Coming to a Close

Final edits and copies of Song of the Swallow are just about finished. Yay! Nice way to end the year.

In terms of other projects, I’ve been up and down. I managed to write 2 short stories, but have been unable to find suitable homes for them. One is a lighter type of story which is even more difficult to place, while the other has received a lot of positive personal rejections. I’ll continue to try to find homes for them.

I also managed to complete NaNoWriMo for the first time ever, which gave me a really horrible first draft of my novel. The horribleness is a gift in disguise. The changes I need to make are sending it in a different direction and making the overall story make more sense. I’m pleased with that.

I’m also working on two novellas while the novel stews for a bit.

All in all, a productive year even if I wasn’t able to place anything.

Sick with sinus problems which is slowing me down, but full speed ahead for the end of 2010!

(cross-posted to Livejournal)

Realms of Fantasy Closing and a Status

Does the time fly…life’s been busy in good ways and bad ways, but it’s given me a lot of time to think.

One of the markets I was preparing to sub to announced it was closing. Realms of Fantasy was always one of those short fiction markets I admired and it’s sad to see it go. I hope everyone who had subscriptions and/or stories on sub there find a new home or can be compensated somehow.

As for me, I’m just waiting on the finals for Song of the Swallow. I’ve been writing some short fiction for the past few months, but have been struggling for them to find a home. That’s led me to make some decisions.

Deep down, I truly believe that my strength is with novels over short stories, so I am going to concentrate more on my current novel. I’ve been finding excuses to avoid it for far too long. I do believe it has a lot of potential and I am really excited for the characters.

In other reflections…

I kind of like what Stephen King had to say about his younger writing self. His early writing was larger shaped by writing seminars he had gone to which promoted “that one is writing for other people rather than one’s self; that language is more important than story; that ambiguity is to be preferred over clarity and simplicity, which are usually signs of a thick and literal mind.”

In other words, he found his original version of The Dark Tower to be filled with “pretension.”

Now, maybe it’s easy for King to talk about this as a best-seller who can do whatever he wants, but I feel there is a lot of truth to what he writes. I don’t think we should ever forget our audience or work to improve our prose, but we can’t forget the heart and soul of writing, of creating a story we love, for something for ourselves.

I’m trying to keep that in mind as I transition more away from short story telling, which I don’t find to be my strength, and into more novel writing.

Song of the Swallow Announcement

Might as well make it official 🙂

Hadley Rille Books will publish my short novel Song of the Swallow, a story set in ancient China during the Song Dynasty.

The book will be a new addition to the Hadley Rille Archaeology Series, joining Jenny Blackford’s The Priestess and the Slave and Shauna Roberts’s Like Mayflies in a Stream.

The actual publish date and the cover will be posted soon.

Short Story: Breaking Barriers

Back in January, I had a short story published online over on Calista Taylor’s blog as part of a romantic steampunk contest. While I didn’t win, I had fun writing something out of my comfort zone. And since it’s already out there online, I figure I’d post it on my blog. As far as romance goes, it’s tame, more of a splash of UST, and there is no real warnings for content. The story has a supernatural flavor and clocks in just shy of 1000 words. If you take the time to read it, I hope you enjoy.

Breaking Barriers

She had waited over a year for this moment, and now it had finally come.

Eleanor Hodgson stood in the doorway, her arms stiff as boards, as she peered into the hidden room in her father’s basement. Lit only by the glow of the oil lamps that lined the stonewalls, and not the broken electric lanterns that had been fitted between them, the room teetered on the line between life and death, light and darkness. Each flicker within the lamps cast moving shadows over the hunks of machinery that littered the floor, dancing like ghostly waifs before they retreated into the recesses of the lab.

And away from Charles Butler.

An average man, he was neither handsome nor homely, but carried the stench of hard labor in his oily clothes. Lost to his tinkering, Charlie–as he liked to be called–hunched over a metal contraption, one of her father’s unfinished experiments, which rested on a small mahogany table. She still felt the loss, yet knew that her father’s work was in capable hands. He hadn’t recruited the former garret-master without good reason.

Her attention returned to the broken lamps.

“Blew them out,” Charlie said, answering her unspoken question. He turned and offered a lopsided grin, the smudge of forgotten soot highlighting the lines on his face. “Come right in, Ellie.”

“Miss Hodgson,” she said. She tightened the pin that held her hair and stepped into the workroom, closing the door behind her. “Remember your place.”

Charlie gave a lazy shrug and smiled before returning to the mangled mess of valves, pipes, and tubes that comprised the heart of the monstrosity. A typewriter rested in front, connected to the steam turbine by copper wires. Brass plating lined the sides of the typewriter, giving it a haunted gleam in the dim light.

