Category: Writers Cafes

Wednesday Writers Cafe

~ tahenryauthoress ~ 4 Comments

Just got home. Why am I posting once I am back at home you ask? Because once again the internet was inaccessible at the cafe. Bleh. I got 688 words written for my spy novel tonight, but I bet at least 200 of them are notes to research things once I have an internet connection.

Tell me how does it help me to pay good money for a baby sitter so I can go and work in peace if I can’t do any work while I am there?

Sigh. Quiet night at the cafe, for writers anyway. We talked about life, love, and the pursuit of movies that make you want to talk about them after you watch them. smiles.

If only the internet had been working it would have been almost idyllic.

Wednesday Writer’s Cafe

~ tahenryauthoress ~ 5 Comments

I bailed.

I know, I know. I never miss unless something major has gone down. But really I didn’t get anywhere near enough sleep the night before and when I tried to grab a nap my kiddo was incapable of letting me. Plus I didn’t have a sitter. And the other mom who brings her kids to write in (they play with mine super well), told me they weren’t coming. AGHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH

Does that qualify as major?

It did to me.

So I stayed home. I didn’t even write. I didn’t even write my bog post for Wednesday. I watched documentaries and painted. I needed that break though, let me tell you. Yesterday felt almost as long as the drive back from Park City, Utah, which I did in one day, all 850 odd miles of it, with my kiddo.

So onto the photo situation. I promised you a reveal this week and I will.

The problem is…..

Everyone seems to like one photo and I really like another. I posted the photos to facebook because I wasn’t getting enough meaningful feedback here. And I got a full slew of friends who swear this is the best photo ever.

Image One
Most voted for.

I like it. I do. It needs some photo shopping, like the shadow and lines on my neck.

But personally, I feel pulled to this one.

IMG_2612 (2)

Yes, it needs the shine fixed on my lip gloss. I’m thinking about maybe bringing it up from black and white to a tonal shot, not full color but playful. It could be interesting given how much of my hair is on display and is blue and green.

Sigh, what’s an author to do. Tell me, please?

Wednesday Writer’s Cafe – Special Edition

~ tahenryauthoress ~ 6 Comments

Good morning Internet! Welcome to my usual Thursday morning post about the writing I didn’t get done at the Wednesday night Writer’s Cafe, with a twist. I only got about 350 words written last night. That spy novel is just dragging on me. I like the characters, I do. But the plot is just wearing me out. sigh.

Ok, on to more fun things. I need to pick an author photo. And marketing photos. And maybe a new shot for my blog. My cohorts at the Cafe helped me narrow it down to six. You, yes, you, get to have an opinion too.

Quick Disclaimer: This is not the way I wanted to do this but after three hours of wrestling with the limitations of WordPress, my laptop, and my software, this was what I needed to go with before my kiddo self destructed.

combowithwords

Image One: Am I pushing you away or being arty? You decide.

Image Two: I’m too distant they say. Hello, I’m writing under a pseudonym. I like distance.

Image Three: Yes, my lips are too shiny. I’ll have it edited if it gets picked.

Image Four: We had so much fun with this picture. S and V thought this was the quintessential me. I don’t know about all that.

Image Five: This was debated. Heartily. So, some thought it was too blurry. Others thought it was arty. What say you?

Image Six: More debate. It’s not very authory. Like I care. LOL. Do you?

Vote in the comments. Tell me what you like. What you hate. Or just post a number. I’m easy and I’ll wait on posting my decision until next Wednesday’s Writer’s Cafe update. You have time, but not too much, don’t dally.

Wednesday Writer’s Cafe

~ tahenryauthoress ~ 3 Comments

was preempted this week by The Bard & Starlet hour. I have to say it went really well. And no, none of my work was included so I am not biased. LOL

Six local authors, members of FreeValley Publishing, gently modified scenes from their own novels or short stories into screen plays which were then acted out, radio play style, by local actors. The whole shebang was directed by local director Michael Renney, who also managed sound effects and acted as host of the “radio hour.”

The crowd at Boxleys was really warm and why wouldn’t they be. They were getting fabulous entertainment with their dinner. From my vantage point (behind the camera) I could see half the room ordered the Tequila Shrimp, so they must be good, in case you ever find yourself at Boxleys.

The evening started with a short story by David S. Moore. A sweet innocent family is looking for their new home. And their real estate agent would love to sell them this genetically engineered house, even though he doesn’t quite understand how it works. See, it’s adaptive to it’s environmental influences. And that’s where David leaves us. Wondering just what this house might do in the future as it “adapts” on it’s own. I had to pounce on him as soon as the evening’s show ended just to find out what does happen. And no, I’m not telling you. Ask David if you want to know.

