S.M. Pace's Blog, page 10

A-Z Challenge Letter F

A little unoriginal today, but definitely a fabulous feast of F themed pics

I love how these two purple Flowers are sorting of hidden in the leaves.  I noticed them because their color was so vibrant.

 

 

 

 

 

 

These are growing in front of my house.  I must admit here that I have a black thumb.  Flowers do not do well under my care.  I’m not sure what breed of flower these are, but they’re apparently pretty hardy, because they come back every year.

 

 

 

 

 

This stuff actually has a specific name, which I have forgotten.  But it’s also very long living and grows back every year, all along the edge of our lawn.  I love the way it seems to cascade over the curb.

 

IWSG – Do I Read Enough and A-Z Letter E

There’s a lot to get to today, so let’s get started!

It’s that time of the month again, when writers both secure and insecure gather across the blogosphere to share their insecurities, worries, support and advice.

Check out the IWSG website to sign up and find a whole bunch of other awesome stuff related to writing and publishing.  Also check out Ninja Captain Alex Cavanaugh’s website.

Also visit the amazing IWSG co-hosts for the month of April.

Megan Morgan,  Chris Votey,  Viola Fury,  Christine Rains,  Madeline Mora-Summonte,  L.G. Keltner,  Patricia Lynne

Writers are “supposed” to be readers.  I use quotes not to be sarcastic, but because I always hesitate to fall for the trap of proscribed behavior assigned to a particular profession.  But in this case, I tend to agree, I think most writers love to read.

And I do love to read.  As a kid, I always had my nose buried in a book, whether it was going to the store, being dragged to a family get together, or in the middle of math class.  I thirsted for new books, but was happy to dive into old favorites if I couldn’t get my hands on anything new.

These days, well, my TBR list on Goodreads is titled Books to Read in 2014.  I think I got around to reading one of those books.

I feel like a bit of a failure when I realize how it’s been since I read something new.  Part it is just being busy, with husband, baby and job taking up so much of my time.  But an equally sizable part just doesn’t want to risk trying out a new book.  I’ve been disappointed quite a bit in the last few years by books that I had high hopes for.  A couple of my favorite authors either stopped writing, or my favorite series started to go downhill, which left me feeling cold.  So, I crawled into the warm and comfort of old books that I read many times.

I plan to change that this year.  I’m going back to my Goodread TBR list, and starting over.  The nice thing about books is that they don’t go bad  Wish me luck.

What’s something you wish you did more of, whether it’s related to writing or just life in general?

It’s E day, so here’s a enigmatic series of E pics  Enigmatic in that they don’t make much sense.

I thought about covering them in strawberry jam :-)

Easter morning breakfast.  Yes, that is a bunny shaped pancake, ’cause that’s how I roll on holiday mornings.  I didn’t get around to egg dying this year.  However …

 

 

 

 

 

 

Eggs!  To be specific, four eggs and five yokes.  I have a bizarre fascination with double yokes.  I always wonder what that would have meant for the chick that might have hatched from that egg.  Twin chicks?  Conjoined chicks?  Someone who raises chickens, please, let me know.

 

 

 

To finish up with my Wednesday Word Counts:

Cry of the Hawk – 11,337

Blood Poison 2 – 1,216

Revisions are moving along and things are looking good.  Wish me luck and good luck to all of you.  See you tomorrow for the next day of the A-Z challenge.

Top Ten Tuesday and A-Z Letter D

 

It’s Top Ten Tuesday, and today I get to direct you to some awesome book related websites.  The first one you ought to visit is The Broke and the Bookish, where Top Ten Tuesday was born.  Check out the other Top Ten Tuesdays lists, (new topic every week) and sign up on the linky every Monday night if you decide to create your own top ten list for the week.

Top Three Bookish People You Should Follow On Twitter/Instagram/Youtube/Snapchat/Facebook

I’m not a big social media junkie, nor do I spend much time online.  But when I do get online, these are the three websites I always check out to see what’s going on.

