A.J. Maguire

Tag: Writing

  • 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!

  • 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.

     

  • 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.

  • Camp NaNoWriMo

    For those who aren’t already aware of the pure awesomeness that is National Novel Writing Month I feel the need to inform you of what it is.  Basically, during the month of November, crazy people (like me) attempt to write 50,000 words in thirty days.  I’ve only won a handful of times — possibly less, I haven’t kept count since starting school — but I can tell you that my published book Witch-Born came out of NaNoWriMo 2008.

    If you’re familiar with that book then you know that it’s actually something like 104,000 words all together, but that’s hardly the point.  The point is that the first half of the book was done in a one month and the second half — which always takes longer for me given the need to tie all the plot lines together and that … ahem … I tend to have a lot of action — was done through the month of December.  After that, I took a year or so to edit it.  (That’s really not that long when you count the months where Alpha Readers had the manuscript and I was left in suspense until I heard back from them.)

    But why am I talking about National Novel Writing Month in August when it’s not official until November?

    Because the crazy people over there at the Letters of Light Foundation host multiple events throughout the year.  These events include Scriptfrenzy and — you guessed it — Camp NaNoWriMo!  This Camp starts TODAY!

    That’s right!  If you’re a glutton for punishment, or if you love words and want to string them together into some strange, convoluted plot where the antagonist becomes the protagonist and the maiden in distress turns out to be a troll in disguise … well then, head over to Camp NaNoWriMo and get started!  It’s free, it’s easy (relatively) and it’s fun.  Your domestic animals may get neglected for thirty days and you may forget to bathe once or twice, but it is otherwise harmless.

    Personally, I’m in summer school, I have a child, one cat, and a full-time job … but I signed up anyway.  I’ll likely lose (again) but my brain needs a break from the projects already on my plate and, quite frankly, I’ve had this science fiction novel simmering in the back of my mind for about six months now.

    So!  In the spirit of Camp NaNoWriMo, I have made a new page where I will post snippets of the work.  I warn that these will be grammatically terrible and might have strange last names like  JoHanna I-Don’t-Know-Yet, but there will be some form of accountability on my part.

  • Short Stories

    This week my very first short story EVER came out in the Love and Darker Passions Anthology from Double Dragon Publishing.  The cover is creepy and I haven’t read everyone’s stories yet that are in it, but I’m totally proud of it.  The story is titled “The Man Who Loved Medusa” and it’s the very first story in the book.
          (I mean really, look at that cover.  It gives me the willies.)

    (Also note, if you go the Amazon page you can get a sneak peek at the first bit of Medusa’s story.)

    When I was invited to do a story for this anthology, my first worry was that I wouldn’t know how to write anything less than 90 thousand words.  But as it turned out, I was able to manage this story in under 5 thousand words.  During the process, however, I have to note that there were several differences between novel writing and short story format.

    Let’s face it, you just plain don’t have time to fill the reader in on all the aspects of the world, setting, characters, plot and what have you when you’re working with a short story.  Every time I wanted to go off on a tangent, I had to pull myself back and putt a 1″ picture frame around what I was trying to say.  (Thank you, Ann Lamont, for the 1″ picture frame analogy in your book Bird by Bird.)

    Using Lamont’s analogy here became extremely helpful in writing this short story.  It kept me focused on the who, what, why, and how of the story in front of me.  Note I left out the when and where of the situation.  I learned very quickly that everything — every word, description, and dialog line — had to serve multiple purposes.  The when and where came out within the framework of answering the who and what of the story.

    This was supremely tricky for me, but I’m very proud of the way it came out.  And in fact, I was invited into another anthology for next year dealing with folk tales, which brings me to the second portion of this post; I finished my second short story ever.

    This second short story I am calling, for right now, Fish Wish.  It’s just the rough draft so far, but I can tell you that I threw lunar bases, moon dust, space travel, near asphyxiation, divorce, the folk tale The Fisherman’s Wife, and the term nano-fishers into a big blender and pressed puree!  And that’s not even the best part.  The best part is that I managed to do it all in less than 2 thousand words.

    Bwahahaha!

    But really, the challenge of writing short stories has made a vast improvement on my novel writing as well.  While I can get away with a longer word count in a novel, the task of allowing setting, dialog, and every word to do more than one thing in respects to my storytelling is … well … wonderful.

