Trek and T*ts

So I had a Star Trek and mammogram kind of day. Here's the picture to prove it. In the early a.m. went to have my annual mammogram. Go get yours if you are due! And that's all I'm going to say about it.
And in an unexpected turn of events, I actually got to go out to lunch with my husband and go see a grown-up movie afterward. We so very rarely get to do this since he works and we have a child which means kid friendly entertainments ninety-nine percent of the time.
We went to Wurst und Bier, http://wurstundbiercolumbus.com/ and ate a lot of German meats and each had a beer. Neither one of us could remember the last time we'd both gotten to have an alcoholic beverage AT THE SAME TIME. We could do this because a) our son was not with us, and b) we could walk over to the movie theatre after we ate and drank. And oh my goodness the meat and beer were delicious. We waddled over to the movie theatre and lowered our bloated bodies into the plush seats of the UltraScreen for a matinee of Star Trek Into Darkness. OH MY.
What can I say about this movie? It grabbed you and just kept tossing you from one scene to the next. Bruce Greenwood! Peter Weller! Klingons! Tribbles! KHAN!!!!
I enjoyed the movie very much, but had trouble catching my breath about halfway through because of the unrelenting action sequences, explosions, crashes, assaults, and general mayhem. It did throw in a lot of material from past Treks (radiation in the warp core, hello! and KHAN!!!) but I was very entertained and that's all I expect from my summer fun films.
Simon Pegg was lovely as usual. And I'm finally getting the Benedict Cumberbatch crushes. I guess it just took him playing a despotic, genetically engineered superman to catch my eye.

P.S. I want all the leather jackets everyone wears in the film. Right now. Even though it's eighty degrees and sunny.

Blog Hop!!!

Welcome to my first blog hop! I've never done this before so let's hope it all goes well. I'm only asking two things, please make a comment below and then click through on the link at the bottom so you can visit the other contemporary Secret Cravings authors hosting this weekend.
Be sure to post a comment here and at the other author's blogs. I'll be giving away a copy of my my book Bent Boot Road to someone.


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Gatsby in Mind

Joel Edgerton as Tom Buchanan

I don't own copywrite on this so will remove if asked

 

 

Lucky me, I was able to the new Baz Luhrmann film The Great Gatsby this weekend. On Mother’s Day to be exact, so that was a nice present to myself. I’d seen one review of the film that was vaguely complimentary, so I didn’t have many preconceived notions about it before I sat down other than I liked F. Scott Fitzgerald’s novel, and I love that period. I was hoping for some great costumes and sets, hoped for good music, and as long as the script wasn’t radically different than the book, I didn’t really care. It had an afternoon to myself, a tub of popcorn, and an iced chai (yes, my theatre serves chai, who knew? They also serve White Castles, which is all kinds of awesome.)

Let me say first off, I really liked the movie. It was as wild, frenetic, loud, and colorful as you would expect from this director and once I settled in for the ride, it was perfectly fun. I believe the movie treated the characters much more sympathetically than I ever did as a reader, which made sense considering how ‘pretty’ the whole movie was. It would be jarring to have terribly conflicted and hard to categorize characters in the middle of these over the top gorgeous surroundings. And they were gorgeous. The crystal was Waterford by my guess, the costumes conspicuously expensive, and the floral arrangements alone looked like they’d cost tens of thousands of dollars. There was as much conspicuous consumption up there on the big screen as what you would have seen at any striver’s party during the twenties. The only quibbles I had were with jewelry; Daisy’s famous pearls rolling all over the floor when the string broke was totally unrealistic, pearls are always individually knotted to prevent just such an occurrence but I’ll give it a pass because it’s such a dramatic visual. And one of Jordan Baker’s necklaces was too clunky for the period, it would have fit better for a thirties costume.

I didn’t notice the actors much, Gatsby and Daisy were credible, Carraway was more appealing than he’d ever seemed in the book as was Jordan Baker. The only actor that stood out to me was Joel Edgerton, he really nailed Tom Buchanan and gave him more nuance and interest than I’d ever gotten from the book. Of course he was a horrible, spoiled, and entirely pointless excuse for a person, but the actor made him interesting.

