The Muse Named Jenni Has Won--I'm Working On ATWD: Siege

My plan was simple. I liked it. It felt good. I felt it would get my butt back into writing gear with FRESH NEW stuff and let me put the zombie deadlands aside for a few months.

I would work on a new piece of supernatural post-apocalyptic goodness all through February, revise it in March, send it off to the editor afterward, then possibly submit it to Permuted Press.

The best laid plans and all that...

I keep having dreams about Jenni and Katie. I keep having nightmares about zombies! Hell, I have Jenni's nightmares about zombies. They aren't diminishing, but increasing.

I've given up.

I'm working on the third book in the As The World Dies Trilogy. It's official.

The new work will have to wait for a month or two.

Stupid muse.

Freakin' Zombies.! Why Won't They Leave Me Alone!??!

Last night, all I did was dream about zombies.

Yuck.

It was like watching an anthology of shorts with different people/families trying to escape on the first days of the apocalypse. Sheer insanity. One desperate family was trying to escape a FEMA camp where the zombies were amassing outside the fences, but more survivors just kept getting routed into it. Another was a group of teenagers trying to get home and the older sister makes a really bad choice (when one of the kids opened the back door, I forced myself to wake up). Another was a grandmother, mom, and their kids trying to find safe refuge. There were soldiers firing randomly at cars and people as they lost control of the population. People running on foot when their cars couldn't go any further.

UGH!

It was awful.

I woke up and I was ragingly sick. Fever, swollen eyes, coughing, sore throat, asthma, the whole shebang.

I thought for sure I would have a nightmare about ghosts since we watched The Orphanage last night or about vampires, since I'm reading Tanith Lee's Blood Opera trilogy about the Scarabae.

But...oh..no! I dream about...

...freakin' zombies.

*sigh*

Oh, well. More fodder for future stories, I suppose.

The first of the edits are coming in already on As The World Dies: Fighting to Survive. I'm excited. The first editor to finish reading loved the novel and she felt it didn't suffer from a sophomore slump. That was a massive relief. I want to keep the story taunt, exciting, but emotional.

Anyway, I'm gonna go lay on the sofa now and stare at the TV. I think I may watch the Resident Evil movies. I'm in a cheesy, goofy kind of mood.

Ideas Are Ping-Ponging in My Head!! UGH!!! And A Few Writing Tips

I do not suffer from a lack of story ideas.

In one regard, this is very, very good. But in another, it is enough to make me utterly nuts.

Like most writers, I have a day job and that means I don't have the luxury of an entire day spent at the computer typing away on my latest inspiration. Instead, I come home, decompress from the long day, fix dinner, do some chores, maybe watch a show online (I just finished all three seasons of Arrested Development on Hulu.com) and try to fit at least two hours of writing in to the end of the day.

And, of course, I try not to ignore my husband (too much) or my pets.

It's rough to have all these ideas being born and feeling like I can't pay attention to them quite yet. I hate putting off writing something just because I got x y and z to take care of. Blah.

It's been especially chaotic in my head. I blame this on the zombie world receding as I put a little distance between me and the trilogy for a little bit. I need a breather from all my freaking zombie nightmares. Ugh! I actually dreamed about a ghost last night and I was pretty happy about that. Killing zombies all night in my sleep can be taxing after awhile.

Not to say that Katie and Jenni aren't far from my dreams or thoughts. I don't have enough distance yet to be totally zombie free. But I need to be this month. I need to decompress and embrace something new for a bit. Trust me, I got a lotta love for de zombies, but right now...

So what is bouncing around in my head at the speed of light? Well, a vampire short story, a dark fantasy, two vampire novels, and a really horrific apocalyptic novel that I am almost afraid to write. That one is going to spawn terrible nightmares.

I've decided to concentrate on the vampire short story and write down notes on everything else. I'll probably plunge into the vampire novel in January.

I won't have a respite from the zombies too long though. The edits are starting to come in and I think I'll put them off just another week. I want to write something fresh and new right now (i.e. the vampire short story) and get some distance from the As The World Dies movie in my head.

