Category: writing

Life Talk, seasons, writing

April, May, Tulips, and Writing

elouisebates

I hope you all has a wonderful Easter! We did; my husband’s family came out for the weekend, and we thoroughly enjoyed spending time together, filling and hiding plastic eggs for the kids to hunt on Sunday after church, and eating all the food I could keep coming out of my kitchen. We were a surprisingly hungry bunch this weekend!

As much as I loved having family out, and visiting them in our turn, I must confess to a sneaking sense of relief and freedom as we enter the month of April. Why? Because we have NOTHING planned. No trips, no people coming out to see us, nothing. Just living.

Now, I have learned in the last almost-decade of my married life that this is usually when life decides to laugh heartily at our expense and whack us on the nose with a broomstick. So I’m fully expecting Things to Happen. Even so, I’m reveling in the illusion of freedom right now.

We can finally start following our schedule! I can finish sewing the kids’ spring clothes! I can get more writing done! We’ll be able to do more than two days of school in a week! I can keep practicing driving so as to be more comfortable behind the wheel by the time we move! Carl and I can work together on the weekends to sort, organize, and pack boxes so that I don’t get completely overwhelmed by it all the week before we move!

(I am so laughing at myself even as I type this. This is NOT going to happen.)

Also of excitement to me are two things happening in May (in the merry, merry month of May …). One: my mother is getting her Master’s! We’re going up north for her graduation ceremony, and THEN we’re going just a little further north to go to the Tulip Festival in Ottawa, Canada.

This was an excursion we made most years when I was a kid, and Carl and I have wanted to go up every year since we were dating, and never made it. This year I said since we were already going to be so close (my parents live just south of the US-Canada border) at the right time of year, we WERE going to go. And so we are making sure our passports are up to date and GOING. I can’t wait. The girls are going to be blown away by so many tulips in one place, and downtown Ottawa is always worth a visit even without the flowers. Hurrah!

The second thing will actually happen before the first (confused yet?). For Mother’s Day weekend, happening before my mom’s graduation, Carl is going to take the kids to visit his mom. Where will I be during this? I’m SO glad you asked. I will be having a couple days entirely to myself. Not Here. Not at home, surrounded by all the Things I need to do every day, mocking me whenever I take the time to write. Not at his mother’s, where I still have to be mommy and wife (and daughter-in-law) even though we aren’t home. They are going to drop me off somewhere between our house and his mother’s, and I will have a real-live solo writing retreat. It’s my (belated)birthday present/(current)Mother’s Day present/(future)keeping everything functioning while Carl’s in seminary present.

So, any recommendations for a good place to stay in the Berkshires or southern Vermont for a solo writing retreat with no car?

And how is April looking for you?

Ever been to the Tulip Festival in Ottawa?

Did you have a nice Easter?

(A picture from last spring, taken at a park here in our city. Now imagine that, plus thousands more. THAT’S what it will be like in Ottawa.)

Books, writing

Overcoming Adversity Launch Day

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It’s the Overcoming Adversity Anthology launch day!

Cover design by DR Cartwright, from a concept by Ella Wilson
Blurb:
A collection of seventy moving and uplifting original pieces – real life, flash fiction, and poetry – about battling against the odds and the ultimate triumph of the human spirit. The contributors include Amazon bestselling authors Alex J. Cavanaugh and Kyra Lennon, and the cream of upcoming talent.

The anthology is part of a fundraising effort to send the editor’s stepson, Andrew McNaughton, to a specialist college in England. Andrew has cerebral palsy, and is a remarkable young man with a promising future. However, the free further education options offered in his own country of Scotland will not challenge him and allow him to progress. In order to access the education he deserves, Andrew will have to pay exorbitant fees, thus creating a situation of discrimination.

Help us get Andrew to college by buying a book that runs the full gamut of human emotions, ultimately leaving you inspired and glad to be alive. Whatever struggles you are going through, our sincere hope is that this book will help.

Purchase Links:

(Paperback coming soon)

Editor Bio: Nick Wilford is a writer and stay-at-home dad. Once a journalist, he now makes use of those rare times when the house is quiet to explore the realms of fiction. When not writing he can usually be found spending time with his family or cleaning something. He has four short stories published in Writer’s Muse magazine. Nick is also co-running a campaign to get a dedicated specialist college built in Scotland. Visit him at http://nickwilford.blogspot.co.uk/.

