Category Archives: For Writers

Wanna Know Where The Crazy Lives? It’s ‘Between the Covers’

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As part of the Orangeberry Summer Splash, I came across a pretty amazing author, Terra Harmony. I reviewed her book; she graced my lil ol’ blog with a guest post. Then, we started to talk. I found out a couple things about Terra (she’s really, really funny) and about the writing process in general. We decided to share those conversations with all you in a little series called “Between the Covers” (not those covers–book covers–nasty…).

Session one is up over at Terra’s blog now. Part 2 will be back here on Friday. Check it out and tell us what you think!

Festival of Fiendishness: ANNIE WILKES

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Writers are pretty much the top of the food chain: we have few natural predators. Our imaginations and Wikipedia keep us, for the most part, out of harms way. We spend the majority of our time in a seated position, scribbling on pads or tapping at keyboards. The most likely hazard of the writing profession is carpal tunnel. And severe caffeine withdrawal. And chairs with poor lumbar support.

And fame.

Fame changes everything. Sure you want people to read your stories, until they start leaving negative comments and reviews. Or pressuring you for the next release. Or taking your ass hostage and tying you to the bed until you resurrect their favorite character you killed in the last book.

Yes, my wicked little readers, today’s villain is the Queen of Literary Terror and the sexiest thing in denim cotton floral print frock, Annie Wilkes from Misery, played by Maxim 100 beauty, Kathy Bates.

Your girl is avid fan of the Misery Chastain romance series. When she finds out the author, Paul Sheldon, has killed off Misery herself, thus ending the series, Annie is hotter than Twilight fans finding out Kristen Stewart was stepping out on Robert Pattinson. So my man’s car accident that leaves him with two broken legs in the middle of a blizzard down the street from Annie’s house is “fortuitous.”

She does what anybody—and especially a “number one fan”—would do: she bundles Paul up, takes his raggedy ass to her house, and, rather than call the police or the paramedics or even the fucking WonderPets, Annie proceeds to torture the shit out of him until he agrees to write another Misery Chastain book bringing Misery back to life. And I’m talking about withholding care and pain meds or cutting off his thumb when he gets mad about a letter missing on the typewriter. This can’t end well, right?

So while he’s writing, Annie takes a couple trips into town. This gives Paul a little bit of time to go investigating, and he does, Shaggy and Scooby-style. Sneaking around on wobbly legs looking for clues, Paul finds out that Annie absolutely is getting coal in her stocking: your girl is a serial killer in a jumper and has been killing people for years. When Annie finds out about Paul’s little excursions into her private life, she decides to “limit” him. If you watched the movie, this is the part where she ties homey to the bed, places a wedge of wood between his feet, and BREAKS HIS ANKLES WITH A SLEDGEHAMMER! Annie ain’t 100 percent And this is tame compared to what she did to my man in the book: cuts off his foot and cauterizes it with a blowtorch. What kind of shit?

And she goes out like a G: she kills a cop by running him over with a lawnmower (read that again: she rain him over with a LAWNBOY!), takes a typewriter blow to the head, gets choked out and takes a header into a mantle. But she still won’t die! After going two rounds with Paul Sheldon Michael Meyers-style, Annie finally dies while trying to start her chainsaw. I think I heard 50 Cent singing “I don’t know what you heard about me” at the end of the movie.

Annie Wilkes is awesome because she’s a romance-novel reading, Country Living magazine dressed hot pocket of unmitigated crazy. Sports figures, celebrities, and rock stars have the corner on fruitcake fans; you don’t ever hear about authors becoming a victim of their fans. Annie Wilkes teaches us that fame is fame is fame is fame and there’s enough crazy to go around. For all my author friends, I bet you’ll take that one star review over the alternative, huh?

Next up, like sand in the hour glass, so are the days of our lives (yeah, I’ve seen a soap opera before. I’m man enough to admit it)—Victor Kiriakis comes to the Festival!

Water (The Akasha Series #1) – Book Review #OBSummer

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Let me get this out the way: Kaitlyn Alder is BADASS!

And now for the more subdued part of my review:
I read Water as part of the OrangeBerry Summer Splash Blog Tour and was introduced to Kaitlyn, her elemental powers and the eco-fantasy genre all in one fell swoop. And Terra Harmony, the author, doesn’t waste any time throwing you into the action. Some readers like to move into stories gradually—they want to learn about the sunlight, the intricate shapes the shadows make dappling on pavement, the sounds of children playing from the nearby park wafting through the air. Yeah, screw all that! Harmony introduces us to Kaitlyn as she’s snowboarding for her life, trying to outrun an avalanche.

She fails.

And that’s just the first chapter.

