Oh! What a beautiful morning!

So, in case you didn't know this, I absolutely LOVE Deviantart. Today's pieces made me especially happy.

Observe:



Rainbow By: ryo-says-meow

I adore color. And this totally woke me up this morning. Hello Rainbow Bright! Can I look like that when I'm 50? Please? I'll be a crazy starving artist by then, so it'll be all good, right?



Gloomy Earl Grey By: JinkiMania

I find this one so dark and alluring. You have to maximize it to really get the full monty. I've got a thing for Wonderland, can you tell? I want to have a mad tea party in my back yard. Plus, this particular artist is AMAZING. I am deviant stalking now...



Untitled Series In The Forest By: WildRainOfIceAndFire

I also deviant stalk this artist. Mainly because she has this uncanny ability to find people who look like characters in my books. This particular one reminds me of Connor. Please tell me someone else sees the similarity. Plus, she's just a super talented photographer!

My Life of Pie

Having successfully trolled the depths of a not-as-successful-as-should-have-been-because-of-technical-and-clerical-errors Lunacon, I emerge victorious.

I have two phone conversations planned for tomorrow with the lovely Michele Lang of the Lady Lazarus persuasion and the inspiring Shannon Delaney of the 13 to Life series. I am excited to learn more about the business and the process. I'm also just gosh darn excited to get to know both of these wonderful authors further. They both seem like such nice people!

As for my writing...Well, let me quote Psyche Corporation by saying, "Wonderland hasn't been peaceful since Oz declared war." That's a powerfully symbolic statement, if I do say so myself. It's a continual battle between the powers that be and the creative faculties of my brain. I'm not entirely sure who is winning, nor do I know who I'd like to win at this point. Lately, I feel like a pie. Cut up and at the mercy of so many champing, salivating mouths.

Very dramatic, I know, but eh...better to take out my pen and write than use it to gouge out a customer's eye, yes? Just kidding, I'm not capable of such grotesque horrors. Can you tell work has been stressful lately? Naaa...

Anyway, back to writing. I’d like to say that I have brilliant new developments, but not really. Scar-Crossed is hanging out in editorial limbo and I’m anxious about it. I'm quickly learning that there's no faster kill-muse for A.L. Davroe than anxiety. I'm dealing with how to cope with my anxiety without popping myself full of pills, so be proud of me! It's mostly career and quarter-life crisis related, so I don't believe it is a long-term disturbance. But until I know what's up with my MS, I’m just kind of brain-jamming it out in left field.

All is not lost. I do have a brilliant action idea for Great White Light and a final end to Tamrin. I also have been wrestling with Cross-Breed, which is the working title to the sequel to Scar-Crossed. I’ve been tamping out a couple of pages a week, so I can't complain. Some words are better than no words. Right?

While at Lunacon I decided that I should pursue something completely different than anything I’m currently working on. In this way, I will not be continually dragged down by things that aren’t going anywhere.

I started on a stand alone based off of the Holy Children. This one will be a pure UF romance. I'm also working on a demon-based YA, probably another romance. I also learned that historic novels are coming in hot right now, so I’m trying to figure out how to get the Lilith thing off the ground. I’ve got concept, characters, and plenty of story to tell, but I still need a clean arc. The one good part about this one is that I don’t need to do too much more research than I already have because it’s pre “Flood” history.

I’ll hopefully start putting out more work sometime soon. I’ve been busy with conventions and costumes. The Anachronism is this weekend and then I don’t have anything until Steampunk World’s Fair in May. So, providing I find out that my manuscript hasn't suddenly caught the plague and died, things should be looking up.

In other news: I finished reading the first book in the Mistborn trilogy by Brandon Sanderson. Absolutely loved it. Am in the middle of Dracula by Bram Stoker…finding it boring. Sad, considering an English major should love the classics. Eh, blame it on my nonexistent ADD, but it just doesn’t hold my attention. Had the same problem with The Magicians by Lev Grossman. I admittedly put it down and started something else because I guess I’m just not in the mood. I put that down for Dark Lover by J.R. Ward. I started reading this series because my best friend is like OMG about it. I’m enjoying it so far. Although, I don’t know how I feel about the names of the Brotherhood members… Yeah, not going there. Just got White Cat by Holly Black and City of Bones by Cassie Clare in through ILL, so I'll be busy with those for a spell.

