Susan Abel Sullivan's Blog, page 3

Whine or Wine? Writer's Block

Why whine about writer's block when you can wine? My cousin recently stopped by the house and presented me with a most fabulous wine: Writer's Block!  My writing gets blocked from time to time and a little wine gets the words flowing again. (And whining feels good, too!) But I had no idea there was a vintage by this name or with a picture of the Bard on the label. Uber cool!


And on a related note, I'm happy to announce that I gave birth yesterday to a twenty-one chapter, 55K word book, revised and polished and just about ready for beta readers.  Book and author are both doing fine and I'm in the process of cleaning it up (i.e. formatting it for submission).  It's a YA novel titled The Simon Sylvestri School for the Supernaturally Challenged.


Cheers!

Remembering Goober

Goobs: 2011-2015 Goober shared a spiritual kinship with Marley the dog in the movie Marley & Me.  Both dogs were high energy, prone to destruction and ate what they chewed up.  Marley passed everything he ate, often in very bizarre poops.  Goober was not so lucky.  


After two previous obstruction surgeries and a serious restriction on the type and brand of toys he could play with and how long he could stay unattended in the yard, he swallowed something yet again that stopped him up.  Each surgery and post-op care ran over $3K.  We just couldn't justify putting money we didn't have into a dog that wouldn't stop eating what he chewed.  Our other dogs would have chewed a muzzle off of him.  And keeping him caged 24/7 would have killed his spirit.


So we had to say goodbye.


If there was an opossum in the yard, Goober had to hunt and tree it.


He completely dismantled and ate a large wooden hot tub, but ironically was never obstructed from that.  


After the hot tub was destroyed, he started on our wood privacy fence and would rip boards off with his teeth, chew them up, and then escape the yard for a high adventure of running willy nilly through the neighborhood.  He could do this in less than ten minutes.


Until he was three years old, he'd grab a corner of the couch or a chair cushion and rip it apart.  Anything we didn't want destroyed had to be kept out of reach. He eventually grew out of that and stuck to his vet-approved toys.  


He showed up on our doorstep when he was 6 months old.  Thin, no collar.  I put an ad on Craigslist, but the one person who answered it had lost a basset hound.


He was quite a popular fellow at the veterinarian's office.  Everyone loved Goober.


He taught me to never name a dog anything that rhymes with No.  Our first name for him was Bo.  And because he thought I was constantly telling him no, no, no, his behavior was less than stellar.  After his first surgery, we changed his name to Goober and his behavior did a 180 degree turn overnight.


He loved to cuddle.  He weighed 37 pounds when we took him in.  He reached 65 pounds at full growth, yet he'd still climb up in our laps to be held.  


He'd lay on the bed with me and hubs on Sunday mornings and rest his snout on our arms.


He was a fabulous watchdog barking ferociously at people and other dogs through the front window.  No one would ever have dared try to break in with Goober on watch.


He loved people, but detested other dogs.  The only dogs he ever got along with were our older pitbull Moxie and our newest dog Luna, a border collie mix.


He loved to play.  He'd get a wild hair and go dashing across the yard in huge figure eights, running like the wind.  Sometimes his back feet would run faster than his front feet.  


He did not like the swimming pool.


He adored our house sitters.


We taught him to "speak" on command.  He'd woof when I held a hand to my ear and get a treat.


He'd loved everyone's food but his own.


Every night you could set your watch by him when he'd want to go outside and patrol the perimeter at eight o'clock.


He wrestled with a raccoon once under the historic cottage in our backyard.  


He would not come in from outside when called.  


He liked to kiss and would sneak a little tongue if you weren't careful.


Goober--also called Goobs and The Goobster--was just a big galoot with an even bigger heart.  He taught me patience and tested my commitment.


Rest in peace, sweet boy.

30K-Words-in-30-Days Challenge

If you're a writer, you measure your output not in chapters, scenes and paragraphs, but in words. We writers call it word count and there are different word counts for different kinds of writing such as flash fiction (a few hundred), short stories (a few thousand) and novels (tens of thousands to over a 100K words).


