A.J. Maguire

Author: ajmaguire

  • Dr. Who & The Sonic Screwdriver

    So I finally got Netflix and I was watching Star Trek Voyager when I realized that … Holy Cow!  I could be watching Dr. Who!  So I started watching it with my son, who actually seems to enjoy it.  In fact, he picked up a laser pointer that we use to play with the cat and proclaimed that it was his sonic screwdriver.  He now “unlocks” all of our doors with it.

    I’ve managed to get through the first two seasons and half of the third.  (These being the set that started back in 2005.  I might try the older generation later, but right now I’m too busy trying to catch up.)  And I have to admit that I am still a Chris Eccleston fan.  He played the Ninth Doctor and while I like David Tennant, the character sort of lost something in the transfer.  Eccleston had more gravity to him.  He felt a little more dangerous.

    But, well, we’ll see how I feel after I’ve finally caught up on all the seasons.  (I do have a loooong way to go yet.)  I did cry at the end of Season 2, which startled my son enough that he gave me the pouty lip.  I had to spend the rest of the night laughing and giggling with him about how Mommy got all emotional over a silly TV show.  (He was properly assuaged via Oreo cookies, so I’m fairly certain he hasn’t been emotionally scarred.)

    That said, I’m pretty much addicted to the show now.  Thank you BBC, you give me all the fun stuff to love.

  • Book Review – Hounded by Kevin Hearne

    So, I’m part Irish.  I’m also part Scottish, which makes for a wicked bad temper and an inability to quit even when everything is screaming that I’ve lost.  But it also makes me curious when I run into Irish or Scottish books of fiction, which is what made me pick up Hounded by Kevin Hearne.  (FYI, I’ve read like … all of the Outlander series by Diana Gabaldon on the main basis that it was dealing with Scots.)

    Overall I enjoyed the book.  It was funny, it had a different outlook on Druids and gods and things, and it had a dog.  (I’m a sucker for pets.)  In fact, I think Oberon the dog was my favorite character in the book.  Atticus was just too … “I’ve got control here even when it looks like I don’t” … for me.  I never really felt like he was in danger.

    In fact, I was more worried about his dog.  But then again, I sort of got the feeling that Atticus was more worried about his dog than he was about himself, too.  Until the part where the Earth was quasi-destroyed by an overambitious love-god and Atticus got all Druidic and grouchy about it.  And if he was going to get that touchy about it, I would have enjoyed watching him do some gardening or something, showing the connection he had to the Earth and all that.

    I imagine that it wouldn’t really be cool to watch a hot guy in Celtic tattoos do his gardening for several pages, but the dude was so busy killing giants or getting hit on by seductive goddesses that he really didn’t do much Druidic.  He drew his power from the Earth, true, but that just wasn’t enough for me.

    And … yes … I was slightly annoyed at the werewolves and vampires making a showcase on the pages.  Honestly, I’m happy that other people are happy reading about the undead and pack animals’ masquerading as people, but it’s just not for me.  (As horrible as this sounds I really can’t understand the appeal of the undead.  I’ve always equated it as some weird form of necrophilia.)

    Thus, as much as I enjoyed Oberon the dog and his amusing comments, I can’t give the book more than three or four stars on the meter.  But don’t let that bother any of you.  If you like vampires and werewolves and witches, or if your Scottish-Irish like me, then you should give the book a chance.

  • Witch-Born Giveaway

    I promised that in October I would run a Giveaway of the novel Witch-Born, and so I’ve gone ahead and started it.  Or, well, it hasn’t started quite yet.  It starts September 8th and runs all the way through October.  I’ve put in the widget already, so you can click on that and go straight to Goodreads, who is hosting the Giveaway.

    Thank you, Goodreads!  You are super-fabulous!

    Anyway, as this is the first time I’ve given away Witch-Born, I figure I should take a moment to give a little background information on the novel.

    So!  There I was getting ready for National Novel Writing Month back in 2008, and I had this great outline for a straight Romance novel.  (I love National Novel Writing Month.  Seriously.  If you know anything about them then you know they are out there promoting literacy and everything in young people.)  But then a funny thing happened.  November 1st showed up and I simply could not write the novel I had mapped out.

    It was infuriating.

    I had taken all of October to create that outline and suddenly I couldn’t use it.  So I threw it aside, grabbed the two main characters (in my mind it was by the throat, even though I’m pretty sure both of them could have killed me with a wink) and let them lead.  By November 3rd I had a better idea of what the story was about.  My straight romance novel was overrun by witches, dirigibles, snake-like creatures that attached to people and took over their minds, and assassination plots.

    It was pure mayhem.   And I loved every second of it.

