IWW: In the spotlight

If you had told me I’d be speaking in front of people about my book years ago, I wouldn’t have believed you…and I might have thrown up a little.

And if I had committed to speak then, they would have had to drag me in like this:

Even though I did theater in high school, I’ll always had a hard time with crowds. It’s more than being an introvert, it’s an aversion about talking about myself, especially my work.

I’ve met a lot of women who resist talking themselves up, even when it’s appropriate. It’s a pretty hard skill to acquire, and I’m still flabbergasted when people ask me about my work. I still think someone has paid them to be interested.

I pictured my first Q&A would go like this:

Fortunately, my first talk went worlds better than that. WORLDS. However, if you do meet me and ask me about my work or compliment me, please forgive me if I stammer a bit. After years of practice, I can handle that hair question easier, at least. From airports to restaurants, all over the world, people have always wanted to know if this is my real hair.

Do you have to jump start your brain when someone asks about your work? How about if they ask you about your hair?

IWW: It ain’t always easy

Perhaps you’ve seen this in stores?

It’s a firefighter and police officer, though I use those terms loosely. (Where ARE the sparkly-skirted police officers?) The separation of the pants is supposed to convince you that you’re getting more for your buck. But as it comes, it looks like you’re getting the saucy firefighter:

"Who's first to be rescued, lovahs?"

And the short and sparkly skirted police officer,

"Perpetually bendy arm would be great if I had a gun!"

who’s probably chasing this woman:

"MARDI GRAS!!!!"

Best money I ever spent.

Halloween 2011

I really like the Barbie “I can do…” series, but they’re cutting a lot of corners here. Taekwondo Barbie is pretty complete. She even comes with accessories.

"Come at me, and it'll take a surgeon to remove this water bottle from your ass."

The diver, however, lacks some essential gear.

"The mask and weight belt are all I need, right?"

And the astronaut is a little shortsighted.

"Kiss my ass, radiation."

It’s a race to see what kills her first.

For firefighter Barbie, even if I put the Mardi Gras pants on her, she still looks like a bad costume.

Is anyone else seeing Michael Jackson circa Thriller?

Belly shirt, pleather coat, and culottes. I’m pretty sure all firefighters wear this. Or at least, the sexy ones do.

At least there’s paleontologist Barbie. She’s pretty complete.

SPARKLY BONES!

Still with action culottes, but what are ya gonna do?

Whose with me for Halloween 2012? I call sexy firefighter! I hate pants anyway.

IWW: The Love Triangle

Action movies take three to tango, a wild dance of hero/villain/captive culminating in some serious high-wire fighting over pits of rabid crocodiles.

Am I right?

The villain has more style, loves a shiny, jagged knife (because she wants that shit up close and personal), and has a pet that’s cooler than yours. Not a dog or a cat, something more…MORE. Like a baby panda.

Also, she builds her lair beneath an active volcano

Nailed it.

The hero’s in black ops, which I assumed meant she wore lots of black. She’s ex-CIA, ex-military, ex-coast guard, and an ex-librarian because I like to read. She uses a gun because killing from a distance is somehow humane.

Doesn't need to see the light die in your eyes

But because we’re hard fucking core, we can’t use weapons to hurt each other. That shit’s for babies who don’t KUNG FU.

Ditch gun!

Lose knife!

Battle royale under an exploding volcano…full of crocodiles (not pictured, but trust me, they’re down there)!

Body slam with pithy comment!

Mind if I drop in?

Flying kick with lamer comment! (The villain is always cleverer than the hero. See: Schwarzenegger, Arnold.)

Sorry, I've got to take out the trash!

After several death defying jumps over lava crocs, the hero wins, saves the captive and either kills the villain or leads her away in cuffs.

Let's get this panda back where he belongs!

Scene.

But…I’m disturbed. My three-way tango? Not so much. You see this?

Sigh

That’s not a tango-er, that’s a helpless muppet. It’s more like a love…line, than a triangle. All the conflict, all the passion is between the hero and the villain. This thing hanging behind them could be a giant plastic pear for all the ways it drives the plot.

The villain may have tried to seduce him. The hero may have realized that she wanted to live/retire/random epiphany because of him, but in the end, he’s a tool, in more ways than one. He’s a plot device, not a character, as replaceable as they come.

