What If? Blogfest

So, man, am I a late entry!

I'm almost sure I was following Cassie Mae's blog, but if so, that means I haven't looked at my blogger for a good two months. That also means I just saw there is a contest happening this week! -_-

It is the What If? Blogfest, and the rules are as follows:

Think of your favorite "well known" fairytale and ask "What If…!"

Then, pick one of these four categories:
· Best Plot Twist
· Best Love Story
· Best Tragedy
· Best Comic Relief
Finally, write a scene(s) illustrating a new detail of the fabled fairytale that changes our perspective. 300 words MAX.

I love a good tragedy, so I decided to go for Team Tragedy!

Hopefully I have time to go read some of the other bloggers' entries, because LG Keltner's was really good! I started following LG from the last blogfest I followed. :D

And here is my entry!
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 Thus With A Kiss...

This wasn’t happening.

The kind old lady had told him exactly what to do to wake Snow: find her, confess your love for her, then kiss her. Well, he had found her, told her he loved her, and kissed her, so why was she still asleep? Why wasn’t she stirring?

Charming’s stomach cramped, as though his breakfast had been sour and he hadn’t noticed. The air chilled his suddenly hot skin and made his head swim. The dwarves watching and waiting for their fair maiden to awaken all looked at him. They dried their eyes long enough to realize something was terribly wrong.

Snow had been asleep for weeks. The poison should have worn off by now, right? It couldn’t have still been on her lips. It just wasn’t possible.

Still, Charming’s next steps were his last. His legs grew numb and buckled beneath him. His head hit the mossy ground with a soft smack, and he looked at the frosted leaves above him, the white-gray sky, the dwarves’ faces once they ran to his side. Doc raced away to get his bag, and Happy started to cry all over again.

As his breath quickened and his heart slowed, Charming whispered, “Snow.”

His eyes closed, and just before he died, he thought he heard her sweet voice say, “Charming?”

Next Project: Ruby, a tribute sequel

I just noticed aspiration has a lot of different meanings.

Anyhow, I now have a critique partner and a beta reader for Save the Queen, and while I hope there aren't too many more changes I need to make on it, I'm glad to get some new eyes on this one. I was 19 when I started writing it, so finishing it at 26, of course I had a lot of growth, and after 2 years editing and revising, it's not a TOTALLY different story, but I do think it's better than when I started it. Hopefully, I can get some more beta readers, but Facebook only got me one loyal friend, whose been reading my stuff since we were in the 4th grade. I'll have to look at AQC to see where else to get readers.

And now that I'm "done" with it for now, I started working on a tribute sequel for Octavia Butler's Fledgling. It was her last published novel before she died, and I loved it. It's about a little girl who wakes up burned and skull-fractured in a bunch of ruins, basically, and when she heals and gets out into the world, she learns she's a 53-year-old vampire named Shori. She's not really a vampire, but her race was the cause of all the folklore, and she has to find out what happened to her and her family because she permanently lost her memory. I've seen mixed reviews: most people (the ones with sense *wink*) loved it. A few were extremely uncomfortable with it, and a few others were turned off by the court hearing the book turns into for the last third of the story. I personally loved everything about the book. It has action, mystery, sex (yeeaah haha); it made me happy, sad, angry. A good book takes you there, and for me, Octavia Butler usually succeeded in that anyhow.

So the sequel I started actually was derived from a series of vampire roleplays I used to do online with some friends. I played two characters, a cannibal/wendigo named Rubix and a 300-year-old vampire named Finlay "Falon" Moynahan (he was very Irish). I had begun writing stories for them and some of the other vampires that one of the guys said I could use that he created, and I'd even wrote a long backstory sequence for Falon and some shorter stories, but I knew they weren't going to see the light of day. I'm not even sure how the idea came to me to write them as Ina (the race in Fledgling), since I read the book either last year or the year before, but it was on my mind the last few months that it was a good place to put them. So, I read the book again, took notes as I did, compiled them, and started writing the story circling Shori's birth daughter Ruby as she prepares to (looking for a good word) spawn (ew) the next generation of dark-skinned Ina.

Shori isn't old enough to mate but is already bound to her mates when we are introduced to her, so I am working from scratch on those aspects, which is kind of cool, I think. I also want to use some of the Ina language, which means, of course, creating it, but I think I can do it. Butler described the alphabet, so at least I have something to work with.

I will keep working on it and see how it turns out. It's a really important piece to me, because of how memorable Fledgling is, and to keep the memory of some of my favorite roleplay characters alive.

Magic Mike

Yes, I saw it. What of it?!

No, seriously, my sister took me to see Magic Mike for my birthday. First off, I must say, it's not JUST a movie about strippers. I promise.

Magic Mike is a young and popular stripper who has, if I counted correctly, two or three other day jobs, and he is using all of these jobs to establish his own unique furniture business. No one will give him a chance, though, because all of his day (and night) jobs pay in cash, and he has no credit. I don't understand that about businesses. He had $1500 in cash on the table before the woman, and she called him struggling or something else insulting because he had no credit. The money is RIGHT THERE!

Anyway, at his job with his dad, he takes under his wing this kind of shady kid and brings him on to the stripper scene as payback for him driving him home. The kid lives with his sister who's really uptight and worries a lot because he had a troublesome past. Mike promises her he'll look after him. So we get to see how this ragtag (and I mean ragtag. Kevin Nash is in this, for goodness sake) group of strippers works from night to night, their struggles and their victories.