From there we flow to the amusing adventures of The Witty Miss Livingstone by Kennedy J Quinn. I had the pleasure of being at many a write-in while Kennedy was penning this entertainment last November for Nanowrimo. I have heard so many clips I am chomping at the bit to get a crack at beta but no words yet. sigh. Miss Livingstone is a young woman who is moved from her proper Eastern sphere to 1910 Snoqualmie Valley. While initially bored with her new locale, she finds worlds of wonder in time travel. I don’t want to give away too much. Kennedy is editing for beta and hopes to publish Miss Livingstone later this year. You can tell her to hurry up, here.

Onto the nicest woman I have ever met. I should tell you each author sat at a little table on the side of the stage and “typed” out their thoughts as each scene unfolded. While Victoria Bastedo sat there, she didn’t type but she had the best facial expressions. I almost believed she was thinking up what her characters were saying as she sat there. Green Eyed Pursuit is a young adult mystery set in Victorian times is my guess. A simple quest to find one’s father evolves into so much more for the main character. Last night was the official release for Green Eyed Pursuit and the 457th book for Victoria. I exaggerate but not by much.

I am always predisposed to like a book for charity. Just the fact that someone went to a lot of effort that will benefit themselves to the tune of nothing, makes me want to like the art. If they can actually create art so much the better. Jeffrey Cook is no stranger to creating quality, his attention to detail pleases the researcher in me immensely.  Sound & Fury, Shakespeare Goes Punk, is an anthology of short stories written for the benefit of Paws Animal Shelter in Kirkwood. Local authors doing good locally. In “Young Secret Nobles in Love,” two young steam punk pirates negotiate the murky world parental permission for engagement, then negotiate their own rules of marriage.

Swim, Swan, Swim was also written during Nanowrimo last year. I heard lots of snippets, but finally got a real flavor during last night’s scene where Tennyson Swan attempts to placate both his niece’s demands for white alphabet food and his nephew’s demands for information about the murky family history. A mystery with a lot of emotional trappings is my guess when all is said and done. No word from T. Tommia Wright on when we might get to see the finished product. Nudge her along here if you like.

We capped off the evening under Stars in the Texas Sky by local author Stephen J. Matlock. I have not read this book but each time I hear a portion of it at an event, I become intrigued. The first scene I heard made it feel like a social commentary. Last night’s scene focused on the interplay and blossoming friendship of two young men 1952 small town Texas. I must admit I like the friendship better than the social commentary. I believed these were 14 year olds just on that cusp of becoming aware of themselves, finding who they are, finding how important it is to have a friend who understands you when you need to go spelunking in your own mind. Stephen is working on his second book set in Windmill, Texas.

If you missed it, I’m sorry for you.

Now don’t they feel dumb…

~ tahenryauthoress ~ 1 Comment

This morning as I was doing home school with my kiddo we were reading this book ajuniorggbout Geography. I love this book and if I can get it on other subjects I will. (the tone is funny while still talking to kids like they have brains.) But I digress, I came across a section on big Hollywood movies that make major mistakes pertaining to Geography.

-Jurassic Park, when Nedry is meeting on the beach to discuss stealing the dino embryos, the local is listed as San Jose, Costa Rica. Except San Jose is 50 miles from the beach. Oops

-Armageddon, when they are celebrating the destruction of the meteorite all over the world, it is magically day in every local.

-Titanic, Jack tells Rose he used to fish in Lake Wissota in Wisconsin. Throw away line to give him some back story, right? Oops, Lake Wissata was created by a dam that was built in 1915, three years after the Titanic sunk. Too bad he didn’t use his time machine to go back and tell himself not to get on the Titanic, eh?

-Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom, Indy’s plane flies Southwest out of Shanghai passing over the Great Wall of China, which is actually hundreds of miles North of Shanghai. Cool airplane trick. I want one.

-The Sound of Music, the Von Trapp family climbs over the Alps from Salzberg and across the border into Switzerland. Yeah, they are safe. But wait, if you cross the Alps from Salzberg the border you cross is actually into Nazi Germany. Oops, not safe.

This right here is why I research. Because someone always cares. These are quick mistakes that could have been avoided with a 30 second google search. I always take the 30 seconds, even when that means 3 years to write one stinkin’ spy novel. It will be correct when I finally finish it.

And I used these example because I liked these movies. I still do.

