Vicki Pettersson's Blog, page 5

Show your work week

Courtesy of NYT Bestseller and fellow UF author, Chloe Neill, a few of us UF and paranormal authors have gotten together for Show Your Work Week:

Here’s the schedule for the week, which begins today:

Monday, October 21:   Jennifer Estep
Tuesday, October 22: Jaye Wells
Wednesday, October 23: Lucienne Diver, Faith Hunter
thursday, October 24: Yasmine Galenorn
Friday, October 25: Vicki Pettersson

I’m looking forward to hearing about these writers’ processes, and I’ll update this blog with links throughout the week as the posts become available. As you can see, I’m up on Friday, and as I rarely talk about process, I was a tad verbose. It was a great way to shake out the cobwebs, though, and take a look at some of the tools that have become mainstays in my writer’s toolbox.

Meanwhile, it’s back to work on the third and final book in the Celestial Blues series, The Given. I’m intent on giving Grif and Kit a proper send-off, no matter how sweet or bitter it might be.

Everything I know about drugs in one post.

I write fantasy. (Duh.) Yet fantasy for fantasy’s sake doesn’t interest me. I love a good, solid grounding of reality – it gives me purpose as a writer, and allows me a place to think about issues that really matter to me, and to society as a whole. Superheroes and angels and the world I build around it is just the spoonful of sugar, and I like my fiction to go down easy, so there ya go.

So you may have seen this already if you’re on my Facebook or Twitter accounts, but I had a couple of readers contact me regarding this article: krokodil, the Russian street drug featured in – and, indeed, what inspired – the plot of The Lost has hit America. (The header said ‘finally’ hit America … as if it was the event we were all waiting for. I mean, really.)

I actually heard a news broadcast about a year ago of a woman wandering through a local WalMart, and serripitously opening and mixing paint thinner and gasoline, but the employees had no idea why and it took them awhile to catch on to what she was doing. I think their greatest worry was that she was using (no pun intended) gasoline and not paying for it. It eventually came out that she was a meth addict, but for someone who is not addicted to these sort of drugs, the reasons for this particular concoction still had to seem unreal.

Look, y’all know IANAD and I am certainly no expert on drugs. Advil is a rarity for me. I was given a prescription for (no surprise to those who read my last two posts) anxiety during a particularly stressful time a few years ago and couldn’t bring myself to even fill it. My husband, James, is so skeeved by drugs that we don’t even watch Breaking Bad. (I’m trying to get him to cave on that one, but he just pulls up before and after pics of people on meth from the Internet and my “But everyone is watching it” argument is totally blown.) My cognitive understanding of this sort of opiod concoction is that one hit and you’re finished. Your mind, the way your brain is physically wired, is forever changed. But desperation doesn’t think this way, does it? Desperation has its own language.*

I am willingly – even gleefully – addicted to caffeine** and I have a pretty obsessive and addictive personality overall, so I think I could very easily love, say, wine enough to bed down with a bottle or two at night if I let myself. But it’s knowing that which helps me keep it in check. I love cocktails and cocktail culture – mules and Hendricks/tonic are my summer drinks; old-fashioned in the winter – but I like them as much for their social aspects, and the theatre of them (much like a Japanese tea ceremony) as I do for the taste.

So, no, I don’t understand the addiction aspect of drugs, but I do work hard to understand the human condition, and if there’s one thing I learned while researching krokodil, it’s this: taking drugs away from a desperate person – or making them unattainable – doesn’t make that person any less desperate. If you look in the interactive section of the above article, most comments are along the lines of “For the love of God, why???” which is a reasonable question coming from a reasonable person…

Who has never known true desperation.

So this is what I try to do when writing, and considering any character and their habits or traits: Why … but with the intent of understanding, not judgment. I try to put myself in their shoes, their thoughts. Under what conditions would I do this?

Well, let’s see. If I was born in outer Siberia where the government stomps on people as a matter of course – that is, when they’re in give-a-shit mode – then I cannot say with any degree of certainty that I’d have to fortitude to resist escape. Any sort of it. So, yeah, I can put myself in that position.