To wrap up this weak review, the movie starts on a high of "This is the life, we get money, chicks, we're sexy!" to "Do you really want to be doing this the rest of your life?" It's a deeper movie than it seems.

Upside to this movie: Watching Channing Tatum dance. It's, well, magical.

Downside to this movie: the 1,001 F-bombs. The dialogue was really natural, but I could've stood for 500 less F words.

And the winners are... (Versatile Blogger Award pt. 2)

Here is the first part of my Versatile Blogger post...and the 1-1/2 part.

Fortunately, I realized early that while I'd love to look at all 95 sets of Hookers & Hangers, to make my decision BASED on the Hookers & Hangers, it was wiser of me to make sure they hadn't yet received the Versatile Blogger award. Shaved a lot of time.

My 10 nominations for the Versatile Blogger award, from the list of Hookers & Hangers entrants, based either on those posts or their other posts are (*drum roll*):

Winner based on posts I read.
1. T. L. Bodine Great posts that I'm currently reading, and I've already followed her on Twitter. She also has a list of short stories on her blog to read, and I plan to do that soon.

Winners based on Hookers & Hangers.
1. Tobi Summers Chock Full of Words I knew she was getting one when I saw her GaiaOnline avatar! Her current novel in the editing stages is an urban fantasy about werewolves. Exciting!

2. Amanda Olivieri From Imagination to Ink Her project Death & Co. sounds very intriguing. I also like 1st-person POV shifts.

3. Jenny Morris Jenny's Imaginary World Her Hookers & Hangers from Already There, her collaboration with Kelley Lynn, sound like our every day conversation in this tiny "city" of Dover. The cynicism and determination define a generation here.

4. A.W. Exley Mutterings from the Oubliette Hey, a Kiwi! :-D I love their accents. Anyway, sylphs and embers. Sexy. Her current manuscript is a steampunk called Nefertiti's Heart. I've never read steampunk, but with hookers and hangers like those...I can get into it. *wink*

5. Mara Rae Scribble Scrabble First off, she gets one for that giant baby in her banner. He's adorable. Second, her hangers were awesome.

6. Amy L. Sonnichsen The Green Bathtub The Crazy Part is her current WIP, and the hookers and hangers to it are intriguing.

7. Gina This is Not Your Blog The lines from her YA Romance sound like things I would say. lol

8. Deana Barnhart Yeah, knives in bellies. Not a good look. hehe I also like the image of someone rushing up to another person and punching them. I want to know what he did to deserve it.

9. Kristin McLaughlin Her hookers and hangers painted some really telling pictures, and I'm quite interested in knowing the story around them now.

And a year later (not really, but it took SO long!) I have finished my Versatile Blogger noms! =D I made it just over 2/3 of the way down the list of Hookers & Hangers. I'll still probably skim the rest, but from what I've seen, these are my favorites.

These aren't in any particular order, but I see some of my picks were either the Hookers & Hangers winners or honorable mentions! Congratulations, all!

Here are the rules to the Versatile Blogger:

RULES

1. Thank and link back to the person who gave you the award.
2. List the rules.
3. List seven random facts about yourself.
4. Nominate ten people for the award. And notify them that you've given them an award.

Distracted

Can I express how utterly and totally distracted I am right now!?

I'm sitting at my desk at work on a day where I actually HAVE work to do, and all I want to do is blog and brainstorm and revamp my blog to accommodate my smaller works. I enjoy this job, and I love how laid back it is (I'm in the Office of Directors, but still, these people are SO chill), but--and they said I was going to be--I'm BORED.

Not bored as in "this is a boring job," but bored as in, "This is NOT my job." I said from jump (from jump I mean, like, when I was 12. Excuse my lingo and grammar right now, too, I'm in my Deborah-rant-zone, and I do run-on sentences when I'm ranting) that writing was going to be my full-time job. People have told me it's a hobby, and I won't be able to get by on just writing, and I know a lot of people have day jobs because writing isn't all that sustaining, but I want to dream bigger than the logical and the typical.

I want to be a bestselling author. I want to write the screenplay when they (whoever they are) ask to adapt my book. I want to sit in the Executive Director's chair and yell "CUT, do it this way! This is the vision!" I want to be at the Editor's side because for the love of GOD LOTR and King Kong were TOO LONG and some scenes from LOTR that didn't make it into the final cut needed to be in the final cut, because I notice when things aren't resolved. Geez, I've heard it said Stephen King pops up in a lot of his movies now because he hated how The Shining was done! I can be there if I say I need to be there!

Breathe. One. Two.

Okay. I'm calmish.

I'm 28 years old. I had dreams of marriage and my second child by now. So now that that's gone to pot, I still remember that when I was 21, I said in 10 years I'd have a book published and some other stuff that I've forgotten (it was 7 years ago after all). This process, the editing, the revisions, the queries, the critiques, is putting me on that goal, so I hope I see it soon.

In the meantime, I'm going to be finding something more MY job to do with my time while that happens. I'm not quitting my job, by any means, but I'm definitely looking at my other options. I'm the least normal person I know (which often sucks), and I want a life that reflects all of who I am.

Nervous breakdown over. It came 2 years too soon, so I'm going to have a great 30th birthday. I claim that now, Jesus.

Back to work.