Alex J. Cavanaugh

Ninja captain Alex Cavanaugh is a sci-fi author with an awesome website that he updates frequently.  He shares book reviews, provides support for budding writers, and also heads the Insecure Writers Support Group.  Definitely check him out.

The Dom

I love this channel.  The Dom has a youtube series called Lost in Adaptation in which he compares novels to their movie adaptations.  It’s funny, informative, and has actually alerted me to some awesome novels to add to my TBR list.

The Passive Voice

This is where we stray a little.  Passive Voice deals with current events surrounding authors and publishing.  If those specific things don’t interest you this may not be your bag, but I found it very informative and, as a self-published author, very inspirational.  It’s also pretty funny.  It’s one of the few major websites where I actually read the comments, because they are quite intelligent.

A-Z Challenge Letter D

(apologies for letter D taking so long to actually appear; rough day yesterday) For your viewing pleasure here is a decoupage of things D.

Yep, that’s right.  I’m scraping the bottom of this barrel, because I really struggled finding a picture of something that started with a D.  Hopefully, the story is worth the wait, because I know some people popped by I found no D pictures.

Silly as this picture is, there is meaning behind, and it relates to my Dearest husband, who I call Bear.  When I was pregnant, I swore of the majority of soda, and all caffeine.  Caffeine I can live without, but soda was painful to part with.  Especially Dr. Pepper, my fav.

Caffeine free Dr. Pepper is not sold where we live, so, I was out of luck.  I went eight months of pregnancy with no Dr. Pepper, and assumed I would be going right to the end.  By month nine, I was tired, big as a house, and desperate for any small source of comfort.

Then Bear surprised me.  He had ordered an entire case of caffeine free Dr. Pepper, just for me.  It was the sweetest thing in the world.  Some girls get flowers, or a sweet card, or a gift they’ve been hinting about.  But we all know the best gift is one you really wanted, but didn’t ever ask for.  Bear knows me so darn well.

So, yeah, this picture makes me tear up a little.

 

A-Z Challenge Letter C and Monday Wake Up!

First Monday of the A-Z challenge, and we’ve reached letter C.

Back in 2014 I went to Denver, Colorado, and visited the aquarium there.

I love looking at Coral.  It’s so varied and beautiful, like underwater flowers.  The black and yellow lines in this pic are actually fish.

In the picture below, I loved how colorful the starfish were.  I never knew they came in pastels.

 

 

 

 

 

I love the pale “ghost” fish in the background of this picture.  I hope one day I can go back to the aquarium with Bear and Bunny.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Monday Wake Up!

Beautiful aquarium pics strikes me as a great way to start a Monday.  I’m doing a new weekly post each Monday to start the week off right.  I’ll be listing my WIPs, my current progress and my goals for the week.  I’m hoping this will keep me motivated.

I currently have four big projects in the works, two in draft, two in revision.

My two revision projects are Chalice, a novella set in the Threads of Magic universe (the world of my two self-published novels) and Blood Poison (tentative title), an urban fantasy vampire novel.   Chalice is a bit of a Frankenstein in that I made it halfway through a first revision, decided I was meandering, and will be starting over by smashing together the revised first half and original second half of the novella.  We’ll see how that goes.  Blood Poison will be transformed into a vampire romance novel, as I have an ebook market I plan to submit to that I think will be perfect for it.

My drafts in progress are Cry of the Hawk, third book in the Threads of Magic series, and Blood Poison 2 (extremely tentative title), the sequel to Blood Poison.  It should be wacky fun to write a sequel to a book I haven’t finished revising.

Wish me luck!  Cheers!

Share your goals for the week in the comments.  What do you do on Mondays to start the week off with a bang?

WeWriWa – Cry of Hawk Excerpt

Welcome to another Weekend Writing Warriors blogpost.  If you want to learn more about Wewriwa, follow the links.  Visit some of the awesome Wewriwa blogs and even sign up yourself, and share some of your amazing snippets.

On to the snippet:

Here’s a little snippet from my rough draft of Cry of the Hawk.  Background:  A major battle has just taken place, causing three of the characters, Toby, Ora and Cor, to be separated from their settlement.