I tend to be a SLOW writer and on a good day might get 700-1000 words in one to three HOURS.  On bad days my word count might actually be a negative number from writing and deleting and writing some more and then deleting that.  There's a story about the writer James Joyce that I can especially relate to.  One day Joyce's friend said, "James, how many words did you write today?"  Joyce says, "Seven." His friend goes, "James, that's GREAT.." To which Joyce replies, "Yes, but I don't know what order they go in."


Since I'm such a pokey writer and since February was such a dismal writing month for me, I decided to challenge myself to writing thirty-thousand words in thirty days


That was sixteen days ago.  


So far I've written 16,686 words on my novel-in-progress--I think this is an all-time record for me!  But now comes the point in my process where I need to pause a couple of days and roughly outline the third and final act of my book to make sure I tie up all of the plot threads and answer all of the dangling questions.  


Then it's back to the mad dash for the finish line, or in my case, deadline.  By the end of the challenge I hope to have a total of 65K words written on the first draft of my 5th book with the best two words at the end: literally--THE END. 


I'll let you know how it goes.

Don't Go Down in the Basement

I wish my basement stairs looked this good! This month I have a true-life paranormal tale for you.  It involves an old house, a basement, and a ghost.  And it happened to me less than two weeks ago.

The hubs and I have somehow managed to acquire three houses.  The how and the why of this is its own story.  One of the houses is between where I live now in Alabama and where I'm moving to in Georgia and it's a historic home built sometime between the 1930s and the 1950s in the historic Garden District of Montgomery, Alabama, and it's up for sale.  
The weekend before last I packed up the cats and the snakes and drove to the house in Georgia to visit the hubs.  I figured I'd stop by the Montgomery house on the return trip, do a little light cleaning and check the status of a project our contractor has been working on.  The trip from Georgia to Montgomery took more than seven hours along a mostly four-lane highway through the countryside.  The last hour was on a lovely (not!) two-lane road in the rain in the dark and by the time I reached Montgomery I was already tired.  

I unloaded my cleaning supplies and vacuum from the mini-van and checked out the house.  Everything seemed fine except that the light cleaning the hubs told me it would need turned out to be a three-hour tour of duty.  And of course, some of the light bulbs had burned out, and with the dark and the rain, the house wasn't as well lit as I would have liked.  But I set to work on the cleaning starting with the upstairs.  


After two hours of work, I was in the downstairs bathroom when an odd banging sound started.  I  stopped and listened, thinking that maybe a tree branch was bumping the house.  But it sounded as if it were coming from somewhere in the house, possibly in the basement.  I was tired and wanting to hurry up and get all the cleaning done because I still had another two and a half hour drive ahead of me and at the rate I was going I wouldn't get home until almost midnight. So I just kept going with what I was doing.  The furnace was off, by the way, and the house doesn't have radiators, so the banging couldn't be explained that way.  

 I finished the downstairs bath and bedroom, cleaned the front hall, dining room and kitchen, all the while listening to that odd banging sound.  And let me tell you, I was creeped out by it.  But being the responsible person that I am, I wanted to get all of the ding-dang cleaning done before I left, banging or not.  

At last I was nearly done with my work and went upstairs to double check that I'd gotten everything and stopped off in the bathroom.  The banging carried up the stairs quite clearly.  Since I'd been downstairs and seen nothing that could have been making the noise, I figured whatever it was must be down in the basement.  And I had to go down there before I left to unplug a dehumidifier.  Yep, I was rather unnerved.


Okay, I told myself, you're being silly.  Just go down in the basement.  You've already been down there once already and there was NOTHING out of place.  Yeah, that's what they always think in the horror movies.


So I go to the basement door which I'd left open with the stairwell light on and the banging stops.  Uh oh.  Can you say creepy?  I thought you could.  


Down the stairs I go, my heart pounding, feeling EXACTLY like those silly women in scary stories who go down in the basement despite the audience shouting otherwise at them.  


Nothing was out of place, but I really didn't take the time to do a close examination.  I unplugged the machine and then hauled ass up the stairs.  


