Category Archives: WRITING

A Bowl of Cherries Vs. Sucking Beetroot

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Greetings, Precious Readers. As most of you know, I’ve had a rather eventful few years. Yes, i found the love of my life, and we are now happily engaged to be married. But getting to this point was a path strewn with rocks and blocks and sharp pointy things, and quicksand and befanged beasts, attacking from all sides. Okay, that might have been a tad melodramatic. But it’s been really challenging. It’s harder than it seems to leave everything behind and start from scratch in another country when you don’t even like to leave the house, and you’re also an … Continue reading →

Pitfall and the Scoop

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Somehow I got tag-teamed. TT Thomas and Kathleen Wheeler both tagged me for this Blog Hop, My Writing Process. I suppose i could post this twice, but maybe just once will do. It’s not like the Blog Hop Nazis will chase me down and break my thumbs. So here goes….. 1)What am I working on? You mean besides this computer jigsaw puzzle? (Addicted to those). Oh, writing. My current project is Pitfall (A Jurassic Romantic Adventure Dramedy). Just as most stories begin, I had the what-if : What if two lesbians who are very different, found themselves tossed back 150 … Continue reading →

Good Writers Aren’t Good Accidentally

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I received another message from a reader who wanted to know when the third book in the Rain Falls series would be available. And another reader who wanted to know when the 6th on the AKA Investigations series would be out. Though certain delays like my recent relocation to another country and health issues have slowed me down, I sometimes feel like readers think what we do is like making dinner. Granted, I wrote Rain Falls (my first bestseller!) and the sequel, In Absentia fairly quickly; and the last three in the AKA series were produced faster than usual. But … Continue reading →

Fiction Writes Me

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Reading, especially fiction, has always been at least sometimes described as a means of escape. People read fiction to immerse themselves in someone else’s story. Perhaps because their own is too painful to contemplate. Perhaps because their own is too mundane. Whatever the reason for the escapist tendency of fiction readers, I hope there will always be plenty of them, otherwise, my profession will become a hobby. And I really am rooted in the expression of self through language. Why do I write fiction? Other than the pat answers like it’s who I am. I have to, there’s a reason … Continue reading →

Rain Falls hits #1 on Amazon!

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After only a week of sales, my book, Rain Falls reached #1 on Amazon in its genre. {happy dance} https://www.amazon.com/dp/B00HX82ZV4 BLURB:  India Bell is looking for a regular writing gig to supplement her royalties. She ends up with two assignments – one, to interview up-and-coming lesbian romance writer Tegan Lowry, and the other? To win a bet to write her own lesbian romance, thus securing for herself a job as an editor. There’s a bit of an issue with the second of those. India writes science fiction, not romance. There’s none of that confusing touchy-feely stuff in her science fiction … Continue reading →

Syzygy gets GLOWING review!

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WHILE BLINKING AWAY HAPPY TEARS::: If I never get another review in my life, this will suffice. I have never been so overjoyed by not only how well this reviewer understood what i was trying to accomplish–on EVERY LEVEL–with Also Known as Syzygy, but that the review was glowing like Christmas lights, while also being profoundly intelligent and insightful. All the hard work is now worth it. I could not be more pleased by what this reviewer had to say about one of my books (all of them, really). This book was, at times, very difficult to write, but I … Continue reading →

Careless Editors & Languishing in Romantical Writer-Myths

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What’s wrong with this sentence? “My only child was struck and killed by a car riding a bicycle home from the beach one afternoon in September.” (From Enon, by Paul Harding) So, there was this car riding a bicycle to the beach, see, and…. {Sigh}. And this book was published traditionally and by Random House, where I assume they have professional editors being paid the big bucks to catch things like that. I’m sure there are a million reasons why an editor could have missed that. Perhaps he had been up too late the night before, perhaps he sneezed and … Continue reading →