Toby crouched beside Cor in the high grass, watching the magickers patrol the perimeter. He noted with painful, and somewhat frightened clarity, that the Yois soldiers were no where to be seen.

“We would have to fight our way through them.” Cor pointed out.

Toby nodded. “This is not good. What now?”

Cor shook his head. “Where’s Ora. Maybe she has some ideas.”

A-Z Challenge Letter B

The A-Z challenge continues with a bountiful bouquet of B pics (I will do my best to keep up these alliterative openers)

Something happened over a year ago that changed my life.  I met someone very special, who has come to mean the absolute world to me.  We met under difficult circumstances, and it was an exhausting day for both of us.  But it’s a day I’ll never forget.

My Sweet Bunny Boy!

This was Bunny Boy’s very first picture, taken less than five minutes after he was born.

A couple of days later we went home, and I took this picture that same night.  My inner fantasy writer is shining through.  I played around with editing the photo, and now he looks like a hairy baby werewolf.

 

 

Bunny has grown quite a bit in the last year.  It also seems the effects of his

werewolf gene have receded for now.  We’ll see what happens when puberty hits.  I’ll keep you posted.

 

A-Z Challenge Begins!

The A-Z Challenge begins today!

Here is a collection of A themed assonance, in picture form.

A shame you can’t capture wind in pictures :-(

You would be forgiven for thinking the focus of this picture is the trees, especially because my amateur photo manipulations enhanced the green leaves.  Actually, my focus was the Atmosphere

I loved how white the sky is and how it highlights the trees.  As well, the wind was blowing, and moving the leaves beautifully.  I tried to take a video, but the wind had died down by then.

 

 

I fully embrace my heathen lifestyle :-)

 

This is a picture of my Altar, though I won’t go into detail about my beliefs or practices.  I like this picture because of the lighting and shadows.  Especially the red candle’s shadow connecting to the star.

 

 

 

 

 

 

I did have one more picture I wanted to post, but I couldn’t get my phone to work.  I’ll add the last pic later, so enjoy these two for now

Cheers!

 

 

Do You Have A Goal March Update

 Another month has gone by, and it’s time for Mischa Gericke’s Do You Have Goals Bloghop.

Check out Mischa’s website, The Five Year Project and the Do You Have Goals Bloghop.  Sign up to share your monthly goals and revel in the encouragement of your fellow bloggers

 

My March goals were a bit of a bust, but I did get some writing done, so there’s that.

I got about 5000 words on Cry of the Hawk.  Other than that I didn’t meet any of my goals, so let’s try again in April.

Goals for April

 

My goals for this month.

Set up my Patreon Page
Complete the first draft for Book 3 of my Threads of Magic series
Earn $250 this month through fiction sales
Complete the A-Z 2016 challenge (click here to learn more)

 

My official 5 year plan is to be making a stable income through my writing, by January of 2021.

My current, foreseeable, big goal is to earn $2500 a month by October 1st, 2017.

Wish me luck, and good luck to all of you in your goals this

Top Ten List – Books I Haven’t Given Enough Attention To

In my internet/blogging travels, I stumbled across The Broke and the Bookish (which is a fantastic blog name, btw) and their awesome Top Ten Tuesday bloghop.  Who doesn’t love lists.

Today’s theme: Ten Books I Really Love But Feel Like I Haven’t Talked About Enough

This will be a tough one in some ways, not so tough in others.  I don’t really talk about books much, so I have a lengthy list of books that I love but have never talked about to choose from.  Let’s begin.

Blood and Chocolate by Annette Curtis Klause

This was the novel that began my love affair with werewolves.  It was the first story I’d read about a werewolf who was born a werewolf, and wasn’t fighting to rid herself of a curse.  Not only are the characters great, the worldbuilding is top-notch.  Klause builds a very realistic, very unique society.  The werewolves are similar to humans, but still have very different outlooks on life, and Klause doesn’t shy away from the implications of that.  If you like werewolves, this is worth a read.

