#PitMad

I will be participating in #PitMad again on Thursday.

#PitMad is a semi-annual Twitter pitch contest for writers. Writers pitch their books in one tweet, and they get three tries to tantalize agents and publishers with their pitch. Hopefully, an agent/publisher sees a pitch they like and send a request for a full manuscript, which is the first step to a pathway that may lead to traditional publishing.

I have three different books I will be pitching right now, and I hope that I will have luck this time. I’ve rewritten the pitches from past #PitMads, so they’re fresh and new.

Here are my pitches:

Adam and Lilith, star-crossed lovers in a 6000-year-old play, meet again at the brink of apocalypse. Humanity’s fate rests on a collective of pacifists facing immortals and their armies. Lilith’s life is at stake – and if she dies, so do all women on earth. #A #F #FTA

Anthropologist Anna Smith crosses the war-torn remains of the US to chase a legend. Amidst attempts on her life, Anna finds her past entwined with the story she found. Who she is – old and new – could be the key in stopping genocide. #A #F

Dr. Jeanne Beaumont’s life escapes logical, scientific notions – there’s a monstrous vine in her lab and a man half her age courting her. Josh Young sees his crush naked in a vision of a riotous garden. Together they find things don’t have to be logical to be true. #A #R #CR

#PitMad happens four times a year, so there’s plenty of times to participate.

Sorry I didn’t write yesterday, but I have been struggling with a catastrophic tooth infection (as in half my lower jaw) and I’m on hydrocodone to deal with the pain.

In short, I am seriously out of it.

I thought about leaving the typos in here to show how seriously out of it I am, but I can’t stand leaving spelling and grammar errors in a piece, so I’m revising errors as I go along. Believe me, there are many errors happening.

I hope to be out of pain soon, after which I’ll see whether I have any teeth left from this.

Sleepbot Environmental Broadcast

I have once again discovered my favorite internet radio station — Sleepbot Environmental Broadcast. The station pumps out lowkey ambient 24/7, and I like to play it all night as background music to sleep by.

I first started listening to Sleepbot in the late 1990s when I had first moved to Maryville and I was racked with chronic insomnia. (I should note that I was much later diagnosed with bipolar II, which explains the periods of insomnia). I would lay on the floor with my laptop and listen to the vague waves of music. I don’t know if it ever made me feel truly sleepy back then, but I would half-sleep, drifting among the motifs.

But then there was the wolves. One night I was half asleep again, only to hear wolves howling. Not the pretty howls we think wolves make, but shrieking yelping group howls. I slammed awake, thinking I had dreamed them, but the wolf track was real. I’m not sure why anyone thought that was restful music, but okay.

Photo by patrice schoefolt on Pexels.com

So, it’s years later, and I’ve discovered Sleepbot again using a wonderful iPhone app called Radio Garden (which, as you can see from the link, has an online presence as well). It’s now my nightly serenade and now I fall asleep to it.

Last night, I was vegging out listening to Sleepbot convinced I must have imagined those wolves howling.

I. DID. NOT. IMAGINE. THOSE. WOLVES.

There they were again with the most nightmarish howling by sheer coincidence.

Did I mention I love sleepbot?

The Meaning of This Website

This is not my official book/author website. That’s here and I haven’t done anything to it since the launch of The Kringle Conspiracy. I’m not promoting The Kringle Conspiracy right now because it’s past Christmas (is this the right thing to do?) My official website is where I’m a totally together person as a writer and I have no qualms about recommending my really great book.

This is my personal blog, and I suspect it’s more interesting to read. This is where I explore what it means to be a writer, the misgivings and triumphs. This is where I try to turn my life into essays as necessary practice for writing, and where I let you know who I am. This is where you find out that I’m jealous of my cat and that the day after Valentine’s Day is the real holiday.

I believe that it’s good to see the human side of someone. In the age of COVID and the Internet, it seems the best way to get to know each other is in the written word. So I offer this website as a way to get to know one particular writer and fellow human being.

Thank you for reading.

In Need of Some Serendipity

Oh, folks, I am not in a very good mood today. I have a toothache. It’s not as bad as it was yesterday, when the hydrocodone wasn’t even touching the pain, but nonetheless I had a doozy of a toothache.