I would like to share how I will be getting my ping-ponging story ideas down so I can look at them later. Lynn Viehl has an awesome blog called Paperback Writer. She has created a really awesome tool for getting your ideas in line for a new story. She has The Novel Notebook posted at Scribd here.

I have had many people ask me how I write and I have to admit that it wasn't until the last two years that I figured out how to get my thoughts down in a coherent way. The Novel Notebook definitely helps get ideas down that I can't get to quite yet. But when I do write, I transfer that information into yWriter. yWriter is the BEST writing program in the world. It's amazing and I love it. But its not an editing program. There is no spellcheck or grammar check. It's all about getting your idea down in a cohesive and coherent manner. Once the story is written, you can then export it as an .rtf and edit it in Word or OpenOffice. Write first, edit later.

Anyway, I better get back to making dinner, then I need to get back into my writing groove.


P.S. Please spread the word about Pretty When She Dies to any vampire lovers you know out there! Thanks!

A Vampire Movie That Made Me CRY!!

I cannot fully express how much I loved this movie!

It was absolutely amazing!! I walked out of the theater completely inspired and deeply touched.

It is a hauntingly beautiful movie in every way. Beautifully acted and wonderfully shot, it is a gruesome and yet touching story. It is hard to even put it into words how incredible this movie is.

I highly recommend this movie to anyone who loves the vampire genre.

I think this may be my favorite vampire film of all time. It was just that damn good!

Sweet Dreams of Zombies and Vampires

Book Signing v 2.0

Saturday went quite well at the book signing. I actually signed books! That were already bought and brought in for me to sign, but, hey, I actually got to sign my lil' name! Everyone was cool about the shipment not arriving on time and the store has asked me back on October 11, 2008. That is the day the Zombie Ball happens at Elysium down on Red River and 7th in Austin, Texas. The store will be supporting the ball by doing a little pre-party and I will be there with my zombie novel.

I Feel Famous!!

The book shipment came in Monday. I dropped the pre-ordered books off at Secret Oktober. I also left five copies for whoever wants to snatch up a copy locally. While I was hanging out talking to my friend (who is the owner), she got a phone call from someone asking if the book was in stock. They wanted to pick one up. She was grinning like crazy when speaking to the customer and pitched the October 11th book signing. I was glowing!

The As The World Dies t-shirt RAWKS
My husband wore it this weekend and got a ton of compliments. It's really awesome. So go ahead and order one if you want one. They're really cool. I'm going to see if a local Austin t-shirt vendor can make the shirts for me locally, so we'll have them at the conventions next year.

Pretty When She Dies-A Vampire Novel

Well, what can I say? I do tend to be a ditz at times. I thought I had done all the revisions on the novel, but could not find the first nine chapters when I sat down to do them. So I thought that maybe I had already done them and forgotten. Uh. Yeah. That would make life easy. I botched it and didn't do those nine chapters. I am not going to put my copy editor through that kind of hell. So I'm reading through the chapters and fixing them up.

This is the novel I wrote in two and a half weeks. Because I was writing as fast as my little fingers could go, I have a lot of run on sentences. To be specific, I linked two sentences with an "and" that didn't need to be linked. If that makes sense.

Anyway, fixing that issue.

We're still trying to get this one out ASAP.

I hope to get the first chapter or two up on Scribd so you can take a sneak beak.

I've Been Interviewed!
CL. Fiere, the editor-in-chief of TREI Literary Magazine, contacted me recently about an interview for the October issue of the online magazine. I was thrilled to answer her questions and my interview is now up! Please check it out!

The entire magazine is fabulous and you'll have plenty to read and enjoy. I'm so glad to be part of such a wonderful issue.

And this zombie girl from TREI Literary Magazine will eat you if you don't check it out.

How's that to give you nightmares?

