Cover Art

Filed in: blog | publishing    Tags: cover art | deviantart | feimo | schumy330 | tang dynasty images

The going statement is that writers have absolutely no say over what goes on their covers, but my publisher did ask me to send some images that I thought might be useful for the covers, though they already had many images in mind. I wish I was more artistic! I sent a couple of images that have inspired me in terms of the period and clothing but now I’m wondering if I should have sent more in the way of setting and location? Then again, I was a afraid of sending too much since they have an art department that thinks about these things and I’m so not a graphic artsy person that I didn’t want to mess with it.

Of course there’s the swordwoman in red that I use as my avatar. I’ve always loved that since my heroine starts and ends the book wearing a red wedding dress. It’s also very flowing and dramatic.

There are a couple of other artists I found on deviantart whose style I quite like.

schumy330’s work captures the ethereal quality of Tang dynasty costumes. Her portraits are so fresh and innocent.

http://schumy330.deviantart.com/gallery/

Feimo is a bit edgier and more seductive

http://feimo.deviantart.com/gallery/

I’m quite excited to find out what the covers will look like. It has me quite giddy. That also means that soon, hopefully soon, I will have definitive news of a release date.

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Glamourous Life

Filed in: travel   

I have Fergie’s song Glamorous in my head. I’m sitting in the Hard Rock Hotel for a company meeting and the room is pretty darn schmancy. The honor bar has a Wish Candle and a Love Kit right there next to the salted cashews.

Of course, I’m surrounded by Kleenex and sucking on cough drops. Sick again which is SO not glamorous. The nice hotel lady asked me what music I wanted playing in my room when I arrived and I laughed and said, “I have no idea. No preference.” So they ended up piping some Kurt Cobain. I really should have asked for something more upbeat.

I’m not hip enough for this place. LOL. Now if these were my young and wild days…but nowadays, I just want to be home with hubby to tuck me in.  Am I getting old and jaded?

P.S. I sent the manuscript to Gail! Twiddling thumbs now. Maybe I should live it up and celebrate a little since I’m in this hip venue.

Really, I just want to light that wish candle and hope that a new story idea comes to me.

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Reading emotions – East vs. West

Filed in: blog | research    Tags: asians | caucasians | cross-cultural studies | multicultural romance | sociology

I found this while looking up information about facial characteristics and it was just too fascinating to ignore. Basically this study had Caucasian and Asian subjects look at faces and tracked their eye movements as they performed facial recognition tasks and identified emotions.

It found that when reading emotions, Caucasians tended to look at the face as a whole where Asians focused on the eyes. Thus, Asians in the study would miscategorize negative emotions such as mistaking fear for surprise, for instance. Asians would ignore changes in the mouth that would cue them in.

I doubly found this fascinating because the princess in my current manuscript, a very observant person who’s learned how to survive in court by reading peoples’ intentions, distinctly notes that the hero, a westerner, poses a different set of challenges for her because the way he reacts and displays emotions is so different from what she’s accustomed to. Nice touch, eh? Well, I thought so.

I found several other articles on the same study with some additional insight. First, that this behavior seemed to be cultural rather than genetic as Asians raised in Western cultures didn’t show the same tendencies. Another thought was that this may be adaptive behavior due to the fact that Asian culture tends to look down upon showing negative emotion in public so Asians trained themselves to look carefully at the eyes because facial expressions were not so open.

Science Daily article – Caucasians and Asians Don’t Examine Faces in the Same Way

I’m interested to see what people think of this. Isn’t it a great way to describe cultural differences into a multicultural relationship? There are subtle, ingrained differences in addition to the larger obvious ones.

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Nothing’s going to stop me now

Filed in: blog | writing    Tags: perseverance | revisions

Maybe a better title for the post would be “slow and steady wins the race”. It always takes me longer than I think to do revisions. As soon as I open the the draft, I just want to change everything.

But I’m working hard, I promise. I even have proof. We had a power outage earlier this week and without electricity to distract me, I was able to break out the propane lamp and mark up a couple chapters before the power came back on. I have a new appreciation for authors who had to write by candlelight.

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The best lessons I learned, I learned in food service

Filed in: blog | slice of life    Tags: college life | first job

I was discussing with hubby the other day that everyone needs to have a crappy job some time in their life and have a bucket of bolts for a first car. Why? he asked. He had plenty crappy jobs and also spent plenty of paychecks to fix his clunker so he could drive himself to said job, yet he didn’t quite agree.

For the stories, I argued.

