Something in the Air- Taryn's Tiny Tales

Something in the air this morning caught my attention as we stood on the porch, waiting for the bus to pick up my kids for school. It's a blustery day out there, gloomy and gray and though it was around 50º at the time, the wind was slap-happy and really smacking us around so it felt cooler.

And there it was, this odor that hit my sense of smell and hurled me back in time. It actually caused me to tear up a little. The sudden ache of missing my grandpa, struck my center and hurt more than it has in quite some time. I was transported back to running around the junkyard and scavenging through old car bodies for trinkets- be it a cute key-chain or bauble, climbing to the top of the wood pile or the coal pile and tromping through thick muck in the mule lot.

The muffled sound of an old radio with a wire clothes hanger of an antenna played in the background, country music twanging out the sad notes of George Jones and Johnny Cash, Barbara Mandrell and Crystal Gail. It was the 80s and I was a kid.

The smell of old rancid motor oil and gasoline, automotive lubricants and cleaners enveloped me in a warm embrace as memories of huddling near the stove in the back of that old cold garage on blistery winter days bound vividly to the forefront of my mind. I'd shiver near the stove, gloved hands hovering as close as possible to it without burning myself. I'd be nearly frozen while bundled up, in sweaters and jeans and thick socks, piling on scarves and sock caps and burrowing deep into my mom's old green Army jacket she got from some surplus store. All the while, my grandpa and uncle would work on a car, their breath appearing in front of them like the cigarette smoke that usually encircled their heads.

The crisp aroma of burnt wood and tobacco, lighter fluid and the stinging odor of coal, was enough to make your eyes water while the heat from the stove felt as though it were drying out ever pore in your body. It felt so good though I couldn't help myself. Rotating like the Earth on its axis, I would pivot in a slow circle, the stove my Sun, warming the hills and valleys of my tiny world. I didn't care how cold it was, I only wanted to spend time with my grandpa and my uncle, listening to them talk shop and sitting on a stack of old rubber tires or scooting around on my uncle's creeper, wishing it was a skateboard.

Ah...but the memories fade back and I'm here in the present again and remember that our neighbor has a huge garage across the road, one in which he sometimes works on cars himself and sometimes, on really crisp mornings, the odors are carried on the wind, whisking me back to my childhood, back to my hometown and making me as homesick as ever.

#WIPlash Wednesdays- I Need a Break

I have been posting a lot more blogs for the past several months, almost every day of the week but Sundays and I have to say, it's draining me. I should have started off slow and simply added things as I came to them, but now I'm seeing that sometimes I just don't have it in me to write a blog for each day, so if you start to notice a slight decrease in my blog posts, it's due to the fact that I've become overwhelmed by trying to write so many blogs and honestly, my creative juices feel like they've been used up on blogs rather than actual writing,....

So....

I'm going to take a step back and reassess. I'll still have Tuesdays with Taryn, Fun Feature Friday and SCENTsational Saturdays up every week, but Memory Lane Mondays, WIPlash Wednesdays and my Free-for-All or Favorite Book Thursdays and when I'm visiting other blogs will appear only when I'm feeling up to posting or when I actually feel I have something to say that isn't stealing my creativity away from what I really need to be doing and that is writing.

Last week I only added just under 1,400 words to the WIP so I'm going to see if I can knock out more than that by allowing myself to be "okay" with not having a post daily unless I'm feeling up to writing and sharing more. All of life is a delicate balancing act and with my husband's work schedule changing recently as well, I'm finding it's time to figure out how to schedule around everything. I love blogging, but if I hope to publish more books, I need to actually write those manuscripts and concentrate on that whenever possible.

I hope you'll join me on the days I do post and chat with me, leave comments or just say hello. I'd love the company.

Now I need to so see what I can do about filling up my writer's creativity inkwell.

Happy Hump Day!

I can see the weekend from here.

