R. Lee Smith's Blog, page 35

Storm Warnings…

I must reluctantly confess to being a fairly superstitious person, although only in a conventional sense, if you can have a conventional superstition. I’ve nothing against black cats and I’ve deliberately broken a mirror (bitch got in my way) and when people say the words “Friday the 13th” to me, I think first of the television series and then of the movies (and neither with any great swelling of emotion). On the other hand, I do have a pair of earrings that I only wore to job interviews (and yes, I always got the job when I wore) and before I lost it (or it was stolen by someone who sensed its power), I had a little lucky octopus that I took to Bingo, and I guess some part of me genuinely believed that when I grabbed it and whispered the number I needed into its tiny rubber siphon, it would telekinetically sieze the corresponding ball and guide it into the caller’s hand. I’m one of those people who believes that talking about something bad that might happen almost guarantees that it will happen, especially if you talk about it next to an open window. Which is why I have waited a week to make this particular post, now that the weather has decided to relax for the summer and I think it’s safe to tell the story.

Let me start by saying that about three years ago, I moved to Kansas after a lifetime in the Great Pacific Northwest. There are a lot of things I could say about the differences between those two areas, but today I’m going to talk about the weather. You see, I used to think I knew weather. I didn’t know weather. I didn’t know weather at all.

I used to think it got hot in the summers just because I occasionally got heatstroke; in Kansas, it can be 80 degrees in February or October, and 100 degrees in the middle of the night during the summer. I used to think it got cold just because it snowed once in a while; in Kansas, it starts snowing in September and keeps it up as late as April (note that it can also be 80 degrees during these exact same times. That’s not a typo), piling it up as deep as the windows and burying the damn car during the appropriate winter months. I even thought I was used to rain, growing up as I did just outside of Seattle; I was wrong. But then there is the one thing I could not even pretend to acclimate to in the Northwest and that is Tornado Season.

In three years, I still have not seen a tornado with my naked eyes, although we did have rotating clouds roll over the top of us once while my sister and I were sitting by the side of the road with a flat tire. And believe you me, we were watching it. In fact, let me be clear: I don’t want to see one. I saw Twister. I don’t need to get any closer than that.

Contrary to popular belief, Kansas is not entirely flat. The part that I live in is actually fairly hilly and as such, we were told that our odds of getting hit with a tornado were pretty low. Unless the tornado spawned right on top of us, that was. In which case, it was likely to keep bumping off the hills until it blew itself out, coincidentally wiping the entire town off the face of the Earth. So, yeah, almost comforting, but not quite.

Some of you may know that the Midwest is prone to runs of bad weather. Just about every town out here has a siren. The siren means “Tornado is here.” Not “tornado is coming” or “tornado could happen” but “tornado is here.” Last week, for the first time in three years, the sirens went off. 

It was ten-thirty at night. My brother-in-law had gone to bed and my sister and I were just sitting down to watch some TV. I had just made nachos and had the first chip in my hand when the sirens sounded.

We looked at each other.

“Basement,” she said.

She grabbed her laptop and her parrot. I grabbed the cat, who had stumbled over to be cuddled and steal nachos anyway. We went down to the corner of the basement designated as the Bunker, where my sister’s husband had taken to sleeping, simply because it was cooler. He had a TV down there and we watched the Weather Channel post sports updates and advertisements for McDonalds for the next forty-five minutes until we finally turned on the computer and started getting our weather news from people who understood that people huddled in their basements don’t give a crisp goddamn about basketball or burgers.

It’s funny, the things you think about when you are sitting in the dark waiting to hear the roof of your house detach. I thought about Moore and Joplin and Greensburg. I was worried for my father, who has no basement and no town siren either. I was weirdly grateful that my dog had died the previous year, because storms freaked him right the fuck out and at one hundred and eighty pounds, if he chose to run screaming down the street instead of hide with me in the basement, there wasn’t anything at all I could have done about it. I keep family photos and such in a footlocker in my room and I was pretty sure those would make it even in the worst-case; I may have to dig down for a while to find them, but I thought the trunk would be intact. I had a lot of stuff I thought I’d miss, but it was just stuff in the end. We were all there in the basement–cat and bird and all–and we’d be okay.

But I was going to lose my computer. Which meant I was going to lose my stories. And this is the thing about thinking about tornados: inbetween the idea of being killed by one or losing a loved one and escaping entirely unscathed exists a mental landscape of miles and miles where you think about losing everything else you have, one precious thing at a time.

Sitting in the dark watching the weather lady make absolutely damn sure we had the sports scores, I thought for forty-five long minutes about losing my books. They’re all backed up, of course. On disks. Right next to the computer. Which were quite possibly about to be blown to separate points of Oz. When I finish a book, I am in the habit of mailing it to myself as a kind of poor man’s backup, so I wasn’t so much worried about those as I was all unfinished ones. Two hundred pages of Pool. Ninety pages of my untitled djinni story. Thirty pages plus outline and notes for The Bull of Minos. My rough outline and six scenes for The Bone Tree. Half a dozen short stories awaiting half a dozen more before I combine them into an anthology. If I lost them, I could write others, surely, but could I ever write them again?