As for someone living just one state over – or in Walmart – it becomes a little harder to understand how a person afforded all the privileges of being born in this country could actively choose this form of addiction, but pain and suffering and desperation isn’t a zero sum game. You have no idea what’s going on with a person just by looking at them (again, a reference to my last post).

So outrage and disbelief is appropriate, but judgment helps no one because it doesn’t come from an altruistic place, or one of understanding. We all have our addictions, but so many factors – nature and nurture and opportunity and how much you’ve already had to endure – go into forming a person’s resilience.

So what can we do about this? (I’m not even sure that’s the point of this post, but it’s always a question worth posing, right?) Maybe nothing at all for someone who is so far gone that they think injecting lighter fluid in their veins will provide a happy escape.

But how about not being another mitigating factor in pushing someone over the edge? Just a smile or an encouraging word, genuinely felt, can turn someone’s day around. And how you live your days is how you live your life, right?

Anyway, that’s my post on drugs: don’t be such a dick to people that you make them want to do drugs.

Also. Sometimes the craziest parts of fiction are those you can’t make up.

* On desperation. As per my last post, I’ve been having trouble sleeping. When my sister visited this summer, she gave me a bottle of this:

I accepted it with thanks and, of course, didn’t take it. Then, in desperation for this acute insomnia I’ve been suffering, I pulled the bottle out two nights ago and took two pills with dinner. I had no idea how long it would take for this stuff to enter the system, but Jesus, what I wouldn’t do for eight solid hours.

I slept through the night and woke freakin’ joyous yesterday. I couldn’t believe it. So, rinse and repeat …

Deeply, and like a baby, throughout the night again.

Holy shit.

So, there. I’m desperate and I took drugs. I am not going to say that if any of you suffer from insomnia that you should take them, because that would then make me a drug pusher. But do what you will with that information.

** On caffeine: So James took away my coffee maker. He came to realize, through study of the Nespresso bill, that instead of saving us money (by not having to trek to Starbucks for a brilliant cup) that my addiction was actually costing us money. Like, a couple grand for the year. I work at home – I can’t sleep – and so I was pulling these babies from 5 a.m. to 4 p.m. So his ultimatum was to cut down or go back to drip. For some reason he thought this would work on me, which is weird because he knows me *insert world’s biggest eyeroll*.

See, when I’m addicted, my friends, it is a deep and abiding commitment. I am nothing, if not loyal. (Which makes me a great friend and a terrible businesswoman. But that’s another post.) So I’m stubbornly back on drip, but in light of my sleep issues I’ve decided I have to stop drinking coffee by 3 p.m. If I can make it up in sleep hours, no one should be able to see a difference in my cheery **koff** disposition. So stay tuned…

Thank you

I’m trying to remember what year it was … back in 1991 or ’92, I think – there was this new thing called the Internet and a friend gave me a Prodigy disk and showed me how to install it on my desktop, which was little more than a word processor and a ginormous calculator (attached to a printer with feed lines that I’d have to tear off gently before handing in for my college coursework).

 

Anyway. After being screeched at by the little men in the machine (I wish there was a word for the sound the phone lines made when connecting to the Internet back then; there’s a whole new generation now who never heard it, but it was impressive) the Prodigy software would welcome me, and I’d patiently click and wait, and click and wait, and finally the pages, the communities, I was interested in, would load. There were two. A tennis forum, where I met a girl named Regina who adored Andre Agassi, and I got to gush over Boris Becker and Steffi Graf. There was also a very active Books & Writers forum, though it was called something else at the time, with a good handful of fantastic published authors, the best known of whom was Diana Gabaldon.

 

Obviously, this writer’s forum had a huge influence on me. It was a part of my daily life before the Internet was a part of daily lives. I met Joanna Bourne and Darlene Marshall there, both of whom writes historical romances, Barbara Rogan, writer of literary mysteries, and Diana herself. I exchanged messages with Linda Grimes and Susan Adrian, who slaved away daily with me at the page, hoping someday to be published. (And now we all are.) We had guest authors come in sometimes, too. One such author was a newbie you might know. She wrote Dead Witch Walking and chatted with us about that. (*waves* Hi, Kim!)