So was it a ghost making all that racket?  I really don't know and am not sure if I really want to know.  When the hubs and I bought the house last spring, the previous owners had jokingly told us the house had a ghost named Robert.  Now I'm wondering if they weren't joking.  


So if you like your houses to come with a spook, I know where you can buy one in the historic district of a fine old Southern city that's steeped in history.  It's a charming house, ghost aside, especially in the daylight.  It was supposedly built for two unmarried sisters by their rich daddy behind the family mansion  The kitchen is small because the ladies took their meals at the main house.  The neighborhood is quaint and very Norman Rockwell with glorious Victorians mixed in with bungalows and Craftsman-style houses from the 1920s-1950s.  F. Scott Fitzgerald even lived in the area at one time and his house is now a museum.  


My historic home in Anniston, Alabama definitely has a few spooks.  They're quiet, though, and only show up now and then in the middle of the night.  Because what's a historic home in the Deep South without a ghost or two? It's part of our culture.  

Spending a Year with Buffy

Somehow I missed Buffy the first time around.  Between working jobs that had me scheduled during prime time TV hours, my writers group that met at night, and competition from the Sci-Fi channel, I never tuned in to Buffy the Vampire Slayer on WB when it originally aired between 1997-2003.  

Two years ago I found Seasons One and Three of Buffy the Vampire Slayer at Goodwill for five bucks.  And that began my sixteen-month voyage into the entire run of Buffy.  I finished the series finale last week and was quite satisfied.  And I'm a rather critical series-finale viewer.  Very often a show will try to end with a big bang only to disappoint fans (think SEINFELD).  


Ironically, the first season of Buffy didn't really do it for me  I'm sure in 1997 it was a breath of fresh air, but eighteen years later with a slew of urban fantasy spawned from the show, I found Buffy a rather one-note character who was too powerful and needed a heavy dose of "kryptonite" or some kind of fatal flaw.  


But I kept watching and the show blossomed into a fascinating and compelling series that kept me plugging dvds into my player every week.  Each season brought new depth to the show and the characters, and I enjoyed watching them both grow and grow up.  


My favorite characters were originally Willow and Oz, but Buffy grew on me as the show progressed. Xander became less annoying and quite interesting once he and Anya became a thing.  Fortunately Angel left and Spike (ah, Spike!) took over. If any one character was my favorite throughout the entire show, it would have to be Spike with Oz a close second.  Faith literally stole the show in every scene she was in  Willow took the nerdy smart-girl role and made it her own with her interesting delivery.  Tara sneaked in and found a place in my heart.  Dawn grew on me as time went by.  Anya was totally delightful.  Cordelia was fun as the show's popular girl turned Scooby.  And Giles was the show's rock.  

So now that I've watched the entire series of Buffy in less than two years, I can say my life is richer for it.  I can totally see how it is said to have inspired the entire Urban Fantasy genre.  And I'm a little sad that it's now over.  


But that's what's dvds are for.

Let's Twist Again! Getting Past a Block

The Simon Sylvestri School for the Supernaturally Challenged in Montraven, Alabama [actually it's Sidney Lanier High School in Montgomery, AL] When a scene goes all dead on me, I know it's time to call in the twist.  And I don't mean the dance from the 1960s song "The Twist" by Chubby Checker.  Nope, it's time to call in a plot twist.

I'm not a writer who outlines in great detail before beginning a discovery draft.  To me that's the whole point of the discovery draft--to DISCOVER.  I also can't outline in advance to save my life.  I might do some story boarding ahead of time and I'll have a vague, fuzzy notion of where I want to go, but that's it.  New York Times bestselling mystery author Sue Grafton described it as driving through a fog--you can only see as far as the headlights. 

Driving through a fog is what writing a first draft is like for me and why they tend to take several months to complete.  Once I've written the whole story, I know the characters and what's going to happen and my revision process proceeds rather quickly.  But as I'm excavating the plot initially, I'll often start off a scene without knowing how it'll end and the thing will stall out midway.  It's like taking that three-hour tour with the Gilligan's Island gang and getting stuck on an island with nowhere to go.  