Dr. Pus Loves Me...or at Least My Book
To finish this off, I must give you the fabulous news that Dr. Pus' Library of the Living Dead podcast will feature the ENTIRE novel of As The World Dies: The First Days complete with voice actors, sound effects, music and Dr. Pus' own narration. Of course, this won't be dumped into one podcast, but spread out over time. I'm so excited!

Finally...
I'm making headway with As The World Dies: Fighting to Survive. I'm even dreaming about Jenni and Katie and lots and lots of zombies. That is a good thing, of course. It keeps me inspired.

I have to admit the best part of the book signing was when one woman said to me, "When is the next one coming out? I'm on pins and needles!"

It's coming. I promise. It's coming!

And One More Thing...
Here is a mock up of the cover for Pretty When She Dies. Rose Munoz of Excentric Visions Photography has been kind enough to let me use her awesome photograph on the cover!

I'm so excited!

Kindle, My Mad Crush, and General Insanity

It shouldn't be too long now, but soon As The World Dies: The First Days will be available for the Kindle. We were not going to go this route at first, but after several conversations with Indie Authors and hearing about the good response to this format, we went ahead and dove in. It was a total bitch to format, but thanks to April Hamilton's wonderful pdf on the subject, we sorted out the issues. We loaded it up last night and hopefully it will be available for any Kindle owners out there shortly.

Update: The Kindle version of the book is now for sale! Yay!!!

Back in April, I wrote about my mad crush on Morris Rosenthal. He wrote a very good book about self-publishing and has a very informative blog as well. I make sure to read it every week and it always gives me a lot to think about. Yesterday, he gave me a little shout out on his blog, which I thought was very cute. Of course, I just write about vampires, I'm not one myself (thank God! I'm Italian! I need my garlic!), but it was pretty damn funny. It actually made my day. Yeah, yeah, I'm easy to amuse. I'm low maintenance that way.

I have to say that both April Hamilton and Morris Rosenthal had a huge impact on me when I decided to go Independent and I am grateful for the advice they doll out on a regular basis to writers who want to see their words in print, but have battered themselves bloody against the gatekeepers of the publishing industry.

Today I was speaking with a colleague from one of our Dallas office and he was very intrigued with the news of my decision to be an Independent Author. He spoke of how he knows many musicians who spent years and years sending out demo tapes to recording companies. Now, they don't give a damn about the recording companies and are doing it on their own terms thanks to the new media. The Internet opened a gateway to a new form of success and many musicans have grabbed onto it.

Authors have been a little slower to adapt to the new media. My colleague even said, during our conversation, that many of the writers he knows have given up on their dreams of publication. "They gave up. They got too beaten down."

I was recently talking to Andrea Dean Van Scoyoc, a very successful Independent Author, via Myspace. We had spoken years ago when I was supposed to be polished by a small publishing house. Kody Boye had brought her up in a conversation and I remembered her almost instantly. I touched base with her again about her Twisted Dreams magazine and one of the things she said to me was that she was back to being an Independent Author after working with publishing houses the last two years. It was a reminder, once more, that the path I have chosen is a good one and it's up to me to make it work.

Meanwhile, promotion and the Kindle formatting nightmare has consumed a lot of my recent time, but I am making progress on the rewrite of As The World Dies: Fighting to Survive. The tangled mess is untangling slowly, but surely. It does feel good to be writing new scenes with my old familiar characters. Jenni had me giggling out loud the other night. Calhoun amuses me to no end.

In fact, I have come to realize Calhoun really does know where the zombies came from. He's just so batshit crazy, the way he describes things muddles it all up. But he knows far more than anyone around him realizes and that is much more to him than meets the eye.

Anyway, progress is progress...

Surrounded by Zombies

Strange how I ended up with a zombie trilogy, a zombie novella, and a series of zombie short stories considering my first and foremost love is for the vampire. Though, if I consider my past carefully, I realize that my love for the vampire was born out of my stark fear. They were my childhood bogeymen. They were the things I feared most appearing outside my window. Vampires were my night terror, my personal demon, my greatest fear. The only way I could make peace with that fear was to embrace them, to write about them.