 

The point is, a greater average number of working writers came out of that forum, I think, because it was expected there. It was what you do. It was what came next if you did the work. We all hoped to be published, but I think we all expected it a bit as well. Diana was already a legend back then, and would freely regale us with lengthy stories of her own editor (and editor, OMG!) who reportedly said things like, “It’s so not hard to be published in New York. All you have to do is write something one of us loves.”

 

We all drank that cool aid.

 

It’s where I learned the protocol of the Internet. Where I learned how to behave. It’s where I learned how to critique and take critique in return, that ad hom was never acceptable, that you call readers what they are – readers, not minions or fans or something else that knocks the author/writer partnership out of balance – and you write. Every day. You write.

 

That forum, and my own hard work, turned me from a dreamer into a writer and, from there, an author. It was the first place I joyously announced the sale of The Scent of Shadows and they all celebrated with me. (I still have those messages.)

 

But I totally digress, because the first actual friend I ever made on the Internet was Regina, from the tennis forum. We spoke to each other openly about everything, we spoke like sisters, and when I tried to explain this to Sarit, a good Real Life friend, she scoffed and said, “You cannot become a real friend with someone you met on the Internet.”*

 

Fast forward to 2013 and we all know differently. And your response to yesterday’s post is proof of that. I actually panicked after posting it and came back online to delete it, but messages had already begun trickling in … the first of which was a simple Thank you.

 

No, thank you. I plan to take time and respond to each individual message this weekend but for now please know how much your messages meant.

 

And be kind to yourself today, too.

 

 

*BTW, Sarit is back in her home country of Israel now and we’ve been able to reconnect … you guessed it, via the Internet. (So there, Sarit!)

Beautiful destruction; aka, Life – In medias res

I’m rewriting two books just now. One came with a one-page edit letter, and the other came with a fifty-four page edit letter. (Oddly, it’s the latter that’s in far better shape.) So I’m spending the next many weeks on what I consider that heavy-lifting of writing, not getting the story down, but reworking what’s already there. Of course, being contrary, this makes me long to write fresh words again, though doing that makes me long for the security of a finished draft. But none of that’s important. I want to talk about this:

 This man blows up flowers. See?

 

 

Because flowers are bastards, I guess. But the process is cool – he freezes them with liquid nitrogen and then shoots them with an airgun.

 (Even more amazing is the process you have to go through to actually purchase one of these images, because I’ve tried to access prices for a few pieces and I can’t. So if anyone can tell me how to purchase fine art, please tell me. It may be that you have to purchase the original and there are no prints in which case these images will live on my Pinterest page with all the other things that make me feel bad about my imperfect life.)

 Where was I?

 Oh yeah. Blowing up bastard flowers.

 That was just a beautiful and violent teaser to ease you into this blog. I’ve debated whether to say anything about this next subject at all because there are already so many voices out there on the Internet. Lots to look at, debate, infuriate, inspire. Not really my thing as I try not to get emotionally involved in things that can be emptied out in a tweet. I mean, here’s my daily feed in a nutshell:

 Writing is rewriting.

 Franzen’s a blowhard.

 You’re not gonna put that indie publishing genie back in the bottle.

 There. I mean, how much more is there to say unless you want to start splitting hairs? (How big of a blowhard is Franzen? Huge. There. Next.)

 Seriously, I write for the connection. The reader and me. A meeting of the minds. So while the flowers above make me pause in amazement, and tweets and status updates serve as distraction, sometimes there’s someone or something that touches me at the level where I recognize them as me. That’s what you respond to when you read too, right? So when I saw this post about depression by one of my favorite writers – who has had more success with her sole book than I have with all of mine, my first thought was, She has no reason to be depressed. Though of course if you know anything about depression you know that’s not how it works. Depression has its own reasons and none of them are about making sense.

 Then I saw this post by a young woman simply overwhelmed by life and I thought, But you haven’t even made any proper mistakes yet. What do you have to be depressed about? Again, not the point.

 And then I thought, Gee. I bet people think that about me.