As I watched the film, I began to see where the novel influences my own writing. In my first book, Bent Boot Road, I compare my hero Carter, with an Arrow Collar man, an image of which featured prominently in the film. My heroine Lydia also compares the hero’s nice shirts to Gatsby’s lovely excess. Of course, Carter Harris is about as far away from Jay Gatsby as a fictional person could be. All they have in common are ethnicity, gender, and sartorial elegance. And in the book I am polishing for pitches this summer, my hero, Thomas, arranges for a beautiful hotel room with fresh flowers and lots of snacks for the heroine Mel to enjoy when she comes to London. It was very similar to the scene in The Great Gatsby where Jay Gatsby sets up an overblown tea for the reunion with Daisy, all to try and impress her. So F. Scott Fitzgerald’s work has had a subconscious influence on me as a writer and not just as a reader, which is really interesting considering I haven’t read the thing in at least a decade.



Sunshine On My Brain

Maybe because it finally feels like spring and the sunshine and warmer temperatures are mellowing my brain, or maybe because I wrote over 50,000 words on a new book last month for Camp NaNo, I haven’t paid attention to making a blog post in far too long. Let's blame it on all the plants emerging in my garden and distracting me terribly.

First off, the writing is going very, very well. I am so pleased with the SFR story I’m finishing up now, all the little connections and threads I needed are coming together at the end and that’s a great feeling. And I went through another story (one I wrote last November for NaNo)  and revised it in the last two weeks. This one I’m going to pitch to an editor at Lori Foster’s Reader and Author Get Together in June, so it’s very nice to have most of the heavy lifting done on it already. It’s a contemporary set in Ohio, the heroine is a small town school bus driver employed for the summer to drive around some movie actors on a location shoot in her home county. And our hero is one of those actors who decides he doesn’t want to be famous. So far, my favorite scenes to write were one at a garage sale, and another of a seduction in below zero weather in a drafty bedroom.

Still waiting to hear about the pitch I made three weeks ago. I kept myself busy and haven’t thought about it much other than wanting to know what the editor thought so I can enter it into our Central Ohio Fiction Writer's contest; Ignite the Flame. I might just enter my contemporary instead and not worry about it. I just want to find a publisher for my SFRs, I have written four and I’d love to find a home for them so I can get them out there.

I also managed to order my swag for the above mentioned RAGT. If you are attending, expect a magnet from me, and I’ll have some cover post cards to sign, stress balls, AND bags of Brach’s hard candies. Getting ready for this event has been hit or miss for me. I have no idea what to expect, so I’m kind of muddling through all the pre-planning. Although I have been getting great advice from a writer friend, Allyson Young http://www.allysonyoung.com/Home.html , who has attended before. This will be my first ‘appearance’ as Lynn Rae, author. It’s a little daunting. I have a not so secret fear that no one will have even heard of my book, let alone read it. Ah well, if that’s so, I’ll just mingle and fake it.

Reading Horror

(not my photo, let me know to take it down if it's yours!)

 

Lately I’ve noticed that I’m on a horror-reading kick. I shouldn’t be surprised because I grew up reading Stephen King but I had backed off the genre for a while. Having a young child to worry about sort of dampened my enthusiasm for opening my mind to wretched creatures preying on innocent people. It’s just like disaster movies. I used to love them, loved anything with earthquakes or plane crashes or disease outbreaks and now when I watch them I think about little children being caught up in it and I start to cry. So no more disaster movies. There’s no accounting for the fact that I am a huge fan of the Walking Dead,  I can manage to watch that without all the mommy hormones flooding my body.

But reading horror seems to be creeping back into my comfort zone, so to speak. Creeping like a stealthy zombie, that is. Here are a few that I have/am reading that I have enjoyed.

Those Across the River by Christopher Buehlman. Oh my goodness, this was GOOOD. Very well-written, not over the top gross, and was set during the Great Depression which was unique (and commenting as a historian, the setting and period rang very true so kudos author Buehlman). A very good spin on the were-beast mythos. This is a debut book so I’ll be hoping for more from this author.

Horns by Joe Hill. Not quite done with this one yet but I am enjoying it so far.  Enough that I plan on reading more of his work. He writes this story from several POVs and despite my misgivings at being in the head of a terrible person, he handled it so well that I kept reading. I’m not sure how it’s going to end and that’s a good thing.

