Renee Carter Hall

Still miss you. Still think of you every time I carefully trap a spider under a cup and take it outside instead of killing it, every time I keep a watchful eye on a turtle crossing our driveway to make sure it's not heading toward the road, every time I see or hear someone cringing back from some reptile in the pet store or on TV, when I can only see how beautiful the creature is.

And when I've moved a turtle off the road, or massaged a medicine-soaked cotton ball into a stray cat's ears, or surprised a deer into staring at me when I open the door to bring in the mail, I've always found myself saying the same words, and I realize they're yours.

You're all right, softly, soothingly, you're all right.

Man, how long has it been since I took an online quiz? I used to wind up doing those things practically on a daily basis in my early days on LiveJournal -- what character from Lord of the Rings are you, your hobbit name, your elf name, what animal are you, what book are you, on and on and on.

Anyway...

you are lightskyblue #87CEFA

Your dominant hues are cyan and blue. You like people and enjoy making friends. You're conservative and like to make sure things make sense before you step into them, especially in relationships. You are curious but respected for your opinions by people who you sometimes wouldn't even suspect. Your saturation level is lower than average - You don't stress out over things and don't understand people who do. Finishing projects may sometimes be a challenge, but you schedule time as you see fit and the important things all happen in the end, even if not everyone sees your grand master plan. Your outlook on life is bright. You see good things in situations where others may not be able to, and it frustrates you to see them get down on everything.

the spacefem.com html color quiz

Took this the other day and wound up with steel blue, which was fairly similar, I think, in terms of the description. The "finishing projects" thing is definitely on target, though I think I do stress over things far more than this would imply. :)

Will have a general update later today, but for now, in the interests of 1) updating here on a more regular basis, and 2) making this journal about slightly more than just me and whatever I'm doing, I've decided to use Fridays to post links to interesting writing/music/art/whatever I happen across that I think deserves a signal boost, even if it's only the tiny one I can offer here.

I'm starting off with singer/songwriter Zoe Mulford, whose work I first heard at a local music festival several years ago. To listen to her songs is to listen with a perpetual lump in your throat -- and yet wind up smiling. Her lyrics have the trick of being both accessible and inevitable, without feeling forced, and in her songwriting she seems equally at home with poignance and humor.

You can listen to a few of her songs on her website:

http://zoemulford.com/music.html

And you can find a list of her albums (available from CD Baby and, for the two earlier ones, from iTunes) here:

http://zoemulford.com/products.html

Enjoy!

Well, by now I'm down to two goals for the year: Finish at least one short story per month, and open an Etsy shop. I have a feeling the Etsy shop goal is going to be put on hold until fall, and if things go well, I'm going to be focused more on novels than short stories during the second half of the year. So with all that in mind, I think my goals check-ins are going to be less list-oriented and more just taking stock of where things are and what's on the horizon.

I worked on a few different short stories in June (and got a couple of the drafts I finished earlier this year polished and submitted), but I didn't get any stories fully completed by the end of the month. There were two good reasons for this, though: first, I started working full-time as a medical transcriptionist instead of part-time (meaning I now spend eight hours a day at the computer instead of four), and second, I spent a big chunk of June getting the last revisions done on my novel By Sword and Star. The extra hours of work time sapped my energy for a couple weeks before I adjusted, and the novel took up most of the rest.

As far as the rest of this year goes, as I just mentioned in my earlier post, I'm planning on doing Camp NaNoWriMo in August, with a book concept called The Second Life of Bartholomew T. Lion. If that doesn't completely burn me out, I'd really like to also do the regular NaNo in November, to complete a first draft of my second furry novel, working title Huntress. This has wound up being a very lousy year for me so far in terms of publishing short stories, so I'm putting the focus on creation for the rest of the year, and I would love to be able to close out 2011 with one novel published and two others with completed first drafts. We'll see...

Smashwords is having a site-wide sale during July, and I've added my fantasy novelette "Real Dragons Don't Wear Sweaters" to the promotion. This means that through July 31, if you enter the code SSW50 at checkout, you can get "Real Dragons" for half price -- just 99 cents. So if you haven't downloaded your copy yet, now's the time!

http://www.smashwords.com/books/view/63869

1. Finish at least one short story per month. Total completed: 1

The month of May kind of slipped by when I wasn't looking. Or, to be more precise, when I was reading and sending out submissions. >_< My current work in progress is being stubborn and taking a lot longer than expected to come together. I think I've figured out what's supposed to happen, but I still feel like I'm missing a piece or two.

2. Put at least one long short story/novella up for sale on Smashwords. Done! Separate announcement coming in a bit, to cross-post to LJ. (Okay, okay, yeah, I uploaded that novelette today, not last month. But I'm counting it anyway.)

3. Open an Etsy shop. Next step on this one is going to be hauling the old printer/scanner/copier out of the box and seeing if it still works after a couple years in the basement, since it's going to be a lot nicer to use scans of my art and not digital photos.

