My lovely friends, be sure to read their journals!

Yes, I'm copy-editing on Christmas Eve. (Don't have much choice.) But at least I'm getting some entertainment out of it: discovering, for example, that I described someone's manner as "both sheepless and helpless."

Sheepish. Not sheepless. Though it's true he has no sheep, it's not really relevant to this scene.

The following folks won on either the Rath, my blog give away, or the randomizer.
( Read more... )

STILL WANT ONE/DIDN'T GET IT HERE:
I'm still giving 10 away in the Goodreads program thru the 12th of Jan.

There is nothing like the fear of the suitcase to give you a case of furry ankles.  As it is, every time I move, Jack-Jack thinks I'm leaving.  Right then!  He is wrong.  I am leaving in about a 1/2 hour or when ever Carrie shows up.  I'm mostly packed.  Though I haven't figured out how to fit my snow shoes in my suitcase.  I might have to think about stuffing them in my purse.  :-/  I'll figure something out.  Just hope the boy-in-the-basement doesn't get to lonely by himself.  Well, he'll have three cat's but I'm not sure that's a bonus when two are loud mouth simese.  :0)  Finis.

When no one is home, it is easy to play on the interweb for hours.  And hours.  Then realize suddenly, your leaving tomorrow and you haven't packed!  Oh snap.

ARC winners will be announced in the next day or so.  Thereason is prob obvious to For those who read the Twitter feed or FB (which gets my twitter feed),  but for those who aren't there:  we had around 18-19 inches of snow on Saturday.  The resulting being-snowed-in, waaay too many hours of shoveling snow, & canceled school tweaked my schedule quite a bit.

I haven't forgotten the contests.  Snow & kids & Winter Break starting a few days early took priority though.

Will get results up as soon as I can do so.

and I scream.  Why you might ask yourself?  Well, I'm home alone.  All by myself.  Happily watching Darkness Falls.  A horror movie.  I should know better.  Especially when the phone is programmed to sound like the phone from Scream. 
As such, with the help of the furry monsters from within the closet, I have managed to freak myself out.  My Mom is laughing, because she's the one who called, and telling me I'm a seasoned horror movie veteran.  In order to relax and calm myself down I'm going to watch some Supernatural.  Which, technically is a horror television show, but there is nothing quite as funny as seeing Sam try to be normal and Dean take Cas to a whore house.  After "Free to be you and me"  I think I'm going to watch "The End" because two Deans are always better than one!  :)

Two more days until I get to go home for the holidays.  Finis.

On the 12 day of Christmas, my true love gave to me . . .
12 Humans Hiding,
11 Tinks a Tinkling
10 Porno flicks
9 Pole Dancers
8 Pixies Partying
7 Karma Sutras
6 Fairies Farting
5 Trolls in Drag
4 Purple Condoms
3 French Ticklers
2 Horny Vamps
And a Sucubus in the Snow

–by Kim Harrison Dec 15, 2009

This makes me laugh.  Every time.  I love Kim Harrison. 

I think this is what I'm going to give out as my holiday poem for this Solstice. I hope you all enjoy. :)



Toe to heel Father Time walks his wheel,
Changing season with each quarter turn,
True north with the rising sun,
Bloomed spring in all her golden green,
Move round to the east,
Bringing in summers lazy heat,
Another turn rounds down to the south,
Fall touches his brim with a hint of chill,
Those final steps turn west,
And winter shows her cold heart.

At the wheel great turns,
In the seasons of warmth and cold,
Father Time is called to witness,
The kings who must battle to claim their crowns,
So on the longest night of the year,
Father Time rests for a moment,
Holding a crown.

Dressed in red with sprigs of holly in his hair,
The Holly King stands tall and fit,
Withering in the evening mist,
The Oak King no longer fertile and proud,
Both great in their right,
But at the turning of the wheel,
Only one has the might,
A clash of swords sweep thunder in the air,
As the battle commences day fades into night,
For hours the dark holds sway,
And the trees groan with the movements of Kings,
Till a spark lights the air,
And the Holly King stands tall,
His brother forced down in slumber.

