Haus of Rhi

  Haus of Rhi Newsletter Monthly Updates Craft Chats make a better Writers Group Every writer struggles. Many times, usually, in the process of a single book. A critique group that only reads what you've already got written isn't going to necessarily be useful in helping with plot structure, character dynamics and consistency, or a million other details that aren't restricted to a single story.  So when I took over a group that was losing its leader, I discussed with the other members what would help them the most in their writing process. Since none were previously published, we settled on a structure that didn't focus on line edits, but would hopefully be more valuable. And that's how our Craft Chat began. We have focused discussions on dialogue, plot structure, character POV, conflict, antagonist forces. Helping new writers feel brave enough to keep going also inspires me to hack through the underbrush and push on with my own works. I'm giving them what I wis...

Once upon a time (stay with me here, because it was A Dark And Stormy Night, as well, let me tell you)... I sat down and wrote the beginnings to half a dozen stories, all set in the same world. A few of them had a single recurring character. One of them was set over two thousand years into the future from the others. 'Then' Me became concerned by the horror aspect of this latter story. I distinctly recall writing the scene where one of the characters calmly turns to the MC and says, "Run." And the MC doesn't immediately register what's going on. And then they look up and freak out and have an understandably visceral prey response to what they see, reek of fear from every pore, and bolt . Apparently between that scene and the schizophrenic high-functioning sociopathic serial killer human spliced with unknown alien genetics who's another of the POV characters, this story was just too much for the feeble psyche of 'Then' Me to tackle finishing. 'T...

The Writer's Tool: The Eclipse Tarot This month was a fortuitous one for me to get to know my Eclipse Tarot. I created the deck with the intent of using it as a writing tool, exclusively. Yet I still needed to spend some time getting to know it, to grasp the nuances of its voice, the currents of its energies, in order to successfully and efficiently employ it for its purpose. After all, any craftsman must invest the time in familiarizing himself with a new tool before setting its edge to precious raw material. Tarot Rebels' August Challenge employed a series of questions, one each day for the duration of the month. Silly questions like, what restaurant would you prefer, what kind of pet would you have, what's your musical taste, that on the surface seem flippant and out of place. Yet through the course of the month I found my way to hearing this deck's voice, to understanding its insecurities and immaturity. It doesn't mind clutter, for instance, understand...

Trionfi Della Luna, daily spread. Belief systems are usually instilled foundationally from a very young age. Mine certainly were. It took me a great deal of time and willpower to buck them, to find something I wanted to believe in, to figure out just what I believed as opposed to what I'd been told to, programmed to, and brainwashed to believe. These days, I like to think I have a solid foundational structure to what I believe, but there's a great deal overlaying that, and it's really subject to change with little to no notice whatsoever. I like to renovate. I like to try out new ideas and concepts before I disregard them entirely. Sometimes they're too similar to the constructs I razed in my twenties for me to even be remotely interested in them. When it comes to tarot, for me it's about exploring my precognitive tendencies, my divinatory abilities, and opening up the creative outlets and process. I keep anything akin to religious derivative out of my inte...

(L to R) Mary-el, Lumina, and Deviant Moon tarots. Love's a state of mind. "This is the story of an old Welsh witch." Do you know that song? In the society and time from which tarot originated (to our best estimations), arranged marriages were a norm. Marriage was a contract for political or financial gain. Lovers were an expense, a luxury, a potential weakness for exploitation, an opportunity to further one's interest, garner favor, and increase power. The Lovers is a card associated with the element of air. I also associate this card with Gemini, the Twins, as well as Yin and Yang. I see it as an allusion to balances of power between myself and others, about power plays and relationships and connections, none of them necessarily romantic or sexual. This card speaks to me of othila  and ehwaz , of group souls, and links between people -- the ancestral connection, the collective unconscious.

It takes bravery and courage to move forward through life. Over and through and under and around all the obstacles and resistance rising up to thwart us. Courage is not the absence of fear, but rather the assessment that something else is more important. - Theodore Roosevelt  Confronting fears and pushing forward despite them takes strength. I like to think the Fool isn't unaware of the cliff before them, or the precipice of unknown. Instead, they're choosing to focus on the possibilities, the positive, and the potential gain of flight. They've stopped second guessing. They've stopped doubting. They've stopped asking "what if" and decided to find out what they're capable of. "The Fool's Journey" is often described as the parallel of "The Hero's Journey" which most avid readers would agree is a staple framework for the majority of literature out there, as well as movies. But as the calendar turns and offers an opportuni...

