A is For Adventure

So here's the thing. Despite the fact that I've released my fifth book this year (you can check the tab at the top of the page to see the whole collection) I've been in kind of a dry spell with my writing this year. It's not writer's block, per se, I always feel like writer's block is where you can't come up with ideas and I've got ideas galore, it's more like I just got out of the writing habit over the holidays at the end of the year and never got back into it.

Then the other day I was noodling around on the computer, looking at some old bookmarks, and I saw the one for the Blogging From A to Z Challenge. And I thought to myself, why not? Maybe this is just what I need to get off my lazy butt, metaphorically speaking. If nothing else, it'll be a great adventure.

Now most of the people visiting here this month will already be familiar with the challenge but for those who aren't, let me explain. The idea is to write a blog post every day except Sundays during the month of April, which will result in 26 blog posts. And since there are 26 letters in the alphabet, part of the fun is to use a letter of the alphabet, in sequential order, as the theme for each day. Hence the title of this post.

You'll notice the little badge at the top of my widgets on the right hand column. If you click on it, it'll take you to the main page of the challenge where you'll find listings for all the participants. Trust me, you're not going to be able to visit them all in one day. At the writing of this post there were almost 2,000 names on the list. But it might be fun trying. :-D

One of the fun things is that most people find a central theme to their posts: mythological animals, poetry forms, photographs ... one year one of the participants wrote a novel with each letter of the alphabet representing the theme for each chapter. The possibilities are endless.

And the best part is, there's still time to sign up! All you need is a blog and an idea. And then maybe you can have a little adventure of your own.

It's Alive!

Happy Release Day to me,
Happy Release Day to me,
Buy my book and leave a review please,
Happy Release Day to me!

I am pleased and proud to announce that after years of sweat, swearing, and suffering, Lucky Dog, the long awaited sequel to my swords and sorcery adventure/fantasy Magical Misfire is now available on Amazon.

If wishes were horses, beggars would ride . . .

Jessica O'Conner didn't know about beggars, but she certainly wished for a more comfortable mode of transportation than horseback.

When she first arrived in the magical realm, she had adventures galore. Now the fun continues as she journeys southward to the wizards she hopes can send her home again. But nothing's ever that simple for Jessica. First she accidentally turns a man into a dog, her magical moonstone pendant is stolen, and she somehow finds herself agreeing to raise the dead to pick some flowers. Then her troubles really begin.

Poor Jessica. It's just one thing after another with her. She gets a little side-tracked on her way south, but she makes a couple more friends along the way. And have we heard the last of the dastardly Prince Ewan, now King Ewan? Guess you'll just have to read to find out. ;-)

Check it out HERE. And just to be a nice gal, I'm making the e-version available for just $2.99 until the end of March.

Right now Lucky Dog is only available from Amazon. Sorry about that, but I'll let you know about the other e-formats as soon as they're available. And keep your eyes peeled for the upcoming Goodreads contest where you can win a paperback version.

The Best Laid Schemes ...

... o’ Mice an’ Men
Gang aft agley,
An’ lea’e us nought but grief an’ pain,
For promis’d joy!
from To a Mouse, by Robert Burns

Procrastination is the name of the game folks. Of course there are a lot of other names that apply to me these days, but that's the one I'm picking. ;-)

A few weeks ago I finished reading a book and if it hadn't been on my Kindle I would have pitched it across the room. And if you know me at all, you know it would take a lot to make me treat any book so badly. However, this one ended on a cliff hanger, one of my pet peeves. Normally I'm pretty good at ferreting these offensive tomes out and just not downloading them, but this one managed to slip through. At any rate, I sat down and started a nice, rant-worthy post about it, and ... it's still not done. I just keep putting it off.

I've also been putting off the edits for An Elemental Earth. No idea why; I just can't seem to get in the right head space. It's done, it just needs to be edited. And because it was serialized the editing shouldn't be all that difficult - no major changes or anything.

