Ramblings of an Australian Writer

It's the end of the week, and I feel very much as if my brain is "argle blargle wargle." You see, I haven't had much sleep, and there's been a few reasons for this. They include the weather, joint pain, my cat deciding to be a LOUD conversationalist at silly o'clock in the morning, and finally, my Nano novel.

This is going to be the novel that ate L. J.'s brain, I can just tell. I've hit the point in my targeted wordcount that I have to keep extending it. I'm over 75K words now, and this morning, mum said to me, "Are you nearly finished it?"

Oh, how I laughed. LAUGHED, I tell you. And then I sighed, because the joke's on me, really, as I have to wear my fingers to the bone, typing uphill both ways in the rain and snow and drought... you know how it goes. Basically, I'm tired, so I'm a bit dramatic and a touch sleepy-hysterical, which is of course, the best time to write a LJ post! Y/Y? Y.

Anyway, I've neglected blogging for the healthy pursuit of gardening, which is more in the nature of the pursuit of agony and fear of the summer sun burning all our plants. Subsequently, two giant outdoor umbrellas are on their way, because I can't figure out anything else that works to shade everything. I've tried just about everything else, hit Gardner Google, and mum suggested the umbrellas, so that was the winner. I like the idea a lot because when it's not summer, we can fold them up and store them in the garden tool nook, so they're not out all the time.

In October, though, I had a lovely weekend visit from my good friend and fellow author, meredith_shayne. We went all over the Adelaide Hills and down into the Barossa Valley, bought a lot of things, tasted a lot of amazing wine, and had a great time. It's been a while since we've had the chance to hang out together, that little thing called the Tasman Sea is a bit difficult to drive over! So that was terrific, all in all.

Then in November, there was a visit from another old friend and fellow author, vayshti, an Adelaide expat, so we spent a lovely day together in a different part of the Adelaide Hills and then went to a brunch with some of the members of the South Australian M/M Group at a great cafe in North Adelaide called E For Ethel. (Best toasted cheese and ham and tomato sandwich I've ever eaten.)

There's been a lot of other things of the less exciting and happy kind too--I was diagnosed with acute bursitis, and had a very painful injection of corticosteroids for that, followed by long sessions with my pain clinician, aka, physiotherapist. Mum had lots of various tests and so on as well, so November has been a mixture of medical things and writing and gardening. Suffice to say, that now the garden is looking pretty amazing, and my left shoulder is achey as opposed to agonising. And I haven't yet hit the point in my book where I know I'm nearing the end.

To conclude, a couple of photos. As ever, click to see full size!




1. Meredith and her birthday present from me--a plush Captain America shield. 2. The Giant Rocking Horse in Gumeracha, one of the places we visited when Meredith was here. 3. Robyn Walker and I, up in Mt. Torrens in the hills. 4. The quirky awesomeness that is E For Ethel cafe.

More later! Hope everyone is well. <3

I have been quite slack in keeping up with my blog these last few weeks--all I can say is that I've not been 100% and my back has twinges which render me useless for a day at a time, so things have been stressful. However, there are some things happening that I want to share with you all, so here we go!

The Romance Reviews Year End Splash Party continues, so pop along to join in the fun and win great prizes!

The Rainbow Awards Pre-Party and 7th Anniversary giveaway is on and "City of Jade" is one of the wonderful books being given out today. Enter here or here.

Liam Jones, a character from The Archangel Chronicles, had to discuss his police rap sheet over at Cate Ashwood's blog. Liam makes his debut in The Wind-Up Forest, along with his brother, Declan, a group of Venatores and new angels and demons and monsters. To read a little about Liam, head on over here!

Ice enters serial at Less Than Three Press this month, so if you're keen to read about vampires in Antarctica in the future, then head on over to LT3 and sign up for serial, here. There's a whole collection of wonderful authors and their vampire stories available now, too, as LT3's vampire collection is available for order and preorder, so do check it out.

And last but certainly not least, I recieved the cover art for The Wind-Up Forest. Anne Cain is a genius. I love this cover SO MUCH. Behold the beauty! click to see the full size image.

Link of the Now: Has to be one of my favourite blogs, Messy Nessy Chic. Go, read and lose yourself in the wonderful things that she posts, about life in Paris, interesting finds from the internet, travel, food, fashion, abandoned places, history, and so much more.

