Krista D. Ball's Blog, page 10

Six Sunday – The Amazing Transformation of Wicca Dog

I know that I'm a no-name author and I definitely get not wanting to spend money on an author who might just completely suck. Trust me: I know. So, in honour of saving money, you are welcome to download a free copy of Wicca Dog from Smashwords. Just enter the code: DD24A and you can read it for free.

Unseen, Pan trotted along the secondary road grasping a jumbo bag of low-fat popcorn, sans butter, sans flavour. Damned nymphs and their diet. One would think that a pagan event honouring him would entitle him to choosing the snacks. Not so much.

A blue sedan whizzed down the road, kicking up dust. Pan recognized the driver, a Wiccan named Robert.

Did you know I have other blogs?

It occurred to me today that I might not have told you fine folks that I have two other blogs:

Sleepless e-Reader is where I do reviews of books. The catch is that they need to be available in ebook format.
Writer in Residence is a writing info site, where other authors come in and talk about different hot topics in the writing world.

You are welcome to pop by the other blogs any time!

~~~~

As for an update on the writing, I'm busy doing some pre-editorial edits for Road to Hell. My editor and I spoke and I let her know that I'd caught a plot concern. It's small, but it's in a few places. So, I'm going through and fixing it up before she picks up the book, since she won't be getting to it for about another month. That worked out well for both of us.

I've been dividing my writing time between Tranquility's Grief  and the untitled MG chapter book. I'm very pleased with the chapter book's development and this edit is going much smooth than I remember all previous edits ever being. I believe I'm actually getting better at this writing gig; things are coming a lot faster to me than they used to.

Tranquility's Grief will need a major overhaul when I'm done this draft. It's been written over the better part of a year in bits and pieces, with me changing my mind partway through over a few issues. So, part of the book is written with one thing happening…and then I leave a note reminding myself that I changed things, and I just keep on rocking.

However, I think this might be the last book that I write in the staggered scene method. At least, not at the extreme that both Tranquility books. I'm finding my new projects have a much clearer beginning and end in my mind now and I'm able to writing in order a little better.

Overall, things are going well in the writing department now that I've narrowed my focus on a three projects. I am hoping to have the MG project titled and ready for submission by the spring. (I'm in Edmonton…spring is months away [image error] )

A little snippet from today's writing

So this is what I wrote today, the beginning of my (untitled) MG historical fantasy.

Chapter 1

Sisep couldn't stop shivering as she stood knee-deep in the cold river. Blisters covered her small hands. She couldn't let go of the wood post she held to pick the splinters out of her fingers, either, since the post was holding up part of the river fence. Her village needed the fence to stay up so that the adults a few steps away from her could harpoon the fish.

However, she was cold and hungry and really, really sore. The sun was already high in the sky. Sisep only had a small piece of smoked eel since first meal, and that meal was only some raspberries and trout.

"I'm tired of fishing," Sisep complained, her shoulders slumping from having to stand all day. "I want to play."

When Muwin, Sisep's mother glared at her, she felt her cheeks flush. She didn't mean to say the words out loud. She grimaced and looked down at the murky waters that surrounded her feet.

Ooo sale!

Flying Kite, Crashing Ship is on sale at the Muse bookstore $2. You can't even get a bag of chips and a pop for that! http://tinyurl.com/2vg6l3w

/end shameless self-promotion

Captain, we have focus

Thanks to everyone who helped me brainstorm out what I needed to do, where to put my focus, and also helped work out a few obstacles that I was having considering the pet projects and distribution. This helped a lot.

I've opted to move my focus to 3 major projects:

Road to Hell: I have sold the manuscript, so obviously the necessary obligations for post-acceptance needs to be managed.
Tranquility's Grief: I have submitted Book 1 already, so a number of people felt that I should have book 2 of the series finished (at least a rough draft) in case I sell it. I love the faith that folks have in me. Also, I love the Bethanyverse that I've created, so am happy to be writing in that world.
Untitled MG project: I spoke with a publisher who is interested in the concept and, therefore, interested in seeing the project. So, with the concept being interesting, I felt I should get the manuscript done.

So that's where I'm at for the next couple of months. I'll revisit this the beginning of May and see where I'm at. I like the idea of starting to cross projects off the list because it is growing faster than the number of cats in my house.

