Living the Fictional Dream

Hello to anyone who’s still out there! Sorry for the long delay between posts. Times have been crazy of late, but more on that later.

I have a few tidbits of news to share. First of all, Every Day Fiction has released the table of contents for July 2010, and guess who’s on it? Yours truly! I’ve had reprints published this year, but this will be my first official new story published in 2010. I’m excited! And the TOC mentioned me specifically as a “returning favorite.” That was nice to read.

Tune into EDF on the 4th of July and read my story, “The Vote.” I’m not going to say too much about the story until the 4th, but I will warn you ahead of time that it’s not a 4th of July story. In fact, its more apocalyptic than patriotic. But I had an interesting voyage writing and revising it, so I’m thrilled that it’s going to be joining my other stories published by EDF.

In other news, I received a contributor’s copy the other day. It was print issue #2 of Residential Aliens, which includes a reprint of my story, “The Sorcerer’s Wife.” The story originally appeared in the ResAliens webzine, and has now graced their print ‘zine, as well. If you’d like a copy for your very own, click here. It’s a great little ‘zine. I’m really happy with it. And if you want to read TSW online, it’s still available in the ResAliens archives.

My writing group had its annual Story Every Day (SED) contest in June. Sadly, I was the winner. The goal of the story is to write a new story of at least 500 words every day for two weeks. The winner is the person with the most stories, and if there is a tie, the winner is the person with the most stories and the highest word count. I say sadly I was the winner because I was able to write a whopping… wait for it… three stories. **sigh** Not a banner year for the SED contest. But, on the bright side, every story written is a good thing, so three (or two, or one, as others in the group wrote) is something to be proud of. I was hoping for more, but my muse just was not cooperating.

Why wasn’t my muse cooperating, do you ask? Well, I guess it is time to tell y’all. On the personal front, there has been stuff going on, contributing to the “crazy” in my life that I mentioned earlier.

For those readers who haven’t heard, I am pregnant. Again! Less than a year after my darling little girl was born, Hubby and I find ourselves expecting number 2. It was definitely sooner than we had planned (if this little one carries to term, as sister did not, they will be 14 months apart), but we are very excited. The new baby is due in September.

For some reason, though, when I’m pregnant, my muse clams up on me. Hence not much activity around the old blog, or on my writing in general.

Add that to working full-time, chasing around after a little girl who is crawling like the wind and working on that walking thing, and planning a first birthday party for next week, and life has been hectic to the max. I’m loving every minute, though (OK… maybe not the actual work, but even that is not so bad, LOL).

I hope all of you out there in blog land are doing well. I miss reading everyone’s blogs and commenting. If I ever have a bit of spare time, I really want to get back to that. I hope you’re all doing well, and that everyone is having a truly fantastic summer (as well as super-high word counts!).

It has been a busy couple of weeks. Normally, I limit this blog to writing topics, but this news is too important!

My darling sister and her significant other tied the knot last Saturday. We just finished a week of wedding festivities (bachelorette party — which I got sick and had to miss, bummer! – rehearsal, rehearsal dinner, bridesmaid mani/pedis, and of course the big day and all its hoop-la). I was the matron of honor and Hubby was the officiant, so we were very involved in all aspects of the ceremony.

The ceremony was beatuiful, the reception was fun (and she finally got her dancing!), and I even got through my toast without fainting (me and public speaking, not such a good combo).

Now that all the festivities are over, I need a holiday! How long until the next 3-day weekend? President’s Day in February. Whew!

The search terms that result in hits on this blog are interesting — at least to me.

For example, I wrote one post this year comparing my new favorite vampire paramour, Sookie Stackhouse, to former powerhouse Anita Blake, and, I swear, that post has garnered more search hits than any other. When I go through the list, 44 of the 108 tearch terms used in the past month were related to Sookie, Anita, or both.

My posts mentioning the Twilight series and the TV show Castle garnered quite a few search terms of their own, though not as many as Anita and Sookie did. Strangely enough, many searches people ran trying to find out the names of the writers in the poker game in the first episode of Castle hit my blog quite a few times. I guess I am a writer (and my blog is a writing blog) and I wrote an entry about Castle, so it makes sense.

The lesson I’ve learned from the above is that if you want search engines to direct people to your blog, blog about big names in pop culture. Of course, the caveat is that most of the people who visited my blog due to one of these searches spent little to no time on the site. For the one or two who spent a few minutes, most of the others spent 00:00:00.

My post on vampires versus werewolves came up with several search topics that were actually on the same topic (search terms like “what’s the rivalry between vampires and werewolves”).

