#SonofaPitch #4: Talisman

For my regular readers, these are some special posts this week as part of a pitch contest I'm providing feedback for.

For participants, welcome to my blog! I'm happy to host you and excited to see what kinds of stories you've written. Please remember that only the author of this piece and the participating judges are supposed to comment. All other comments will be deleted.

Title: Talisman

Category and Genre: Adult/Fantasy

Word Count: 90,000


Query:

In Talisman, ordinary people are drawn to ordinary objects with the power to fill the holes in their lives. A plain young woman discovers a mirror that transforms her into whatever person she wants to be. A hopeless gambler finds a lucky coin. A blind girl obtains glasses that enable her to see. The main protagonist, Adam—a millennial stuck in a mind-numbing job, with no girl, no prospects, no purpose—finds a key that enables him to summon untapped willpower and envision possibility. So of course he has no idea what to do with it. That’s when Adam meets Delilah and is drawn into the middle of a secret war between the Order, which believes the talismans are the key to natural selection, and the Following, which believes the talismans herald the Second Coming and that Adam may be the martyr for whom they’ve been waiting. So Adam must find his true purpose, decide whether he can trust Delilah, and avoid becoming a casualty.


First 250 Words:

A darkness without end, she had been born without sight. She likes to think that the fleeting memory of being born into the world, a world of light and movement, was real. Her doctors had ignored such reminisces.

If true, no matter how unlikely, it is unimportant now. What is more cruel, a child who could once see or one who would never know the loss? Such questions were philosophical.

She likes to imagine red. It seems pure. Is it like "sharp" or "hot"? Is it "blaring" or "piercing?"

There are those who muse that one person's red could look blue to another and vice versa. The subject and the name would be the same, the experience divergent. Who can tell?

Some brains were wired differently. They could smell green or see sweet. It was all a matter of perception, not worse, just different. She had consoled herself with such thoughts.

The doctors had given her mother too much oxygen or perhaps it was the nurses. They had not heeded the monitors. She had been a newborn. Her mother died giving birth to her. Everyone said there was nothing that could have been done.

She did not accept that. Her attorney had won compensation. She got A's studying Braille high school text books. Some things just happen. Some things people make happen.

The apartment building is quiet but not silent. The floors creak. Someone is moving about behind a closed door.

#SonofaPitch #3: Chained

For my regular readers, these are some special posts this week as part of a pitch contest I'm providing feedback for.

For participants, welcome to my blog! I'm happy to host you and excited to see what kinds of stories you've written. Please remember that only the author of this piece and the participating judges are supposed to comment. All other comments will be deleted.

Title: CHAINED
Age and Genre: Adult Fantasy
Word Count: 118k


Query:

When slavers steal her from her village in the wastes of the southern continent, Astara doesn’t expect to emerge from a horrific ritual with the power to accomplish unexplainable feats. But being cursed with magic also bestows her with another unwelcomed gift: a lifetime of enslavement.

Wishing to return to her family, Astara is instead sold to a pair of cosmopolitan, ladder-climbing nobles who already own a famous dancer, Dahlia Vessa. But Dahlia is not who she seems to be: she’s a double agent, spying on her masters for a clandestine faction called the Nameless Circle.

The Circle fights to free those branded with magic, but they’re not the only ones set on freeing the city’s slaves. Astara and Dahlia are soon caught in the middle of an underground war between the Circle, and another faction who seek to exterminate those without magic.

The factions soon discover the two women are a pairing of Arcana SiFayn, an incredibly rare type of mage who combine powers to cast devastatingly strong magic. With control of either one of them, the Circle and Revs believe they would have the power to change the tide of the war against the masters to their subversive objectives.

But after Dahlia is arrested for murder due to the wild powers of their connection, Astara must find a way to free her friend before she’s executed for her alleged crimes, or worse: the Revenants convince her to join them in their genocidal crusade.

