Monday Muse: Dare I say it? 50!

Apocalypse Please (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Hey all. I procrastinated ALL WEEKEND when I have a huge deadline this week. And now that I’m sitting down to work and realizing that at last count my new novel The Storytellers..the one I should have been editing all weekend has…wait for it…50 CHARACTERS! Egads!

50 is my new favorite number. It’s going to be my muse not only for this week but for the entire month of May.

I’m turning 50 soon–very, very soon. And I’m going to throw a little book birthday bash here. I can’t wait  Some awesome authors have joined in to celebrate with me which is so much fun. They’ll be some fun surprises and a great giveaway with lots of fabulous free ebooks. More on that later….

But, back to this Monday’s muse. In the face of the number 50 the  muse made me procrastinate. I SHOULD have been home swimming through my edits. Trying to stay afloat. But I didn’t, I did everything but. That’s SO 49 of me! I’ve done the opposite of everything that I probably should have done this year. And it’s been wonderful. So I went with my gut and did everything I wasn’t supposed to this weekend. Here’s three things my muse picked up on while I procrastinated.

1 & 2: I saw two amazing movies that I never heard of, and I’m kind of a movie freak, so this is rare. One was Winter’s Bones….egads! If you like it scary and horrifying and love Jennifer Lawrence this is for you. The other is The King of California…if you like it cooky and weird and love stories about outrageous quests and impossible relationships, this one is for you.

3: I love church for lots of reasons but one of them is because it’s so old fashioned hearing stories told aloud. This week’s story was about a man who couldn’t walk and had waited to be healed at a healing pool for 38 years. For 38 years every time the time was right for a miracle to occur he never was the first one to the healing pool. He always missed his chance. He was really caught up in the how of healing. Not in the who. This made my muse thankful and determined.

What’s inspired you this week?  What’s your muse up to?

Related articles

• Musing Mondays (May 6) (cynthia2729.wordpress.com)

Monday Muse: Believing without seeing

I went to an evensong service at church last night. When I go to church, I usually attend in the morning. But, the beach called yesterday morning. I had a fabulous time with my husband walking along our favorite beach with our dog Oso, an Aussie Shepherd, and grand-dog Twiglet, a Yorkshire terrier. The surf and the tide was high and Joe and I stretched out in the sand and watched the waves and the surfers. It’s wonderful to share a favorite spot on a lazy Sunday morning.

Wordless Wednesday

JOY

Johnny Cash inspired Winnemucca, a small-town fairy tale

I thought I’d share one of the inspirations behind Winnemucca, a small-town fairy tale, where fear’s as blind as love. There isn’t a better day to do it than today, what would have been Johnny Cash’s 81st birthday. It’s hard to believe he was only eight years younger than my Dad.

Everyone always asks me about the title. “Winnemucca? Where’s that?” Most of the people who’ve been to Winnemucca ask if I’ve ever been there, especially when I tell them that Winnemucca, NV is the Emerald City of the novel. When I heard Johnny Cash’s version of the song, it inspired me to write about an enchanted road trip. “I’ve Been Everywhere” is Ginny’s father’s favorite song. She has no idea why, not until the end of the story.

But Johnny Cash did more than inspire the plot of the story.

Ginny, a seventeen-year old girl who’s happily ever after has gone bad, meets a truck driver who is more like a fairy godfather. He’s a fairy truck driver, and his character is also inspired by Johnny Cash. He not only teaches her guitar but also speaks to her soul. This story of a girl listening to her intuition for the first time, no matter where it leads, is a story of faith. Along the way she meets many characters that help her find her own path in life. Even if it takes her where she never expected.

Happy Birthday, Johnny Cash!

Here’s one of my favorite quotes of Johnny Cash:

“The Master of Life’s been good to me. He has given me strength to face past illnesses, and victory in the face of defeat. He has given me life and joy where others saw oblivion. He has given new purposes to live for. New services to render and old wounds to heal. Life and love go on. Let the music play.”

Monday Muse: Far and away & Moon Killers (Shadow Series #3) sneak peek!