Hybrid Methodology

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(and 3 New Books for the Holidays) I have just completed three books, and am going to make my deadline to get them out for holiday sales. One is a standalone novel in the Crime/Vigilante vein: Another Justice. One is the 5th in the AKA Investigations Series, titled, Also Known as Sleepy Cat Peak, and the other is an anthology of Bold Erotic Stories called The Speed of Dark. The Vigilante one was difficult, in many ways, the erotic anthology, I had been writing in between other projects for some time now; and I was surprised and thrilled that the … Continue reading →

Muse Recovery & Descriptive Prose

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{dusting off the blog}. It’s been a while since my last entry. I was busy with moving back from New Zealand to Denver area, to prepare a life for me and my Sweetie, and we have of course been missing each other desperately, and spending lots of time online Skyping and Typing. And I had to get settled for a while, so I can work out the other plans on the horizon. I am currently residing in an extended stay suite and will probably be here for a while, so i have been trying to climb back on the writing-horse … Continue reading →

Literary Loitering romanticized notions about writers

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In a certain writing magazine a certain author was featured, and in that story, we are told The notebooks filled. But he reached a point where he had to stop. “I just begin, and then find I write myself into a corner of human experience about which I’m totally ignorant,” he says. Writing paused for about six months while he plowed into research. He read 33 books, including the Koran twice. He came to the point where he felt he could teach a class on Islamic extremism. Informed and enlightened, he finished the novel. Which took five-and-a-half years to write. … Continue reading →

Nonfiction & Non-nonfiction It bothers me when anything is referred to as a negative of something else

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It bothers me when anything is referred to as a negative of something else,  such as nonfiction is NOT fiction. Its only identity is about what it is NOT. Like Man and non-man.  Like white and non-white. Like yellow and non-yellow. I find it so pejorative, with this word in particular, and I wish there was another way to say “nonfiction” that was about what it IS, not what it is NOT. Fiction is also referred to as literature or fictional prose, but it is a positive–it is fictional. It’s not even non-nonfiction, perhaps only because that would be cumbersome. … Continue reading →

Going Mainstream

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CAUTION: FRUSTRATED RANT HOVERING NEARBY. When you find yourself, as a writer, lamenting about why you’re even writing at all, and entertaining the idea of not writing any more, something has to change. I’m growing more and more frustrated with, and weary of, the lack of support from Lesbian Readers for what I want to offer them. I am sick to death of their constant praise of bad writing in the LesFic market, and their unwillingness to demand better, and try anything out of their narrow reading interests. It’s painfully clear that most LesFic Readers have literary blinders, and will … Continue reading →

Scott Crowder Interview of me on House of Fists (reblog)

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reblog Kelli Jae Baeli   My favorite of her book covers. Grumpy Cat cracks me the hell up. Kelli Jae Baeli is different from most of the writers I interview here at The House of Fists in that it was her non-fiction that first drew me to her work, as opposed to the horror or dark fiction practiced by the other interviewees. I’m trying to learn more about writing, though, and not just about writing horror, so I immediately asked her to do me the honor of being interviewed here. She writes very clearly and persuasively, her tone neatly balanced … Continue reading →

Scribe’s Melancholia, Literary Mind-Expansion & 50 Shades of Grape It's just too difficult to pinpoint the fickle and often inexplicable tastes of the readers

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  I’m in a bit of a funk, a tizzy, a doldrum (take your pick) about writing at the moment. Call it Scribe’s Melancholia. I’m having to seriously consider ignoring my book-marketing, because it’s so time-consuming and takes me away from what I’m really supposed to be doing–writing (Hello). Back to old-school, where writers were sequestered in a dark room with a candle and their muses, and never had to actually market themselves as a product, nor deal with their creations after they were delivered to the publisher. Further, it’s impossible to predict what people will buy anymore. And as far … Continue reading →

Simplified Science Blog?

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The educational system (especially in the U.S.) has failed to provide a useful appreciation of the sciences. Because of that, we have a string of social issues that stem from the generalized ignorance about the world we live in. Instead of just being disgusted by the plentiful ignorance, I’d like to try to do something about it. In light of the posts below (from one of my Facebook threads)…I am seriously thinking about starting a multi-author blog in order to teach from this standpoint–I want to have guest authors post about their area of expertise and/or interest in regard to … Continue reading →