Haus of Rhi

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...

Today marks the halfway point for NanoWrimo. Bringing Red's story to life has not been an easy journey thus far, nor is the path likely to become more forgiving in the weeks to come. I've felt more like Frankenstein than a parent. Fashioning from the death, despair, and destruction a miracle of science, not some fresh gift of nature to be molded and formed like wet clay. Largely this is because the first portion of Red's story has lurked in the back of my mind like a ghost limb in the years since Blacker Than Black  came to fruition. She was there, loitering in the shadows, sharp gaze following every shift of inspiration, the ebb and flow of creative energies. Waiting for her time to come. And in the end, she isn't the one telling her story. The task of narrator falls to someone else. She approves of this in ways I cannot begin to describe. For her, it feels like a relief. The pressure has shifted. The performance anxiety no longer exists. She can breathe, and be...

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...

With a story as short as my piece "Blood & Peyote," I don't really feel comfortable actually offering an excerpt. Even a small one offers up too large a chunk. I've seen a few readers comment that they don't want to spoil the surprise and pleasure of reading the anthology when it comes out. So I've devised a substitute. It offers a bit of the mood, tone, and flavor of the story and the characters without divulging anything of the actual narrative. Behold, I give you the soundtrack to "Blood & Peyote." Each song was chosen to coincide with a specific scene and section. The exception is the twelve-minute "Blackfoot Fire" which is included for the sole intention of conveying something of Apisi Howling's culture, as well as his weight in the story. In the event that Spotify doesn't work for you, I've created an abridged Blood & Peyote from rhi.e on 8tracks Radio as well. There are a couple songs missing from...

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 ...