Sep 18, 2010

You've got blood on your hands once you kill somebody!

The moment was tense; my peace of mind in a dangerous condition. A Seer would have to be present to detect the evidence. But I knew. I knew I was guilty--a character I really really really wanted to keep was killed off with one tap of my index finger. The highlighted area of the page blinked out, into the ethernet forever. Never to be seen again.
                                   
I stand by my decision...with luck the mystery will be stronger and the plot tighter, but the character was driving the story. My MC was struggling to keep up; his sweet nature, his old-fashioned manners falling to the side of the road whenever this guy came into a scene. He HAD to go. And he was so wicked, so evil, that most of my readers refused to go farther than the first full scene. He frightened adults.........how could I send him out to middle graders? So I done it. He's gone. finis.

Now comes the weird part.  .  .
I went hunting, like a good blogger, for a picture, an image of a typist with bloody fingers. All in good fun.
And Lordy, Lordy! There is a whole genre of sick minds posting bloody hands and fingers on the Images files. They even have t-shirts! There's a dozen re-tellings of the Bloody Fingers camping out in a tent story. There's also an APP for the Iphone with spinning knives and your fingers dodging them in tighter and tighter circles. And amazing enough, a recipe for Bloody Fingers to eat. Who knew?


Bloody Fingers for Kids

1 pack blanched white whole almonds
red food coloring
egg - beaten with a fork
As many as you need: Frozen fully cooked breaded chicken strips

Pre-heat the oven.
Dye the almonds. Glue them to the chicken strips with egg.
Arrange them on a cooking sheet and toast until ready.
Serve with drizzles of very red (Prego) basic pizza sauce, it's thicker than spaghetti sauce.


And last, but not least (as they say)...........you can send your friends and loved ones a Bloody Finger email. Like that's something they'll cherish for a long long time to come?

I'm closing the door on this revelation and getting back to work.

Sep 4, 2010

Dorrie and the Magic Elixir

What would I do without Chuck Sambuchino and Nathan Bransford and their digests? Or Deborah Halverson and Darcy Pattison for a tidbit a day? Or wonderful challenges from writers like Ms. Snark whom I adore. They are my writing buddies in absentia. My back-up crew unpaid save by admiration. They cheer us on and redirect us when we ramble,
just like Dorrie kept an eye on her Mother as the battle continued against the machinations of Wink, the rotten lizardly Wizard.

We all begin as little witches with an adoloescent knowledge of writing skills garnered from the books we've read and oh Lordy, we do read. We read everything from memoirs of people we've never heard of to junk mail to dreams of worlds beyound the Van Allen belts to steamy close encounters to blogs. And we leap, schemes and plots in hand, into the writing world like daughters and sons of Calliope, aware of all the baby spells we've learned and intrigued by the adult spells we hunger to perfect.

I look upon the advice so freely offered online from writers, editors, and agents as secrets to the Power. And I am studying the Big Book of Magic Spells as hard as I can.