I've recently discovered that instead of sweating out my writing process hoping for an idea to get things moving again, what I really need to do to jump-start the stall is to ask myself: What unexpected twist can I throw into the story that is consistent with the world and characters as I've set them up?  Have I already set up an element in the book that could be used as a twist?  

After watching the entire series of the TV show 24 on DVD over a fifteen-month period, I got the feeling that the writers used the same tactic.  My hubs and I started playing "Name that Plot Twist" to see if we could guess how the plot might twist in each episode.  Sometimes we were right; often the writers outfoxed us. The discovery draft is the perfect time to try an unexpected plot twist because the manuscript is still malleable. 

 So if you find yourself stuck or blocked, try doing the twist.  In fact, you could get up and dance around a bit to stimulate blood flow to the brain and you could also toss the unexpected into your story.  The beauty of throwing in a twist early on is that it can be edited out or changed later if it ultimately doesn't work out.  But I think it's far better to keep moving forward on a piece than to let it sit for too long and grow stale.  

So come on, baby, let's do the twist!

Another Wild Kingdom Moment

We never seem to have a shortage of wild kingdom moments at Casa Sullivan.  For a small city (pop: 40K or so) downtown Anniston, Alabama has a tremendous amount of wildlife roaming the streets at night.  Tonight was no exception.


I let my dogs out for a potty break sometime after 7 PM.  Three dogs went out, two dogs came back to the door a few minutes later.  Who's missing? Goober.  And he's out in the yard doing his "Moxie has the toy I want" bark.  What this means is that he's "treed" some wild critter or maybe a stray cat.


So I grab a flashlight and my coat--there's a freeze forecast tonight--and head out into the jungle of our half-acre urban backyard in the historic district of downtown Anniston.  Sure enough, Goober has found a trespasser--a beautiful gray opossum that is playing possum and gone into a death-like seizure with his mouth gaping open in a grimace, tongue hanging out, body stiff and smelling like something that's been dead for several days.  


I haul the dog off the critter and herd him back into the house.  Then I go back and scruff the possum while supporting his back end with the other hand and carry him out of the backyard.  If I don't, he may still be in the yard the next time the dogs go out and we'll go through all this again. And next time Goober's attentions could be lethal to our interloper.


I gently lay the possum on its side near some bushes and then step back. It jumps up and runs off into the night, but it IS alive and apparently unharmed and that makes me deliriously happy.  I've done my wild-critter-good-deed for the week.  


Interestingly, an opossum's greatest enemies are dogs and cars.  Most wild possums are lucky if they have a lifespan of a year. Captive possums can live 3-4 years and some have lived even longer.  


 [Disclaimer: Kids--don't try this at home.  I'm assuming all risks by picking up a wild critter in my yard.  Even though the chances of getting rabies from any opossum are slim to none (you are more likely to get rabies from your mail carrier than an opossum), getting bitten by any animal can lead to infection or nerve/tissue damage.]  

My Life as a Ben Stiller Movie

Moxie, the good dog This past Tuesday was like something out of a Ben Stiller movie--MEET THE PETS or maybe HOME SICK WITH THE FOCKERS.  And like Stephen King says, "It stops being funny when it starts being you."


I woke up that morning feeling like mild death on a cracker with a text from my boss asking if I could come in and teach ZUMBA in two hours.  I wasn't even sure if I could make it out of bed in two hours.  I'd been dealing with a cold/allergy/mild flu for several days, but this was the day when it was knocking me on my butt.  


So I declined and called in sick myself and spent the morning finding subs for my night classes.  So far, nothing comedic or even interesting.  But that was all about to change.


At Noon I thought I'd better let my three dogs out into the backyard since they'd only been out once so far.  I was still in my PJs, still feeling pretty darn yucky, and ready to get back in bed.  


As I climb back under the covers, I knock a can of Coke onto the hardwood floor.  I clean up the spill and notice my cell phone is missing.  I'm on my hands and knees looking under the bed and there it is, halfway under a king-sized bed in the land of mutant dust bunnies and cat yak.  