First 250 words:

Ministers escorted a line of captives across the length of the square training area, cruel cold cobblestones under their bare feet. At the end of the queue, shivering and teeth chattering, a young woman followed, shuffling her steps before crossing an open door’s threshold and entering a crumbling wood building. Holding her chained wrists against her chest, she stared at the floor, the pale morning light casting the Ministers’ shadows across the planked boards like mythical phantoms ready to strike. She startled when the door clapped closed behind her.

Nearly all the Ministers Astara encountered possessed magic–powers they could use to do things she had only dreamed of before slavers kidnapped her from her village on the southern continent. Lighting. Fire. Throwing objects without touching them. Slamming a door without so much as lifting a finger was hardly the most impressive feat, but she still didn’t understand how any of them did it. Her people didn’t have magic on the Mountain; in all her twenty-two years of life on the Great Southern Plains, in the region known as the “Dustbin” to the local Rykonians, she’d never seen anything like it.

In front of her, the other captives continued to walk in sync further into the building, and Astara’s chains attached to them yanked her forward. She stumbled and wobbled, her vision blurring, but managed to stay upright, feeling like she’d been awake for days on a hunt. Maybe she’d not quite woken up, her body sluggish and lethargic.

#SonofaPitch #2: Forge Bay

For my regular readers, these are some special posts this week as part of a pitch contest I'm providing feedback for.

For participants, welcome to my blog! I'm happy to host you and excited to see what kinds of stories you've written. Please remember that only the author of this piece and the participating judges are supposed to comment. All other comments will be deleted.

Title: FORGE BAY
Category and Genre: Adult Fantasy
Word Count: 108,000


Query:

Jona is a young warrior, bonded as concubine to a powerful kin chief she despises. Forbidden to wield her spear, she rails against a life trapped behind the loom, but cannot leave if she hopes to preserve the final shred of her family's prestige.

When one of the chief’s fighters is killed in a failed ambush, his honorless kin captures the man they deem guilty. Roused by memory of her brother’s unlawful death, Jona attempts to free the captive before he faces retribution. After botching the rescue, she inadvertently opens a Farstep, an entryway to a lost realm enabling her to travel anywhere in the world within moments. Jona must decide whether she can trust the stranger beside her as she chooses between the unknown dangers beyond the Farstep, or the swift wrath of the kin she’s desperate to leave behind.

Meanwhile, Age is a reluctant prodigy of the people who maintain a tenuous link to the little magic left in the world. His unmatched ability to control the essences of nature should be a boon. To Age, his talents only mire him in suffocating responsibilities.

When a strange new power beckons to him in a way he can’t ignore, his instincts urge him to investigate. Eager to spy on the Farstep and avoid the awful sacrifice his people demand of him, Age uses his magic to infiltrate the kin. But he never expects to befriend Jona, and to regret the lie that has her believing he’s someone he’s not. Caught between conflicting loyalties, Age faces an impossible choice: to serve his people, or save his friend.

First 250 Words:

The band of raiders returned at sunset.

Jona sensed the glimmer of a dozen lives in her mind as they neared the seaside farm on horseback. She stilled the shuttle of the loom she shared with Elva, and lifted a hand to block the light from the setting sun so she could watch the raiders’ triumphant return through the weaving room’s narrow window. Sunlight speared defiantly across the plains, threatening to dazzle her vision—but wasn’t bright enough to wash out the thrashing profile of a person tied behind one of the mounts, being dragged through the grass until the riders dismounted in the yard. And atop that horse—

It couldn’t be.

She lunged, kicking aside her cushions to reach the open window. Golden sunlight glinted off motes of grit churned up by the people and horses milling in the yard a stone’s throw away. Coughing, Jona waved away the dust as she pulled herself into the overgrown window well.

The answer to her prayers rested casually over the rump of the nearest horse.

“Jona?” Elva’s voice, empty of its normal laughter, nearly drowned within the roaring of Jona’s own heartbeat as it echoed in her ears. “What’s wrong?”

“Our raiders are back,” Jona said, hardly paying attention to what she was saying. There was a man lying in the grass, covered in dirt and straw, trying to draw himself up to his knees. As he stirred, one of the raiders turned and booted him in the ribs.