#WIPlash Wednesdays- Spring Broke Me

(Click images for larger, clearer versions)

Spring Break is over. :( I had a really wonderful visit with my family and friends but as always, the visit never lasts long enough. Usually the time away gives my brain and body a break from the daily routine we have during the school year. This time, I find I've come back with a lot of things weighing on my mind- Blog scheduling, promo'ing, and all sorts of other things that need my attention.
The plans changed on Saturday, as my husband was going to drive up after work, stay the night at my parents' and we'd head back on Sunday morning, but then he found out he'd probably have to work Mon-Fri rather than his regular Wed-Sat due to a small inventory they've planned at the warehouse for this coming weekend. Fly in the ointment.
Considering we needed to restock the cabinets with food, grocery shopping needed to be done, as well as getting the yard mowed in case the weather didn't permit me to take care of it during the day while he was at work. So we headed home Saturday evening, much to our daughter's dismay because she still wanted more time with Grandma and Pop-Pop and she was NOT happy that we had to leave early.
Sunday we tackled the grocery shopping and the yard, got the kids ready for heading back to school after a week without a regular bedtime and days away from books and homework. It's time to knuckle down and knock out the rest of the school year. Less than a month now, I do believe.
So, anyway...Monday I balanced up the checkbook, put bills out in the mail, kids on the bus, laundry into dryer and started another load, ate a bowl of cereal, unpacked my laptop and then collapsed on the bed and took a nap with the Miz until 10 AM.
Then I spent the rest of the day finishing laundry, playing catch up on email, scheduling blog posts (I've fallen so far behind) so I have "unwritten" blogs lined up in the drafts where I can easily see the titles of what kind of posts I have coming up and give myself time to think about what I'll even write. I also spent some time out of doors snapping all these great photos of my roses and irises that are in bloom at the moment.
Tuesday was spent doing more of the same, when I'd really rather have been writing. Yes, what good is WIPlash Wednesdays if I write nothing? Honestly, these writing spurts are driving me insane. There seriously are not enough hours in the day for me to accomplish all the things I want to or need to and sometimes I feel like I'm just barely keeping up. When will the world slow down so I can catch up?
I need focus and a schedule and it needs to include writing. Most of what I spend my time doing focuses around social networking and building those skills and getting the word out, etc. Monday night I lay in bed, wide away for an hour before my busy brain would let me nod off to dream land, just because everyone else in the house was asleep and I felt obligated to go to bed when they did. Unfortunately, I wasted that hour staring into the darkness, with only the black and gray shadows illuminating the room, vague blocky images taunting me that I should have gotten up and used that time wisely.
I need to listen to myself more and stop letting all the outside interference create static so that I can't hear what I need to.

How do you find balance?
Is there such a thing?
What do you do when life gets out of control and you need to slow things down?
Do you take a step back to breath?
Share with me what helps you.

It's My #Anniversary- #Quitsmoking 3 Years Ago

It doesn't seem like it's been that long, but I'm proud to say I have 3 years under my belt that I have been quit smoking. I won't lie and say I don't miss it, but I can say that those times are so far and few between and miniscule in my mind that I rarely realize I have that moment of missing it until the desire for a cigarette passes.

I know my husband and I are both better off (his 3 yr anniversary is in April- we did different methods to quit. I went with patches, he weaned himself down to quitting cold turkey) and so are our children.

I'm giving myself a hearty pat on the back for making it this far, from being a smoker for 15 or 16 years of my life to being able to say I can go about my day without reaching for that old cancer stick.

What major milestone have YOU accomplished recently?

1 Year #Anniversary- #BookContract #writer #TMPress

March 13th, 2011- I didn't know it that day, what was waiting in my email for me, but when I opened that email up, I nearly hyperventilated with excitement when KJ at Turquoise Morning Press offered me a contract for Castaway Hearts.

Now here we are a year later, less than 3 weeks away from the release of my novel and I still get giddy all over again thinking about the day I opened that email. I was about to start painting the living room, hadn't thought much about my email over the weekend and then decided to check it before I got started because I knew painting was going to be an all day job.

A few days later, March 18th, I signed my contract, then the next day I posted And So It Begins...

WIPlash Wednesdays- Question from Joey R.

We're always attracted to the edges of what we are, out by the edges where it's a little raw and nervy.

~E.L. Doctorow~

Joey R.- Do you sometimes use actual events or things that has happened to you or people you know in your work?

Not really, but I do draw from life. Though I write romantic fiction, it is based in reality, so there are certainly bound to be topics or ideas that I've taken from the life around me, though I haven't written anything directly that could be tied to one event or person, or even myself specifically, because I take bits and pieces of knowledge, common sense, experience and mesh it together. They say, "write what you know" and I do, but not always the way you would think.

