Sunday, June 16, 2013

Happy Father's Day Daddies of the world!!!

Hola Papas!

I would be remiss if I acknowledged Mother's Day and not Father's Day. Unfortunately, unlike Mother's Day I don't have a Father's Day poem to highlight the beautifully complicated relationship one has with their father. Which got me to wondering, why is it that I don't? My father was their for all my milestones, angst, and general life stuff that happens when growing up. He kissed boo boos, helped build forts, and made fish sticks that were just crispy enough. My love of sci-fi and those things strange and peculiar are a directive product of his influence. I think the greatest contribution he has given me is having not put me in a box or isolate me on a pedestal because I am his female child, with words and actions that discount my ability to think and reason or control and stifle my sexuality because I was born with a vagina. 

With his most famous words of wisdom, "She's going to do what she wants. I know I raised her right and I want to always be there in her life." I leave you with no poem for the Father's today just a great deal of appreciation for those Dads like mine that let us be who we are meant to be because they know they had a big part in shaping us.

Happy Father's Day!

Janet

Friday, June 7, 2013

I scream, you scream...

Welcome my beauties!

This is another late night blog because sleep and I are not on speaking terms currently. Don't be too upset, we've been having this on again/off again relationship for quite some time. Instead of staring at the backs of my eyelids for hours or giggling at the nonsensical responses Sig Other makes when I try to engage him in a conversation while he's sleeping (yes I'm childish at times), I thought I would do a little plotting. Considering I'm super committed to this new writing strategy it seemed like the best way to utilize the time that should be spent sleeping. Unfortunately, I got side tracked and began looking up symptoms of possible diseases/infections/cancers I may have. Needing to take a break before I ended up convincing myself I needed something amputated I decided to look at work of mine that would benefit from a little TLC when it came to promotion.

This has been on my checklist for quite some time and after narrowing down my book Into the Realm of Mystery and Night  as a great candidate I sent out a call for places to showcase what I happen to think is a damn good collection of mysteriously horrific short stories. I was so enamored with my own prose that I began to contemplate why everyone else wasn't as stoked by what goes bump in the night. Maybe my stories really aren't as fiendishly clever as I thought, but that strong sense of self confidence I possess (that dances along a fine edge of delusional at times) dismissed that completely. Instead I looked at where I pushed it and how.

I'm an eclectic person and it's not surprising that my writing reflects that, but where I spend my time in social media is usually firmly housed in the romance genre. There is a spectrum in this genre but usually the blood curdling screams readers are anticipating are induced by mind blowing orgasms, not a psychotic ghost (or at least that's the response I've gotten) and I need to find the folks that scream with excited anticipation of something scary about to happen. Which has left me feeling as if I need to do a little screaming of my own, "Oi! Come out, come out wherever you are. I'm here, but in a totally non creepy way, I just want to play with you."

Janet

Tuesday, June 4, 2013

It's the journey, not the destination.

Greetings Lovelies,

As I wait for my body to recover from the punishment of doing 125 crunches (yes I am suffering from temporary insanity, with summer being the onset of symptoms) I started thinking about a WIP I've been plotting. While I was going over character descriptions, what type of arch I'm trying to achieve and a whole host of things folks do whilst plotting I had a moment. "Omigod! I'm actually plotting something."

Although I can get obsessed with useless details of a story, actual plotting is so out of my stratosphere. In a recent blog I did for Mocha Memoirs Press I discussed those obsessive details that clutter my mind and though I've shelved my epic sci-fi thing (I'll get to it eventually) I've actually taken my time with my newest idea. It's equal parts exciting and scary because I have always carried the entirety of a story in my head, but this time it appears as if I won't cut corners when it's time to transfer it from my noggin to paper. 

I'm ever so optimistic and I ask you all to wish me luck. I'd suggest you hold me accountable to this new philosophy, but when pressured my latent adolescent behavior surfaces and I become petulant, muttering under my breath, "This is stupid and I don't want to do it." I'm special like that.

Anyhoo, here's to the journey and not the destination. May it be filled with a plot that makes sense, smexy sexy time, a hero and heroine you can root for, and word count that has me comfortably sitting in the novel section. 

Janet