Page 1

Last night and went and sat out in twilight to calm my mind. It’s been racing a lot the last few days. Mostly with ideas for the future. See I want to supplement my income, I know that writing will not do that right away (though it is my belief and my goal that it will eventually.)
So I am thinking on other business avenues, other money making ploys and ways to take the things I love and to make them make me money. Be it something entrepreneurial, doing something others do and just doing it better, or something completely different, the mind is racing to come up with the perfect idea and perfecting the ones I have. So wanting to sleep last night I decided I needed stop thinking about these things and calm myself. So off I went outside to relax. I took my notebook because I always do and once out there words simply spilled out on to the pages.
I am going to do three blog posts in a row now to separate the writing up because that is the way it came out. Page by page. So this is page one. Enjoy.

Write for me your soul
With painted words
Show me the light that burns
The darkness that consumes
In your words let me know you
In expression let me see you
Honest words
Honest heart
Show me your soul
Write for me your world

**
In love I come to know myself
In love I become brave
My frailty made strong

**
I wish for a moment I could see through your eyes
Understand your view of me
Or would I need to see through your eyes
Your heart
Your mind
Your soul
For a moment I would like to see through your eyes
And see why you love me

The perfect tale for children

One thing I have always wanted to write was a children’s book. And in thinking about it I stumbled on what I think was the key to me liking a book when I was much smaller. It was the concept of taking an ordinary child and putting them in a situation that was extra-ordinary or them finding out they were in fact special. A lot of them had the same sort of medium for transport, some kind of ordinary object that provided a way to this other life. It worked with movies and TV shows too. One of my favourite shows as a child though I don’t think it was on for very long, was a show called Wildfire. It was an animated show about a girl who has a horse called Wildfire who takes her to another world where she had adventures and eventually discovered that she was in fact an exiled princess.
It was the childhood dream I guess, or mine anyway, to discover that I was in fact a princess, that I was special and magical. (Yeah, that desire might not be entirely gone.)
Magic mirrors, wardrobes, portals in the garden or under the Christmas tree, all these wonderfully ordinary things that anyone could come across. And that is what I want to write, the perfect children’s tale about an ordinary child who gets their own chance to be special and captivate a new generation of children. That is what I want to do.
There is just one problem.
I can never find the right story. *le sigh* Oh well I guess I keep trucking on with the stories I am getting until then.

Christmas, Goals and beta readers wanted

I hope everyone had a happy Christmas. I was a very spoiled little Princess. And yes I got two of the books I was dying to get for Christmas so I had a very big happy. One of which was James Rollins’ “Bloodline” which I devoured in less than 24 hours. I am a huge fan of James Rollins Sigma series and have been hanging out for Bloodline since it was released. I was told not to buy it because my birthday was coming up, then it was Christmas coming up and finally I got a copy. If you have not read the Sigma series I highly recommend them. For those who have read them…OH MY GOD ABOUT SEICHAN!?!? And *le swoon* for Tucker and Kane. They better become series regulars.

I also was lucky enough to win a copy of a dear friends book. Ke-Yana Drake writer of the Time Speaker Universe ran a competition for Christmas for page likes and I was one of the lucky winners. (If you haven’t liked her page on Facebook go do so.)(One assumes you have all already liked mine…if not there is a link right over there next to this blog post so go do it…go ahead, make my day.)

So now that Christmas is over I am looking to get focused again. I have the next few days off which I hadn’t been expecting so I plan to make the most of that time. I have a lot of writing I want to catch up on as the muse has been stressed and tired and not talking overly much, I want to reread over Nyssa’s Tale, perhaps start looking for some beta readers for it, read over more of Sam and I’s writing as we start to get a few things closer to the completion of the first draft (cannot begin to say how excited I am to be getting closer to sharing some of those stories with you all, they are really really awesome…and I’m only a little bias on the subject.)

So yes, time to refocus on a few of my goals now that Christmas is dusted for another year, 2013 is going to be one heck of a year for a lot of us. I can’t wait to tackle it and make my dreams come true.

Do you have any goals you are setting for the new year? I’d love to hear them.

And if you’d like to be a beta reader, well I’d love to know.

