I’m having to manually recreate a lot of sidebar widgets from locally stored files, and I have to manually re-enter all of my links from my blogroll and my writers’ resources list. If we’d exchanged blog links before, I’ll get your link back up shortly. Reciprocation, fair play, all that.

Unsurprisingly, this process is making me a wee bit cranky.

But at least it got me to finally update my blog?

I should come up with something more worthwhile to say.

Um…hi?

Okay, okay, a little publishing/writing/etc. related news: I did cover art for an MLR Press book, Z. Allora’s The Dark Angels: With Wings. It’s the first time I’ve had someone request a manga-style illustration for a book cover, but it was a lot of fun to work on and experiment with as far as art styles, especially since I’m used to shading dark-skinned people. Experimenting with various layered painting techniques to create Caucasian skin that didn’t look sickly or sunburned was a learning experience, I’ll say that. I’m currently working on roughs for the sequel.

Yep, that’s about all I’ve got.

I guess I’ve been absent for a while, but…well, life decided to eat my face, between some work-related and life-related stress combined with taking my grandmother’s death a lot harder than I realized. I had some things to deal with, and they were best dealt with out of the public eye. Long story short, life bit me and kept biting until I got tired of it and bit back.

So, like I said…hi.

But I want to talk about something personal today – not to showcase my grief, but to remember someone with love. Elnora Sanders died this morning, in the early hours before dawn. She had stage 3B breast cancer; she’d beaten it back twice before, but this time it was too much for her to handle. It had seeded throughout her entire body, and her organs just…gave up. She died in terrible pain. Just as bad, probably, was the pain my mother had to go through, sitting there and holding her hand helplessly.

But my mother said when the pain stopped, and Elnora slipped away…she smiled.

That’s so like her. I’m not surprised.

Elnora Sanders was my grandmother, and my friend. When I didn’t speak to any of my relatives for five years, she was the one person I still called at least once a month. But more, she was the linchpin of my family. I have a diverse and enormous family that on my mother’s side alone is a confusing cultural and ethnic mélange; I won’t even try to explain my father’s side. My great-grandmother had twenty-four children. My grandmother had eight children by multiple husbands, and those eight children went on to have many more children of their own, some of whom have already started raising their own families.

There are hundreds of us in one generation alone. We have different family names – in fact, only a few of us carry on the Sanders name, and it’s only by a strange set of circumstances that I have that name rather than my mother’s married name or my father’s family name. And I’ll be honest: most of us hate each other. We’re wildly different, have different morals and ideals, were raised in different generations and different areas of the country. My branch of the family might think another branch is country, ghetto, and ill-behaved; that same branch might think we’re stuck-up, snotty, and don’t value real down-to-earth people or respect our roots. Putting any one family module in an enclosed space with another is likely to result in bodily harm. If we get away with just a few nasty words exchanged, we’re lucky.

Unless Elnora was in the room.

She was our matriarch, our dictator…and we would do anything for her. We called her “Ma Dear,” though we said it so quickly it became “M’Deah” over the years. Anything she asked, we did. Anything she wanted, we gave. When she spoke, we listened. Every holiday we came together under her roof, and even when quibbling over whose dessert was better or trying to pry the butcher knives from the hands of the more certifiably insane cousins, it was her love, her Southern cooking, and her strength that brought us together. She fought to bring this family into the world, and every last one of us knew it. More often than not she was a single parent in an age when that was unheard of, especially for a woman – but she worked her ass off to put food in her children’s mouths. Often the older siblings were left to look after the younger ones because Elnora was at work. Even after she had a stroke that left her unable to say “onions” as anything other than “nunyuns,” she gave up so much to keep them safe, to give them opportunities to grow strong, to get an education, to make something out of themselves.

And she let them be themselves, which is probably why they’re all so wildly different and argumentative now.

Never in my life have I known her to live anywhere but on that same plot of Louisiana property. Even when my mother, aunts, and uncles chipped in to build her a new house, it was a new house bumped up shoulder to shoulder with the sagging, grey-washed boards of the old one. It’s a place that will be forever fixed in my mind as hers. I will always remember coming down the gravel driveway on Easter, Thanksgiving, Christmas…and feeling her influence wrap around me. My family may have all hated each other at any other time, but when we came into M’Deah’s domain…we did our best to love each other. Not out of obligation, not under duress…but because she made us want to, by loving us all.

