writing ideas

#WIPpetWed #AppalachianElementals 3/13/2019 Something Brand New

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Welcome to #WIPpet Wednesday*, a blog hop where authors share from their current works in progress (WIPs)!

Since Keeping House is off to the proofreader, I’m sharing a little of my latest WIP this week. It’s Historical Appalachian Fantasy set in the Revolutionary War era and the years thereafter and, yes, it’s going to be part of the #AppalachianElementals series. It’s out of sequence so it’ll definitely be a side tale, and I don’t yet know when it’ll be finished, but I already love the main character’s voice. You might not know the characters involved, yet, but they’re in Keeping House, including Cent, who’ll be appearing as a secondary character in their 19th-century male form. (Cent has been reincarnated over a hundred times, if you don’t know, so these stories tie together through her/him/them and through Embreeville Mountain, a real place near where I live in Northeast Tennessee.)

I’m striving for historical accuracy inside this story so I’m doing a lot of research on the colonial era, especially what was then the frontier, but there’s not a whole lot of written history concerning the area and this is Fantasy genre so I’m allowing myself to leave holes that require more research. But there are no holes in this #WIPpet.

Here’s my math for 3/13/2019: 3+3-2-1= the first 3 paragraphs from my new unnamed story.

     “Whatcha doin’ up that tree, Nub?” Conall scratches his head as he looks up at me. I could dot his eye with a half-rotten crab apple if I wished, but I don’t. I drop a handful of leaves in his face instead, and he swats at them like they’re swarming bees, making me laugh.

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#KeepingHouseNovel #RainbowSnippets Eighty-Three: A Mason Jar of Moonshine

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It’s Saturday, time for #Rainbowsnippets, and I’m running behind for numerous reasons. Getting my life together before my first knee replacement surgery (probably within the next month). Because our house is/was disorganized. Because we’re trying to reduce food waste around here. Because I found empty soap containers in the bathroom cabinet that should’ve gone to recycling two years ago.

Reasons.

But that doesn’t mean I shouldn’t get my writerly duties accomplished. Better late than never, right?

This #Rainbowsnippets* is uniquely mine, but there are lots of other great snippets to read, so after you finish here click the FB link at the bottom of the post to discover other great LGBTQIA authors and their works.

Cent, from Cleaning House and Mama etc. is the protagonist in my current #WIP, Keeping House,  and she’s butting head with another character, Dane Gow,  she-king of the Hunter Fey,  so you’d best pay attention to the king or you might get hurt. Things had taken a dangerous turn last week when Cent brought up weapons so let’s see how it’s going now.

This first sentence comes from last week’s snippet, and it’s Cent talking.

 …“This goes only if you and your men disarm too.”

 “Just checkin’.” Dane raised the edge of her kilt to show the Glock nine-millimeter strapped to her thigh. “I’m already grinnin’ like a possum about the next three months.”

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#WIPpetWed #AppalachianElementals 1/16/2019: Singer or Howe

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It is done (for now). I’m through with Keeping House and it’s off to my betas. Whew! What a relief, kinda sorta. Actually, I’m nervous to the point of nail-biting, more so than I generally am when a book goes off to my betas (probably not because I think I say this every time LOL). I know Keeping House has some great content, but I’m unsure about the whole. The one person I’ve read it to, my alpha, loves it, but we’ll see about the betas.

 

So where am I going next? Another novella, I think. It’ll be about a character I first introduced in Mama, Me, and the Holiday Tree who’s a secondary character in Keeping House, Bea Gow. Bea is short for Beatrice. I was going to write the story from her husband, Conall’s, POV, but I don’t think I can pull off a believable cis man’s perspective. He was the only one speaking to me about the story until recently, so I was leaning toward him, but now Bea’s finally piping in, and I believe her take will be the more interesting of the two. Hmm, I might switch between the two, I dunno yet, but I’ll let you know soon enough.

Bea and Conall’s friendship and eventual love story is a very different one, but everything I tend to write is somewhat twisted and different, so that’s nothing new (insert cocky smile here).

Welcome to #WIPpet Wednesday*, a blog hop where authors share from their current works in progress (WIPs).

This week we’re picking up where we left off in Chapter Two.  Cent and Betty are talking about one of the homestead’s two house spirits when, low and behold, look who appears.

