The Names of It

First, I'm sorry I've neglected you, lovely reader, with my absence. You're the apple of my eye and I promise never to do it again.

Now, last week was beyond weird, strange, boring, frustrating, and full of a lot of nothing. To be honest, I had some of the worst PMS and was working on edits. For the record:

PMS + edits = a bitch about words

I then cried to my sister (who lives 600 miles away) through private message about my woes and "Aunt Flow," and as a way to make myself feel better, started trash talking Flow and calling her evil names. Many messages later, there was quite an impressive collection of disgusting and vulgar nicknames for ye ol' period and I was feeling a million times happier.

Flash Fiction: The Business of Remembering

Just a bit of flash for you. Not prompted by anything other than trying to condense a character's back story -- for my own good -- who will probably never see the light of day. Sometimes, things like this are the only thing you have left of an entire novel. Writers are weird.

The Business of Remembering

Cynthia remembered standing in the kitchen braiding pigtails when Grandma’s phone rang. She remembered freckles across her mom’s nose. She imagined 747s shattering over the Atlantic, and pictured freckles dissolving into bubbles and plane fragments. Mothers existed in photos. On television children deserved hugs. That wasn’t real life.

She might’ve steadied if her father refused the drink. Years broke him. Empty bottles consumed counter tops. He sent the bullet from temple to temple. No one adopts eight year olds.

Editing and Other Labor Intensive Jobs

So, I'm currently editing the first draft of la novel tentatively titled A Burning Spirit. I'm also still trying to come up with a title that sticks for longer than a few happy days. I swear I'm just going to start calling it my witchy book and then you will all know what I'm talking about without me giving it a title.

As always, I find editing to be the real meat and potatoes of "writing." There's just so much work involved and while it is work to clean up sentences that were no more birthed from you as much as they just fell out while you were on your way somewhere, I love the challenge of the job.

This witchy book, huh, you like? Anyway, this witchy book is actually the fourth novel I've written and the first that I have loved from start to finish during the writing of the first draft and I'm still in love with it now that I'm editing. While I'm no idiot, and I know damn well, this feeling might fade away by the time I'm line editing, right now it feels like momentum and potential. I still want to be in the same room with Elsbeth, the main character, and I still crush on the boys, the innocent Andrew and horrific Hopkins, for so many different reasons.

So, that's where I am: buckling down, choosing to work on my novel, and editing to make it a better tale for you to some day pick up in the store or download and really enjoy the ride whether it be on a broom, a team of black oxen, or otherwise.

Judging Books By Their Covers

Although I tend to talk about writing a lot here on my blog, you may not realize I'm a major reader too. I know, I know, like a real person, right? I lay in bed at night, knees tipped to the sky, cat lying on my feet, and flip the actual pages of books or press the button to turn pages on my old school Kindle sans ads and touch screens.

I read quite a wide variety of books and I'm often in more than one book at a time. I also take advantage of my local library, which is fantastic beyond belief, for both my print and digital books to keep costs down. I'm a starving writer, I NEED my library to support my habit. Currently on my nightstand I have Shangai Girls by Lisa See, Scott Snyder and Scott Tuft's comic issue #5 of Severed, The Help from Katherine Stockett, Fables: Book Three by Bill Willingham, and Tom Franklin's richly-verbed Crooked Letter, Crooked Letter. In bed is the safest place for me to read since that means my child and the cats are already asleep, so my time is quiet and mine. But why do I pick up these books and what's sucking me in?