Zeba needed fresh air.The smoky bar atmosphere stifled her lungs, but she enjoyed the stiff drinks and suckers at pool.She gathered up her winnings, five hundred dollars for the night, and waved off further offers to play another game.
“No, boys.Tonight I’ll give you all a break.Consider yourself lucky I’m taking the rest of the night off.”She glanced around to ensure no one took serious offense at her winning and leaving, but the regulars knew her and knew she wouldn’t cheat, at least not get caught at it, nor make any obvious gestures of grifting(?).Not like she couldn’t handle herself.She could duck and punch with the best of them, but she wasn’t as big as some of these guys, and never as drunk, although tonight, the booze seemed to affect her a little more than usual.Or perhaps she was just tired.
Shooting pool for rent was a far better job than what Lulu did.Touching some sweaty cowpoke or 18 wheeler wasn’t her idea of fun.Bad enough she shot pool with them, but then, she liked their money all the same.Less work, more fun, better pay was her motto.
Zeba tipped the bartender his usual ten percent.“Thanks, Joe.”
“Already?”Joe upturned a polished shot glass with one hand and prepared to pour Cinnamon Schnapps with the other.
“Pass.Just need an early night.”Zeba waved him off as she headed for the ladies room at the back of the bar.At the sink, she splashed water on her face.She was tired.She ached everywhere.And her head thundered with every heartbeat.What was wrong with her?A cold maybe.Damned drunk probably sneezed on her.She vowed to double up her vitamin C when she got home.
Then she doubled over the sink and puked.Not a cold then.The flu?Shit.Sara, her neighbor, kept warning her to get a flu shot.Never know what those morons are coughing and sneezing on you, she’d say.Bars are a hotbed of germs and viruses.Well, Sara should know, she worked in a hospital, which, according to Sara, was the number one place to get sick and die.Zeba had vowed never to need a doctor, much less a hospital.She didn’t trust them.She came from a long line of family who didn’t trust doctors.But she did trust Sara.And if she could just make it home before she puked again, she knew Sara would take good care of her.
A decision made, Zeba stepped out of the bathroom as another wave of nausea hit her.Determined to exit the building, she stumbled out the back door, making it to the dumpster before doubling over again and spewing her guts on the concrete.
“Crap.”She wiped her mouth with the back of her sleeve.This wasn’t good.She inhaled a huge lungful of air.Not the freshest in town, filled with odors of stale beer and urine, but better than carcinogistic-laden cigarette smoke.
She leaned against the rusted dumpster until her head cleared enough that she finally trusted herself to drive home. She reached into her jeans pocket to remove her keys when another wave hit her.She was determined to make it home.She had no one to call.Sara worked the night shift.She had no family to speak of, no one that would claim her anyway.So she was on her own and she liked it like that.But once in a great while, like tonight, she wished she had someone she could call to rescue her from the rare but occasional ravages of being human.
The cold metal keys in her hand brought her back to reality.She’d passed out?She blinked, the image of dumpster legs and trash littered her vision.Then she felt the graveled cement imprinting her cheek.This was worse than she thought.She pushed herself up from the ground, her arms stiff, her back sore.As she made it to her knees, she noticed blood dripping from her sides.Again, her body spasmed and she screamed as pain ripped her back.
Panting, Zeba crawled toward the bar’s back door.She had to get help.She had no idea what was happening to her, but she had to get help.
Another spasm wracked her body.Another scream rent from her throat.
Her body arched with the constriction.Then she felt something tearing on her
This is a copy of the quick jot of my ideas on the angel story I’m letting bubble up in my subconscious.It’s formatted like a letter.The X’s are placeholders for filling in later.
This is a letter by the guy who caught an angel in the act of painfully sprouting wings in an alley behind a bar.I want this guy who’s telling the story to be highly intelligent and frustrated because he’s already tried to inform the more established news and scientific publications and specialists about his encounter(s), but of course they thought he was a nutter and the story all a hoax.
So he’s resorted to the last resort to get his news out.He’s sending this to a magazine like National Enquirer (a gossip / rumor mag that runs stories of alien babies etc LOL).You’ll see that I’ve come to these thoughts after retyping my draft (I wrote it by hand one night about 3am), so some things will of course change.
Could I maintain a whole book of this guy following around the angels to catch them, study them, reveal them to the world?He’d become an angel fanatic, maybe go a little bit crazy as the book wears on, doubting himself off and on, (maybe his best friend or close relative sees his house with all the angel sightings notes, newspaper articles on whatever, and pictures pasted all over his office walls, they want to put him in a loony bin), but somehow in the end, he’d finally meet up with one face to face, one that has come to terms with his or her own angel-ness (I want to show their (the angels) struggles too, to deal with this unwanted aberration to their body, unwanted and uncontrollable.).
I don’t know if this will be one angel he tracks or more than one, but I’m thinking not too many, because I’d need to develop the story of the angel thru his observations and letters to the editor of this sensationalist rag (magazine).I think this would make a good series.The concern is developing the story from his point of view, not the angel(s) and keeping it interesting.I’ll have to see how that goes as I write it I guess.Anyway, let me know what you think J.I’ll have more on it later I’m sure as I’m all excited about this new story.
