I may be crazy. Ah hell, I might as well own it, right? I am crazy.

I just signed up for Camp NaNoWriMo for June. Camp NaNoWriMo is the same as regular NaNoWriMo but it takes place in June or August rather than November.

I signed up because I’ve really been struggling with writing new fiction this year. I’ve created several poems I’m really fond of, but when it comes to fiction I haven’t written anything new all year. I’ve re-written a few stories, and I’m up to my eyeballs with HTRYN revisions on Twixt, but brand new from nothing drafts? Nada. In five months. That’s unacceptable.

So, that’s where Camp NaNoWriMo comes in.

I have a story I’m meant to be working on with Danica. It’s called Hollow Children and the idea is that I’m going to write it and then she will illustrate it. I’ve decided to make it my Camp NaNo project. Perhaps the daily word counts, accountability and a NaNo-light atmosphere will help me get it done. It will then sit for a few months until I find time to revise it, but it will be written and maybe that will break through this wall in my brain that is keeping me from getting any new fiction written.

Or, maybe I’m just crazy.

This entry concludes the Blogging from A to Z challenge! Yay! I’ll be doing a W1S1 summary post for the month of April tomorrow but after that I won’t be blogging before next week. At that point I’ll do a sum-up post for Blogging from A to Z, the Platform Challenge and the April Poem a Day Challenge. Thank you to all my existing readers for sticking around while I did this blogging challenge, and welcome aboard to the new readers who found me because of it. You’re awesome. All of you.

Z is for zombie. It’s also for Zamboni. Sadly I don’t have any zombie or Zamboni photographs handy that wouldn’t require effort to locate and edit, so I went with this picture. It’s not apocalyptic-y, but it’s kinda forlorn, so… Close enough

So yes. Z is for zombie and Zamboni. A couple years ago my NaNoWriMo novel was a zombie novel set in Edmonton which I, oh so cleverly, titled Deadmonton The spark that set me thinking about Deadmonton was the idea of having a book which included a scene where a zombie gets killed with a zamboni.

Deadmonton, in its current incarnation is deeply flawed and I’m not sure I’m ever going to get around to fixing it, to be honest. The good news is that means I can share a scene from it with you here. Which scene? Well, the zombie vs Zamboni scene of course. This scene has a lot of problems with it, but if you read it without your editor hat on, it’s kinda fun too.

Warning: There is plenty of violence and profanity in this scene.

Zombie Vs Zamboni
(A Deadmonton excerpt)

Leading up to this scene Ashley was skating on freshly Zamboni-ed ice at Hawrelak Park when zombies start coming from all directions and surrounding her. The driver of the Zamboni has helped her onto the Zamboni, presumably to get away.

(more…)

This is my husband Jo. I call this picture of him ‘Gameface’ because when I took it we were in the lab and he was doing all sorts of science-y stuff with like test tubes and pipettes and stuff. I think Jo is pretty freaking awesome, (so much so that I commissioned a theme song for him a couple years ago for Christmas. Much of it won’t make sense unless you played WoW with us, but it’s still worth a listen ). We’ve been married for about 7 years now and together for closer to 11.

We talk about a lot of things around our house but a theme that recurs again and again in our conversations is gender. The perceptions of gender, the portrayals of it in fiction and popular media, that sort of thing.

When I asked Jo to do a guest blog this month he said he had just the thing, and that it had something to do with chickens. Turns out, we don’t get to hear about chickens, but his post does include turkeys, which are almost as awesome, so that’s okay

~*~

I was asked to do a guest column focusing on the letter W, and I wasn’t sure where to settle. I am a scientist, a biochemist specifically, but my interests extend beyond that. The first thing that comes to mind (that is science related) with this letter is tryptophan. This is an amino acid—an essential amino acid famously mentioned on Seinfeld!(1)—but the relationship to the letter “W” comes from the shorthand notation we use to refer to it. As I often point out to student in my classes, biochemists are lazy and would rather write three letters—or maybe just one, if they can get away with it—instead of the full name for something. Tryptophan is typically written as either Trp or W (T was already taken by threonine)—and you can remember this if you pronounce the word “twyptophan”, as if you have some kind of speech impediment. Ha ha, such laughs we have in science! That said, the extent of my dialogue is only as long as a Kilgore Trout novel.