And now back to Nano (and waiting for my groceries) I go!

I have finished my Nano novel. It feels very strange right now, to have a Saturday night with nothing to write - although that's not exactly true, I do have things to write, I'm just taking a wee break - so I've been faffing with Paint Shop Pro instead.

The novel, being book two in my Archangels in love series, clocked in on its first draft at 72503 words. Phew. I suspect this will grow when I get to the editing. I know there's things I need to expand on and things I need to clarify. Right now, though, I'm mentally exhausted and I know it will come out as 'argle blargle wargle' and that would be very bad indeed. No one wants to buy a novel that has random gibberish peppered throughout the text. Like book one, it ended on a cliffhanger of sorts, as I know what I'm doing with book three, but I need to take a breather.

Even though my brain is saying, "Write, write, write!" I will, you silly muscle, just not tonight, omg. I am tiiiiired.

Overall, though, the story I wrote is the one I wanted to tell and it went down some paths I didn't think it would, but those will be clarified and expanded as required in my edits.

I'm also exhausted because not just has November been Nano month, it's also been medical month and I've had at least three appointments with a specialist/doctor/dental surgeon of some sort every week. For that reason alone, I'll be glad when November's over.

Anyhoo. Book first draft finished. YAY!

I've been pretty quiet on the blogging front here the last several weeks, and I apologise for that. Things have been all varieties of hectic, so I haven't had the energy or the time to participate in things I enjoy that I normally would, like Six Sentence Sunday or Thursday Thirteen.

It's been a period of medical specialists and treatments and I think November is going to be pretty much eaten up by this. I've got at least two different things each week and it doesn't look to be calming down once we get into December, either. I'm hopeful that it will eventually calm down, because, if nothing else, I like my sleep!

I have managed to get quite a bit done in Nanowrimo this year, which is good. I'm writing book two of my Archangels series, this one I'm grappling with the title too. I have a feeling that every book in this series is going to be accompanied by a zillion different titles before I settle on one that suits the individual book. At the moment, the working title is Beings of Light and Dark, which is also a homage to one of my favourite novels by Roger Zelazny, but I don't know if it will stay that. I'm already looking at it and wrinkling my nose, which is not a good sign for the survival of that title. I fear its days are numbered.

In between writing and medical stuff, I've been absorbed by Tetris. That's about the extent of my brain power. However, I've been very, very lucky in that my physio is awesome and happily geeks out with me during my appointments over books and TV. My GP continues to be awesome, and the educator at the Diabetes Clinic is fantastic, too.

I'm glad to say that my CT scan and X-ray came up clear, so this means that the issues in my knees are as we first thought, soft tissue related. I just hope I don't have to have another MRI, as I hate enclosed spaces and the MRI is like a machine version of a tomb, in my opinion. I hate them. And I'm just putting it out there, universe: no alien probes for me, mmkay? Kthx.

I've hit a really enjoyable part in the novel, and writing this is great fun, so I'm really excited about the whole writing procedure at the moment. I had my fears that this book would actually hit the 50K word mark, but now I think it will get to my planned minimum word count of 70K words. If it goes over that, even better.

There's not really a lot else to report. It's warming up here as we move towards summer and I'm dreading it, as it's been pretty humid already and humidity is the worst thing, don't you think? It's like breathing water. I hate it. I can cope with the heat of the Aussie summer, but the humidity, ugh. Do not want!

Hope you're all doing well and I hope we'll all touch base with each other real soon.

Oh, and I'm at Four Strong Women on the 2nd of December, so do come and say hi and commiserate with me about having noisy and unruly neighbours!

Today is a good day.

Even though I had a blood test done this morning (a regular thing - it never gets less unpleasant), nothing was going to ruin my good mood. And why such a good mood? I woke up to a lovely email from Dreamspinner Press, offering me a contract for the first novel in The Archangel Chronicles.

So No Quarter, the novel that went through over thirteen title changes, has a home and will be published in ebook, paperback and audio book in the first quarter of 2012. Yes, I am excite!

It's a good six months for me in terms of releases. I have Long Road Back coming out in December, as part of the Dreamspinner Press Christmas Advent Calender daily-dose anthology, and preordering for the full anthology is already up, at a special price of $39.99. Individual stories will be available for purchase in December.

