But It's a Dry Heat

Archive for the ‘Writing’ Category

Horse Sketches and Fictional Workplace Hijinks

I start off with a plan. “I will practice drawing people today. Because I still can’t draw people. I will not draw horses. Because horses are easy to draw. Seriously, no horses!”

Five minutes later, and I’ve got this. Four quick horse sketches. Because I can’t stop myself. I’ve been drawing horses since I could hold a pencil. People are hard to draw, with their weird round heads and walking on two legs.

Anyway, I’m making this a sketchbook dump Friday and excerpt Friday. Technically, the sequel to The Music of Chaos is about 90-percent done. First draft, anyway. I got stuck on a scene at the end, and then wandered off to two other projects. The problem is, I got two author voices–Hello, Sybil!–the snarky, first person, Mary Sue-ish voice of The Music of Chaos and the third person voice that I use elsewhere. The second voice has been in control lately.

In this bit of dialogue from Chapter One, Hallowbone Holiday (working title), Regan O’Connell leaves work, the day job, early…. (more…)

Lost in the Opposite of Paradise

It’s summer in the desert; it hasn’t rained in months; it’s hot.

In other news, water is wet.

As the blog name suggests, “But it’s a dry heat.” By comparison to the deep South, this is true. Except we’re edging up on our so-called monsoon season, which is New Mexico for “if we’re lucky, three inches of rain will fall in about a month.” The season announces itself with blithering heat and slight bit of humidity. The problem is that many of us still rely on evaporative cooling, i.e., the swamp cooler. Basically, a metal box that pushes wet air into the house. Works great in bone dry climes; add even a touch of humidity, and it’s not even an improvement over a fan.

It’s too damn hot to do anything but work on my current WIP, a romantic space opera. But I am writing, and as proof, I give you, an excerpt. Along with an appallingly bad sketch. This, kiddies, is what happens when artists who can’t draw people draw people without using a reference photo. Setup: Kelly, mild-mannered bookstore owner attends the gallery opening of Eric, an artist and escaped convict from another universe. Although, Kelly isn’t aware of the latter. (Unedited, in the raw.)

****Lost in Paradise, WIP, excerpt****

The first painting looked like a photo from (more…)

Fun with Fire

And I didn’t set myself on fire once.

Not even my shoelaces.

Not-so-spontaneous combustion being an occupational hazard of being an artist who works in metal. Welder, plasma torch, grinders, all spiting sparks and fiery bits of metal. Combine that with my spectacular propensity for stupidity, and you’ve got a recipe for flaming artist. And not in a homosexual way, not that there’s anything wrong with that. We at Casa de Kirby being supporters of marriage equality and all that.

 

 

This weekend is the first Art in the Park. Corrales, NM at the lovely La Entrada Park. It runs from 10 am to 4 pm. Entrance is free and there will be activities for the kids, food, music and loads of great artists. Please stop by if you are in the Albuquerque area. I’ll have a few copies of The Music of Chaos on hand as well.

See ya there!

Why I Read Fan Fiction

My To Be Read (TBR) pile of books is starting to reach swaying heights that violate all manner of OSHA rules. I’ve got list of books on hold at the library; more in a stack by my desk; and I regularly download “great deals” onto my Kindle.

But lately, I’ve given chunks of reading time over to fan fiction. For those who are don’t know, here’s the definition of fan fiction.

Back in my halcyon* days of fulltime, grownup employment, I read a lot of fan fiction. What else what I gonna do? Work? (*As in days of wine and honey and health insurance.) Once I started writing my own original fiction, I drifted away from fan fics, in part because of the bias among certain sectors of the writing community. Every so often, in between the regular author vs. reviewer scuffles and other Internet scandals, the fan fiction controversy pokes its head out of water like Nessie, and there’s a general freakout from folks on both sides of the issue. The issue isn’t anything I want to deal with here, but the angst is derived from the fact that (more…)

Dear Author, Don’t Make Me Smack You.

Several months ago I read a much-lauded book, the first in another long epic series where the author is taking a god’s age to finish the sequels. (Like I can talk. I’m still not done with the 80K sequel to The Music of Chaos.) Despite all its press, I found the novel overrated, but that’s not the point of this post.

In one small scene in the novel, the protagonist, while on horseback, shakes the horse’s reins to encourage it to move forward.

And then my head exploded, raining confetti all around the room.

This isn’t the first book I’ve read where the author mistakenly thought that riders shake the reins to signal “Go.” It may have been one (more…)

Regarding Greyhounds, and WIP Excerpts

It’s an absolutely lovely day here in sunny New Mexico. Blue sky, a light breeze, and 74 degrees.

My muse, however, has been very persistent and I spent most of the morning writing. By about noon, the greyhound decided I totally sucked because I hadn’t taken him for a walk. Never mind that the backdoor had been open and he’d been free to sun on the lawn all morning. (This, because, the flies haven’t come out of hibernation or back from Florida or whatever it is that flies do when they aren’t tormenting horses or loitering on dog shit.)

