I’m very excited about tomorrow. I will be at HallowRead tomorrow in Ellicott City, which is very charming. I highly recommend day trips to Ellicott City in general.
I will be speaking on the “Coming of Age” panel at 1:15pm, if you are into that kind of thing. I will have tee shirts available for sale, and swag bags for reviewers.
Come by and say hi and, if ya like, buy a book!
Tickets are available for purchase here: http://hallowread.com/tickets/
Hope to see you there!
I fell in love with you a little when I read it. Pixels or paper, it wouldn’t have mattered. Though there is something to be said for the slip smooth, the crinkle, of paper. But the pixels reach me so much faster, a bullet hitting its mark.
Slide your glossy razor fingernail down my breastbone, peel back a layer. And another.
Focus your laser insight into my eyes. Blind me with your gifts. I won’t have to see my own overly-dramatic adolescent ramblings.
You can never make a great writer out of a good writer, a great writer once said. Mr. King, what a wound. Not so wide as a church door, but ’tis enough, ’twill serve.
So I will wash my mouth out with adverbs. I will slice away planks of purple prose and drop them into the pot with what I thought were wild parsnips. On high. Until boiling. Drink. Sleep.
Incoherent. Disjointed. What is this, anyway? It doesn’t make sense. It does, too. A flashing sign overhead, “EDIT ME.” Spellcheck. Wait, I need to look up “lie” and “lay” again. It’s the mechanics of cameras all over again.
I’m tired, but inspired. And it starts over every. single. day.
You don’t care. And I’m fine with it. I will keep working at going from competent to good while you spill great all over the place. I’ll wipe it up. I’ll like it. And I’m not even mad about it.
Actually, you do care. And that’s what makes it all worth something.
Abstract works better in acrylics. Eyes roll. “Wow, she’s trying way too hard.”
“Fishing.”
“Yeah.”
One foot in front of the other. Writing mix on the playlist. Focus. Steady as she goes. O CAPTAIN! my captain!
Be grateful it’s out there, all of that beauty. Stop worrying. Don’t show any lack of confidence, it’s deadly you know.
Is it?
Well, if that were true, I’d have died at twelve.
“Who are you talking to?”
“Does it matter?”
I can if I say I can. From competent to good is better than “never tried.”
Lookie what has come to a local (for me) bookseller! Daedalus always has great prices on books – I mean, you can get every gift you need for an entire year at this place, but I am pretty excited about this bad boy. This shall soon be mine!
Here is the blurb from the Daedalus site:
A storytelling sorceress, Angela Carter has often been named as a literary godmother to Neil Gaiman, David Mitchell, Audrey Niffenegger, J.K. Rowling, Kelly Link, and other masters of supernatural fiction. Along with her James Tait Black Memorial Prize–winning novel Nights at the Circus, she is most often recognized for this pivotal collection of stories, from 1979. The Bloody Chamber mines some of our most enduring fairy tales—”Red Riding Hood,” “Beauty and the Beast,” “Puss-in-Boots,” and “Bluebeard” among them—and includes the story that inspired Neil Jordan’s 1984 film of the same name, “The Company of Wolves.” Carter extracts hidden themes and parts of the tales that went untold, giving them new life in a gorgeous prose style steeped in the romantic trappings of the gothic tradition. “Since I first came across The Bloody Chamber, I have kept a copy with me wherever I have been living,” writes Link in her introduction. “Reading Carter, each time, was electrifying. It lit up the readerly brain and all the writerly nerves…. The girls and women in The Bloody Chamber remake the rules of the stories they find themselves in with their boldness. And Angela Carter, too was bold. I have tried to learn that lesson from her.” This handsome trade paperback edition celebrates what would have been the tragically short-lived author’s 75th anniversary.
“Sex isn’t a subtext in The Bloody Chamber, but the text itself…. Carter produced … fiction that was lavishly fabulist and infinitely playful…. Salman Rushdie, who became her friend, described her as ‘the first great writer I ever met.’ Yet her legacy has been a slow and stealthy one, invisible to many of the readers who have benefited from it…. Most contemporary literary fiction with a touch of magic, from Karen Russell’s to Helen Oyeyemi’s, owes something to Angela Carter’s trail-blazing.”—Salon
“She was, among other things, a quirky, original, and baroque stylist, a trait especially marked in The Bloody Chamber—her vocabulary a mix of finely tuned phrase, luscious adjective, witty aphorism, and hearty, up-theirs vulgarity.”—Margaret Atwood
I keep up with what’s going on in the self-publishing market, for obvious reasons (oy, with the research, can’t a girl just write something?) and I wanted to share THIS ARTICLE just because it’s the strangest article I’ve ever read. At first I thought it was a satire article – in part because photo looks so staged and in part because…just…so.many.things.
Even as I’m about to post this, I double-checked to make sure it wasn’t the plot of a weekly evening soap opera. An interesting read even if you aren’t in the book world. But especially if you’re in the romance and erotica book world. And also, anybody who follows Amazon and their shenanigans.
Can’t we all just play nice?
Do you ever find yourself on the cusp of a feeling and you try to use music to intensify that feeling?
Maybe it’s somewhat silly to even post because people use music to evoke feeling all the time. For weddings, you’ll find love songs and joyful tunes. If you’re angry and want to rage against the machine you can, well, listen to Rage Against the Machine. Of course there is the ever-popular post breakup wallow.
But I’m not really talking about those sorts of things. I’m talking about finding a feeling. You feel something welling up in you, but you aren’t certain what it is. Is it that you’re about to be sad? Or maybe you’re just feeling particularly loving?
I have restless music days. Days where I change the channel on Spotify or switch to Songza or Pandora, searching. What melody, what lyrics, what genre is going to vibrate the correct heartstrings? It’s like having one of those itches that you scratch, but it moves. You keep chasing it, but you still have the sensation of the itch, just beneath your skin.
When I find the right music the restlessness settles. My soul tunes in and I tend to get stuck on it for days. Looping a limited playlist or even listening to the same song several times in one day. Sometimes in a row. The itch is scratched and I use the feelings to make something.
Today I am writing on the second book of the Red August series and behind me, my lover is editing the first book. It’s nice when he’s here I can work at my desk writing, and he can sit behind me at the table, writing.
We have officially reached workaholic status, though. All day yesterday I was making artwork for my store website (which is set to launch May1). Last week I split my time between writing, making items for my online store and making a Cafepress shop. Which is still very much NOT DONE. But off to a good little start.
Anyway, at first I was playing a music list with no lyrics. Then I ended up putting on my Fairytale Writing Mix – Red August which is on Spotify. You can follow it, if you like and you use Spotify – I am under “Heather Brooks.”
I take several approaches to listening to music while writing. If I’m in an easily distracted mood I will put on instrumentals. I have a list that is almost all instrumental called Myth, Magic, Faeries & Mermaids. I may even just listen to coffee shop sounds on Coffitivity. Other times I like having some music with lyrics happening – and usually it’s because I want something that gives me the atmosphere of what I’m writing. In the case of Red August I made a list that has a lot of sexy, ethereal stuff on it. Also, since the book is set in the early 1980s, I listened to some of the stuff around then. Retrojam is good for that.
So, here are probably my top five favorites (in no particular order) from my Fairytale Writing Mix – Red August:
– Howl – Florence + The Machine
– Exiles (The Wolves of Midwinter) – Mary Fahl– Born to Die – Lana Del Rey
– Ride – Lana Del Rey
– My Immortal – Evanescence
If you have suggestions for good songs that fit the haunted, werewolf, wolf, hunter, huntress, archery theme, please leave me a comment!
H.L. Brooks 