It builds character when you have to stick your hand into one of those giant industrial dish wash-o-trons to pull out twisted silverware and broken glasses. And skills like changing flats and duct taping broken lights — these are life skills they don’t teach in school!

On a related note, I’ve been having a back and forth on LinkedIn with a former co-worker. We worked together in college in the Rieber Hall Dining Services. From his online resume, he’s a pretty successful technical guru type now. He jokingly told me he did some of his most meaningful work at Rieber. Hey, come to think of it, so did I.

Here’s the scenario: Doors close at 9:00 and you want to clean up and get out of there as fast as you can so you can either stay up all night studying for that Chemistry exam or go hang with the college buddies. You’re competing against every other team to get to check out first. There’s a limited number of mops, brooms, and carts to get the job done.

Cue Mission Impossible theme. I had every task mapped out in my head. I put people where they were best suited and planned around those liability newbies that could slow you down. I remember showdowns between myself and other TLs (team leads) as I tried to corner the right stuff to get my team out fast.

Go ahead and laugh. I’m sort of laughing now.

It’s been a long time since I’ve had to mop floors and refill ketchup bottles, but I learned something about efficiency and putting your head down and getting your hands dirty. I learned how to negotiate and collaborate and coerce. That has to somehow, somewhere, translate into leading a team of professional types in the day job today.

I also have great stories to tell. Not everyone can empathize with the difficulties of learning different system architectures or of writing fiction, but almost everyone knows what it means to have that crappy job and that crappy first car. So my final argument was that when you’re sitting in front of someone in an interview or you’re out there networking, that connection might just pay off.

But going to the top schools and rubbing elbows with Ivy Leaguers and the upper crust from the beginning would help even more, hubby argued. If you could get there by skipping all the hardship, wouldn’t that be better?

Right. Fine.

But the stories can’t be as good.

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Do you get writer’s insomnia?

Filed in: blog | slice of life | writing    Tags: edgar allen poe | insomnia | michael chabon | midnight disease | stephen king

I blogged about it today over at the Ruby-Slippered Sisterhood.

http://www.rubyslipperedsisterhood.com/rss/index.php/adrenaline-and-the-midnight-disease/

Come on by if you have a chance!

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Readers and Critiques

Filed in: blog | writing    Tags: critique | revisions process

Parts of Across the Silk Road, aka Book 1 remastered, have been sent out to readers. No one has the entire manuscript, not even Little Sis, because I’m still hashing out the last chapters which are still in draft form. I have to thank my readers for being so patient with me and my jigsaw process. Right after I finish this draft, I’ll pick up from the beginning and revise in earnest again.

Last night, after critique group, I was thinking of how deep my revision process is. I expect a lot of the tone of the book to change and deepen in the subsequent drafts. Rarely does the structure or plot change, but the emotions get worked over and sharpened (at least I hope) which requires more invasive and far reaching changes threaded throughout the book. It’s so time consuming and nerve wracking to work this way, but I may just have to resign myself to it.

I wonder if this is in some way due to the style of critique I prefer, which I developed from working with Little Sis. I was telling her last time we were together how most readers will read and tell you what worked and what didn’t, giving you suggestions for what you can tweak. That’s definitely needed and very useful. But what my sister tells me is not whether the story is working, but rather, she tells me what the story can be.

The suggestions Little Sis will give are ones that will turn a scene on its tail. She’ll redirect the emotional path of the scene, at times, changing the tone of the entire chapter and perhaps even subsequent chapters. The characters will develop in an entirely different way from what I have on the page — but not in conflict with my overall arch. I can see where this sort of critique can be unwelcome. The changes are not insignificant, but her special skill is that she is sensitive to where the story is going. She’s able to tell me how to do what I want, but even better.

I think it takes a special kind of love to be able to do that. A special kind of tough love.

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Excerpt Monday: Shinjuku pt.2

Filed in: blog | excerpts    Tags: excerpt monday | romantic elements | Shinjuku | tokyo

This EM tried to sneak up on me, but I caught it. Ha! Excerpt Monday was started by authors Bria Quinlan and Alexia Reed. Unpublished and published authors post excerpts every month. They’ve added many new features such as holiday free reads and new releases too. Check it out on the blog: Excerpt Monday

This month is a continuation of the opening I posted last month. The working title of it is, “My Thoughts Return to Shinjuku”. Perhaps as it unfolds a little more, a little muse might suggest a better title?