At one o’clock, I’d run out of words and it was time to get up and move and stop growing my ass. I put on the hound’s harness and out we went into the warm sunlight.

Halfway down the block, the greyhound’s tongue is a pink, wet ribbon, flopped out of his long snout, his head is down and he’s drooping like an orchid in the desert. My delicate little flower. “You’re trying to kill me,” he seems to say.

“Puh-lease. There’s no point in killing you. It’s not like you’d make good eating.”

Tomorrow? We’ll go through the exact same routine.

Here’s my response to a Lucky Seven tag on Facebook, via Maureen O. Betita. Supposed to post 7 lines, from 7th paragraph, on 7th page from current WIP. As usual, I cheated. This comes from chapter one, even though there is a prologue, but I’m so appalled that I’ve written a prologue, I can’t bear to make it more real by posting excerpts. And it’s more than seven sentences, because…I can’t follow instructions. Neener-neener-neener.

***working title, Lost in Paradise***

“Some help here, huh?” said Eowyn, Kelly’s seventeen-year-old niece.

Kelly grabbed the garbage bags, noting the contents–more coffee filters and cups–and hefted them into the dumpster.

“You’re late,” noted Eowyn.

“Nonsense. A bookseller is never late. She arrives precisely when she means to.”

“Ugh.” Eowyn marched ahead of her and opened the door. “You know the Lord of the Rings movies are the bane of my existence. Before them, only real nerds teased me about my name.”

Kelly strolled through the doorway, ahead of her niece. “I can’t help it. I was compelled by–”

“Wisconsin called. They want their genre cheese back.” Before Kelly could reply, Eowyn asked, “So how was the booksellers’ conference?”

****

Mischief managed. Have a great Friday.

Clumsy and Insane; What’s Not to Love?

Ask any horse owner for the defining characteristics of equines and they’ll likely say “accident prone” and “frequently paranoid.”

The second is a function of the horse’s position on the food chain, herbivore, aka, a carnivore’s happy meal. While the average horse is as likely to be eaten by a lion as I am to win the lottery, most equines retain an instinctive wariness of anything that smacks of predator. In the modern setting this might mean a black trashbag or a small child dressed in a Halloween costume (horse eating gnome).

Non-horsey folks, having seen movie horses who gallop without hesitation toward gunfire, think horses arrive, out-of-the-box, brave and cooperative.  Horses are smart and can be trained (desensitized) to tolerate all manner of scary things. Hollywood horses, because they have to carry expensive commodities–actors–are particularly bomb proof. But even a horse who’s utterly unfazed by gunfire, might come unglued at the sight of your grandma and her purple hat with the peacock feathers.

Writers really should take note of this. If your fictional equines are calm, tractable beasts of burden, you’re missing out on a prime opportunity to torture your characters.

Horses are also (more…)

Bet Your eBook Can’t Do This!

I’m utterly obsessed with my current WIP. Writing anything else when these damn pushy characters keep demanding time is about impossible. They did let me take a break and do some sketching….

I was thinking about my earlier post regarding my new Kindle and how much I like reading on it. (I do. In fact, I think I would have bailed on the book I’m currently reading–‘nother Twilight clone–if it were in print.) It’s just easier to skim slog through a really bad book on my Kindle.

But then I started thinking about the many uses of print books. Several immediately came to mind, but given my limited drawing skills, I went with four. It’s getting easier to draw people, but it still took at least 30-minutes to draw the ‘toons with people, vs. two-minutes to draw the greyhound.

Middle panel features Regan O’Connell smacking Breas Montrose (The Music of Chaos). I assure you, he deserved it.

Click the image for a full-sized view!

In Which an Author Discovers Stinging Insects

After following the latest bouts of reviewer vs. author, it occured to me that the controversy is driven, in part, by the collision between one of the oldest professions and technology.

Storytelling vs. the Internet.

It reminds me of the fan fiction debates that flare up like the clap from time to time.

For those unfamiliar with the controversy(ies), here’s the run-down:

An author gets a bad review, usually from a blog or Goodreads. The author responds with an angry takedown of the review. More civil authors may accept the review by declaring it “not a review” and posting a definition of what constitutes a review. Others muster their friends, unleashing them on (more…)

What’s a Snot Monkey?

A simian with post nasal drip.

The, uh, real answer is here, at my guest blog at Carina Press. What does this have to do with my new novel, The Canvas Thief? *Snerk* Honestly? Probably, not much. I just didn’t want to write yet another blog where the author gushes about her characters, how this story is sooo special to her. It is, but that kind of blog reads like a mom going on about how her awesome children. It’s trite and filled with “Helloo, Captain Obvious!”