My flash fiction title "Norma the Wal-Mart Greeter Meets the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse" is the co-winner of this year's Meager Puddle of Limelight Award for Best Short Story Title, hosted by jongibbs:

http://jongibbs.livejournal.com/186862.html

(Darn it, I knew I should have told my husband to go vote for me in the final round. Then it wouldn't have been a tie.) ;)

On a serious note, though, there is a certain satisfaction in knowing that I tied for first place without asking anybody outright to vote for me, even though it's possible I could have driven a few more voters to LJ to win outright. I'm just not crazy about doing the whole "hey guyz! go vote for me!!!" thing, even though I know it's not exactly frowned upon.

At any rate, both of us winners get a copy of Jon Gibbs' book Fur-Face (which I'd been wanting to read), a coffee mug that says "I are a writer" (sweet!), and either a guest blog post or an interview on his blog. Since I don't have any astounding ideas for blog posts at the moment, I'll be taking the interview option. Plus, interviews give me a satisfying illusion of importance. :)

(I really should make "Norma" into a series: "Norma the Wal-Mart Greeter Finds the Lost City of Atlantis," "Norma the Wal-Mart Greeter Meets Cthulhu"...)

Or not. :D

Sometimes I think they know when I'm having a bad day and time the films to be released then. :)

First, the standard disclaimer: No, nobody's under any obligation to buy me anything ever, whether it's for any sort of recognized holiday/celebration or not. And if you think this sort of thing is tacky, feel free to ignore it. :)

That said, here's my current wish list for journals/notebooks/blank books from around the web...

( Read more... )

It used to be that I could only write in something very casual -- in high school and for several years after, I was fond of the Mead Five Star 5-subject notebooks. Anything else just felt like it was too formal and lovely to write in. I'm glad I got over that. ;)

1. Finish at least one short story per month. Total completed: 2 (Technically, I could say two and two-thirds, since I'm almost done with another one, but it's on hold for a few days while I figure out how everything fits together.)

This month's two completed drafts were ones that I've had in progress for... a couple years now, so it feels good to finally get them done. They need some polishing up, but the pieces are all there, anyway, and I should be able to start sending them out by the end of this month. One is a lighthearted fantasy piece called "Real Dragons Don't Wear Sweaters," about a pet dragon wanting to be a real, wild dragon instead of being cute and fuzzy and pink, and the other, currently titled "Best of Breed," is a somewhat grittier piece told from the perspective of an anthro female cat and explores the relationship she has -- or doesn't have -- with her male human handler.

I'm really happy with how "Dragons" turned out -- I love the characters, I love the humor I was able to use, and I feel like it's one of my best stories in recent months. "Best of Breed" has been trickier, and as I've worked on it I've had to keep shoving away the potential criticisms popping up in my mind (predictable, cliched, confusing, whatever). Whatever editors and readers wind up thinking about it, at least I've finished the draft, and it might clean up better than I think, anyway.

2. Put at least one long short story/novella up for sale on Smashwords. Working on it. That two-thirds story I mentioned in #1 is a novellette/novella (depending on what its word count winds up at) called "Signal," and that's the draft I'm planning to be my first Smashwords offering (not counting a story or two I'll put up for free just to test everything out).

The biggest problem at the moment is that, while I know how I'll want the cover art to look, I don't have a lot of spare cash right now to commission a really good artist to do it, and I don't have the skills or the tools to do it myself (since I really want it digitally colored, instead of traditional media). But I'm planning to ask around, since there may be very good artists willing to do the work for less than I'm expecting. *shrug* (Another consideration is that I'm hoping to eventually make a profit, even a tiny one, from selling stuff on Smashwords, and the more I pay upfront for cover art commissions, the more copies I have to sell just to break even. I wish I had more artist friends...)

3. Work on my website. I'm counting this one as done. This was my biggest priority for March, and all the main pages are there now. At this point it's just going to be an ongoing project, adding things, tweaking things, improving layouts, and so on. (Eventually the poetry page may have poems on separate pages with internal navigation, and I'll be adding a few more stories and probably putting up PDF versions for download.)

My newest online project will now be learning how to navigate and figuring out what to do with my Goodreads page, where I just signed up a few days ago. I'm still learning how to use the site, but it looks like fun, even if it also looks like it has the potential to take up a lot of time if I'm really trying to catalogue everything I'm reading or want to read. :)

In a way, it feels a little like I'm putting the cart before the horse since I don't have a book to promote yet (my Goodreads author page is there courtesy of short stories in New Fables, an annual anthropomorphic journal/anthology). But all in all, I think I'd rather get comfortable with a place like that before I have something to promote, because I don't want to be one of those people who suddenly shows up in social media trying to shill their book seventeen different ways to anybody who'll listen, and winds up coming off as somebody who's just there to sell stuff.

Speaking of selling stuff...

4. Open an Etsy shop. No work on this one for March. It's hard for me to have enough energy to spread over writing and art both, so I tend to shift back and forth from one to the other.

Overall, I'm satisfied with this month. Of course I would have liked to get more drafts completed, but these were both long (and long overdue), so I'm still happy with what I've gotten done. At some point I guess I'm going to have to accept that I just don't churn things out as quickly as others do, except in rare cases where everything clicks.