And as far as other writing goes ... yeah, I've pretty much been putting that off too. The Toronto Star runs a short story contest every year and I actually have a story that's close to being done for it, but I keep putting off finishing it. Why? Who knows. I even started to rewrite it completely in an effort to not finish it. Maybe I'm waiting for Wednesday when I'll finish it in a flurry and then overnight it so it gets there in time. No electronic submissions allowed, it has to be physically in their hands on February 29.

I'll open up one of the things I should/could be working on but then I'll figure I've got a big block of time coming up later, so I'll do it then. Or I really need to beat the devil at solitaire, otherwise I'll have bad luck. Or maybe I should write that email I've also been putting off. Or ... you get the idea.

I've got all kinds of other things I could be working on as well, but ... It's not like I'm not coming up with ideas, I've got oodles of ideas. I've got one that's been marinating in my brain for a while now and I keep refining it. But that's as far as it goes. The words in my head just don't seem to make it onto the paper. It's like they're being diverted somewhere - I just have to figure out where.

Another word that might be applicable here is distraction. I remember when I used to be able to focus (usually on a book) on something and nothing in the universe would distract me. In fact, family members would think it rather amusing (okay, more often they found it annoying) that World War III could be going off around me and my attention would never waver from the book I was reading.

However, as I've grown older I find I'm losing the ability to focus with that kind of intensity. That's not to say I've lost it entirely, sometimes my husband will be talking away to me and I just won't be aware of it. Then five minutes later something will click and I'll look up from my book or my lap top with a, "What?" Drives him crazy.

When I started writing this post, I put some CDs on to listen to and suddenly my attention wavered from what I was doing to what I was listening to. It was Two Steps From Hell, Battleborne from their newest CD Battlecry. This is one of the few songs of theirs that have lyrics and I love the story it tells so much that I decided to look it up to see if it was from a movie or something. That led to finding it on YouTube, then posting it to Facebook for others to enjoy, and then ... then I remembered I was actually working on a blog post.

And so it goes.

Some people call it writer's block, I call it procrastination and distraction.

What Barnum Said. Or Maybe He Didn't ...

The old saying, "There's a sucker born every minute" has for a long time been attributed to P. T. Barnum. I actually thought it was W. C. Fields, or maybe it was W. C. Fields in the role of P. T. Barnum, but it turns out I was wrong too. The line was actually delivered by David Hannum, a rival of Barnum's. He tried to scam the public with a fake archeological artifact, only to be upstaged by Barnum, which prompted the famous line.

Now, what this has to do with me is this: I'd been chatting with a friend of mine and she suggested I should start submitting my poetry because there are all kinds of markets out there and I have rather a lot of poetry. So I was looking through some of the many sites I have bookmarked and one of them was having a contest for a poetry form called the Etheree. This just happens to be a form I've never tried before, but I figured what have I got to lose? And who knows, I might even become $100.00 richer for it.

Only you have to join their community to access their contests. So for the sake of the contest I did. And then once I signed my life away I discovered that I had to upgrade to a paid membership before I could enter their contest. Which I didn't. I guess I'm not that big a sucker after all.

But still, it wasn't a totally bad experience. I discovered a new poetry form and I wrote my first poem of the new year. :-)

The Etheree poetry form is a great form for beginners or people who don't like to rhyme. The basic form is ten lines long. The first line is one syllable, the second line is two syllables, and so forth until the tenth line of ten syllables. Once you get the hang of it you also try doing it in reverse, going from ten syllables to one, or get all fancy and do the first verse going one to ten, and a second verse going from ten back down to one. You could actually have a lot of fun with it.

Ice
blankets
the trees and
grass, creating
a winter landscape
that glistens in the sun.
Listen, do you hear the chimes
from the sinuous breeze winding
its way between shards of crystal?
Winter has never sounded so lovely.

A faint but steady dripping sound instead
of crystal chimes is heard as winter
with great reluctance bows before
the advancement of the sun -
like it or like it not,
spring is on its way
and cannot be
halted for
any
one.

Write On!

So last week, on my other blog, I made some sort of rash promise that I'd start blogging more often. Specifically, that I'd blog here try to blog here once at least once a week. Obviously I'm not off to a great start, but in my defense, I was still recovering from my life de-railment courtesy of the holidays. You can read about it HERE.