So that got me thinking about W in other ways. W is for “Woman”, both as the straight up letter thing, but also in a more obscure way. Tryptophan, as Seinfeld implies, is abundant in turkey, which leads me to the other way that W and Women come together. In humans, at the genetic level, women are homogametic (XX) for the sex chromosomes while males are heterogametic (XY); the Y chromosome is a degenerate version of the X chromosome and that of course leads to a wealth of joke material regarding remote controls and sexual relations in general. But in turkeys (also other birds, insects and other species) the males are homogametic (ZZ) while females are heterogametic (WZ). This has an immediate repercussion—particularly if someone makes a joke about roosters having inferior chromosomes based on them having an X/Y chromosome system instead of the W/Z. Not that I think hens are inferior to roosters because they have degenerate chromosomes!

Variations on this occur, which leads to one of my other interests regarding sexual ambiguity. It is never as simple as having two options—and in moths and butterflies the difference between females and males may extend from WZ/ZZ to Z/ZZ or WZZ/ZZZZ or further, making the situation much more interesting. The lines between woman and men are never as clear as we like to think, not even at the genetic level.

Kate Bornstein is one of my heroes, and if you have never read the book “Gender Outlaw” I can’t recommend it highly enough. I have loathed gender-based generalizations for as long as I can remember; awareness of the genetic spectrum as well as the phenotypic spectrum of gender/orientation is a huge eye-opener for tolerance and awareness. When I was a grad student I wore skirts regularly; I have never minded being mistaken for a woman; and although I have never identified as female I was always a little jealous of the clothing options (especially formal wear!). One of my tattoos revolves around gender ambiguity and combines male and female symbology as a core part of the design. I do not considered myself “straight” but as slightly bent.

So what is the end message here? “W” is for women—no matter what their chromosome composition—and I love them all.

References:
(1) Seinfeld script for episode 162 “The Merv Griffin Show” http://www.seinology.com/scripts/script-162.shtml
Kate Bornstein’sWeblog: http://katebornstein.typepad.com/

~*~

In case you didn’t catch the mouse over, that picture up there? That’s one of Jo’s tattoos.

Did you see how he ended his post with ‘I love them all’? He did that to drive me bonkers. Anytime someone says they love/hate/whatever all of anything (including groups of people) that I’m like ‘Argh! You do not! You don’t know them all! Rawr! Rage!’ Well, okay, not so much the rage, but definitely the rawr ;0)

Anyway, I love Jo’s point about how there is a spectrum of gender identities (and sexuality) even at the genetic level. You can’t just put people into box #1 or box #2 and expect them to fit. I feel like that idea is beginning to creep more and more into my work. For example, I had a lot of fun when I was working on See The Sky Again (an Aphanasian novel that is still very much a WIP) in taking the usual gender roles, standing them on their heads and then turning them inside out.

If you haven’t quite heard enough from Jo, you’re in lucky. Last night we went to the premiere of the documentary ‘Always Forward‘ by PhotonMotion. The documentary is about the Biochemistry department at the University of Alberta, which happens to be where Jo works and teaches. He’s featured in the movie (mostly near the beginning) with his super awesome 3d models making appearances throughout. I thought he looked a little un-used to being in front of the camera, but the footage of him lecturing his class really shows the Jo I know.

~*~

This blog post is part of the Blogging from A to Z challenge over the month of April and was brought to you by Jo Parrish and the letter W. I can’t believe the month is almost over (though I’m pretty thankful LOL). Tomorrow I’ll be tackling the letter X.