Let's get this panda untaped from this pear

And in the movies, that was always a woman.

What the shit? I didn’t want to be hanging in the villain’s lair under the volcano. I wanted to be swinging by my whip and cutting fools with my light saber. I wanted to kick ass on my own time, my own way. I’d already started on the path to writing strong female leads, and Barbie was going to help.

Did you ever put yourself in movies or television? Which role did you covet? (It’s all right if you wanted to be rescued. ^_^)

IWW: Origins

Today is the first of a series I hope to get many miles out of, my I Write Women (IWW) series. It’s the story of how I came to write adventure stories where women stab the shit out of things.
To help me write about writing women, I’ve enlisted the help of my fav toy of all time, Barbie:

"Happy to be here! Can't wait to stab shit."

I never got the whole, “little girls will grow up with unrealistic expectations of what their bodies should look like.” I remember someone telling me that I shouldn’t expect to look like Barbie someday. No shit. For one thing, my toes aren’t one high-heeled piece.

These are very useful for kicking, however.

She’s freakishly disproportionate. She’s made of hard plastic and wasn’t huggably soft like a real human being. As a child, I wondered if this common sense was hard won for the poor deluded soul who told me I couldn’t look like Barbie. I pictured her horror when she tried to speak to Barbie and realized that Barbie would never ever speak back.

I loved adventure stories, fantasy/sci-fi or otherwise. And even though most of the adults I knew were women, there were very few women in the stories that I loved. And if there was a woman, she was almost always captured and had to wait to be rescued.
But I didn’t see this as a male/female thing. I saw it as an odd-man-out thing. The lesser represented gender gets captured. Got it. Well, I had fifteen Barbies and one Ken.

It just made sense.

Did you notice skewed gender/race/sexuality roles in the stories around you as a kid? Did you change them in your play? Maybe you just preferred matchbox.

What we hide

On January 2nd, the Bloggess posted this little gem of a blog post about depression, both with a bang and a whimper.

It’s about depression, about how people struggle with it silently, but survive. It’s about how when folks overcome depression, they feel they can’t celebrate because they’re too ashamed they were depressed in the first place.

I celebrate you everyday, Jenny. You’re my goddamned hero, which is so much better than being a regular hero. You put yourself out there , and you’re funny. Among the trolls of the internet who do anything they can to bring someone down, you have the balls to get out there and tell jokes, to lead a war on William Shatner and to net a giant metal chicken a gazillion facebook followers.

The fact that you can admit something you’re ashamed of can only make me love you more. And I know you know, now more than ever, that you’re not alone, but I’ll say it again. You’re not alone. Never will be. I for one will stalk you forever. Comforting, huh?

And to everyone else, no matter what secret battles you’re fighting, you’re not alone either. Even if I don’t share your personal pain, there is someone out there who does. You’re all my heroes, the silent masses who struggle with depression, with self-harming, with eating disorders, or with what I went through when I finally admitted to myself that I find women just as attractive as men. (That may come as a surprise to some of you, or not, but I’ll just throw it out there. If it means you don’t want to be my friend anymore, we probably should never have been friends in the first place.) <–See? That's what I'm talking about when I'm talking about shame.

It all comes down to shame. We don't let our pain out because we're afraid of what people will think. When I finally admitted both the above struggle and my issues with food, I was amazed at how wonderful and supportive my husband is. If you don't have a support team, I support you. I'm with you. And if you do have a support team in place, I'm with you still, one more voice helping out. One more voice telling you that you're not alone. I see you. I hear you. I am you.

We're all gonna get through this together.

Yeah, yeah, rejection, blah blah

Favorite quote of the day:

“Rejection always stings. It stings me, you, everybody. Nobody likes to be rejected. A writer who likes being rejected is a writer who is secretly a robot and must be smelted down into slag before he tries to kill us all because he hates our meat. Pain is instructive. And it’s not permanent. Not if you don’t let it be. Some writers savor misery like a hard candy endlessly sucked in the pocket of one’s cheek, but fuck that.”

Taken blithely from Chuck Wendig’s blog.

I read that earlier today and it brought up so many memories. I’m not currently submitting anything, but I distinctly recall most of the rejections I’ve gotten. Many have been the puzzling form rejections. Some of have been handwritten little gems. Only one suggested I try something different with the work. The rest were veiled ways of saying, “I don’t think I can sell this.”