In which resolutions are not made. (Because aren't they made to be broken or something?) Last year, around this time, I made a decision to get to know my recently acquired tarot deck, the Mary-el, with daily card readings. It worked, and with every passing week and month, I fell more in love with Marie White's artistry as well as her positive interpretations and applications of traditional and conventional meanings and associations. I guess one could claim it was a resolution. If so, it's gotta be the very first time I've followed through for the entire year, to the very end. Sure there were days when my interpretations were little more than a few sentences. And I think that, somewhere along the way, I actually missed a couple days here and there. It's the intent and follow through that matters. Even when I faltered, I didn't give up. Mostly because it was something I was doing for myself, something I was interested in and moderately passionate about, and a...

I wanted to preface this impromptu discussion born of a stream of tweets churned out on my Twitter feed. This is not about inexperienced writers snubbing their noses at any sort of editorial effort on their work. This is about knowing the rules and knowing when to break them, and breaking them in a specific sort of way as an artistic technique. Let us not confuse the two, for we have all of us read unedited stories published on Smashwords or Lulu or Amazon that made our brains bleed with the urge to claw out our eyes. This is about the presence of prose poetry in fiction as a writing technique, and about how much of it is damaged or lost in translation through the course of the editorial stage of the publishing process. Prose poetry is a recognized form of art, in that it is  a recognized form of poetry . Sadly, it is not wholly recognized as a form of prose. Or at least, it is not recognized as a form of  fiction  prose. Had an interesting conversation about pro...

American Crow mobbing Red-tailed Hawk. Source: http://www.allaboutbirds.org/guide/american_crow/id While driving yesterday, I saw three large crows circling above a winter-bare tree. They took turns dive-bombing at a dark shape in the branches. They were persistent, calculating, and energetic. Thankfully traffic was sparse enough to let me slow down a good bit as I got closer. That dark shape was a red-tailed hawk. It didn't seem terribly disturbed by the mobbing crows, but then, even bare the branches kept them from getting too close so it's possible they'd treed it out of the sky. This time of year, with no nests or juveniles to protect, it's rather curious to see crows being hostile. Defending hunting territorial lines, perhaps. Or did the hawk steal their roadkill, maybe? Or they were just being the intellectual assholes that's earned them notoriety in the avian world. All equally possible. Strange omens. It hasn't been that rough a winter, really. ...

Okay, so I didn't reach that 50k goal. But November was far from a loss. Red's story is sitting just past the halfway point. I have a solid framework of where it's going and how it's getting there. I just need to find the energy and inspiration to write it. And...that's not a thing that will happen this month. My momentum dies every year around this time. It's inevitable. I'm planning to reach the fin  for her story during the month of January. It was one of the projects on my "To Write" list for 2014. Or was that 2013. I don't recall. I've been sitting on it so long, if it had been plant life we'd be dealing with diamonds right about now. Actually, I think that particular analogy is best allocated to my old trunk novel, DC. Whose first volume has been lurking in a shadowy corner of my psyche for the past year, draft completed and just...waiting. For the time to be right. And soon, I think. First, though, I want to finish with R...

Literal and figurative, mind. The past couple weeks have been rife with research, exploring and developing writing tools. Resurrecting old projects, that sat incomplete and untouched for too long, is a large contributor. Foremost on my mind lately has been Red's story, the sequel (of sorts) to Blacker Than Black.  Many of the dangling threads from the end of that tale have provided anchors and, if you will, belay lines, for the skeleton of what Red's story will become. It's been almost three years since I touched that 150k word tome. And I'm going to have to reread it because I never did finish fleshing out the timeline and character references as I intended. Red's character is very easy to slip into. It's the plot that, as usual, will offer the greatest obstacles for me. I lean heavily toward character-driven stories. But there's means, motive, and opportunity floating around like flotsam and jetsam and it needs addressed. And also, nothing in the live...

Perfect porch perch weather is perfect. It's something I have to do every time I start a new project. The right atmosphere to encourage the muses. The right music for white noise. Rarely does the same music work for more than one project. This time, I couldn't even stay in the same genre of music. Perhaps because this project is in a different realm than my most recent works. It strays back into the universe of the Doctrine and Alliance, political foes constantly at each others' throats, though its cast of characters is entirely removed. It has no name just yet, and it's shaping up to meld together a couple ideas that had been gestating on the back burner. One based on a dream I had decades ago about the reclamation of a military base by the indigenous locals, and an unrelated story about a genetically modified assassin whose xeno-genetics overload its psyche--the ensuing bloodbath of a killing spree lands it in a maximum security intergalactic prison. It seems ...