Alley
=================
Date:
To:
From: Carson “Jargon” Delacort III
Subject: Unusual Sighting
Dear Mr. Xxx,
Please find enclosed an image of a woman I shot with my Nikon XX camera last night in the alley behind Red’s Bar.Although grainy and lacking proper lighting, I believe this image validates the rumors of angels on earth.
Be they dark or light, I cannot say, for the film only captures the physical and from that frozen celluloid moment, we must infer an entire history of these beings as part human and part something else.
At this point, however, it is not the history of these winged beings that concerns me as much as their presence and their purpose.
Are they good beings or bad?Are they beings at all, or mere apertures of light and shade spiced with our imagination?
That, Dear Mr. XXX, is my quest – to seek the truth of these seemingly miraculous beings.I’m asking you, as our most popular expert on extreme beings on earth, if one who’s only studied a thing and never experienced it, as you stated in a recent article, can be an expert on anything,
I am enclosing a small souvenir you may consider it a field sample for your personal effects (personal study?).
And I do mean to ask you to keep this personal, between you and myself only, until we have irrefutable proof one way or the other.
Perhaps this could be a hoax.This could also be Darwin on drugs.But whatever our results, we must maintain self-sufficiency and discretion in all aspects of our research and results until which time we feel we’ve gathered sufficient evidence to present to the xxx council. (scientific alien council thing)
I thank you for your patience.If you are still in doubt, test the DNA on the section of quilt.You may find it remarkably relative.
Sincerely,
Carson Jargon Delacort, III
(Then I’d go into this guy’s POV, Carson “Jargon” Delacort, and describe the pictures and the scene he’s sending the editor.)
Whichever it is, it hits me every year. The slightly cooler weather has me wanting to work on my house. So what do I do at 4am? Browse color schemes, redecorating ideas, revamping rooms. <sigh> This year tho, I've the energy to do it.
Does anyone else get these alien urges to do "seasonal nesting"?
In the August issue of RWR, there’s an article by Colleen Gleason called “The New Romance?” (page 21 if you’re looking).Now, I’m notoriously late reading my RWR, usually regaling it to the bathroom mag stash for quick article reading (I read everywhere).And, I hadn’t read this one, yet, when I received a post on our chapter Yahoo! Group linking to a blog post of the article -- Friday’s response on Sizzlingpens Blogspot ( www.sizzlingpens.blogspot.com ) of course, I simply had to respond, and respond, and respond.
My first response was, “what’s HEA”? Hmmm, H is for Husband and DH is for Dead Husband, says my speculative fiction brain, causing no small sense of shock, you can imagine, when I read DH.
In RWR, Colleen writes, “The new types of series are different because they are about one woman, and they don’t strictly follow the accepted principle of romance: one man and one woman riding off into their happily-ever-after.”And about non-HEAs she says, “But at the end of the day, they’re still romances.”
We (at NTRWA) just had a speaker about a genre labeled "women's fiction", where, instead of an “HEA ending”, women's fiction has a "hopeful ending". Yet, perhaps we'd have to call a paranormal HEA a "sub-genre" because it has no separate floor space. (But when you're already a vampire, or get turned into one by the end of the book, could that really be hopeful?)
This notion of the “new romance”, where the ending of the book has no male/female protag happy ending, bothers some readers and writers, and it bothers them a lot, thinking that the classification for this new trend should be “women’s fiction with romantic elements” (per Juliet Burns in the Sizzling Pens blogpost).These trends especially are blossoming in the paranormal romance sub-genre.
In one of the articles for our chapter newsletter, I wrote on the influence of speculative fiction in paranormal romance ("Pushing Paranormal", Heart to Heart, June 2008), about how it melded from the gothic romances seasoned with science fiction and fantasy. (I'd say all romance is fantasy, but that's a whole other bag of magic beans :). The ever-expanding genre of romance is developing into an "umbrella term", like speculative fiction is now.
Many readers think that if they spend their hard-earned money on a romance, that it must have an HEA.
All things change, for better or for worse, even the romance genre. That said, paranormals aren't going to follow the "old tradition", because when speaking of paranormal romance, what is the "old tradition" anyway? The paranormal romance isn't THAT old, certainly not old enough for any tradition to set in. Not that the romance hasn't been around for a while, it has. (Jane Austin bless your heart, and who can forget Sir Tristan? :). Tradition in is different for everyone. It is defined by our purpose for reading romances, what it satisfies inside us, the niche it fulfills in our lives.The age of the reader most likely will determine that person's definition of "traditional" (unless and until there's a sub-genre of romance called "traditional", now why didn't I think of that? :)
Paranormal is a new blend (new I say because I'm 53 years young and have watched genres develop). So why should it follow traditional strictures? Without the HEA, paranormals, and for that matter, any genre, has wonderfully endless (as in infinite, though, in writing, what is ever infinite but our capability to proscrastinate?) creative possibilities.
Juliet says “I love a good vampire story. Especially if they have some elements of romance in them. But to call it a romance? Isn’t that kind of like wanting your cake and eat it too?”