 

Hogfather by Terry Prachet

This was the first novel I ever read by the late and wonderful Sir Terry Prachet.  I’ve certainly never read a book of his that I didn’t like, but this one holds a special place in my heart that still believes in Santa Claus and the tooth fairy.  And the Hogfather, of course.

 

Divine Secrets of the Ya Ya Sisterhood by Rebecca Wells

This one is a little darker than the previous two.  The relationships between the female characters are complex, twisted and in many ways, all kinds of messed up.  But they’re also loving, nurturing and compelling, and the story pulls you right in with the depth of character building and scene setting.  If you like dramatic women’s fiction, I can’t recommend this enough.

 

The Song of the Lioness Quartet by Tamora Pierce

Okay, cheating a bit since a quartet is four books, but you can’t recommend one Lioness book without the rest.  This was the series that started my love of fantasy.  You get to watch the characters grow from children to young adults, which, as a teenager, was my favorite part.  It made the characters amazingly real to me, and their adventures were a lot of fun.

 

The Years of Rice and Salt by Kim Stanley Robinson

I love epic, decade, if not century, spanning stories.  This one has that in spades.  The premise is simple.  What if the Black Death epidemic of the 14th century had wiped out 99% of Europe’s population?  The novel follows a handful of souls throughout their various lives as they travel through a beautifully developed alternate history.  Robinson also changes up the writing to fit with the styles popular with each culture that’s being explored, so every section feels unique.

The Language Instinct by Steven Pinker

I read a lot of nonfiction for research, and there are a lot of books that I like.  But there aren’t many that I love, and this is one of the few.  Linguistics is one of my major interests, but it can be a very dense subject.  Pinker describes it in a way that’s down-to-earth, very informative, but also very entertaining.  Worth a read if you have any interest in linguistics, or just generally like non-fiction.

Harpo Speaks! by Harpo Marx

Low and behold, another nonfiction book.  Well, I might hesitate to call this nonfiction, since I think I lot was embellished and even outright made up for the sake of comedy and story.  But I still love it.  I developed a fascination for the Marx brothers sometime in high school, probably as a knee jerk reaction to disliking the Three Stooges.  The internet had also just become a common place thing, so I was able to research info about the Marxes and found out a lot of interesting things about their lives.  Harpo was always my favorite, and his autobiography is a fun read.

Wicked:  The Life and Times of the Wicked Witch of the West by Gregory Maguire

I so loved this book, which is odd, because I never read The Wonderful Wizard of Oz and I’m also not a huge fan of the movie.  Of course, since neither one gives much insight into the Wicked Witch, maybe that’s why.  As evidenced by several books on my list, I love seeing a character grow up.  At the same time, because Maguire uses other character’s POV to tell the story, Elphaba is still a mystery.

To Kill A Mockingbird by Harper Lee

Let’s just pretend a certain sequel never existed, and Atticus Finch can continue to be my hero.  I will also continue to imagine that Scout Finch grew up to become a famous journalist/writer, married Dill and had three rambunctious, precocious kids with him, that she named Jem, Scout and Boo, because why not.

 

Moon Called by Patricia Briggs

Moon Called will always be my favorite of the Mercy Thompson series.  My copy, one of the last paperback books I ever bought, is thoroughly dog-eared from being read over and over again.  I still pick it up now and then, to re-read my favorite parts.  Thank you, Patty Briggs, for an amazing werewolf series to make up for the fact that I never got a sequel to Blood and Chocolate.  And so, we come full circle

Make sure to pop over to The Broke and The Bookish and visit the other blogs on the linky.

Cheers everyone,

Sound off in the comments; what are some books you feel like you don’t talk about enough.  

A-Z Theme Reveal

The A-Z Challenge will soon begin!  I’m super excited this year, because I love my theme.

I’m doing a photo study.

Photography is something I love, but I’m not that great at.  One of my goals this year is to get better.   What better way to challenge myself than spend an entire month taking pictures for my blog.

Spooky pumpkin cat sees into your soul

Good luck to all you A-Zers out there.  The fun is less than two weeks away!