Children of Shadows

March 31, 2014March 31, 201420 Comments

Today I’m proud to host my friend and fellow author, Joleene Naylor, as she tours the blogosphere promoting her latest Amaranthine novel, Children of Shadows. She was kind enough to tell me why she writes about vampires, and some of the challenges she faces in doing so. And stay tuned afterward – there’s a giveaway going on with some pretty awesome prizes.

Holy crap – I didn’t realize I just copied her words almost exactly till I glanced down just now. *sigh* Oh, well – to the guest post! 🙂

Hello! My name is Joleene Naylor, and I’m the author of the Amaranthine vampire series. I’d like thank Kay for hosting me today as I tour the blogosphere promoting my latest release, Children of Shadows.

A question most people ask me is why I write vampires. The truth is, it’s not the only thing I like to write. I’d actually like to do a fantasy series one day. But, right now I don’t have anything interesting to say in that genre. I don’t see any wrongs that need righted, or gaps that need filled, like I did with vampires.

When I started the Amaranthine series in 2005…

Thoughts for the day

March 25, 20144 Comments

No, it’s not blood. Someone had fun with the ketchup while Mommy’s back was turned.

I’ve been doing a lot of reading lately, mostly in a research vein as opposed to reading for fun (although I do enjoy my research). Here are a few things I stumbled across today that really spoke to me:

Real, life-long security comes not from the barrel of a gun or from being able to spy on your fellow citizens like a Stasi informant; it comes with less harsh extremes of wealth and poverty and increased access to health care and education. -David Byrne

Take a bunch of wolverines. Throw them into a roaring F5 tornado. That’s a toddler. It’ll tear through your home, shrieking and whirling about, scooping things up and depositing them elsewhere. It’ll lose things. It’ll destroy other things. It’ll change direction in the hair’s breadth of a moment — “I’m doing this no now I’m doing this other thing wait what’s that over there.” -Chuck Wendig

Then last year, after my illness, turning 40 and most recently the death of a good friend, I realised that life is just too damn short NOT to be doing what I love. The planets kind of aligned, one of those epiphany moments. -Sophie Tallis (emphasis mine)

All three articles are worth checking out in full (I truly related to Chuck Wendig’s post – I have two toddlers of my own, after all, and have felt the pain of a Duplo block embedded in my foot that he so hilariously references). Happy Tuesday, y’all!

How Star Trek improved my confidence in my writing skills

March 15, 20142 Comments

Seymour and I have been rewatching all things Star Trek since we were dating; we’ve taken care of the original series, The Next Generation, Deep Space Nine, and all the movies (although we’re not big fans of the reboot and I haven’t yet seen Into Darkness). We’re halfway through our Enterprise rewatch at the moment (which is great because it means I’m that much closer to a rewatch of my beloved Voyager), having started Season 3 the other night. Seymour’s been telling me about how awful the third season is; he’s not a big fan of the temporal cold war story arc or the Xindi story arc and frankly, I kind of agree with him on the temporal cold war thing.

Anyway, the point of this is that the season premiere of Season 3 had me laughing. And facepalming. The words, “What the hell?!” kept running through my head. Sure, it started off okay – recap of the season finale, Xindi council meeting, theme song (which sucks now – they completely ruined it by jazzing it up). But then they unveil the new command center, and that’s where it all went wrong:

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. 🙂

How to keep things straight (or maybe not-so-straight)

March 1, 2014March 6, 201511 Comments

Today I’m excited to have Jim Webster here with a guest post. His book, Justice 4.1, releases today from Safkhet Publishing, and it sounds like a fantastic read. But don’t take my word for it – here’s the blurb:

When a journalist is shot down in a backward area of Tsarina, Haldar Drom of the Governor’s Investigation Office is sent to investigate. He uncovers a hidden medical facility dedicated to the production of Abate, a drug used for population control, as well as evidence of the implantation of pre-created embryos in women brought to Tsarina for the purpose. He also discovers a deeper plot with far-reaching political ramifications. A senior member of the Governor’s family, Doran Stilan, is running a personal feud with the major pirate/Starmancer Wayland Strang. Indeed, he begins to suspect that Stilan may even be angling to take Strang’s place.

The medical facility is destroyed after it is attacked by mercenaries hired by Strang, and Drom has to travel off world to untangle the threads of the conspiracy.

Arriving back on Tsarina, he has to deal with a failed Starmancer attack, punish the guilty, and arrange for Doran Stilan to get what’s coming without undermining the position of the Governor. To do this, he’ll need skill, know-how, and a whole lot of luck to ensure that the guilty face justice.