This post is about video games. I was originally going to write about the video games I play these days, but then I had a better idea. Let me tell you about a fantastic video game that was never made.

Abbadon’s Curse.

Abbadon’s Curse is a game I wanted to create over ten years ago. I looked over the main game description document that I gave to the developers and it looks like it was created in early 2002 and I’d been working on stuff for the game long before I began that file.

Abbadon’s Curse was going to be fantastic. It was an MMORPG with all of the usual MMORPG-type things in it, but there were a lot of other cool things that I hadn’t seen done in games up until that point. Night and day, for example, with certain spells and abilities only being able to be used in one or the other. Capes which could be designed (like tabards are now in WoW) to have a unique look for each guild (or character). It was also going to be very story-centric, very lore-based.

The game was set in the world of Aphanasia. A place where, upon the death of her son in battle, she blessed that land so that any who died in battle would not remain dead but rise up once more to fight again. Unfortunately, despite the fact her intentions may have been good, in reality her blessing turned out to be more like a curse.  Dun dun dun.

Moonberrys were also very important in that world, as was the magical tree they came from. They were especially important to a race of lizard-men called the Urbagdú or the Reptar who used them in every part of their society. The wise men used the berries for medicines, the mages for magic and the warriors used shed boughs from the trees for weapons. Moonberries were even the closest thing the society had to a currency.

In developing the game and it’s storyline we focused a lot on the reptar because they were going to be our first set of adversaries (you know, after everyone was done leveling off rats, and moving on to wolves, and then…) and we needed to give them depth and story. We had several other races in mind we were going to use as spice in our first release and make more important in the future. The Reptar were found mostly in and around the swamp, but the mountains were home to a race of shadow elves, and pirates tended to prowl the coastlines. And of course, what kind of RPGMMO would be complete without vampires? We had them too… In fact, one of our important, named NPCs was a vampiric pirate

In addition to our races and plots and maps and game design documents, we also had a series of gods for the denizens of Aphanasia to worship (the icons for each are along the bottom there). Abbadon, Calamyr, Rakkir (named after a character I used to RP with), Xaphan and the Dragon Gods.

Alas the game fell apart. I totally blame myself. I was the lead on the game, the story was mine, the bulk of the world development was mine, and it was my work that filled the game design documents, but I can’t program. Not even a little. I wasn’t able to provide strong leadership to the programming team and I think it was largely because of my ignorance in programming. I couldn’t set reasonable timelines or expectations and I didn’t know how to crack the whip.

I’m still very sad this game never got to become a reality, but I was determined not to allow the insane amounts of work I’d put into the world development for it to go to waste. That’s why, if you’ve read any of my Aphanasian stories, a lot of this stuff will sound familiar to you.

The moonberry tree got a bit of a makeover, and I set my stories in a time after Abbadon’s curse has ceased to exist (so far anyway LoL). I tweaked my races and my world to suit the world of fiction better than that of video games, but the skeleton of that world definitely comes from what I developed for a video game.

~ Shadows ~ Sister Margaret ~ Lost and Found ~ Shades of Green ~ There’s Always a Catch ~ The Legend of the First Reptar ~

All the above stories are set in Aphanasia, and most of them can be read for free, if you’re interested. It looks like the e-zine that published The Legend of the First Reptar is no longer in existence, but the other stories are all still available (except Shadows which I just finished LOL)

So, yeah. While I’m terribly sad that Abbadon’s Curse will never be a game you can download and play (barring a minor miracle anyway LoL) I’m pretty pleased with myself that I managed to continue to use the world I’d created for it, making it even more lush, detailed and populated than I had for the game.