  • Alphabet Soup Blog Thingy

    Alright!  So about a week ago my friend Lisa Janice Cohen — author of The Between — challenged me to write a post about ten things I love that begin with the letter “P”.  It seriously took me this long to come up with my list, but here it is!

    Potatoes!  — Anyone who knows me at all will laugh at that this.  I love potatoes in just about any form I can get them.  Except chips.  I’ll eat chips, but I just … yeah.  Not a huge fan.

    Philanthropy — Honestly, we’re all on this planet together and we have a responsibility to each other.  There’s no reason any child should ever go hungry.  We all just need to step up and help where and when we can.  (I’ll even share my potatoes if I need to.)

    Puppies

    —  Oh, come on.  Who doesn’t love puppies?  Just look at them!

     

     

    Panda’s  — Well, I’m kinda cheating here.  I love Red Panda’s especially.  My local zoo just got a new pair and they are so fuzzy and adorable I would just love to take them home and snuggle them.  If I wasn’t afraid of the big teeth, of course.  They do have some sharp chompers.

    Procrustean — Just the word, I promise.  But I mostly love the word because of the history behind it.  And in case you weren’t aware of it, I think I’ll educate you!  In Greek mythology there was this dude called Procrustes.  He was a bit of a bandit, but not in the fun Robin Hood way.  He would put his victims on an iron bed and if they were too short, he would stretch them until they fit.  If they were too tall, he’d start lobbing off appendages to get everything to conform just right.  Thus leading to the definition of Procrustean as ::  marked by arbitrary often ruthless disregard of individual differences or special circumstances.

    And now I’ll bet you’ll never forget what that word means.  And yes, if I’d been given the letter “H” for this, I would likely have chosen History as one of my great loves.  Since I couldn’t, I get to torture you with that image instead. 

    People — Generally speaking, I love people.  We are all so weird.  I mean, just watch us for a day.

    Patterns — I like ivy patterns the best, but when it comes to decoration I do like anything colorful and patterned to give a sense of diversity to a room.

    The Princess Bride — I’m cheating here, too.  But, eh, I would be remiss if I didn’t point out the Princess Bride.  In fact, my son and I just watched it the other night.  He’s insistent that he is the man in the black mask.  But I wouldn’t worry too much.  He insisted that he was Spok when we watched Star Trek, too.

    Paper & Pens — It’s a dangerous thing to let me loose in the office supply section of any store.  Seriously.  I write my first draft via pen and paper.  Every story.  Every time.  I’m sure I’ll have horrible arthritis when I’m older, but for now it works.

    And last but not least …

    Parenthood — There are moments when my son drives me crazy.  When he won’t listen and I have to sit him down and have a discussion with him about what he did wrong and why he can’t do it anymore and all that jazz … but on the whole, being a parent is one of the most fulfilling, wonderful things in this world.

    That’s my list!

  • Travel & Travel Blogs

    One of the things that really helps inspire me are photographs.  It especially helps if these are photographs that I have taken myself, but occasionally I find inspiration in what I see on the Travel Channel or on another person’s blog.

    Oh!

    And let me tell you how much fun I have searching through space photographs!   Just take a look at this image done by gucken over at Deviantart.

    For the Travel Channel, I normally like Anthony Bourdain No Reservations.  He’s just too snarky for his own good sometimes.

    For bloggers who have caught my attention, I’m afraid there are only two.  First there is Katy at her storytellingnomad site.  She has some neat pictures up there of Venice and Europe in general.  I love the pictures, and she adds a bit of the writerly life to her posts by discussing what happened in whichever city she happened to be in.

    The second is Luke Burrage.  You might have already heard of him, and then again you might not.  He runs a Science Fiction Review Podcast that you can get for free on iTunes.  Also, he’s a juggler who works on cruise ships … so he inevitably gets to see wonderful, exotic places.  He is also a photographer and he has some beautiful pictures up on his blog.  (Be patient on his blog link, it’s heavy with content so it takes slightly longer to load.)

    While I would love to visit all the places in the world and experience everything there is to taste, touch, smell and what have you, I’m afraid life is just too short.  However, through these few people I am given a slightly broader scope of experience to work with — albeit vicariously — and I am supremely grateful for the work that they do.

    So!  Kudos to all of you!  And if you, dear reader, know of any travel blogs, pictures blogs, or other forms of art that you think would help stretch my imagination further, then please let me know.