Vixenwriter

Okay, the end of the week that is. And thank goodness! Well, it’s not like I’m off to do anything thrilling this weekend or anything. I have to finish up the school supplies list for my sons who start school on the 5th (WOOOT!) and my sister in law is coming over to visit on Sunday for a few hours with my nephew.

And…a really exciting project has just landed in my lap unexpectedly. I’m putting together an anthology with Jodi Lynn Copeland and Anya Bast. I’m not going to say what the theme is just now as I’m all superstitious about it. But it’s a great theme and all Jodi’s idea and I’m just thrilled to be a part of it.

But my novella is called Stripped and I’m already 2500 words in! Which is good as I need to finish it up in just a few weeks.

Hullo everyone, happy Wednesday! It’s been sort of a busy week already. Frauke got this fabulous blog up for me and also new message boards to replace my yahoo loop. Now people seem a bit hesitant to come on over from yahoo but I hope they’ll make the switch! Yahoo is driving me nuts, it’s slow and it only works half the time and my own loop wasn’t even sending me notification emails for two weeks! So the new messageboards will take some getting used to but they’re much faster! Check em out - through this link!

Writing wise, I finished two outlines for the next Chase Brothers books and one last night for a novella I’m going to write very soon for an anthology. This is A LOT of outlining for me, I don’t usually outline but as I’m writing for two different houses and also aiming at New York, it’s becoming a necessity especially as the NY stuff has to have a synopsis anyway. It’s not my favorite thing but it’s not the torture it once was either. I have no plans to stop pantsing it but I’ll outline when I need to as well.

I’d like to get back to Celtic Triangle soon too, I’m nearly done with the partial! But I also need to finish Wolf Unbound, the next Cascadia Wolves book and Tegan’s story for EC as well.

My kids start back to school next week, thank goodness! The fall is always my favorite time of year in the northwest. Not just because it’s back to school, LOL, I love the weather! I love the trees as you go up the mountain to my house as they turn vibrant reds and oranges. My cherry tree turns a gorgeous orange yellow and everything smells so good.

Dang, I have no idea what to make for dinner tonight, sigh.

What is everyone up to? I need to update my link list today! Did you all know that Maya Banks has a new blog? It’s purty and it’s here so hop on over to say hello and check out her new cover which is hot hot hot!

I just got my release date for Witches Knot:Thrice United! December 20, 2006!! Thanks to my wonderful editor Ann and Raelene for finding a spot for me before the end of the year!

Later in September I’m going to be making a page for the upcoming books with excerpts and some other nifty stuff.

The goddess Frauke has done it! She’s moved my blogspot blog to my website with wordpress software and now it’s under my control. Mine! All mine! (imagine villanous laughter here)

Not a whole lot of a different look for you all but heck, for me? It means my days of hoping and wishing that blogger won’t crap out in mid update are over.

So if you have me blogrolled as http://laurendane.blogspot.com - please change me to www.laurendane.com/blog

Thanks!

Whoops, I forgot to blog that tonight I’ll be at the monthly Ellora’s Cave Author Chat at Writerspace at 5 pm pacific/8 eastern! Don’t miss it.

I’ve got some cool new stuff for my blog and website in the works. Or, I should say my incredible webgoddess Frauke has some cool new stuff in the works.

I’ve become so frustrated with yahoo loops over the last year or so. The message delivery only works about 40% of the time within a ten minute period, sometimes (and much more often lately) not until a day or two later if at all. It bounces addresses randomly. Worse, it always seems to happen during a list celebration of some kind and messages come out of order, prize posts don’t go up, people can’t enter contests because they don’t get the messages on time - it’s just ridiculously frustrating.

So after seeing some folks move to bulletin boards through their websites successfully, I’ve decided to try out php bulletin boards at mine. Only I’m a technological doofus and I know I’d mess it up so I threw myself on Frauke’s mercy and she’s going to install it when whe gets my wordpress blog up.

Another frustration has been the increasing amount of time it takes to do daily blogging around outages, etc. So Angie the Magnificent (aka my editor) convinced me that wordpress was a great option to load it through my website and have more control.

Again, the goddess Frauke has taken pity on me and is helping me (and after all the hassle it’s been dealing with moving from windows servers to linux servers - why don’t they just say that wordpress won’t work with windows servers?) and sql database insanity, I think it all may be in place by the early part of the week.

I’ll make an annoucement here with all the corresponding re-directs, etc when it’s ready to go!

c’est tout bon

I go for months or even longer without watching some of my favorite movies and then I binge. So I watched all three Matrix movies over the last few days and I’d forgotten how much I loved them. Happy sigh.

‘K, now I’m going to wax all fangirl about the movies so feel free to move on, LOL!

I love the duality in the Matrix movies, the lush quality of fantasy versus the stark reality. Still, there’s something so beautiful about the scene where Link’s wife is running around the dock with the other woman with the rocket launcher trying to take out the main digging machine. The concentration, knowing you’re totally going to die but doing it anyway because why die a coward? Why not take them out if you can?

And the commander of the APU corps as they are on the docks as swarms of sentinels come in - amazing. I love that.