She always told me I was her favorite grandchild, too, and I could do no wrong in her eyes. When I was younger, I believed it. It tickled me just pink, and I’d take every chance I could to spend a summer, a week, even just a weekend at her house. I’d catch dragonflies on the clothes lines and pick clover flowers in the field to one side of the house. She never brushed me off when I brought her wreaths of interlaced flowers, and always laughed and waved when I’d catch a dragonfly and turn back to shout in exultation while she watched from her rocking chair on the porch.

I still remember the summer when I was…eleven, I think. My younger cousin and I were spending a week at M’Deah’s; we’d planned and plotted all through the beginning of the summer, working out how to ambush and bully our parents into it (little knowing that they were glad to see the hind end of us for a week or so). Well, despite both of us being labeled as “gifted” children, we were a little short in the common sense department, which led to an air conditioning window unit falling out of the house and into the grass outside because we just didn’t think “Hey, open the window, AC falls out.” I don’t even remember why we thought it was necessary to open the window; I do remember sitting on the front step in a panic, both of us sobbing because we thought our grandmother (then a police dispatcher who didn’t carry a weapon, but we didn’t know that) would come home from work and shoot us.

She came home. She didn’t shoot us. She took one look at the AC lying there with grass poking up through its vents and burst into laughter – then hugged us and asked us how it happened. While we apologized and sniffled and scrubbed at our snotty noses, she just kept laughing and said it was all right, she wasn’t angry…because we were her favorite grandchildren. Any time the story came up, years later, she’d still laugh – much to my and my cousin’s amused mortification.

When I was older, I realized she was lying about her favorite grandchildren – but at the same time, she wasn’t. She loved all her grandchildren so much she couldn’t choose a favorite. So she treated us as if we were all her favorites, first in her eyes. She treated everyone that way, with such love and respect that one couldn’t help but return it.

You don’t find that kind of love in everyone – especially not in someone who’s had such a hard life. With how hard she had to fight for everything she had, everything her children had, you wouldn’t think she’d be so willing to give. That’s not to say she wasn’t a hard woman; she was tough as nails, fierce and proud, and wasn’t afraid to smack any one of her brood upside the head and tell us to stop being idiots. Yet though she was stubborn and flawed and madder than a wet cat when you pushed her buttons the wrong way…she would always give all the love she could to anyone who needed it.

She lived a long life. Long enough to see her oldest son to his grave; long enough to see her grandchildren bring forth her great-grandchildren. What’s more, she lived a good life. Without her, my family will fall apart. We are a tangled viper’s nest of grudges, pettiness, cruelty, snobbishness, very bad decisions, and in some cases pure insanity; I won’t pretend we aren’t. We hate each other, plain and simple. That won’t change. We don’t forget old wounds, and we never let them heal; it’s a failing in our family, and probably the one thing we all share. Without Elnora, without our M’Deah, we won’t have any reason to even try to stop.

Yet I know that for one more day, in a quiet church in the town where my family began, we’ll come together again. If not out of love for each other, then out of love for an amazing woman who gave us her strength, her love, her humor, her life. She was what made us a family, rather than people reluctantly bound by blood ties. I don’t know what we’ll be after this – after her funeral, after she’s well and truly gone.

But because of her, for just one more day…we’ll be a family again, one last time.

When I finished laughing (and that took a while), I promised revenge. Revenge in the form of…BACON. For never was there a nuttier bacon nut, and one day I shall bribe her for ARCs with entire pans full of greasy goodness. (Because really, what else is a pig good for?*)

Oh, and this:

(Click for the larger version.)

Anyway – I may be quiet here, but I’ve been quite noisy elsewhere. Namely over at Fresh Voices Friday, where Sue London interviews me as an unpublished writer / aspiring author (what? I still write in between editing? Gasp!):

http://cmdrsue.blogspot.com/2010/05/fresh-voices-interview-with-adrien-luc.html

Drop by, say hi, and be nice.

