Excitement & the Art of Publishing

I'm so excited.  I'm about to sign a contract to get the sequel to Takuhi’s Dream published. Takuhi’s Nightmare was my July Camp NaNoWriMo effort. The old Empress is dying.  She has chosen Takuhi Maimun-Cheng as her successor. Can she maintain the Compire and keep balance between the Compire, its Assembly, and its allies?  What challenges lie ahead for her two children and her husband?  This is by no means my first published novel.  It is number 11. I get excited each time I sign a contract as though it were my first one because it took me so long to reach this point, and it’s all due to Saturn, the planet named after the old Roman farmers’ god.  I call him the Great Manifester because he will grant your heart’s desire, but you will have to work long and hard to attain it. .  

My mother supported my writing by bringing ho,e from the office she worked in waste paper with a letter printed on the other side.  It was fine for my rough drafts. Of course I would have to use a better paper for the final version.  .But I dreamed of an easier way that I could just dictate and avoid the laborious job of typing.  At last in the 20-teens came another dream come true, the Dragon. Speech recognition software. At last the price was down to where I could afford it, so my house mate and I each got one.  Then we had to train our Dragons. The movie that came on TV was How to Train your Dragon, and we laughed at the synchronicity.  I don’t know about Stephen, but I started using my Dragon right away.  I suppose that he was so busy playing his sex game that he hardly ever wrote anything with it.  

But I use it almost constantly. I still have to type a little, as when I translate the gobbledegook  my Dragon makes out of my speech into intelligible English. But that is just par for the course with Saturn.

highlight lyrics to add meaning...

Tonight's the night we're gonna make it happen

Tonight we'll put all other things aside

Give in this time and show me some affection

We're going for those pleasures in the night I want to love you, feel you

Wrap myself around you

I want to squeeze you, please you

I just can't get enough

And if you move real slow I'll let it go

That’s the song that occurs to me right about now.  Sure, it’s about making love, but couldn’t it be about other things that get one excited too?  I’m sure that were I to use my blood pressure cuff the number would be high, in spite of my having taken both blood pressure meds today (I’m very religious about taking them.) because I’m under stress, but it’s a good kind of stress.  What makes you excited? What quickens your heartbeat? What makes your eyes sparkle with anticipation? What gets the adrenaline and cortisol pumping through your bloodstream because the body cannot tell the difference between good stress and the other kind?

Hypergraphia: The Compulsion to Write

Back in the 90s, a favorite Sunday evening key show of mine was Silk Stalkings..  As you might guess is it was what they call a police procedura, one of my favorite TV drama genres. One episode they were in investigating the death of a woman and suspected her husband had done it. What made the the episode memorable for me was that she had written on every piece of paper in the house, and when she had run out of paper, she had written on the wallpaper. The CSI guy explained that she had a condition called "hypergraphia," the compulsion to write.

I began to think about how fortunate I was – – still am, actually. I have an abundance of paper and besides, an abundance of places on the Internet in which to express myself. That poor woman had only a few paltry pieces of paper and the walls of her home to express her loneliness and her feelings of hopelessness at being stuck in a marriage to a cold and unfeeling domineering possibly abusive man. I had no such hopelessness, but I do have her condition of hypergraphia.

I have to write. I've tried going without writing for a few days, but then I have to write. Something. Whether it's journaling in my diary, on one of my three blog sites, or work on my WIPss (works in progress) I must put pen to paper or fingers to the computer keyboard. My fellow Wiccans would say that I have a very active Visuddha (throat) chakra.  The throat chakra is the seat of artistic self-expression. I’m much more fortunate than that poor dead woman was because of the many outlets I have for writing. Writing.com is a website for writing. Most of my works are far too long to put on that site, however. Then I have my LiveJournal site, blogger, and my author page on Facebook.

