Tic & Pers, from Sisters Quarter Horses, LLC

There’s nothing like being on the back of a horse, dust in your hair, reins in your hands.

The sun beats down on your skin so you wear a light long-sleeved shirt. It also helps to keep away the flies that seem to go hand in hand with the heat and horses. Once in the round pen, no halters at first.

Just you and the horse.

The most valuable thing I’ve learned about horses is that they are prey animals. Running away is their first instinct. On the prairie, it’s all about remaining alert and keeping an eye out for predators.

By our very nature, humans are predators. It’s about taking that animal down for it’s meat, it’s fur, or anything else we can use from it.

For both species, it’s about survival — it’s just what our methods are, what we’re designed for or what we’re prepared for, that’s different.

So I write. Well, more sporadically than not. When I sit down to write, I worry. What is my daughter or my husband doing? Now I’m thirsty, so I get up to get a drink. Of course, now nature calls. Facebook looks at me and tells me “I’m just not ready to write yet” because there are all these neat little links to click. Hey, what about those free Kindle ebooks I saw? Then the news. Politics always gets me riled up. I open Evernote, write a hundred words, then almost automatically, I click onto Chrome to “look something up.”

And so it goes. I call it “writer’s block.” Re-reading what I wrote, it sounds like procrastination.

Without judgment of any kind, it is a delay. I delay my writing. I put it off. And I know why.

I delay because I lack confidence. I lack confidence in myself and my own writing.

My brain says, “Don’t tell me what to do — show me how to do it. Let me try and learn from my own mistakes, but lean in and help me when you can.”

When it comes to learning, that’s my first instinct — it’s what I’m designed for.

I’ve been looking for someone who will teach me what I need to know. Someone who will help me develop that confidence in my writing that I’m lacking. Someone willing to look over my shoulder at what I’m doing and tell me what they think. Someone I can go to with questions.

James Chartrand‘s cornerstone course, Damn Fine Words, will do just that.

Damn Fine Words will prepare me to survive as a writer, a blogger and a marketer.

With that confidence, I will write. I will write and publish my fiction, first of all.  With an author platform and an established website and blog, I will be able to find the people who will love my work.  The money that I will be able to bring in will help me pay for student loans and my daughter’s therapies.

I can see it in my mind, a large open space with trees on one side and a large shade tree in one corner.

My unbridled horse with a saddle on it’s back grazing nearby. I lay underneath the tree, notebook on the ground, scribbling madly. Or perhaps even an iPad that I’ve been able to purchase with money that I earned rather than it being gifted to me by my husband.

That’s my dream. And through writing, I will get there.

The premise behind “and she was” by Alison Gaylin was what caught my eye first: “Missing persons investigator Brenna Spector has a rare neurological disorder that enables her to recall every detail of every day of her life.” But not only can she remember every detail, she is plagued by that remembering at various inopportune times, her memories rearing their heads and taking all of her attention as though they have a life of their own.

That right there was enough to get my attention and for me to pick up the book.

The novel is touted in a subtitle as “A Novel Of Suspense” and it kept that end of the bargain.  As I read through the story, it was difficult for me to put the book down because I wanted to know what was going to happen next.  And, as any reader of good suspense knows, that’s the number one hallmark of a good suspense novel.

So, the mechanics were great.  Brenna’s memory problem was fascinating to me — but I enjoyed the idea that her memories came bubbling up to the surface and enveloped her senses in the past, detracting from the immediacy of the present.  How could someone like that drive a car safely?  But being able to read off a telephone number from a memory of seeing it a couple of years ago… THAT’S something I’d love to do.

The mystery at the center of the plot — the disappearance of Carol Wentz and a decade-gone little girl named Iris Neff — interested me enough to keep me reading but I think a majority of that was in the suspenseful nature of the story itself.  Ultimately, the resolution was sound and I was moderately satisfied with the end, but it still left me a bit dry.

All in all, if you’re looking for a quick, engrossing read, this is a great book to come to.  A sequel is in the works to be published in the fall of 2012 and, most likely, I’ll pick it up gladly.

From the Pikes Peak Writers Conference Website

Yesterday, I had the privilege to sit in the front row in the Aspen Leaf Room at the Colorado Springs Marriott as Donald Maass gave a one-day presentation on topics from his upcoming book, Writing 21st Century Fiction, for the Thursday programming session at the Pikes Peak Writers’ Conference.

Donald Maass is a literary agent at the Donald Maass Literary Agency and the author of a few books on writing: The Career Novelist, Writing the Breakout Novel, Writing the Breakout Novel Workbook, The Fire in Fiction, and The Breakout Novelist: Craft and Strategies for Career Fiction Writers.

His upcoming book, however, Writing 21st Century Fiction, is about what he calls “writing personally.”

From Amazon.com's product page

The ideas for the book came from a simple realization by Maass: at this time in history, lists such as the New York Times Bestseller List highlight what type of books people are really willing to pay for.  The reason: in a recession, the majority of people spend much less and save more.  Therefore for a book to be counted as a “bestseller,” then, not only do people enjoy the book, but it’s overcome the need to save, save, save that drives us during a recession.