    I didn’t want to make Witches into the hunted creatures tradition has placed them in.  So, I decided to make a world where Witches were in charge.  This made for a strange, convoluted society that separates the Witch-Born from the Untalented, but resembles the familiar fiefdom we have in our history books.

    I barely won National Novel Writing Month that year, but I did win.  (First time, too.)  And then I took all of December to complete the novel.  For the next year I edited it.  Then I threw it out on the market where it was picked up by Double Dragon Publishing.  It was published June of 2011 and its sequel (Dead Magic) is currently under contract with Double Dragon.

    It’s actually quite appropriate that I give away Witch-Born now, since I should have Dead Magic completed by November.  (That’s not the publication date, just the day I’ll finish working on it before the editors at Double Dragon start ripping it apart.)

    I’d give you all a teaser of Witch-Born, but if you go to the Amazon page you can get the first chapter and a half for free.  So instead I’ll put up a quick snippet from Dead Magic.  (Not much, mind you.  I don’t want to get in trouble from the publisher.)

    ***

    “Are you taking me to the ark?” Valeda asked bluntly.

           Elsie smiled some more, careful not to show her surprise.  Regardless of her good nature, Miss Quinlan was a reporter.  The last thing Elsie needed was another news report about Delgora matters.  “I’m sure I don’t know what you’re talking about, Miss Quinlan.”

           “I saw it last night.  From my window.” Valeda’s soft gray eyes narrowed at her. “On the southern ridgeline.”

           Elsie chuckled and turned away, resuming their hike before she answered. “First of all, Miss Quinlan, you’ll notice the position of the mid-morning sun is directly to our right.  You, being an educated woman, are well aware of the sun’s rotation from East to West, which would make our current trajectory due north of Delgora Manor.”

           From the corner of her eye, she saw Valeda look to the sky and frown. “That doesn’t deny what I saw last night.”

           “Secondly,” Elsie continued without acknowledging the comment, “Even if I were inclined to divulge Delgora House matters to you, Miss Quinlan, my better sense knows that your profession cannot be trusted.”

           “I’m a reporter, not an idiot.  If you required my silence you would have it.  I’d never cross a Witch.”

  • The End of Camp NaNoWriMo

    Alright … so … it’s after 9PM on the final night of Camp NaNoWriMo and I am quite exhausted.  My end word count is 32,764.  I was hoping to get to at least 40k before the end, but the stars just did not align.

    But that’s fine!  Because I knew when I started this that I couldn’t win with all my obligations at school and everything.  (There was a solid week and a half where I couldn’t write due to finals and what have you.)  And to be honest, it was just plain fun to work on something new and different.

    So!  As promised I will be setting Tapped aside to be finished after I have completed Dead Magic and Usurper.  For those of you who follow my books, Dead Magic is the sequel to Witch-Born and Usurper is the third book in the Sedition series.  My Alpha Readers will be extremely pleased to hear that Dead Magic should be finished by November.  And I suppose if I put that in writing I should be prepared to suffer the consequences should I fail to meet the deadline this time.

    (In my defense, deadlines have been given quite a bit of leeway due to school.  And honestly, I broke a character in Dead Magic and she was driving me nuts, so I needed time away from the work to figure her out.)

    I’ve taken down the Camp NaNoWriMo page given the fact that … well … it’s done.  But come November — if Dead Magic is finished and I’m feeling particularly feisty — I might put a new one up to follow the regular National Novel Writing Month for the year.

    To those of you who participated in Camp NaNoWriMo … congratulations!  Even if you didn’t reach the goal, you still got words down on paper, and a story plotted out in your mind, and you deserve a cookie just for that.  Writing a book is hard.  It takes guts to even try.  So, well done!

  • Snow White and the Huntsman

    Fridays are normally my homework days while I’m in school, but this week was my first week on my little summer break (it’s only two weeks long before the Fall semester starts) and I decided I was going to treat myself to a movie.  (A three dollar movie, but hey, it’s the one I wanted to see.)

    Why did I want to see it?

    …. Uh … to be very shallow, because Chris Hemsworth was in it.  

    Honestly, I became a fan when I saw Thor.  (Even though Tom Hiddleston, who played Loki, is sort of identical to my character Nelek Dyngannon.)

    But to get out of the shallow waters, I tend to watch anything fantasy/fairy tale-ish.  I watched Mirror Mirror, too.  And have almost every version of Robin Hood that has been made in my lifetime.  So, Chris Hemsworth + Snow White tale = I should see this movie.  The only reason I didn’t see it when it first came out was because it looked too scary to take my 4 year old son to, and my Fridays were occupied with school work.

    Let me first say that Charlize Theron was surprisingly terrifying.  I didn’t think she could pull off psycho-evil-queen, but she did.  And I actually felt bad for her (the character, not the actress) with the back-story they gave this lady.