What do I write about? Not much happens in my day to day life, but ideas do occur to me. Back when I was 10 or so years old, while the other kids were killing their imaginations by various means including television, I was busy beefing mine up and improving it. Much later, when I was learning magick, creative visualization came very easily to me. I hardly had to work at it on all except to make the visualizations sharper.

Ideas can come from anywhere. On my favorite mental games to play with myself is "what if – –?". Fear-based what if is to be  discouraged. If your main reason for playing what if is just to create disaster scenarios I discourage it unless you're going to use these disaster scenarios in a story. People in the planning and first responding industry use what if disaster scenarios to plan various drills and preparedness scenarios. In their case thinking of all the horrid things that could happen is part of their job. But unless you are writing about a dystopia, giving yourself nightmares is not a very constructive use  for this sort of thought experiment. For me, real life is already so horrid considering the news of the nation in this world, that I really don't want to think of all the bad things that can happen. A lot of those things are happening in actuality. I don't have to play the negative what if game. These incidents are plastered all over the nose and on Facebook and other social media. So instead of dwelling on the things that can go wrong., I think instead of what could go right. What if an alien  ship disgorge ETs and we have first contact? Sure we could have problems because the aliens could be completely on a completely different wavelength than we are and regard us the way we regard pesky insects. But maybe, just maybe we’ll have more in common with these aliens than we as first guessed. Maybe, just maybe human and humanoid are the basic shapes for advanced life in the galaxy. Of course, we’ll have to broaden our definition of what being human means.

In the far future, two millennia from now, Earthlings have already ventured to the stars. They join an interstellar society called the Compire, which is short for constitutional empire. There are still many worlds left to explore. And on some of these are cultures of advanced sentient life. A group of women, a sisterhood, the members of which evaluate each culture/society to ascertain which level of contact with the rest of the Compire it should have. Takuhi’s Dream is about one of these Sisters as she flees from a nightmarish creature pursuing her wherever she goes as two men pursue her with different agendas. It is true that Takuhi’s Dream was published before, but that was as  a YA, young adult novel but this edition has the adult portions fully restored. Why are the men pursuing her with such fervor, and will she discover the true nature of the creature in her dreams?

How Reading Turned into Writing

I’ve been writing since I was 9 years old, maybe before then even.  My mother always maintained to the very end of her life that I was reading long before 1st grade.  I probably started reading at around age 3 or 4. I can remember picking out words I recognized from the age of three in Ferdinand the Bull when my babysitter was reading it to me.  In 1st grade I can remember getting the entire reading game within 6 weeks of starting 1st grade, so I read ahead to the stories at the back of the book.  I quickly mastered the past tense narrative. First grade phonics helped this ability immeasurably. I was fascinated by fairy tales. I was fascinated by their magic.  I besides liked stories which featured an active heroine. I got into a bit of a pickle in the school library when I tried to check out from the school library books above the primary (grades 1st through 3rd) school shelf.  I knew that I could read these books, why didn’t the librarian? I went home and told my mother, herself a former primary school teacher. She met with the principal and the librarian, who had one question, “But what about the hard words?”  “If my daughter thinks she can read a book, she probably can. We’ll look up the hard words.” I got the meaning of many of those “hard” words from context.  

From about 1st grade on, in the printing part of the class, my teacher had us print out sentences, andmine were always fanciful ones I got from all the fairy tales I’d read.  In the summer between 2nd and 3rd grade, we moved to a suburb, and had a bookmobile coming to down the street from our house. Here no disapproving librarian passed judgment on my choice of reading material.  I discovered the Andrew Lang Fairy Books.  I read them all, or should I say, I devoured them?  I could read a book per day, and I began to conceive of my own fairy tale, which was a mashup of all the fairy tales I had read up to the age of 9.   I named my heroine after the little girl Anne next door, since her mother often tasked me with entertaining her of a summer’s day. What little girl doesn’t want a fairy tale princess named after her?  It would take over 50 years, but I finally had the final version submitted to my publisher in 2017. In that time, fantasy had come of age as a genre, and I was off and running.  