Now, to finish City of Jade (which is looking infinitely more doable than it was a few weeks ago), and November, being Nano month, will be devoted to book two of my Archangels in love series. I'll also be doing reading and research for a historical, hopefully novel length, to submit to the Roman period call at Riptide Publishing. So I'm feeling pretty good about things right now.

Don't forget, the Erotica Apocrypha anthology is now available, in both ebook and paperback format, too.

And today's shirt of lulz is 'Cirque du Llama.'

I am a writing machine!

Okay, not really. However, I completed NanoWriMo this year, coming in at 50629 words. I managed to finish a story for submission to a Valentine's Day themed anthology due by the 8th January 2011, which is called Life And Nothing But.

Currently, I'm working on a story for submission to the Dreamspinner First Time anthology, called City of Gold. I'm finding this is difficult to write when it logically should not be. It's set in the early twelfth century in Constantinople, during one of the short periods of peace of the Byzantine Empire. I know the history and the material, what I didn't know or wasn't entirely sure about, I've researched. (I've also found myself embroiled in a debate about semantics between medieval Latin, medieval Greek and medieval Russian, which, while fascinating, wasn't really what I was searching for at the time!) I've dug into information about the Silk Road and trading with the Byzantine Empire in 1130, when my story is set, I like my two protagonists, I know what the conflict is going to be (laws of the time were very strict regarding homosexuality in Byzantium, but that wasn't the case in other parts of the world), and I'm excited to have this wonderful history backdrop in which to set my story.

Yet it's proving extremely difficult. I don't know why, but I don't like it. I just want to be able to write it, but my inner history pedant keeps getting distracted. Which isn't a problem per se, because I do love a good afternoon of link hopping. I don't know. I have writer's nerves, I think. I need to step away for the afternoon and not think about it, I think.

At least the Valentine's story is with my lovely proof-reader/editor of awesome, so that's one good thing. Tomorrow - or tonight - I'll get back into my historical m/m.

Once again, I am doing Nano. I find the Nano experience to be particularly helpful as I am, I'm ashamed to admit, a procrastinator. The spirit and camaraderie of Nano and the word count updates on a daily basis do help me stay focused and work. This year, I have come up with a daily routine that I think might actually be the one. That is to say, the one that works for *me*.

With a few minor setbacks due to other issues that happen to us all, my writing and everything else, actually, was interupted for two days. I got a bit done, but not a lot and certainly not the amount I'd hoped. However, today I was back at it, back with my routine and as long as Front 242's latest CD took to play, I'd written 1500 words thereabouts.

So what is my routine? I've broken my day up into three pieces. Mornings are for writing. I write to music. Cav once told me that a scientist (and I wish I could remember who this scientist is because I'd like to send him/her a fruit basket for being right,) said that certain kinds of music encourage frequencies that enhance creativity in the brain. Chris, her partner, elaborated to say that these genres of music include things with a persitant beat, ie, dance/techno/darwave styles, or those that followed certain strict timing and key change patters within the piece, ie, classical/opera. I experimented a bit after this fascinating conversation several years ago and found that - for me, at least - they and Mr./Ms. Scientist were right.

I write while listening to dance or darkwave music: Front 242, Prodigy, Orbital, Orgy, etc. I edit to heavier bands and artists, such as Tool, Shinedown, Avenged Sevenfold, Stone Sour, etc. Oddly, I find that artists like the Smashing Pumpkins are good music for both the writing and the editing process. I've tried writing to classical, like Beethoven, because I have a big soft spot for Beethoven, and that's worked too but I always find myself coming back to the electronic over the classical.

So that's my mornings. Write to music. Lose myself in words on the screen and the rythym in my ears. Then I have lunch because food is good. After lunch, it's time to relax, chat with friends, often about the writing process, but about other things too, catch up with LJ, Twitter, Facebook, etc, eye off those chain maille bookmarks on Ebay, that sort of thing. Then it's time for dinner, again because food is good. After dinner, I watch the news, then let the TV drone on as I play around with my iPod playlists for the next day or write a few things that are more in the nature of drabbles, etc. Finally, I go and read. I read until I'm ready to fall asleep and I generally - weather and health permitting, of course - sleep the sleep of the dead. Wake up, start all over again.

