Bliss

March 10, 2016March 12, 20164 Comments

My bliss lies in writing. I love it – I can’t get enough of it.

So many irons in the fire…

No, really. When I haven’t written in a while, I start getting really cranky. Ask my family.

Of course, that also extends to times where I’m not writing as much as I’d like, or times where extracting the story from my brain is like extracting a particularly difficult wisdom tooth, or times where editing is kicking my butt six ways from Sunday…

Still, writing (and editing, I suppose) is my bliss. What’s yours?

Home

March 7, 2016March 7, 20166 Comments

That’s me on the bottom right. Thank goodness high-water pants haven’t made a comeback.

Home is where your story begins.

My story began in a modest red house on a quiet corner in a small town. But nothing stays the same for long, and when my little sister arrived a couple years later, that quiet corner became considerably less quiet.

And so it goes.

Many years (and even more plot twists) later, I left that modest red house with its white garage and its yard full of trees behind me as I ventured out into the world. Eventually, I decided that I wanted to go back to that little red house on the corner, but it was too late. I was too grown up.

Maybe you can’t go home again, but you can always take it with you.

You can’t go home again.

So I made my own home. Several times over, in fact. And while I think it’s true that you can’t go home again, that’s only because I believe that home is something we carry with us wherever we go. Home is in our memories. Home is in the way we look at the world. Home is the way we treat others.

Home is a state of mind, a way of being, a feeling that can’t be taken away.

When I think of home, I think of the warmth of my grandma’s kitchen. I think of the hustle and bustle that went into family get-togethers. I remember the after-dinner tea and cookies, and how all of those things came together the morning after my second wedding as we all congregated in the kitchen of my new home.

Home is family. Home is friends.

Tadpole and Bubbles like to get up to all sorts of shenanigans.

Home is where your heart is.

It may be a sappy cliché, but that’s only because it’s true. Home is where your heart is because, without heart, there can be no home.

Throwback Thursday

March 3, 2016Leave a comment

I’m doing something new today and participating in a Throwback Thursday event. I’ve been working on an old short story the last couple days, and while I’ve wanted to blog about it, I…haven’t. Not yet.

This seemed like the perfect opportunity to share the story again. 🙂

Ideally, I could finish this story in the next month (or maybe two). But since I ended in the middle of a scene and have no idea where I was going with it, I suspect it may take longer than that to finish. Thank goodness I made lots of notes when I started out, or I’d be totally up a creek right now.

I have my work cut out for me as it is.

If you’d like to check out some of the other things people are sharing, head on over to Part-Time Monster, Adventures of a Jayhawk Mommy, and The Qwiet Muse. I can’t wait to check out everything else later on tonight! 🙂

Literally critical, part two

March 1, 20161 Comment

If you missed the first part of this story, look no further! You can find part one of Literally Critical right here. And now, to pick up where we left off…

The problem we faced producing both the ‘Port Naain Re-evaluation of Literature’ and the ‘Port Naain Guide to Literary Merit’ was not the workload. The real problem was the need for anonymity. Had we been able to credit the authors of the copy then we could doubtless have hired plenty of contributors. In fact, the act of merely offering money would mean that we would have been forced to beat writers off with a stick. On the other hand, had the Port Naain literary world known who was writing the content for these two publications; it would most likely have been we who were beaten with sticks.

The anonymity did lead to problems for some. I had to do a review of an event Lancet Foredeck had featured heavily in. Now I will admit that I have never let my long association blind me to the flaws in Lancet’s work. Installation poetry has always struck me as somewhat overblown, after all what poet worth their salt cannot spontaneously knock off a few stanzas or even just a rhyme or two when the situation calls for it.

But still, Lancet is a better than middling painter, a perfectly competent teller of tales to large groups of young children whom he can hold spellbound, and to be fair, he’s not a bad poet. But at the event I attended, he surpassed himself. He launched into a mixture of pre-rehearsed and spontaneous work which was breathtaking in its comprehension and range. As he finally sank down into his seat the entire audience stood to applaud him. Even those who were merely present to drink at the bar rose to applaud him. Indeed the barman brought him a tankard of the bar’s best ale to quench his thirst without even being asked or staying for the money. On that day, in that place…

Literally critical!

