Tag: Writing

Friday Face-Off: Star Trek Lives

On By cherylmahoneyIn Ruminations1 Comment

FFO.jpg

It’s time again for the Friday Face-Off meme, created by Books by Proxy, with weekly topics hosted by Lynn’s Book Blog.  The idea is to put up different covers for one book, and select a favorite.

This week’s theme is: Vintage sci fi – “Live long and prosper.”

With a prompt like that, clearly I have to share a Star Trek cover!  To keep it appropriately vintage, I went back to one of the very first Star Trek novels.  I like to think of the earliest ones as from the “Star Trek lives” era of fandom, before there was Next Generation and syndication, and Star Trek fandom seemed to involve a little more hopefulness and scrappiness–or so I suppose from the forwards I’ve read in these books.  It was before my time!

As to the actual book, I thought I’d go for the slightly ironically-named Spock Must Die! by James Blish, which holds pride of place as “Book #1” in the Star Trek novel universe.

This is the original cover, and…I have no idea what’s going on with all those blobs.  It looks like the image was damaged, except that every picture of the cover (and my copy) have the exact same damage, so…yeah, I don’t know how or why it got approved and printed that way!

Continue reading “Friday Face-Off: Star Trek Lives” →

Friday Face-Off: Sparkles Abound

On By cherylmahoneyIn Ruminations1 Comment

FFO.jpg

It’s time again for the Friday Face-Off meme, created by Books by Proxy, with weekly topics hosted by Lynn’s Book Blog.  The idea is to put up different covers for one book, and select a favorite.

This week’s theme is: the festive season – a cover that is glittery or sparkling

With a prompt like that, I can’t resist sharing the covers from two of my recent releases!  Sparkles actually form a key part of the plot in The Servants and the Beast, as part of the fairy’s curse is an accumulation of sparkles gradually filling the Beast’s castle.  They even had to close one wing because it was so filled with sparkles!

Here’s the audiobook cover – which was just out this week!

Servants is a collaboratively-written novella with four other writers, but one continuous story.  We collaborated again recently to write After the Sparkles Settled, a Christmas epilogue to the story, also out this past week.  I designed the cover, modeled after the original, though less sparkly…

These were very fun stories to write, so it’s fun to have a chance to share the sparkly covers!

Writing Wednesday: Between the Stories

On By cherylmahoneyIn Writing1 Comment

After the big push of NaNoWriMo in November, I’m doing a complete change of pace for December.  I’m still doing my daily writing, but in a very different style.  Instead of writing a story, I’m writing about writing stories by working on a new nonfiction project.

I’ve been attending my writing group for about seven years now, and I’ve noticed patterns emerging.  We seem to give the same type of advice to different people again and again.  Which is fine, and I don’t mind!  But it did make me think it ought to be possible to pull some of this advice together into something standardized.  So I’ve been working on a book of revision advice.  There are a lot of books out there about writing, but I haven’t seen much focused specifically on revising.

So that’s my current project!  It’s not nearly as long or involved as a novel, so I’m hoping to do the draft (or the bulk of it) this month, and publish some time next year.  Although this is rather new and different for me, so we’ll see how that actually pans out!

Here’s an excerpt from one of my sections, with one of the most common advice given at my writing group.  This is (currently) Section 10, Breaking Out of the Brain Jar: Talking Heads

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There’s an old episode of Star Trek involving three brains in jars who, thanks to technology, can talk to each other and the rest of the characters.  I bring this up because a lot of writers fall into the trap of writing their characters as though they are talking brains in jars.  Not literally—that could involve some quite interesting details, in fact—but rather with the complete absence of any details suggesting these characters have bodies and are inhabiting the space they’re in.

Continue reading “Writing Wednesday: Between the Stories” →

Writing Wednesday: After the Thorns

On By cherylmahoneyIn Writing1 Comment

As per my last NaNo update, when November ended I had just a bit of my Princess Beyond the Thorns story still to tell.  So I continued at a pretty close to NaNo pace for the next few days, and finished out the story yesterday, on Tuesday.  I’m happy to have the draft complete and concluded!  Now I can put it away for a few months to let everything simmer before tackling the inevitable revisions…

Counting the three days of December writing, I wrote almost 67,000 words since November 1st.  That brings the total draft to about 121,000…which is long, but fantasy novels are often longer than other genres.  I’ll see what happens in revision.  This may turn out to be two books after all, but for now I’m still looking at it as one.

Over the course of 121,000 words, there were three walls of thorns, two adorable kittens plus a lioness, a handful of sword fights, three villains, two deaths, one wedding, one major fight between the lead couple, and a lot of kissing.

I’d offer an excerpt, but I can’t find anything from the last three days of writing that isn’t rife with spoilers…

Now that the big fantasy draft is done, I have other, slightly lower-key projects in mind to tackle for December.  Plus I have some fun Servants and the Beast-related news that should be going live very soon.  🙂  So stay tuned for that!

NaNoWriMo Day 30: Finish Line

On By cherylmahoneyIn NaNoWriMo, Writing1 Comment

Happy Thanksgiving weekend to my American readers!  And…it’s the last day of NaNoWriMo!  I’m excited to share that I reached and passed my goal of 60,000 words this month.

I passed the 50,000 mark on November 25th, and actually finished my 60,000 word goal a day early.  I had my highest word count day on November 29th, clocking in at 4,276 words.  I got together with several writing friends in the evening, including two doing NaNo, and it was especially fun to pass the 60,000 mark while writing with them.

I kept writing today, even though the pressure was off, and ended up with a final total of 63,068 words, a personal NaNo best.  I’m sooo close to the end of the novel too–I have about three scenes left, so maybe 2,000 to 4,000 words.  I hope to finish in the next couple of days, so I can slack off for December. 🙂

Well, actually, I have an entirely different project I plan to start in December, that I may share about soon.  We’ll see!  But that’s how it goes…  November 1st through 30th: write.  December 1st: keep writing!

Here’s an end-of-NaNo excerpt.  My characters have been angsting for a while, but I’ve brought them nearly up to the happy ending now.  There’s still a few things for them to work out, though…

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Terrence wrapped his hand around hers and it felt so familiar, so good, that Rose couldn’t make herself feel alarm even as they hurried behind the cats.  She knew Xevrix might appear at any moment, but she couldn’t feel it.

“I know this isn’t the time,” Terrence said as they approached the nearest door to the castle, “but when you left through that mirror, did you mean to leave permanently?”

“No,” Rose said in honest surprise.  “Of course not.  I wasn’t that angry.  I mean, I was angry with you—I’m still angry with you, come to think of it, but we can talk about that later—but I just…wanted to prove I could act for myself, I think.”

“Proved,” Terrence said.  “Very proved.  Maybe prove it less intensely next time?”

“Maybe listen to me next time?” Rose countered, tugging on his hand.

“I’m sorry—I’m very, very sorry, and I will happily be very eloquent about it later when we have the time,” he said, pushing open the door.