 Because what people can’t read between the lines of my books is that my hair falls out in clumps because of stress. This has been going on for about three years and the only surprise now is that there’s any hair left on my head at all. You also may not know that I suffer from insomnia, and am awake at 3 a.m. more days of the week than not. Or that a neat, new addition to my not-infrequent panic attacks includes the tightening up of my throat so that I literally have to gasp for breath, and it still doesn’t release. For days.

 I obviously need to work on my coping mechanisms.

 You also have no idea that I was thinking about jumping out of a plane about two months ago. Not, like, skydiving, but as I was sitting on a commercial flight. Without a parachute. Or how I thought that stepping out in front of a moving car, while stupid, would at least be conclusive. Because sometimes, in the midst of ambiguity, you simply want relief. (OMG, my mother is so going to be calling me after this post.)

 So reading these other posts, feeling and thinking these things, I realized, holy shit, there are a lot of people out there who are really hard on themselves. Who are so involved in the minutiae of their lives that they can’t see the big picture. And I’m one of them. And I think it helps to know that you’re not alone. I mean, you’re not even special in your aloneness. Everyone wants to jump out of a plane at some point. Unless, prolly, blowhards like Franzen. (Okay. I’ll stop with the Franzen references. He’s boring me anyway.)

 But go back and look at the comments in the Jenny Lawson post. I could have written any and all of them. And that actually helps, yanno? Because when you’re stuck in your head and you’re thinking, ‘I-hate-my-job, I-hate-my-life, I-hate-I-hate-I-hate…’ at the very least you should know you’re not alone.

 You’re not alone.

 And please don’t worry for me, because I’m not alone either. I have a great family, bosom friends, the knowledge that This Too Shall Pass, and a wonderfully supportive, understanding, loving (and shit-hot) husband, and I am at heart an optimist. Also, when I step back and allow myself perspective – when I finally do catch a breath – I realize that life is great. My life is great. I just need to be better at looking back and acknowledging mistakes, then let them go. At looking forward, acknowledging fear, and diving in anyway. At being as kind with myself as I am with everyone else I love.

 And at realizing that – like those exploding flowers – life doesn’t have to be perfect to be both worth it and utterly goddamned gorgeous.

 Also this:

Because these bats make me think of Bob Fosse, and nobody wants to jump out of a plane – even while rewriting – while thinking of Fosse.

Las Vegas.

I was asked to be a part of the great BLVDS magazine’s Cultural Issue this month. Yes, we haz culture in Vegas.

The whole magazine can be seen for free online and I encourage anyone who might be interested in Las Vegas outside of the usual/Strip to give it a read. I did, and it made me so proud. I do so love this town, and it’s clear the folks at BLVDS do as well.

Incidentally, I had a nice adventure when I popped downtown for the interview, including a quick visit to my beloved Neon Boneyard. (I just missed the tour!) but that’s for another time. I need to write while I can (ie., while the house is still asleep) so below is a screenshot of my interview in BLVDS, but again, go ahead and check out the full magazine. It’s made with love.

Cupcake Wars

So as many most of my readers know, I am not a cook. I’m, like, the anti-cook, and at some point I’ll write up a whole separate post on why that is, but for now let it suffice to say that while I don’t cook, I do know how to bake. The directions must be followed precisely – I can do that – and the reward is great, so it’s something I tackled at an early age.

So this weekend James and I found ourselves with a houseful of preteens, two of whom really wanted to bake cupcakes. Since there are both males and females in this household, I went out and bought the girliest ingredients and decorations that I could find. BECAUSE I’M IN CHARGE OF THE SHOPPING. (Hint: if you want to decorate your cupcakes in Manchester United colors, or those of the Boston Bruins, or even the Dallas Cowboys, then YOU do the shopping. But I took two preteen girls with me, and we chose pink. La-di-dah.)

Anyhoo.

Our family tradition is to gather in the kitchen, turn up the tunes, and have a decorating contest where we fight to win 1) the prettiest, 2) the most original and even 3) the ugliest baked good. Mind, this last one is usually won by default. Nobody’s actually trying for it. As reference, last Christmas I got creamed by one of my Steppies, and walked away with no awards. This time I scored prettiest AND most original – yes, I am bragging here – and let the record show that James got a big ol’ ZERO – that’s what you get when you try for aliens on your baked good, I guess. So here are the collective results:

Can we all agree that Buddy of Cake Boss fame should totally watch his back?