More blogging soon, I'm sure I'll have plenty to spill about The Anachronism on Monday!

TA!

Weekend Wonderful

There are two more days until Lunacon. Just two more days! I just took a look at the schedule of panels and I really like how they are laid out this year! Not only are the panel descriptions on the grid itself, but the times are in military standard AND there are theme topics for each panel. It's a lot easier to find things I'm interested in when the topic says "writing" or "literature." Way to go whoever came up with the new grid!

There will be a number of panels on YA literature this year. You can guess that makes me super excited. There aren't normally many panels on YA at the conventions I go to, so this just goes to show you how much of a presence YA currently has on the market.

Also, a number of authors that I'm pretty sure will recognize me from frequenting their panels will be there, so I'm going to pull some of them aside and ask them some secret recipe questions.

I'm hoping that, like with Arisia, this convention gives me a right proper kick in the butt. Hopefully I'll finish something soon!

One sad aspect of this convention is that there aren't many panels on Steampunk, which is surprising considering how prevalent Steampunk currently is. Oh well, I'm going to the Steampunk World's Fair in May, so I guess I'll just have to get my fill then. Speaking of, I'm working on my costumes and HELLO, I never knew eBay was so wonderfully addictive! Will hopefully be posting pictures soon!

When Worlds Collide

Take a look at this.



This is a whiteboard that my husband normally does his equations on. For anyone who isn't familiar with my husband, he's a mathematician and the complete intellectual opposite of myself. I'll give you three guesses whose side of the whiteboard is whose. :)

Everything in the Second Month

The month of February. Filled with excitement and anxiety. My agent and I are finally at the editing stage of Scar-Crossed. However, I'm finding that while I might be a fairly passable storyteller, I am a GREEN editor. And we're not talking the good kind of faerie green either. Needless to say, it's slow going, but I'm very lucky to have an absolutely fabulous agent who believes in me and is willing to help me around every corner. I just hope I can live up to both our expectations. :)

Since there are long stints of me waiting for responses and sitting on my own edits for a few days until I can go back with fresh eyes and a rested voice, there is lots of down time. So, while I wait for season six of Bones to become available on Netflix, I'm back to my voracious reading/aubiobook schedule.




I was excited to find another two books from Christine Feehan's Carpathian series on biblio. So, of course I scooped up Dark Fire and Dark Dream. Dark Dream was different...and I liked it. Sarah wanted to get with Falcon from the beginning. How awesome is that? I'm getting sick of stubborn, independent paranormal/urban fantasy women. It's not like they aren't awesome in their own right, but when everyone is like that, it gets boring. For once, I want a female who is strong enough to accept things for how they are.









Another exciting find on biblio was The Laughing Corpse by Laurell K. Hamilton. I read Guilty Pleasures last year. I loved it and wanted more. However, I didn't have time to read more and the only audiobook I could find at the time was Blood Noir. I convinced myself that I loved Hamilton enough to skip the books in between. It didn't work out so well. Besides the fact that -- in case no one told you -- the tone of the stories get crazy sexual as the series goes on, I couldn't get past chapter one because I couldn't stand the voice actress they used for Anita Blake. Apparently they thought they needed a voice actress who reflected Anita's overdeveloped libido. So, needless to say I was apprehensive about downloading The Laughing Corpse, but this time the voice actress was perfect :). Can I just tell you how much I love zobies and Voodoo? It might become a problem.





I saw Peter V. Brett at a Lunacon a few years ago. At that time, The Warded Man was just being released, but even then I knew I wanted to read it. I get an Amazon card for Christmas this year and I bought this book with it. I knew that I was going to love this book before I even read it and for the most part, I did. I have one complaint: Leesha getting raped. There used to be a virtual essay following that comment, but I decided that I should probably just write a post in the future about rape in novels.









I possess Ice Land by Betsy Tobin in book form, however, I listened to the audiobook instead. I absolutely love Norse mythology and this story was wonderful. At first I was slightly confused, just because it centers on a number of story lines eventually coming together, but in the end I enjoyed the outcome of each character's fate.