I suppose, in a way, that is what I have now experienced with the zombies. The first time I saw Day of the Dead as a kid, I threw up. It terrified me. I refused to watch anymore zombie movies until an old boyfriend talked me into watching Night of the Living Dead with him. I had such terrible nightmares afterward, again, I swore off watching zombie films.

When my husband and I first started hanging out, we realized quickly we had a lot in common. We were constantly together and never bored, so I suppose it was inevitable we would end up together. For some reason, we decided to watch George A. Romero's Zombie Trilogy. I fell utterly in love with the movies. They scared me to death, but I loved the characters in the stories. I winced for those I cared about when they fell and cheered when ones I hated got their comeuppance. I tried watching a few other zombie movies after I was done with the original trilogy, but none had the feel or the emotional resonance that Romero's did.

I did enjoy the remake of Dawn of the Dead, but again, I only truly cared about whether or not one character lived or died (and he was bitten right before the boat). I feared the zombies, but I just didn't care too much about the characters.

I'm not sure why I wrote that first short story (Tiny Fingers). Maybe it was to gain control over a bad nightmare I had. Or just to try something different. I remember just wanting to get the story into words and posted for people to see. I had read a lot of online zombie fiction before I wrote my own story. And like at lot of the zombie movies, I just didn't really care about the characters or the situations they were in.

As The World Dies: The First Days is exactly what I wanted it to be. A strong zombie story with lots of action, gore and characters you care about. I would never claim to be the master story teller George Romero is in his wonderful tales of the undead, but he definitely inspired me to find the heart of the story and embrace it.

I still love my vampires. I will be returning to them. I admit I was rather snobbish about my vampire novels and treated my zombie story like the red headed stepchild in the beginning. But I have learned to embrace both sets of monsters and the worlds they inhabit.



I'm okay with being not just a writer of vampire fiction, but of zombie fiction as well.

But those werewolves....man...that's a whole other story...

Twilight-Sparkly Vampires and the People Who Love Them

My brush with fandom has been limited, but enjoyable. When I wrote my column Midnight Musings with the Goth Goddess for the Central Texas entertainment mag The Edge Magazine, I was surprised to receive fan mail. I was writing about the scene I love (Goth/Industrial) and it was actually quite a bit of fun. To end up having people writing in to me to tell me how much they were enjoying my column was a surprise, but also quite reassuring. To find out I had an audience was actually a very nice feeling. I wasn't just writing for myself after all.

Fast forward to the original posting of "Tiny Fingers" (the first scene in As The World Dies) a year later and the immediate response I received from people wanting more. Again, I was a little floored. My FIRST FAN, as I like to call him, was nice enough to PM me and encourage me when along with the praise and requests for more, I got a few really snarky comments from old timers on the board. I kept writing and the emails and messages kept coming in. If not for that first batch of die hard fans, I'm not sure if I would have kept going. I never did see myself as a writer of zombie apocalyptic horror, so to end up writing what ended up to be a fairly epic story, shocked me. I give full credit to the fans that kept me going.

Which brings me to the most powerful fandom out there right now. The Twilighters. They are die hard, fanatical, devoted and passionate about the Twilight series. In fact, I was not going to read Twilight at all (though I thought the cover was amazing) until someone in my book club selected that book for the month of August. I picked the book up in WalMart while grocery shopping and ended up devouring it in three days as I rode the Capital Metro bus to work.

I have to say the book was like crack. I could not freaking put it down. And yet I was annoyed with quite a few things in the book, yet I kept reading. I couldn't stop reading. I wanted to finish and figure out what was going on. By the time I hit the last page, I was glad I had read Twilight, but I honestly didn't feel like reading the rest of the books.

If I had read this book in my teens or even early twenties, I am pretty sure I would have plowed through to the end of the series. It definitely is in the tradition of old romance novels and very appealing if you're hoping for a true, romantic love to show up in your life. I think Edward is definitely part of the tradition of the brooding, almost cruel hero from classic literature from Wuthering Heights and Jane Eyre. I disliked him a good portion of the book, yet I sympathized with him. Bella came across like most teenage girls and she didn't really bother me at all.