~*~

This blog post is part of the Blogging from A to Z challenge over the month of April and was brought to you by the letter V for Video Game. Tomorrow my husband Jo will be doing a guest blog. He won’t even tell me what it’s going to be about except that it has something to do with chickens. I hope you’ll stop by, it ought to be entertaining

I’m incredibly pleased to announce that I’ve sold my short story “Crimes Against Humanity” to The WiFiles. “Crimes Against Humanity” is scheduled to be their very first story of 2013 and go live on January 6, 2013.

The Publishing Editor, Jay said of my submission, “I’m a sucker for a good zombie tale, especially when humanity is at the forefront of the tale (as opposed to schlock gore) so this could have been written for my personal taste.” which made me all happy-glowy. Yay!

Interestingly, three out of my four last sales were all zombie-related works. If I’m not careful I may end up typecast as a zombie writer LOL I love zombies, but they aren’t all I write about, honest

Ugh rather succinctly sums up how I’m feeling today, and so it’s my U word.

I feel like I’m coming down with something so I’m going to try and take it easy today, but my to-do list is pretty big so we’ll see how successful I am.

So, what’s a girl to do on an Ugh day when she still has to blog? Wordle!

My daughter, Danica, first introduced me to Wordle when she was using it for a school project but Peggy Eddleman reminded me about it in her blog post this morning. Wordle makes spiffy word clouds out of whatever words or URL you tell it to check out. Today I went and dumped the entire text of Shadows in to see what the results would look like. Voila:

In addition to being a lot of fun, I can see several practical uses for Wordle. For example, if you do like I did and dump your novel into it you’ll be given a glance of what your saying the most, which may help you identify themes or problems. If your story is about vampires, for example, but the word unicorn is the biggest one in the cloud, you may have a problem

You can also plug an rss feed url in and see the keywords for a blog. I did it with my blog and was quite surprised by the results:

It turns out I’m not blogging about what I thought I was. This is something I’ll have to look at again when this month is over and my ability to think coherently has returned. In the meantime, pretty!

~*~

This blog post is part of the Blogging from A to Z challenge over the month of April and was brought to you by Peggy Eddleman and the letter U. Tomorrow I’ll be blogging about video games. Or, that’s the plan at least.

While I was struggling to figure out what I was going to write about for today (it’s T day on the Blogging from A to Z Challenge) I was saved by Kern Windwraith when she tagged me for the Lucky Seven meme. Tagged starts with T, so yay!

Unfortunately that means I have to share some uneditted first draft-y badness, which, ya know, isn’t my favourite, but it will get the job done. Actually, I’m kinda lucky because though the section of my WIP that is covered by this meme is slated for straight-up deletion it’s not terribad and it really shows the voice of my protagonist, Tannis.

S was going to be all about the stories I’ve written that were set in Aphanasia and started with the letter S (Shades of Green, Sister Margaret and Shadows) but I’m tired. This month of blogging thing is a lot of work, and combining it with the other two challenges I did was a mistake. So, I’m going to be lazy today. Today S is all about Shades of Green.

Available at Sam’s Dot Bookstore

Shades of Green was a breakthrough for me. It was the first time anything I’d written was published in a physical form where I was the sole author. My work had been included in a few anthologys or collections, but it’s not quite the same as being the only name on the cover. The only person with words on the pages. It’s not a novel though, so while it checked a lot of boxes on my Bucket List, that one is still empty.

The process of publishing this book was an eye-opening one and while the sales weren’t especially exciting, the education was very, very worthwhile

My back cover text and the endorsement Marge Simon gave the novella are below. If you’re intrigued at all you can click the cover image above and it will take you to a page where you can read the first chapter for free.

Enjoy!

~*~

Z’thandra, the last swamp elf in Aphanasia, lives with the Reptar, a fierce race of lizard-people, most of whom resent her presence and want her gone from their village. When she discovers a human in the swamp and falls in love with him she must face the most difficult decision of her life. Will she pursue a life of happiness with the man she loves and in doing so condemn the Reptar to extinction, or will she chose to sacrifice her future to offer them hope? In the end the choice she makes will affect the Reptar for generations.