Instead of commerical genre fiction being on the NYT list week after week, Don noticed that literary fiction was staying on the list for much, much longer than expected.  So he began to read the bestsellers and to figure out why they lasted longer — what they had that others did not.  It’s these concepts that he shared with us yesterday at the workshop.

He says that the two most common reasons that people purchase a book is through word of mouth (their best friend reads it, loves it, and tells them about it) or seeing it in a display in a bookstore.

As writers, unfortunately, we really don’t have the ability to control what goes in the windowfront of our local Barnes & Noble.  Or the front page of Amazon.  But what we can do is write fiction that people love, that they feel like they HAVE to share with their friends.

So, what is it in these bestsellers that causes people to talk about them so much?

His conclusion: 

They tell a great story.

And they tell it beautifully.

Both of these can be used by literary and commerical fiction alike.  Literary fiction needs action.  It needs events in the middle to keep the middle from sagging.  Commerical fiction needs beauty.  It needs to delve deeper into the characters and their relationships to each other and to the plot as a whole.

His thoughts are that literary authors and commercial authors both have techniques that each can learn from the other.  Instead of the feud between literary and commercial authors, everyone can come together and learn to write great stories and to be great storytellers, regardless of what you write.

The rest of the workshop was how to do just that.

That’s only scratching the surface of what he discussed.  Note: he said that the entire workshop, the entire eight hours, was only a small sliver of what is covered in his book coming out in October.

So I’m going to use what I worked out from this workshop and using the questions he posed to develop my newest novel idea (working title: Discontinuity) and start writing afresh on it.  I’m going to keep The Breakout Novelist by my keyboard and refer to it periodically and snatch up Writing the 21st Century Novel as soon as it’s published.

My goal? To pitch to Don Maass at next year’s Pikes Peak Writers Conference as a conference attendee.

Gives me about a year to sharpen and hone my focus because I haven’t even begun a first draft of Discontinuity and, from what I figured out yesterday, it’s double the book it would have been had I not gone to the workshop.

I look forward to seeing him next year at the conference and I hope that he’ll forgive my stammering and stuttering when he signed my copy of The Breakout Novelist this year.

If you have never heard of these books or have been on the fence about purchasing them, The Breakout Novelist is the best of Writing the Breakout Novel and Workbook, The Fire in Fiction, and The Career Novelist combined.

KIN by Kealan Patrick Burke

I’ve been hearing a lot of good things about Mr. Burke and his work, but this was the first time that I have read one of his novels.

His novel, The Turtle Boy, won a Bram Stoker Award in 2004 and you can get a copy of it at the above Amazon link for FREE.  After reading KIN, it is definitely going on my TBR shelf.

Burke’s newest novel, KIN, has been described as “The Texas Chainsaw Massacre meets Deliverance.”

It’s the story of a girl who escapes from being kidnapped by a deranged family who tortured and brutally murdered the friends she had been traveling with.

It’s the story of a young man who wakes up to the realization that all is not always right with the world, that there are bad people, and that sometimes those bad people and good people cross paths.

And it’s the story of those bad people from their own perspective, where in their own world, they’re doing what they think is right: they live by their own rules and there are consequences for stepping outside of them.

It didn’t take me long to be drawn into the story and to that point of near obsession with what was going to happen next.  But it wasn’t the story of the surviving girl that got me going.  Nor was it the story of the young black man who assists her in her desire for retribution.

It’s the family themselves.

Hearing about Mama and her putrid room, her ginormous body riddled with fat and disease, Papa and his insistence that what they are doing, they are doing in the name of God and because God wills them to kill the nonbelievers.

That’s where Burke really excelled in this story.  He brought me to care about one of the murderous family members and in doing so, he brings me into the family’s clutches where I want to know more about who they are, why they are the way they are, and ultimately, they are who I want to understand and to hear about.  Everything else in the book feels as though it is there to bring me to find out more about this family.

Kealan, I loved this story.  It’s one of the few books that have really caught my attention in the past few years.  You know the books I mean — the ones that crawl under your skin and sit in the back of your conscious mind while you’re going about your day. The ones that make you pick the book back up because you know if you don’t, you’re going to be haunted by the characters and the story forever.  I think this book is definitely one of those that — even if you DO read to the end — it’s still going to stick with you for a very long time.

Insecurity is a very hard thing to get over, but I’m learning I don’t have to be insecure.  About anything.

We all make mistakes in life and I’m beginning to believe that the way you deal with your own mistakes and your reaction to the mistakes of the people around you shows your character in a way that nothing else does.

P.S. Nevermind that I learned this yesterday when I was kicked in the nose by a horse I was grooming… Strangely, I’ve been slightly proud of this — as if it’s some type of badge of honor.  I just really need to sit down and figure out WHY I feel this way

P.S.S. Fortunately, my nose wasn’t broken. I did need three stitches next to my left nostril, but that’s okay. I’m a little bruised and sore today, but that’s okay too.

P.S.S.S. If you ever feel like you’re worried about too many things — past, present or future — and you just don’t know how to focus and clear your mind, a horse kick to the nose really does it for you quite quickly.  Not that I recommend getting kicked in the nose, but it definitely brings you face to face with reality.

P.S.S.S.S. Natural endorphins rock. Just sayin’.

3 stitches!