 201416 Comments

Gaelic Storm at the Englert Theater

I can’t even begin to count the number of songs in which I can find meaning, or the number of songs that I love, that hold inspiration for me, that have shaped the person I’ve become. The first three that popped into my head, though, are “A Way Back Into Love” and “Dance With Me Tonight” from the Music and Lyrics soundtrack, and “Walk Through My Door” from Gaelic Storm’s album, Tree.

I listened to a lot of Gaelic Storm during my teen years, and their first three albums in particular can send me back to fun times with great friends in seconds. While I love all their music, “Walk Through My Door” always reminds me of a certain person. The song itself even inspired a short story, one that I’m told wasn’t half bad.

But, as inevitably happens, I graduated high school and got married (to someone else). And when my marriage ended, I listened to this song again…

Remains

March 28, 201412 Comments

All that survives after our death are publications and people.

So look carefully after the words you write, the thoughts and publications you create, and how you love others. For these are the only things that will remain. -Susan Niebur

I was reading WordPress’s Blogging Through Breast Cancer post Wednesday morning and remembered Susan Niebur’s blog, Toddler Planet, which I always enjoyed reading. She passed away from metastatic breast cancer in 2012, but her blog lives on. Since it’s chock full of resources, I shared the link in the comments section of the WP round-up post.

The day before, my ex-husband became a father for the fourth time. He and his wife welcomed another son to their family, but while she recovered from an emergency cesarean, he headed to a children’s hospital an hour and a half away to be with their son. A crushed umbilical cord led to his arrival three weeks early and a host of problems.

These two things might, at first glance, seem unconnected, and maybe they are, but…

Howdy!

March 24, 20142 Comments

The weather’s been a bit wild lately.

So I’ve been away for a while (yes, I know, a week isn’t exactly an eternity, but since I usually try to pop in here every couple of days, it is a while). I’ve been feeling a bit under the weather lately, so I haven’t been overly active anywhere.

But! I can say that within the next week, I’ll have a couple of bookish-type posts going up, as I’m currently reading Snort and Wobbles by the talented Will Macmillan Jones. Tadpole and Bubbles will be helping me craft a review, which I’ll post here as soon as we’ve finished. Then on Monday, I’m hosting the lovely Joleene Naylor as part of a blog tour for her recently-released book Children of Shadows, the sixth offering in her Amaranthine series.

And as our weather has given us no end of crazy lately, I hope to be back to posting some more lousy haiku in the near future. It’s not the only thing that’s crazy around here, but hopefully I’ll be back to my old self in no time, now that I’ve been to my doctor (again). So, in the meantime, I hope you’re all lovely and that you have a fabulous week, and I’ll see you when I see you! 🙂

Camera skills

March 4, 2014March 5, 20147 Comments

IMG_20140301_104334 Apparently, I’m not too shabby with a camera. I’ve been an amateur photographer for a good decade and a half now (a little over that, actually), ever since I got my first camera for Christmas, and it’s something I love. Most of the pictures that accompany my poems are ones that I’ve taken (unless otherwise noted). It’s so much fun; I can’t imagine not having a camera to play around with. And, while I do miss my old film cameras, it’s nice that with my DSLR, I can take as many pictures as I want without having to worry about paying to have bad pictures developed. Of course, this has also made me a little more careless, I think, in my composition, but such is life.

But I digress. When I post something new here, I usually head over to Facebook and share the link in a couple of groups I’m in. Last week, my post “Lonesome Call” gathered a bit of attention there, as someone found my photo of a lone tree in a field near my hometown particularly inspiring. She crafted a whole poem around the image, which I was quite flattered to read. Apparently it’s been making its way around the web via Facebook, from what I can tell. If you’d like to take a look for yourself, you can find it here.

If you decide to check it out, I hope you’ll enjoy. 🙂

Super sweet

January 15, 20142 Comments

super-sweet-blogging-award1 What a whirlwind this month has been so far! I can’t believe it’s already the halfway point of January.

Of course, this means that I’ll be 30 before I know it. That’s right, the big day is at the end of the month. It’ll be an interesting one this year, for a bunch of reasons, and I’ll be glad to kiss the big 3-0 goodbye next year (for other reasons).

Here’s hoping 30 (and 31) are better for me than they were for my mom. This is something that is going to weigh heavily on my mind for a long time. I may even try to explain it at some point.

But not right now. That’s not supposed to be the point of this post. The point of this post is that holy cow, I can’t believe January’s half gone. Yep. That’s it. That’s the point.

Okay, no it’s not.