~ * ~

It was such a privilege to be able to participate in this anthology. The poem I wrote, Memory, ended up being really special to me, and a chance to honor my grandparents. Thank you for this opportunity, Nick, and I hope it succeeds even beyond everyone’s wildest dreams!

Now, faithful blog readers, go forth and buy!
editing

Writer’s Sludge

elouisebates

I haven’t written one word – save for blog posts, FB and Twitter updates, and the occasional short email – in three weeks.

Writer’s block, you ask?

Not exactly.

More like Writer’s Sludge.

I’m editing. I’m actually in the easy stage of editing, where all the major changes have been made and the end is in sight. I should be able to tackle this no problem, right?

Unfortunately, editing is also the tricky stage, when I need to focus all my attention on the task before me. Which means I can’t do it during the day, when the kids need me. Even putting on a movie doesn’t help (yes, I do resort to that sometimes – I never claimed to be Supermom), because I’m still in “mom” mode, not “writer” mode.

Up until the plague sweeping our house, I had been getting to the library for an hour on Fridays after Carl got home, and even that one hour of writing a week was fantastic. But with at least one of us being sick for almost the entire month of February, that just stopped happening.

Editing in the evenings, after the kids are in bed, you suggest? Yes. I should do that. I often have grand plans throughout the day of doing that. But usually by the time 8:00 rolls around and the kids are asleep, all I can do is curl up in the recliner and read fluffy books. My plans of a winter spent delving into different mythologies has fallen through, too! I’ve fallen back on comfort reads, Agatha Christie and Patricia C Wrede and Miss Read. All good books, but none of which require me to stretch my brain.

Which means, of course, that even now that we’re all (rap wood) healthy again, and I could be working on the MS again, my creative muscles have fallen out of use, and my natural laziness is creeping back to the forefront of my personality, instead of locked tightly in the back, where I usually try to keep it contained.

So I write this blog post in hopes that by being honest and open about this, it will trigger something in me, maybe even that famous stubbornness and contrariness that I’m known for throughout my family and friends, and I’ll start writing again immediately after posting this.

Even though I haven’t been writing/editing, I have started exercising some of my creative muscles again recently. See?

Now I just need to translate that into writing! Hmm … maybe if Maia had to deal with pirates …


1920s, Books, writing

Titles

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As many of you know, the working title for my current MS is Magic & Mayhem. I love the alliteration, the way it gives a sense of being a historical novel (tying in with books such as Sense & Sensibility or Pride & Prejudice, for example), and that it conveys the idea of what’s happening in the book without giving anything away. Perfect title, right?

Except. All of the sudden lately, I’ve been seeing a flood of blank & blank titles all over the place. And if there’s one thing I hate, it’s looking like I’m following a trend (see my other post where I mention my annoyance with many of the similarities between the Crawley sisters and my protagonist’s family – I swear, I wrote mine before I ever even heard of Downton Abbey!). Not just because of hipster tendencies, but because I don’t want to give a false impression of my book. As a story, it doesn’t fit neatly into any genre or follow any current trends. So I would hate to lure somebody in by the title, only to have them irritated when the story reads so differently from other similarly-titled works.

So the question becomes, do I hope that by the time I have this edited, edited again, proofread, formatted, and finally published, that the blank & blank titles are less popular? Except I’m shooting for a late spring, early summer publication, even with all the work that needs to be done, so that really isn’t a lot of time. Do I hope that people will be amused by the subtle Jane Austen/Elizabeth Gaskell reference and miss out on the other, more popular new titles that follow that path?

Or do I go for a different title altogether? I had been playing around with a few ideas before settling on Magic & Mayhem:

Murder of a Manservant (excuse me while I fall asleep)

Of Magic and Men (except that it’s equally about men and women, and “Magic and Humankind” really sounds dull)

A Magical Mystery (booooring!)