    I have long been a fan of Theron.  I think she’s absolutely beautiful, and in this movie she was able to turn that beauty into something really tragic.  Well, tragic and scary.  Let’s face it, she does some pretty nasty things in this movie in order to keep her vitality and all that.

    Now … I have to admit that I twitched when I heard Kristen Stewart was playing the role of Snow White.  Especially when I spotted her in a poster wearing armor.  I could get Stewart as Snow White if the character was a little wimpy, awkward, and incapable of speaking above a whisper level.  But this Snow White was being portrayed as someone with the strength to fight the almighty Queen portrayed by Theron.    

    This just didn’t work for me.  I can’t fully explain why, but something was off in this performance.  I fully admit that I am not a Twilight fan, but that has nothing to do with the movies and everything to do with the fact that I read the first book and didn’t care for it.

    (Twilight fans, I’m glad you like them, they just weren’t for me.  They were a smidgen too angst-driven for me, and that always gets under my skin.  But then, not every book is going to appeal to every reader, so I wish you all well of them and sincerely hope you enjoyed the series as a whole.)

    In any case, Stewart did manage to pull off one thing for the story as a whole, which is why I was still able to enjoy the movie.  Compared to Theron, Stewart was extremely small (and I mean that character-wise and not just physical attributes).  This made for a drastic sense of Stewart and her fellows being up against insurmountable odds.

    And I do so love stories with insurmountable odds.

    Now then, back to being semi-shallow … Chris Hemsworth pulled this movie together for me.  Not only because I loved him in Thor and was willing to see what else he could do as an actor, but because he put a real sense of “goodness hidden by grit” into the story.

    Let me explain that ….

    The story shows us a place where evil Queen Lady has overrun all the good people.  She’s sort of a disease that just infects the land itself.  Trees turn all black and dead, the castle walls suddenly look darker, and everything good is covered by this festering sense of death.  In such a place as this, you would be hard pressed to find someone of good moral character.

    Enter the Huntsman, whose bitterness at a personal loss has managed to overshadow the real man he is.  He’s a mirror to the world itself, and you get the sense that if he can overcome his loss and break free, then the rest of the world can follow with him.  (I’m a writer, I read into things.  It’s totally possible that this isn’t what anyone else saw from his performance but … hey … it’s all relative.)

    So!  I have to say that I enjoyed this movie.  If I were ranking it, I’d put about 4 stars on it.  I liked the concept — even if it was darker than my usual fare — and I enjoyed the performances.  It was just missing something to push it into the 5 star rank.  Nevertheless, I’ll probably buy it for my collection when it comes out for sale.

  • Camp NaNoWriMo Week 4

    Alright!  So I’m sitting at 28043 words.  After a small amount of calculation, I’m pretty sure I won’t be winning this year.  But, I did have finals for school and all of that earlier this month so I knew I probably wouldn’t be.  We’ll see what my end count is a week from today, but I can say that I love the story.  There are a lot of holes I know I need to fix, a lot more character building and world building I need to do for the setting, but I enjoy the story-line immensely.

    For this particular story I decided to challenge myself and stick to only two Points of View.  The result has been a beautiful story about a mother and her son.  We get to see both of them in action, hear their thoughts and their misunderstandings, and watch the strife that comes about when a harsh truth imposes itself in their relationship.  I admit that it is strangely difficult to write only these two POV’s since my very Third Person Limited writing style keeps begging me to go into someone else’s brain for a minute, but I believe this story will be better for the limitation.

    That said, at the end of this month I will be setting Tapped aside (regardless of where I am in the plot) in order to pick up and finish Dead Magic and Usurper.  (Dead Magic first.)  These two are on contract and do require my attention.

    But it has been great fun writing something at break-neck speed, heedless of every caution my internal editor’s voice kept trying to shove in my way.  While I admit that this leaves me with a lot more editing to do later, there is something to say about being able to put the shell of the work down.

    Seven days left.  Let’s see how many words I can slam onto paper before September.

     

  • John Carter

    I know that John Carter is the creation of Edgar Rice Burroughs, but I haven’t actually read the books.  I spotted them, but never picked them up.  I’m not sure if this is a good or bad thing yet.  Because I loved the movie.  Normally, I hate the movie but love the book.  (Like Timeline by Michael Crichton — good heavens, if ever a book was murdered by a movie, it was that one.)

    I will read the books, but for right now I’m happily hoping that they resemble — at least in part — what the movie showed.  And this movie showed a strong, capable man whose major flaw was his compassion.  That compassion of his got him in more trouble than his mouth ever did, which was refreshing.  And he had a seriously tragic event lining his history that explained why he was desperately trying to kill off that compassion.