My day also includes consumption of Coke and chocolate because these things are essential snacks for the living of the life of me. In between, I make sure Castiel, my cat, isn't planning on redecorating my flat with toilet paper as he is wont to do, or howling too loudly and scaring the neighbors who aren't prepared for a cat to holler, "HELLO," at them as they pass at the top of his lungs. Right now, he sleeps on the back of the sofa, no doubt planning tomorrow's decorative inspirations and how best to make the neighbors jump simply by miaowing.

In putting fingers to keyboard this Nano, I've discovered something I've long suspected to be true: writing good guys is harder than writing bad guys.

Now, just bear with me here. Bad guys generally have no morals or few morals or are morally grey and can, therefore, get away with just about anything you, the writer, put your mind to having them do. They can be evil, manipulative bastards with charm and wit and good looks, they can be sinister and depraved yet alluring and beguiling, they are, in short, the perfect carte blanche character. They have no compunction about doing things to the good guy or random red-shirt that you, the writer, want. They can inflict all kinds of misery and suffering, and often with the writer (or maybe it's just me) cackling with Machiavellian glee. Everyone loves a bad guy, they wonder at his motivation, they want to know his backstory, some even want to heal him from his bad guy ways and make him good. There is usually witty reparatee between bad guy and good guy and often a lot of UST. In short, writing them is fun.

The good guys, however, have a tendency to end up as White Knights who can do no wrong and pontificate on the evil in the world, stand stoically enduring all that the bad guy throws at them and comes out on top and heroic with barely a scratch at the end. The good guy's journey essentially is go on a quest, solve the quest, get the girl or guy, triumph over evil, the end. In short, it's boring. Boring to write and to read. His motivation is usually morally pure and if you turned him around fast enough, he'd probably squeak with just how shiny he is.

Often to get around this, the good guy is made morally grey. He has a dark secret or a bad temper, he has a weakness or some flaw that can get him killed. There are many ways to make a good guy morally grey and still be a good guy. This makes the character much more fun to write and to read.

But what about characters who can't be morally grey? How do you write them without making them dull as ditch water, shining White Knights who you want to nickname the Milky Bar Kid? It's extremely hard, I've discovered.

In the process of writing Broken Wings (first draft of the novella now completed and sitting there until I gird up my loins to get back into it and edit it,) I've found that writing Archangels isn't as easy as you might think. I didn't want them to be all about the purity and justice, I wanted them to be personable and likable, characters the reader could identify with. However, Archangels by their very nature aren't supposed to be personable, they're supposed to be terrifying and the ultimate tools of God. Even if one isn't a believer in such things, mythology and scripture is replete with enough information about Archangels and, in fact, all angels, that it's hard to push beyond that perception to make them more believable.

Making them this way and not making them too human was another challenge. Gabriel, my protaganist, has his vices: he smokes, he drinks, he swears like a pirate. Like his brothers, he's not averse to the pleasures of the flesh and like his brothers, he's not much fussed about gender. As angels traditionally have no gender anyway, it made no sense to me for the Archangels to have any concerns over this. This gave them a non-human layer, which helped, but wasn't really enough. Sure, they have wings, they have powers, they have swords. But they're also the ultimate force of power just below God, so they can't be weak or, worse in my mind, just one-dimensional shining bastions of holiness.

The challenge I found was making the ten Archangels of God distinct characters with personalities and foibles in their own right. They each had their flaws, several of them for example, hate humanity with a passion, and only watch over Earth because they were commanded to do so by God. Others had their vices, like Gabriel, while still others, like Michael were woefully socially inept. But even with that, they could still set aside these quirks when the time came and become holy warriors and fight the good fight.

I loved writing Gabriel and his brothers, and I still do. I don't think I'll get tired of writing Gabriel any time soon, to be honest. His voice is very distinct in my head now, along with Archangel Raziel who I've also dabbled with writing as the baby Archangel of the ten. Now I just hope that Broken Wings and my Raziel short, The Gates of Edessa don't suck beyond the telling of it.

14046 / 50000 words. 28% done!

28%, eh? Not too bad at all.

10016 / 50000 words. 20% done!

And now back to bed for me. I'm exhausted and it's 5am.