Writer, Your Baby is Ugly: Time.

Saturday, May 18, 2013

Time.

Tick.

Tick...

Eight hours of work a day, usually more....

Tick...

Eight hours of sleep. I need more, I usually get less.

Tick...

Shower, breakfast, lunch, dinner...

Tick...

Did I mention we live on a mini-farm? Animals to care for, feed, water, milk; stalls and paddocks and henhouses and rabbit cages to clean; dogs to bathe and groom, mice and snakes and geese and ducks and turkeys and guineas, guinea pigs and real meat pigs (the guinea pigs are just a pair as pets, so we won't eat those), bees to tend and yes, we do try to grow a few veggies onsite...

TickTockTickTockTickTockTickTockTickTock!!!

Oh, and the children - did I mention the children? Beautiful children, a wonderful thirteen year old daughter who helps out a ton, and a rambunctious three year old boy who is still alive because he is supernaturally cute. Also need feeding; the boy still requires shepherding in his ongoing potty training. The daughter has art classes, and there has to be some family time now and then.

BONG!

Did I mention we also manage to have a few friends we visit now and then?

So who has time to write?

You've heard all this before. I'm not going to pretend to tell anyone how to manage their priorities, or judge them if they choose different priorities than mine. Your life, your responsibility, your decision.

But I want to write. I need to write.

How am I going to write?

I manage, haphazardly, in stolen evenings and insomniac midnights. There's never enough time, but I take what I can get.

I wrote a flash fiction and submitted it for online publication. I edit the book that's closest to publication readiness. I resist the urge to edit the other book that's mostly done, or the one that's done but totally unedited, or any of the three or four (five?) that are started and well along, but not quite yet wrapped up.

Apparently, I've been writing somewhere. That many open projects don't just creep in under the door and set up among the dust bunnies like ants. The words in those files are mine, the work of several NaNoWriMo's and stolen evenings and insomniac midnights.

Hm. Looks like I better get going - we're out of hay for the horses and goats and rabbits and guinea pigs. The delivery won't make it till next week, so we have to run to the feed store and throw a bail in the trunk.

If you see me on the road, be careful. I'm a pretty safe driver, but...

I'm probably writing.

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Bubbler

Science Fiction (Space)
~98k words, Completed
Seeking representation.

Tam is a Hydran who can’t breathe water.

He’s smart, handsome, and noble born. He just wants to make friends and maybe get the girl, but he’s a bubbler. He thinks his father is ashamed of his handicap and he’s stuck in an interstellar fishtank rooming with a standard human who panics over a little drowning.

He hasn’t settled in at Dad’s new assignment before an invasion has him sabotaging a merchanter, suffering prolonged vacuum, saving thousands more than once, and trying to prevent a suicidal rebellion via sign language from the confines of a regeneration tank. He’s killed his dad and lost his bride to be, been separated from his only friend, and if he can’t talk sense into a room full of panicked diplomats, a hundred worlds will be pulled out of orbit to die.

Being almost seventeen is hard.

Hush

Science Fiction (Post-Apocalytpic)
~100k words, Completed
Seeking representation.

Premise: Society has reverted to small forts and homesteaders; corporations have replaced both government and the Balkanized warlords that appear in the anarchy after a cataclysm.
Corp-trained guards protect forts against rabid ghouls and provide armed daycare for the children while adults farm. While protecting one child, one guard discovers a secret that will wreck the civil order.

Lauren Perez protects children from savagery and contagion. Dealing with old fashioned depravity was never in the job description.

Despite martial armature and training, Lauren feels like antiquated furniture kept only to maintain tradition. She’s stationed at a fort no longer plagued by draugs, ghoulish wrecks scorched by light and drawn by sound. Caulfields like Lauren are far from obsolete, yet she’s somehow reduced to day nanny and peacekeeper.

That’s about to change.

High on prosperity and safety, Lauren’s fort requests decreased tithes to the corporate patron that provides trade trains and Caulfields. Draugs assault the fort, dropped nearby as a covert corporate reminder of the need for their vital services. Complacency shattered, Fort Hogan receives a new commander fighting his own demons.

Draug contagion invades the fort and Lauren faces panicked homesteaders, a rising death toll and odd behavior from her lover, the new commander. Children vanish but his orders block investigation. For the first time, Lauren’s instincts disagree with training and protocol.

She disobeys orders and discovers not only one missing child, but the harsh truth of corporate duplicity. Draugs harry her through dark woods and she doesn’t have bullets enough to defend them both. Lauren must choose: survive to bring the explosive secret home, or follow her calling to save the child.

Lauren’s accepted draugs as a part of life; now she must deal with the real monsters.

Cadagar's Justice

Science Fiction (Space)
Work in Progress.

Advocate Lexa hates that Tradition could absolve a nobleman of a witnessed and confessed massacre. Worse is being assigned to his defense.

She cringed when her client, heir apparent to the greatest house on Pellis, testified he’d slaughtered the family of a rival noble house in cold blood, then insisted on summary sentence. This case she couldn’t win has passed up to the highest court because of its explosive nature, yet he remains a hostile witness in his own defense.

She’d anticipated belligerence, not a charming but sad Gallant.

She never expected pity for the murderer, or to believe he should be acquitted. She never thought here, in the Temple of Law, she’d be tangled in interstellar politics and witness assassinations. She didn't expect a finger in the mail.

Pellans had been designed as troops for a war that ended before they were deployed. Twice human size, with teeth, claws, fur and a deadly rage, they’d been assigned en masse to terraform this world, and had developed rigid customs to curtail their warlike natures. The Traditions were not pointless, and he had followed that code to the letter.

Lexa must discover what would drive the ideal noble son to commit the most heinous of all sins, then convince the High Council to spare him against his will, and make the true culprits pay for their crimes.

Writer, Your Baby is Ugly

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Saturday, May 18, 2013

Time.

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