I was disappointed to find out there were going to be three more books. I felt Twilight should have ended with Edward making Bella a vampire. Yet, I couldn't blame the fans for wanting more. I decided to check out of the series because I just couldn't see there being any possibility of a triangle that everyone was talking about (Bella was totally smitten with Edward). The last book, Breaking Dawn, recently came out and a lot of people have been disappointed in its resolution of a love triangle I found difficulty in even believing in after the first book.

Watching the posts flying back and forth between a lot of those who hated the last book and the ones who loved it, I couldn't help but wonder if the fandom had actually worked against their own writer and the series they loved.

What do I mean by that?

By the fans wanting more, the author may have stretched out the story too long. I believe strongly that a story should have a definitive arc to it that makes sense and doesn't feel forced. I believe that well-crafted characters need to operate within the structure of their personality. To force a character to do something that goes against their established nature just comes across as tampering and jarring. To force a story arc to last longer that it should makes the story seem long winded and watered down. And to break the rules of your established cannon, well, that's just wrong.

When you have a fan base, you definitely feel an obligation to give them what they want. Of course, you may take this in a wrong direction and give them what they literally want, point by point, and end up throwing off your own story. I remember The Lost World movie was a huge disappointment to many who had read the sequel to Jurassic Park and Steven Spielberg said he had basically filled the movie with scenes the fans wanted to see. The last of the Twilight series seemed to follow this pattern. One of the common complaints I read against the book was that the pregnancy of Bella and how she gets everything she wants with zero sacrifice, felt like fan fiction.

I adore my fans. I listen to my fans. But I also know what the characters and the story demand to make the books solid reads. Some fans lobbied hard for certain characters to stay alive in As the World Dies and I struggled with a few of the deaths. I'm a big ol' softie by nature, but I knew that certain characters were not making it to the end of the books. Their natural story arc would end in their deaths and to tamper with it would water down the overall story. It was HARD at times to write those deaths. I loved the characters. I loved their voices, but I knew I could not betray the world I had created.

Fans are a powerful force in the lives of a writer. They can lift you up when you're down and feeling overwhelmed. They can inspire you to keep going when you feel utterly burned out. But, I believe that a writer needs to not cater to the specific demands of a fan base, but do their best to give their fans the best damn story they can. No pulled punches. No easy outs.

I think the Twilighters are an amazing fan base. Devoted to a degree that is almost mind-boggling, but the disappointment of so many with the last book in the series did inspire me to deep introspection about my writing and my own fans.

I love you, guys and gals. I'll give you the best story I can. You just may not always be particularly happy with me.

Moody Lil Bitches

A very long time ago, I bought a replica of this painting. I had no idea who it was or what it was even about. I just knew I loved it at first sight. It now hangs in my home and people often comment on it. It's a stark, intense painting and I love it.

Years later, I found out that the painting was of Sappho, a legendary writer that remains highly regarded to this day. "Dark little Sappho" with her brooding intensity appealed to me when I was still discovering my own writer's voice. The fact she is such a highly regarded female writer of lyric poetry appeals to me. She stands among greats and is considered by some to be the greatest.

Of course, she is also well known for her homoerotic poetry and her name and the place of her birth, Lesbos, has heavily influenced the lesbian community. I may not be gay (though some of my characters are!), but I can see why they adore her.

She's a strong woman who made an impact on our world.

I adore strong women. I also happen to be one. It's often not an easy role to have when people see you as a pillar of strength in adversity. It puts a helluvalot of pressure on you to go beyond what you feel are your limits. I admit I'm often shocked at how much I can accomplish when I push myself. Family, friends and co-worker see me as someone they can depend on and as I grow older, I am more comfortable with this role.

But when it comes to my role as a writer....UGH!!