Magical Mayhem (not bad. But not tremendously riveting)

In thinking about it just recently, as well as perusing old Victorian and Regency novel titles, I’ve come up with a few more:

Murder at Little Oaks (sounds like Nancy Drew – now, Nancy meets magic WOULD be a fun idea to explore sometime, but that’s not this story)

The Portland Papers (since much of the story’s plot revolves around needing to recover stolen papers, this one isn’t too bad. I don’t like that it doesn’t give any hint of the magic, though.)

The Apprentice (possible, since my protagonist is a magic apprentice. Still kind of dullsville, though.)

Such Stuff as Dreams (not bad – it is Shakespeare, after all, who also provided the title for one of my short stories, so there’s some continuity there. It is a little vague, though.)

Sigh. Maybe I should just hire someone to title my books for me …

Quick! Grace! Write out a title for Mummy’s book!
1920s, fantasy, goals, publishing, writing

Magic & Mayhem, Background

elouisebates

I am mostly writing this to help me remember. My brain is terrible at holding onto these details.

In the spring of 2011, I was querying my completed MG fantasy, and researching and outlining a YA fantasy, as well as working on a children’s fantasy. Plenty of projects, especially when one considers that I had two toddlers at the time, one with whom I was starting preschool at home, the other of whom was potty-training.

And yet … I hated all my projects. Every time I re-read them, they seemed grimmer and more bleak. I have never been a dark writer, and I couldn’t figure out why what I was writing was so gloomy (I did find out soon afterward that I was on my way to a nervous breakdown, and though I was never diagnosed officially, I’m pretty sure I also had a mild case of depression – if not that, then at least severe despondency).

So one night, I tossed aside all my projects. Put away my research books. And I decided to write something for sheer fun, without even caring if it got published or not.

I’ve always adored Tommy and Tuppence (Agatha Christie’s creations), and any other male-and-female teams of adventurers/mystery solvers. Kate and Thomas, Cecy and James from Wrede and Stevermer’s Regency fantasy series also come to mind.

I decided to write an adventure story set in the 1920s, mostly because (thanks to LM Montgomery and her Rilla of Ingleside) I’ve always been fascinated by WWI and especially the between-war period. It would have to be in England, of course, because anything that an Anglophile writes for fun is going to be set in Great Britain. And just for some extra amusement, I’d throw magic into the mix. I knew I wanted a gentleman-and-lady team, like Tommy and Tuppence, except I wanted the lady to be the steady, practical one, and the gentleman to be the one who worked more off his impulses and instincts. I love turning tropes on their heads.

I had a few false starts, but eventually my characters and I came to an agreement about their personalities and roles, and the story sprang to life under my fingers. I set aside the research for that YA fantasy. I put the finished MG fantasy aside to look at and revise at a later time. I forgot completely about the children’s fantasy.

Most importantly, I had fun. I remembered why I loved writing. I even bought the first season of Downton Abbey (I had steadfastly resisted getting sucked in up to that point) as “background research,” and was hugely amused and somewhat miffed at some of the parallels between those characters and mine.

Maia and Len and all the rest took over my writing life. And I did not resist. The story that I started just for fun, with no thought of eventual publication, eventually became the story I am planning on publishing this spring or summer, whenever I finish the last bit of polishing. It spurred me to write If This Be Magic & The Traitor and the Spy, two short stories set in the same universe but featuring different characters.

Just a few short weeks ago, I sat down to do something else entirely, and suddenly the entire plot for a prequel unrolled in my brain. I frantically scribbled down the outline and started working – again, just for fun! – on a rough draft of that. That story is now spurring me to hurry up and finish editing Maia and Len’s current tale so I can work undisturbed on that one.

And just recently, I’ve started thinking about those three abandoned stories again, and wondering if I can give them another shot, make something less-grim of them.

The moral of this story is obvious – write for love, not for business. But I’m not recording it here as a moralistic warning to myself or anyone else. I’m writing it because it inspires me, that my best work to date sprang from writing for pure pleasure, and it helped to bring joy back into my life when I was in a very dark place. Just as the darkness in my personal life had been affecting my writing, when I started writing determined to just love it, that bled over into my personal life, and helped to bring me through that bleak tunnel.

I’m not even going to attempt sending Magic & Mayhem, Maia and Len’s tale, to a traditional publisher. Everything about this story has been personal, and I think the publishing part of it should be as well. I’m going to have it professionally edited, of course! But I’m not going to risk losing some of its joy by dealing with queries, rejections, changes, frustrations, and all the rest involved in traditional publishing.