I did that once. When Heat was two hundred and eighty pages along, my younger sister and her boyfriend decided to boost the computer’s performance by reformating the hard drive. They backed up our pictures. They backed up our music files. They backed up my sister’s documents. They hit Yes when the computer asked if they were sure. And then my sister said, “Wait.”

I’ll spare you the details of my reaction, except to say that I did not die from it after all. I just rewrote the book. And finished it, which I otherwise might not have done. I even think some of the scenes are better this way (and some will never be but pale imitations of the glorious scenes they could have been), but that was just one book. Could I lose them all?

I said none of this, of course, but my sister understood it anyway. The next day, she tried to talk to me about an automatic backup service for my computer, but I couldn’t do it–the window was open. However, now it’s been a week, the storm demons appear to have been appeased or at least flown off to other parts of the world, and I feel safe talking about it.

Kids, if you’re out there reading this, have a plan ready in case of an emergency. Know what nature routinely dishes out in your area and prepare for it. Get a first-aid kit together and at least a week’s supply of food and water. Have a radio, flashlight and batteries ready where you’ll be able to find them in a hurry in the dark. If you have pets, factor them into your plan. Hold disaster drills at least once a year. Get a fire-safe for important documents and if you write, for the love of God, back up your system and do not store your back-up in the same room as the system it’s backing up. Also, it helps to have something to do in your emergency room so you’re not spending forty-five minutes bitching to each other about the priorities of the people on the Weather Channel. And seriously, if you decide to watch a movie, make it Jurassic Park or Alien or The Human Centipede…anything but Twister.

Sneak Peak Sunday

Today’s Sneak Peek is an excerpt from The Care and Feeding of Griffins, the first book of my Lords of Arcadia series. The book follows Taryn MacTavish out of her ordinary life and into the world of Arcadia, a refuge of sorts for magical creatures, to raise a baby griffin. She’s made her new home in the Valley of Hoof and Horn and although she has not been made to feel terribly welcome, she’s decided to make the best of things and plant a garden. The excerpt is taken directly after she has finished this exhausting labor and collapsed for some much-needed rest, only to hear approaching footsteps…

* * *

Taryn forced her eyes open. At first, she saw only a black blur with the sun behind it. Then she sat up, struggling onto her elbows, and the intruder took shape.

It was a shape she knew at once, even though she’d never seen it except in bad illustrations. His chest was broad and powerful, with a thin coat of cocoa-brown fur smoothing the outline of his muscles into slabs of raw strength. His arms bulged comic-book style, his forearms rippling as he clenched and unclenched his massive hands on the haft of an equally-massive axe. His torso narrowed into naked loins; the brazen fact of his maleness was stamped from a human mold rather than beast, the only part of him below the waist that was. His legs were beast’s legs that led down to great, spreading, split hooves that were capped with sharpened, brass crescents. His neck was thick. It had to be, to support the bull’s head that grew there. His horns curved impressively wide and forward, made into lethal daggers with brass points.

Taryn found herself thinking very calmly of the Standing Stones where she had spent her first night. In specific, of the hoof print and the horns that had so attracted her. It hadn’t meant game at all, though, had it? It meant minotaur. Minotaur.

The bull’s mouth parted, issuing a voice as deep and cold and the mountain’s heart: “I want you gone from my valley.”

She stared at him and, stunned, heard herself say, “No.”

The minotaur lowered his horns. It was an impressively intimidating gesture, in spite of the fact that he’d have to be standing on his head to gore her as she lay strengthless on the ground. His eyes, oddly human and shockingly grey, narrowed to steely slits. “This is a grace I am giving you, human,” he told her darkly. “Get you gone and leave with your life.”

Weekend Writing Warriors

Today’s Weekend Writing Warriors entry is also from The Care and Feeding of Griffins, very early on in the book, when we first meet Taryn as a young girl on the library steps where she has met a certain singing gypsy. (By the way, that really is only eight sentences. I double- and triple-checked and even I am appalled.)

* * *

Apart from that, Taryn was aware (if only peripherally) that asking if you could see tiny dragons was a question that demanded tact, and Taryn knew (again, peripherally) that she lacked the vocabulary for tact.  If she asked anything, it would end up coming out of her as, “What’s the matter with you?  Are you congenitally incapable of seeing dragons or what?” and then this whole great day would be ruined.

So she let it go.

She accepted the dragons, accepted that her mom wasn’t interested in them, accepted that perhaps Mom couldn’t even see the dragons and that the reasons for this were unknowable and possibly distressing, and so she just let the matter drop and went home.  But she saw them, whether her mom could or not, Taryn saw the dragons.  Long after she grew up, sometimes she would see a dark-haired vaguely-gypsy-looking woman and think, ‘There really were dragons,’ and then smile, not really believing (and yet believing unreservedly) that she had seen them.

