This month our Drollerie Press blog tour theme is “origins.” Please welcome Angela Cameron!
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Hello everyone in Burkhart land! *waves*
Angela Cameron here. As a part of the Drollerie Press author blog tour, I’m stopping by Joely’s to share the story of my beginning as a writer. I always think it’s so interesting to hear how others started out. We each have our own twisted tale of how we either embraced what we were from the beginning—or fought it back with a stick like I did.
Mouth of the South
In all honesty, I knew that I was a storyteller from a young age. I rattled on so much that my parents and aunt literally nicknamed me “Mouth of the South”. In grade school, I wrote stories for my friends and journaled every day. They were often a little dark for my age. I blame it on my dad who is a huge fan of horror and vampires.
I didn’t publish anything until high school, and that was only because my English teacher threatened me into entering a poetry contest. I won, and that victory was almost tempting enough for me to abandon my chosen career as an artist to try writing.
Me…a tech geek? Nah.
But life jumped in my path. I married early on and had a daughter, giving up any hope of ever being the next Stephen King or Anne Rice, who were my favorites. Then, in 1998, I found a guilty pleasure that started that dream right back up—Vampire: The Masquerade. I was such a role playing geek, but I really kicked some ass online. *smiles*
That level of character creation and writing really started an obsession. Still, I fought it and worked as a website designer until 2005, when I went back to college to finish my degree in psychology. I’d done little more than outline a vampire story until 2006, when I finally gave in and sent off a few pieces of flash fiction. They were accepted and published, which started the whole crazy obsession with becoming a novelist.
Regrets?
The next year, I wrote a novella that sold to Drollerie Press and published under the title Nocturne. Of course, it was a vampire story. By the end of this year, I should have four novels and two anthology stories with my name on them. I’m so ecstatic. I’ve never been happier, now that I’ve allowed myself to follow this path. I haven’t “arrived” by any means. No, there are still a whole lot of rungs on that ladder above me. My only regret though is that I’d have done this a long time ago. Seeing your name (or pen name, as in my case) on a published piece is the greatest feeling in the world.
For more information on Angela Cameron and her stories, check out Angela Cameron.
Tomorrow is our second Drollerie Press blog tour with a theme of “origins.” My post will be at Sarah Avery’s blog, and I’ll be hosting Angela Cameron. See you then! After the LAST Upward Basketball game!!!
For such a short read it was jam packed. Romance (Read: Warm Fuzzies and Hot sex). Fantasy (Read: Magic, Suspence, And Dragons, oh my!). Hell I even got a nice juicy battle to chew on, and I looove battle scenes. Two thumbs way way up!
You can read her whole commentary here. Thank you, Soleil! I’m thrilled you’re enjoying your gift certificate from the Character Clinic!
Welcome, gentle reader, to the first round of the Drollerie Press Blog Tour, and thank you, Joely Sue, for making me welcome on your beautifully-titled blog. It’s been a while since I dreamed in rhyme, but I did have a serious case of iambic pentameter some years ago. Since escaping from academia, I dream mostly in character.
My second book, Atlantis Cranks Need Not Apply, is about to be released in mid-February. Our editor Deena Fisher, She Who Wears Many Hats, has done a gorgeous job of designing the PDF version. While I was looking it over one more time, rounding up the last of the questionable commas, I was struck by how polished, how real the advance review copy looked. You’d never guess, seeing it now, what the creative process was like for that book. It’s tempting to say I’m about to tell you a tale about the glorious e-publishing revolution, but really, if there’s a moral of the story, it’s one William Blake told us a long time ago: If the fool will persist in his folly, he will become wise.
Not for the first time in my writing life, I began by doing everything wrong.
Some magazine I’d never heard of, which specialized in a genre I don’t read, posted a call for submissions for a kind of story I don’t write. Psychological horror? Not my thing. Usually my eye just passes over a call like that. I’m a partisan for fantasy–epic, urban, sword and sorcery, whatever, as long as fantasy is in there somewhere, but I don’t like being fed fear for fear’s sake.
But the call for submissions asked for “tales of the life interrupted.” The editor didn’t care whether the protagonist’s daily life was normal by anyone else’s standards, they just wanted the protagonist’s ordinary experience to be turned abruptly upside down by something that he or she would find especially horrifying.
What would a modern-day Neo-Pagan, a practicing witch, find more horrifying than anything else, my brain asked itself. And before I could stop it, my brain answered itself by cooking up a character. Why, for any right-thinking, skeptical Wiccan who hates being mistaken for a New Age fluff-bunny white-lighter, there would be nothing more awful than finding out that Atlantis actually existed.
Oh, no you don’t, I said to my brain, we’re in the middle of a rollicking sword and sorcery manuscript. We are not going to wander off and write an urban fantasy with a comic twist.
But it won’t be urban, said my brain. See? We’ll set it on the Jersey Shore. Here’s a snarky divorced accountant who needs to pull her life back together. Now she’s on the beach watching a hurricane blow in. Just you try to resist her!
There was no resisting Jane.