I also own but listened to Good Omens, by Neil Gaiman and Terry Pratchett. These gents never fail to impress me. Especially Gaiman. I've decided that if it were legal, not incredibly messy, and we both weren't already happily spoken for, I'd marry the right hemisphere of Neil Gaiman's brain. Since that's just gross, I'm incredibly glad Amanda Palmer owns all of him and I eagerly await their progeny. I feel like the poles might shift on the day of that child's birth. o.O







I also -- at the request of many a friend -- read The Lovely Bones by Alice Sebold. While I found the concept wonderful, I didn't like one particular aspect of it. The whole Susie switching bodies with Ruth and sleeping with Ray thing bothered me. There used to be a number of paragraphs explaining why it bothered me, but again, it might be better to hold it for it's own post.









Ah, the classics. Every so often, you need to harken back to your roots by reading one of them. Thus, I finally read The Call of the Wild and its sister novel, White Fang, by Jack London. I enjoyed both of them. Short, gritty, and fresh compared with the verbose novels I read these days. Not that being wordy and detailed is bad, I love a good thousand page epic fantasy, but there's something very fresh and clean about the oldies. Probably because some ideas were still new a hundred years ago. Now technology has made it a lot easier to share stories and you have to put more and more words in to prove that your novel is different from everything else in your genre.





I'm currently reading The Magicians by Lev Grossman and so far, I love it. I've only just finished the first chapter, so that's quite an endorsement. Also, much to the relief of my best friend and the baker at work, I'm starting to read The Mistborn Series by Brandon Sanderson this afternoon.

Enduring the Snowpocalypse

It's snowing...again. I'm staying home from work...again. Anyone else seeing a pattern here? So while Connecticut continually gets dumped on and my world continues to slowly disappear under a perpetually rising blanket of white (that's my picnic table in the picture), I'm writing.

Yes. I've decided the Snowpocalypse is a blessing. Why? Well, normally I couldn't convince myself to take time off of work to write. I'm just too much of a reincarnated Puritan for that. However, I can convince myself to not drive in the snow. Call it self-love, call it a deep seated desire to prevent 5-mile-per-hour-in-zero-visibility-while-SUVs-are-speeding-by-at-80 tension migraines, but I hate driving in the snow. So, I'm staying home.

And staying home means writing. Perspective: The Snowpocalypse is moving into week three and I'm halfway through a novel. Granted, it's not the novel I should be working on. My agent made it clear that I should be working on an entirely different novel, not a sequel to the one I'm trying to get published.

I understand why she says this. We can widen the reader market with a book in a different genre, and what if (God forbid) Scar-Crossed doesn't sell? What the heck are we going to do with a sequel to a book that never got published?

BUT, I've had writer's block for the past three months, I haven't liked anything I did manage to write, and I'm completely at a loss for what to do with the other books I am working on. Right about now, I'm just happy to be getting something down on paper and actually feeling good about it.

Plus, all is not lost. I'm still halfway through The Death of One...and Tamrin...and As Above, So Below. And I'm actually done with The Will of the Fallen (even though it's a cliffhanger). Disclaimer: It wouldn't have to be a cliffhanger if people would just accept the fact that sometimes the bad guy wins. And I have plenty more ideas.

Once I get this sequel to Scar-Crossed out on paper (which at this rate, will be soon) I can put it down and work on something else without being haunted by it. Until then, I'm embracing my blessings in every manner possible. That includes the Snowpocalypse making an appearance in the book itself. No one can say I don't count my blessings. :) Plus, you have to write what you know...and right about now, I know snow.

Arisia Goodness and the End of An Era

Oh boy, I fell behind this month. *Slaps Wrist*

I had every intention of coming back after going to Arisia 2011 and writing a separate post for every panel I went to. I always thought that was a good idea and maybe I'll actually do it, but today I only have a quick update. Firstly, Arisia was awesome! As it usually is.

Kelley Armstrong was a guest of honor, which made me incredibly happy because she writes in both my genres :) and someone needs to represent! She seems like a very nice lady and I should probably get around to reading one of her books...one day.

I've also made a mental note to eventually invest in and read Gail Z. Martin's books on how to promote yourself. I'm going to need that.