From here we learn that Kaitlyn is more than a globe-trotting, freelance photographer with intimacy issues: she’s a Gaia—a person with the ability to manipulate the elements (Air, Wind, Water, and Fire). Problem is Kaitlyn’s all power with none of the control. Where we’d love a light breeze, your girl is causing Hurricane Katrina. Not only that, she’s in the custody of an eco-friendly (but pretty freaking poor), shadowy group called The Seven. They lock her up, don’t tell her anything, vaguely answer her questions, are footloose and fancy free with sedatives, and promise to teach her about her powers.

What I like about Kaitlyn is that she takes none of this lying down: she puts a hurting on everyone until she gets the answers the wants or until her curiosity is peaked. And she’s got a smart-ass sense of humor. She’s all attitude, has great one-liners and a good right cross—it’s more like Captain Planet meets The Last Airbender with a little Firestarter thrown in there for good measure.

I’m gonna stop so I don’t ruin it: Water and its follow up, Air, are both available (you can get it on Amazon and Water is FREE!) and Book #3, Earth, is due out pretty soon. It’s a good, action-packed read. But I do have to say, Kaitlyn’s journey is no walk in the park: just because it has fantasy in the genre, don’t think this is Hunger Games. Harmony deals with some very adult themes in a very adult way and some of the sex scenes in this book are non-consensual.

I have a couple of cons. First, you know how I love my villains, right? Not a fan of this guy. At all. For all the crap he put Kaitlyn through, what he wanted was neither clear nor really all that deep. Ever. And the emotional component underpinning his actions and his goals was too little too late. I didn’t get the why of it all and, without that, I couldn’t get the point. Other than Kaitlyn learning her powers, the villain didn’t give me much to go on. Luckily, Kaitlyn’s story is strong enough to go on.

Beyond that, this is ultimately about saving the environment, right? Save the trees and feed the plankton and global warming stuff. It isn’t even that governments and companies don’t love their trees—it’s that they don’t want to pay to save them. So if you have a group of people who can fix the environment, through whatever means, who cares? Why be clandestine when you’re doing the stuff everybody wants? I couldn’t understand the bigger conflict; it was alluded to late in the book but never really clear.

That aside, would I recommend the book? Absolutely. Ms. Harmony is building a bigger story here and Water is only the beginning. It’s certainly worth diving in and seeing it to the finish line.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Terra’s Akasha Series is a set of FOUR contemporary eco-fantasy novels. ‘Water’ and ‘Air’ are available as e-books, and ‘Fire’ is due to release in October 2012. FYI: Water’s FREE! on Amazon Kindle and Smashwords.

Terra was born and raised in Colorado but has since lived in California, Texas, Utah, North Carolina and Virginia. She’s a former Marine (5½ years, people! We thank you for your service!), has her Masters’ degree and currently resides in the Washington DC area with her husband of 13 years and 3 children.

You can connect with Terra on Facebook or at her blog.

DON’T STOP READING!
Part of the Orangeberry Summer Splash is an awesome giveaway. Click HERE for your chance to win a Kindle FIRE!!

Still Talking: Orangeberry Summer Splash Author Interview

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So friends and foes, you may not know it but August is the MONTH OF PROMOTION! I’m trying to do it like Visa and be everywhere you wanna be so I’m participating in the Orangeberry Summer Splash–hence the lovely badge in this post and on the site. The Summer Splash is a blog tour of 100 magnificent authors and 106 books. I strongly, STRONGLY (this is me saying Pretty Please With Sugar On Top!) encourage you to check out these folks and their works.

Tomorrow, I’ll be haunting My Seryniti with another interview, a guest blog post (still all about villains) AND a book review by Seryniti herself. But wait, there’s more! There’s a TwitterView on August 8–a TwitterView is an interview via Twitter (yeah, I never heard of it either) sponsored by the Hostess With The Mostest, Pandora Poikilos, bestselling author of Excuse Me, My Brains Have Stepped Out. And there are more stops along the way: On August 12, I’ll be breaking down Page 99 of The Road to Hellover at Mommy Reviews. If you haven’t, start reading now! On August 18, I’ll stop by We Fancy Books to deliver my Top Ten Heroes (I like a couple of the good guys). And on August 22-23, Pandora will blow me up on Twitter and plaster my pretty face all over her site at Peace from Pieces.

But the party starts today with an author interview by lil ol’ me over at The Bunny’s Review. Check me out!

And if you wanna learn more about the Orangeberry Summer Splash and the authors in it, check out the press release!

Pursue Your Happyness

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I have to interrupt my lil bout of villainy for an important public service, feel-good type of post. Yeah yeah, I know, it runs counter to my usual bad self but, sometimes, it has to be done. So here goes:

I learned a couple of things from Will Smith: that a poor kid from the ghetto with a winning smile and a bubblegum song about how his “Parents Don’t Understand” can leave his homeboy behind, move to Beverly Hills, and forge a lucrative movie career; that those G-Men is the nondescript black suits, white shirts, and boring ass cars are really the alien police; and that “if you want something, go get it. Period.”