An unprofessional decision? Yeah, probably. But being unprofessional was what brought this book to life. I’m not going to change that now. I have an entire career ahead of me to be professional in. I think I can afford to indulge my whims a little right now, before that career takes off.

Maia and Len are utterly unconventional. Their creator ought to be, as well.

favorites, goals, Life Talk, writing

Year’s End

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I always enjoy reading year’s-end posts from others. So I decided to put one together on the chance that others enjoy reading them, too! Without further ado, here are some of my favorite posts from this blog in 2012.

This post on rituals, from February, is still one of my favorites from the year. I like its quiet thoughtfulness.

My April post on destiny still resonates with me. I need the reminder, still, to not get bogged down in fatalistic negativity.

I wrote a tribute to Lloyd Alexander in May. It’s mostly quotes from his writings, so you know it’s good.

This post on why I write, done in July, is honestly probably one of my favorite things that I’ve ever written. Honest truth, and a reminder to myself to keep aiming high. The comments still uplift me every time I re-read them, too.

I had fun with using scrambled eggs as a metaphor for writing styles in August. Includes some highly amusing pictures of bread loaves that didn’t work.

This post on being French, from September, remains one of my most popular EVER.

I wrote a tribute to my grandmother on the one-year anniversary of her death in October. My hope is that it gives comfort to others who have lost beloveds to Alzheimer’s or other forms of dementia.

In December, life got heavy. So I wrote about choosing joy, light, and love.

2012 was a good year for this family. It was a year of rest and healing (emotional and spiritual), a year of preparing for some big changes coming up in 2013. Carl has been accepted to his grad school of choice, which means that we will be moving sometime in the next six months, and starting a new adventure – taking the first steps on a new path that is still mostly in shadow. Exciting and nerve-wracking all at once.

As for me, I turned thirty, started taking ice dance lessons after twelve years off the ice, began homeschooling the kids, and published my first stories.

It was a good year.

2013 promises to be even better.

The Road goes ever on and on
Down from the door where it began.
Now far ahead the Road has gone,
And I must follow, if I can,
Pursuing it with eager feet,
Until it joins some larger way
Where many paths and errands meet.
And whither then? I cannot say.  -J.R.R. Tolkien


publishing, stories, writing

Holding it in My Hands

elouisebates

My posting schedule is all off these days. It’s not likely to get any better with the approaching holidays, either. Ah well, I just try to roll with it.

I’ve had far more frustrations with publishing If This Be Magic & The Traitor and the Spy (henceforth referred to as Magic & Traitor, because I’m too lazy to type out the whole thing every time) than I did with Justice’s Mask. Smashwords didn’t like some of my formatting, both for the cover and the interior. I was able to fix some, but not all, of the supposed problems, and decided the others weren’t worth fussing about.

The headaches with working through Createspace for print and Kindle were mostly due to me not having used it before (I didn’t bother with a print edition for JM), so I won’t mention them here. I worked through them, at any rate. The only current frustration is that the Kindle edition somehow keeps coming up as written by “E Bates” while the print is by “E L Bates” and I can’t put the “L” in the Kindle where it should be! And I’m guessing that’s the reason why they keep showing up as different publications, instead of two different editions of the same book.

I just keep reminding myself that this is one of the major reasons I wanted to try publishing short stories first – to get a feel for how all of this works, to figure out potential problems and address them now, so that when I publish my novel, it’ll go more smoothly.

So I’m trying to roll with all this, too.

And this happened yesterday, which made me tear up and forgive all the (literal and metaphorical) headaches.

A box was dropped off at my front door, and I opened it up to find these beauties inside.
I have been dreaming of holding my own book in my own hands since I was a little girl. And yesterday, it really happened. And it was just as magical as I’d always expected.
I’m even more excited to finish editing Magic & Mayhem now and move toward publishing that. Holding these slim copies of my own short stories bound and published makes me so, so excited to hold my own novel.
I have updated my “What Does She Write?” page with links to where you can purchase JM and Magic & Traitor, just so I don’t have to keep inundating you all with links to them in every post. After all, that’s kind of the point of a “What Does She Write” page to begin with, isn’t it?