Any events in my novels are the indirect result of living and paying attention to my emotions, my situations as well as being observant of what others have gone through or are going through. There are a lot of things that are just common ground for all of us.

Most people have had their hearts broken by someone they love. Most everyone has lost a loved one or known someone in a bad relationship. Some have been abused, neglected, mistreated, or felt that way. Illness can strike anyone whether it's mental, emotional or physical and that includes things like bad habits, addictions, quirks and behaviors.

We are results of our environment and experience and subject to a plethora of things- accidents, deaths, debilitating disease, job loss, running into an ex at the grocery store. It's all happening around us, all the time, so I have a vast world of ideas at my fingertips. We're all also very adaptable, whether we like change or not, and we also all have a singular goal in common for the majority of our lives and that is to seek out love, regardless of where it comes from- parents, siblings, relatives, friends, acquaintances, lovers.
I draw from all that because I know it is the human condition, our compulsion, to seek love and approval through our work, our hobbies, our relationships and in most everything we do. Even my fictional characters need to be real, believable, fallible. They have quirks, mixtures of my own loved ones' idiosyncrasies, emotional outbursts, hidden sorrows, broken hearts and life experiences and that never-ending need to be loved, find joy and live happy, just like we all do.

Truth is, though that by the time they come to life on the page, I find it easily conceivable to believe they are living people who's situations are just as real to me as anything else I've ever seen or experienced myself.

Thanks for the question Joey!

If anyone else has a question, feel free to ask, leave a comment.

Feel free to leave me more questions in the comments here at anytime.
I'll be happy to answer them.

Happy Hump Day! I can see the weekend from here!

Hello! My Name is Pantser

From where I sit, I see the mist...

The other day I was checking out a blog over on Fresh Fiction.com because of an interview Joan Swan (a debut author of Fever due out at the end of February) was having with Cindy Gerard for a discussion on setting goals and having a book giveaway. I left no comment, as I'm not a registered member. I clicked the link Cindy had posted just to check out what was being discussed and though the book giveaway sounded nice, the thing that stopped me was Joan's take on writing. The very thought has stuck with me for the past few days—

Here is what Joan had to say....

Now, my goal setting techniques are a lot like my plotting techniques. I write (and set goals) into the mist. It's similar to the panster way of writing, but with a tad more structure. The best way to describe it is that I'm standing a point, looking forward. I can only see so far—to where the landscape gets a little fuzzy (that's the mist). I write (or set a goal) to the farthest distance I can see, then set out for it. I know where I am, I know where I'm headed, and if time is an important factor, I have a rough idea of how long it will take me to get there. And somewhere, out there beyond my scope of visibility, is an end point. In a story, that might be the next chapter, the next act or, if we're uber lucky, The End. It's the same with goals for me.

I really like her take on how she writes into the mist. I am a bit more structured when I write, too, though I don't plot at all but I kind of take it as far as I can see into the mist myself and her sentiment really rang true to me, so I just had to share that small gleaning of commonality. Her debut novel also sounds intriguing (title links to the amazon page for it)

Anyway, the first thing this sentiment made me think of was one of my favorite quotes about writing—

It's like driving a car at night. You never see further than your headlights, but you can make the whole trip that way.
~E.L. Doctorow~

It's amazing how often I forget that other authors out there are really, truly just like me. We all are traveling this road to reach similar destinations and I think we all enjoy our own method of getting there. Just as some cannot type a single word without a clearly defined outline, there are also those of us who want to walk into the mist, taking that mysterious journey with our characters as they make the journey as well. Either way, I think that's what is so exciting for us.

Writing revs our engines, fills us with a need for the adventures that lay ahead and whether we use a road map or just jump in the car and drive with only a few little clues as to where we're going, we still know we're going to make it to our chosen destination just the same, with all the little bumpy scenic routes along the way.

This felt very appropriate for this blog today— Into the Mystic—

Here's to lovely travels today my friends. Stop by tomorrow to check out what's on the roster for Fun Feature Friday.

I Have The Touch

Kindle Touch, that is....
pictured below
with cover of Suzanne's Late Harvest,
which is the first book I read on my Kindle.

I received some money for Christmas, so I did the unthinkable- well, at least for me- I bought a Kindle Touch, along with a few new eBooks. I had already been using the Kindle for PC app on my laptop, so this was just a natural progression that I knew I would eventually succumb to.

