How the heck did it get to be December already?
Teacher’s Pet Event!
Welcome! I’m Noony, and my favorite Teacher’s Pet is Steve, the romantic lead in TIGER TIGER.
1. In high school my crush was…? The captain of the debate team.
2. The craziest thing I did in high school was join ROTC (Reserve Officers’ Training Corps).
3. Growing up I wanted to be…? A soldier.
4. On Friday nights you’d have found me… At the beach, by a bonfire with my friends.
5. The hottest teacher at my high school was Mr. Callahan and he taught…? Biology.
To win a copy of TIGER TIGER of your very own (or another of our backlist of your choice), tell us: in high school, who was your first crush?
Remember, visit the other stops on the hop by clicking the link below. Enter your favorite teacher’s pet at the Nice Girls Writing Naughty blog and be entered in the drawing to win the grand prize.
When you grab a tiger by the tail, sometimes he bites back.
Chicagoland Shifters, Book 2
Veterinary trauma surgeon and animal empath Sasha Soskoff has found everything he ever wanted with his new partners Neal, Steve and Carlos. Life feels as safe and secure as it can be among a group of ex-Marine tiger shifters. Until a homeless man is found, gruesomely mauled and murdered, near Neal’s BDSM club.
When it’s determined a rogue tiger did the deed, the jaguars’ accusing eyes turn toward Sasha’s lovers. The precarious balance of peace tips dangerously toward war.
Neal knows damned well none of his tigers committed the crime. Someone must be in Chicago without his knowledge or permission, and they’d better find him fast before uncertainty and conflict rip the tight-knit band apart from the inside.
As Sasha struggles to heal the stress fractures forming among his tiger family, he begins to wonder if his dreams of a home, and love, were too good to be true. And it’s precisely that moment the killer strikes at the heart of the tiger clan—Sasha himself.
Sunday Sit-Down Dinner – Cahokia Mounds
My husband and I celebrate our tenth anniversary this year and we decided to explore our home state of Illinois and nearby St. Louis. Right here in Illinois is the largest archaeological site in North Amercia north of Mexico City: Cahokia Mounds.
No one knows what happened to the more than 20,000 people who called Cahokia home. They disappeared before European contact. Were they destroyed by a plague? Overuse of natural resources? War?
The mounds look like little more than piles of dirt with plants covering them now, but when they were used as a city, they had buildings on top of them. The largest mound in the center of the complex is ten storeys tall – built by hand, with dirt carried in baskets on the backs of workers. On top of this mound stood a large structure, either a home of the leader or some kind of religious temple. No one knows for sure.
I found the silence of the place chilling. The winds don’t say where the people went. The mystery is there, waiting, silent. Not even the peoples who live there now know what made the Cahokians disappear into the mists of history.
Saturday Shorts – Writing Prompts
Writing prompts are a lot of fun to play with, but I do get questions about them: “How do they work?”
A prompt is just something that spurs your imagination. It could be anything from “write about what you had for dinner last night,” to elaborate frameworks onto which you can put a story: “after dinner one night, a man ran outside in his pajamas and shouted, …” It’s that dot-dot-dot that’s the key – it’s the unfinished sentence, the idea that begs to be fleshed out, that gives you the magic of the prompt.
If you’re in the Chicago area and want to try it out for yourself, stop by Writer Zen Garden’s popular Saturday series, The Prompt Circle. It’s free and lots of fun. If you’re not in the area, try going to Google and type in, “writing prompt.” You’ll get lots of ideas.
What’s your favorite way to get story ideas?
Happy August!
Happy August! It’s hard to believe the months of June AND July are over, isn’t it?
We have some exciting news, though! EMERALD KEEP is now under contract with Torquere Press and will be out soon. Yay! And, just in time for Lughnasad, they’re having a site-wide sale for both Torquere Press and their Young Adult imprint, Prizm Books. You can check them out and pick up some great summer reads. Enter coupon code hapaug2014 at checkout and receive a 20% discount!