Also, if you’ve got cash to spare, there’s an auction going on over at http://dothewritethingfornashville.blogspot.com/ – run by several authors and agents, trying to raise money to help flood victims in Nashville. You can bid on everything from signed books to ARCs to swag to agent chats, with all proceeds going to charity.

Good lord, I’m a wordy bugger.

Also: not too long ago one of my authors, Jason Beymer (author of the upcoming humorous fantasy ROGUE’S CURSE), did a great post on character development and how he finds inspiration for his characters. You should go check it out. (And be nice to him. He’s funny.)

Watch this space for some other guest blogs soon, as I cajole my authors and my fellow Lyrical editors into speaking up. (Cynthia, I’m lookin’ at you.)

I keep meaning to update with photos of my nifty new Sony Reader Touch Edition and faff on about how awesome it is, but every time I talk about the thing I sound like a product shill. Bleargh. Well, here, a couple of blurry photos snapped off on my G1 phone, with the thing on my messy, disorganized coffee table:

Man, do we need to vacuum.

That’s the Pixie skin from DecalGirl.com*, crap about my student loans underneath the reader, and Elizabeth Darvill’s BOUND BY BLOOD on the reader’s screen. Liz and Jason have been great sports about not killing me yet despite the volumes of edit notes I’ve dropped on them. Ashley has yet to find out what she’s in for, but she will. [insert innocent smile here]

What else, what else…OH! One other thing: The latest book in Diane Duane’s YOUNG WIZARDS series, A WIZARD OF MARS, released this week. It wasn’t due out until early April, so imagine my surprise when my preorder showed up on my doorstep on the 23rd.

If you love Diane Duane as much as I do, get the damn book. Seriously. YOUNG WIZARDS has always held a firm position as my favorite YA series of all time, and A WIZARD OF MARS is a great addition to the collection.

……

…oi, that’s a lot of tags on this post.

 

 
*Random aside: DecalGirl has the best customer service. My original order was shipped incorrectly; they sent me a skin for the Pocket reader, rather than the Touch edition. I e-mailed asking how to do an exchange, and they apologized and shipped a priority mail replacement the same day. It’s sad that it’s rare to see good, polite customer service, but it’s always nice when you run across it.

Yesterday I signed on as a Content Editor for Lyrical Press.

Basically, that means I help authors shape their manuscripts into the best work possible prior to publication, and work with authors for the duration of their careers with Lyrical. I also get to participate in acquisitions, along with the rest of the editing team. It’s not a full-time gig, but it’s one that makes me happy; I love editing. Plus I get to work with the ever-so-fabulous Amanda. (Who’s probably giving me dirty looks right now.)

Lyrical publishes a rather broad range of genre fiction, but primarily romance of some sort or another, ranging from fantasy to paranormal to realism and more. I don’t have my first author yet – but I’m still getting myself oriented with Lyrical’s processes and standards, and meeting the group. Don’t be surprised if, once I do start working with my first author, I start pimping his or her books like mad.

…promise I’ll try not to shill too much, though. Ahem.

But yeah, that was my good news. I’m torn between wiggling happily and being utterly overwhelmed by the amount of stuff I need to read just to get started.

Definitely wiggling.

*Put the logo on your blog in your post.
*Pass the award onto 12 bloggers.
*Link the nominees within your post.
*Let the nominees know they have received this award by commenting on their blogs.
*Share the love and link to the person from whom you received this award.

It took me a while to actually stop and say, “Wait…out of all the blogs I read, do I actually bloody well talk to a dozen of those people?” Surprisingly, the answer was yes. So here are the twelve people I’m passing the award on to:

1. Anji and her crew over at Cinema Chicks: http://cinemachicks.wordpress.com/
2. Kerry: http://uppington.wordpress.com/
3. Carrie: http://www.carrieclevenger.com/
4. Janet: http://muffintopmommy.wordpress.com/
5. Jinxie: http://jinxiesbabblingblogs.blogspot.com
6. Sabrina: http://coffeequill.blogspot.com/
7. Jennifer: http://www.jenniferambrose.blogspot.com/
8. Lessa: http://gonfalon.org/eclat/
9. Jeffe: http://lovepowerandfairytaleendings.blogspot.com/
10. H.C. Zuerner, also known as the scary hungry kitty: http://kittysbleedingwords.blogspot.com/
11. Wookie’s Girl: http://www.blogger.com/profile/07726231846622344573
12. Slush Pile Hero: http://slushpilehero.wordpress.com

Next, the…uh…”Creative Writer” award, emphasis on the quotes. Which I guess is accurate, since the stories we tell are a big mess of lies. They’re just enjoyable, intricate lies. The rules are a little more complex for this one:

1.)I am to thank the person who tagged me,

2.)Copy and paste the award on my blog,

3.)link to the person who nominated me,

4.)Tell up to 6 lies about myself and one truth.