    But aside from the hero — who I fell in love with as a writer — I have to admit that I loved the monster dog creature, too.  And the aliens … I guess I can call them Martians since they live on Mars.

    I’m not going to give spoilers to the movie or anything, but I will say that I loved it and highly recommend it to any science fiction/ fantasy fans out there.  Ignore the science, suspend your disbelief, and watch the very human elements in the story.

  • End of Week 3

    Is it really week 3?  Well, I suppose the first week was only two or three days long, so I won’t feel bad that I’m only sitting at 19762 words.  And I really, really won’t feel bad about that number since it is finals week and I have 1.5 projects left to do and a lovely multiple choice test waiting for me.  (The .5 project is mostly just gathering some pictures and the other one is an essay, so I should be able to finish relatively quickly.)

    I am seriously excited for the next two weeks, though.  Because after TODAY my summer classes will be done and I can play with my Camp NaNoWriMo project with more intensity.  And I do mean intensity because I just found out that one of the passengers currently on board Jorry’s ship the Zephyr was actually hired by Devon’s real mother to track him down.

    Sweet holy conflict, batman!

    In Jo’s defense, she sorta thought Devon’s real mother was dead.  And the lady did leave her three month old baby behind when she got arrested, so … yeah … Jorry feels fairly justified in her choice to keep him.  (Fairly justified.  She does have the moral capacity to see how murky the situation really is.)

    But, let me tell you, the scene where she gets confronted with this information was super fun to write.  Here, I’ll cheat and leave a snippet on this board as well:

    “That boy’s name is Devon Barlow and he is my son,” she said very quietly. “He is more a part of me than my own skin.  If I ever hear you even whisper such a story on this ship again I will disembowel you.  Are we clear?”

    Well, alright, so that’s more of a quote than a snippet.  If you want the actual snippet you have to go over to the Camp NaNoWriMo page.  At any rate, I need to run off and finish my finals so that I can breathe again.

     

  • Week 2 Round-up (Belated)

    Why yes, I’m several days late in posting this.  Truth is, I made a sudden decision on Friday evening that I was going to travel down and visit my mother for the weekend.  Thus, my blogging time was replaced with a flurry of packing whilst my son clung to my leg and cried; “Grandma! Grandma! Grandma!”

    OK.  So he didn’t cling to my leg, but he did get excited about going to see her.  (He always does.  She spoils him rotten.  Which is, apparently, her job.)

    In any case, if you look at the Camp NaNoWriMo page you can see that I rounded up last week at 14984 words.  Which is superfabulous considering my busy schedule.  I’m not very hopeful for this week considering it is both finals week for summer school AND VBS (vacation bible school) for my son.  But we’ll see how it all turns out in the end.

     

  • Day 3 of Camp NaNoWriMo

    Alright, so it’ll get a little crowded up here if I post all of my word counts every day.  I’ll be putting that up over on the Camp NaNoWriMo page anyway, so there’s no need to be redundant.  However, I also want to spend most of my time trying to … you know … write the novel I’m trying to write for this thing … So I’ve decided that on Friday’s I will post a quick recap on what I’ve done for the week.

    This will be taking the place of my regularly scheduled blog posts.  But I figure the title of my blog is “Writing Mayhem” and what is more chaotic and resembling mayhem than the idea of trying to write 50k words in one month?

    Pfft!  Nothing!  Nothing at all, I tell you.  It’s craziness personified.

    So!  Here is my recap for the first (half)week of Camp NaNoWriMo ::

    I have been introduced to Ms. Johanna Rorry, otherwise known as Jorry or Jo, to her compatriots.  She is, as she has told me, a deserter from the military.  She and her best buddy Seach Barlow (don’t ask me, that’s what he said his name was) both ran away from the military after receiving a distressing call from Jo’s husband — Relo Bomani (I recognize that the names are weird, but in the spirit of NaNoWriMo anything goes) — that they needed to run for their lives.

    I don’t know what was threatening their lives just yet, but I imagine I’ll find out later.  Whatever it was has kept them in hiding for 80 years or so … and I explain the science behind their freakishly long lives within the book.  They are the futuristic equivalent of truckers, meaning they haul food, provisions, and fuel to each of the space stations peppering the galaxy (also explained in the book). This keeps them mobile and anonymous, which is exactly what two deserters from the military would want.

    But .. uh-oh … I have to upset their balance in Chapter One to keep the plot interesting.  So I threw a baby at them.  (Not their baby, they’re not romantically inclined, and I didn’t have it fly through the air, so calm down.)

    In any case, I am ending this week with a word count of 5,076.  Which is super-fabulous.