Maurissa Guibord's Blog, page 11

A hard winter- even in magical places.

 I just returned from a Florida vacation with my family and am kind of wishing we never went...
It was great to see family down there, and the kids had a blast at Disney but the weather was frigid
and we all came home with a magical case of the GI virus du jour. I am thankful that the projectile vomiting
didn't begin on the plane ride home (I'm sure Jet Blue is thankful too- their barf bags would have been woefully inadequate).
So far it's my husband, me and son that have been struck.
I am hove...

Oops! There goes my blog

A little while back, a fellow elevensie Randy Russell asked me to write a guest blog for his series
on Teen Voice. I was thrilled to do it- but am kind of slow on getting the word out-
I'm on vacation (using the term in the loosest possible sense) in Florida, the state now known as H#ll has officially
frozen over.  It was 32 degrees yesterday morning in Orlando.
My kids of course still went in the pool. What can I say? We're from Maine  :-)
So yesterday, I blogged over at Randy's ghostly site abo...

Don't Look!

 
Am still working on copy edits of Warped. Copy edits are embarrassing! Page after page some poor, long-suffering CE has had to point out to me the er, 4th time on a page that I have repeated the same word.
Case in point:  my characters are constantly looking.  She looked at him. He looked at her. She had a perplexed look on her face. They looked around. She gave him a shy look. He looked down.

   ACK!  Why don't they close their stupid eyes already and grope their way around the rest of the s...

Copy edits and Foreign Soil.

 A couple of days ago the UPS driver braved the icy moguls of the driveway, rang the bell and deposited this on my doorstep:





Inside this dirty, bedraggled paper sack is my manuscript for Warped, complete with copy edit marks. The poor thing looks like it walked it here by itself. It's been on some kind of death march from 1745 Broadway to Maine, and apparently got run over by some New York cabbies to boot.
 
But the contents were unscathed- by the delivery I mean. They were scathed plenty by the...

Oh Muse- Thy name is Deadline

I've discovered something about the way I write. Much better under pressure- I'm talking about planet-sized, crushing, coal-into diamond type pressure.
Otherwise known as a deadline.
Deadline. When you look at that word, it's even kind of chilling isn't it? Makes one wonder about the derivation.
Dead...line. As in (cue crypt-keeper voice)  "After this line is passed you shall be dead....Bwaahahaha." 
So my muse, I've decided is a deadline. Represented in form by something like the ghost of...

ARC Giveaway- EVERLASTING

If you like historical adventure, mystical treasure and star-crossed romance you will love Angie Frazier's YA debut,  Everlasting, which comes out in June.  And she's giving away a signed ARC! All you have to do is head over and comment at  angie_frazier   How cool is that?

Happy 2010! 

Making the Perfect Christmas

As the holiday season swirls around me in an increasing frenzy I find myself getting sucked into the annual dilemna.... how to make the perfect Christmas.  For such celebrations we all have visions of how we want our house, holiday cards, special dinner, gifts, decorations, outfit etc. to look. Or maybe how we think they should look. But to borrow an idea from a wonderful sermon I heard during Advent last year I have a suggestion:
Don't try.
 
It's not your job to make things perfect. Not for yo...

Rest in Peace, Mister

I killed him.

I admit it freely. Although the actual cause of death will be recorded as some combination of exhaustion, dehydration (he'd been leaking bodily fluids for some days) and nervous collapse, I was the cause. I drove him too hard. It was the stress, I suppose, that finally did him in. The constant demands. The daily grind, if you will.

I don't think he felt much pain. Disorientation had set in; he hardly knew what time it was anymore. But it was terrible to watch his death throes. I...

The Rustling of Dead Things

 

This isn't really a ghost story because it's something my father told me. And my father never told me stories...
            I was helping Dad rake leaves on a sunny October afternoon. It had been windy the night before and the maples trees had shivered and howled all night long. Now they stood bare and sober, like big drunks the morning after, with all their gaudy rags left on the ground for somebody else to clean up. It wasn’t hard work, the leaves were dry and big swathes of them rushed...