Captain, we have a problem.

For the last couple of months, I've been feeling as though I'm being pulled in a dozen different directions. I can't concentrate and I feel like I have too many projects going on. So, then I decided to open up my projects file and take inventory of my "To Finish" pile. Was I ever shocked.

Untitled Marketing a fiction ebook (tried and tested) – this will be several years before it's done. I'm purposely taking notes of everything I've done for marketing and promotion and am making a little book of it that I'll probably self-publish or make available on the blog in instalments for donations.
No More Blank Screen – blogging for idiot authors. How to blog, what to blog, and the common issues with blogging. (This is a pet project and I'm not sure how I'll put this "out there").
Road to Hell (SF military novel) – SOLD! Now, 10 months of editing, promoting, editing, marketing, editing, editing, proofreading, editing is left before I see it in ebook and then several months before I see print.
Untitled MG book – Yes, I wrote a children's book. I didn't mean to, so shut up. I'll use a num de plum, since I'd hate to be accused of corrupting the youth of today. The book is a part of the Identity series (Harvest Moon being the first one). This one explores a young Mi'kmaq girl's deserve to be something other than a human and the consequences of forgetting one's identity.
Incubator – SF short story about smuggling organs.
Dancing Sky – story 3 in the Identity series. This one is YA this time, where a young Inuit woman is forced to marry against her will by the vote of her tribe. It is only through a conversation with an ancestor and a very large polar bear that she comes to see that being married does not change who she is.
I am not Nancy April – This one explores culture and how being the last of your culture and people can feel. Set in the last days of Shanawdithit, she confronts her illness and death, knowing that she is the last of her kind.
Untitled FF romance – Huh? I know, I know. I wrote a lesbian romance. I blame drugs.
Untitled Paranormal Mystery/thriller/adventure/hell I suck at labelling – Anyone who follows me on Twitter has heard about this story. I constantly complain about how it STILL lacks a title. This novella is an "urban fantasy" set in St Anthony, Newfoundland, where a Pentecostal kid rebelling against his parents accidently summons the spirits of the Beothuk and Viking souls. Um, oops.
Untitled comedy fantasy - because, really, there is way too much gloom in the above list. This one involves the queen's fiancé being turned into a cat by the wizard's guild due to a tax hike.
Bread Soup for Mama(working title) – Historical Regency novel. No, not a romance. A historical novel. It is possible to write this time period without everyone getting married. Honest to god. It's about a spinster daughter caring for her invalid mother following a stroke. She decides to write a cookbook. Everyone decides to "help" her.
Where Hope Fears to Tread (working title) – This novel will probably take me years to write. I'm not sure if I will even ever finish it. It is the most emotionally exhausting thing I've ever written. I generally can only write 200-300 words at a time. It's set in Edmonton's poorest neighbourhood and follows a teen's decent into prostitution and how she crawls back out.
The Tranquility Series – Book 1, Tranquility's Blaze, is in submission world. I'm working on Book 2, Tranquility's Grief.

Holy crap! How did I end up with 13 unfinished projects? No wonder I've been feeling overwhelmed and pulled in, well, 13 different directions. Most of these were written in the last 6 months, too, so they aren't even old projects! I did a number of them for NaNo. Also, let's not forget that I edited 2 novels during this period, too. Oh, and I debuted my first single title project.

Yeah. I can see why I'm feeling scattered and burned out. Time to reorganize and work out an action plan before my head explodes.

Any tips for organizing? Do I go by which are the closest to completion or the oldest projects? Do I aim for all the small projects first, or mix it up with lengths? How do you deal with this kind of mess?

Rape, Consent, and Spec Fiction

[image error]Anyone on Twitter last week got to witness my three hour meltdown over a Manitoba judge's sentencing of a rapist. Not familiar with the case? Here's the first paragraph from the linked article:

A Manitoba judge has decided not to send a man to jail for sexually assaulting a woman because the victim was wearing heavy makeup and "wanted to party" on the night of the attack, the Winnipeg Free Press is reporting.

You can see why I went a little off the road on that, especially since only a few days before, a Toronto police officer told women the best way to protect themselves from sexual assault was "Don't dress like a slut."

I've been wanting to do a blog post about rape for a while now, but I keep putting off. It's too controversial, it's going to make me angry when the rape apologists come out of the wood work, I'm going to end up ranting. Well, after last week, I can't keep quiet any longer.