Then there’s the fact that my husband got 500 likes on a picture of a cat. Five Hundred Likes.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m glad he got — no, I’m jealous. I’m jealous of my cat.

If I sold 500 copies of a book, I would be ecstatic. If I had 500 people visit this blog, I would be doing cartwheels in the living room (Do not mentally envision a 55-year-old overweight woman doing a cartwheel). I’m jealous of my cat (and by extension my husband) for effortlessly managing what I’ve been busting my butt trying to do.

That is the nature of serendipity. We can’t predict the capricious nature of audiences, nor the dominant culture references that fuel the next big thing. We can try to sell our stories, our ideas, our art as the next big thing, but audiences will balk if they feel you’re selling too hard. But so much of success is serendipity — writing about the right thing, being in the right place, stumbling across the right feeling.

I could use a bit of serendipity right now.

Out of Commission Today

Abscessed tooth and pain meds. Sorry.

The Joys of Study Music

I have become dependent on music to get me through my productive moments. I used to write in silence, with no background music.

Then two things happened:

I married Richard, who believes in a decent stereo (as opposed to the iPhone/portable speaker version I used.
I discovered Apple Music and an endless collection of albums and, more importantly, playlists.

Because of #1, I have gotten used to music in the atmosphere in our 7.2 Dolby Atmos system (not new, but very serviceable). It sounds much clearer than the iHome speaker in my room. When I listen to the oldies of my childhood, it sounds so much clearer than the AM radio of my childhood that I hear elements in the music that I didn’t know existed.

Because of #2, I have discovered concentration/study music, which focuses me for writing. I never thought I’d find music that would do this.

I can’t concentrate to most music, I’ve discovered. One of my favorite playlists on Apple Music is 70s Singer-Songwriters, because that album is, in effect, my childhood. But it communicates its mood and message too well, because I spend too much concentration in reminiscing. I can remember where I first heard most of the songs on the playlist, and the emotions (“the feels”, in the very evocative language of today) take over my focus.

But then there’s study music, which covers everything from modulated classical music to downbeat electronica to lo-fi. The idea is no words, chill rhythm, and restrained dynamics. The belief is that the music involves just enough of the brain to cancel distractions while at the same time leaving enough room to study, or in my case, write.

This is not the same principle as making playlists to go with an album. Those are typically used to evoke emotions in the listener that translate to characterization and plot elements. I make playlists (not always successfully — this current one is horrible) but they don’t help me focus. The very things that, to me, evoke the emotions — the lyrics — make it difficult for me to focus.

So my writing times are filled with playlists and albums that speak to my brain more than to my heart, and that’s okay, especially for the editing I’m doing right now.

So this morning, after breakfast and coffee, I will go back to editing Gaia’s Hands with the help of my study music.

Talking About My Books

The cover blurb (if I get that far) for Gaia’s Hands:

Dr. Jeanne Beaumont’s life has escaped her logical, scientific notions – a seedling in her lab has grown into a monstrous vine, and a man half her age courts her.

Josh Young’s world of spirits and visions informs his writing but isolates him. Then in a vision of his current crush naked in a lush orchard of trees and vines, he realizes he wants more.

As Jeanne and Josh discover each other, pieces fall together: the vine’s lush growth, Josh’s visions, the attacks on Jeanne’s life’s work. What brought them together threatens to push them apart, unless they realize that things don’t have to be logical to be true.

***********************

I’m bad at writing book cover blurbs, and not that great at writing cover letter blurbs. It’s hard for me to find the essential pieces, keep the suspense in place, and communicate the gist of the book in as few words as possible. I’m lucky that this blurb only took two tries (but I thought the first, too long draft was perfect. Go figure.).

I might have learned something from this, however. Don’t repeat, don’t tell the whole story. I need to go over all my cover letters now and see if I can capture what I learned there. Wish me luck.

I see the light at the end of the edit!

I am done with the revision of Gaia’s Hands! I think I finally have it in a place where I like it, although it definitely needs some revision on the revision as any good novel would.

This is momentous, because Gaia’s Hands is the first novel I ever wrote.

To give you some background — I had a dream. And it was a pretty raunchy dream, raunchier than the book finally ended up, but it was also romantic. So I kept interrogating the dream, and particularly its characters, and it kept developing further.