As for my winning-est entry, those who’ve been following my yard drama on Facebook won’t be surprised. I have bunnies on the brain:

Seriously, off to hit a deadline now. Smell you Peeps latah.

THE LOST (& life) in a video nutshell

Got any questions re. THE LOST or the Celestial Blues series? They’re pretty well answered in the below video. I think it’s hilarious that it catches Janene* and me chatting and primping right before go-time. A little behind the scenes look at nervousness personified before we get going!

After that, both light-hearted and serious answers as to What Comes Next.

Enjoy … and if it generates any thoughts or questions, do drop me a line and let me know!

* Yes, that is Janene’s real accent. Yes, she really is that genuine and sweet. This was my first time meeting her, but I’m happy to now call her Friend.

Meridian Six is here!

Woot! Look what I just found, guys! You remember me lauding Jaye Wells recently, right? I got an early read of the first book in her new Prospero’s War series, DIRTY MAGIC, and I swear to you – she gets better and more imaginative with each book. This is a writer in Full Stride, and I admire her greatly. Unfortunately, DIRTY MAGIC isn’t out until next year, but this is:

Meridian Six: A new Jaye Wells novella — Amazon, B&N, Kobo – $2.99!

Meridian Six remembers the days before the Troika enslaved humans. She also remembers her mother, a freedom fighter who was murdered in the final battle between humans and vampires. But it is her mother’s final words that have haunted her:

Red means life.

When M6 finally runs from the vampires who’ve held her captive, she finds herself used by her own race. Because in a world at war, freedom is a luxury paid for in blood.

I read the first scene when Wells released it here, and again, another strong world, another auto-buy for me. It was so strong and unique I had to do a little more research on how she wrote it/what inspired it, etc. Bingo! Turns out it feels fully developed because she originally conceived of it as a full novel and series.

Anyway, if you like my work, I think you’ll love hers, and this novella will only run you $2.99. So have it with your coffee, not in lieu of it. And if you think it’s as fabulous as I do, let Wells know by leaving her a brief review on your favorite site. Even a line or two helps authors more than you know.

Or just tell her I sent you. I’m going to run into her at some point or another, and maybe I’ll get a taco out if it.

$0.99 story … and an appearance.

Zee news of zee day:

Remember the Blood – A Short: now available for only $0.99 via Amazon, B&N, and Kobo:

Ever feel single-mindedly consumed by passion? Think love is worth hanging onto at any cost? Imagine if it were also a brutal need.

New Year’s Eve is a night of celebration and remembrance for some … but for others it’s a time to forget. While the years might pile up easily behind vampires Ina and Alexander, the memories do not. Forgetting is the price they must pay for the gift of eternal life, but Ina and Alexander will do anything to stay together … and for that they must remember the blood.

*

And on that cheery note:

*

I’ll be at the annual Boas & Tiaras Tea here in Dallas (actually, Allen) Texas this Saturday, June 8th. It’s held at the Hilton Garden Inn ( in Allen) from 11am to 3pm, and tickets are still available. A welcome reception gives you time to mingle with the authors as well as shop for books and check out our raffle baskets. Proceeds from the raffle basket sales and a portion of the book sales will go to Plano Family Literacy. A high tea will be served, oh-la-la.

Honestly, I love this event because it’s irreverent and it’s held in my adopted hometown so I’ve gotten to know a fair number of the DFW readers over the past couple of years. I love seeing them, as well as the Fresh Fiction gang, who really work hard to bring readers and authors together. It’s a great time, and my only appearance this summer — so come say hi before I head back into my writing cave, yes?

*

For more info on All Happenings, be sure to sign up for my newsletter. The latest goes out tomorrow.

Urban Fantasy must-reads!

So you can always tell when I disappear into what my friend, Janu, likes to call my writing cave. I appear only to eat or work out or raise the pesky little people I’m responsible for, and for whom the word “deadline” means nothing. (There’s growing up to be done, and by God, they’re going to do it!)