The 1st book I had published for an ebook house was what’s now known as “an urban fantasy” about the Celtic God of Love Aongus MacOgg, where under a geas (obligation) from the Morrighan, he is plopped down in the middle of present-day San Francisco where he must become loved by a woman from this time.  You’ll know by this that in those 50 years, I had also devoured numerous books on mythology. Numerous stories had been written about the Greco-Roman deities coming to the present day, but how many Celtic deities had? It was a wide-open field, and I was plowing it for all I was worth. I discovered NaNoWriMo, and in the 10 or so years since then have written numerous 1st rough drafts, which I am now working on.  

I still read.  I frankly don’t see how a person can write, call hirself a writer, and not read.  A person on Facebook asked, “If I want to write, does that mean that I must also read?”  I don’t know how he can escape without reading a single book and still want to call himself a writer.   How can he know what’s out there if he doesn’t read? Writing is a lot like alchemy, you turn base metal in the shape of a rough idea into gold by refining it until it shines.  My latest effort that is seeing publication is titled Love on the Other Side of the Sun II: Book of Invasions.  It follows after Love on the Other Side of the Sun I with our three couples forcibly separated, first by a bunch of radical Muslims, and then by some very greedy Mormons.  Will they ever be able to get back together? Will their daughter be returned to the loving arms of her family before she is forced to marry one of the Elders?  Find out at CrimsonFrostBooks.com. Or at Amazon.com. 

Fee Diddly doo wop skiddly skiddly dow wee.  Scat singing is an art form where the performer uses hir voice. We as a musical instrument without recourse to intelligible lyrics. They often use it to test a tune out before entrusting it to a musical instrumen. It is the use of the human voice as an instrument in its purest form. Satchmo Louis Armstrong was a past master at this from 1927 on. Bobby McFerrin is a modern exponent of this practice. Cab  Callaway did it. Duke Ellington and Ella Fitzgerald did it. I read somewhere that it dates from a time when black folks were either slaves or share-croppers, and either weren’t allowed to own instruments because slaves weren’t allowed to own anything, or they were so busy working in the fields that they couldn’t stop long enough to play an instrument, since even a blues harp requires the hands to hold it in front of one’s mouth, as the holder had not yet been invented that Bob Dylan is so famous for using.  It’s become a fixture in jazz, which is so dependent on improvisation within certain structures. It seems as though all the jazz greats did scat singing. When something is that old an ubiquitous, it attains the status of a tradition.

What, you may ask, has scat singing got to do with the art of the novel?  To be frank, I don’t know, Except that novel writing, like scat singing, employs improvisation within a set group of rules or principles. One learns these rules through experience. In the case of the scat singers, it was growing up with the art form being practiced around them. In my case, it was going to school and studying novels. Then, when I found a publisher, it was going through succeeding layers of editing before coming up with the finished product and having it published.  

The next job is promotion.  Here too am I learning my way around the various rules of the groups to which I belong. It's a steep learning curve, for me anyway, since like most writers, I am an introvert and do not have the sales type personality. When I started to write this blog, my mind was blank. I knew I wanted to write something, but had no idea what.  Then a friend suggested that I just write whatever came to mind, hence the paragraph on scat singing. In my ugly notebook, I often start out, by way of warming up, with the written form of scat singing. I put nonsense syllables down by way of warming up my writing muscles.

My ninth book just came out.  It is Love on the Other Side of the Sun II: The Book of Invasions.  All right, I confess that I stole the subtitle. It is the English translation of a book written by a cleric on the mythical history of Ireland. I am not the only one to steal that title.  It is also the title of an album by a group named Horslips. But my book is the story of two invasions by inimical forces on Nibiru. The husbands of the three main characters/ heroines are separated from them and sent to work camps. Will they ever be united with their beloved wives and children again? The e-book is  for sale at Amazon.com. Download a copy, why don't you?