Blog Archives
Yeah, I Said I Wasn’t Gonna Do This, But…
As you may know (or may not now but will have full knowledge of the facts that others have at their disposal by the time you finish the sentence that continues just after the closing parenthesis here), I’ve been struggling to finish the sequel to The Curse of Troius. I’ve been wrestling with it for over a year now and it’s mostly done but the last bit is going to really take every shred of skill I have as a writer and I’m just not good enough to do it right now.
While I’ve been engaged in mentally grappling with it, I’ve gotten an idea for my next project. I’m really excited by it. If you like my blog, then I think you’ll probably love it, since it takes the things that seem to mostly work here and puts them in a novel. Yes, it’s a zombie story.
An Interview with Steven Montano, Author of Blood Skies
It’s a Me and My Shovel first today: a by-god interview with a real person instead of with fictional characters. It is my pleasure today to interview Steven Montano, author of Blood Skies, an apocalyptic vampire urban fantasy military novel. Trust me, it all makes sense. After you finish reading the interview, go to www.bloodskies.com and read more about it, including Tales of a Blood Earth, a series of unrelated (OR ARE THEY???) short stories set in the Blood Skies world. I’ve read the book, I give it 5 stars, and I recommend it to you as well. It’s because I enjoyed it so much that I pressured Steven to talk to me at length. And I do mean At Length; this is Me and My Shovel, after all, so get yourself another tasty beverage and get comfy.
Now, when you read this, imagine my voice is all deep and Barry-White-esque, and Steven’s got like this Michael Caine accent thing going. Trust me, it’ll sound cool.
Here we go!
Guest Post: The Power of Personality by Evelyn Lafont
Today I have something unprecedented here at my little ole site – a guest post! Evelyn Lafont, aka Keyboard Hussy, is a writer, yes, but she’s funny, caustic, blunt, imaginative, and a ton of other things besides that. If you like the type of humor I attempt to purvey here, then I highly recommend you read her book, her blog, and her online mag. Links below her article. I’m going to get out of her way, because she’ll totally knife me in sternum if I don’t.
Magic in the World of The Curse of Troius
Get your Nerd Waders out. This one is gonna be geeky. Like a 7th level Spiritwrack spell geeky. Thou hast been warned.
During a recent author interview (see what I did there!? Didn’t that make me sound all authoritative and cool? Like I’m a big time dude that magnanimously allowed the guy with the white card that says PRESS tucked into his fedora onto my yacht and allowed him to savor the aroma of my pipe and swirled brandy. It was almost exactly like that.)
Anyway, during a recent author interview, I was asked about the nature of magic in the world of The Curse of Troius. It was an interesting question, or at least it was interesting to me, since I never expected it. Magic plays a very subtle background role in Curse, with few “on-screen” demonstrations of spells and wizardly goodness. The zombie plague at the heart of the story is caused by magic, of course, but little of it is described in detail as a process – mostly because I didn’t want to turn it into a story about My Magic System. It was enough for me to show that magic was behind it, then move on the the important stuff like gnashing teeth and spilled innards.
Happy Birthday, Blog
Mmmm moustache cake.
It was two years ago today that my first blog post went up. Lady Aravan read it. She’s a tremendous supporter that way. For several months I wrote, whatever random shit I could, just trying to train myself to get words on “paper” again, to an audience of one (then two, after a Peruvian farmer with bad English skills thought this was a gardening website). It had been so long since I’d written anything beyond a grocery list or vague jottings for a tabletop game that I wanted to see if I had what it took to write an actual story. I’d gotten an idea, see, and I wanted to see if I could make it work, if I could capture the thing that was in my brain.
That was two years ago. That idea has been published for just over a year now, for better or worse. My blog has soldiered on, sometimes neglected, other times ignored outright, but it’s been here, mostly unread (and much of it deserves that honor), but serving its purpose: keeping me in the habit of expressing myself through the magic of hunt-and-peck typing. In the last two or three weeks, my blog has seen an influx of people, some fellow writers, some friends, who have been kind and generous to me. The support you have all shown me here, from Lady Aravan on Day 1 to the latest person who foolishly clicks the link I post on Twitter or Facebook, means more than I can say. The problem with being a person known for sarcasm and jadedness (if it’s not a word, it is now) is the difficulty of communicating sincere and heartfelt emotion. But here it is: To the people that come here and read my words, Thank You. I love you all, because you help keep me sane, and keep that hope buried deep inside me that one day I could peck out stories and sell them for a living – that hope that keeps me in my dingy Matrix office every day, hoping towards tomorrow – you help keep that hope alive, and I am forever in your debt for it.
Later today I’ll put up a real post, something besides the blog-navel-gazing that I find tedious. But it’s a special occasion. So come on, blog, blow out the fucking candles already. You’re ruining my reputation.
I Am Apparently the World’s Least Organized Writer Ever
One of the many cool side effects of coming into contact with a whole slew of authors, indie and otherwise, is being able to hear about the writing process from other perspectives. It’s fascinating (to me) to hear about how people go through the creative process and what they do to keep on track and plot and plan and gather information and organize themselves and all the work that goes into the long painful birthing process. I’ve read about the outlines people put together. I’ve seen in-depth analysis (with pictures!) about the creation of character cards that detail each person’s description, personality, traits, and their connection to the other major and minor figures in the novel all charted on a huge whiteboard. Notebooks, scribblings, collages, all part of an organized approach to writing a novel.
I see this stuff, and all I can think of is: Holy shit, I am the least organized writer of all time. Read the rest of this entry
Winter in Derenemyn 