Five Years Ago

Five Years Ago.

Fairytale Fortnight

Here is a link the “Fairytale Fortnight” invitation.  This is a very cute idea to help bring fairytale lovers together.

 

Red August

Coming this Summer

 

What if you found out that you were descended from a long line of clandestine fighters, and that your family was still at war? Or that the love of your life was something other than human? August Archer thinks she’s a normal teenage girl—even though she has been having disturbing and erotic dreams about wolves lately. Still grieving over the loss of her bookish, charming father, and wondering over his final gift of a red hooded cloak, August is uprooted from her New York City apartment to a tiny town in Maryland, and the rambling Victorian house where he grew up. There she meets a wise woman with a gift for herbal medicine, the gentle old man who keeps the house in repair and the grounds thriving, and her new neighbor: an enigmatic, irresistibly fascinating man who refuses to talk to her, yet who seems to know her better than she knows herself, and fuels her most intense romantic fantasies. But it’s when August begins to coax her feisty Scottish grandmother out of her self-imposed catatonia that a strange tale of werewolves and hunters emerges—one in which the man of her dreams may be her family’s oldest enemy—in this modern-day telling of the Red Riding Hood story.

Mood Music

I enjoy background noise when I’m writing.  Sometimes I play a show series like Psych or Once in the background.  I’ve used Coffitivity as well.  If I’m working on a fantasy story I have been known to put on movies like Labyrinth or Star Wars.  It’s a lonely gig sometimes.  Especially for somebody like me who fluctuates between introvert and extrovert. Having some background noise makes it feel like there is somebody else here.  Especially if it’s characters like Monk or Gus that I know so well.  It’s like having somebody here chatting, solving a murder or having a fantasy adventure without me having to tidy up the place or stop working to entertain them.  They can go about their business and I can go about mine.

Sometimes though, I want a little mood music.  I might be needing to really immerse myself in a place or time.  I have several playlists on Spotify that include music with little or no lyrics, for those days I’m too easily derailed.

For the Red August series I have a list that includes Celtic music as well as fantasy movie soundtracks.   Then a few days ago I discovered Retrojam which is a cool little website that suggests playlists to you based on your birthday.  You plug in the numbers and it spits out some lists from what you would have been hearing on the radio in sixth grade or high school, depending on which list you select.  It was pretty effective.

The main character in Red August is August Archer who is coming of age in the early 1980s.  Having lists of songs that set me in that space helped me sink into her much easier and recall some old feelings and memories from my formative years during that era.

Some of the songs had me chuckling because they were so sappy or not at all what I would listen to.  I was a total, Police, Led Zeppelin and Pink Floyd girl back in the early 80s.  But unless you avoided the radio, you couldn’t help but hear a lot of other stuff floating around in the top forty, much of which will bring nostalgic feelings screaming forward.

Enjoy the trip!

 

55,714

55,714 and my first draft of Red August is done.

I finished it on Monday and it is going through the editing process.

I’m very excited to not only be done with the first draft of the first book in this series, but I am also excited to be working on the second book in the series.