I lost a few followers on Twitter last week for saying that we need to move away from victim-blaming and on to consent-teaching. When the teen girl was gang-raped last fall (we call it "sexually assaulted" up here, since conviction is easier), Canadians were horrified to see video of teenage boys saying how they think it wasn't rape because she didn't say no (she had been drugged and, legally, was unable to give consent anyway…which she couldn't…because she was drugged).

I heard this crap when I was a teenager. I thought the world would have moved passed it, but clearly we haven't. And why is that? Because I firmly believe of 3 major issues:

We do not teach our young men what consent is.
We do not teach our young girls how to give consent.
We still think rape is about sex and not about power.

I grew up in a ultra-conservative Christian world, where women were generally blamed for everything that happened to them, especially when it came to sexual assault. Date rape happened because a girl was alone with a boy and "encouraged" him. Men can't say no once they start. Any of this sound familiar?

There is a great ad in Edmonton right now:

Just because she's drunk, doesn't mean she wants to f**k.

We actually need to teach our young men this.  Fathers and mothers need to tell their sons before they even start dating, that if a women says no, you stop — even if you've already started.  After the assault of the young woman last September, I talked about consent at the dinner table. My then 11 year old looked at me and said, "that's common sense." The only reason it's common sense to him is because he's grown up around it being talked about openly and without "dumbing down" or "less intense."

Which means, if we are going to teach our boys to understand consent, we need to teach our girls how to give it. That's right, parents: girls need to learn how to give sexual consent and they need to be taught young. I was in my early 20s before I understood how to give sexual consent because I had been brought up in a culture with so much shame over sex that I was unable to know how to give it properly.

We were taught that women should never say yes to sex. I'm not talking about giving the impression. No, I mean I had several pastors throughout my teen years say "girls, you should never, ever say yes to sex." Period. Full stop. Two things very quickly evolved from that. First, teen boys who thought that the girls really wanted to have sex (and some of us did), but were too afraid of eternal hell to say yes. So, they forced the sex, thinking the girls wanted it.

The problem was that they got some of the signals muddled. You can see the issue, right?

And, finally, there is this huge confusion that rape is about sex. It really, really isn't. There are people who sell their bodies for a career. There is no reason to take it from someone who isn't willing. So, if it isn't about sex, what's it about? Well, it's about power and advantage.

Sex has been used as a weapon for about as long as humanity has figured out that it could be used as such. Rape plays a key role in historical wars and, still today, is used as an effective weapon to bring fear to large groups of people. Rape is a weapon. It is about making someone do what you want. That is about power.

So what does this have to do with speculative fiction? Well, anyone who's ever reads fantasy (especially) will see that a lot of raping goes on in the genre. However, one thing that bothers me is that it isn't used the way that rape is actually used in life: as a means of exerting power over another human being. If an author is going to use it, I want to see it be used as a means of controlling a conquered population, as seen throughout history and even today.

Or, I want to see it on a more individual level: as a means of exerting power over another human being, and often between people who know each other.

As an author, I have on-page rape scenes. In Tranquility's Blaze, a woman is raped. The assault is about power (in my case, the very meaning of power) and it is used as a weapon.

To contrast, I also have I have a sexual consent scene between two characters:

He grabbed her hands before the fourth bow would expose her unbound breasts. "I need to hear you say that this is what you want."

I think we need more of these kinds of scenes in books. I think the conversation of consent should become a part of our sexual dialogue today. As an author, I can influence this by adding these scenes.

Let's start having conversations, on Facebook, across the dinner table, at work (which we did yesterday), and for authors in our work. Let's call rape what it truly is:  a means of stripping dignity and power from another human being.

Because that's what it's about, folks.

Loot and prizes, brought to you by the number 6