But for me first drafts especially are like another reality — I truly have to live there for a goodly amount of time if I’m going to bring that world alive for anyone else. Right now I’m finishing up the first draft of THE GIVEN, the final book in my Celestial Blues trilogy. I want to give Kit and Grif – and you, the reader – a deserved and satisfying ending, but that requires pulling focus away from other areas of my life. These days, my half of any conversation consists merely of grunts and glassy-eyed gazes, so I’d advise just standing back a ways, and waiting for it to pass. It always does.

In the meantime, I like to offer up to my readers some other great storytelling options. This first one is a bit of a tease, but I just can’t help talking about it. I finished it, and immediately wrote the author, “I wish I’d written this!”

This being Jaye Wells’s DIRTY MAGIC.

Great cover, right? And here’s the description:

The first in an all-new urban fantasy series by USA Today bestseller Jaye Wells.

The last thing patrol cop Kate Prospero expected to find on her nightly rounds was a werewolf covered in the blood of his latest victim. But then, she also didn’t expect that shooting him would land her in the crosshairs of a Magic Enforcement Agency task force, who wants to know why she killed their lead snitch.

The more Prospero learns about the dangerous new potion the MEA is investigating, the more she’s convinced that earning a spot on their task force is the career break she’s been wanting. But getting the assignment proves much easier than solving the case. Especially once the investigation reveals their lead suspect is the man she walked away from ten years earlier-on the same day she swore she’d never use dirty magic again.

Kate Prospero’s about to learn the hard way that crossing a wizard will always get you burned, and that when it comes to magic, you should be never say never.

And, FWIW, here’s what I had to say upon completing it:

Jaye Wells raises the urban fantasy bar with DIRTY MAGIC, a hard-boiled series debut as unique and surprising as the creatures and characters peopling it. Kate Prospero is charged with policing the Cauldron, a magical world so fully realized, and so gritty, it gets under your nails. Wells is known for deftly weaving non-stop action with no-holds barred humor, but the unique and deeply drawn relationships are the real alchemy here. DIRTY MAGIC showcases seasoned pro, Wells, at the top of her game, and establishes newcomer Kate Prospero as the urban fantasy heroine to beat.

Which doesn’t even do it justice. Seriously, guys, just go preorder it here.

Also, a little insider info — Ms. Wells has been a very sneaky writer. It turns out she’s also writing funny paranormal romances as Kate Eden — who knew? So if you like your vamps to do more than just bite, I suggest giving these a shot. They’re priced great, too.

Speaking of vamps, this will be out next week:

This is the only vampire story I’ve ever written. I was never interested in bloodsuckers if only because there was already so much text already out there. I’m not going to contribute to a mythos if I’m only rehashing the same ol’, same ol’, yanno? But when I was invited to contribute to the Mammoth Book of Vampire Romance some years back, I decided to take on the challenge of creating my own mythology for vampires, and I was really drawn by the question: what would someone who thrives on blood actually find romantic? This, Remember the Blood, was my answer and it was as dark as anything I’ve ever written. But romantic too, I think. Or maybe not. Maybe my husband needs to buy me more chocolate and roses.

But later. Right now I’m on deadline.

Next, don’t forget Jocelynn Drake just released the latest in her newest Urban Fantasy series, DEAD MAN’S DEAL:

In a world where elves, faeries, trolls, werewolves, and vampires swim free in a sea of humanity, sometimes you need an edge. Looking for a little love? Need some luck? Desperate for revenge? Gage can give you what you need. The most talented tattoo artist in town, he knows the right symbol and the right mix of ingredients and ink to achieve your heart’s desire. One tattoo is all it takes. But remember, everything has its price. . . .

Finally, this one needs no introduction:

But what you need to know is that DEAD WITCH WALKING will be Amazon’s daily deal this Sunday, which means it will be 1.99 for a very short time. You can’t afford not to add it to your e-collection, or gift it to someone you know and like. It’s Sunday only, so save this link til then, k?

Hope that helps feed your reading addiction while I’m in my cave.