I began by writing pages and pages of dialogue between Jane and her roommate Sophie, who’s also her coven sister, her landlady, her gadfly, an aspiring hippie chick born a generation too late for peace and love. Three days of writing Jane and Sophie convinced me I had to write the story. In another week, they’d introduced me to the rest of Rugosa Coven, and I knew I wouldn’t be getting back to that sword and sorcery novel any time soon.
Jane’s Atlantis story wasn’t going to fit most of the guidelines that inspired it. It wasn’t going to be a horror story, it wasn’t going to suit the temperament of the editor whose call for submissions called it into being. It certainly wouldn’t fit the tiny word count the horror magazine wanted. That’s what I mean when I say I started by doing everything wrong. But the story was going to kick ass.
That’s what I kept telling myself–It’s going to kick ass, Sarah–while I watched the mounting word count.
I always seem to write to the wrong length for market conditions. My first-ever novel, my first trunk manuscript, was an epic fantasy family saga about a democratizing revolution, and it was about the length of the entire Lord of the Rings series. I love that book, but there’s nowhere for a first novel of that length to go. So I got to experience my own bit of psychological horror as Atlantis Cranks Need Not Apply grew past the length that’s (sort of) easy to sell to magazines, then past the length that’s extremely hard to sell to magazines, and then solidly into novella range. Magazines are getting out of the novella business. Big publishing houses have been almost entirely out of the novella business for a long time. I have a sneaking suspicion that the only reason any new science fiction and fantasy novellas still get into print at all is that the Hugo and Nebula Awards have novella categories. Just when I began to hope Atlantis Cranks would grow past the novella stage and expand into a full-fledged novel, the story…how can I describe this?…it took a breath and lived. It was itself, it was no other story but itself, and tripling or halving its length for marketability’s sake would have done it a violence it would not have survived.
Oh, well, I told my brain. Another trunk manuscript. I guess now we pick ourselves up and go back to that sword and sorcery project. Can we make it a nice, round 100,000 words? Everybody loves to see a number like that in the query letter.
My brain promptly responded by cooking up a second Rugosa Coven story, equally irresistible, that weighed in at an even more market-awkward length than the first one. As I had for Atlantis Cranks, I buffed Closing Arguments to a fine polish, even though I was certain I would never find it a home. When I’d dutifully collected rejection slips from every market in the genre that considers novellas, I decided I’d record both pieces as serial podcasts and give them away for free.
Before I made it to the end of the manual for my shiny new podcasting microphone, my wonderful critique partner David Sklar told me about this new small press he’d discovered, one that would consider novellas. David had been wrestled to the ground by a gorgeous novella that refused to get any longer, so he knew what I’d been up against with the Rugosa Coven stories. We ended up getting our acceptances for Closing Arguments and The Shadow of the Antlered Bird from Drollerie Press on the same day.
It’s been an adventure since then, trying to figure out how the new world of e-publishing works when nobody else, not even the big players in the business, not even Amazon, seems to know for sure what rules to play by. It’s been a struggle to work on the third novella in the series, the one that will complete the three-novella print volume that Drollerie Press will release in late 2009, while learning how to be a mother for the first time. It’s been, in the best Blakean sense, folly. I’m persisting. I like to think I’ll be wise sometime soon.
Most of the night was spent working on my Drollerie Press blog tour post. I wanted to show why I call this blog “dreaming in rhyme” — but I wasn’t feeling particularly poetic.
My favorite thing to do is parody. Take a famous poem, song, even a Bible passage, and change it into something else (like Story Genesis, which I’m going to have to repost since it’s currently gone after the domain transfer last fall). Yet tonight, I couldn’t find the RIGHT poem to warp.
I turned to Gregar, my wicked Shadowed Blood Muse, but he was no help at all. Poetry, after all, is Conn’s area of expertise. He reminded me of a particularly smoldering rendition of “She walks in beauty like the night,” and viola, I had my poem to warp into a “bio” or introduction. It should go up 1/31/2009. I’ll post a link here when it’s up.
I also typed in hardcopy edits in NSR through Chapter Six while watching Tivo’d Hell’s Kitchen and American Idol. Not sure how many pages that is, exactly, since I printed it single-space to save paper. Still have a good 40 pages or so to input.
I also revised the page navigation on the website slightly, consolidating the multiple “Series” pages into a single Bookshelf page. I needed to make room! Let’s see, I have the Connaghers (don’t know if that’s the “series” name, exactly, but it was a starting point). As soon as I finish Revision Xibalba, I’ll have a Maya series. Then there’s the new 7Crows world I’m building. I can’t have a tab in the navigation for each or it’ll get too cluttered. I hate putzing around with html tables, though. I’m never happy with the end result, but the Bookshelf page will do for now.
I’m dreading the Evil Day Job tomorrow. Loooooong phone meeting. I’ll be taking Aleve beforehand to help mitigate the headache of straining to listen and track voices of a rather large group (some strangers, so I won’t be able to recognize their voices as easily) through up to six hours of discussion.