#SonofaPitch #1: Traditor

For my regular readers, these are some special posts this week as part of a pitch contest I'm providing feedback for.

For participants, welcome to my blog! I'm happy to host you and excited to see what kinds of stories you've written. Please remember that only the author of this piece and the participating judges are supposed to comment. All other comments will be deleted.

Title: Traditor
Category and Genre: Adult Science Fiction
Word Count: 130,000

Query:
When Mer York meets a charming man named Bryn in the park, she doesn’t suspect that he’s actually a civil disobedient—a Dissenter—on the run from the law. When government agents known as Company Men link her to him, Mer is thrust into a world of secret organizations in which her allegiance could mean the difference between freedom and subjugation not only for her, but for the entire country.

Traditor is a tale of adventure and romance in a society where government surveillance has grown out of control. The novel follows Mer’s transformation from a dutiful government worker to a Dissenter. Although initially intending to sabotage Bryn’s plans, Mer begins to reevaluate her beliefs when she discovers that the chip he carries was designed by Company Men to control people’s minds. Mer decides to turn traitor and fight to keep the chip safe until its existence can be made known. At the end of many adventures Bryn and Mer seem to be in the clear—until a comrade’s death leads to betrayal by one of their own.

First 250 Words:
She was never sure what woke her. Maybe there was a noise, something she couldn’t remember when she was fully awake. Maybe it was a sort of sixth sense, the feeling that lets you know you’re being watched from behind. Whatever it was, Mer opened her eyes just as the heavy moon hid its face behind a cloudbank.

She lay immobile for a moment. She often woke before her alarm, a product of years of conditioning, years of dreading the moment the buzzer would go off. Normally it was two or three minutes before, however. Judging from the darkness and the dead calm of her neighborhood Mer thought it must be much earlier: two at the very latest.

She should just go back to sleep. Maybe she ought to get up and take a pill? No, no need. Mer could feel fatigue pulling her under.

Her eyes had drifted shut, the wisps of dreams just beginning when she heard the creak.

Her first instinct was to sit up, but Mer forced herself to lie still. It was a neighbor, she told herself. Someone moving around their house downstairs.

There was another, softer this time. It’s the floorboards. This isn’t exactly a new place. Houses get old, houses groan. It’s nothing. Go back to bed.

Then she heard the creak again.

#IWSG: Time for writing

How do you find the time to write in your busy day? 

That is the $64,000 question, isn't it? The truth is that I don't "find the time." I FIGHT for it. I wrest it from the jaws of dangerous beasts with my bare hands. I hack it from the calendar with a machete. I steal it, then run away and gobble it up in secret.

Well, maybe it's not that dramatic, but it is a struggle. I have a day job, a family, a husband, a dog, a house…all things that covet and demand my time and attention. They're all also things I love and value, that I *want* to spend time on and with, unlike the housework and grocery shopping, which I'm happy to push aside for writing.

But I do have a daily writing habit (I'm a Magic Spreadsheet devotee) and it HAS made a huge difference in my productivity and happiness. So, here's how I got there:

1. Household meeting: If you share your living space with others humans, you're going to need to have a direct talk about "writing time." At La Casa Bryant, this amounted to a family meeting where I announced my intentions to write every day and told them I would need support in the form of "alone time" to do that. I was tired of packing up and going to coffee shops and libraries and wanted to do my writing at home.

We planned together to figure out when would be the most workable time for us. That ended up being 8:30 at night at first, with my husband and older daughter agreeing to deal with the younger daughter's needs if any arose after her 8:00 bedtime. It wasn't ideal for me, as I was often physically and mentally weary by then, but it was better than nothing and I started writing at least 250 words a day (now I'm up to 800ish on school days and 2000 on non-school days most of the time).

Disclaimer: Not my actual sink, though it is sometimes this bad. 

2. Work space: I wanted to be able to write at home, but that was hard at first. At home, you have to discipline yourself to ignore all the other pulls of home. I'm pretty good at writing among chaos and noise of certain sorts, so it works for me most of the time, and when it doesn't, I shut myself in the bedroom where I can close the door on everyone else. There's no home office space available for me without moving, so I adapted.