Quick reminder; if you are in the area, tonight at 7PM at Boxleys in North Bend is the Bard and Starlett hour. bard-starlet-radio-hour-flyer-final

The Pitfalls of writing over a long period of time

~ tahenryauthoress ~ 2 Comments

When I wrote my Wednesday Writers Cafe recap, I sort of glazed over the whole Mongolia and Moscow situation in my spy novel but I thought touch on that a bit more.

See when the night started I thought my characters were in Uzbekistan. I had just finished editing the most recently written section of my novel, where my main characters infiltrate the home of an arms dealer and force him to tell them who he stole the warhead for and where it is now, not that he knows the latter. But in that section I have the arms dealer speaking Uzbek to his son, who tries to defend Dad, it’s a long story, about 40K words right now. So at the start of the cafe I was grumbling about how to get them out of Uzbekistan without sending them back through China which is how they got there.

My writing friends, like true friends, began throwing out all sorts of suggestions, and I started checking into the feasibility of them, flight distances, etc when I suddenly realize when I started writing the section, 18 months ago, all of my distances, and travel times, and issues have them going from China to Mongolia. Mongolia, not Uzbekistan.

Crap, somewhere in those 18 months I forgot where I put the arms dealer’s house. I started writing based on where I thought I had left them and because really I wanted to be able to say he spoke Uzbek.

Sigh, so now not only did I have to rewrite some stuff but my spies are in Mongolia and I need to move them out of there. Repeat the previous fun and games where I try to figure out how to get them out of Mongolia without going back through China. sigh.

This is the problem with writing a novel over the course of 2 1/2 years at current count, and it’s only half done. Plus I just decided to change the bad guy because of that whole mess with North Korea and the movie. All my North Korea research is for naught and I must start again. This time however I picked a bad guy I know something about, having taken a class in it while pursuing my degree. This will hopefully cut down on the amount of research I need to do.

Ok new goal. If I want to finish this spy novel before this year’s Nano how many words per week do I need to write….There are exactly 23 weeks until November first. If I write 2k words per week for 20 weeks, that leaves me 3 weeks to research this year’s Nano before it’s time to write. That’s not bad. I think I can actually do that. But that does raise the question, what am I going to write for Nano 2015? Don’t tell me one challenge at a time, I don’t work that way.

Aren’t You Beautiful….

~ tahenryauthoress ~ 1 Comment

Well, aren’t you?

Last night was writers cafe, I had super good intentions about how much I was going to get written. I had a sitter, she even showed up,  I was ready to write given that I got little done yesterday morning and then it happened….

the Writers Cafe. We should give up the premise that anyone gets more than a few words written at these things. I did manage to hold the line long enough to get my spies out of Mongolia and into Moscow. Out of the pan and into the fire one might say but then I got a text.

To back up, a few weeks ago at the cafe I was told I needed to think about my author’s photo for that book I’m going to publish this summer. Not to mention for my blog (what my laptop and fingers shot isn’t going to cut it?), and for my promotional materials. Ugh. Marketing. I hate Marketing. I have a whole blogs about it hating it and panels I went to so I could hate it a little less.

The problem with marketing, for me anyway, is that these days you aren’t just selling your book, you’re selling yourself as well. Readers want to know their authors. I am so not comfortable with that. I don’t want to be looked at. I want to be invisible behind my screen and produce novels that do my talking for me. Yes, I know, reality check.

So I texted a friend I am going to see in a few weeks, who’s taken most of the pictures of me I have ever liked, and asked her to take my author photos for me. Last night she texted and asked me to find examples of pictures I might like, I had said I wanted whimsical and weird/arty shots, and we would recreate them. LOL. Down the google rabbit hole I went.

So this is my question to you, what would your author photo look like if you had money, time, and a professional photographer who knew how to get the best out of you?

“Anyone caught discussing books would be executed in the marketplace”

~ tahenryauthoress ~ 3 Comments

No, this isn’t from some dystopian novel I’ve started writing. laughing. File that under things that will never happen. It’s from the establishment of the Chinese nation, quite some time ago. My son and I have been listening to Story of the World, Ancient History while driving around lately. It’s good for him, he is happier to do the History lesson when we get to it in my lesson plan if he’s heard the CD chapter a few times already.

It’s good for me too because I hear little things that I hadn’t before. I know I have a degree in history but my focus was on Wars of the Twentieth century. I did take some ancient, Africa and Rome. But all my other classes focused 1740 forward.

So this morning when the CD was explaining how China was united by a ruler named Chin (hence China) who overcame multiple other warlords and maintained his dynasty by severe rule, I heard this bit about book burning and discussing books being punishable by death. And it occurs to me there are so many ways I could have died if I had lived in another time.