Retreat

Sometimes you have to get away. From everything. From everyone. From the old thoughts. Find some new ones. That’s what I’m doing this week. Spending time away. My brother said something to me this week that inspired me: “We all have thoughts, not all of them are helpful” He said to recognize the ones that aren’t and pay attention to the ones that are. I hope this inspires you too. In this season before Lent I’m thinking about what I might give up or dedicate myself to. Are you looking to give something up in this season of Lent? Or, are you looking to dedicate yourself to something important instead?

Today on A Love for Lit, there is an excerpt from Shadow Slayer (Shadow Series #2) and a bonus sneak peek from Moon Killers (Shadow Series #3) click here to check it out! Click here to download 13 on Halloween (Shadow Series #1) for free.

Give your muse a hug from me!

YA Indie Carnival : How do you Pinterest? Using Pinterest for Character/Setting Inspiration

Witches Brew!

Achem…I don’t know why, I just never got into it. I remember my friend Abbi Glines (you HAVE to check out her new book WHILE IT LASTS—- O. M. G.)  talking about Pinterest in a FB post a while back and I sort of scratched my head and looked it up and that’s about as far as I got. You HAVE to check out Suzy Turner’s and T.R. Grave’s posts about Pinterest because they are WAY more savvy then me. I’m at the total newbie stage where I’m just beginning to figure out how amazingly fun this can be. Honestly, I’m more of a visual person than anything so if you are too, I think you’ll love it. Basically Suzy talks about using Pinterest to make book mood boards. I love that! I’ve totally made those out of magazine cut outs. This is just a super-cool digital way to share your inspirations for your books with readers and friends. I’m really into Halloween and I’ve started a little Halloween board. It’s a sort of mash up of food, jewelry and odd Halloween stuff I come across. I’ve also got a board called Inspiration. Not for any book in particular, but when I see the photo, a story comes alive for me. My next board is called Dreams Come True. It’s great fun and like Suzy and Ms. Grave say…TOTALLY ADDICTING….like I needed one more distraction from my edtis? Not. How do you use Pinterest? What boards do you have?

To find out more about carnis using Pinterest click here.

To find out what’s new at the carnival this week click here.

See you at the carnival next week when we post on the topic “Beat the heat”!

The inspirations & challenges behind TRANSFER STUDENT, an intergalactic tale of beauty & the geek

I wrote the first draft of TRANSFER STUDENT in 2006 after my father-in-law died. It was a crazy, sad time. I was working at the Los Angeles Times on the re-opening of the Griffith Observatory [it had been closed for five years for renovations] and we were back-and-forth between LA and Fresno [a four hour drive from LA], more and more frequently as my father-in-law got worse and worse, eventually ending up on life support. His name was Ray. I named the Reathan word for “year” in his honor.

After Ray passed, just hours after, it was nighttime and my husband Joe, his mom and I all sat out on my mother-in-law’s patio and looked at the stars. She said she knew Ray was up there, one of the stars. And that’s all it took. I had the beginnings of a story about souls that traveled, that starjumped, through space. And I wanted to explore the idea of a parallel planet similar to Earth, a sister planet. Retha is that planet and an anagram for Earth.

There were other things that inspired the story too. Los Angeles was a major inspiration because I raised my kids there and I love the city. So I knew that the female protagonist would be from LA. And since I worked in entertainment for a time, I knew Beverly Hills would be a lot of fun to write about.

I also wrote about places I had more of a connection to––Griffith Park and Zuma beach. And lastly, a news story that unfolded over the years further inspired the plot as I wrote and rewrote Transfer Student.

This same news story is also why I decided to tell Transfer Student from two POVs, a teenage girl and a teenage boy alien. The news story profiled the hostilities surrounding a man who announced he would be having an operation to become a woman. Because he was an official in a municipality this was a very public, personal announcement. It made national news at the time. It captured my attention for a variety of reasons and I knew that I wanted to write a story about how the vessel that a soul inhabits doesn’t define it. A story that’s been written perhaps a million times, but I wanted to write about in a way that explored many things: what it means to love; what it means to be a boy or a girl; what it means to risk everything to become who you really are. Transfer Student is a classic fish-out-of-water story that I’ve written as a love letter to teens and also as a way for all of us to see a piece of ourselves in everyone we meet, no matter our differences, no matter what planet we call home.

