Well, my doves, the writing is a slow-going slog recently. I’ve been working on cleaning up my computer so I can upgrade the operating system, and you know, that’s never a quick or easy project. I love my computer…I work on a 27 inch iMac I’ve had for about three years. The only problem I have with it is that it works so well and is so awesome I can’t justify getting a new computer! (bright! shiny! new!)
Anyway, I’m thinking about the book all the time, but the words are coming more slowly than I’d like. That’s just how it goes sometimes, though. If they’re not there, they just ain’t.
Still, you don’t write a book a chapter or page or even a sentence at a time.
You write one word at a time.
One after another after another after another, and then one more, and then another one comes after that…
So I’m off to do that word-writing thing! Happy Thursday!
Oh, and a favorite bit from what I’ve been doing…
She looks at him over her shoulder at the window. “Remember when we used to have those tin-can phones?”
“Yeah.” Gabe props himself on his elbow. His heartbeat’s slowing, but the heat low in his belly is taking longer to go away. He won’t get up to go to the bathroom until she’s gone.
“We were stupid little kids, weren’t we?”
“Yeah. Total assholes.”
She smiles at him, almost like she means to say more. Gabe hopes she does, though he’s not sure what, exactly, he hopes she’ll say.
Instead, Janelle pushes aside his curtains and slides up the window. With one leg over the sill, she makes a show of looking down.
“If I ever break my neck doing this…”
He sits up higher, thinking there’s something important she means to say. He’s a little too high for it, whatever it is. He should be more serious, he thinks. Though she isn’t.
Janelle giggles, her throat working for a second as she tips her head back. She lets it loll forward. Then she pulls the other leg through the window, props her foot on the wooden shelf Gabe built to hold his air conditioner in the summer and stretches her other leg out to the nearly identical shelf at her window. She left hers open. Her room will be freezing cold, he thinks.
If she ever broke her neck doing that, he thinks, if she ever fell when she tried to jump…what would he do? Would he jump after her? Would he pretend he didn’t know what she was doing? Would he lie and say he pushed her just to keep everyone from knowing the truth?
The next morning, not high, in fact so deathly sober it’s like someone put a stack of encyclopedias on his head, Gabe is late for the bus and has to run. Everyone’s laughing at him when he gets on the bus, even Janelle. She sits in the middle, her mask of makeup turning her into a stranger. She doesn’t look at him until he pauses at her seat, thinking this once he’ll ask if he can sit with her. Wondering what she’d do if he leaned down right this minute and kissed her for the first time in front of everyone.
“Sit down back there!” Hollers the bus driver, and Gabe moves to the back of the bus, his usual seat.
From there he can watch the back of Janelle’s head and see her profile when she turns, as she always does, to look out the window. So he watches. She never looks back.
It’s no secret whatsoever that I just adore Christopher Dallman’s music. And him, too, he’s supernice and if I have a regret it’s that the day I got to meet him that I did not take a picture of us together because…now I don’t have one.
Anyway, Christopher’s music invariably ends up on just about every writing playlist I make. Beautiful melodies and lovely lyrics, plus, I just have a thing for boys with guitars.
You can find out more about him from his website and Twitter. He likes to do surprise living room concerts, so be prepared!
and my faaaaaavorite…
So, check him out, give him a listen, buy his stuff!
musicians: I’m always looking for new music. If you’d like to be featured on Tunes Tuesday, drop me a line at readinbed @ gmail.com and point me toward your songs! No promises, but if I like what I hear, I’ll feature you. And, I listen to all kinds of music except Christian Inspirational!
So it’s come to my attention that someone is publishing short erotic stories on Amazon, BN.com, etc. using the name “Megan Harten.” This person doesn’t seem to have a website or anything else using this name — like, you know, if it was a real person using a real name. The publisher’s listed as Kay Raines, who coincidentally (or not) has also published a lot of stories for the Kindle.
My question is — if you’re gonna use a pen name, why hijack someone else’s?
Now listen — I don’t hold with some crazy assed notion that nobody else should be allowed to use the name Megan. I mean, it’s my real name, it’s the real name of many many other people. And the last name Hart, which is ALSO my real name, belongs to many many other people, too. So there are authors who use the name Megan. There are authors who use the name Hart. Sometimes they’re real names, sometimes they’re pen names. There’s a Megan Hart who’s a baker on some reality show, and one who writes cookbooks, and one who’s a singer and one who’s a wrestler. I have no belief that if someone uses the name “Megan” they’re somehow infringing on my reputation or whatever. Same with Hart.