Oh, and if possible, I have a COLD. Yes, I just finished antibiotics for bronchitis, and now the right side of my nose is like concrete and I’m sneezing my ass off! I tried Bethanie’s suggestion of Airborne, and promptly gave myself a mouthful of canker sores (not kidding, 5 on my bottom lip alone) from the high vitamin C dose. Sigh. I guess I’ll have to do it every other day or so until my body gets used to it. Off to blow my nose and early bed to make up for staying up until after 1 AM last night.
Sorry, I ended up getting absorbed in reading an old work last night, and stayed up waaaaay too late. It’s a pleasure to read something from last year that I’ve written, and I have no desire to change yet. Usually I want to grab the red pen and shift sentences around, eliminate words, etc. but I didn’t feel that urge. I’m sure I’ll feel differently once the editor gets ahold of it.
On the other hand, I did do some heavy editing earlier, both yesterday before work and early evening after dinner. I printed out the 52+K version of NSR and made an entire hardcopy pass. I’ve got half of those edits made back in the main file. It was a good opportunity for me to put the threads all back in my head. Sometimes, I can’t see the big picture like I need to. I can’t see if I’m using too much green, or not enough orange, or if the red has been entirely forgotten for 50+ pages. I’m very pleased with this revision so far. It’s tight, the plots weave well, and I left myself itching to hurry up with the next scene already, which is a good thing.
I still need to write something for the Drollerie Press blog tour 1/31. I haven’t been inspired yet. Part of me thinks I should use the opportunity to “dream in rhyme” but the right poem hasn’t hit me yet. I don’t know whether to do a parody, or a hidey-hidey-ho song, or what. We’ll see what I come up with. I’m running out of time!
Watch here for some kind of “characterization clinic.” Details are whirling around in my head. If it works for your schedule, I’m thinking possibly the week of Valentine’s Day? Some kind of “101 Ways to Make Lovable Characters” or something equally cheesy. Even if you just have a few links to share about how to build a living, breathing character, I’d love for you to participate. I’m especially looking forward to anything involving tarot, astrology, numerology, etc. Don’t be intimidated. Published or not, reader, writer, all are welcome to post thoughts, even if you simply want to talk about your all-time favorite character.
I know who my all-time favorite character is. Yeah, he’s one of mine–I’m a writer, I can’t help but choose one of my own. You all know who he is, too. ::cough:: Gregar ::cough::
Although it may surprise you that Conn from Letters to an English Professor is in the running, and not just for his car.
If you have thoughts, ideas, etc. about the characterization clinic, feel free to shout them out!
Well, taking a sick day Thursday and generally feeling not so great really put a kink in my goals for last week. I even got up fairly early Sat. (thanks to basketball and a math quiz bowl for Princess Monster) and wrote a while on a brand new scene for NSR, but it’s just not flowing. I don’t have it clear in my mind, and so I’m “searching” for the right words.
Last week’s goals:
Submit the short story to the antho, which requires a query and a “new” bio because I think I’ll be submitting this under a different pen name. DONE. Sent out the first query of 2009 last night.
Revise another 10K of NSR. SHORT. Only grew the story by 7,711 words, including the new incomplete scene I’m struggling with.
FInalize characters for the SFR. Specifically, name the hero and figure out his goals and background. How is he in opposition to the heroine’s goal? DONE. Figured out the hero’s goal and he’s totally playing the heroine at the beginning. I even moved on to plotting, but ran into some other issues.
Goals for this week:
Character interview at Ginger Simpson’s blog for “Bring a Character to Blog Week” starting today. My post (the interview with Ruin, The Rock) is set to post Tuesday morning.
Write up some kind of intriguing post for the first Drollerie Press blog tour on 1/31/2009.
Grow NSR by 13K to make up for shortfall last week.
Plot 7Crows to position myself for a novella month in February.
The various imprints of Drollerie Press now have their own websites! Take a look — they’re very pretty. Of course, you can find *everything* still at the Bookshop, which also received a new look.
Continuing our chat about The Chocolatier’s Wife and Beautiful Death, here’s the next questions I asked Cindy and her response. Head over to Cindy’s blog for my questions/answers re: BD.
How long have you been writing, and where does TCW fit in your bibliography? And what’s in the works for you next?
I’ve been writing since my teens…about 20 years. The Chocolateir’s Wife is my third completed book. Of my first two, Blue Moon is, ironically, my second book. The first I wrote, Balancing Act, will be out in a year or so. I’ve also written a lot of short stories and poems. I wanted to write longer works, but when I was a teen I was more interested in expressing myself…my emotions, what I was going through…in a descriptive way, and I loved poems because I could finish them. Then I did short stories…when I finished my first novel, it was really a relief!
And since I missed a week or so over the holidays, I’ll post another.
What’s next for the world of Chocolatier’s Wife?
As for what’s next for that world…I have several plans. Someday, I think William is going to have to face the sea…I imagine a mystery, perhaps, happening while he and Tasmin go on a voyage, perhaps to visit cocoa plantations? I’m not sure. But I am working on a story set in the “enemy” empire of Pandroth. I don’t know if I ever will truly write about William and Tasmin again…but I love them so much, it gives me comfort to think I might just.
