Hats and Muscles

I still have glue on the bottom of my sock. I spent all morning making hats out of crepe paper to glue them to Satan's head. He's reveling, particularly in the zebra striped one.

Dracula's Kiss

I have an iris, a sixty dollar iris named Dracula's kiss. He waits for me in the garden at dusk every evening, when the grass is silver and the air drips with the scent of iris, lilac, and fresh mown lawn. He whispers nothings as he silkily caresses my cheek, intoxicating my senses one by one. He's the color of grape suckers, darkly glistening, a blood red streak falling down his chin.

Yes, that is a dab of purple on my nose, spotted by the wily eyes of inexperience. Why do I have a purple nose? It goes dashed well with the purple prose:)

Stowaways in First Person

I have a cat. I suppose. Maybe it's like the Beatles song, and she has me. At first we saw the kittens, then voila, hissing crazy mama cat who had her babies in my garage. The kitties are adorable and after a few hours of sitting and staring at each other, Mama rubbed against my legs and stopped hissing, and even let her babies climb all over me. So... the trouble with Iron King, is that although it's a first person narrative, I lose track of who it is that's talking. The writing is lovely, description, ditto, but I haven't got the slightest idea who this girl is, and I'm in her head. Hmmm. Inner monologue? Generic reactions? I don't know, but it makes me want to delve into my own first person narrative and see if it has the same issues. I'm sure it doesn't. I'm sure it's perfect;)

boxed love

Dog ears? Very soft. Not so soft in paper. Along with my shipment I received an anonymous gift, a book called... never mind what it's called. I flipped through it, curious why my printer would include something as random as a fiction book with one of those white blurb boxes on the back. The best worst line went: Her bad feeling senses were tingling. Unless it was: He was slowly but surely erasing her perfectly drawn picture of herself so that he could dip his hands into outrageous colors and sling them onto the canvas. Or this: The first press of their lips wasn't what we expected. No, the last is a tense change and doesn't qualify for particularly noticeable badness. I'm going with the second one. Oh, the acknowledgements were fun: Back in May, I hadn't planned on publishing a book, let alone writing one- This is probably the general breakdown of this story's problem. I am rather new at this whole publishing thing, but I think it might be a good idea to plan on writing a book, before you plan to publish one. Otherwise, you're so rushed to publish, you might simply have a book full of words instead of a story. Hmmm. A warning to all of us...

You Wish, Young Adult fiction Mandy Hubbard

Just finished Mandy Hubbard's You Wish, and I found myself laughing repeatedly at the ridiculousness. Completely ludicrous situations the girl gets into. I met Mandy Hubbard at the writer's conference in Columbus last month. She was really sweet and encouraging. She's now agenting and I almost wish I hadn't gone ahead and published, an agent like her would be so awesome. Oh well. At least I get to hang our with her characters.

Real stuff!

I am doing a blog tour. This is exciting and adventurous. I'm taking my companions, the pink tent and the bucking camel, along with me. I'm going to drop by a different site each and every week, and at the end of that time, I'm going to give out a grab bag for someone who follows the conversation with a vast amount of wisdom and cleverness. That means comments. Except at Backseat Nightmares where I started last week where the comments thingy didn't work. You see what an adventure this is? Why, we didn't know it was an adventure until we were already well on our way. This week it's the author M.L John's blog http://mljohn.wordpress.com/2011/05/10/guest-post-from-juliann-whicker/  and it's fabulous, her blog I mean. My post is a little bit weird, but that's normal. Right. Stay tuned for next week's exciting destination!

Hooking

Today I'm going to die.

Devlin crumpled the paper in his fist and dropped his head against the leather wrapped steering wheel hard enough to leave a mark in his white skin. He'd written other letters, words that couldn't numb the guilt he felt every time he saw his sister's lifeless eyes. He shook his head and straightened up. It was almost over. The pain would soon end for both of them.

All right. So the above is my hook, and the only purpose it serves is to tantalize a reader and leave them going, "What? Who? Why? How?" and then proceed to read the next four chapters which is world building and frankly, not as miraculously fast moving as the rest of it. I took it out because I don't like hooks. They irritate me personally as a reader, they're like cliff hangers and feel like a ploy, a trick, something that good writing doesn't need. So it's my arrogance after all. Down with that! In with the hook! Bring out the gun! Slash all pretensions to ribbons! Catfish fry for lunch!