Juggernaut by Adam Baker. Almost done with this one too. The premise is great; Three Kings meets The Walking Dead. That’s all you need to know, if that sounds good, you’re going to like this one. More suspense than horror, at least to my mind, but there’s enough creepy gross out to satisfy. I really like this author’s choices in choosing POVs as well.

Despite my renewed interest in horror fiction, I won’t be writing any of it. My brain just can’t conjure up the necessary plots and the idea of sustaining my creativity through all the awful blood and guts is frightening. I’d hate to think what I’d be like to live with if I was trying to write horror. At least with romance there is an inherent optimism and knowledge that good things await, not matter how dire the situation I’m writing.

Here We Go Again

Isn't that a great picture? I took it last fall on my way to Chichen Itza.  Those are ceramic wall plaques on the most fantastic orange wall. I loved the contrasting colors and repetition.  It reminds me of all the colorful bits and pieces you need when readying something for a submission to a publisher.  Writing the story is one thing, making it fit for an editor to read is quite another.

Look at that, it’s been a  week since I posted.  There’s a reason for that; I’ve been hard at work on my new MS for the April Camp NaNo and revising another manuscript in the hopes of being able to submit it.  I had a pitch with an editor yesterday and she asked to see the whole thing so hopefully all those hours of editing, re-writing, blank stares, sore back, and despair are worth it. And if she isn’t interested, I do understand.  My book isn’t easy to categorize.  It’s a small town sci-fi romance with no space battles or aliens.  My heroine works as a trash recycler. It’s not dystopian or shiny perfect future. People on my world work and get dirty and don’t have many places to shop because the settlement exists to grow food and ship it away to more populated worlds. Definitely not something I could pitch as fitting very neatly into one of their lines. But I’m grateful she’ll at least take a look at it.

So I spent my writing time today doing a massive re-write of the ending (always the most difficult part for me to write), running that spell check AGAIN, and fixing everything on my knock list. Once I did that, I did a little happy dance around the room, drank a cup of tea, and returned to the computer to write up the dreaded synopsis.  Once I completed that, I started in on this blog post because I am done done done until I hit send tomorrow morning.  Or heck, maybe I’ll send it out tonight with a glad heart and return to my current WIP with a clear conscience.  And speaking of quirky Sci-Fi, the story I am writing now takes place on a world made of peat moss, animal-like trees, and a special epiphyte that makes the human brain VERY happy. I love it there and can’t wait to return to it.

From the Caribbean to Deep Space

So that’s a picture of a fan palm.  At least I think it’s a fan palm.  I took that picture last fall on a trip in the Caribbean because I love palms of all sorts. But this palm inspired a biological plot twist in my April Camp NaNoWriMo novel.  For those confused by the acronym, NaNoWriMo refers to National Novel Writing Month which is November.  But for those of us insane enough to want a novel in a month more than once a year, there are mini-celebrations in April and July.  I wrote a pretty decent novel last November that just needs some polishing so I decided to take the plunge again this month.

Because I’ve been doing so much ‘business’ over the last few months (editing, promoting, blogging, etc.), I was starved for something purely creative.  As the germs of my work in progress started to grow in my head and I began to make notes in a composition book which is what I do for every novel I’ve written.  I outline the story, make character studies, and diagram scenes in there.  Sometimes I’ll even write dialogue longhand to get a feel for the characters.  My last contemporary/paranormal buzzed to a halt because both of my main characters were just too, well, repressed, so I decided to indulge myself with a sci-fi effort.

When I write sci-fi, I am able to let go of so much that realism that I think is important when you write contemporary.  With sci-fi I can make up names and places and plants and devices to my heart’s content.  Plus I don’t have to abide by current societal norms.  Just an example of how wild my imagination can get; I am creating a world filled with symbiotic trees that have all sorts of epiphytes living on them.  Intrepid scientists have recently discovered that one of these epiphytes produces a compound that does something magical to human blood chemistry (one guess what that is) and now the race is on for people looking to get rich quick.  It’s sort of like the California gold rush except on a soggy planet very far away.

And this fan palm was the inspiration for the organism that hosts the epiphyte in question.  The waving of the fronds is an important part of the life cycle of the epiphyte.  The sad thing is that I have written pages of notes about the biology of these creatures and I know that hardly any of it will appear in the book.  But it’s my world and it’s safe in my imagination.