Monday Morning Pages

Noon and Wilder Posted on by

20141201_193155It’s Day Two of NaNoWriMo, or National Novel Writing Month.

Those of us who are participating feverishly scribble or tippet-tap all day, in between our other tasks: at lunch, on breaks, while the kids are asleep, anywhere we can. That’s how NaNo works: accumulate words. Like Julia Cameron says, “Accumulate pages, not judgments.”

Why Morning Pages?

The Artist’s Way teaches us that forward motion creates its own momentum. In order to sustain that momentum, we need to know, and practice, that which feeds our inner artist.

Why, then, do Morning Pages during NaNo?

Morning pages are three pages, longhand, done in the morning. As Cameron points out, they’re not meant to be Writing with a capital W. They’re more like brain drain, she says. Natalie Goldberg likens this type of writing to meditation.

Whatever you call them, Morning Pages work.

Try it today: take out three letter-sized pieces of blank paper and a pen or pencil. Write three pages, and then put them away. Don’t read them, and don’t share them. Then tomorrow, try it again. Try it every day in NaNo and see what effect it has on your month.

Write on!

Monday Morning Pages

Noon and Wilder Posted on by

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Those of you who have been reading this blog for a while know that I am a big believer in the magic of the morning pages. Writing three pages, longhand, every day helps to keep our artistic channel clear and us in touch with our own creative voice. This is never more true than when we are experiencing upheaval.

After several months of highly stressful politics, my husband’s company had another layoff and this time, he was let go. It’s a shame, really, since it means his former department is down to a skeleton crew and unable to discharge all the duties for which they’re supposedly responsible. Such is the way of corporate culture, though.

The silver lining here is that he is free to explore other options. That’s always the difficulty of being employed: if one is unhappy, it’s very difficult to muster up the energy necessary for escape velocity. This experience has helped give him the cosmic push out the door so he can now focus on his next adventure.

Of course, that makes things more complicated, not less, since it opens the field to Seattle a lot sooner than we had planned. We are vacationing there next week, in fact, to get the “lay of the land.”

In writing news, Rachel and I have been busy. Cat’s Cradle will be available this week! I know, I’m being cagey on the exact date, but there’s a reason: this will be the first time I’ve uploaded a book myself and I want to make sure I have the best product possible before I let everyone know. ~grin~

Rachel and I have sold Sealed by Magic to LooseId, and are pleased as punch to be back for another book with them. Their editing staff is professional and easy to work with and we couldn’t be happier. The release date is August 4th; stay tuned for a cover sneak-peak once we have the art. That will be in the next couple weeks. It’s a tight schedule; line edits are due tomorrow. Eeep!

Other than that, Rachel and I are keeping our heads down. I’m still on hiatus from teaching and the renewed focus on my writing has allowed me to flesh out several projects. We will be submitting Sapphire Dream shortly, but have completely rewritten it. We cut the original story in half and will be making the second half into a different book with a different POV (point of view). It should be a lot of fun.

TJ’s story, which is book 4 in Chicagoland Shifters, is coming along. We have the rough outline rewritten and are in the process of reworking the material we already have. We’re combining what was book 1 and book 3 of his story into the first book, and dropping part of the original storyline. Sounds complicated? Yes. ~grin~

It’s hard to believe it’s already July. This year has gone by very quickly. What are you up to, Dear Reader? I’d love to hear; tell me in the comments. And have a lovely rest of July!

Z Is For… Zac Bennett!

Noon and Wilder Posted on by

ZWelcome to the last day of the A-Z Challenge! We made it all the way to Z. Phew!

Today, I want to give you a sneak peak at an upcoming Noon & Wilder book called SEALED BY MAGIC, the sequel to SEALED BY FIRE.  We had a lot of fun writing Magic because we explored more of the lamia culture and how it relates to the witches in Seattle.  I love worldbuilding, so this one was a lot of fun to write.

Here’s the blurb:

Will a brewing shifter war tear apart two young men, brought together by magic and a fate stronger than one life?

Seattle has been at peace since before it was founded on the banks of the Puget Sound. The war between the witches and the snake shifters ended and they now live separate lives. Generations of distrust have kept them separated, until Ari Fitzgerald meets Zachary Bennett, a young witch from the Queen City Coven.

Ari is the son of the lamia king. He needs to find the source of the black market trading in lamia venom before any other snake shifters are hurt, or worse. The young ones are most at risk, because their venom is more potent. Ari discovers the source is a witch and suspicion falls on Zac and his coven.