Yes, and why not? It's fiction, why can't we have the universe with sugar icing AND whipped cream AND chocolate syrup and anything else we want? Certainly, the genre label doesn't define our reading-taste buds.
Well, yes it does, to some extent. Labeling a genre is a bookselling gimmick, a marketing device, used to separate all the types of literature in the world into designated bookstore floor space. Just ask Diana Gabaldon, whose best-selling OUTLANDER series (another series!) weaves history, time travel, and romance into a rollicking good adventure.Or ask Andrew Davidson, author of THE GARGOYLE, where a beautiful gargoyle sculptress tells a third-degree burn victim that they were once lovers in medieval Germany.Davidson’s book isn’t marketed in the romance section, but obviously includes romantic elements.
Whatever sells the most will get more hype and attention, whether it's an entire genre, or a single book. The baseline here is money, that green stuff most writers get so little of. And as Colleen stated in her article, usually the publisher determines where a book is placed in a bookstore, but sometimes, the publisher allows the bookstore to decide.It’s placed where they think it’ll sell well.
Readers may not be satisfied with a series romance where several books frame the HEA story.However, the HEA, if present at all, is there, it just takes longer to get from A to Z.These are stories too big to publish in one book (that green stuff again).
It can be frustrating to start a series that isn't completed yet, dropped by the publisher before the story frame completes, or doesn't have more than one or two books published when begun. That isn't anyone's fault, especially not the author's (we can only write so fast).If it's a good enough story to read more than one or two pages before it’s tossed, (I'm very picky) then it's probably good enough to read an entire series, however long that series may be. So, a series of books doesn't necessitate a lack of story or HEA. It just means a more full-bodied story with larger landscapes and deeper characters.
I heartily understand anyone’s disappointment with a seemingly never-ending story when expecting an HEA (expectations ruin relationships, even the readers’ relationships with the characters and the author, however, it never seems to affect the publisher, funny how that is? No, not really).Perhaps the problem would be better addressed by asking a question:
~~ How does one determine which sub-genre to select? ~~
Which I’ll answer next.
~ Alley is a member (and past board member multiple years) of the DFW Writers' Workshop (www.dfwrite.org), co-founder and member of the North Texas Speculative Fiction Workshop (www.ntsfw.com), and board member and newsletter editor at the North Texas Romance Writers of America, (www.ntrwa.org). She writes speculative fiction with romantic elements.
<<So what do you do when you end a project? How long before you can shift gears? What tricks do you do to make the transition easier?>>
And I can't answer this LOL. I've yet to complete polishing the 2 WIPS I have, though I have made great strides since clearing most of the chemo out of my sogged brain.
It's really made a difference, though I never thought it did when I was on chemo. Intellectually, I knew it was having an effect. I was totally unmotivated. I tried pills for depression and pills for energy (those helped some but made me very scatter-brained, tho I did a LOT of scattering on them LOL) and none of them really helped and had side effects that weren't worth the bother for the lack of results, so stopped those.
However, now that I'm going a bit better, the cogs finding their coglets, I feel as if I have sooo much to do! My problem now is focusing and finishing.
Thanks to Darlene's weekly posts on my Writing & Publishing Yahoogroup about what we did each week writing, I feel like I'm starting to accomplish things.
1. I bought a spiral calendar showing the week on two pages and write down **everything** I did concerning writing, reading, research, contacts, etc. (I've realized my whole life is about writing in some form or fashion. I can't read without analyzing, critiquing, thinking. Can't watch a movie, tv show, or even people watching, squirrel watching outside my kitchen windows, without it fodder. I know, we *say* that all the time, but I'm always amazed when I truly realize it. And I realize it over and over again.)
2. I prioritize my tasks by deadline. If I don't have a deadline, I make one.
3. I've promised I will start the "newest" WIP during Nanowrimo (Nov) and basically do nothing else, as much as my scatterbrain will allow.
4. I've accepted a temp (possibly perm) copyediting job to stretch my editing muscles.
5. I've been researching how to write reviews and have several books authors have asked for reviews. This is a slower project tho, as I won't allow it to interefere with my current WIP.
6. I'm getting business cards. All they say is "writer" basically, but at cons, they are essential. I'm just about ready to be that writer who needs them.
7. Received business cards will be organized in a binder. I've lost so many already from cons, due to juggling my office from my own room to my bedroom (with no room).
8. I keep a spreadsheet on writers I know and one for writers and their agents and editors, when they are mentioned. I won't remember every agent's or editor's name, but over time, I may retain a few and then when it's time for me to submit, I'll have some resources of my own, current ones, to review and maybe I'll even remember names when I attend cons and such.
9. I've learned **how** I write. Which I think is the most important thing a writer learns. I write in huge blocks of time. I've learned to allow myself to do this and to allow myself breaks when I need them. I write in layers, fast first draft, get the gist of the story down, then fill it out and up, delving into the thing again and again.
10. I've learned to appreciate other writers, especially those who give their time to me (and others) to help us become better writers. My writer friends and acquaintances sometimes seem overwhelming and I just a fledgling, but no one makes me feel that way. It's my own insecurities. (another thing to work on)