Today is Six Sunday's one year anniversary. To celebrate, a number of the regular authors have donated books and gift certificates for several winners. I've added a $5 gift certificate to the MuseItUp bookstore, where you can get a number of goodies well under that price.

So, how it works is leave a comment and the amazing 6 Sunday gurus will automatically add folks to the draw for the prizes. Since there's lots of prizes, there'll be lots of winners!

Remember to check out everyone else's stories, too!

From my upcoming military SF novel, Road to Hell. Captain Katherine Francis is reading the death toll report from her home planet, after it was invaded:

No tears came though, even as the names of her friends and family scrolled on the screen. Instead, near-blinding rage formed like a tornado in her gut. She gritted her teeth against the storm, her body shaking.

Sherry Terrance, Missing in Action.

Katherine's math teacher in high school. She had never quite forgiven Ms. Terrance for that F on a group assignment.

Day 5: Dismal failure…or was it?

I failed. Or, I succeeded. I guess it depends largely upon how you look at it.

I didn't write a novel this week, nor did I come close. There were two main reasons for this: firstly, the kids left the house in such a mess that I feared a toxic waste sewer would soon form and flood out of their rooms. Secondly, there was the system shock of being alone in my house. All quiet. All day. No one yelling. No one crying. No one hitting the other. No one squeezing their wounds in an attempt to produce blood, thereby being able to open my office door (since the rule of the closed door is: if there's no blood, I don't want to speak to you).

I do know that I'm significantly more productive in the evening than in the morning. This is unfortunate, since that's about the only true bit of peace that I have two days a week.

I also know that I crave routine. A little shake up now and then is good for the system, but I like to know where my personal time is going to land by knowing what day of the week it is.

And, let's face it, I finished two scenes that I'd partially written months ago AND I finished 2 completely new scenes. I figure this is progress and anytime words get added to the work-in-progress, it's a good thing. I also went back over the partial manuscript and drew up a new outline for it, rearranged some chapters, and re-read what was there to make the bridging a little smoother. It will still need a full edit, but at least what's there is what will be staying. So, it's not even throw away words: word count for the sake of word count.

Overall, I'm pleased that I got some writing in and that I have a scrubbed clean house for the weekend. And when the routine returns on Monday, I'll be ready to get back into the swing of things.

Day 2: Can I write a novel in a week?

Today, I was faced with the bane of every author: laundry. I admit that we'd fallen well behind lately on the household chores. There were some…challenges of an early teenage nature that…made us all wish we were all deaf for a few days there. I rolled out of bed around 9am and was faced with the 348 loads of laundry to wash and fold. After two hours, I'm still folding what had already been washed but not folded, not to mention the clothes washed this morning.

So, I hadn't written by 11am. Driven by guilt, I sat down for an hour and wrote 1000 words. I'm noticing that my focus wains after 20 minutes during the daytime, so it did slow me down a few things. I'll need to work on that, I think.

But all this got me thinking about the conventional writing advice out there. I've come across a number of male authors who make comments like:

No matter what, I would come home from work and write 3 hours a night.

I read a number of female author blogs. I haven't come across any who state this. On twitter, I see a number of male authors make comments about how they *will* be writing for 3 hours tonight. On the flip side, I see a lot of female authors saying how they had to stop writing because their husbands wanted to play WoW (so couldn't use the computer), or they had a sick kid and "hubby" was busy washing his car, and so on.

I am incredibly lucky that I'm with The Engineer. Before I was published, be valued my writing time. He felt that it was an investment into our futures, just as it would have been if he supported me to go to school. This freedom to write – and him taking on additional household and childcare responsibilities - has allowed me to produce as much as I have been able to.

Which, brings me back to the laundry. There are a lot of women who feel that they have to look after all of the household chores. And there are plenty of men who agree. I've been slow writing today because I have opted to do some serious house cleaning. There are a lot of women out there who don't have the choice. They have spouses who don't support their writing because it isn't bringing in any money. Or, worse, it's bringing in money but looking after kids and chores is still her job.

So, today, I'm celebrating that I don't have to do chores and that I have a supporter partner who will pick up the slack so that I can write.