My favorite rejection was from an assistant who said she tried really hard to convince her boss to take me on. It was handwritten on the first page of my manuscript, wrapped around the form rejection as if she couldn’t leave a paper trail. Utterly heartwarming. I hope she some day gets her own agency. ^_^

I think I’m going to have a thoughtful day. How about you?

What happens in Vegas is pretty much what you’d expect at home

Prepare to show me some geek love, people. I’m in Las Vegas…

I apologize for the quality of some of these pics.

….at a Star Trek convention! That’s right. I came all the way to sin city for the 45th anniversary of Star Trek. Love me.

Of course, sin city doesn’t really have much of the sin anymore. I’ve been here a lot, mostly in my youth before a lot of the super hotels were built, or if they were built, before they were really super, taking up multiple city blocks on their own. Caesar’s palace alone took us about fifteen to twenty minutes to just walk by. Though the fountains in front of the Bellagio were made of awesome.

the view from our hotel of the strip

When I was a teenager, I remember having to dodge sleazy dudes handing out flyers for hookers. I remember everywhere the rhinestones and showgirls and strippers.

Now the showgirls are contained in large reviews at some of the less big hotels, the strippers are sort of a theme (the stripper bar didn’t really seem to have any, but you could take a lesson in pole dancing) and the only time we saw an advertisement for prostitutes, they were still trying to convince everyone they were escorts.

Sure, some horny guys and gals are still flocking here, searching for action, and there are the ever present gamblers (though not nearly so many as before) but we’ve mostly seen families with small children, walking and gawking like the rest of us.

*Side rant* I swear to the fucking universe, I’m going to crusade for a mandatory class called Be A-Fucking-Ware of Your Surroundings! And it’s going to be taught worldwide, in whatever grade it needs to be taught in. If you need to consult your map, get out of the middle of the goddamned sidewalk before you do it, or the people around you will run into your dumbass like a herd of stampeding cattle. No, the top of the escalator is NOT a good place to stop with your brood and try and figure out where you are. Kids are no excuse to act like a gaggle of douche-canoes. Little Timmy throws a fit because he’s scared of the escalator? Pick his ass up and go and find the elevator. Yes, this town is also unfamiliar to the rest of us, but the rest of us aren’t losing our shit at the slightest provocation. Be aware of other people. Get out of the way.

*deep breath*

I’m going to go hide at the Star Trek convention. Where everything makes sense…because it’s written in Klingon. As a parting shot, I have a present for Sherlock Holmes. Your arch nemesis is in Arizona. His town is so big it’s divided in half, and the highway commission has thoughtfully told you where he exits.

Come see me at Fansci today for more Star Trek fun, or on my Facebook fan page for more Vegas pics.

Going Commando — Guest post by Maria Zannini

Please join me in welcoming Maria Zannini on her Indie Roadshow!

Going Commando

According to the Urban Dictionary, going commando refers to not wearing any underwear. When Barbara asked me if indie publishing was liberating, ‘going commando’ was the first thing that crossed my mind.

Indie publishing defies convention. Often times it’s ingenuous and a little rowdy. Authors tend to speak their minds, perhaps because they don’t have the restraints of traditional publishing. Or maybe it’s the passion required to go it on your own.

Indie authors sometimes have rough edges. Their books range from the primitive to the ultra sophisticated. They’re mavericks at heart and that’s a good start.

Despite the entrepreneurial aspect of self-publishing, it also requires an immense amount of dedication and focus to see this all the way through. Nowadays, even agents are getting in on the act and ‘assisting’ authors to self-publish, but in the early days, it was all up to the author.

Is it liberating? Absolutely. It’s also one of the scariest things I’ve ever done. (Not that that’s ever stopped me before.)

What I love best about indie publishing:

• I got to create my own cover art. My only limitation was how much I wanted to spend on the photographs.

• I was able to set my own timetable.

• The copyright belongs to me. It’s all mine, both for story and art.

What I hate about indie publishing:

• Distribution still sucks. There is so much competition that you have to find a way to distinguish yourself. Even writing a good book isn’t enough.

• You have to pay for everything.

Can You Go Commando? Answer these five questions.