February 29, 20162 Comments

Tomorrow, another one of poet Tallis Steelyard’s intriguing adventures will hit the virtual shelves. In honor of the event, here he is to talk about the life of a literary critic:

It is true that looking back I have had an interesting career. Indeed there is much I have achieved that I can look back upon with a sense of modest pride. There are very few incidents I feel disinclined to recall to mind and few about which I feel any real shame. But because I feel a duty to a younger generation of poets and other writers, I believe it behoves me to set aside my regrets, my mortification, and tell the plain unvarnished story. You see, I too have dabbled in literary criticism; I have dipped my pen in its unhallowed waters.

Now I don’t want anyone to assume that I did this because I was pandering to some unfathomable malevolence within my nature. No I did it for the most honourable of all reasons; we needed the money.

On reflection, one sees that within the life of even a great artist there are times which appear designed purely to test your mettle. This was one. Shena had not been well, she had caught something she just couldn’t seem to shake off, and she spent much of the winter confined to the barge. This meant that our income dropped considerably, we were faced with having to heat the barge during the day, and what reserves we had were waning rapidly. I had attempted to take her place dealing with the shore combers, but frankly I never made a tenth of what Shena did, and what I did make was purely because some of their number took pity on me and shared my desire to see her fit and well and back at work.

Then Silac Glicken approached me.

Where my heart will take me

January 27, 2016February 4, 20166 Comments

Don’t stop believin’.
Let it go.
Be true to your heart.
Keep on movin’.
I’m goin’ where my heart will take me.

What do these five things have in common, aside from being fantastic songs? They’re words that I find inspiring. But more than that, they’re words I hope to live by in 2016.

Two more days. In two more days, I’ll be 32. While I officially surpassed my mother’s age back in August, it’s really just hitting me now, as I approach the first birthday she never reached. Perhaps this all seems a bit self-indulgent, but for some reason, I’ve always thought I would leave the world like she did – young, and with things left to do. There was – is – so much I want to accomplish before I die, and I had no idea…

Two down, sixteen to go!

January 7, 2016January 6, 20168 Comments

It’s been a while since I’ve kept track of the books I read in a year, but I signed up for a Goodreads challenge last week. My goal: read eighteen books this year. I figured one book a month wouldn’t be too terribly difficult, and I could maybe squeeze another six in around them. It feels like a cheat; in the old days, I could’ve read eighteen books in a matter of weeks. But now?

Such book binges are a pipe dream.

I’m well on my way to meeting my goal, though. In the past week, I’ve knocked out two books, and I have three more lined up and ready to go. Then there’s that plot book I’ve been meaning to read…

But today I want to tell you about Portrait of a Girl by Will Macmillan Jones. You may remember him from such reviews as The Showing and Snort and Wobbles and The Banned Underground books. It’s no secret I’m a huge fan, or at least it shouldn’t be, and I wasn’t disappointed with this latest book:

Does lightning ever strike twice? It would seem so for the unfortunate Mister Jones. After a harrowing encounter with the paranormal in The Showing, once again he again finds himself in mortal danger on the borders of that shadowed world.

An antique painting holds a strange fascination for him – and others. What does the girl in the portrait want from Mister Jones and from the others who become entranced by her beauty? And can she be stopped before she unleashes her ancient evil into our modern world in a lake of blood?

‘Portrait of a Girl’ is the second in the collection of Mister Jones paranormal mysteries.

This story engaged my attention at once; I sat down to read this story and finished it in a single sitting. The further I read, the more difficulty I had in putting it down for such trivial things as food and sleep. Like any good tale, the tension grew steadily right to the very end, and I’m fairly certain that the goosebumps on my arms throughout my read had as much to do with the story as they did with the cold breeze sneaking in around my window.