Zac works for his brother-in-law, a powerful bear shifter who doesn’t care about shifter politics. When three coyote shifters come to town, looking for black-market lamia venom and a witch to kidnap, Zac gets caught in the middle between his brother-in-law’s shifters and the power-hungry coyotes.

Together, Ari and Zac must find the source of the venom before the city erupts into a dangerous and costly shifter war.

Y Is For… Yarn – Knit and Crochet; Sisters of the Same Legacy

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Yarn.  It’s seductive.  Here at Noon & Wilder, we have both kinds of textile arts – knitting and crochet.  I know, I know, apocryphal.  But it works for us.  I helps that I was able to teach Rachel some of the basics of crochet, and she took it from there.

Crochet is actually older than knitting by quite a bit; scholars believe that it started as a functional craft for making things like fishing nets.  The earliest known knitted textiles, on the other hand, were socks and underwear – woven broadcloth couldn’t curve around the human form and therefore led to very uncomfortable intimate-wear.

So, in a real sense, textile arts brought us naughty lingerie.

Betcha didn’t see that comin’, eh?  Not your grandmothers crafts anymore.

What about you, Dear Reader?
What juxtapositions of history and modern life catch your fancy?

 

X Is For… Xenophobia

Noon and Wilder Posted on by

XXenophobia is the fear of the other, that which is foreign or strange.  It’s most commonly used to refer to people who irrationally dislike foreigners, but it can be broader than that.  I think it’s a very sad thing to be a xenophobe; imagine how lonely they are.  They don’t interact with others outside their group, so they’re not exposed to new ideas; they don’t socialize with people from other places so they never get to realize how wonderful and filled with amazing things the world can be; and they remain closed and ignorant.

I remember when I was small that my parents took me traveling with them.  While I was not fortunate enough to be able to go overseas, I did travel around the States quite a bit and have learned several languages.  It’s been my experience that people who like to travel are less frequently xenophobic than those who stay in their own little universe.  What surprised me the most, though, is that when I came to Chicago, (which is the third-largest city in the U.S.), I met many, many people who had never traveled beyond the city’s limits – and yet, to me, Chicago is exotic and full of many different cultures.

So I ask you, Dear Reader.
If money and time were no object, where would you travel?

W Is For… Were Are the Wheres?

Noon and Wilder Posted on by

WWerewolves.  They spawned a whole literature, and other creatures – cat shifters, dog shifters, bird shifters, snake shifters…

Recently, we were working with our editor at Red Quill and she pointed out that “lycanthrope” means, literally, werewolf:  from the Latin, and before that Greek, meaning wolf man.

It struck me by complete surprise.  I mean, I know that the meaning of lycanthrope is wolf man, but somehow I just extrapolated from there to all shifters being lycanthropes or catching lycanthropy – cat lycanthropy, dog lycanthropy, etc.  It doesn’t help that the genre seems to think that too, and has used lycanthropy as a catch-all term.  We batted around some ideas for things like felisthropy, but it sounded too contrived and goofy.

What about you, Dear Reader?
What words have stumped you, once you’ve discovered their true meanings?

V Is For… Volodya, and Other Unpronounceable Names

Noon and Wilder Posted on by

VNames are tricky.  I’ve worked with internationals most of my career, and the first difficult name I encountered was Nguyen, which is a very common family name of Vietnamese origin.  It’s pronounced, by the way, like “Win.”  Currently, I live and work in an ethnically diverse neighborhood of Chicago; there are seventeen different languages just on my block – people from the Americas, (English, Spanish, French, Haitian Creole, Jamaican, and a whole host of smaller regional languages); Europe, (French, German, Romanian, Polish, and Russian); the Middle East, (Arabic, Farsi, and some other languages); Africa, (Ghanan, Nigerian, Swahili – which is, itself, a trade language and not of any one ethnic group); and Asia, (Korean, Vietnamese, Japanese, and Chinese – which isn’t a language but a whole host of them, most common of which are Mandarin and Cantonese).  We also have a large Jewish population, and its a varied one in and of itself – some of its members speak English, others Yiddish or the language of their country of origin, and many, many of them speak Hebrew.

