Tag: Literature

A sneak peek…and news

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The finalists for the GUTGAA agent contest won’t officially be announced till Friday, but it’s not looking good for me so far.  As of right now, only three people have stopped by to comment on my entry (how many have actually looked at it is anyone’s guess) and none of them were judges.  I won’t lie, I’m disappointed.  I was really hoping to make it through to round two and possible see a request come my way.  But I have been having a lot of fun with the whole blogfest and I’ve made a lot of new friends and I’m really happy for everyone who is moving on.  There are a ton of talented writers out there and the ones getting through deserve all their hard-earned success.  The small press competition is coming up, but I’m not going to be competing in that.  Good luck to those of you who are!

FYI, if you want to enter the small press competition, you need to sign up here.

So back to querying I go.  Between GUTGAA and PitMad, I’ve acquired some new people to add to my query list, which is also helpful.  The GUTGAA pitch polish helped me fine-tune my query pitch and the comments I received on it in my agent contest entry were favorable.  See?  Good things, right?  Plus, PitMad was good exposure since I was throwing out pitches every half hour or so, right?  Visibility is good, right?  I’m working on the power of positive thinking here, people.

I think I need to keep working on my positivity skills.

Would you like a peek at what I’ve been working on the last couple of days?

Vote for Vegin!

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Cast your votes for Vegin Martoka today!  He’s been nominated for President of the United States of America and I think he would be a great leader for our country in this difficult time.  After all, he led Lokana through one of the most turbulent times in its history, dealing with the devastating droughts and the assassination of his parents, as well as the attempted coup by the Zealots, led by his own brother-in-law, Balil.

Vegin believes all men – and women – were created equal and will make sure that all are treated equally before the law.  He despises corruption and has ousted corrupt officials from every level of government.  A family man, Vegin strives to lead by example.  Honor, decency, and integrity are very important to him.  He is a team player, willing to compromise when needed, and believes that the needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few.

So vote for Vegin!  Click here to cast your vote.  He will lead Lokana – erm, America, sorry – back to glory! 😀

(c) 2012.  All rights reserved.

Pitching like crazy!

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If you follow me on Twitter, then chances are you’ll have seen me tweeting like mad today about Vegin, Anná, and the goings-on in Lokana.  If you follow me here, then chances are you know that brevity is not my strong suit, which means that a pitch session on Twitter is guaranteed to make my brain explode.  I have two reasonably decent short pitches that fit within Twitter limits and still leave room for hashtags.  Coming up with others, though, has given me one heck of a headache.

Agents a-plenty lurked about the hashtag #PitMad today, scoping out all the pitches you could handle.  Tweets were flying fast and furious and without TweetDeck, I’m afraid I’d have been lost.  Heck, even with it, I was afraid I’d be lost!  TweetDeck’s lovely columns feature kept me scrolling along in real time, so there was slightly less confusion.  I’ll take any reduction in confusion I can get these days.  Anyway, so with agents lurking, authors were pitching their books in 140 characters or less and boy, was it crazy!  Here are some of the different ways I came up with to pitch The Lokana Chronicles:

One man longs to transform his kingdom…

Daddy

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Night after night he sat there, hunched over his desk with a paperback in hand.  He angled his desk lamp over the page so that the incandescent bulb glowed mere inches away from his head.  I can’t count the number of hours I saw him sit like that, devouring page after chapter after book.  He read all kinds of books: westerns and poetry and biographies and anything else he could get his hands on.

But Louis L’Amour was his favorite.  If he didn’t read every book that man wrote, he sure came close.  He would read the books and when he was done, round them up and donate them to the library.  Other times, depending on the author, he would give them to me.  Our home was always stuffed to the gills with books and I am proud to say that such is still the case – I have far more books than places to put them (which only means that I need more shelf space).

Daddy instilled in me a love of books that I hope to instill in my own children,  that I am trying to instill in my own children.  I love to see Cricket’s face light up when he sees a new book; I love to discuss the Goosebumps series with Tomcat and tell him which ones I enjoyed when I was younger and hear which ones he likes.  I love watching Seymour install beautiful custom bookshelves in every nook and cranny our old house has to offer and believe me, there are plenty.

But of the many wonderful memories related to books that spill forth from my childhood, the one that will stick with me the longest is the one of my father in his squeaky desk chair, his jacket sleeves shoved up his forearms and his hair mussed up because he hadn’t combed it yet that day, hunched over his desk devouring another book with a beer and a cigarette nearby.