For a while, I had to go out. But I had less control of my environment in coffeeshops and libraries and, even with headphones, had interruptions and pulls of my attention that cost me writing time. After all, I can't insist that other coffee shop patrons talk more quietly or sit further away like I can with my family. Plus I had to spend time getting there and back instead of just popping open the laptop and going.

3. Mental space: This part was hard for me. I'm a mom and a middle school teacher, so generally that means my own needs and wants are very very last on the list of priorities. So, step one for me was to convince myself that it was okay to insist on having this time. I couldn't utilize my writing time well if my head was full of guilt and to-do lists, so I had to learn to set that aside, at least for an hour at a time.

Now I know I'm a better wife and mother when I get my writing time because I get that release and don't resent my family for keeping me from it. In fact, if I'm cranky, they might recommend that I "go write for a while."

4. Sacrifices: There are only so many hours in the day. So, if you're going to add regular writing time, you probably have to give something up. For me, that was television. I don't like it that much anyway, so it wasn't too painful. My own stories do more for my soul, even while they are beating me up in the process. I save up television time for summer vacation and then Netflix to my heart's content (I had almost eight weeks this summer--it's not the nice long break it used to be when I started teaching, but I'm still glad to have it). But that gave me back 1-2 hours a day to use in other ways. You'd be surprised what I can do with 1-2 hours a day.

So, there's my story. What's yours? How do you arrange your life to leave room for writing or other creative pursuits?
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If you're not already following #IWSG (Insecure Writer's Support Group), you should really check it out. The monthly blog hop is a panoply of insight into the writing life at all stages of hobby and career. Search the hashtag in your favorite social media venue and you'll find something interesting on the first Wednesday of every month.

1,000 days and Counting: Don't Break the Chain!

A couple of months ago I hit a major milestone in my writing life: I hit my one-thousandth day in a row of writing. I've written before about the Magic Spreadsheet, back when I first started using it in 2013, and later that same year when I was clocking along at 500 words a day. Now that I'm more than 1,000 days and 1,000,000 words in, it seems like a good time to think about this tool and how/why it works so well for me.

In the history of my writing life, starting when I was a child and continuing until I was 42 years old, I started hundreds of projects and never finished a one. I'd write until I hit something that stopped me (either within the story, or in my life)…then I'd stop. When I came back, I always started something new.

That's fine, if you want to write just for the enjoyment of writing. But I wanted to *be* a writer, with books for sale in bookstores. Maybe even make my living at it someday. You can't do that on unfinished work.

People are motivated by different things. I honestly didn't expect the Magic Spreadsheet to be as effective for me as it has been. After all, I've tried point systems and gamifications of various sorts for other aspects of my life (exercise, chores, etc.) and it only works for a little while. They usually feel artificial and constricting to me--but this one was different.

I don't really care about my number of points or my rankings against other writers that much (Okay, maybe I do check to make sure that I'm ahead of Chad in points, since he'll always be ahead of me on number of days).

But I have a chain--a chain of 1,066 days as I write this. And it's maintaining that chain that has me writing every day, even when life is busy and even when I feel terrible, even when the children are sick and the Internet is down, even when I'm on vacation or have to do my writing on the mom couch at lessons. The longer the chain of days written in a row grows, the less likely it becomes that I will break it. I'll cut myself the slack to make a weaker link on some days (only writing 250 words, the minimum), but mostly I write somewhere between 800 and 4,000 words a day now, and that adds up fast.

Now, that explains why I write every day, but not why it helped me finish things. That, I think is physics: momentum in particular. Momentum fed by sheer stubbornness.

If I'm not allowed to drop a project (because that would break the chain!), then I have to find a way to move forward in it, thinking my way out of corners I'd trapped myself in, digging my way out of holes I'd fallen into. I have to find a way or I'll break the chain, you see.