As I hunt down a broom to fish out the phone, it rings.  By the time I get the phone in hand and disinfect it, the call has gone to voice mail. I don't recognize the number, but it's local so I listen to the message.


It's an irate neighbor telling me that there's a big hole in the back of my privacy fence (we have a half-acre lot with some wooded areas so I can't see the entire fence or yard from any given vantage point) and my dogs are running willy-nilly around the neighborhood.  


I'm like WHAT????? 


I run outside and my dog Moxie (pictured above) is on the back deck, but the other two are missing and there's a hole way in the back corner of the fence that's big enough to ride a tricycle through!


I throw a robe on over my flannel PJs and jump in the car to go hunt down my wayward dogs.  Amazingly, I find them one street down off an alley in the backyard of a vacant house and manage to coax them in the mini-van even though they're hyped up on adrenalin.  The next day my butt muscles are sore from where I summoned superhuman strength to grab and hoist my dogs into the van.  One of 'em weighs more than sixty pounds!


So we get back home with our 8-month old puppy Luna and our six-thousand dollar dog Goober (the one who's had TWO very expensive obstruction surgeries in the past year).  


I fall back into bed totally wiped for a couple of hours and then wrangle up a hammer and the only nails I could find--some small, thin ones without much of a head--and tromp out into the cold in my PJs and robe through an overgrown part of the yard still feeling like death on a cracker to hammer up the damn hole in the fence and to shore up any other loose boards.  


So yes, this is my life, like something out of a Ben Stiller comedy and always good fodder for my Cleo Tidwell Paranormal Mysteries.  Fortunately it all turned out well since the dogs are all back home and I didn't catch my death of cold.  It's always something here at Casa Sullivan!

Gonna Pop Some Tags

Lookie what I found yesterday at the thrift store--a faux-buffalo hat--'cause you just never know when you might need a buffalo hat.  (By the way, it's easy to overlook the black buffalo horns jutting out on either side of the hat--do ya seem 'em now?)

I'm always on the look-out for hats and costume pieces for my local fitness classes.  Yes, in addition to being a writer, I'm also a fitness instructor/presenter, and I love to create fun and dramatic fitness classes for my local students and aquatic-fitness workshop attendees. 


 The thrift store is a fabulous place to find all sorts of props and costumes--very often in the toy aisle, although I did find an awesome Western hat made in Texas in the Men's Hat bin for only 50 cents last year.  

I currently have an animal-themed water fitness class and this buffalo hat will go perfectly with the bluegrass version of Disney's "Circle of Life."  

Or maybe I'll just wear it around the house . . . LOL 

Q & A with Guest Author Jenn Lyons

Today I'm spotlighting Atlanta-based writer Jenn Lyons-- author of Blood Chimera and Blood Sin from World Weaver Press--with a distinctly Susan Sullivan Q & A session.  Let's jump right in . . . 


1.  Name three items on your bucket list.

   Hmm. Honestly, I’ve never done a bucket list. I would like to be on the New York Times’ Bestseller list someday, but that’s about as close to a ‘before I die’ list as I’ve gotten. 

    Ditto the New York Times Bestseller list for moi, too. 

2.  Secret (or not so secret) celebrity crush?

    Oh, it’s not a secret – Tom Hiddleston. He’s also my private fan-casting for Dr. Aerick Zorn (although more from his period piece work rather than the Thor/Avengers movies.) Of course, I don’t like to limit myself to just *one* celebrity crush. I have dozens!

    I had the biggest crush on Harrison Ford after Indiana Jones first came out.  And Johnny Depp and Matthew Perry are particular favs of mine. 

3.  What song or musical piece represents the soundtrack of your life at the moment?

     Girl with the Lion’s Tail, by SJ Tucker

    I'll have to Google this one.  If it isn't Zumba music, I tend to be unaware of it until someone in my class directs me to YouTube.