Here’s my #WIPpet math for 1/16/2019: 1+6=7 for seven paragraphs from Keeping House, Appalachian Elementals book 2. The first paragraph is in orange because it comes from last week’s #WIPpet.

     (Betty speaking) “Gotta watch out for Birdie. She’ll rearrange your room if she can.”

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#AppalachianElementals #FictionFri The Rhodes Family Tree

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One of the major themes in the Appalachian Elementals series is family. It was central to  Cleaning House, to Mama, Me, & the Holiday Tree, and is central to Keeping House, my current work in progress. Family is also, like in many cultures, central to Appalachia. We’re traditionally close-knit, though that has somewhat changed over the last few generations. That said, I might, at a later date, take a closer look at Tess and Roslyn Rhodes’ generation (meaning write a story where they’re the MCs, but that’s for another day since I’m currently neck deep in #NaNoWriMo (National Novel Writing Month).

When Cleaning House was a rough draft, I scrawled out the Rhodes’ family tree as it relates to Cent and her cousin, Aubrey, adding details like birth/death dates, where the magic derives from in each family member, if there’s any magic at all, and ended up with four-five generations (depending on your take), going back to Cent and Aubrey’s great-great-grandmother Amadahy, a fictional member of the North Carolina Cherokee tribal rolls (one of my own ancestors, six generations back, is listed on those same rolls, I’ve been told).

Anyway, that initial scrawl to set down a lineage has become the graphic below, an actual family tree.

Creating the family tree helped bring the characters to life, to give them roots. It helped me determine how they might have thought, their experiences,  how things developed between generations and, more specifically, where things have gone wrong. Continue reading →

#HolidayTreeNovella Release Day Celebration: Quick Descriptions and Best Lines

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It’s finally release day for Mama, Me, and the Holiday Tree! To kick this celebration off right, I’m sharing a little about every character in the novella and giving you what I think might well be their best line within the story. Like most of my stories, there’s an ensemble cast, and I’ve fourteen characters, two of whom are so minor in their presence that they really don’t have lines. That said, pay attention to them because you’ll see them in the second novel in the Appalachian Elementals series, Keeping House, which will be released next year.

 

Here’s some info about Mama, Me, & the Holiday Tree to get you started.

A dozen handmade holiday ornaments, that’s all, but it might be an impossible task.

Centenary Rhodes and her mother are at constant odds. It’s one of the many reasons Cent left home when she was eighteen. Mama’s difficult for anyone to manage, but now that Cent’s back home, she has to try. Mama, however, won’t acknowledge who Cent’s become, even though she’s repeatedly been shown the truth.

It’ll take more than popcorn strings and paper snowflakes to heal the rift that’s formed between Cent and Mama. It’s going to take bushels of patience, heaps of magic, and assistance from everyone on both sides of Embreeville Mountain to reset the Balance between them.

But with Yule and Christmas just around the corner, it might already be too late.

Mama, Me, and the Holiday Tree is available for preorder in both print and ebook formats. And the ebook format is only $.99 for a limited time!

Amazon | Amazon UK | Kobo | Barnes & Noble

And now, what I promised, quick descriptions of and the best lines (IMO) from each character in Mama, Me, & the Holiday Tree.

Centenary Rhodes (Cent) [protagonist]  in an obvious moment of distress or doubt

Nonbinary, she/her/they/their, happily married, multi-lived witch, possessor of important secrets

“I’ll try since y’all think it’s so important.”

 

 

 

Stowne [Earth Elemental]  (some of their many forms)

Cent’s spouse, they/them, a true mountain soul

“Patience. You said you find grace in it, so find that grace in yourself.”

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1: An Introduction to Jeanne’s YouTube Writing #Playlist – Best Played on Shuffle

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10, 9, 8, 7, 6, 5, 4, 3, 2, 1 … This marks the final day of my ten-day countdown to the release of my novella Mama, Me, and the Holiday Tree. Tomorrow. Tomorrow? Yikes! Tomorrow! You can read more about #HolidayTreeNovella at the bottom of this post, but today I’m taking you taking you on a brief tour of my writing playlist because, why not? Because music, poetry, and prose are closely related and forever intertwined.