It is with joy and sorrow,
That Father Time stands with the light of dawn,
To place the solstice crown,
Upon the Holly Kings brow.

I'm still pondering the icon issue, so feel free to go on adding suggestions to that post. (The problem is not with the pictures I've been given already, but rather with my subconscious, which just doesn't want to play ball. I don't know what it's looking for -- that it hasn't been given already -- or whether it's just being cranky. Quite possibly the latter.)

Some how I need to come up with insperation. I need to write my Yule poem. I can't come up with a single idea. I've been staring at the screen for over an hour. It's still blank. I think I need to come back to this later.

Heh. I got a Jack Skelington purse. It's cool. I also got Heroes on DVD and a 5 pointed star lazy susan. I love my Stephie. :) Finis.

Writing the 5th & final WL feels like writing the end of each novel. I have this its-here-finally-oh-gods-write-faster-NO-stop-don't-wanna-be-done-ARGH-must-write-this-been-seeding-clues-so-long . . . except yanno, more so bc it's finishing a 5 book series.

( Read more... ) . . .

. . . but today, I'm still on racing, so back to it.

HOLIDAYS:

As blurred as I am lately, I'm not sure I'll remember to post a holiday msg, so I wanted to at the very least wish you all a Happy Hanukkah. Happy early Yule. Happy early Solstice. Happy early Christmas. . . and to those who are non-faith, hope you're snuggled in somewhere lovely with someone fabulous for Winter's arrival.

This totally would have been my icon for this book, had it been posted sooner.

Even if it is a meteor, rather than a comet.

Copy-edits for A Star Shall Fall arrived today. They're due back shortly after New Year's.

I got yer Glamorous Life of the Writer right here. >_<

arielstarshadow (edit: got it wrong the first time; so sorry!) asked in comments to this post how I go about making playlists and soundtracks for writing. At this point I've become a bit more systematic about it, so here, in case it's useful to anyone else, is my system.

( I wasn't always this organized. )

Here's the interesting thing about the process. Some authors, as a revision tool, outline their book after they've written it; that helps them figure out just what they're doing with their story. This? Is my equivalent. Deciding what deserves to have a song, I've realized, is a form of outlining, and then the actual selection of music forces me to think about what exactly I'm trying to convey. This is somewhat true of the character-related selections, but especially true of the ones that soundtrack specific events; I use a lot of film scores, which means I'm listening to various pieces trying to find the one that really matches the arc of that scene. No, I want something that sounds creepier at the beginning, and then builds in a slow crescendo rather than going loud really suddenly, and then it needs to cut off right after the climax, without a long denoument -- I learn a lot about my story by going through this process. And sometimes, yes, I'll listen to a piece and decide that while it doesn't match the scene I have, maybe the scene would be better off if it were more like the music. Mostly the soundtrack gets matched to the story, but not always.

I will, as requested, post more about specific instances of the relationship between music and my work, though not tonight. It's going to be a bit tough, since the discussion won't mean much if you can't hear the song in question; I'll have to see what I can find online. But we'll see what we can do.

1) I mentioned Patrick Rothfuss' "Worldbuilders" charity event for Heifer International before; my own donations went up today, along with a lot of books from some awesome people. For every $10 you donate to the charity, Pat will match $5 and put your name into the drawing at the end. Donate $50, get your name in five times, plus $25 of a matching donation. See other posts on his blog for other great prizes.

2) "The Twa Corbies" is live on Podcastle. I quite enjoyed this reading; Elie Hirschman, who did the voicework for it, is a lot better at the ravens than I am. :-)

3) SF Novelists day again; this time, continuing my discussion of ways authors do female characters wrong, we talk about virgins and whores. Comments for this should be left on the SF Novelists blog; no registration required.