If you’ve read The Showing, you’ll be pleased to see some familiar faces in this tale, as well as some new ones. And if you’re like me, you’ll be keen to reread the pair of them until the next in the series comes out!

Check out Portrait of a Girl today – you won’t regret it!

The Showing

January 5, 2016January 4, 20164 Comments

I spent the first weekend of the new year enjoying a variety of fun things: movies with the family, sledding with the kids, and time spent curled up with a good book. I’ve spent far too little time the past few months curled up with good books, and I mean to make up for it.

The book I lost myself in this time was called The Showing, by Will Macmillan Jones. It’s a fantastically spooky tale about a spooky old house. It took me right back to my childhood, when I read every spooky book I could lay my hands on. And like the best of those old stories, this one had me shivering in anticipation. I half-expected something to jump out at me, but nothing ever did.

To break up all the spooky tension, there were a few lighter moments. I couldn’t help smiling at Evie’s collection of books (Cheyenne, by L.L. Wiedmeier; Leah, by A. Baker; and The Binding, by S. Dogra), all of which are real books that you should also check out. And this part had me giggling loud enough to make my family further question my sanity:

Across town, other resources were being wasted, but at least they weren’t mine. Evans pulled a load of cash out of his pocket and it vanished, just like that, into the pocket of a somewhat blowsy middle-aged lady who called herself a medium.

I put her down as an extra-large.

It takes a lot of skill to write good comedy, and at least as much to write good horror. Will Macmillan Jones excels in both areas. If you haven’t read his Banned Underground series, I highly recommend it.

As for me? I’ll be settling down with the next book in the Mister Jones series, Portrait of a Girl. I can’t wait! 🙂

Have you read any good books lately?

Defeating Winter

January 4, 2016January 3, 201611 Comments

I found the following in my drafts, and I really like it:

The people here are as harsh as the landscape, but they’re not without their warmth, and in a land of perpetual winter, warmth is important. Heck, even in a world not cursed with perpetual winter, warmth is important. Grab hold of whatever warmth you can find, magnify it, and pass it on – that’s the way to defeat winter.

It has potential. Possibility. It came from a draft of a review I was writing a while back, but I couldn’t figure out how to properly work it in. Still, there it is. Waiting. Hoping.

Like people, waiting for spring.

When writers say they get their inspiration from everywhere, this is what they mean. A couple-few throwaway sentences scrapped from a review. A sunrise on a bitter winter morning, the kind that reminds you there is still joy and beauty in a frozen world. A brisk wind at your back as you walk down the street.

I can’t wait to see what this will turn into. 🙂

A Much Arranged Marriage, or, Further Adventures With Tallis and Friends

December 30, 2015December 30, 20154 Comments

As I said, I spent a little time reading over the long Christmas weekend, and one of the things I read was A Much Arranged Marriage, the newest book in The Port Naain Intelligencer series by Jim Webster. As usual, poet Tallis Steelyard and friends have become embroiled in a mystery, though this time in a rather less dramatic fashion than in Flotsam or Jetsam. But just because it didn’t start with a bang doesn’t mean it didn’t finish with one:

Benor is asked to help warn off a blackmailer who appears to be threatening a young girl’s chances of marriage. But the deeper he digs, the more dangerous things become.

It all starts with a request for help from Tallis Steelyard’s patron, Mistress Bellin Hanchkillian. She seeks to help the granddaughter of a childhood friend, but nothing about the situation is exactly what it seems. Once Tallis and Benor were on the job, I couldn’t stop reading – I had to know what would happen next. I read the whole book in one sitting, which is both good and bad. It’s great because it’s nice to read something a little shorter every now and then, but it also kind of stinks because I’m always left wanting more. I guess it’s a good thing I don’t have to wait long between installments! 🙂

If you haven’t yet read A Much Arranged Marriage, what are you waiting for? It’s a great book, and I highly recommend it.