Pursue your happyness.

In the based-on-a-true-story movie, The Pursuit of Happyness, Will Smith plays Chris Gardner, a single dad whose just trying to do the damn thing and take care of his son. His wife left him, unpaid parking tickets got his car towed and him arrested, and his only source of income is selling these unsellable bone scanning machines. Oh yeah, and the IRS takes all his money. FROM HIS ACCOUNT. Chris gets a spot in an unpaid internship (clad in a wife beater tank top and paint-covered pants) and does everything he can—from taking the bus to jacking taxis for their fares to sleeping in train stations and shelters—so he can complete the internship and POTENTIALLY win a full-time gig with Dean Witter (remember them? They’re Morgan Stanley now). Short of Seven Pounds, Will Smith only does feel-good movies; you can figure out how this ends.

My wife has always been a go-getter. Seriously. When we moved out to Colorado (leaving sunny Cleveland, Ohio (the land of dreams) in a Saturn Vue and a 5×10 U-Haul trailer with two kids and a dog), my wife found a job and was AT WORK in 2 DAYS. Interview, hire, start. 48 hours. Never seen anything like it. When she got fed with working for The Man, she started her own event planning company. And got good at it.

And this week, she became an Authorized Disney Vacation Planner.

Now you might be thinking: dude, it’s just Disney vacations. Whoop-de-doo! I get that. But my wife LOVES Disney. I told you that. She LOVES Disney. Read no less than 12 Disney guides before we went to Disneyland for the first time. She searches for the hidden Mickeys in the parks and the resorts on the property. Wants to be Belle when she grows up. My wife is literally a Certified Mousejunkie.

And this is what makes her happy.

We have a million reasons why we don’t pursue that which makes us happy. Which feeds our souls. Which completes us. We find the practical, the realistic, the superficial, the ancillary, the financial—we are exceptionally creative when it comes to the rationale for why we shouldn’t do what we love and be the people we wish to be. And we shortchange ourselves in the process.

Our country is founded on the pursuit of that which makes us happy. It is your God-given right. You deserve it. I deserve it. And I am terribly proud of my wife: she figured it out.

And she is happy.

If you wanna book a Disney vacation (you know you do), you can check the Wife out at amanda@dreamfindertravel.net or on her Facebook page.

Gotta run, guys. The Honey Badger turns 10 today and is bringing all the attitude and ass that Tweendom inspires. I’ll be back to the badness tomorrow.

See ya!

TOMORROW: The Festival of Fiendishness

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I know what you’re thinking: all my shows are ending! What am I gonna do? The doctors from Grey Anatomy are all dead and stuff (seriously how much shit can happen to one freaking hospital?); the Gleeks graduated (no more Brittany? Say it ain’t so!); and Chuck Bass is…well, Chuck Bass. And unless you love comics, there’s nothing for you in the movies—it’s just the Avengers, Spidey, and Batman. Oh yeah, there’s Will Smith. And battleships. And aliens.

But rest assured, true believers, here I come to save you from those entertainment doldrums! Can’t stand to watch another rerun of Everybody Loves Raymond? Really don’t care about the Real Housewives of Billings, Montana? Have you had it up to here with Ryan Seacrest on EVERY MEDIA OUTLET ON EARTH? I have the answer! What’s that you say? Can it be? Is it really? Yes, friends and neighbors, boys and girls, I bring you the Celebration of Wickedness VOLUME TWO! It’s the Festival of Fiendishness and it kicks off tomorrow.

Despite the fact that it sounds like another shrimp special from Red Lobster, the Festival is two scoops of villainy goodness. I know I said ‘summer’ but the truth is, we had 42 minutes of sun here in Seattle over the last 2 weeks—that’s about as summer as it’s gonna get. And I really can’t wait! This time around, we branch out from comics and movies—I ‘m gonna get medieval on that ass with a villain straight from Shakespeare; we have a couple of literary bad guys (I can read—Hooked On Phonics worked for me!), even soap operas (I’ve seen a couple…I’m man enough to admit it), along with our usual spate of comic book baddies and motion picture mischief-makers.

But tomorrow—TOMORROW—we make it official with one of the most compelling, complex, nuanced, multi-chinned villains ever: South Park’s ERIC CARTMAN. Na na na na nana. Heh heh heh heh hehheh

Assemble Your Avengers

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Guess what?! I’m BAAAAACCKKK! Did you miss me? Don’t be coy; you know you did. I know I said I was gonna take a day off: well, after being laid out by a pretty nasty sinus infection and then moving my house AROUND THE CORNER, here I am 6 days later. Good as new. Well…kinda. Let’s just say I’m 10% better than last week.