Megan Harten? I kind of have a problem with. (Unless it’s your legal name, in which case you have every right to use it.)
I mean, I don’t go around using the name Nora Robertson just because I’d like to sell a bunch of stuff. Or Steven King. You see what I’m saying?
If Megan Hart or Megan Harten’s your real name, hey, good for you. Go on with your bad self. It’s a great name.
But if it’s not your real name…if you’re just trying to piggyback onto someone else’s ride…that’s just gross.
Maybe Kay Raines’ real name is Megan Harten. Maybe she wrote a bunch of erotica under a penname and decided to come clean with the world and show her real face and use her real name.
Maybe.
At any rate, if you buy “Megan Harten’s” stuff an like it, good for you. If, on the other hand, you don’t think it quite matches up to the rest of my work, there’s a good reason for it. I didn’t write it.
Hi, and welcome to Snippet Saturday! So. Setting as character…what does that even meeeeean? I guess the short answer is that sometimes, you know how you read a book and it could really be set anywhere and it wouldn’t matter? Or sometimes, you read a book and it just wouldn’t work if it was set anyplace else?
Setting can be more than just a place where a book “happens.” It can be an integral part of a story. A book set in New York City is very different than one set in rural Pennsylvania, even if you’re telling essentially the same story. Characters from different places will react differently to the same situations, just like people in real life do!
I tend to set most of my books in rural central Pennsylvania, in the Harrisburg/Lancaster areas. Why? Well…because that’s where I live, lived and/or grew up, and it’s easier for me to imagine the actual locations of these places than to make them up. I’ve also set a number of books in fantasy worlds, and I love doing that too!The setting of a book changes/enhances or adds to the voice and tone of a story, just like the characters do.
Setting can also be more than the overall location, it can be something specific within the story. A certain place that is important…
Contemporary setting, central rural PA
Dirty by Megan Hart
There could be no talking here, for even a shout would’ve been difficult to hear above the pounding throb of the music. The bass thumped its pulse in the pit of my stomach, the hollow of my throat, my wrists, between my thighs. The crowd surged around us like the ocean against rocks, parting and retreating to return in the next instant, surrounding us. It pressed in on us as the song changed and brought more dancers onto the floor.
He wasn’t smiling any more, like this was serious business. Like he could see nothing else around us, like his world had narrowed to only me. I shivered at the look.
When he put his other hand on my side, up high, just under my breast, I startled but had no place to go. No retreat. I looked up, into his eyes, those light and dark eyes, and lost myself in them.
We moved together, and my hand slid from his shoulder to cup the back of his neck. The edges of his sandy hair tickled my knuckles. The heat of his hand branded me through my blouse. Heat flared, too, in my belly where it rubbed against his groin.
It had been a long, long time since I’d danced with anyone, an eternity since I’d had a man’s hands on me, since I’d seen my own desire reflected in another’s gaze. It stole my breath and drew my tongue out to lick my lips. The motion caught his attention the way a cat will watch a mouse.
His hand slid up my back to tangle in my hair, tip my head back, bare my throat to his mouth as he bent to slide his lips along my skin. I felt myself gasp but couldn’t hear it. He pulled me closer, and I gave in to his whim.
The crowd had become one body moving to the music’s sensual beat. One entity with us in the center of it, pressed so close I could no longer be certain where I ended and he began. His hand slid up to embrace my breast through my blouse. I blinked and saw nothing but his face shadowed with blue and green, the colors pulsing in time to the rhythm.
Nobody watched us. Nobody saw. We had become part of something bigger and yet remained separate from it. The couple next to us kissed, their tongues tangling as their hands stroked and kneaded each other. The dance floor had become an orgy of lust. I smelled it, tasted it, saw it reflected in his eyes and knew he saw it in mine. The song changed again, blending into the previous one without break.
Bodies all around us pressed us together. Sweat slid down my spine and shone on his forehead. Everything had become heat and beat.
His cock pressed hard against my belly. The sensation parted my lips in silent reaction, and his gaze watched my mouth again, his expression tense, like he was in pain.
It wasn’t pain that thinned his mouth. I knew it by the way his jaw tightened when another surge of the crowd rocked me against his body. The hand on my ass splayed, then stroked upward to reach the small of my back, then down again to caress and press me against his erection.