I went through a whole phase where if you told me not to do something, I did it, just to see what would happen. Luckily I live in the United States and it was the nineties, so I got told things like don’t get that tattoo (I have three), don’t get that piercing (I’ve had 6), if you don’t go to college you’ll never get a job (ha and double ha), you’ll never make it as a writer (still proving that one wrong), etc etc etc

Even right now I have blue and purple hair. House wives shouldn’t have multi colored hair. Shrug. Kiss it.

Ok, maybe it wasn’t a phase as such but a way of life.

So you can imagine if I was told “Do not discuss books in public.”

There I am on my quickly nailed together box (no soap boxes back then), speaking persuasively in favor of books: of what you can learn, how they can change your life, that a populace that can read will never be truly oppressed…right up until they cut my head off with an ax.

So there my head is, staring up at you from the ground, asking what are you doing that everyone or even just one someone told you, you can’t, you shouldn’t, you won’t…..

“Different TDY, Same Shit.”

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That’s the final line of my spy novel. It amuses me every time I read it because the TDY the assistant is wrapping up is handling Stanley. And it’s Stanley who’s asked the question. The hwole novel the assistant has quietly propped Stanley up or soothed his ego as the situation called for. It’s this easy little tweak of the idiot the assistant is assigned to run rather than being able to do real work.

Not that the spy novel is done by any stretch of the imagination. But I wrote the final chapter during the first Nano I worked on the spy novel in. Yes, you read that right. I worked on this spy novel for 2 Nanowrimos and the year in between. And still it’s not done. I’ve only got about 35K words. I expect another five years will get it done. Laughing. Given that half the year I am working on a nano, researching it, writing it, editing it. That doesn’t leave much time for Galatea, Talon, Gareth, and Stanley. On the other hand it provides a much needed vacation from these characters so I don’t hate them, because after three plus years, I’m a little tired of them every now and then.

I went to writer’s cafe last night. I love when I’m working, editing as it was in this case, and I’m not wholly absorbed in my work so that I have twenty percent of my brain available to catch the amusing snippets of words from other conversations. My writers group is having an Old Fashioned Radio Show on May 27th at Boxleys in North Bend. There was lots of conversation about that tonight which I won’t repeat here, LOL. Then an odd discussion on writing advice from Stephen King. But I think my fave was when I got drawn into a conversation that started like this…If Castle had a cross over episode with NCIS who would Rick bond with best? Hello, Tony of course. But that led me down a long rabbit hole of amusement which ended with me explaining that soon I would be back at the Friday writers cafe because my son would be done with co-op on Fridays and I hadn’t enrolled him in any classes on Friday for next year after a long debate over education versus my writing career with my husband. The woman I was talking to got that “oh you poor dear, I understand” look on her face so I felt compelled to explain that I had been arguing for Henry’s education, while my husband had been arguing for the writers cafe. She says, “What incredible support.” To which I could say quite easily, “yes, it was. My husband is amazing in all the ways that really matter.”

It’s Wednesday at the Cabana….Copa Cabannnnnna

~ tahenryauthoress ~ 3 Comments

I don’t know where I am going with that. laughing.

It has been a truly strange few days. Last night I got a burr up my butt about this song that I hadn’t heard before the last few months. Now I hear at least once a week on Jack and it gets stuck in my head every time for days. So I finally googled it up, never heard of the band. Finger Eleven. Apparently they were super cool back in the day but their last gig was a free bar show. sigh. How did I not hear of them before this? So there I am singing “if your body mirrors what your eyes can do, you’ll probably move right through me as I move to you” when my hubby asks what the bleep I’m doing. So I share and then I remember this other song which I play for him, this leads us down the never ending you tube rabbit hole of listening to songs by the two different artists that sing Somebody that I used to know. Weird, weird music. All that meant I did not finish the two beta reads I owed to authors in my writing group, which meant I needed to finish them tonight at the write in and meet my commitments. I don’t want to start piling up bad writing karma before I even need beta readers myself. laughing

I figured it wouldn’t take too long but then when I got to the table tonight….serious…a discussion on the physics and quantum mechanics of warp space travel. Oh mi god. I love these people. How could I concentrate with that going on all around me? I couldn’t so it took all evening for me to get through the betas and send feedback. And now, now when I could write for a few minutes, although not too long because I without sitter this evening and so must be mindful of the fact that my five year needs to get home to bed, they are talking about Agatha Christie and her brilliance. I am sucked in. It is over. Hang up my keyboard for the evening. I am done. Forget the yellow feathers in my hair and my tee shirt cut down to there, I’ve lost my mind to the charms of intellectual masturbation and I’m not even half blind drunk.