Talk about an action-packed book! That’s a lot of things to keep track of. With that in mind, here’s Jim to tell us a bit about how he keeps everything straight (or not-so-straight) while writing:

Off the grid

February 17, 201416 Comments

My computer died last week. It’s my own fault; I left it out where Thumper could reach it and he finally succumbed to temptation and decided that Mommy’s computer needed playing with. When Daddy busted him, he dropped it and broke the charger cord. But since my husband is the handy sort, he patched it up with some electrical tape and it was good as new.

For a while.

Last week, my computer decided it no longer wanted to recognize my adapter and instructed me to use the correct adapter for my computer because, until I did as it suggested, my computer was no longer going to charge. I scrambled to get some things printed for our taxes and get my photos backed up to my external hard drive, but my last-second backup failed as my computer finally lost power. *sigh*

So now I’m in the market for either a new power cord or a new computer. The new cord is clearly the cheaper of the two options, but my computer really needs replacing. It’s five years old and showing its age, but I’m not holding my breath on getting a new one any time in the near future. At any rate, my posts may be a bit sporadic until I get one or the other (new cord or new computer). While WordPress has some fantastic mobile apps, I much prefer an actual computer to mobile posting. It’s just easier, at least at the moment. Maybe one day I’ll be so used to mobile computing that it won’t be an issue, but for the time being, I’ll stick to mobile posting as a last resort.

And who knows? Maybe I’ll actually get some writing done! 😀

How do you handle techno-glitches?

An interview for the ages

February 10, 2014October 12, 20219 Comments

Today I’m excited to be interviewing Irene Soldatos, author of the wonderful book, Bad Bishop. It really is a fabulous read, and I jumped at the chance to learn more about it. Share my curiosity? Then pull up a chair, relax, and get ready for a little fun with history!

KK: What inspired you to write this story?

IS: That’s a difficult question. There was no one moment of inspiration, rather an idea that slowly developed. I read a lot of history. And there are three historians in my family, so I’ve grown up steeped in it, and I suppose I am more conscious than most of the enormous differences, cultural, social, ideological, technological between the people of one historical period and those of another, but also the very many similarities. I found myself often wondering what someone who was born and grew up in classical antiquity would make of the middle ages, for example, if he or she could somehow see it. I suppose this book is a thought experiment on that concept. I wanted to bring together and juxtapose people from various different time periods, in one story. One way to do that would be time travel. But I didn’t like that idea, because it would mean they would have missed the process of history. And the process is even more important than the time period they would arrive at, i.e. the one I set the story in.

KK: The amount of research needed for this book must have been incredible. What did that process involve?

It’s crazy, man

February 5, 2014February 5, 2014Leave a comment

I’m here to tell you that it’s okay to fall. It’s human to fall. And it’s okay to forsake a thing for a while — perhaps for even five years, as I did with The 33. But don’t you dare walk away from it, not for good. Don’t turn your back on the shaggy thing, and that soggy first-draft copy. Don’t you dare ignore what you were born to do: to herd words.

Stay in the crazy-making business. It’s the best job I know.

–J.C. Hutchins, “This Crazy-Making Business Called ‘Writing'”

Cop out

January 13, 2014March 3, 201617 Comments

Mosaic image of Mars as seen by Viking 1, 22 February 1980 (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

There’s a game going around Facebook today, wherein someone tags you to share a passage from page 7 of your current work in progress. I was tagged, but I had a little trouble deciding what to post – I’m working on three things at the moment (well, sort of). I’m still working on that short sci-fi piece that I started back in May, in addition to mulling over revision possibilities for The Lokana Chronicles, and since my short been getting a lot of my time lately, I finally decided to go with that.

And now, because I’m too tired to come up with something better, I’m going to post it here. (It was a long weekend; I’m still in recovery.) From my story, The Colony, I give you a conversation between Lynn Treadwell, the protagonist, and Mr. Edward Barrington III, an executive with the Company, who’ve sent Lynn’s husband to Mars as part of a colony expedition:

In memoriam

January 8, 201431 Comments

ljp I haven’t been feeling well lately. I’ve been dealing with a nasty headache off and on all week, and I was supposed to have surgery yesterday. Thanks to my insurance company dropping the ball, I was forced to reschedule at the last minute. I’ve had a dozen ideas for posts, but I haven’t gotten any of them written (although I did start one – I think it was on Monday).