(c) 2012.  All rights reserved.

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Even more literary thoughts

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A word is dead when it is said, some say.  I say it just begins to live that day.  —Emily Dickinson

There is no greater agony than bearing an untold story inside you.  —Maya Angelou

A day without sunshine is like, you know, night.  —Steve Martin

A professional writer is an amateur who didn’t quit.  –Richard Bach

A room without books is like a body without a soul.  –Marcus Tullius Cicero

(c) 2012.  All rights reserved.

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The Lokana Chronicles, an excerpt

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Since I’ve finally managed to get things finished up with The Lokana Chronicles for the time being, I thought I’d share a couple of excerpts with all you lovely folks.  The first chapter is available here, but these tidbits come from a little further into the story.  Happy reading!

***

After months of siege, the royal army was exhausted; both supplies and morale were low and getting lower.  It was noon when the Zealot army broke through the city gates.

***

Anná
Artwork by Hazel Butler

Henry crouched next to the door, but all he could hear at first was the murmur of muffled voices.  He waved a hand at John to be quiet as he pressed his ear closer to the door.  Where’s a glass when you really need one? he wondered silently as he tried to make out what was being said.  Voices suddenly rose.  Henry recognized Vegin’s as the loudest.  “They’re talking about Anná,” he whispered.  It had taken both brothers a long time to acclimate their tongues to the change in pronunciation.  “Something about Ravenna…”  Henry’s breath caught in his throat as he realized what was happening.

John tapped his brother on the shoulder, worried.  “What is it?  What did you hear?”  But Henry didn’t move, didn’t respond.  He just sat there, stunned, the same way he’d done a hundred times before as a kid playing freeze tag.  Only this time, they weren’t kids.  And this was no game.

(c) 2012.  All rights reserved.

She’s a-gone!

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That’s it!  I’ve finished!  Yes, that’s right, again, I’ve finally finished again.  But this time I mean it.  I just hit send on an email to someone who requested my full manuscript.  So now I really am done.  And now if you’ll excuse me, I’m going to go breathe into a brown paper bag for a bit and then maybe read a book.  For fun!

I know, I’m such a party girl. 😛

(c) 2012.  All rights reserved.

To the writing cave!

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Once again, I’m hunkered down, making revisions.  Once again, I spy a light at the end of the tunnel.  I know I’ve said this about a dozen times, but I’ve entered the homestretch and man, does it feel good!

So forgive the sparseness of my posts of late.  I hope to be back to something approaching normal sometime soon. 🙂

(c) 2012.  All rights reserved.

The importance of proofreading

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So I’ve been proofreading my novel before sending it out into the wide world on a full request from a query.  It’s a good thing, too, because last night, on the verge of sleep, I found a large, economy-sized error.  This was the kind of error that made me cringe in terror, the kind of error that, had I not found it prior to sending out my manuscript, would have caused me to actually pull hair out of my head.  This, ladies and gentlemen, is the stuff of which nightmares are made.

This error was more than a little typo, more than a minor spellcheck oversight.  I had done some major rearranging of text and failed to delete the redundancies at one point, but then thought I had it all taken care of.  I happily went about printing off my final hard copy and set to reading through it, making a note of each instance where something needed to be fixed (and I’m not talking about instances where I decided that something sounded better if I wrote it differently – I’m talking about instances like where I said witting instead of sitting or considering when I meant consider).

Then I discovered that Chapter 13 needed to be deleted.

Not just a portion of it, oh, no.  The whole thing had to go.  I was falling asleep reading because I was absolutely exhausted, yet I was awake enough to realize that I had just read the opening to Chapter 13 ten minutes earlier…in Chapter 11.  I flipped quickly through Chapter 13, then back through the three preceding chapters and discovered that Chapter 13 contained parts of Chapters 10, 11, and 12.  Talk about en epic facepalm.

Prior to this discovery, I’d been considering just winging the whole proofing bit.  I knew there were a couple of places that I needed to hammer out a bit more, but I thought that once I got those straightened out, I could probably just give it a rest and then send it on in.  Boy, am I glad I talked myself out of that idea!  Part of me is really anxious to get this whole proofing project done with because I’m impatient, but fortunately the logical side of me is louder and knows that I need to take my time and do it right.  Yay logic! 🙂

And now, back to the grindstone.  I’ve got some more polishing to do.

(c) 2012.  All rights reserved.

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