I kept writing excerpts of the dream and its spun gossamer threads, and I kept making my husband read them. (My husband is very patient.) After maybe a half-dozen of these, Richard said, “If you’re going to write all these stories on the same topic, you might as well write a novel.”

“I can’t write a novel!” I squeaked. “It’s too long! I don’t know how to write plots!”

“Try,” he said.

So I wrote the first draft, and didn’t like it. I then wrote several other drafts, adding voiceovers and deleting them, adding a couple new characters, deleting them, turning it into a novella, giving up on that. and leaving the story in the metaphorical drawer for a while only to start again. Toward the end of the process, I handed it off to a writing coach, who pointed out that there were so many editing errors from having gone through it so many times my eyes bled, She also informed me that Gaia’s Hands was, in fact, a romance novel and I should emphasize that.

This was a revelation. I knew there was a romance involved, but there was also this fantasy element of Jeanne’s talent and Josh’s visions and the build toward a miracle at the end. Primary to the book, however, was Josh and Jeanne’s unorthodox relationship with its age difference.

So I emphasized that romance, not forgetting the fantasy elements, but using the romance as the backbone of the story. Jeanne and Josh, it turns out, make a great couple. They fight and break up in a totally believable style, and come back to each other within a week just as believably. And they make sense as the unprepared wielders of talents that come from — Japanese spirits? Gaia?

I think I’m happy with Gaia’s Hands. I think.

The Internet Created My Writing Career

I don’t think I would have become a semi-serious writer before the Internet. I like to be correct over details, and before the Internet, I would have had to do much more difficult research to write anything, even a fantasy novel. I would have spent hours in libraries, searching for books and hoping the titles yielded the information I was looking for. I might search through an encyclopedia or two to glean some data about my topic. I would have spent so much time researching that I wouldn’t be able to experience the fun of writing. It would have been a lot like writing my dissertation. Urgk.

For example, in Whose Hearts are Mountains (my favorite book to illustrate the wonders of an Internet search), my online searches included:

Underground dwellings
Owyhee Desert
Wilson’s Sink
desert flora
desert fauna
dry land crops
water reclaiming
biodiesel
jatropha diesel
castor diesel
ricin poisoning symptoms
castor pomace
sage tea
smallpox
bubonic plague
bioweapons
guanacos
mules

Imagine having to go to a library for this search. Imagine telling the librarian you need a book on ricin poisoning. Imagine taking notes on all these items (and because we’re talking about the days without the Internet it’s also the days before a laptop) with pen and paper, and trying to arrange all those notes.

Imagine trying to juggle all these notes while writing.

Imagine feeling like writing after all that. I don’t know how anyone did it.

Using the internet, though, creates a responsibility to the writer. I must check the validity of all my sources to make sure the information is correct. Here is a source that explains the process of assessing the quality of information on the Internet. I use a lot of my college training to do this process, but anyone should be able to walk through the process outlined in the website above. (The process is also handy for sounding out claims of mysterious cures, deep state conspiracies, and urban legends.)

Whose Hearts are Mountains is a story I wanted to write about thirty years ago, but I found the research too daunting. It wasn’t “writing what I know” — it had to happen in the middle of a desert, and I knew nothing about deserts. I had that dissertation to write. But I could write it thirty years later simply because of the advent of the Internet.

Happy Half-Price Chocolate Day!

Today is one of my favorite holidays — Happy half-price chocolate day!

I’m only partially joking. The benefits of chocolate are well known —

lowers cholesterol levels
prevents cognitive decline
reduces the risk of cardiovascular problems

Not to mention tastes good.

The problem with Half Price Chocolate Day in the US is that it features American chocolates which are, in a word, awful. They have a burnt-milk flavor and are overly sweet. I am not a world traveler, but I have had good chocolate. Lindt chocolates are pretty good, although aficionados don’t like them so well, calling them bitter. I have had very good Belgian chocolate, and I have had American artisan chocolates (with Burdick being one of my favorites), which are nothing like mass market chocolate. Yet I will sometimes eat American chocolate, especially if it’s half-price.

I would love it if one of you from overseas would email me some good chocolate!