I was lost. Lost in his eyes, in his touch, in the pounding pulse of music and lust. Lost in my own desire, which I’d denied for so long and now could no longer fight.
I saw the shift in his gaze and knew the exact moment when he recognized my reaction. If he’d smiled smugly or leered, I’d have fled. Instead, his eyes narrowed slightly, and his expression became a mixture of determination and helpless admiration. He looked at me as though he didn’t care if the song ever stopped or if he never looked at another woman again.
And a different sort of setting…
Stillness Faine had never been assigned to a house so modest it didn’t have a name. What sort of man was Edward Delaw, to hold such a high position within the Court of Firth and yet abide in a house as humble this? She paused with her hand on the front gate to look it over before making her way down the crushed shell path to the front door.
“You be all right, Mistress?”
She turned to look back at the driver of the carriage she’d hired to bring her from Pevensie station. “Yes, Thomas, thank you. Master Delaw is expecting me.”
Thomas gave the house a dubious look. “You sure? He might’ve sent for you, if he was.”
“I arrived early,” she assured him. “The mountain pass thawed a bit sooner than anticipated. I was able to travel more swiftly than the Order predicted. I’ll be fine.”
He looked her over. She knew he saw a small woman with dark blonde hair pulled into a thick braid spilling down her back and clad in a dark plum traveling gown of modest cut and sturdy fabric. She carried a trundle-bag in one hand and her overcoat, too heavy for the early spring weather, in the other.
She wondered if her appearance disappointed him.
“Right.” He nodded again and clucked to the horses. “Well, I’ll be back this way tomorrow afters, if you need a ride back.”
She returned her attention to the house. Spring-green ivy climbed red-brick walls, and the gabled roof spoke of cozy, tucked-away garret rooms. Smoke from the chimney wisped its gray tail against the background of blue sky.
Shells crunched beneath her soles, and ten strides took her to the front door. She smiled at the sight of the knocker, a pixie’s face done in copper with the ring through its nose. Fine details showed the owner of this house had a sense of humor and style, too, no matter the lack of lavish wings and gardens.
She took a moment to center herself before she knocked. Each assignment was to be met face-forward, but every time she faced a new patron her stomach churned. The trick was to keep her inner turmoil from showing. After all, a patron who sent to the Order of Solace for a Handmaiden had certain expectations.
She recited the five principles under her breath, and calm overtook her. Before she could lift the knocker, the door opened so fast she stumbled. In the next moment she was pushed back by the man ejecting himself from the doorway.
“…later,” he was saying over his shoulder. “Hello! What’s this?”
In one swift motion he moved and spoke, reaching for her arm to keep her from falling. His fingers gripped her upper arm while the other hand came around to grab her wrist. He pulled. Nessa regained her feet.
“Who are you?” The man she thought must be Edward Delaw demanded.
He let her go, and Nessa shook the folds of her gown around her ankles, straightening her appearance swiftly. “I’m your Handmaiden, my lord Delaw. You sent for me?”
“You weren’t due in for another fortnight.”
“I was able to travel faster than anticipated. I trust it’s not an inconvenient time for my arrival?”
“I’m just off to Pevensie to see Prince Cillian’s latest toys. I’ll be home later. See to it Margera gets you settled.” He looked down at the worn trundle bag at her feet. “Is that all you brought?”
“Aye, my lord, I –”
“Ah, yes.” His lips tightened in what might have been meant as a smile. “Yes, the Order informed me I’d be responsible for providing for you. Very well. I shall make arrangements for that while I’m in town.”
He started off down the path again, shouting out to the man who’d brought round a prancing black horse from the back of the house. “Oi, Peter! Hurry, lad, I must be off!”
Her new patron swung up on the back of the horse, slung the leather bag Peter handed him round his neck, and urged the horse into motion.
It wasn’t the most illustrious greeting she’d ever had, to be sure. “Hello,” she called as Delaw vanished down the lane.
Peter turned, eyebrows lifting. “Hello. Pleading your mercy, but – ah, yes. You must be the Handmaiden, and thank the Holy Mother you’ve arrived.”
“I am.” Nessa paused as Peter strode toward her and bent to lift her bag. He opened the front door for her. “Though I fear I must ask…why so happy to see me?”