The funny thing about re-reading part one — There is no elevator as our protagonist goes to the tea room. But I remember…oops, I mean…I imagined this elevator scene so vividly that the tea room simply must be on the second or third floor. I’ll have to fix that in edits. And the fact that the protagonist’s name sounds familiar is purely coincidental…

From last month:

But I was already late. And the formalness of the woman’s kimono and the meticulous room made me feel all the more gaijin. I hurried across the stones in my socks and knelt down onto the mat. The guy next to me was, like me, wearing jeans. He was the first Caucasian I had seen in days. I shot him an apologetic look, but he simply waited patiently with his hands resting on his knees for the tea ceremony to continue.  Read Part One

Part Two:

The hostess returned to the front of the room in tiny steps, the looped knot of her obi swaying back and forth behind her. The muted lantern light cast a reverent glow. A tray had been set with a kettle and bowls as well as other implements. She served us each a bubble-shaped purple jelly on a paper doily.

“Traditional Japanese sweet,” she explained.

And then the polyphonic tones of Beethoven’s Fifth cut into the proceedings. I sliced into the bubble with a toothpick-like utensil while she pattered to the back room to grab her cell phone. Thank goodness it wasn’t mine.

“Moshi-moshi.” She spoke in hushed tones in the back room while we ate.

The coconut-flavored jelly slid cool down my throat. I took my time picking at it as there was nothing else to do while we waited. The hostess was still talking on the phone when I finished, so I folded the paper carefully in my hands and glanced over at my jean-clad counterpart. He shifted on the mat, but otherwise remained respectfully still. He had light brown hair, short and unstyled. His jaw was slightly square and the look of him invoked an immediate sense of familiarity. I darted my gaze away before he could return it.

I remember how I stood in a subway train a month ago and realized, ‘Hey, I’m not shorter than everyone here’. This was the first time in my life I was surrounded by people who looked like me; Asian faces on every street, in every restaurant — and not just the wait staff.  Why should that feel like a Twilight Zone moment? Like that woman who wakes up from the operating table and is mortified when she sees her own face.

The Japanese woman returned to take us through the rest of the ritual: the respectful bowing, the whisking of the powder and water into a froth. I held the tea bowl in both hands and drank deep. True green tea tastes like boiled grass. The stuff they sell in the States is usually a doctored version.

The phone only rang once more before the ceremony was completed. We paid the hostess for our cultural experience and she zipped the yen notes into a small silk purse.

Out in the lighted hallway, I could see my tea companion more clearly.  His eyes were the same color as his hair, brown and common. He had that everyman boyish face that you saw many times over in the US. Only here in Tokyo could he achieve any sort of distinctiveness. The backpack slung over his shoulder made me think he might be a graduate student.

“That was interesting,” he remarked.

“Yes, it was.”

The stiff formality of the tea room remained with us as we walked to the elevator. Once inside, we grew even more quiet as we stared up at the lighted numbers, counting each ding down. The top of my head barely reached his shoulder.

“The cell tone added a real authentic touch,” he said out of the corner of his mouth. “Especially when it rang the second time.”

“And I felt like such an ugly American for being late!”

We laughed together in the close space, poking fun at how we had come expecting a rich and somber ritual.

“I’m Scott.”

“Jeannie,” I replied, and we passed into the second phase of casual meetings.

———————

This month’s links:

Don’t forget to come back on the first Monday of February for New Release Monday.  See what’s coming out and enter to win a free basket of New Releases.

So, to kick it off, your hosts:

Bria Quinlan, Rom Com (PG13)

and

Alexia Reed, Urban Fantasy (R)

Joining us this week:

Stephanie Draven, Fantasy with Romantic Elements (PG 13)
Danie Ford, Contemporary YA (PG 13)
Babette James, Contemporary Romance (PG 13)
Cynthia Justlin, Thriller with Romantic Elements (PG 13)
Kaige, Historical Romance (PG 13)
R. F. Long, Fantasy Romance (PG13)
Shawntelle Madsion, Paranormal Romance (PG13)
Debbie Mumford, Science Fiction/ Fantasy (PG13)

Kendal Corbitt, Erotica Contemporary (R)
KB Alan, Erotic Paranormal Romance (R)
Cate Hart, YA Paranormal (R)
Jeanne St. James, Interracial Menage Erotic Romance (R)
Cherrie Lynn, Contemporary Erotic Romance (R)
Michelle Picard, Paranormal/Fantasy (R)
Mary Quast, Contemporary Romance (R)
Danielle Yockman, Historical Romance (R)

Sara Brookes, Paranormal Romance/Urban Fantasy (NC17)
Angeleque Ford, Contemporary, Interracial, Erotic Romance (NC 17)
Elise Logan, Contemporary Romance (NC17)

12 Comments

A Room of One’s Own – A reflection

Filed in: blog | writing    Tags: a room of one's own | virginia woolf | writing and working

I was pondering about my current stressful day job situation — actually, I’ve been pondering about this for quite a while. Job dissatisfaction inevitably makes the thought of quitting and writing full time for a while so very tempting. I mean, I know I couldn’t actually make a living writing. It’s a far off dream. I was just thinking for the next month or so, that’s all.