I really love what I write. I wouldn't write it if I didn't want to read it. I often write because I want to know how the damn story ends! But just because I adore a certain character and love to hang out in an imaginary world does not necessarily mean everyone out there will, too.

I cruise writer's blogs. It's cool to see what's up in the minds of other people slogging away at their computers to create fantastic worlds. Two topics caught my eye recently: self-promotion and reviews.

I have to admit, both of these things make me shudder.

I love positive reviews, but the negative ones can be a little disconcerting. Whenever I get a negative review, I consider what the reader is saying seriously (unless its obvious they're just trolling). If I want to be the best writer I can be, I'm going to have to take some hits and learn from them when they are legit. It just sucks donkey balls to realize you've goofed it. But if I realize its legit, I do take care to evolve and change. I am not perfect, so I know my writing won't be either. It does annoy the hell out of me when some one's version of a review is them telling you how they would write your story (...and you should have so and so die and the robot should really be blah blah blah...and this gun should be..and blah blah blah). Reviews are tricky things. They are valuable when they give you new perspective. But when I realize someone is just being a troll, I just ignore and keep going.

As for the whole self promotion thing...yuck. I have noticed that most writer's websites look identical and they all write in a particular style in their blogs. I'm not stupid. I know the pack mentality when I see it. I've never done well with packs. I'm that weird girl standing on the outside of it. Hell, I was Goth before I knew what Goth was.

But I can't fault the other authors for this. Our whole society is obsessed with either being this really cool individual that sticks out from the crowd (so we can ridicule them later) or running with the pack of the cool peeps(so we can ridicule them later). And when people see something is working for a successful author, I think the inclination is that is they have the magic formula, quick, grab it!

Mary Janice Davidson, for example, is credited for creating paranormal chick lit. The woman is freaking hilarious and foul mouthed to boot. Seriously warped. She makes me laugh out loud when I'm reading her Betsy series (the mermaid series..not so much though). As soon as she hit the big time, the market flooded with knock offs. I tried reading one, but it really sucked (no pun intended) and I couldn't stand it. I didn't even finish it or if I did, I have blocked it from my mind! Long story short, I don't read any paranormal chick lit but MJD. Everything else just feels fake.

Laurell K. Hamilton, meanwhile, is well known at this point in her career for books full of vampire and furry were-animal orgies. I loved the books in the Anita Blake series until Narcissus in Chains. It was in that book that all that had come before took a flying leap out the window and we all fell down the rabbit hole into paranormal porn theater. When LKH wrote that infamous "Dear Negative Reader" post, she was writing to me. I have completely checked out of that series and the Merry one and I'm not spending a cent on the books anymore. But she makes the big bucks and has lots of fans, so there are copycats everywhere. Sunny is one that comes to mind with her Mona Lisa books. I read one of her short stories in an anthology and actually checked online to see if it was LKH in disguise. Nope. Just a copycat. I don't read either author.

Its so bizarre to feel so much pressure to be a unique writer but at the same time fit into the pack. I see it on so many blogs and articles about the publishing world it makes my head spin. "Stand out to the agents and publishing houses!" headlines scream over articles that tell you how to stun and amaze the gatekeepers. Of course, this will most likely result in a nice form letter that reads "This is not what we are looking for. We want paranormal chick lit and erotic werewolf vampire orgies". Okay, leave off the second sentence, but that's what you'll end up with. Try and stand out and you'll probably get kicked to the curve.

I would love to think that as an Independent Author I'm free of these two sharp barbs, but I'm not. I will have reviews that I will want to frame and hang on my wall and others that will probably make me want to crawl under my desk. I'll face the big questions of "Do I just be my normal, weird gothy self or try and look like I'm normal. Is what I'm writing the way to go or should I try something different?"

At this point, I'm inclined to just be who I am in my blog, website and myspace. I'm going to write what I want to read and hope people like it. The pressure is still there...to stun and amaze with my wonderful individuality...while running with the pack and hanging with the cool kids.

Eh...

Goths dress better anyway....

Just check out Sappho...