My recent post about wacky eye colors in L.J. Smith’s novels made my blog hit on a search for “characters with unique eyes” — so, I guess, that one person’s crazy eyes is another person’s unique.

The biggest laugh I got reading the search results was the search term “clavicle sexy.” The blog hit on that one because of the post I wrote a while back about the latest novel in the Luxe series and how the auther way overused the term clavicle when describing her characters.

And then there is the strangeness of searches like “erin selkie” and “erin’s story blog.” Of course it makes perfect sense that those searches would turn up hits for this blog. The oddness comes from the fact that of those two searches, one recorded zero time spent on the site and the other recorded only 3 seconds spent. Is there another Erin out there who has a story blog and/or who has written about selkies? If so, I would like to meet this doppleganger.

The person who searched for “erin ‘the wall’ hypersonic tales” only spent 14 seconds on the site, and I know good and well that person was searching for me. But maybe they didn’t want the blog, but wanted to look at the actual story on hypersonic tales?

Last, but not least, someone came to my blog as a result of the search “summerlyn’s dream.” I really wonder what they meant by that. I assume they were not referring to my baby girl. It’s amazing how many Summerlyn’s I’ve heard about since we chose that name for our daughter. We thought it was so unique — the person we heard about it from spelled it Summerlan, and we used a different spelling. But, since July, I’ve had at least two other people tell me they know someone named Summerlyn (one a little girl born two weeks after ours). I would be interested to know what Summerlyn this searcher was looking for when they wound up on this blog.

Well, there’s not really a conclusion to this rambling post. I’m about out of blogging time for today, so I’d better end this. Maybe some day I will think of a way to use these search results to the benefit of my blog, but, with the exception of blogging about big pop culture items, I can’t see how at the moment (and I don’t want to blog about pop culture as an angle… I only want to do it if I’m moved to).

I guess the biggest moral of the search results story is that, 9 times out of 10 (or even more often than that), they don’t really matter. The searchers don’t spend any time here anyway, because, no matter how relevant the term, it wasn’t what they actually wanted to read about anyway.

Happy searching and blogging everyone!

Hello, blog readers.

Wondering where I’ve been these past few weeks? Well, it’s been a crazy time, let me just say. I don’t normally talk about a lot of non-writing stuff on this blog, but I’ll make an exception today.

A little over a week ago, my little girl, Summerlyn Anne, was born. She came 7 weeks early, which was a big surprise and not exactly what my husband and I had planned for. But she is apparently headstrong (she gets that from her daddy) and decided that she couldn’t wait to join the world any longer.

Summerlyn was born at 4 lbs., 3 oz., and 17 inches. Because she was a preemie, she has been in the NICU since she was born, but she is doing really well. She never needed oxygen and she got off the breathing tubes after just a couple of days. She’s now in an open-air crib, as well, and maintaining her own temperature. Once she learns to take all her feedings on her own, we’ll be able to bring our little darling home. Until then, life is being lived crazily between working frantically at home to finish all the stuff we thought we had more time to do (like the nursery) and spending time with her at the NICU.

I would share a picture, but I’ll need my husband’s help on that. I’m not great with the linking and the HTML.

I hope all my friends out in the blog-o-sphere are doing well, and I promise I’ll start regular blog updates again once the world slows down a little and I have time to get back to things that are writing-related. Right now, it’s all Summer all the time, and I can’t wait until my little girl comes home!

This is a little belated, but last week one of my archived posts from this blog was reprinted over at EDF’s Flash Fiction Blog. It’s called “Excuses, Excuses,” and originally appeared here last July. Head on over and take a look. And, while you’re there, read some of the other recent blog entries. Jordan wrote an interesting one on dialog-only stories, K.C. contributed one about common story ideas, and there are quite a few other interesting reads, as well. This is a very informational and helpful blog if you write fiction — flash or otherwise.

Sorry I’ve been M.I.A. in the blog-o-sphere lately. The craziness keeps increasing. I guess it will be that way until the baby makes her appearance (estimated at the end of August). My husband and I have been/will be booked every weekend between Memorial Day and the end of June! Trips home, attending weddings (3 in June!), helping my sister move (well, he did that last weekend — I supervised and fetched lunch!), and baby showers. It’s all fun and/or important stuff, but leaves little time on the weekends for writing or blogging. Add to that a huge slew of projects at work that have to get done before I go on maternity leave and all the house projects we want to complete before the baby comes (finishing the nursery paint job, new carpet in the nursery, putting together baby furniture), and I’m definitely feeling the pressure.