Anyway, I'm finally getting back on track - a whole new track, but a track nonetheless - and this morning I was looking for something to read online while I ate my oatmeal (breakfast of champions when it's snowing outside) and I started going through my bookmarks on my laptop.

I have this bad habit of seeing something interesting and then just bookmarking it for later instead of reading it as I see it, which leads to a plethora of bookmarks. I try to have at least a semblance of order to them, so I save them to folders with names like Recipes, Crafts, Cool Stuff, Useful Stuff, Interesting Stuff ... In the Miscellaneous folder, which is a sub-folder to the Writing folder, I found a fun little link that analyzes your writing to see who you write like. Naturally, I had to try it out.

I write like
Rudyard Kipling

I Write Like. Analyze your writing!

I have to confess though, the first passage I tried it told me I write like Stephanie Meyers. Really?? Good thing I was still editing that piece. Although I wouldn't mind her kind of popularity. Of course I'd take the longevity of Rudyard Kipling over the popularity of Stephanie Meyers any day.

So then I tried it a third time and got this:

I write like
Oscar Wilde

I Write Like. Analyze your writing!

If you haven't tried it yourself, give it a try. And let me know who you write like. I'll even make it easy for you. Here's the link HERE

A Purrfectly Dumb Idea

Even though my granddaughter is a month shy of her first birthday, she's really into books. On the one hand, this makes me very proud. But on the other hand, she'll pick one or two favourites and I get to read them over and over and over and over. I've got the book, You're Purrfect to Me, by Sandra Magsamen, memorized. It has cat ears. :-D

Well ... rats. I was trying to insert a picture of the book here, but Blogger's being a jerk today.

Here's a link to the book itself: You're Purrfect to Me. If you're around a toddler at all, I highly recommend it. My granddaughter especially loves it when I roll the r's in purrfect. ;-)

Taking a look at some of these board books you'd think there'd be nothing to writing them, but you'd be wrong. Don't believe me? Give it a shot. Seriously!

About this time last year, a friend and I went to a Christmas bazaar where I found this cute little Christmas ornament that looked like a hedgehog. And then I got a brilliant idea - wouldn't it be neat to buy a different ornament each year and write a story about it to give to my (as yet unborn) grandchild? I'm a writer, after all. How hard could it be?

Plenty hard, as it turns out.

I've got this hedgehog, and it looks like a girl hedgehog because she's dressed kind of matronly and in Christmas fabric. Obviously, I need a Christmas themed story, but other than that I'm drawing a blank. Normally I write science fiction, fantasy, and romance - I'm a little out of my depth here.

She needs a name. She needs a purpose. She needs to do something other than sit there collecting dust on my shelf.

Wish me luck.

A Poem For Remembrance Day

Here in Canada, the 11th hour of the 11th day of the 11th month is the time and date set aside for to honour those who have fallen in armed conflicts, chosen because that was when hostilities ceased during World War I. I think there are very few families whose lives have not been touched by the loss of a grandparent, parent, child, or some other relative who has served their country. There have been so many conflicts since World War I, and so many losses.

Despite the fact this year marks the 100th anniversary of the iconic Remembrance Day poem, In Flanders Fields, by John McCrae, I felt the urge to write my own poem of remembrance and I'd like to share it with you here.


Always

I remember my grandfather.
He liked to draw
and when I was very small
he taught me the proper way
to draw a pine tree.
He served
with the St. John's Ambulance
as a driver
in World War I and II.
I will never forget.

I remember my uncle.
He like to read
Louis L'Amour
and to work with
anything mechanical.
He served
as a tail gunner
in a British Lancaster
in World War II before
he became a POW.
I will never forget.

I remember my father.
He liked to work with his hands;
he loved power boats
and used to take me fishing
when I was a child.
He served
with the Canadian Armed Forces
as a Peace Keeper
in Egypt and Korea.
I will never forget.

I remember my brother-in-law.
He had a ready smile
and loved to play pranks.
He carved wood and leather;
he was an amazing artist.
He served
with the American Armed Forces
and fought in Korea.
I will never forget.

These men are my family.
I do not need
a single day
to remember them.
I will remember them
each and every day.
Always.