The Oracle, love it! The very first time Neo goes back into the Matrix when they’re all dressed to the nines - gorgeous and then tragic. There’s always that edge in the movies.

And Smith. Agent Smith is one of my favorite movie villains of all time. So complicated and totally batshit crazy! I love a crazy villain! The interrogation scene with they’ve got Morpheous in the agent headquarters and they come in with the helicopter? Fabulous! What imagination!

No small amount of tragedy in the movies though, I like that too. There are several points, usually between Neo and Trinity that I get weepy.

And speaking of Trinity - that moment in the first movie when she’s just jumped from one building to the other, being chased by agents - she’s on her back at the bottom of the stairwell and she’s telling herself, “get up, Trinity, get up, Trinity” it’s sort of one of my little mantras. I love her character! When she goes into the club and meets Monica Belluci (and oh my god, honestly, I adore her, what a completely beautiful woman Belluci is!) that little moment when Bellucci wants to kiss Neo, oh that was good! And when Neo saved her life! And at the end, when she tells Neo what she was going to say to him the first time he saved her life? *weeps* Motorcycle Trinity, helicopter Trinity, soft Trinity in a dress - she’s a wonderful heroine.

Jada Pinkett as Niobe is fab too! That scene on the freeway with her and Ghost? Loved it! And when she’s piloting the Hammer back to Zion in revolutions and the sentinels are all over the ship and she’s just totally kicking ass with Morpheus at her side.

And who doesn’t love Morpheus? What a great metaphorical character he is. This is a man who’s gained legendary status and he’s so humble in that strength. He believes in Neo even when Neo doesn’t. Even at the end, he believes - puts aside his status and his pride and pours that belief into Neo. That’s strength wielded wisely. As opposed to Locke, who can’t believe in anything and now he’s empty and bitter and holds on to Niobe as a way to get back at Morpheus but he doesn’t truly get Niobe the way Morpheus does. Morpheus inspires because while he owns his power, he doesn’t misuse it.

There are so many wonderful meta themes in the movies. I’m always in awe of the way all the important things in the universe are layered into the movies with such a deft touch. And yeah, sometimes a heavy hand, but still, if I can create characters that are half as vivid as Mifune on that damned dock, I’ll count myself fortunate indeed.

A lot of times people ask writers about where they get their inspiration. Some authors have excellent answers that are complex and fascinating about process.

Me? Led Zeppelin. I’m not joking.

Music is a huge part of my creative process. I make jewelry listening to music, I cook listening to music and I definitely write and edit listening to music.

But as I was going through all my projects and notes, trying to put them in some sort of order of importance so I would not go insane and feel so stressed I just keeled over, I found a little three sentence word document. A kernel of a book.

And I began to think on it and the characters began to introduce themselves to me. But it wasn’t until Monday when I was coming back from taking my 2 year old to her Well Baby Visit that it all clicked.

Why?

Here’s where Led Zeppelin comes in. Kasmir came on the radio. Now I lurve me some Led Zeppelin. I love that bawdy mix of blues and 70’s rock. I love the over the top references to the Lord of the Rings and the Hobbit and I love those hokey videos/mini movies they made.

So Kasmir came on and there’s that opening. Now if you haven’t ever heard Kasmir, go and download it from itunes or Amazon or something. Everyone should hear it. It’s a great song. Slow, methodical, it’s got this great sort of eastern flair (hence Kasmir). And the lyrics start.

Oh let the sun beat down upon my face, stars to fill my dream I am a traveler of both time and space, to be where I have been To sit with elders of the gentle race, this world has seldom seen They talk of days for which they sit and wait and all will be revealed

Talk and song from tongues of lilting grace, whose sounds caress my ear But not a word I heard could I relate, the story was quite clear

And there it was. Celtic Triangle was born, it had a title (with some wonderful help from my husband the following day) and my metastory fell into place and I finished my rough outline last night. I should thank Plant and Page in my dedication. Oh and my babysitter who first introduced me to Led Zeppelin when I was nine.

Right now the boys are running around the house with pillow cases safety pinned to their shirts and “flying” Of course I had to give the cautionary, “You can’t REALLY fly. Do you both understand that? Repeat what I just said.” because my sons, while loveable, tend to attract danger and injury.

We went to the new elementary school yesterday for the open house. New schools rock. They have a computer lab in the library with new computers that were donated by a local corporation. At my oldest’s last school they had like 486s. Shameful. I do hope that school got some new computers too, it had the lowest number of computers per student in the entire district. The boys have a computer at home but most of the kids at their old school didn’t.

My oldest met his 3rd grade teacher. He seemed very nice and it struck me how he is now moving into real school. They have desks in rows versus tables. Kiddo #1 said, “I’ve never had a teacher who was a Mister before.” LOL, the dude was amused too. I was amused because the guy looked just like the lead singer of the Presidents of the United States.

He was also impressed that the library was just a few doors down, the bathrooms next door and the playground literally just outside. “All the things I like best!”

Middle Kid was most impressed by the fact that his kindy class had a bathroom in it.

Of course by tour’s end, Ms. Terrible Two was throwing a huge fit and trying to toss herself out of my arms and if I put her down she laid on the asphalt. Sigh. That was just apparently part and parcel of my day yesterday.