Books, fantasy, stories, writing

New Book!

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Just in time for the holidays!

My cover designer finished the cover for my short story collection (can I call it a collection if it’s just two stories? And if not, what SHOULD I be calling it? Seriously, this has been driving me nuts. A duology? But they aren’t connected to each other, just similarly-themed) a couple months sooner than I was expecting. The stories themselves have been ready to go for ages, so all I had to do was fix up a little bit of formatting, and voila! Just in time to add to your Christmas wish list:

If This Be Magic & The Traitor and the Spy, available now at Smashwords and Amazon, and soon to be available in print.
Here’s the blurb for If This Be Magic:
As if being the worst student at Miss Cranston’s Select Seminary for the Study of Sorcery weren’t bad enough, now sixteen-year-old Sophie Abbott suspects her uncle, the most respected magician in Boston, of secretly working for the Kaiser. The year is 1915, and though America isn’t in the war yet, Sophie can’t sit by and do nothing. Before long, she and Uncle Edward’s apprentice Owen are deep in danger and treachery, and Sophie’s unique ability to see magic as a spiderweb of spells might be the only thing that can save them. Time is running short and Owen’s life is in her hands. Every spell she has ever attempted has failed spectacularly – can Sophie trust her magic now?

And for The Traitor and the Spy:

Philomena Stirling-Vane is fourteen years old in Victorian England, and in the unhappy position of having accidentally inherited the family magic. Her father is outraged, and her mother nearly prostrate with grief over the unhappy prospect of a lady magician in the family. When Jonathan Kempson, Mr Stirling-Vane’s former apprentice, requires another magician’s assistance to track down a traitor to the Council of Magicians, Phil sees her chance. Disguised as her brother, she accompanies Mr Kempson to London, where they must overcome their mutual dislike and learn to work together to unweave the tapestry of deception laid around them.

I was immensely proud of Justice’s Mask, and still am, but these two are even closer to my heart. They are fantasy, for one, which is my first and best love. They also both have a great deal more humor than Justice’s Mask, and while the more serious tone fits JM, I really do prefer to keep a more light-hearted tone when I can.

They are also set in the same world, though different eras, as my forthcoming novel Magic & Mayhem (I am aiming for a summer publication – we’ll see). This is my first attempt at playing with different stories and different characters in the same fantasy world, and it’s been so much fun.

Also, the cover. Isn’t that just gorgeous? I am so in love with it. It was created by Kathryn Jonell, and I highly recommend her work for anyone looking for a cover designer.

I have two more short stories and a novella from my summertime non-novel writing. I’m not sure when or how I’ll publish those, but for right now, I am so, so pleased with the three I’ve already published.

I hope you all enjoy them as much as I do!
philosophy, research, stories, writing

The Joy of the Library

elouisebates

Thank you all for your encouragement on my last post! I did get out my journal (and my fancy pens that I bought for art and then never used because I haven’t started the art book yet) the other day, but I haven’t written in it yet. Mainly because I started a new writing project (I am calling it Jane Austen meets Alias meets Diana Wynne Jones, which gives you a glimpse into how my brain works) and am having too much fun with that to try anything else.

Carl and the kids dropped me off at the library Friday late afternoon, and after wandering around for twenty minutes in a blissful daze about being able to pick out books without distraction, I meandered to the back, sat at a table, pulled out my laptop, and wrote.

Aside from the one tutor who breezed through the DESIGNATED QUIET AREA (seriously, there are signs!) talking at the top of his voice to his clearly not-hearing-impaired student, it was bliss. Forty minutes of quiet writing time, no one needing me, no guilt over the household chores staring at me, no need to hop right up and get supper started, nothing.

So I wrote, and I plotted, and I looked up the differences in address as regards a contessa vs a countess, and I wrote some more, and finally I got up with a happy sigh, checked my books out, went into the foyer, called Carl, and talked him through the last few steps of supper prep (basically: “Stir, turn the oven off, leave the dish covered.”). Then he and the littles came back for me, we went home, and ate the dinner that I’d started before I left and Carl finished. It was delicious, by the way. Lentils and rice!