December is my month for nostalgia, and this year I want to post about the Wheel of Time series: past, present, and future.

( It all began in 1995 . . . . )

Which is why I've decided to come back to the series, for one final farewell.

But I don't remember the story well enough to believe I'd get any enjoyment out of picking up the last few books cold. So instead we're going with another plan. Tor put out The Gathering Storm in October; if the schedule goes as it should -- I know; a big "if" -- the last volume will be coming out in late 2011. This works out nicely for me: at a rate of one book every two months, I would finish a re-read of the series in March of 2012. (May if I decide to read New Spring.) And that's what I'm going to try to do.

I freely admit I may fail at this; after all, we're talking about a two-year project, here. That's a lot of time in which to forget or fall behind. And I may decide partway through that I have other things I'd rather do with my time; it depends on how much my critical brain insists on kicking into gear. But I want to give it a shot, at least. Because this series was important to me, back in the day, and I think I could learn a lot from re-reading it professional eyes. (Even if some of what I learn is "note to self, never do that.")

I will of course blog this project. So starting next month, look for the occasional post as I journey down Nostalgia Street.

Want to know how the Victorian book is going to end?

Here you go:



So there's a funny story behind this. We're in India, going from (I think) Mysore to Bangalore, and I'm staring out the window listening to music. My iPod's on shuffle, and this song comes up. And the following mental conversation ensues.

SUBCONSCIOUS: We're totally putting this on the soundtrack for the Victorian book.
ME: What?
SUBCONSCIOUS: For the end. Or rather, the Climactic Moment.
ME: Self, we don't know what the Climactic Moment is going to be. Because we don't know how the book is going to end.
SUBCONSCIOUS: It's going to end like this, of course!
ME: It doesn't work that way. We fit the music to the book, not the book to the music.
SUBCONSCIOUS: Uh-huh. That's why the second half of Doppelganger maps perfectly to "Amazonia."
ME: That's different.
SUBCONSCIOUS: How?
ME: Listening to the song gave me plot ideas. You're saying I have to generate plot ideas to fit the song.
SUBCONSCIOUS: Exactly. Now get to work.

The subconscious always wins these fights. I gave it some thought, and realized that of the two-three very vague ways I had thought of ending the book, one of them fit much better with the mood of the piece than the others did -- specifically the last minute. (It's instrumental, if you haven't listened to it yet; hence not really a spoiler.) Odds are rather good that we'll be going down that path.

Now I just have to figure out why the book will end that way . . . .

Here's the 4th contest to win an ARC of Radiant Shadows. . . All you have to do is VOTE for one of the videos.

I think I have all of the casting videos so far up as my favourites at my YouTube page http://www.youtube.com/user/MelissaMarrAuthor (look to the right and you'll see abt 40 videos under "favorites." ALL videos there are eligible to be voted for.)

If I missed your entry OR if you make one before the 18th, let me know, & I'll add it.

As I've said before, you can enter up to SIX times.
SIX entries will be chosen via a randomizer (US & Canada) on or after the 18th of Dec.

Winners will be posted here in the blog, so remember to check back after the 18th.

If you are NOT an LJ user, sign your entries w a name/URL.


NOTES: Please don't spam people's personal blogs for your extra entries. Thanks!

REMINDERS:

Contest #1: Goodreads. I'm still giving 10 away in the Goodreads program. Thru the 12th of Jan (10 ARCs)

Contest #2: Fansite--You can still enter the book teaser/trailr/casting contest over there (ARCs to the videos voted top 12)

Contest #3: WL Casting AND teaser/trailers--ARCs to the top 10 videos (votes go in the replies to the blog post you are reading rt now. SEE ABOVE.)

Contest #4: Replying to this blog post & voting. 6 ARCs

12/17/09 ETA: To clarify, everyone gets ONE vote. THEN, to get extras, you post a link up to 5 times. Those voting more than once w/o links are NOT COUNTED as entries OR as votes.