4. Do you have any secret or quirky talents?

     Oooh, um, hmm. I can draw? (I suppose that really isn’t much of a secret.) Oh, I suppose I do have a talent for acquiring scads of largely useless trivia about a wide range of subjects. For example, I once studied epidemiology for a year in order to describe what ended up being a very short passage on a fictional disease in one of my novels.

    On the plus side, I already knew all about ebola in advance of this most recent outbreak. 

    I'll make sure to find you should there be an ebola or zombie virus outbreak--you'd be very handy in an apocalyptic situation. *jots down note for future reference*

5.  If you could have one superhero power, what would it be and why?

    I’m greedy. I’d like my one superhero power to be possessing magic, a la Doctor Strange. Yes, that probably does include having every other super power.

    I’ll just have to learn to cope. Somehow.

     Hey, nothing wrong with being the All Being, Mistress of Space, Time and Dimension.  Go for the glory--and the power--I say!

6.  What’s lurking in your basement or crawl space?

    Literally? Granite. My house sits on this giant granite slab, so there isn’t any kind of basement or crawl space (actually a little bit of a concern, as the tornadoes creep further east and Atlanta has recently been reclassified as being inside ‘Tornado Alley.’) Metaphorically? My own insecurities and anxieties. Those demons lurk all over the place.


    Yes, you all do have that huge heap o'granite in Atlanta (Stone Mountain).  Makes sense that the ground is pure rock.  We have that lovely Georgia red clay in Anniston, Alabama. It's a bastard to dig up for a basement, but that's what back hoes are for.

    Love your metaphorical answer.  You win the prize, Jenn, for being the first guest to come up with that.  How would you like another cat? *Cue evil laugh*

7. Favorite Southern novel?

    I live in Georgia, which I realize means that I’m supposed to say Gone with the Wind. Despite that fact, I think I’ll go with To Kill A Mockingbird. Sorry, Margaret.

    To Kill a Mockingbird is my favorite Southern novel, too!

8.  If a genie could grant you three wishes, what would you wish for and why?

    Tempting as it is to wish for scads and scads of money, I think if I could wish for anything it would be the scientific advances we need to reliably leave Earth and colonize other planets. And with the second wish, for the wisdom to use those advances wisely.


    That's quite noble!

    After that sure. One wish left? Scads and scads of money. Why not? I could start up a scholarship.

9. Have you ever fallen in love with a fictional character(s), and if so, who and from what novel/show/movie?

    Oh, I fall in love with fictional characters constantly. I had a deeply committed relationship with Buckaroo Bonsai when I was thirteen, but that was before I ran off with Jareth into the Labyrinth. Talia Winters broke my heart on Babylon Five, and then Marcus Cole broke it again (apparently I really identified with Susan Ivanovna.) Most recently I had a giant crush on both the leads to Almost Human.

     Then of course, there’s Batman. There’s always Batman.

    Ah, yes, Batman. *swoons*

10.  And since you live in Atlanta, I’ve gotta ask: Coke or Pepsi?  Georgia or Georgia Tech? Rhett or Ashley?

    Coke, but I can’t drink soft drinks anymore (or sugar) for health reasons. Definitely Georgia Tech (my sister received her degree there.) Also: Rhett. 

     I'm a Rhett gal, myself.  Ashley was always too milquetoast for me.  

     
    And that concludes today's Q & A with author Jenn Lyons.  Major thanks to Jenn for taking the time out of her busy schedule to answer my goofy questions.  


--Jenn Lyons lives in Atlanta, Georgia, with her husband, three cats and a lot of opinions on anything from Sumerian creation myths to the correct way to make a martini. At various points in her life, she has wanted to be an archaeologist, anthropologist, architect, diamond cutter, fashion illustrator, graphic designer, or Batman. Turning from such obvious trades, she is now a video game producer by day, and spends her evenings writing science fiction and fantasy. When not writing, she can be found debating the Oxford comma and Joss Whedon’s oeuvre at various local coffee shops.   
 
Blood Sin, the sequel to the paranormal mystery Blood Chimera by Jenn Lyons, is available in trade paperback and ebook today, Tuesday, November 4, 2014.