Look Ma - I'm an Author!

Two years ago an author friend put out a call for short stories to fill an anthology.  On a lark and a desire to take more risks I wrote a short story and submitted it for consideration. I wrote about the process in  "Writing's hard" , she whined  Well....after much waiting it is here and I am officially a published author. 



Wandering Weeds: Tales of Rabid Vegetation  The Amazon Kindle version
Wandering Weeds: Tales of Rabid Vegetation  The Amazon Print version
Createspace Print Version

 

The Wicked Weeds Promo:

 

They roll in from unknown places, mysterious and unexplained. They take root, take over, spread to all corners and refuse to be eradicated. no one can say why they came, but there's no arguing that they're up to no good. These plants are out for blood, and getting rid of them will take a certain kind of hero - the best kind.

Twenty-five tales of evil weeds to entertain, enthrall and change the way you look at the unwelcome invaders in your lawn. From feral tumbleweeds to ravenous seaweed, from alien life forms to migrating asteroid fields, in these pages you will find fairy tales and weird westerns, space romps and chilling horror stories.

Scary or silly, wicked or wily, these plants are here to stay.

 

 

And if you are of a mind to Blog hop to the different authors sites, here are some more links:

 

francespauli.blogspot.com

katiemjohn.blogspot.co.uk

mpaxauthor.com/blog

www.adrianeceallaigh.com

vossfoster.blogspot.com

Just Because You Can, Doesn't Mean You Should

Just because you can, doesn’t mean you should. A friend commented on my last blog post and I wanted to respond, but being long winded, over inclusive and verbose it became another blog.

Frances Pauli commented that:
I want to be in love with the characters, NOT intimate with them. Seriously, the weirder and more graphic it is the better it "sells" right now.


I have noticed that there is an increasing “go for the quick and intense” mentality in the general public. Graphic sex in books as a replacement for good writing or a story line is part of this. Culturally, I think it is also reflected in “speed dating”, “hook ups”, and our rather intense but short relationships. As soon as the “high” is beginning to abate we think there is something wrong and we rush to the next intense moment. The Meth addicts I have occasionally worked with have stated that nothing is as intense in life, sex, you name it, as when you are on a meth run. It is really hard for them to let go of that intense high no matter how destructive it might be to the rest of their life. As a culture we are also not very good at delayed gratification. The ability to delay gratification to a future point requires a certain maturity, something else that our culture doesn’t support.

Just as meditation can change brain function, so can our rapid fire video games, special effect movies,  and texting instead of writing (email is the new snail mail);  the graphic sex in movie and books keeps us titillated and like a meth addict on a high. Partially, I think this might be explained by the presence of mirror neurons in the brain.

A mirror neuron is a neuron that fires both when an animal acts and when the animal observes the same action performed by another.^[1][2] Thus, the neuron "mirrors" the behavior of the other, as though the observer were itself acting.  Wikipedia. 

So all that graphic sex we are reading about, our brain thinks we are experiencing on some level.  The sex, violence, intense music, etc., creates high which is very addictive.  We don’t know how to slow down, to see the beauty around us in simple and quiet things.  We become instantly bored and anxious when our systems aren't amped up, we reach for something exciting like a junkie looking for the next fix and like a junkie we are developing tolerance and need bigger and bigger doses to get the same effect.  Books get sexually more graphic to appeal enough to be purchased.  It is one ugly cycle.

This leads me to something else I have been thinking about lately and my next blog which will be titled "Love is Just a Feeling".

What Happened to Good Writing?

Whatever happened to good writing? And I don’t mean knowing where to place a comma or a period. Jane Austin apparently was dreadful at it, but she had a fabulous grasp of character, plot and story development. I have a Kindle, and I love my Kindle because of its ability to store several books for me to read without the weight of the actual tome. Most of the books I get are free which probably explains the quality of what I am getting. But I am sure tired of porn billed as a story. I wish the publisher notes were more honest, something on the lines of:


Bored woman of an uncertain age who has decided she can write, borrows her husband porn collection and writes pages of sex loosely strung together by a plot line that is the usual contrivance of hot male Vampire meets teenage looking female vampire and neither one can keep their hands off one another as they look for and kill the evil Werewolf. You will want to read this hot romance because you too are bored, shallow and are secretly a voyeur regarding other people’s sex lives.

Had it been an accurate description, I would have passed. I found myself forwarding through the sex scenes out of sheer boredom. IF I had to read one more sentence with “his throbbing dick….” I was going to throw something. I wanted character, plot, and suspense – ok….I wanted Harry Potter type writing for free. I don’t know about you, but I really didn’t need it graphically shown to me that Rhett Butler had more than proved his abilities to Scarlet O’Hara's satisfaction after he lost his temper, carried her upstairs and the next scene in the movie is the morning after and there she is in bed, a happy little lady with a perky disposition and a smile on her face. Go Rhett!

Being able to put gas in your car doesn’t make you a mechanic, nor does knowing where a comma goes make you a writer. There are plenty of great books for free that can be downloaded to the Kindle – Jane Austin included – I need to quit expecting good modern writing for free and revisit some of the great authors of yesterday.

Write On

I think to myself everyday that I need to blog, and then bam (!) another day goes by and no blog. Suddenly, I am in danger of becoming an inconsistent, unreliable writer. I may already be in danger of being a whiney, boring one - but that is a different issue. Francis Pauli is a writer, not someone that wants to write, she is someone that HAS to write - therefore she is a writer. She has a blog called Speculative Friction and in it once a week, she writes about writing and getting published, etc. Her latest musings were about how anyone can write, even the dental hygienist (this discovery being made while the said hygienist was staring down her throat and doing important cleaning type things). This sparked a short conversation between us regarding whether anyone can write. My position being that generally when people say they want to write a book, what they are really saying is that they want to be published and turn out to be the next Stephanie Meyers or JK Rowlings. Francis, if I understood her correctly, feels that some people just have to write, that the stories are just brewing and crave to be written, Like I said she is a writer, I'm not. Oh, I can write, but I don't have any burning desire to, other than to irriate Jon (not very noble and minus 50 DKP for me). No, I write for a completely different reason, because I hate it. So why do I do it? Well, every year at the turn of the year, my youngest and I go to lunch and at some point she grabs a napkin, I provide a pen and we create our "Next year's agenda". Well this last year - I wrote on the napkin that I would take more risks, I would write more, of course I'm thinking journal - what I had for breakfast type stuff. I also made an off hand remark to a friend about "how I don't pretend to be perfect", caught myself and said "actually, I do". She just looked at me and said "nice save". Sigh, so....why do I write because it is a risk, it rips the veil of pretending to be perfect and forces me to live a more honest life, well sort of - ok, let's just settle for it is a risk.



I think we should all risk more, push the boundaries of our comfort, follow our hearts and not let anyone tell us differently. I may not understand Francis' need to write, but I do understand the need to ride - so then again maybe we do understand each other more than we know.