As a writer who has always valued the weight of a real book in my hand, the crisp rustle of the pages, the smell of the ink, or better yet, the aged aroma, of a book, I find that print books fill me with this mystical sense that "all's right with the world." The idea of reading books on the computer or an eReader was a foreign idea that, for a long time, I refused to surrender to. I'm not a huge fan of change, so it took a while for me to warm to the idea.

I grew up in the 80's & 90's, when eBooks were not commonplace, or least, not on my radar at all. Heck, my parents didn't even have a HOME computer until I moved out when I was 20. The very idea of reading a BOOK on the computer was as foreign to me as going to Russia or China or Japan. I did NOT speak the language and some ways I just didn't want to. I wanted to cling to the traditional mindset of what constitutes becoming a published author.

See, what I understood was my Smith Corona word processor and my 3 1/2 inch floppy disks that housed my stories and which I took for granted, not always saving backup of what I typed. At some point, ol' Smithy gave up on me and started acting wonky, corrupting my disks to the point that printing out saved files looked like alien transcripts from Planet ShouldaPrintedThatOutToBeginWith.

Meanwhile, all a young writer like myself dreamed of was seeing my stories in print, of grasping it in my hands in the middle of Joseph Beth Booksellers or Waldenbooks, Barnes & Noble or Borders... or even my beloved Little Professor in Frankfort, Kentucky, which no longer exists. In fact quite a few of those brick & mortars are disappearing now and it still saddens me.

I eagerly looked forward to being able to say,

"Whoa! This is utterly fantastic! It's real! LOOK! This is MY book!"

I grew up longing for that moment. Whether the book succeeded was another story, but that first taste of personal success was borne of my love for reading and the sense of satisfaction of holding my creation in my hands, of whisking through the pages for a favorite passage and feeling that, once in print my words and a story of my heart that I loved so much would be immortalized- captured for eternity and solidified in those pages of that binding. And others might read it and glean some joy and happiness from something that came from ME and my heart.

I knew of Amazon and I remember when it was just about "books" but of course, in this quickly changing landscape of technology, eBooks were just becoming more the "norm" at the same time I started to come into my own as a writer and that hit on a very personal level. I had put my writing on the back burner for a decade after Smithy's demise. I think in some ways, I wondered, what's the point if all my hard work is wasted on computer technology that I can't trust? My word processor wasn't much more than a baby version of computers and I'd be damned if I'd trust saving my writing on anything like that, not without printing out huge stacks of cumbersome pages, just to be sure nothing was lost if my computer got sick on me or files were deleted by accident.

Of course, I've warmed to the idea of eBooks more as time has gone on. I've been growing as a writer and a reader, just as eBooks are growing in the publishing industry by leaps and bounds. I'm excited that my first novel will be available in both eBook and print versions. I feel the meshing of the two worlds as they have collided with each other. I don't think print books are the dinosaurs who will become extinct, but I do believe they have to make room for their modern day descendents because change happens and much as we might not like it, it's usually a good thing.

I want to believe that they can walk hand-in-hand in the business though and for me, buying my Kindle Touch didn't change my views about reading books completely in eBook format. There are still some authors I will always read in print, so long as their books are printed. One being Yasmine Galenorn, though I did buy her novella Etched in Silver for my Kindle, even though I already have it in the print anthology it was originally released in, but that's because I LOVE that story so much I wanted access to it no matter where I am.

So yeah, there are certain book series I will buy in print vs eBook, but I did discover that Kindle has amassed a great collection of "free" books- a lot of them classics, some I've read and some I've always wanted to read, so I downloaded a bunch of those (Jane Austen, D.H. Lawrence, H.P. Lovecraft, etc) as well as books by my fellow authors or authors I've recently discovered.

All in all, I can't believe how much I'm enjoying the freedom my Kindle Touch gives me, to read books away from the computer in a way that doesn't feel like I'm reading on a techie device at all. Much as my former "print books only" self would disagree, I have to say that my purchase was well worth it already and I have a feeling I'm going to enjoy it for a LONG time to come- especially knowing I can tote my "eLibrary" with me anywhere without lugging a dufflebag full of books and yet I'll never be at a loss for some good adventure, mystery or romance. Yeah, that's what I call having the touch.