I went to a couple of panels to help me with my steampunk rut...This included a seminar on how steam engines work and where to find then now. An Alchemy 101 workshop, And a steampunk costuming panel. I can't say they did much for my ability to get back into my steampunk novel, but I found them interesting and fun. And now I want to go out and blow a thousand dollars on costumes. Design on a dime for costumers anyone?

On a note that might make you forgive me for being completely unable to complete the steampunk novel -- (cue drum roll...) I was incredibly inspired by the heroine development panels I went to and am now quite happily steaming through another version of the sequel to Scar-Crossed. See, that's steampunk. Steaming through it. A spiffier version of what's already happened. No? Okay, never mind.

Anyway. Yes, yes, I've said this before, but I REALLY feel it with this one. I know where I'm going and how I want things to progress. Lacey actually has a point to existing now! This required taking huge steps back and circling the problem a number of times until I figured out what the problem was. I have a feeling this might happen with every novel I write that's not part of some bigger plot...so I guess I'll have to get used to it? *sigh* Now, if only I could find the time to finish it right this minute so I can die happy!

Writer's group meets tomorrow, so I'll see what my crit-partner thinks of my thoughts. (On a not me note, her story sounds absolutely fascinating and I hope she finishes soon so I can read it!)

Oh also, I'm reading Peter V. Brett's The Warded Man and Laurell K. Hamilton's The Laughing Corpse. I just finished another Carpathian novel, don't hate, they're an utter indulgence.

excitement

So, it's a secret, but I'm excited about it. Things are really ramping up.

There's other stuff too, but that's all boring.

Crossing Over

No I'm not dying. I'm actually quite alive. What no one else knows is that The Hill Dweller Series is written to mesh perfectly with the mythos of The Will of the Fallen Series. Actually, it was more like I wrote Will of the Fallen, turned around and realized I could write quite a few series around the different supernatural groups that I had created. the Hill Dweller series was born right after that.

What I mean by crossing over is that I'm going to draw characters from one series and use them in another. Kind of like a guest appearance that gets readers interested in the characters from my other series -- thus making them go out and buy it. We can thank Sherrilyn Kenyon for that little bit of inspiration. Originally, I was going to keep characters from other supernatural groups out of the picture, but then I realized it would be so much cooler with them in there and it might help me get out of this moat-sized rut I've managed to run around myself.

So get excited! In the next installment of the Hill Dwellers, Lacey's going to learn what the Hill Dwellers really are, what they really do, and where she really comes from. Don't you just love family reunions?

Taking the plunge.

I just sent out my manuscript. I'm a little nervous. A little excited. I'm still not 100% certain that it's ready for the agent to look at it. I was more ready to send it to her right after I wrote it, but I think I made myself nervous about it since then. Part of it is because she keeps telling me to take my time and somehow that's mentally translating to: "You're obviously nowhere close to ready to show this to me." When in fact I probably am and I'm probably just looking for problems where none exist.

At this point, I don't know what else to fix and my betas are quieter than Baileville in a blizzard. I actually think I'm starting to be more of a hindrance than a help to myself. I'm getting headaches from reading my manuscript upside down and backwards in search of what needs to be fixed. The beta readers say it's tight and flows. No one seems to have any problems with the adjustments I've added. The only negative feedback I've gotten seem to be stylistic preferences from reader to reader. I really had to sit down and ask myself, what else can I do with this. And, other than sitting on it for another few months in the hope that inspiration smacks me in the nose, nothing. So I just have to let my baby walk into the spotlight and hold my breath. Tomatoes or roses? The world is watching.

Of course, there could very well be problems. There could be plenty that neither the betas or I caught. That tends to happen when you've read the same thing eight times over. And then there is the dreaded fear that somehow I didn't understand what my agent suggested I fix and I made a whole bunch of changes that weren't necessary. However, I think that's unlikely.

All I can do is sit back and pray that what I've sent is gold and the line-editing process wont take a million years. I realize that the publishing industry is slower than molasses in January, but I need something to move forward.

That's my other realization: Other than coming to understand that sometimes you just have to jump and hope you land on your feet, I've realized that being frozen in mid-air -- eyes locked on the target, but ETA unknown -- isn't any better than standing on the cliff -- uncertain if you'll ever even take the plunge. In fact, I'm finding it worse.