5.)Tag at leasr 7 people for this award. I tagged 8 because the whole “7″ thing was getting redundant and I despise redundancy.

6.)Post links to their blogs

7.) Comment on each of their blogs to inform them of the nomination.

So, thank you Annarkie. My (sometimes snarky) six lies and one truth, and you get to guess which one is the truth:

1. My name is actually Adrien Luc-Sanders, not Adrien-Luc Sanders. I’m really a woman who married a man with the last name Sanders, but wanted to keep my maiden last name of Luc.

2. I am entirely neurotic about walking on floors in bare feet. As in, I refuse to put my feet in the bed if they’ve touched the floor, because they might contaminate the sheets.

3. Once I came two tequilas away from getting married in Brazil. To a woman.

4. When I was a little boy, I fantasized about having Superman for a boyfriend.

5. I once accepted a dare to eat a live lizard.

6. I’ve left weird things hidden in various places in every apartment I’ve lived in, just to freak out the next renters.

7. I’m really Billy Joel.

And now for my list of seven bloggers to pass the award to:

1. Allison, who bled sunshine all over me. http://mynfel.blogspot.com
2. Kerry, who has a bloody sunflower for her Twitter icon. http://uppington.wordpress.com/
3. Carrie, who rhymes with Kerry but writes bloody stories. No sunshine or sunflowers. http://www.carrieclevenger.com/
4. Janet, also known as MuffinTopMommy, whose Twitter icon sometimes looks like a flower. http://muffintopmommy.wordpress.com/
5. Jinxie, because I’m running out of ways to link these and figured a J-name would work. http://jinxiesbabblingblogs.blogspot.com
6. Sabrina, because her blog name makes me want coffee (and she’s one of my closest friends, not just a fellow writer). http://coffeequill.blogspot.com/
7. Jennifer, just because I like her and completely gave up on the thematic thing. http://www.jenniferambrose.blogspot.com/

…at least I could use part of my list of a dozen for the list of seven, just with a few embellishments.

Now if you’ll excuse me, I have a crap ton of comments to leave. ~groans~ I have some other good news to share, too, but I’ll save that for tomorrow after I’m done with some paperwork.

TOTAL: 46,163 (?!?!? Was not expecting that number!)

NIHILISM: 11,689
EDGE: 4,450
SHADOW’S VOICE: 4,830
THE THIRTEENTH HOUR: 140
WAKING MAGIC: 2,545
SWITCH: 1,694
ICARUS BURNING: 7,141
GESTALT: 8,212
GEAS: 4,097

Summing up the stories doesn’t reflect the total, because there have been times when I counted words for a day only to erase them the next day and start over from scratch – and some of these are only the amount I wrote on the story in the past month, not the length of the stories overall.

Still…it’s pretty telling, don’t you think? It’s sure as hell indicative of what I need to fix in my writing workflow.

I have enough words written for half a novel, but I don’t have half a novel. I have fragments of several novels.

Which is what I expected out of the first month – and while it’s good to know I can write half a novel in a month (without the reckless lack of premeditation that characterizes NaNoWriMo), this demonstrates more than anything a need for consistency. But that’s why I’m doing this. This an exercise in building discipline, making a habit out of writing every day as a professional should; I may be a pantser, but even pantsers have to have discipline and dedication. That discipline comes in stages: first conditioning to write every day, then conditioning to write decently every day instead of page-vomiting to get to the word count, then conditioning to stay with one story and see it through rather than just waiting for one to strike inspiration and hold my attention long enough to finish. I’d say I’m fairly well along on the first two, and getting close to the third. I’ve told myself I’m going to finish NIHILISM, and that’s that.