And I get to talk about the Avengers.

You knew this was coming, right? For all my discussion about villains, I’ve spent plenty of words and pages on comic books and comic book heroes. Talking about the Avengers was inevitable.

Now if you’ve missed the Avengers’ $200M US opening this past weekend (which is the largest opening in history) or the total $641M the film has taken in over the last 2 weeks or the commercials and trailers that dominate every television program on the planet, the Avengers is the explosive, rip-roaring production featuring 6 Marvel superheroes—Captain America, Iron Man, Hulk, Thor, Black Widow and Hawkeye—battling for the salvation of Earth against, Loki, the Asgardian God of Mischief (and Thor’s brother) and his otherworldly army. I should have written copy, huh?

This post is less a review about the movie (which is SPECTACULAR! Seriously, just drop your shit and go see it!) than it is a review of the idea. Nick Fury, played by the masterfully angry Samuel L. Jackson, says “There was an idea to bring together a group of remarkable people, so when we needed them, they could fight the battles that we never could. It’s called the Avengers Initiative.” This could be said for Marvel’s approach the entire Avengers franchise, starting back in 2008 with Iron Man (and later Iron Man 2), then a new and improved Incredible Hulk, Thor and finally Captain America. 5 films. 6 heroes. More than $2B (that’s B for Billion) in ticket sales worldwide—half of what Disney paid for Marvel.

But, in the beginning, there was an idea.

Call it a gamble, call it hubris, call it balls—Marvel waged 4 years and nearly $800M on an idea of introduce the principal characters in individual movies, cast them masterfully (seriously, who else could have played Tony Stark?) tie them together with 2 minute long snippets after the credits, and culminate with a tremendous production that would be thrilling entertainment for everyone. An idea. An idea no more or less powerful than making us care about a kid from the desert pulled into a galactic war to save a princess. No more or less powerful than having us emotionally invest in an orphaned child with unimaginable power and even greater enemies. No more or less powerful than the most forbidden of love stories—a bloodsucking killer and a virginal high school student.

Ideas shape worlds, change cultures, and apparently destroy the city of Cleveland—they, and the stories they live in, are the basic form of human communication. They strike us, emotionally, psychically, physically; make us perceive our environment, and one another, in new and interesting ways; force us to re-examine ourselves. Ideas have power. They can be palpable, tangible, kinetic forces. They can fuel revolutions and quell rebellions. And ideas, in the hands of writers, change people. They can people. Become part of them, part of their lexicon, become a new prism on the lens through which they see the world.

So take your ideas and palm them like the gems they are. Hug them close like nuggets of gold, stroke them like magnificent beasts. Then hold them to the light and give them to the world.

And believe in them.

They might save the world.

…And the Celebration Begins!

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Tomorrow begins the month-long 30 Days of Madness literary extravaganza. That means between battling the Day Job Dragon, being a parent to DMFRHs, and reinstating my war with Tony Horton and Shaun T, I’m completing a 100-page script through Scriptfrenzy, writing a 50,000 word novel AAANNNNDDD participating in the A to Z Blog Challenge, blogging for the next 30 days about villains.

And that’s what this post is about. Villains. Antagonists. The bad guys. The best part, to me, of any story.

See, as much as we identify with and extoll the virtues of our heroes and heroines, it is the villain that is the source of the conflict. The villain makes the story. Who would Harry Potter be without Voldemort? Some poor, emotionally fragile, mentally abused kid living under the stairs. who learns magic and becomes a non-descript student at Hogwarts. At best. Not even as noteworthy as Neville.

If there’s no Darth Vader, Luke Skywalker would have just been some kid—if he existed at all—fighting with his uncle about moisture farming IN THE FREAKING DESERT. Think about it: Chief Brody wouldn’t need a bigger boat, Ripley would have made it home on time, and we never would have heard Captain Kirk scream Khan’s name throughout the galaxy. Villains make the story.

So, for the month of April, we’re gonna take a little tour, you and I. We’re going to look at of some of the best villains I’ve found, pick apart their wicked little ways, and see what makes them tick. And along the way, I get to hop of some other blogs and introduce you to some new voices here. Should be fun.

And here are your 2012 Celebration of Wickedness winners!

Alien
Incredible Hulk
Cruella DeVille
Dracula
Venom
Freddy Krueger
Godzilla
The Clown from It
The House in Amityville Horror
Dr. Claw
Jaws
Joker
Lucifer
Megatron
Lex Luthor
Khan Noonien Singh
Overlook Hotel
Poltergeist
Evil Queen
Voldemort
Scar
Hannibal Lecter
Clubber Lang
Kyzer Soze
Darth Vader
Wicked Witch of the West
Magneto
Teddy Ruxpin
Ernst Blofeld
General Zod