Writing 101 and Blogging 101

I may have made a big mistake because I joined both Writing 101 and Blogging 101. For one I am supposed to write stream of consciousness and for the other a blog about why I am blogging, including a picture. So I’m going to try to do each, in a way. I’m blogging because I want to get to know people and fill them in on what I’m doing. I want to make friends and inform them about myself. I think I have some important things to say and some amusing and intelligent ways to say them. Why else do people write blogs? Some have issues of importance, such as domestic abuse or writing or how to make paper airplanes. The reasons go from the sublime to the ridiculous.

I like to read other blogs and comment on them. I like to write about things that are interesting to me. I wrote and reblogged about Robin Williams because I think there is a lot of misinformation on the web and in peoples’ minds about the nature of mental illness. I know that many people think that depressed people are that way because they choose it, that if they were less selfish they would pull themselves up by the bootstraps and get over it. Do we treat any other illness this way? Do we tell people with cancer or MS or epilepsy that they are selfish? Of course not. We don’t offer home nostrums to these people either. But the number of people who have advice for little tricks or practices that will “help” the depressed seems to grow every day. And the number of people who say “I’m depressed today” when they mean they are sad is also growing. We would never say we feel a little cancerous today, but saying we’re depressed today is okay. Why? People who live with unremitting and persistent depression don’t say, “I’m a little depressed today.” In fact, they don’t reference it at all, because we live in a society that thinks depression is equal on some scale to malingering.

The problem with stream of consciousness is that one can too easily get on a soapbox. If you learned anything from that diatribe, thank you. I’ve wanted to say that for years, and it feels good to have it in writing. As you may or may not have guessed, I have suffered from unremitting and persistent depression for almost 20 years. But I’m doing better now, thanks for asking. And as I do better, I find my creativity has returned. I have written my first book and am halfway through the first draft of my second book. Numbers three and four are waiting in the wings, so I hope this progress I have made against a pernicious disease lasts long enough to get them all written.   I even have the cover ready for the first book and you can find it here.   http://www.pinterest.com/pin/308848486919623720/ I’m supposed to embed the picture in the blog. but I haven’t figured out how to do that. But here it is! How did I do that?

So I hope this post satisfies both Writing 101 and Blogging 101. And I hope you, dear reader, know a little more about me and why I write.

https://wordpress.com/read/blog/id/73069450/

Cover Art for Fantastical Trips

I arranged with an English artist to do the cover for my first book. She has done a number of paintings I have admired, including the three dragon paintings now gracing the wall above my desk. They serve as inspiration when things are going slowly. Unfortunately, the story I’m working on now has no dragons in it. At least, not yet. As a Pantser, I cannot say with certainty what will come in the latter stages of the book.

But Fantastical Trips has dragons in it, as well as sorcerers from earth, cat people called felixities, and raven people called avanees. These are important, since the cover design reflects an important  meeting between one of the two top sorcerers and two felixities, an avanee and a kerp, a perfect human only shrunk to about two feet tall.

The sketch of the cover picture can be found at http://www.pinterest.com/barbaraalsop7/fantastical-trips/  [For reasons I do not understand, Pinterest is putting an additional suffix on this link. You will have to erase the language after “…trips/” and then you should get the board.] You will also see there some pictures that I passed on as models for the ones on the cover. There was much hemming and hawing on the issue of the felixities’ legs. There is one scene in which they kneel with Freddy, who starts to laugh when she sees that the felixities’ feet point forward. It was therefore essential to have the felixities drawn with legs that would indeed point forward when they kneel.

As you will see in the rough drawing on the Pinterest site, the legs are successful. The sorcerer is fine looking. There will be a dragon on the back. And I cannot wait until I have the cover in my hands. I shall share it with you when I do. My editor will begin working on the book on October 15, which should give me time to make necessary changes in time for a pre-Christmas release.  I will keep you posted!

Fantastical Trips

This is the final title of my first book, I think. I will be workshopping it through September and the beginning of October with my pals at the Burlington Writers Workshop who will whip it and me into shape. I hope that I will also have editing services on it during the same time frame. And if all goes well, self-publication before the holidays.

The story is fairly simple, and the blurb that will be on the back of the book is I hope a hook:

“A parallel earth has a long history of peaceful coexistence among its five sentient species. One thousand years ago, they signed a compact of nonaggression and nonviolence, but the veneer of civility is wearing thin. Battles between the sorcerers, sorcerers abusing other species, the use of deadly overmagic, all paint a picture of a world that has lost its way.

“There are just two high-grade sorcerers left, and they are brothers who are about to go head-to-head.  One may be stronger than the other, but the weaker is cunning, and sees a way to improve his chances. He invents and tests a spell – which allows him to find his way to a device to store magic!  He knows not what it looks like, but he’ll perform his spell and get whatever may come.

“What exactly is he going to bring from our earth to fulfill his plan?”

I would love to hear from those of you following my blog what you think of this as a blurb. The story begins with the summoning, and what the sorcerer has summoned is a human woman. It is not what he expected, since when he left our earth, there was a healthy and thriving community of Sorceresses, and he fully expected them to be in charge still. But Freddy, the woman he summons, has an ability that is, in a sense, antithetical to the magic practiced by the sorcerers both before and after the dividing of the planet.

Freddy is actually immune to magic, in the sense that magic cannot harm her. It can work on her in the way that the summoning spell can seize her, but only if she has done something to diminish her control over her body. What did Freddy do? I’ll give you a hint. It’s 1969, and she has just completed her freshman year in college. The answer can be found in the first line of the book. Watch this space!