One thing I’ve noticed about Americans is how chauvinist we are about names.  We have trouble with foreign words, much less names, and I’ve met many, many people who only speak one language who insist they cannot possibly say such a foreign-sounding name as [insert name here].  For example, I worked with a lady who insisted that the last name “Bougoulas” was “Boogaloo.”  The gentleman whose name it was acted very graciously and didn’t appear offended, but I have to wonder how many times he’d encountered people unwilling to say “Boo-goo-lass.”  And that’s not even a “difficult” name.  Try saying some of the names from Africa, that use consonants next to each other in ways American English speakers aren’t familiar with – Mkuto, for example.

When Rachel and I wrote Burning Bright, the main character’s original name is Volodya, which is short for Vladimir in Russian.  We were advised to pick a different name, because it was felt that Volodya was too difficult for readers to enjoy.   We selected Sasha, which is short for Aleksandr in Russian.  It worked and we’re used to it now, but it was a hard choice to make.

What about you, Dear Reader?
Do you prefer familiar names, or do you like a touch of the exotic?

U Is For… Understanding!

Noon and Wilder Posted on by

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I have found, in writing, that I need to get deeply into a project before I know where it’s going.  I typically need to write 20,000 to 30,000 words before I have a good feel for it, and know who the characters are and where they’re going.  Sometimes I know the plot of the book, other times I don’t.  But I definitely don’t know the world or the people in it without that first drafting process.

I have met writers that have a few thousand words, or maybe a thousand, and get lost in the plotting and outlining process.  I knew a writer that said he needed to get the “story beats” down first.  He was so insistent on that, that he refused outright to do any writing until that was done.  When I asked him what “story beats” were, he didn’t have a concrete answer, and what I gleaned from his answer is that he puts the story arc on index cards.  That’s fine and dandy if it helps you get on the page.  But since it didn’t help him, and he was effectively blocked by trying to do it, I’d argue it’s not useful.

It’s like many things:  it’s a lot harder to rock the boat when you’re rowing.  Get into the project.  Learn to draft.  Put down the words.  Trust yourself, and trust story.  Tell the critic that says it’s not worth it, no one wants to read it, you don’t know how to do it, and all the other bullshit that critics like to say, that they’re on vacation for the next 30 minutes – set the timer and just draft.  Write.  It’s called a “rough” draft for a reason – but it’s a helluva lot harder to edit it if it hasn’t been written yet.  So write it.

What about you, Dear Reader?
What advice do you have for someone starting something new?

T Is For… Truffles!

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Ah, yes. Truffles.  While there are truffles here on Earth, the first being a type of chocolate confection and the second being a type of mushroom confection, truffles really are a cross between a Cocker Spaniel and an aardvark.

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See? Aren’t they adorable?  Truffles have the fur of the Cocker Spaniel, and similar coloring for the most part, (a range of browns and tans), and their snouts are a little longer and more like a small elephant’s than the aardvark’s.

Why a truffle?

Well, it’s like this:  the first settlers to Persis saw the native animals and their resemblance to Old Earth animals.  Then they realized that the primary food source for truffles was a type of plant that grows under the surface of the sand, and the truffles use their long snouts to reach it.  They reminded the settlers of the pigs that are used in hunting the valuable truffle mushrooms.   The name got shortened to truffle, and it stuck – the native animals were then known as truffles.

What about you, Dear Reader?
What would an animal that you made up look like?

S Is For… Sapphire Dream!

Noon and Wilder Posted on by

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I adore gems.  Did you ever see the animated movie, The Secret of NIMH?  There’s a character of a magpie who likes, as he calls them, “Sparklies.”  Yup.  Me, to a “T”.  When we started writing the Persis Chronicles, we decided to name the different Keeps, which are essentially universities, after gems and precious stones.  As time went on, there’s even a difference between the Gem Keeps and the Stone Keeps, with the Gem Keeps perceived to be higher class or more desirable.

The next book in the Persis Chronicles is Sapphire Dream, and Rachel and I are working on final edits now so we can submit it for consideration (so please, keep your fingers crossed).  The story is about a young man named Cheula, whose first Contract didn’t go as planned.  The man with whom he Contracted was abusive and, while Cheula wanted the time to be a success, it didn’t work out and Cheula had to call the Seekers, equivalent to the police.

The most interesting part, for me, about writing this one is that there’s several elements that are directly out of real life – domestic abuse, independence, being willing and able to ask for help, and how to manage home relationships and sexuality.  Weaving those kinds of real-world things into a story is fun and rewarding because it makes it more real to me.  The characters become real people in the process.

What about you, Dear Reader?
How much “real” do you like in your fiction?