“Straight fantasy has to be really good to hold my interest. “Shades of Green” is absolutely excellent! Among the best fantasies I’ve read, a tale that unfolded smoothly and drew me in from the start. You’ll find yourself sincerely concerned for young Z’thandra and her plight. Parrish is one talented writer!”

-Marge Simon, Stoker winner, VECTORS: A Week in the Death of a Planet, 2008.

~*~

This blog post is part of the Blogging from A to Z challenge over the month of April and was brought to you by the letter S. If you come by on Monday I’ll be talking about something that begins with the letter T… I have no idea what that will be, but it’ll be T-rific! :-p

The first annual NaNoLJers anthology is done, and doesn’t it look pretty?

NaNoLJers is a livejournal community run by Amber Stults (as of December 2011) which I founded in 2005.I created it selfishly, so that I’d have a group of people I would feel accountable to in regard to my NaNoWriMo novel. On the unselfish side of my motivations, you have the fact I truly wanted to help other people achieve their NaNoWriMo goals too.

Since 2005 NaNoLJers has grown into a community of about 1,000 people but it’s really quiet. Like, really, really quiet, except in May, October and November. That’s because in May we run a writing challenge called Writo De Mayo. November is obviously all about NaNoWriMo and October is about pre-NaNo excitement LOL Still, there are writing prompts, exercises and the like posted on a regular basis (some of them by yours truly) and a great bunch of people are members. If you poke them just right they sometimes even come out to chat outside of the busy periods. Sometimes…

Anyway, before I stepped down as the community leader I started what I hope will become a NaNoLJers tradition — the annual anthology.

Putting together the guidelines was a little tricky and required a lot of tinkering. The thing about NaNoLJers (gawd, could I say that word anymore? LOL) is that we’ve got members at every stage of their writing careers. Some are professional writers and some are just starting out. I wanted to find a way to showcase everyone’s work no matter where they fit on the spectrum. I think we managed it here. Members of the community didn’t submit work for consideration, they submitted it for publication. That way there was no judgement. Less fear. Make no mistake, putting your work ‘out there’ for people to read for the first time (especially) is terrifying. I wanted to minimize that.

I decided to call this anthology Winding Path for three reasons:

1. The title fit with the cover image that we, as a writing community, had chosen to use as the cover.
2. One of the pieces sent in for inclusion was titled Winding Path
3. This anthology took a very winding path toward completion. First there was the endless tweaking of the guidelines for ‘submission’ and then deadlines kept getting pushed back, and finally I had some personal issues with focus and getting things done that pushed back it’s completion even further.

It’s done now, and looks pretty spiffy, even if I do say so myself. It was the first time I’d ever done the entire layout for a .pdf myself (Jo does that stuff for Niteblade) and I learned a crapload of things in the process. That should hopefully make things go smoother next time I do a layout. I tried to do the cover design but then the following conversation took place:

Me: *grumble, swear, grumble*
Jo: You okay?
Me: No. I’m not a graphics person. I don’t do graphics, I do words!
Jo: I do graphics. For a living, even. *gently takes my laptop away*

I think he did a gorgeous job, far better than I could have.

So, if you’re curious you can download a copy of the NaNoLJers Anthology (completely free) at our community page:

~ Winding Path ~

It contains stories by Clare Revell, Amber Stults, Debbie Gorsuch, Emi Bullard, Reb Kreyling, Jade Brooke and yours truly. I’m hoping that next year we’ll have even greater interest and a bigger collection to show for it at the end. If you think you’d like to be a part of that, just join the community and keep an eye open for the guidelines I’ll be putting up sometime around June. Or just read the anthology. It’s all good.

My zombie munchkin story (oh yes, you did read that right), “…Oh My!” has found a home with Kzine and I couldn’t be happier. The release date hasn’t been set yet, but you can bet I’ll tell you all about it as soon as it is.