• Are you self-motivated?
• Do you have the means to hire editors and designers if you need them?
• Are you willing to stay the course? (Success generally doesn’t occur overnight.)
• Do you like to network?
• Do you have thick skin?

If you answered yes to all these questions, you have the cahonas to go commando. It’s not for everyone. You’re basically publishing without a net. If the book goes sour, you earn all the blame. But if the book is a winner, you also get all the glory.

I think a lot of it will depend on your level of self-confidence. This industry can crush you like a grape. Depression is common and while friends and alcohol might help, for the most part, you’re on your own. Publishing has never been for the weak. Indie publishing raises that bar even higher.

How did you do on the quiz? Can you do it? Do you think you might try it sometime in the future?

***
I hope you’ll follow along with the rest of the Indie Roadshow as I share the things I learned on my road to self-publishing.

The Devil To Pay is available at Amazon and Smashwords for only $2.99. It is the first book of the series, Second Chances.

Synopsis: The road to Hell is paved with good intentions and bad tequila. Shannon McKee finds herself at the end of her rope, and she bargains her soul in a fit of despair.

Shannon’s plea is answered immediately by two men who couldn’t be more different from one another. Yet they share a bond and an affection for the stubborn Miss McKee that even they don’t understand.

When Heaven and Hell demand their payment, Shannon has no choice but to submit. No matter who gets her soul, she’s not getting out of this alive.

Bio: Maria Zannini used to save the world from bad advertising, but now she spends her time wrangling chickens, and fighting for a piece of the bed against dogs of epic proportions. Occasionally, she writes novels.

Follow me on Facebook or my blog.

Like me everwhere, and don’t be afraid of the pizza buffet

Ladies and Gentlemen, if you look out the right side of the blog, you’ll see the buttons to my facebook fan page and my twitter account. Hint, hint. No rush, only, when I take over the world, you’ll want to already be in on the ground floor. ^_^

As you know by my copious rants, I live in a college town. Many of the young people I encounter on a day-to-day basis are morbidly conscious of being observed. (Could this be because I’m staring at them? Meh, probably not.) This became no clearer than when, the other day, I visited a pizza buffet and saw a very pregnant twenty-something filling her plate with salad while staring longingly at the huge pizza spread.

O__O Honey.

Get on in there! Not as many people are staring and judging as you think, and even if they were, pregnant women are one of the few classes entitled to put some serious hurt on a pizza buffet! No one is going to fuck with you, no one is going to sneer. Hell, most of us would probably nod. And if some douche did give you static, you need only look divinely sad and stroke your unborn child while tears dribble soundlessly down your face. We would attack said douche like a pack of rabid wolverines if s/he made you cry!

Speaking of crying, you’ll be weeping into your corn flakes if you miss Maria Zannini next week. She’s stopping by with her Indie Roadshow, and it just won’t be the same if you don’t show. ;__; *sniff*

I swear, I’ll get back to talking about writing one of these days. Probably after someone buys my freaking house! What are you working on/reading right now?

Ode to vacation

I wish I was on one right now. I’m obsessed with dirt, people. I’ve become a fascist about dishes. If I had a nickel for every time in the past few days that I’ve shouted, “Why can’t you keep your FUR on your BODY!?!” I’d have a shit-ton of nickles. (Which is what they measure nickles in.)

Ah, the delights of showing a house. I’ve never experienced them in this capacity before. Today is my first showing, and I’ve been obsessively picking at fluff. This doesn’t make sense, you say? Of course it doesn’t. Being incredibly weird, I don’t know what makes “normal” people turn down a house. (I also don’t know why I picture everyone who will come to look at my house as incredibly average, yuppie types, but there ya go.)

Something inside me says they will judge this house based on how clean I’ve gotten the shower. (A bit of the mold is still there. Cat missing for seven days. Send help.)

This obsessing over average, normal, yuppie judgement could just be me trying to justify all the hard hours I’ve spent trying to make it look like no on lives here, or if someone does live here, she is an obsessive neat-freak with no pets or life, and certainly no delightfully cheerful knick knacks or pictures of dragons. Nope, nosiree, no dragons here…except maybe the mold.

I’m off to search now for fun things to do in Austin. Ah, Austin, it’s become the land of Turkish Delight in my mind. Let me cling to my hopes and dreams…

Did the cleanliness of a house ever influence your decision to buy it?