We are definitely attempting to make this a weekly thing. Coffee shops are fun, but a quiet (or MOSTLY QUIET yes I’m talking to you obnoxious tutor who was supposed to be in the teen room anyway) library with all sorts of wonderful resources (not just the internet!) at my fingertips is far better for me. And it gets me out of the house, and even one hour of not having to be “mommy” is wonderful.

I love libraries, always have, ever since I was very young and enthralled by the one row of picture books at our local library (it was teensy-tiny, for a teensy-tiny town, but far better stocked than you might think). Library nights were the highlight of the week for our family for years: Dad would get home from work, we’d all pile in the car and drive to the library (the one night it was open late), browse for a while, check out an enormous stack of books apiece, stop at the gas station on the way home for soda (or Clearly Canadian – Mountain Blackberry was the BEST) and chocolate bars, then go home, Dad would make popcorn, and we’d all sit in the living room with our books and snacks, and read until bedtime.

The first thing I do in every new town we move to is find the local library. Sometimes the local library sucks and we have to go further afield to find the best one for us. We’ve been lucky these last two moves – we’ve ended up only five minutes away from a wonderful library each time.

The big excitement for Joy when she turned five was that she could finally get her own library card. Both the girls love going to the library, admittedly for the toys as well as the books, but also for the thrill of SO MANY books in one place, and all for the reading of anyone who wants. It really is a wonderful thing, when you think about it.

So it makes sense, for me, that the library would bring a sense of peace to my soul when I go there to write, that it would feel just right, comfortable and natural in a way that no other place can quite match. I’m already eagerly anticipating my next writing visit there.

Maybe this week I’ll get around to attempting some poetry.

Where is your favorite out-of-the-house place to write?

Joy signing her name for the library card

Enthralled in a book that she checked out all by her very own self!


philosophy, writing

Poetry of Life

elouisebates

I am not a poet. I shouldn’t really have to say that on here, should I? If you’ve read even a few of my posts, you’d know that I have a very conversational style in my writing; I write as I talk, and I am not a poet in my conversations, either.

Most of the time that doesn’t bother me. I’m not much on reading poetry, either. I memorized the first few stanzas of Sir Walter Scott’s “The Lady of the Lake” when I was a kid, and I gained some appreciation for Emily Dickinson in my freshman creative writing class in college, and I struggle to appreciate John Donne because of my abiding love for Lord Peter Wimsey, but really? Poetry is a closed book to me. I can scratch together a few lines for a Christmas present for a family member, or put together a little poem to hang next to a baby picture on my littles’ bedroom wall, but using poetry to express my innermost feelings? Not gonna happen.

And then I read people who write prose so beautifully that it reads like poetry, those blog posts that dig into my heart, those words accompanying a recipe in a cookbook that make me want to bury my hands in flour and build a legacy, those lines in a book that shine a light on feelings that have been obscure even to me. And I wish (oh how I wish) that I could write the same way. That even if I can’t write poetry, that my prose could be deep and rich and beautiful and speak out of the chambers of my heart, right into others’ hearts.

But I sit with my fingers poised over the keyboard, or twirling a pen above a blank page, and what comes out is my usual light chatter instead. Even when I am writing for myself, that doesn’t change, so it isn’t that I’m afraid to expose my inner self to others. Or is it that, is it that I have hidden myself away from others for so long that it’s become an ingrained habit, something I can’t break even for myself?

This post here is more stream-of-consciousness than I usually write. It’s about as close to poetry as I get. I do have a poetry blog that I started several years ago in an attempt to develop a more poetic side, but it’s been gathering dust for many months. Maybe I should start working on that again?

I don’t want to stay in the shallows, with my writing or with my life. I’m not afraid to dive into the unknown deeps when it comes to my life. I shouldn’t be afraid of stretching out with my writing, either. Light entertainment is fine, and even good, at times, but I don’t want that to be all I ever write. I want to make people think, and feel, with my writing. I want to use my writing to convey at least a part of the beauty and wonder I find in this world, this life.

Maybe I just need to take a deep breath, and dive right in. No fear.

I wrote this over a period of a couple days, but I have not edited anything (well, aside from a few spelling errors). An attempt to stay raw and not polish the truth away from my words.