The wolf, it mocks me with its laughter. As a kid, I was a nerd. I loved learning, and the scholarly aspect of my formative education was far from a burden -- with the exception of that damned section on quantum mechanics during Physics 2AP my senior year. Anyway, I used to look forward to going back to school. It was a relief from the endless doldrums of summer, for one. Granted, I usually found plenty of time and energy to invest in writing, and going back to school sort of cramped that. And the actual interactions with my peers? No thanks, I could do without that. But all the school supplies. Notebooks, and pens, and erasers, and mechanical pencils...it was enough to make me drool. And yep, it's that time of year again. I really didn't intend to go buy anything. I seriously didn't. I'd splurged on a hoard of writing utensils earlier this spring, actually, and didn't need anything. Really. Plenty of space left in the notebooks I've got. I certainly d...

Releases October 13, 2014. So, it's now official enough for public knowledge: The military anthology for which I've completed a short story is slated for release in mid-October, just in time for GayRomLit, and has a confirmed title and cover art. I'm so excited. Mostly because I completed a story.  Yes, it's short, and I'm still doing some tweak editing, but thanks to my Magical Betas of Awesome, it has a solid ending that I don't loathe with every fiber of my being, as I do most endings that I write. The characters are ones that I enjoy immensely, and their entire squad is likely just as interesting too, come to think of it. I expect there will be more of tattooed, red-headed heathen Chartreuse Beaudrou and his battle buddy, Kainai medicine man Apisi Howling. No, neither of them look anything like that hairless, pale hot toddy on the cover there. But that's okay. He's doing his job quite well, too. I did my damnedest to keep their story "...

I forgot how exuberantly "puppy" actual puppies are capable of being. I was reminded, yesterday, when I was introduced rather unexpectedly to a yellow lab pup who was all legs and paws and bright blue eyes. I remembered, almost immediately, the entire pack of yellow labs my riding instructor kept at her ranch. They went everywhere together, it seemed, a teeming mass of golden tawniness, happy friendly energy bumbling everywhere, wet noses and slobbery tongues and solid bodies nudging enthusiastically into legs and knees and whatever else was within reach. This puppy was precisely like that, came barreling toward me with no bark of warning or malicious intent. Just a huge pile of happiness as though he could instantly detect that I was someone he wanted to sniff and lick and share his energy with. He came racing after me not once but on four separate instances, which thoroughly baffled his humans because he'd never done anything like it before. Ever. Ah, the innocent ...

As though winter isn't rough enough most of the time, this year Mercury went into retrograde for the entire month of February, and of course, oriented in Pisces. That's my constellation, the one that resonates with me the most--I'm technically an Aquarius/Pisces cusp, but when it comes to art, and writing, the Piscean in me comes to the fore. (The Aquarian side I save mostly for forced social interactions.) At any rate, February was a big fat bust. The most I managed to write on any given day was 100 words, when words came at all. Oftentimes just that much took hours to accomplish. Yet life is cyclic in so many ways, and Mercury relented at last. I could almost feel  the floodgate giving way, the surge of words scourging away the residue built up by weeks of frustration and headdesking. Of course, the parameters of my upbringing demanded this sort of pagan resonance receive disbelief and an "evil" label, so despite the years and distance between us, I still dou...

It's come back to me, and I am so, so very relieved. Back in October, the anthology piece I was writing just...stalled out and died on me. I was struggling with the relational dynamics between the characters, how best to proceed with constructing a believable interplay that would engage some emotional investment from the audience. This project has been excruciating for me on a number of levels, but what I've struggled with most is the faint undertones of questionable consent. Not on a sexual level, but a relational one. The power play between the main characters, the dissonance that occurs. I still don't know if it will have a "satisfying" resolution. But then, I didn't go into this WIP with the expectation of a positive or even satisfying climax taking place. I think I've worked my way around to that much--a satisfying climax, as the case may be--but the resolution that takes place in its aftermath is unlikely to leave the audience with more than the b...

Or, Rhi's Nano-Adventure Begins. Terribly fascinating, the way these things happen. Since I initially began writing this MHT anthology short story, I'd been planning to hammer out the last of it during Nano and have done with it. I desperately want to do a story for this project and despite the obstacles that are arising, my plans to finish it have not changed. However, just as I sat down to write today I read a note from a reader asking about the potential for a sequel to "Blacker Than Black." And in the course of penning my response, Red woke up. No, no. Red didn't just "wake up." Red came roaring to life like a soldier shaken awake by incoming mortar sirens and impacts. It's a good thing that she and I are so familiar with one another or I might have backhanded her into Alpha Centauri. As things stand, however, my Nano-Adventure is off to a roaring, energetic start (which is how these things usually begin, is it not) with 3k already dumped...