However, I am looking forward to my writing group’s write-in this week. Those are always fun, and I know I’ll have at least a couple of hours that I can devote only to writing. It will be a nice change of pace from the hectic day-to-day.

I hope everyone else is having a less hectic time than I am, and that you all have ample time to pound away on those works in progress! Happy writing, everyone!

Naming is such a tricky thing. Sometimes, if I’m lucky, a character will spring to mind with his or her name already in place. Sarah Kirby from “The Widow and the Stranger” was like that. Some of the characters from my novel-in-progress — Caryn, Sean, Brilynn — as well.

And then there are the ones I have to struggle for. I flip through name books or name websites, looking for the perfect name. Sometimes I’ll pick a letter of the alphabet and go through all the names for the appropriate gender that start with that letter. I’ve always believed that characters should have names starting with different letters so it’s easier for the reader not to get them confused. In a novel, you can have a couple with the same initial, but the shorter the story, the more strictly I try to adhere to this rule.

I always thought that my experience naming characters would be helpful when it finally came time in my life to name a child, but now that my first little one is on the way, it’s not proving such an easy task. Of course, for the baby, my husband and I actually have to agree on a name. (Well, I guess that’s not always true, but it’s important to me — I want him to love what we name our child just as much as I do.)

The problem is, we have very different ideas about what makes a good name, especially for girls. We had our boy’s name totally picked out, but since the ultrasound said girl, we’ve been wrangling back and forth for months.

I love plant names… Sage, Holly, Rose, Laurel. He thinks that those names are too sissy, and has outlawed all plant names. Left to his own devices, he chooses many names that I think are too common or boring.

And, as if we didn’t have enough trouble between the two of us, there are always plenty of other people to offer suggestions and opinions. My sister loves the trendy names, like Piper and Taylor. My in-laws prefer more traditional names, like Ann — and they especially dislike names coming from the natural world (like Sierra) or names that would have nicknames. One friend told us that we should be sure to name our baby something that you can find on those racks of keychains in souvenir shops, because the child would be disappointed all of her life if she couldn’t be a part of that. Another friend tends to point out negativity in the meaning of a name (Leah was the unwanted sister in the Bible, Sage is a big ugly bush).

Now I understand why some people don’t tell anyone the name until the baby is actually born and the name is on the birth certificate, LOL! But a lot of times, the comments are helpful and encouraging, and sometimes other people see something that we didn’t see before. My husband especially gets a kick out of announcing the “name of the day.” I think it amuses him when people don’t like it!

We still have several months to go, and I have faith that eventually my husband and I will settle upon the perfect name for our little one. We have three top girl names that haven’t really changed in a while. And, of course, if the ultrasound proves wrong about the gender, we still have that boy’s name all ready. I suspect that, at this point, we need to meet our little one before we can decide on the perfect name.

But all this drama and back and forth over names has made me appreciate how much easier it was when I was just naming characters. Sure, those characters are very real to me, but if you’re writing along and suddenly the name isn’t working for the character, it can always be changed. And, when it comes to a character’s name, there is only myself to please.

Whether for a real person or a character, names are important. Names are identity. Names say a lot about who a person is. Nothing tells everything about a person, of course — I’m sure there could be an assassin or a ninja out there named Ethel or Maude — but names send a certain impression out into the world, and, for both my baby and my characters, I want to make sure that impression is a good one!

The power of the sense of smell is fairly amazing when you think about it. Especially considering that humans are so much less dependent on that sense than the other four, especially sight. But it is so crazy how a certain aroma will take you back to a specific memory almost instantly.

When I was a kid, I loved going to the library. For much of my childhood, the small town where I grew up didn’t have its own library, so on Saturdays and during the summer my mom would take me to the main library branch in the larger town about 30 minutes away.

I remember the smell of the building that would waft over me when I stepped through the doors. It was kind of musty and old, but not in a bad way. I loved that smell, and I loved how it clung to the books when I would take them home. When I was young, I always assumed the scent had something to do with the books themselves, but now I think that it probably had more to do with the age of the building.

The library I went to as a girl was built in… I guess the 50s or 60s. It had a bomb shelter in the basement, if that helps date it for you. There is a building across the street from where I work, a bank, and every time I walk in there (there’s a Subway on the first floor where I like to pick up lunch sometimes) I catch a whiff of that library/old building smell.

One whiff, and I’m suddenly 11 years old clutching an arm load of books and waiting for them to run my library card through their little machine. Though they later got scanable cards, the ones in my memory are the ones they had when I first got a card — they were pink and made of paper and they went through some kind of machine that pressed them and made them warm to the touch after when you checked out books.

