Where on Earth Have I Been??

1. Santa Fe:

shopping mecca and home of this year's Left Coast Crime convention. It was great fun to hang out with other writers and readers and add to my turquoise collection.

2. The Amazon Henge:

my work in progress. This is the novel that I wrote in a month last November for NaNoWriMo, and it's morphed on me yet again. Strange, how a re-draft takes longer than the first draft!

3. Reading frenzy:

I'm a slow reader, but I managed to read 16 books in the past 2 months. Here are some favorites that stood out:

Open Season, by C.J. Box (first of the Joe Pickett game warden mystery series set in Wyoming)

Tell No One, by Harlan Coben (a thriller about a deadly secret)

Zuzu's Petals, by Lauren Ward Larsen (a chilling story of surviving preeclampsia and the uplifting story of second chances)

The Ghosts of Belfast, by Stuart Neville (a noir treatment of guilt)

4. Gone, painting:

Look out, world, I've discovered that talent is not a prerequisite to paint. Like writing, talent helps, but practice is critical. So...working on that! Here's my first painting:

CARIBBEAN, again!

Heck, I don't mind going back to the Caribbean, especially in the dead of winter. Someone's got to fill those mega-cruise ships, right? Here are some of my favorite activities:

1. reading on deck

2. soaking up tropical beauty

3. shopping, till Al drops

Can't wait for next time!

New Story Coming Soon!

"The Seventh Sleeve of Tombaugh" is about a man who joins a mission to Pluto to escape the masses of humanity, only to find out the secret truth about Pluto and what this secret will mean to humanity's future.

This is the story I sold while being a writer on the road (see my post from October 28, 2010). Look for it soon in the anthology Alien Aberrations, which should be available from your favorite bookstore.

ALIEN ABERRATIONS, edited by Stephen R. Pastore

Original cover art by Stephen Bryant

Publisher: Grand Mal Press

http://www.grandmalpress.com/

ISBN: 9780982945919

The Table of Contents:

• The Greylings' Song by Allison Littlewood
• Omega by Randy Chandler
• Second Chance by Zoot Campbell
• What Lies Beneath by Faith Kauwe
• The Nuclear Lamentation by David Dunwoody
• The Seventh Sleeve of Tombaugh by Rebecca S.W. Bates
• The Kleptos by Ryan C. Thomas
• Greetings by John Bushore
• Sunnyville by Alex Leopardi
• Love Cubed by Jay French
• Pokey Bear by Y.B. Cats
• One Hunch is as Good As Another by Patrick Rutigliano
• The Nest by Gregory L. Norris
• Allies by Christopher Daonahue
• Getting Used To It by Patrick Flanagan

Winner!

Here's a brief summary of my NaNoWriMo experience last month:

week 1: FUN! Story and characters flow out of my head.

week 2: BORING -- I want to be almost anyplace except entering the middle of my story.

week 3: DESPAIR -- Story morphs, and I hope like heck I can find my idea again in the midst of so much garbage.

week 4: PANIC -- The end is in sight, but it looks farther away than ever before, and furthermore, I haven't a clue anymore what I'm writing.

Then, as if by magic, the words flowed into my story for a total of 50,303 words. (Magic is what I love about writing!) I had enough words to win the challenge, but...

The book is not finished.

I will let it simmer, then do the necessary research, and then fill in the gaps. I'm calling the book The Amazon Henge. It's a time-travel, female Indiana Jones sort of story.

NaNoWriMo: approaching the finish line

With less than a week left of this novel writing challenge in a month, I am almost on target with my word count at 44,000. To my surprise, I am finding the last 6,000 words to be much harder than I expected. I am out of story. I desperately need to research! My characters have changed on me, to the point that I don't know who they are anymore. My plot has taken some surprising twists, morphing into a story that I hadn't planned. I'm ready to take a breath, and let this story rest for a bit, but I still have 6,000 more words to fathom from the great unknown.

NaNoWriMo: a midway report

November is National Novel Writing Month, and in a moment of blind optimism only two days before kick-off, I decided to take the challenge. Now I have to write 50,000 words this month!

Why sign on? Because..

1. It's a way to kick one of my novel ideas out of my head (I have 9 full-blown ideas that I seriously want to write, sooner rather than later--see my July post on "Starting a Novel--part 1"). I had no idea in July that I would end up doing this.

2. It's fun. I get to tell myself a story, while each day I don't know exactly where the story is going to take me, or who's going to show up in it.

3. It's hard.

"The book is stupid," Critical Voice whines in my head.

"Shut up, just type." I don't have time to listen to CV because I have too many words to type.

Choosing a hard writerly challenge always helps me grow as a writer.

So far I have 22,000 words, not quite half-way to my goal. So, can I get all the way to 50,000 words in just 15 more days? Beats me!

"Crawlers" Is Here!

I just received my contributor's copy of Infradead, a trade paperback anthology that contains my novella "Crawlers." This anthology deals with human extinction, and here's what the cover copy says:

Does the world end with a whimper or a bang?
2012: the Maya calendar expires
2029: an asteroid takes aim at the Earth
Or . . .
Could a mistake during time travel destroy contemporary human civilization?
How would Satan tempt the last woman on Earth?
Will robots replace humans?
Have the gods played a practical joke?
Could the next step in evolution change our species?
Did someone lose a bet?
The stories in this book are about the "or."

"Crawlers" is about changing our species. The story starts with stealing wildflower seeds from an ecologically devastated Rocky Mountains and progresses through colonization of Mars, where experiments should help restore Earth's ecology. And then, things go terribly wrong...

Infradead is available from Sam's Dot Publishing for $12.00, and you can find it here:

http://www.samsdotpublishing.com/purchasecenter/anthologies.htm