But It's a Dry Heat

Archive for May, 2011

Desert Garden in May

Life’s a beach.

Of sorts.  Casa de Kirby sits in the midst of a vast sandy desert. Lots of sand and sagebrush.  No rain. No large body of water, unless you count the Rio Grande, which, nowadays, isn’t so grande.

Provided you can stand the complete absence of moisture–hasn’t rained in months–it’s not a bad place to call home.

Being an avid gardener, when I first moved out here, I was horrified by the soil.  Soil is a generous term.  It really is beach sand.  The funny thing is, it turned out to be a great growing medium, especially for drought tolerant plants that demanded “well-drained soil.”  You don’t get any more (more…)

AWOL from the Battle of the Sexes

If men are from Mars, so too are women.

I periodically come across discussions regarding the depiction of men in romance novels, in particular, how men are written by female authors. The common concern is that the men aren’t “manly” enough, that they have been feminized (whatever that means).  Alternately, some female writers opine that men are mysterious beings who cannot be fathomed by the female mind.

This is big deal for some women writers.  They even take classes for insight into the male mind.

Which boggles my mostly female, but somewhat male mind.  Do these women know any men? Is the whole of (more…)

Clarity Counts

Here in New Mexico, the local schools use a program called Character Counts to uh, indoctrinate teach kids to be good little cogs in the machine how to play well with others. Whether or not this actually works is debatable. What has always struck me about Character Counts is how those words are essentially nonsense, word salad. Serious, what does “Character counts” mean?

Here’s where someone wearily says, “You know what it means.”

No, I don’t.  At least not absent the whole campaign that goes with the program.  “Character counts” what? Sheep? Cards?

Words do mean … stuff.  But meaning and clarity are a function of a whole bunch of other words.  One of the most common problems I see when critiquing stories over at Critters is a total lack of clarity.  Often this is because (more…)

Blood: The Last Vampire

As a rule, “live-action film inspired by anime” is synonymous with the kind of suck that can give you a full-body hickie.  Blood: The Last Vampire obediently follows that rule.

Saya (Gianna Jun) is a half-human, half-vampire vampire slayer who works for a covert agency known as The Council.  The Council being your run-of-the-mill secret society dedicated to making vampires extinct, a la the Council in Buffy the Vampire Slayer and others. (I can’t really diss the trope, as it’s one I employ in my stories.)  Like Buffy, Saya has a handler, Michael (Liam Cunningham).  But where [Buffy’s]Giles put in a bit of effort trying to school Buffy in the intricacies of supernatural lore, Michael’s primary job is to bring Saya little bottles of blood, wrapped discretely in brown paper bags and placed in her little, dorm-room style fridge.

There are indications that (more…)

Editing, Tweeting and Drawing

I have a whole pile of partially written blog posts sitting on my desktop.

But I’ve spent the past week and change working through the print galley for The Music of Chaos.  In the interest of actually getting something done, I’ve resist the urge to fiddle around on the web.  Well, sort of …. there’s my recent fascination with Twitter.

Ah, Facebook, how quickly I fell out of love.  Actually, I never really was in love; it was just a fling, bought out of boredom and “everybody else is doing it.”

I’m a lurker. Twitter, unlike Facebook, is a lurker’s paradise.  With Facebook, since everyone has their profile locked out of privacy concerns (self included), there’s no skulking around on the edges, watching someone’s interactions to determine if they’re worth knowing.

With Twitter you can follow almost anybody. And it’s full of obnoxiously funny people, the kind of folks who like to slay sacred cows and turn ’em into steaks.

Technically, I’m doing Twitter all wrong.  As a good little author type, I’m supposed to be following people in the publishing industry and sucking up to interacting with them.  Ass kissing. Networking.

Except, I’ve never been much good at networking. Not now; not back in the days of a grownup job. If I thought someone was interesting, I’d pursue friendship. If not, I didn’t bother.  Yeah.  I know.  “Who you know” is how things get done, but I bailed on a 8-to-5 career expressly because I couldn’t shovel the requisite bullshit.