In any event, Taryn had her Redmond Library card for only six years before she moved with her family to Oregon, and by then she had mostly forgotten about the dragons and already had the egg.

Do Blogs Have Dedication Pages? They Do Now

This blog is dedicated to my sister, Cris, without whose colossal contributions, I would not have one. She has been gently encouraging me for years to do something like this and now that I’ve finally caved, she’s had to spend quite a bit of time she could otherwise be spending on her own pursuits trying to explain to me what a widget is. I’m not kidding when I call myself a Luddite. When she first told me I had to put my entries in HTML, I told her that couldn’t be true because I’d seen the internet and plenty of it was in English.

For medical reasons, I no longer live alone. For the last six years or so, Cris and her long-suffering husband have made me welcome in their home, asking exactly zero dollars in payment. Some people will say that is what family is for, but I’m well aware that isn’t always how it washes out. I owe them both an enormous debt of gratitude. In fact, it was my sister who finally convinced me that e-readers like Kindle and Nook were not, as I insisted, the laserdisc of our day and that they would indeed be replacing paperbacks (blasphemy!) as the standard format for publication and that I really ought to give self-publishing a try. Up until that day, I’d had two rather dismal experiences with publishers and because I had failed all of two times (!) to get the results I expected, I had given up on selling my books. Not on writing them, I might add. I’ve been writing since I was twelve and I’ve considered myself readable since I was twenty or so, but until my sister literally dragged me over to the computer and showed me what to do, I was perfectly content to write the books, show them to a few friends and family members, and leave them in a folder on my hard drive called “Finished.” I simply could not believe that anyone else would be interested in them or would pay actual money to read one. Six years later, I’m crossing that dotted line out of Hobby into Making A Living and I owe it all to her persistent interference.

While I’m at it, I’d like to take a moment to thank my Beta-readers, Mical, Laura and Cris again. A good writer needs ruthlessness as much as support and I do appreciate it, even if I fail to mention it as often as I should while I’m making those bitter cuts. Also, check out my cover art! Each and every cover was designed for me by the marvelous Sarah Jane Lehoux at sarah-janelehoux.com

5/21 Hump Day Hook

For my first Hump Day Hook post, I thought I’d use something from my next book, The Last Hour of Gann. In it, colonists from Earth have crashed without hope of rescue on an alien world with a dark history. The very few survivors are soon discovered by Meoraq, a holy warrior on a pilgrimage to one of his world’s most sacred shrines, who believes the strangers have been sent by God as a test of his worthiness (and his patience). Yet among these ugly, soft-skinned monsters, there is one woman, Amber, who is unlike any woman Meoraq has ever known…

* * * * *

Meoraq gathered up a fistful of her mane as she began her formal protests and cut it off. He stabbed the blade deep into the ground, still piercing the hair—to hell with the tent; he could get another tent—and swept back the blanket. His belly was hot and every nerve felt new and alive in a way he had never known. He had never been so aware of his own body or of a woman’s. And she was still struggling, still pretending not to understand, but when he slipped his hand through her tangled hair and behind her head, her shouting, swearing protests stopped and she grew very quiet as he leaned close to scrape his chin along her throat, filling his senses with the fullness of her scent.

“What are you doing?” she whispered.

His throat was too tight to answer, but hers was soft. He nuzzled his way up to the underside of her jaw and scraped his chin slowly down again, breathing her in. The heat in his belly had become pain, a second pulse like a hammer from within. His hand dropped, feeling along the front of her shirt and plucking once at the alien fastens he found there. “Take this off,” he murmured. “I don’t want to rip it.”

Kicking and screaming will the Luddites of the world be dragged into the new millennium.

So this is my first post on my first blog. You’d think, as a writer, I’d be better at it than I suspect I’m going to be. I’ve never even kept a diary. I’ve been waiting for years for this Facebook fad and Twitter trend to blow over and it ain’t happening, so I guess no choice remains except to join them too. One step at a time. The first step, as anyone will tell you, is to admit you have a problem. The second step is to start a blog and tell total strangers you have a problem. Also that you have a book. So here is my blog, where I will keep all my readers (and anyone else who happens along) fully informed of my progress in my latest works and even more fully informed of the most random crap to enter my mind because the state of the progress I’ve achieved in my latest work is probably pretty boring. For example, today I will be editing. I will be using an orange highlighter and pink post-it tabs. When I have to make lengthy notations rather than merely highlighting words that need to be changed, I will use a gel-ink rollerball pen with a padded grip. They are the only kind of pen I use. I will also doodle in the margins of my pages because editing is boring and dinosaurs are fun. I hope you enjoyed reading all that, because you’re going to get a lot more of it in the future at this blog until I learn how to write on one.