A to Z Challenge, Day 26: Z Is For Zen Garden Collective
Woot! We have made it through the challenge. This picture is actually two summers ago, but the sentiment still stands. Hammock, knitting, a relaxing cup of tea – YOU’VE EARNED IT!
But before you go, here’s a parting thought: Rachel and I have been hard at work, behind the scenes, with several of our cohort at the Writer Zen Garden. We’ll be launching the non-profit Zen Garden Collective later this year, a place for people to collaborate, create, and grow.
In the meantime, we hope you’ve enjoyed this ride on the interwebs with me, A. Catherine Noon, and my partner in crime, Rachel Wilder. You can follow us by clicking the “follow” link on the left panel, visit our other blogs, and even join Writer Zen Garden. The Meetup group is free, and so is the online forum; if you’d like to join the forum, please email me at a.catherine.noon AT gmail – we manually approve new members to cut down on spam accounts. (We had a rash of Viagra ads one day and just decided, “Enough is enough!” 🙂
And finally, keep your eyes peeled for our forthcoming release from LooseId LLC and the paperback release of TIGER TIGER from Samhain Publishing. We have more books planned (EMERALD KEEP and Mitch’s book are coming together nicely) and will announce those when they’re done. Thank you to each and every one of our readers who have made our blogs a pleasure to write and who buy our books: we love you all!
Thank you for visiting, and happy blogging!
A to Z Challenge, Day 25: Y Is For Yes
A to Z Challenge, Day 24: X Is For X Marks the Spot
In pirate stories, there’s a map where X marks the spot of hidden treasure. Just like those pirates, writers have to find their own buried treasure – or, in this case, imaginary worlds in which the story occurs. Even if it’s a real place, like Chicago, the specifics are unique to the fictional story taking place.
We talked about map-making earlier in the A-Z Challenge, so today I wanted to talk about distance. If you make up a world and a transportation system, all of a sudden the time it takes to get from point A to point B is different: there aren’t cars and well-maintained roads.
In writing EMERALD FIRE and now, EMERALD KEEP, Rachel and I invented a form of transport called a sandsail. After a while, we needed larger vessels, and thus corsairs and cruisers were born. It became material to the plot of EMERALD KEEP how long it took because the characters had to make it to Reghdad (our underground city) before the beginning of Daymonth (when the surface of the planet became too hot for humans to bear).
In maps, something called a scale tells the reader what the distance is – it could be miles, as in the case of Mapquest or Google Maps showing you how to get from New York to Los Angeles. It could be feet, in the case of trying to get from one block to a house three blocks away.
With that for context, I give you our creation: the Map of Persis, the first draft of it, anyway. We’ve added to it as we’ve needed to have additional places. But this gives us a great deal of precision in how many days a journey will take and where different places are in relation to each other.
Besides. It was a lot of fun to draw.
What is your favorite source of navigational data? (Mapquest, Google Maps, AAA, etc.)
A to Z Challenge, Day 23: W Is For Wiped
A to Z Challenge, Day 22: V Is For Vanya
We are working on edits of our forthcoming book from LooseId LLC and are super excited about it. In fact, when you’re talking to an author, it’s probably a good idea not to ask, “So, what are you writing?”
Because we’ll tell you.
Our main character is Vanya Demidov and I wanted to say a few words about the name, Vanya. Vanya is short for Ivan; which, contrary to popular opinion, is not pronounced “AYEvuhn.” It’s “ee-VAHN,” somewhat like Yvonne. It means, John.
Oh, come now. You know translations yield odd results, don’t you?
John is also Johann, Jon (pronounced “YAHN”), and Sean (pronounced “SHAHN”) and also, Shawn. Same pronunciation.
There. Aren’t you glad I explained myself?
What’s the most unusual name, either for a character or a person of your acquaintance, that you’ve ever heard?