Haus of Rhi

Camp Nano had actually been chugging along reasonably well through the middle of the month. Halfway through June, I managed to stay on track and broke the 25k barrier only a day or so late. And I did hit 50k... for the year. The irony is that, well, the day I broke the halfway mark? I received an email from my Riptide editor. Yep. I am wading through edits, my focus on a completely different project. And switching gears between them doesn't happen easily enough for me to try finishing out the month goal of 50k. Especially not when all my creative energy is going into polishing. It takes a lot of elbow grease. Can I count the 2k+ that I've added in the edits? So! August Camp Nano it is, then! I'll take the year-milestone of 50k as a technical victory, putting me at the halfway point for that. I set an annual goal of 100k for this year for a couple reasons -- the greatest being a matter of quality over quantity, but editing processes contributed heavily as well. I knew ...

Earlier this past week, I grabbed a special collector's edition of Scientific American Mind titled "His Mind, Her Mind: How We're Different" off the magazine rack. Because, in all seriousness, I wanted to see how they tackled a headline I caught on the contents page. An article titled, "The Third Gender." I'll admit, though I had high hopes, just seeing that title gave me a queasy feeling. I knew deep down that it was going to be rough reading before I even started. Guess I'm a masochist, because I read it anyway. And you know what? I was right. I realize that Scientific American isn't a scientific journal where the foremost minds in their fields publish those papers that you need a comparable doctorate to parse through. That being said, the author of this particular article still contradicted himself so often that I began to suspect he was confusing himself. Or perhaps was confused himself already, and it simply presented that way in the ...

Dear readers, Hi! Send Twizzlers and black licorice jelly beans please? Oh, and more coffee of course. Not that I don't have plenty, but one can never have enough. The weather's great, sun's warm, and the occasional glimpses of Black Hawks and Chinooks are just enough to be a timely distraction. I was sorely tempted to go sit and watch the #soldierporn flying around all afternoon, but that sun-so warm and lovely in an indirect way on my front porch-promised the murder of a thousand lobster-burns if I dared neglect my day's task. So I saluted the Chinook with my Moleskine and went back to writing.

I rarely recall much of any detail about my dreams anymore. They dissipate the moment my conscious awareness reboots and comes back online. This morning was different. In living color, playing out before me as though I were an actor in a lead role of a theater production. The edges of the stage, the curtain, invisible. Immersed, I experienced every emotion, every touch, heard every word and musical note, with clarity and realism that I cannot begin to describe. I think I might have even experienced a few smells, too. Talk about engaging all the senses. I know it was a dream. But it didn't feel like one. And the words came pouring forth from my fingers before the fuel of caffeinated beverage was past my lips. I rarely write 600 words in ten minutes. Hell if I didn't this morning. Good morning, new muse. Go sit in the corner and strum your guitar and keep all the other muses in some kind of passive state of non-frenzy while I finish this other project. And then I wil...

So I've set a goal to finish the WIP known as the Trunked Novel Overhaul before the end of June. That leaves me with, roughly, somewhere between 40-50k needing written, with the bit of backtracking I needed to do in order to detour around some plot-block issues I had. One of my fellow Riptide authors tweeted this morning about "Camp Nanowrimo" which, not surprisingly, I'd known nothing about because I live in a cave under a mountain most of the time. At any rate, I've signed up for the June camp . And because I'm silly and sentimental and this WIP has been with me forever, I tossed up an old sketch for the "cover art" spot: Insignis A piece inspired by one of the original characters, which has since been smooshed back into a lump of clay and recreated along with many others. The concept prevails, though. And I am acutely aware that I have less talent for drawing than I do for writing. This is here because, as I said, it's been a long ...

Thanks to everyone who followed the "Hop Against Homophobia" this past weekend. The participation was huge and it was so awesome to see all the wonderful blogposts raising visibility and awareness of not just homophobia, but transphobia as well. The winners of the two copies of Dark Edge of Honor  are: Erica (eri.pike@gmail.com) and Ashley (ashley.vanburen@gmail.com) Check your email account for your ebook, and thank you to everyone who took the time to stop by and comment at Haus of Rhi!

One of the things that turned me toward M/M romance was repeated encounters with a double standard of homosexual acceptance. For years, everywhere I turned, I kept hearing the same thing: "women can be lesbian, nothing wrong with that, but two guys that is just wrong  and gross  and unnatural ." And yes, I've heard a reversed version of this double standard in which a person accepts male homosexuality but rejects the validity of the same in females. But I've heard it a great deal less often. As in, so rarely it's virtually nonexistent. Now, I'll be the first to acknowledge that it's a reading preference when it comes to book content. How a reader finds entertainment and the subject matters they enjoy most are individual and unique, nor should they ever be infringed upon. But when those personal preferences are focused outward and reflected on others to dictate what is or is not acceptable choices, or valid identities or orientations, when one indi...