Call of the Creator: Fantasy Writing from a Christian Worldview

Sometimes having ideas is a real pain in the neck. When I was younger, I was never consumed with artistic passion. Certainly, I enjoyed making things--films, drawings, the occasional sculpture. They were a natural outgrowth of who I was and am. But I'm finding as I get older, my ideas are beginning to take hold of me in a way they never used to. While I can never hope to aspire to the level of genius of one of the "old masters," I do begin to see what people mean when they ascribe the phrase, "the agony and the ecstasy" to the life and work of Michelangelo. When I began to write, I really only had one idea, the idea that birthed Curse Bearer . What began as just a toe in the water of writing quickly became an overwhelming flood that swept me away in the current of creation. I nurtured that idea for several years, and then began to realize quite a few other ideas were rushing along in the current as well. The Windrider Saga was born and entered the public...

Well, NaNoWriMo isn't going too badly. I'm still scheduled to finish ahead of time, even accounting for two days off from writing due to a really persistent cold that has been keeping me in bed instead of writing at 5 am like I'd planned. It's probably because my husband was so impressed how I managed to bolt out of bed at 5 for about a week and a half. Then the combination of sleeplessness, coughing, and eventually Nyquil shattered that illusion. But I hope to recover in the coming week. Being Thanksgiving week, I only have three days of work, so I will be able to indulge my night-owl productivity more than usual. Hooray for that! Now that the book is what I'd call mostly roughed out, I think it's about time to stop calling it WRIIINanoDraft. (That's the lovely file name it has right now.) It deserves a real title, and I historically rot at titling anything. The current phrase I'm looking at to entitle this installment of the saga is... Valor...

Well friends...I headed into this month thinking I would keep you updated on NaNo, but I fear my little sidebar widget has been all I've been able to depend on for updates. It seems trying to write 1600+ words a day leaves me for very little time to blog. There are a few things I wanted to make sure you knew about though, aside from my NaNo mania. This week, Jennette Mbewe is hosting a three-part interview and giveaway on her blog. We're trying to get as much word out about Curse Bearer as possible, so please drop by her posts. You can find the first one here:  Jennette's fine blog interview . There will be subsequent posts on Wednesday and Friday. You'll see there is a giveaway associated with the interview, which is hosted at my facebook page. By liking my page, tweeting or posting about my work, or reviewing Curse Bearer, you can gain entries into the giveaway for books, ebooks, tshirts, and artwork. Jennette worked hard to set up this excellent giveaway, so gain...

Well, NaNoWriMo began today, and believe it or not, this is my first time to give it a shot. Three books published, and I've never done NaNo. I was beginning to feel like I wasn't entirely sold out to this "writer" thing, so I took the plunge this year. Believe it or not, it was not hard for me to get up at 5 am to start writing. Who knew that creative time would be powerful enough to defeat my love affair with blankets and warm coziness? Well, at least for one day. As the battle continues to rage throughout November, we shall see how well I continue to do. Honestly, though, I can see how early risers have a bit of a love affair with the pre-dawn and dawn hours. Right now, because we haven't gotten back to standard time, the sun comes up at about 7:30 am, and I get to watch the sunrise on my way to work. It really tends to be a glorious display of pink and gold beauty. And since I now take winding country roads to work, I can appreciate it way more that I wo...

Curse Bearer , the first book in The Risen Age Archive released in early October, an I have been swept up in a whirlwind of activity in my efforts to work the promotion angle for this book. As many of you may recall, back in the end of August, I ran a successful Kickstarter Campaign to fund the marketing campaign for this book. We reached the $3500 funding goal in about 19 days, and even after the campaign was over, the donations continued to come in. We ended up raising $4997, all told. The Kickstarter campaign, in and of itself, worked as a marketing tool for the book because it generated some presales of the novel as well as interesting some of my local media outlets in what I was doing...something that might not have happened without taking a trendy approach to this book release. With the funds raised from the campaign, I will be able to push the book in targeted markets. With the extra donations, I will be able to enter fiction contests and try to win some accolades for the no...

November is coming. And November mean NaNoWriMo...or to those of you newer to authorial circles: National Novel Writing Month. It's a sort of "compete against yourself" contest where authors try to write 50,000 words in one month. That's about 200 pages, at least the way I set margins and line spacing. This requires a per-day average of a little over 1600 words, but really, it's more, because I don't know anybody who writes every day of the week. I have never yet in my 5 years of writing fiction tackled NaNo. Every year, it comes around and I think, "I'd really LIKE to do it this year, but..." This year, I am going to kick myself in the tush and do it. Why? Because the fact is, every project I've got on my hard drive right now is published in some form or another. (Two of them will be self published in the next couple of weeks in order to fulfill rewards for my Kickstarter campaign, and all my completed Windrider and Curse Bearer stuff ...

Many different people have referred to the process of creating books and movies like this: A book is never actually "released." It just eventually escapes. Now, I have to admit, for as long as I have been working on my current release, Curse Bearer , I know I'll  never feel entirely sure I have done everything I possibly could have to sharpen the book. But the fact is, if I was allowed to rework everything I possibly could, I would rewrite the book over and over for my entire life, and it would never come out. There is a great lesson to be learned in calling something done and allowing it to be what it is at that point. The reviews from my advance readers are coming in, and most of those reviews are from writers. I'm amassing a pile of solid, four-star reviews with a couple of fives thrown in. At first, the four stars were giving me heart palpitations, but the more I read them, the more at peace I am. The points that my reviewers have cited in withholding my fin...