My instructions were to write six interesting things about myself or my work and then recommend six other blogs for visiting. I got the impression, though the rules never said outright, that choosing writers’ or writing-related blogs would be better than not.

Okay, so six interesting things about myself or my work. That’s quite tricky really…*thinks*

1. I met my husband online on a silly photo-rating website. He traveled to come meet me in order to model for some pictures I wanted taken, and despite my best intentions I fell in love with him almost immediately. We were engaged within four months of meeting and married on October 31st a few years ago. We wore costumes — he and our daughter dressed up as pirates and I was a wench.

2. I am ridiculously addicted to World of Warcraft. Thankfully, for family peace, my husband and daughter both play as well. Danica is far less addicted than Jo or I, which I think is definitely a good thing, but it’s nice to have the game as something we can all do together. It’s not a traditional family activity, I grant you, but we make sure to do lots of things with actual face-time as well, so I think it’s all good

3. My Aphanasian novels, Swamp Story* and Shadows are about to be joined by another. I plan to write a third story set in Aphanasia this November for NaNoWriMo. “See The Sky Again” will tell the tragic story of the mountain elf A’nuntu. What makes this extra cool to me is that A’nuntu makes a small but pivotal appearance in Shadows, continuing my trend of having all the Aphanasian novels connected in some way.

4. I’m currently in the second year of a four year degree; a B.A. with a double major — Psychology and English. I am incredibly busy so I tend to take one or two courses at a time with long stretches in between. My goal is to finish it before I’m 40, and sadly it may take that long. That’s okay though, because I really enjoy the courses…mostly. Statistics sucked, but in the end I got an A

5. The only television I watch are re-runs of Law and Order while I’m working out every afternoon, and Doctor Who which we tape on our VCR (no TiVo here) and watch later as a family.

6. I enjoy cooking and baking (though I’m not very fond of cleaning up afterward) when I’m making something special, but day-to-day standard meals bore the crap out of me.

Bonus: I’m attending the World Fantasy convention in Calgary this year. It will be my first convention and I’m equally nervous and excited. Okay, perhaps a bit more excited than nervous…a bit

Now for the fun part…picking six of my favorite writing-related blogs. For the record these are in no particular order.

1. BD Wilson: BD is one of my best friends and a phenomenal writer. Best of all, she’s promised that when she becomes a world famous author she won’t forget me. Yay!

2. Carrie Jones: Carrie rocks. She’s hilarious, has an awesome dog, is running for office and is an amazing writer. Her novel, Tips on Having a Gay (ex)Boyfriend is incredible. I’ve not read Love (and Other Uses for Duct Tape) yet, but it’s totally on my list, and I intend to buy Need as soon as it hits the shelves.

3. Jim C. Hines: Have you read Jim’s Goblin series? If you haven’t you totally should. You should also be anxiously awaiting his Princess series as I am. Jim’s a great writer and his blog is not to be missed — where else can you find gay fire-spiders and LoL book covers?

4. Amber Stults: Amber is a friend, writer, book reviewer and book blogger. Her website always has loads of interesting links and information and I drop by at least once a week just to look around. You should too.

5. Greg Schwartz: Greg is a wonderful poet who I had the pleasure of meeting through Niteblade. I love his work and I find his informative posts about what markets are looking for what and such very helpful. If you like dark poetry or market information, this is a blog worth visiting.

6. NaNoLJers: It’s probably against the rules for me to link to this blog because I know damn well they aren’t going to do this meme no matter how many times I tag them. I know that, because I run it LOL NaNoLJers is a friendly NaNo-centric writing group that was formed to cheer its members toward victory during NaNoWriMo. It has since grown and now has writing exercises posted twice a week, a word of the week every Wednesday and we host our own NaNo-like writing challenge in May called Writo de Mayo.

Voila! I’m done. I hope you enjoyed getting to know a bit more about me, and that you visit these very awesome links.