So let’s see if I can get a good 30,000 words on NIHILISM in February, ne?

Tangent: Last night I finally saw Avatar. In 3D. Yes, I know I’m late. And while I enjoyed it a hell of a lot, I remembered why I don’t do 3D movies: my eyes hate me for a full 24 hours after. Last night I spent wandering around with my eyes terribly strained, struggling to restore depth perception in a truly three-dimensional world after two and a half hours spent viewing recorded images projected in multiple layered depths of field. I bumped into a lot of things. And this morning my eyes are just sleepy and sore, with a little difficulty focusing on things beyond a certain distance. I came away better than Hikaru, though. By the time we were even halfway through the film, he had a migraine so bad he could barely enjoy the movie.

As for the movie itself: it’s pretty much what I’d heard. Beautifully rendered visuals (slight disconnect between real and CGI, more obvious than people say it is), plot a mashup of about five or six other already-good movies, with your classic “white savior learns the old ways**/plight of the natives” storyline with some heavy-handed Earth Mother / environmentalist / corporate fatcat stuff thrown in.

It was still a damned fun film, with engaging characters and heartfelt emotion. And some damned awesome action. Just because I recognize it for what it is doesn’t mean I didn’t love the hell out of it. (And enjoyed that we ended up rooting for the aliens, not the humans, just like in District 9.) I’d like to see it again, actually.

…just…not in 3D.

Final note: I’m not saying much about the Amazon / MacMillan debacle. Others have already said it far better; just hit Google and you’ll see. But I will say that I was one paycheck away from buying a Kindle, and now I’ve started shopping for a Sony Reader because of this. And I’m not the only one. One consumer’s voice often makes no difference. But anger enough consumers, especially when those consumers are both writers and avid readers…and you’ve basically screwed yourself.

 

 

*I can’t type that without thinking of the “1,000 Words” song from FFX-2, and now it’s stuck in my bloody head.

**That’s the one thing I try not to think too hard about, as it would ruin my enjoyment of the movie since it’s a pet peeve. It wouldn’t make me as touchy as films like Last of the Mohicans and The Last Samurai, but that could be because oh, hey, I’m not part blue cat-person. But still. From the perspective of a non-white person, those movies can be a little insulting. And I’m sticking my fingers in my ears and saying LALALALA because dammit I LIKED Avatar and I want to keep liking it.

• Haven’t missed a day on the 1k a day challenge yet.
• Discovered this may not be the best for my writing process, as forcing it is a good way to kill a story. Live and learn. Hitting the goal of 1,000 words doesn’t make them stink any less when all those words are trash. Eau de Literary Roadkill.
• Revived NIHILISM in story form. Go ahead and groan, Sihaya and Indikaze. SHINJI THE ANGSTBUNNY LIVES.
• Started watching Sita Sings the Blues, which has amazing animation and music.
• Got a few more partial requests on SHADOW’S BREATH.
• Got a few rejections, too. Either nice personal notes saying it’s a good story, I’m a good writer, but it’s not for them…or the usual “dear author” form letters. Onward and upward.
• Told my doubts they can kiss my shiny metal ass, and figured I can try to write a better story while waiting to see if an agent will pick up SHADOW’S BREATH.
• …though I also finished chapter one of SHADOW’S VOICE. Not working on that seriously, though. Sell SB first, then worry about the sequel. Although Roman is now popping up in my dreams. In Cabo. With the Kingpin. Yes, from Marvel comics. You really don’t want to know.
• Got really sick of hearing a thousand contradictory, argumentative predictions on the future of publishing. Also, the Apple tablet. Sweet honking baby jesus.
• Made some shiny new writer friends on Twitter. The large majority of them are batshit insane. That’s okay. I fit right in.
• Got a few good nibbles on editorial jobs; response so far has been positive. Looking good. And behaving myself in public while I try to get a foot in the door. Which means I probably shouldn’t be calling people batshit insane.
• Took a stab at writing a classic romance novel.
• Failed spectacularly and hilariously. I’m a little rusty on what goes where when there’s a woman involved.
• Realized drab, blow-by-blow lists like this are dull as hell.
• Signed off.