Peter chuckled and stepped aside to let her through. “Because he’s a right bit of a cranky bastard, our lord Edward, and frankly, Mum and me is afeared if he don’t get some solace he’ll rant himself into apoplexy.”
“Ah.” Simple enough an answer, and not unexpected. “I’ll do what I can.”
I started my new book a couple weeks ago. I had a lofty goal for it, 5,000 words day. That’s not an impossible goal, but it does mean it’s all-day writing, without much time for anything else. Well, the truth is, I’ve been averaging a few less than that, making more of my normal pace. And that’s fine, too. I do have other things to do for my work, and these first two weeks after “the Holidays” is always a time of struggling to get back into a schedule.
The thing is, I’ve been thinking about this book for a long time. Going Home is about a woman who moves back to her tiny hometown to take care of her ailing grandmother. The house next door still belongs to the same family who lived there when she was younger and lived with her grandma.
There was a scandal.
She left.
Now she’s back and struggling with her life, raising a son, caring for her grandma, dealing with a lot of stuff.
And the boys next door have all grown up.
It’s not a romance. It’s not erotic. It’s mainstream fiction and I’ve had this book in my head for so long I thought it would be so easy to just sit down and write it…but of course, the truth is, it’s never easy. Writing isn’t easy. If it was easy, everyone would do it!
So I’m working on that, finding my way through it. Figuring out who the characters are and why they acted the way they did. I’m writing out of order because there are some scenes so vividly etched in my head it’s easier to start with them, and since I started using Scrivener it’s so easy to rearrange chapters.
So that’s where I am — starting a new book. Feeling my way. I’m not really a plotter, at least not more than a few chapters at a time, because once I start writing, so much changes.
But here’s a bit I particularly liked:
“Old habits didn’t just die hard, they rose like the undead and just kept walking.”
Today’s Tunes Tuesday brings you the musical stylings of Jim Hanft.
I saw Jim Hanft play in Philly…oh, golly. I don’t remember when. I was there to see Jason Manns, but hooray! Jim was a bonus!
You can learn more about him at his website, www.jimhanft.com as well as Twitter and Facebook. If you sign up for his mailing list, you get an email that says something like “You and Jim Hanft are now best friends” or something cute like that. It made me laugh.
Check out his music, learn more about him, see him play live if you can! Oh, and buy his songs (don’t download them illegally, that’s just not nice.)
This one’s my favorite:
musicians: I’m always looking for new music. If you’d like to be featured on Tunes Tuesday, drop me a line at readinbed @ gmail.com and point me toward your songs! No promises, but if I like what I hear, I’ll feature you. And, I listen to all kinds of music except Christian Inspirational!
Okay, I’m just kidding. This is actually my very first Snippet Saturday, and the topic is fears, I was just trying to be clever. But then I thought, well…it sort of IS a nightmare. A little bit. Because I fear I won’t remember to post my blog…then I remember, I’m writing this in December and scheduling it. So I should be fine.
Phew.
Still with me?
Fear. You might think horror novels are the only place where fear places a large role, but I think fear is the motivating factor behind almost all fiction. What motivates us more than our fears? I don’t necessarily mean being scared of the dark or the thing under the bed. I mean things like death, loss, financial insecurity, being in an accident. Even fears of wonderful things like having kids, getting married…falling in love.
In my most recent book, ALL FALL DOWN, fear plays a large role in both of the main characters. Sunshine fears life in the “outside” world. Her stepmother, Liesel, fears getting what she always wanted — a family — isn’t as great as she thought it would be. Both women struggle with their own fears and must learn how to deal with them.
EXCERPT:
Sunny finished every day at four, but always went to the library a few blocks away to wait until Chris picked her up at a little after six. Liesel could’ve come for her, but it interrupted nap times and was a huge hassle to get all three kids in the car for a fifteen minute drive. Besides, Sunny liked the library. In those two hours, she could study for her G.E.D. She could sit and read, uninterrupted, which was a luxury she’d never known in Sanctuary. Novels, magazines, newspapers, non-fiction texts on subjects she’d never heard of. She struggled sometimes with the bigger words, because though she’d been taught to read well enough to get through the family literature, reading for pleasure had been discouraged. She struggled more often with references to events and situations she didn’t know. History she’d never been taught. Slang she’d never heard.