A phrase came to me today, the title of Virginia Woolf’s essay, “A Room of One’s Own”. I’d never read it before, but I had a foggy idea about the theme. Well, no, actually I didn’t. I knew one thing about the essay; this line: “a woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction”.

So I went searching to find it online and then was compelled to read. An essay, of all things, on a Friday evening after a long, hard week of work. I think this is okay to link because it’s licensed: http://ebooks.adelaide.edu.au/w/woolf/virginia/w91r/

It’s amazing. (Yes, laugh at how I’m just now discovering Virginia Woolf. I was a math and science gal, remember?) She’s a wonderful writer and her use of language is so complex and unexpected. The way she formulates her ideas seems like a stream of consciousness, but when the ideas start to gel together, the effect is astounding.

I had to highlight a few quotes that kept on pulling at my mindstrings to show you the progression*:

“Indeed, I thought, slipping the silver into my purse, it is remarkable, remembering the bitterness of those days, what a change of temper a fixed income will bring about.”

“Therefore not merely do effort and labour cease, but also hatred and bitterness.”

And then when reflecting on the argument that no woman could match the genius of Shakespeare:
“For it is a perennial puzzle why no woman wrote a word of that extraordinary literature when every other man, it seemed, was capable of song or sonnet. What were the conditions in which women lived? I asked myself; for fiction, imaginative work that is, is not dropped like a pebble upon the ground, as science may be; fiction is like a spider’s web, attached ever so lightly perhaps, but still attached to life at all four corners. Often the attachment is scarcely perceptible; Shakespeare’s plays, for instance, seem to hang there complete by themselves. But when the web is pulled askew, hooked up at the edge, torn in the middle, one remembers that these webs are not spun in mid–air by incorporeal creatures, but are the work of suffering human beings, and are attached to grossly material things, like health and money and the houses we live in.”

I confess, I’m not done yet, but I found a little bit of peace and an outpouring of inspiration in her words. If I didn’t have this job, I wouldn’t have the freedom and the peace of mind to write. I’d be scared and fretful. My thoughts wouldn’t be free to think about imaginary places and people. Back in the day of Shakespeare or even for many in the 1920’s on the cusp of suffrage as women were entering the workforce, a woman didn’t have means to make money. She didn’t have the means to give herself the freedom to become educated and travel and absorb culture in order to create.

My day job gives me that freedom. I have the luxury to travel to a couple of conferences a year and go out with my writing partners. I load my shelves with as many books as I want. I’ll still strive to find balance within the dreaded day job, but I know it’s a fallacy to think that having more free time without a paying job would allow me to write.

I have a room of my own and I have a little money. And it’s so empowering that I’m writing in a genre and in a time filled with women who, struggle as they might with jobs, family, and all of life’s ups and downs, can still find the peace of mind to create.

*Quotes are from Virginia Woolf’s “A Room of One’s Own”, an essay based upon two papers read to the Arts Society at Newnham and the Odtaa at Girton in October 1928.

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Deja Vu All Over Again

Filed in: blog | craft    Tags: style | writing reflection

Wait, I think I’ve already done a blog post with that title…

I’m finishing up this round of edits on Across the Silk Road and now that I’ve nearly completed three books and a short in this world, I’m getting a bit worried. Little Sis had a couple comments wondering if some elements or scenes in this book were too reminiscent of Butterfly Swords or The Dragon and the Pearl. And then what about vocabulary and echo phrases across the books? I’m worried enough about catching those in one book let alone across several.

Of course there are recurring themes and elements. I love big, sweeping honor plays. Themes of loyalty and redemption and warrior culture are always hanging about. But what about love scenes or milestones that start to have a similar feel? I wonder if this is inevitable.

How do you keep it fresh? Is it really time to write something completely different after these revisions? My paranormal project is also set in a fantasy Tang dynasty. Maybe I need to let that rest and write the contemporary I’ve been ruminating about. I can sneak that in. Really.

It leaves me to also wonder, how much of this is your signature style and voice that readers will embrace and love about your writing? How much of it is you falling into old habits and no longer keeping it fresh? A thin red line indeed.

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