*formerly known as Blood and Stone

It’s a short poem, a rictameter (I loves me some rictameters) but I think it’s packed full of goodness. I hope you agree

I’ve also got a set of four poems published at The Monsters Next Door where I am in the awesome position of sharing a table of contents with several poets and authors I’ve had the honor of publishing in Niteblade. I’m in good company there and after you check out my poems it would be well worth your time to check out some of the other great work there. For real

First, my short story Axe was chosen to appear in the first ever print edition of Demon Minds. Yay! I was very excited about having it accepted for the online version a few weeks ago, but I’m one of those writers who love, love, loves to see their work in actual print. Axe is the most disturbing story I’ve ever written, though, so it’s exciting and nerve-wracking to know it is going to print.

Also in the category of nerve-wracking is that I heard back from one of the agents I’d queried about Blood and Stone (which I’ve renamed Swamp Story). She requested a partial. *squee* I’m so excited, but nervous too. Keep your fingers crossed for me…

But wait, there’s more!

The day before yesterday I got an email from Carolyn Clink inviting me to read some of my poetry at an open mic event during World Fantasy. I don’t intend to read, but I hope to attend and listen, and I did do a little fan-girl squeal and bounce in my seat at reading the email. It was sent to me and a few other people, but we were all mentioned by name in the body of the email. Yes, I really did think ‘Oh my god, Carolyn Clink wrote me an email, she totally knows I’m alive!’. Yup. For those of you not familiar with Carolyn, she’s a very talented poet and she is married to Robert J. Sawyer. Yup. So full of awesome.

But, more about yesterday…

I’d entered a contest a few days ago and I got the email yesterday that I’d won! I would include a link here to the book I won, but um…I don’t have the link yet. Once I do, I’ll share it

Last, but certainly not least, my copies of Lost Innocence arrived yesterday. They look amazing! I can’t wait for people to see them, they are so gorgeous. Now I just need to figure out how to get them to the post office (I don’t drive and 40 books are heavy). I suspect they will be being mailed out in waves.

So yes, I had a fantastic day yesterday. Have you ever had a day like that? I’d love to hear about it.

• The cover is amazing. Amazing. Bart Willard is one talented artist.
• The front cover has a quote from Nate Kenyon saying, “…a knockout collection from some very talented writers.” I’m one of those writers. Wheee!
• My story, Spoiled Picnic, is one of the stories blurbed on the back cover.
• Spoiled Picnic is the very first story in the anthology. The first one. That, hopefully, means that everyone who buys the book will read my story first. How cool is that?

So yes, I was blown away by Abominations before I even started reading, but now that I’ve devoured it, from cover to cover, I love it even more. Every author’s take on the idea of Abominations was unique and interesting. I think my two favorite stories were ‘WHATEVER HAPPENED TO BABY CHARLES?’ by John Teehan and ‘STARVELITO’ by Lon Prater. Both of them are absolutely brilliant.

If you haven’t done it already and you like horror stories, you really ought to pick up a copy of Abominations, and trust me when I say I’d tell you that even if my own story wasn’t in it. Really. It’s a killer book

Lost Innocence

It’s available now by clicking the cover image above. Check it out, you can see the first ten pages completely free and I’d love to hear what you think about the layout which is slightly different than what we use for the magazine.

I’m obsessively checking the page for sales and reviews as well (we’ve had some of the former, none of the latter yet) and the only rating so far is my own LOL Not that I’m biased or anything, but I gave it a six out of five

My “workshop” is actually going to mostly be a Q&A session in a forum regarding Niteblade, but still I’m nervous. What if no one comes? That would suck LoL I noticed last year there were a couple forums that had no one posting in them and I don’t want to be one of those places.

So please, if you’re attending, and you totally should if you’re a writer, pop by the ‘Meet Rhonda Parrish of Niteblade Magazine’ forum a couple times during the week to keep me company, okay?

Based on my expiriences last year, I also highly reccomend anything run/taught by TC McMullen and Karina Fabian’s world building workshop was also very good.

Go here now to sign up if you haven’t already. All you do is join the mailing list and then in September Lea will send you all the information you need to official register and pick what workshops and such you’re going to attend.