In my younger years, meaning in the days before children, post-grad studies and, eventually, illness and disability, I was a musician. I played several instruments including woodwinds, guitar, bass guitar, and piano. That said, I’m a music junkie. My tastes are diverse to say the least, and I almost always have my earbuds in whenever I’m writing.

Yes, I have a writing playlist on YouTube, a decent-sized one at 432 songs and counting, and it’s one that I frequently listen to via my Chrome browser (Hint: I use an ad blocker so it flows uninterrupted – cheater, cheater, yes, I know). I also use Pandora from time to time, but I keep getting blasted with music I simply don’t care for, so I never stay long. And, yes, before you ask, I sometimes use Spotify, but they often don’t have the songs or artists I’m looking for.

Why do I have a playlist and, more importantly, why do I have it set to public? I know no better way to get to know someone, from a distance, than accessing the music they listen to regularly.

So if you wish to get to know me as a writer, aside from my blog, this is the quickest means.

Here are the newest additions to my playlist (Note: this might change at any point because I add songs almost daily anymore).

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3: #HolidayTreeNovella #AppalachianElementals #FictionFriday Where do you Find Creative Inspiration?

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10, 9, 8, 7, 6, 5, 4, 3…This is the eighth day of my ten-day countdown to the release of my holiday novella, Mama, Me, & the Holiday Tree, #1.5 in the Appalachian Elementals series. Today, I’m talking about inspiration and where best to find it.

 

Inspiration (noun)

  1. An inspiring or animating action or influence: I cannot write poetry without inspiration.
  2. Something inspired, as an idea.
  3. A result of inspired activity.

(courtesy of Dictionary.com)

All artists, writers, and creative sorts, need inspiration. Ideas don’t generally manifest out of thin air. There has to be something to trigger creativity. An idea. An image. An emotion. A hallucination. A bender (not suggested).Insert your own trigger here.

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#WriteLGBTQ #WIP #AppalachianElementals Water Powered

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#WriteLBGTQ Chemistry? Not quite, but water, H2O, is an element. Close enough. And a word of advice… never piss off a primary water elemental. They have minions.

 

 

 

Stowne called to the watchtower corners. North. South. East. But when they called to the West, the lesser water elementals drew up, combining into a collective wave that centered on Kenzie, pushing him from the circle sands.

#AppalachianElementals #KeepingHouseNovel #CleaningHouseNovel #Paranormal #amwriting #Fantasy #queerbooks

 

 

 

10: #HolidayTreeNovella #WritersLife The Real Struggle to Define my Writing or A Guide to Plot Bunny Fur

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10 This marks day first day of my ten-day countdown until the release of my novella Mama, Me, and the Holiday Tree. You can read more about #HolidayTreeNovella at the bottom of this post, but today I’m relating my struggle to define myself as a writer or a creating a plot bunny Swiffer ad one.

I’ll let you decided.

So I’ve been thinking about my writing, about its consistent inconsistencies, and I’ve decided to summarize it so others might understand that the struggle is very real.

Here goes.

Me in 2000 – first trying to get my material out there: (In a tentative voice) I’ve written a couple of short stories and a few poems. Want to see them?

Enter novel-length Sci-Fi plot bunny: Hi! Waves at poetry bunny and short-story plot bunny as they hop away: Later!

 

 

Me in 2005 – my first novel finds print: (In a semi-confident voice) I write novel-length Science Fiction.

Enter novel-length epic Sci-Fi plot bunny. Yeah, but…

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Breaking Fae: The Hunters of the Appalachian Elementals Series

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When I say fairies (fae) what immediately comes to your mind? No, shove Tinkerbell aside. I’m not talking about cute, delicate-winged fae. I mean the fae of English, Scots, and Irish folklore. (there are different fairy legends across the globe, but I’m concentrating on this particular set for a reason). Often, the English, Scots, and Irish fae legends are written into two courts – the Seelie (happy, blessed) and the Unseelie (unhappy, unclean or unholy). There are a lot of stories based on this folklore.

  • Changling Child or Children
  • Careful What you wish for
  • Fairy rings
  • Leprechauns
  • Ballybogs
  • Brownies

Now, not all of the above can be associated with either the Seelie or Unseelie courts, but perhaps I should back up and describe the differences between the courts to begin with.

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