It's been freeing in my writing process, too because I'll let myself write something I'm not sure is going to be right. Wanting to get it "right" was part of what would stop me in the past--I wouldn't write it until I was sure I knew where it was going. Now, I'll write a scene three different ways to see which is better. They all go into the word count, and I'll choose the right one (or combine them, or scrap them all and try again) in the final version. Once I got to "the end" for the first time, I was able to trust in the process in a way I never had before.

So, how about you? What works for you to keep moving forward when you hit blocks in your endeavors? Does tracking help? Or does it make you feel trapped? Would love to hear your stories in the comments.

What to Drink From in the Morning

My teaching life is about to step up into full gear again. I'm in teacher workdays this week. They are interesting days with a range of meetings (from rage-inducing and time-wasting to thoughtful and useful), intermixed with far too little time left unscheduled and usable for classroom organization and lesson planning. I miss the days when they just let teachers work on teacher work days.

On Monday, the kids are back.

Something I'm trying this year is getting up earlier and giving myself a positive, well-paced morning to lead into the hectic melee we call the school day. This is challenging. Even after twenty years of teaching, I am not a morning person. The husband and I are trying morning yoga practice and I am trying breakfast.

I'm not a breakfast eater, generally, though I know that it is generally considered a good thing to do for your health and wellbeing. Food is unappealing to me first thing when I wake. And traditional breakfast foods (cereal, milk, yogurt, toast, eggs, etc.) are even less so. It's a little better if I don't eat breakfast foods. Leftover supper warmed up is something I'm trying. Protein heavy. I'm giving it a go, but I'm not a fan.

I am a fan of the hot drink varieties of caffeine though: coffee and tea. Especially tea. And I know that the experience is enhanced when you have the right mug to drink it out of. So, I'm mug shopping--in my own cabinets because I'm a teacher in North Carolina (that means I'm chronically broke because they pay peanuts here).

There are a few different things that make a mug perfect.

First, there's the weight. The mug should have some heft, so that you don't tip it over by just because you flicked your hand awkwardly reaching for the blueberries. But it can't be too heavy, where you end up settling it too heavily on the table and sloshing the liquid heaven onto your hand and tablecloth. Tea is much better INSIDE mama than OUTSIDE.

Then there's the shape of rim and how it feel against your lips. I like one that's curved inward, so that when I lift the cup, the warm nirvana is guided down my gullet like it's riding a slide into wonderland. I don't like the ones that feel thin and plastic-y when they bump against my teeth. I really don't like the ones that curve outward, so that the liquid flows into the upper palate and ends up dribbling on my blouse.

Feel in the hand is also important. I have arthritis, so my hands are often stiff and sore in the morning. I like a taller mug with enough surface area to wrap my fingers around and warm the swollen joints. I like a nice retention of heat that comes with thicker sides. Again, not the thin and delicate sort for me. They're pretty, but I don't like to hold them. I always feel like I will break them with my clumsiness (and often have done exactly that).

Retention of heat in the drink itself is also vital. Mugs that are too large, especially the ones that widen towards the top, have too much surface area and the drink can become cold while you are still staring blankly at the sunlight dappling the tabletop and noticing the dust motes it reveals. By the time you remember to pick it up and sip--ew! cold tea. (Oddly, I love iced tea, but cannot countenance hot tea that has become cold).

And lastly, there's the art. Whether it's caffeine humor, a picture of your kids, or just a nice pattern you like, the mug should lift your spirits when you look at it.

So, I found my perfect one. It's my Elmo's mug. It's a traditional diner mug, hefty but not heavy in my hands, large enough to warm my hands and shaped to keep my drink warm, too. It has that curve in the side that keeps my drink pouring in the right direction. And Elmo's is special. It's the first place my now-husband and I had breakfast together. It's the one restaurant choice guaranteed to please all four Bryants. Seeing the mug lifts my heart thinking about Sweetman's face smiling in the lovely morning sunlight through their long windows or my youngest giving me a chocolate chip pancake grin, or my eldest stealing my warm cinnamon apples and giving me a teasing look that says, "What? I'm completely innocent here."

In short, it makes me feel love and loved, and that, my friends, is the right thing to drink from in the morning.