Another scent memory that sometimes strikes me unawares is the smell of sun on grass. It’s been a while since I got a really good whiff of this one, but I used to smell it a lot when I was in college — I guess because they were always working on the grounds. The smell of sun-baked grass used to cling to my first dog’s coat when he would come back in the house from his back yard time. Sandy (a cockerspaniel) was an inside dog, which made smelling the outdoors on him all the more unusual. Sandy passed away while I was in college, but whenever I inhale that sunshiney, grassy smell, I’m transported back to when that little stinker used to sit on my feet or want to play tug-of-war; I can totally see him standing in front of me wagging his little stump of a tail.

The power of various smells and aromas can be utilized to great effect in one’s writing, in my opinion. The more senses you invoke in the story, the richer and more detailed your fictional world will be come, which makes you better able to draw in your reader and hold him there, right where you want him.

Hearing and sight are the dominant senses we describe in stories, but if you add the scent of woodsmoke; the taste of the cool, crisp water; or the way the fur carresses your main character’s fingertips, it gives the story an extra layer of depth. And, every detail you add has the possibility of resonating with your audience in ways you can’t anticipate — we all have our own associations with sights, sounds, smells, etc., and the more we can tap into those within our readers, the more bound they will be to our stories.

Man, when Stephen first upgraded my blog to the new version of WordPress, my spam count went down to almost nothing. It was so nice! But now, a few months later, the spam demons have found me again. Not as bad as they were before, but it’s getting up there.

Luckily, the new WordPress makes deleting spam a lot easier than the old version, in which I had to deal with each comment. Now I can just hit “delete all spam” and poof, it’s gone.

The one problem I’m having is that sometimes a legitimate comment finds its way into the spam folder instead of actually posting or going into the pending folder. I try to glance through the spam folder to make sure I’m not deleting a valid comment, but when the spam numbers are up over 100, I don’t always have that much time.

So, I just wanted to mention it here and say that if you posted a comment and it never showed up, it might have gotten deleted as spam. If that happened, I’m sorry! I definitely wouldn’t have done that on purpose!

If you post a comment and it doesn’t appear on the site, you’re always welcome to shoot me an email and let me know. Then I’ll know that there is a reason to comb through the hundreds of spam messages.

So, I guess this is the last place that I haven’t talked yet about the biggest reason why my writing output has been down this year — and my reading and my blogging, too. Since this is a writing blog, I tend not to discuss non-writing/real life all that much, but maybe now it’s time.

A lot of you (especially the people that I know in real life) already know this, but for those who don’t, my husband and I found out over Christmas that we are expecting our first baby! The last ultrasound said that it’s a girl, and she’s due at the end of August! (Don’t ask me about names — we had our boy name picked out for sure, but we’re totally up in the air on girl names, and it’s looking like we’ll be that way until we actually meet her!)

We are very, very excited about this. It’s something we’ve wanted for a long time, though we only officially started seriously trying for it last year. There have been a few little bobbles so far, like a fainting spell and the morning sickness that didn’t go away until way into the second trimester, but for the most part everything is going really well.

I know it’s going to be a big adjustment. If it’s been this hard for me to get up the energy to write when all I’ve deal with so far is morning sickness and fatigue (I’ve been going to bed at 9:45, OMG!), what’s going to happen when there are 3 a.m. feedings and everything else that goes along with having a little one of your very own?

Whatever happens, it’s going to be an interesting journey, and I’m looking forward to every part of it — even the challenging parts.

I can’t not write — I’m always making up stories in my head, even when I’m too tired to sit down at the computer and write them down. I know that I’ll figure this out eventually, and writing will happen. We’ll just see how long it takes me to get there!

Happy April 1st! Nope… no April Fool’s jokes from me. I think I’ve outgrown the pranking phase of my life. I was never very good at it anyway, LOL!

I like April, because it feels as if the new year is finally here. It’s hard to get excited about a new year when it is cold, drizzly, and gray outside. By the time April gets here, the weather is finally turning toward spring. We’ve had a few great days so far this year, but it keeps cooling off again. I see every cool snap, though, as a slight delay for the oppressive Texas summer.

There is something about the crisp air warmed by the spring sun and the sparkling days of this time of year that tends to inspire my muse. I hope the same will be true this year, as it has been in year’s past. My poor muse needs a kickstart — she has been very absentee thus far in 2009. I also need to kickstart my motivation to get my butt in the chair and write. That is a big part of productivity, as well. I can’t blame it all on my long-suffering muse.

Happy April, everyone. I wishyou all great weather and inspiring story ideas.