Her father’s spectregraph.

A machine to reach the other side. A gadget to change the world. That had been her father’s last invention before his untimely death, one he had never been able to finish on his own.

She glanced at Charlie.

He handed her a spare pair of goggles. “It’ll help see through the steam.”

She accepted the goggles and waited for his mark. A spark of mischief danced in his blue eyes as he pulled the lever and hopped back. An abrupt hiss signaled the start. Steam pushed through the valves, while the typewriter trembled from the pressure.

A crack of electricity charged the air; Eleanor took Charlie’s hand and squeezed.

All the same in death: her father’s final words. He had once told her that his inventions would help revolutionize not just London, but the world. He had told her they would break down every last barrier.

He had told her that one day she would need to let go.

She had waited a year to ask him what he’d meant.

Eleanor held her breath while the keys clinked one by one. As the bars pounded the paper beneath the brass plating, she couldn’t stop her excitement from getting the better of her. Her father, and now Charlie, had managed to create something extraordinary.

She approached the typewriter. The paper was damp from the steam, but the ink was legible. As she leaned closer, she felt Charlie’s unwelcome hand on her back.

Today, she didn’t stop him.

She read the print: As should be in life.

The words meant nothing to her. She frowned and shot an accusing glare at Charlie. He kept smiling, his good-natured flare shining through the darkness that shrouded the spectregraph.

“What do you find so amusing?”

“That’d be him, Ellie.”

She ignored his indiscretion. Her father had always been a man of few words, but words that held an immeasurable weight. But was this really him? Not some parlor trick or demonic ploy? Was that all the spectregraph could accomplish? Mere bits of esoteric phrases would do nothing to revolutionize the world.

“What do you mean?” she asked. “What barriers? What must I let go?”

The typewriter punched out a few more words.

You know, they said. You know.

Eleanor trembled.

“Maybe he’s talking ’bout different barriers than you’re thinking,” Charlie offered.

It wasn’t a remark filled with scorn or conceit. Charlie’s voice was warm and compassionate with a hint of sorrow. She found the comfort of his hand on her back more reassuring than ever.

She took off her goggles and stared at the dying spectregraph as the last of the steam sputtered through the pipes. While the results could have been created by a wayward spirit, a psychic ruse, or by other supernatural entities, in her heart, she knew that Charlie was right. She should be happy that her father’s machine worked.

Instead, she was miserable knowing there would be no more midnight rendezvous in the dark room. No more long lazy summer evenings where the two of them would debate the morality of her father’s wishes, test and experiment his gadgets, or pore over his feverish notes.

There would be no more Charlie.

She had never understood what her father had meant. Yet, as she stood with Charlie and stared at her father’s final work, she finally understood his simple words. She had been a fool.

Charlie knew it as well. “I guess that’s it then,” he said, his voice low.

“I suppose it is.” Eleanor paused, considering her future, her past, and what the present could hold for her and Charlie. “Though, I wonder… My father would never have settled for merely chatting with the dead. He would have wanted to communicate with a full manifestation.”

Charlie arched his eyebrows, barely noticeable under his raised goggles, though she could see the knowing smile tugging at the corners of his mouth. “I wouldn’t want to let Mister Hodgson down.”

Eleanor pulled the pin from her loose bun, and after giving her hair a hearty shake, she turned to Charlie. “Then we have much work to do.” She snapped on her goggles and grinned. “Shall we?”

I Write Romance

I write romance.

No, I’m not just talking about romance in the traditional genre sense of the word, though my current story seems to be straddling the line between urban fantasy and paranormal romance. I mean romance defined as:

(A) a prose narrative treating imaginary characters involved in events remote in time or place and usually heroic, adventurous, or mysterious (Merrian-Webster).

But I can narrow it down more precisely than that. I write stories about love.

This romance can be between two people who have fallen in love. It might be the love between a mother and her child, a father and his children, siblings, between a mentor and his/her apprentice, between friends, between strangers who have created a bond that transcends their differences, between a person and their god, or people learning to love themselves.

Every story I write is a story about love.

I write romance.

And I love it.

What stories about love do you write?

Song of the Swallow – Summer Release

Song of the Swallow, my short novel, will be released this summer as part of the archaeology series at Hadley Rille Books. My book focuses on the lives of imperial concubines in the years before the Mongols conquered China. The book is founded in graduate research on nushu writing (a form of women’s writing in China), Chinese folk legends, and society, in additional to independent post-graduate research on the Song Dynasty.

As soon as I know the release date, I’ll let you know 🙂