As far as the actual writing of the story I had a few challenges. I had never written in a male POV. My early drafts really show that weakness. I always wrote Ashley in the first person. But, I’d always write Rhoe from the third person, as if I was literarily tip-toeing up to the first person present that he’s written in today.

I have no idea how many drafts I’ve written of Transfer Student. But I do know that in order to get to first person present I had to write in the third and past too so I could be sure that the first person present was the only way to tell the story I wanted to tell. There is nothing more immediate than first person present, in my humble opinion. And I want the reader to be on the journey as it happens. To feel and discover with the characters. I want the reader to starjump with the characters and experience the longing and awkwardness that comes when you try to figure out a new world. There was only one tense that would do––first person present.

I hope Transfer Student sounds like a story you’d like to read.

SMASHWORDS | KINDLE | NOOK |KOBO| PAPERBACK

Interview & Review with Kate’s Reads on the Transfer Student Tour Today!

CONGRATS TO TO EBOOK WINNER @MacDibble! GOOD LUCK TO TODAY’S TWEETERS! [read on for tweet deets ]

Today on the tour I’m excited to be interviewed by Kate’s Reads. She’s a great book blogger and she’s one of my go-to blogs to find out what’s next on my TBR list! Kate asked for an interview and I really enjoyed her questions. It’s kind of funny how some stories just happen. This story is like that. One experience led to another and another and before I knew it, I had a story. TRANSFER STUDENT needed about six years to “cook.” My personal life during the years 2006-2009 played a huge part in informing my characters and the plot. Kate was nice enough to do a book review too, you can read it here! 

I hope you’ll check out the interview Thanks for stopping by the tour here and, as always to win today’s EBOOK of TRANSFER STUDENT Tweet [& post ur tweet link here or at Kate's interview]:

Can’t wait to read Transfer Student by @Laurawriting Check out the Blog Tour & Giveaway! #teenreads #scifi #romance #ya http://wp.me/P1J9jx-bs

Image via Wikipedia

Here’s a little excerpt from Kate’s Interview with me.

Q) How did you come up with the Rethan words and where did you get the ideas for the landscape of Retha?

 

I travel and live away from home sometimes because my husband renovates hotels. At the time I revised Transfer Student, we had the good fortune to live in Big Sur, CA, a very remote part of the central California coast that remains largely undisturbed by man. The landscape is so wild that the missionaries who settled California did not enter and instead just referred to it as El Sur Grande, The Big South…Big Sur. The first road was built on the only horse path to “town” [Monterey] in the 1930s––a road that flirts with the Pacific Ocean winding into cliffs and over waves and sand dunes. Big Sur inspired planet Retha––a place where there are no roads because Rethans fly and while Rethan’s are innovative, they aren’t extremely technological. Because Big Sur is so remote,

TRANSFER STUDENT EBOOK Winner & BEHIND THE SCENES: Why 2 POVs

Congrats to @CassReviews winner of yesterday’s EBOOK. Good luck to today’s tweeters & commentors!

On the tour today…THE TAO OF WEBFOOT and an excerpt from Rhoe’s POV. Enter to win & comment there for a free EBOOK & SWAG! Winner announced here tomorrow

Behind The Scenes of TRANSFER STUDENT: Why two POVs?

Los Angeles was a major inspiration because I raised my kids there and I love the city. So I knew that the female protagonist would be from LA. I knew Beverly Hills would be a lot of fun to write about. I also was inspired by places I had more of a connection to––Griffith Park and Zuma beach. And lastly, a news story that unfolded over the years further inspired the plot as I wrote and rewrote Transfer Student. This same news story is also why I decided to tell Transfer Student from two POVs, a teenage girl and a teenage boy alien. The news story profiled the hostilities surrounding a man who announced he would be having an operation to become a woman. Because he was an official in a municipality in the southern U.S. this was a very public, personal announcement. It made national news at the time and captured my attention for a variety of reasons. I knew that I wanted to write a story about how the vessel that a soul inhabits doesn’t define it. The soul itself does. A story that’s been written perhaps a million times, but one I wanted to write about in a way that explores what it means to love, what it means to be a boy or a girl, and what it means to risk everything to become who you really are. Transfer Student is a classic fish-out-of-water story that I’ve written as a love letter to teens and also as a way for all of us to see a piece of ourselves in everyone we meet, no matter our differences, no matter what planet we call home.