She could also use the library’s computers to get on the internet. She’d have been allowed to use the computer at Liesel and Chris’s house, but there never seemed to be any time and Sunny felt funny asking permission to use what seemed like such a personal possession. At the library, she watched videos of funny kittens or penguins getting tickled or babies laughing. She watched television commercials for products she’d never heard of and caught pieces of movies and TV programs that made little sense. The comments left on these videos left her just as confused. The blemished seemed to make a habit out of being anonymously cruel.
Liesel said The Wizard of Oz had been her favorite movie as a little girl and had played it for the kids and Sunny. Navigating this new world made Sunny feel like Dorothy stepping out from her black and white house into a world of color so bright it didn’t seem real. Everything in this world seemed like a dream.
Sometimes she left the library with her head aching, too full of information she didn’t know how to process. Other times she turned new concepts over and over in her mind and meditated on them until the voice of the stone angel whispered and helped her piece together what had become a very, very big quilt of ideas. There was so much to learn, so much she’d been denied, and she wanted to fill herself up.
Today at the library, on the internet, she searched for information on the Family of Superior Bliss.
One site had long lists of accusations about the family, none of which were true, including the idea that they sacrificed animals to Satan. Sunny could only laugh at such blatant misconception. Another site showed photos of family members, including the only picture of Sunny herself, the one the news people had used. It had been taken during one of the visits from the social people who came to make sure the children were safe. Sunny clicked away from that site fast. Too many memories. And then, finally, scrolling through pages of links that had nothing to do with her family but another with a father figure that people had labeled a “cult,” she stopped on a simple website detailing local Lebanon County religious history.
This site had pictures of Papa as a young man with his wife next to him, baby John in her arms. Pages of text detailing Papa’s background and how he’d founded the family. She found copies of his early words, so different even from the stories she remembered that had changed during her lifetime. The internet called Papa’s teaching his “doctrine” and described how it had changed over time, beginning as a simple dictate to live a life closer to the Earth and as natural as possible and becoming something “twisted,” was what the website called it.
Sunny felt twisted, reading that. Her fingers moved the mouse, clicking and scrolling, until she had to close the pages and leave the computer to stop herself from feeling sick. If she was still seeing Dr. Braddock she might’ve asked for advice on how to filter all of this, how to file it away into sections that made sense, but Sunny had stopped her appointments when they decided she should get a job. She wasn’t sad about it; Chris and Liesel and Dr. Braddock had met with Sunny and asked her how she felt about her life, and that she should know she could talk to any of them at any time. None of them understood she didn’t need to talk to them when she had the stone angel to listen.
The stone angel wasn’t real. Her voice was Sunny’s voice. She knew that. Just like she knew from deep inside her heart that not everything Papa taught was wrong. Here in the library was a big can with “Reduce, Reuse, Recycle” printed on the lid. Liesel talked about being “green,” which didn’t mean a color but things like turning off lights or buying vegetables from the stands on the side of the road.
And yet…so much of what she’d been raised to believe was wrong. It had to be. Why else would her mother have gotten cancer? Why else would Sunny have three children by the time she was nineteen, something that had seemed natural and normal in Sanctuary and was definitely frowned upon out here. The blemished might be obsessed with sex, but not when babies resulted from it. Why else, she thought as she logged off the computer to go to the parking lot to wait for Christopher, would Papa have died?
The temperature outside the library was hot. Sunny’d grown too used to air conditioning. She pulled a bottle of cola from her bag, too used to the sweet taste and bubbles to give it up in place of water. She looked up at the summer sky, blue and cloudless, and breathed in the scent of hot asphalt. Car exhaust. Her own sweat, which she knew enough now to find repulsive and cover with deodorant, though she hadn’t managed to find the courage to utilize antiperspirant. Too many chemicals, the lingering fear of cancers that started when you blocked your body’s natural functions.
All of these things were part of her new life, the one her mother had insisted she have. Sunny’d thought maybe it was so she could bring the light to Liesel and Chris, maybe even lots of other people, but it had been too difficult to convince anyone else when her own faith had been so shaken. Now she wasn’t sure what her task was supposed to be.
And how was she supposed to love what she wasn’t sure she was supposed to do?
I write to music. Always. Hear what I'm listening to right this very minute as I write. You can listen to what I was listening to when I wrote certain books and stories. And, if you like a song, please purchase it from your favorite retailer so you can support the artist — because downloading music without paying for it is as douchey as pirating ebooks!