Not about to start now.

In the meantime, here’s a doodle of Talis, my emo, dark elf  in The Music of Chaos and its sequel. I haven’t done much drawing lately and I’m afraid any progress I made in learning to draw people has been lost.  So I’m going to try and get a least one little drawing, even a scribble done, once a week.

Have a great weekend.

Why Leash Laws Are Awesome (Or Why Certain Dog Owners Are Idiots)

After yet another run-in with a member of that special, entitled breed–the dog owner who refuses to leash his dog–I thought I’d post a rant about why leash laws are nifty.

There’s a certain segment of the dog-owning populace who are totally incorrigible.  But this is directed at the small percentage of irresponsible dog owners who maybe, just maybe, haven’t giving their bad behavior much thought.

Rule Number One for Dog Owners: It is rude to allow your dog to approach and interact with a person or their dog without the person’s express permission.

Repeated for emphasis: It is rude to allow your dog to approach and interact with a person or their dog without the person’s express permission.  Period.  Note there are no exceptions for bank holidays and “friendly dogs.”  Unless you are 100-percent sure the other person wants your dog near them, put him on a leash.

And this is where the off-leash crowd pulls out the same (more…)

The Canvas Thief

So I stopped procrastinating and put the contract for The Canvas Thief in the envelope.  It’s now crossing the continent, destination Canada.  Actually, the fact that Harlequin/Carina Press–yes, as in Romance novels–is in Canada is news to me.  Shows how much I know about what has (sort of) become my genre.  (There’s a long blog posting about my weird relationship with romance sitting on my hard drive. I keep fiddling with it, trying to explain my is-shoes with romance tropes in a way that doesn’t alienate every romance reader/writer out there.)

The Canvas Thief (which, I hope will get a new title because I suck at titles) is a hybrid of romance, urban fantasy and suspense. Set in Santa Fe, New Mexico, it’s the story of an artist who accidentally brings two of her graphic novel characters to life.  It’s set in the same “universe” as The Music of Chaos and Breas the vampire is a secondary character.

Since I set out to write romantic fantasy, not a romance, it doesn’t adhere to some romance novel requirements.  Like that the hero and heroine meet in the first chapter, if not first page.  In The Canvas Thief, they meet in Chapter Four.

That could, I guess, change during editing. I’m pretty malleable, editorially, but I’m rather adamant that this story not have the usual forced, first page/first chapter meeting of H/h seen in many romance novels.  It just doesn’t work. Not for this story.

The Tourist

A lovely day in Paris.  (Aren’t the days always lovely in cinematic Paris?  You’d think they never had winter.  Unlike poor Moscow, where it’s always winter.)

Anyway … Elise (Angelina Jolie) is sitting at a table in a sidewalk cafe. She is looking gorgeous in that way that even makes straight women think about changing teams. In a nearby office, Scotland Yard Inspector John Acheson (Paul Bettany) and his team are watching Elise.  A young bike messenger approaches Elise and gives her a message.  Acheson orders his team to apprehend the unfortunate lad as soon as he delivers his message.

Why?  Because they think he may be Alexander Pearce, Elise’s lover.  Alexander is wanted because … (more…)

Son of a Witch

A caravan traveling through an isolated part of the Land of Oz comes across a corpse.  This isn’t the first they’ve seen on their journey, but the others have been “scraped,” the faces of the dead removed with surgical precision.

Except this body isn’t dead. Yet.  Though badly beaten, Liir Thropp, a young man who may or may not be the son of the infamous Elphaba Thropp, Wicked Witch of the West, is still alive.  The caravan delivers him to a convent where he is coaxed back to health by a mute young woman name Candle.

His recovery, seen through the eyes of Candle and the maunts (nuns) of the convent, is juxtaposed with (more…)