Victory or Death

“Failure comes at a price I can’t afford”

I’ve never had anyone ask what Buaidh No Bas means. It’s in most of my profiles around the strange little place we call the interwebz. But I guess that could be because Google is our friend, why ask when you can GTS?
It’s the Gaelic version of the clan MacNeil motto. The Latin is Vincere Vel Mori and the English, which is what most of you will be wanting to know I guess, is Victory or Death. (Also in case you are wondering, yes I am of MacNeil descent.)

Rambling around to the point and the quote at the top…. I was listening to “Avalon” by Professor Green featuring Sierra Kusterbeck, again this morning. That quote is from the song and it seems to tie in quite well with the clan motto and the way that I want to live my life. To never back down and give up on what I believe in, to keep trying and fighting until success or death find me. I can afford to do no less.

In the past I’ve been the kind of girl who just gave up on trying most of the time, chickening out and letting fear or the obstacles stop me.

This has been the case for my writing. Eiridis has been sitting as a completed first draft for over six years now. For a lot of that time I’ve been too scared to do anything more with it and take it that next step. Scared I could not write something good enough, and hiding behind the obstacle of the rewrite and the edit because trust me, this baby needs a lot of work to get where it is meant to be. And I let that control me and stop me. And some days I’m almost like that with Nyssa. I am so proud of what I’ve created in Nyssa but what if I’m just kidding myself? And what of the hard work I need to put in still. As well as being an inherent fraidy cat, I’m also a lazy little kitten who would rather purr in the pool of sunshine than go and do something productive. That is especially true when it comes to editing. See I really kind of loathe editing. All those rules and ways things have to be and yeah, that was the part of English class I loathed more than taking “Dead Poet’s Society” and over analysing the birds flying. It melts my brain and I can admit…I’m just not good at editing and I’m still not sure where my skills stand on the rewrite aspects either.
But failure comes at a price I can’t afford and that goes for all aspects of this dream of mine to be a real honest to goodness writer and published author.

There is so much hard work to be done, so many obstacles to overcome, so much fear to punch in the face but I’m up for the challenge. I will keep fighting until success or death finds me.

A closed door gathers no distractions

Back in 2006 I read Stephen King On Writing. I took a lot away from it, including the concept of writing with the door closed. I did that. Literally. I took the spare computer out to the garage, set up a desk near the punching bag and each morning I would come out shut the door, do an hours work out on with the swiss ball and the punching bag and then I would sit and I would write as I munched away on seaweed rice crackers and drank water. In six weeks I wrote 115,000 words approx. and I also dropped a dress size.

But now, now I don’t write with the door closed, heck I don’t even hold off on sharing writing all that much anymore. My partner Sam gets to see everything pretty much, raw and in all its glory. Is this a good or bad thing? Often I will post things up on the character in question’s tumblr, or maybe share it with my other friends and writing people. I didn’t do that with Nyssa, still haven’t. Sam has read it but there is another person I am dying to show it to but I am resisting, I am keeping it closed to the world as I go through and edit it. Now this is hard for me, I’m a Leo, I thrive on praise and knowing that people like what I’ve written and getting feedback. (So if you haven’t already go and read Babypire and tell me that you like it, do it now, yes right now, this post will wait, I promise I won’t write anymore until you are back. Are you back? Good, we can continue.) Now it’s not exactly closed door writing for Nyssa but it’s the closest I’ve done in a long time, and what happened. On my holiday I knocked out nearly 40,000 words in just shy of two weeks and finished the story. This is a good thing. So I’m wondering if I should do that more. Stop just writing in spurts for my own personal writing, take one solo project on and run with it. Keep from showing all in sundry until it is finished. I am thinking that I might just set myself a goal for November, write Babypire. No word count to meet, nothing like that, just a deadline, to take Babypire and finish it. I’m assuming at this stage it’s going to be a very long short story or a novella, it doesn’t seem to have the complete substance for a full blown novel. So I won’t be doing NaNo as such, but I will be taking the chance to set myself a goal and achieve it in that month. After all according to the pagan calendar that will be the first month of the new year so why not take the chance to make it a good month. I just need to focus again and keep the door closed. But don’t worry Sam, I plan on locking you in the room with me *winks*