I hope you enjoy the story, I had fun writing it. When I first wrote it it was in 2nd person. I revised it to 3rd because I think it worked better for the story, but I really enjoyed writing from the second person point of view and will likely try it again sometime

Meet Gunter, he’s going to be the main character of a novel I’m working on in my brain at the moment (tentatively planned to follow ‘Deadmonton’ in my “writing schedule” lol). I hope you’re intrigued by him, because I plan to do quite a few exercises with him as I get to know him before I begin writing the novel with him in it

An icy gale forced itself into the narrow alley between the ramshackle buildings. Discarded sheets of newspapers flew up into the air, spun around like frenzied dances then fell back onto the ground, spent.

Gunter stood on the street at the alley’s mouth. Light from a gas lamp post flickered and fluttered, playing games with his facial features. Shading and illuminating them at its whim. The wind picked up again, rushing out of the alley and pelting him with daggers in the guise of dust. Pulling his coat tighter against himself, he wished, not for the first time, for his fur. Alas, as easy as it would be for him to change he would doubtlessly attract attention and that was the opposite of what he wanted right now. Dian was so close he could smell him. He hadn’t followed him halfway around the world to lose him now because he was a bit chilly.

Gunter could hear the distinctive clatter of the wheels and hooves on the cobble stone, a horse-drawn carriage was drawing near. He pressed his back against the building behind him, putting as much distance as possible between himself and the horse. Even so, as the horse drew alongside him its nostrils flared, its eyes grew wild and it skittered sideways giving him a wide berth.

The carriage’s driver cursed and pulled on the reins, struggling to control the frightened animal and keep the carriage from tipping. The two wheels closest to Gunter came off the ground a foot then slammed back down with such force Gunter was surprised to only see splinters of wood fly off rather than the whole wheel shattering.

A noise came from inside the carriage followed by the head of a rather tousled-looking Englishman. The man’s eyes fell on Gunter, the light post illuminating and exaggerating his Eurasian features and golden skin tone. As the carriage raced the corner and began to turn the man yelled, “You there, coolie, go back to your jungle! Your stink is frightening my horse!”

You have no idea how true that is, Gunter thought without humor as he tipped a non-existent hat at the retreating carriage. No idea at all.

This contains a fair bit of foul language, so read at your own risk.

Monday, January 14, 2008 11:06 am

The hospital was on fire. Again. Devon cursed and muttered under his breath. Goddamn homeless people. When were they going to learn not to set the fricking place on fire? When?

He leaned up against the fire truck he’d arrived at the scene in, and watched everyone scurry around. To the untrained eye it would look like chaos, but Devon had been a firefighter for long enough to know what was going on, and he knew, very soon, he’d be going in. He could see it in the way the captain kept glancing over at he and Fred.

Devon took off his helmet, ran his fingers through his raven hair and nudged Fred with his elbow. Fred turned to look at him, eyebrow raised. “Yeah?”

“We’re goin’ in, I expect.”

“Ye ever been in there?” Fred asked with a tilt of his head. Devon noticed that the skinnier man was licking his lips nervously.

“The Camsell? Yeah sure, lotsa times. The bums set it on fire every couple months. Never this bad before though,” he said, looking over at the smoke pouring out of almost a quarter of the windows.

“I hear it’s haunted.”

“Eh, people always say shit like that about old abandoned buildings - especially ones like hospitals where loads of people have died.”

“I guess so,” Fred muttered, and Devon watched his pink tongue dart out and lick at the corner of his mouth again. “I guess so.”

“You don’t believe in all that shit, do you?”

“Who me? Nah.” Fred said.

Devon could see that he was lying. Fuck, he thought. Bad enough I’m here this afternoon, but to be stuck here partnered with the rookie, an apparently superstitious rookie, it was as if the fates were conspiring against him.

Arcane Whispers is available on Amazon. This excites me greatly, far more than it should perhaps, but it feels like a significant step forward.

Someday soon a book with my name on the cover will be on Amazon, but for now, I’ll count this as progress and revel in it