Haus of Rhi

Since, you know, diving into the shallow end is just downright fucking dumb. My week's break from writing has come to a close. Of course, this doesn't mean the distractions are gone just yet. It just means I'm not willing to be unproductive any longer. Life, & The Universe, often conspire against one, though. This is occurring today, in fact. I sit down to write, manage to crank out 750 words, and get slapped with ... drama. While ordinarily I wouldn't mind, I was kinda on a roll. Had my head in the game, chugging right along and ... train wreck. Moral of the story? Hey Rhi....next time, turn your cell phone OFF. Highly recommended. And now I'm off to try and get my head back into it. Jhez is giving me a hairy eyeball.

Beautiful weather. Finally. Even the thunderstorms are beautiful, to me. Something about the unharnessed power, the raw energy, inherent in the shift of seasons, draws me. And if the combination of damp and cool air didn't chill me to the bone, I'd sit out on the porch and watch them rage and batter against the constructs of humanity as though attempting to purge a disease from the land. Unfortunately for the writer in me, that energy doesn't translate directly to inspiration. That may be largely a result of increased distractions and complications being thrown my way in the past week. Or that could just be a convenient excuse for my inability to dredge up sufficient intrinsic motivation to sit down on my ass and type out the words. Although...I'm typing this. So for the time being, I'm using the (at least moderately legitimate) excuse that I'm filling my tank with energy and inspiration to be engaged at some later date (in the near future, one would hope/expe...

I guess I could blame it on the rain. Or one of a hundred other things. Like the fact that I seem to have lost my bottle of Fukitol pills. Or the fact that I nabbed a book to read--and managed to  pick a bittersweet romance that is just...pushing all the wrong buttons. Bad Rhi. The past couple days have been highly unproductive in terms of writing. I try to remind myself that this sort of thing happens. That the muses, and the inspiration, are like the tides (at least with me they are). Sometimes the surge is so strong I can't make myself stop writing. And then there are the days when there's just nothing there. It's not really that I can't see where the story is going. Sometimes I can and it still happens. It helps, some, having two different WIPs to divert my energies to. I work on one, and when the words won't come anymore, I switch--if I can remember to, that is. Writing story projects in tandem isn't something I'm accustomed to doing. It takes some...

It took every ounce of willpower I possess, but I managed to refrain from purchasing an MP3 player and car adapter recently. See, I have this lovely trance playlist, and I drive for hours up into the nearby Appalachians when I need inspiration and to re-energize my writer's mind. Mountains=no radio signal. Older car=no auxiliary port. Me=very sad. [Insert melodramatic sigh here.] I have spoiled myself with my digital playlist to the point where listening to a cd where I get a couple good songs in a soup of worthless noise is no longer acceptable. Amazing what technology does to us, isn't it. ...Now, if I could get Pandora in my car? I'd be a happy little lark. Of course, I'm a Frugal Writer, and try to stick to the necessities in life. (Half my brain is screaming, "OMG! It's music , it's a flippin' Necessity, thankyouverymuch!") So... Here's an excerpt from Black's sequel, Blood Red to taunt your taste buds and whet your appetite.....

Copyedits for FOAT came and went rather swiftly. The prose is, apparently, as squeaky clean as a brand new car right off the lot. Most of the flagged issues were ones that ended up being declined alterations on style grounds. Both Aleks and I tend to use punctuation properly in dialogue, as well as elsewhere, and I find it almost funny that a question given the cadence of a statement would by default require a question mark as punctuation instead of a period. The nuances of spoken language are what defines a character, a mindset, an emotional state, for the reader's benefit. You change those to parallel predefined standards, and all the sudden the life is sucked out of the characters, the depth depleted from the prose. It is those little things, those nuances, that create the quality of the story, when combined in the final product. My 35-pound lapdog almost gave me a heart attack yesterday. He tends to curl up in the footspace beneath my desk in the writing corner while I...

The Trunked Novel Rewrite is dangling on the cusp of what will be a violent and messy scene wherein the MC, Jaedyn, attempts (unsuccessfully) to extricate his father from being ravaged to pieces by wild, mind-driven carnivores. The other MC, Renji, hasn't quite yet come to terms with the fact that his love interest has gone from being female...to male...in the general course of my apparent machete-wielding. His introductory chapter is horridly stalled. Hey, Renji? I promise, I'm doing it with surgical precision. Really, I am. Even if it doesn't appear that way. The excessive blood spatter is disturbing, yet unavoidable. I guess I'll get back on track with that one when he settles down. Black's sequel, Blood Red, has hit a Snag-Lag also. Konaton is disbelieving, Jhez is offended, and I threw my hands up and left them alone to stew. Andrej Pejic .... the face of Black. Through the course of yesterday evening, though, I did manage to find the face of Black....

Or, A Ramble About Craft. I don’t pretend to have a “New! Improved!” perspective on writing, or any artistic expression, regardless of the medium, for that matter. I don’t have all the answers. I don’t have any answers, come to think of it. I just have the moon outside my living room window. And a philosophy. It’s not even an opinion – those are like anal sphincters. Everyone has one. They pass some rather rank gases and other matter, too. No thanks. Blind eye, writer’s block, deaf ear, clumsy hands. No matter what your chosen or preferred medium of artistic expression is, you’ve either heard these kinds of expressions before—or have experienced them firsthand. The composer who sits down to play, only to stare at the blank grids, and hear nothing in his mind. The writer’s Blinking Cursor of Doom, mocking. The painter who looks at the canvas and sees…nothing, not even negative space. Or the one who claims their mind doesn’t see in enough detail. Or what their hand does draw isn’t wh...