She talks to wolves...

The time has come for all good women and men to become wicked creatures of sensual scent and the mythic dark. Persephone is sashaying back to her crown and her love, scattering dried petals and dying leaves behind her with every deliberate step. Hades has opened up his door, and soon it’ll close behind her.

Nothing to fear awaits you in these dark passages, so long as you’re a friend to Furies.

If any of that resonated with you – and you like perfume oils – you’re a BPAL fan. You just might not know it yet. Black Phoenix Alchemy Lab are great people with a great company, and they’ve been helping us smell amazing for more than a decade. They revel in the beautifully macabre, and also partner up to feed our geeky hearts with perfume oils inspired by Neil Gaiman‘s words and worlds, Jim Henson’s Labyrinth, Guillermo del Toro’s Crimson Peak, Lovecraftian lore, fairy tales, and so much more.

This year, they decided to start a series of contests inspired by the Seven Deadly Sins. “Seduce us in 7!” they cried, and threw open their email box and social media accounts to receive stories of seven words inspired by the designated sin. Their very first sin was LUST, and I had the honor of being the very first winner – that’s my micro story above, beautifully rendered by the BPAL folks. As I put it when I found out:

It’s been over 6 months, but still? I’M SO EXCITED.

You should also all read the honorable mentions and check out the hashtag on Twitter (though you’d have to scroll back a fair bit for the Lust edition entries). There is some truly beautiful and evocative work there.

And now? I want to tell you about the perfume oil they created.

As a winner, I received a bottle of the final scent. In the bottle, the pomegranate is strong and lush – to my nose, it almost trips over into cherry. The end of the inhale pulls the smoke into play. On my skin, wet: the smoke emerges first, tickling my nose until the pomegranate rose up behind it. And, at last, on my skin, dry: the two distinct notes I picked out at first fully merge into a complicated and heady interplay that draws the nose closer. A perfect match for my sentence! BPAL’s artistry is stunning, and I’m delighted all over again that my story inspired them.

Since the Lust edition of the contest, they’ve also hosted one for Sloth and then Wrath. There are four more sins to go – make sure you’re following BPAL on Twitter (or Facebook!) so you can participate in the next ones. Even if you’re just reading, you’re in for a real treat.

And don’t forget to enjoy the Autumnal equinox – the Seven Word Story: Lust perfume oil would be a perfect complement to your dying year festivities.

Mirrored from geekdame.com. Please comment there.

It never fails: George R. R. Martin makes a commenting-enabled post about his life over at grrm and the creeps come out. By creeps, I mean those individuals who think that George's only viable commitment is that he finish A Dance with Dragons, the next book in the A Song of Ice and Fire series NOW. In fact, preferably yesterday. Or, more accurately, TWO YEARS AGO.

It doesn't matter if George is posting about other writing (which he's perfectly entitled to do, being a writer). It doesn't matter if he posts about football (which is also fine, because he is a living being with multiple interests). It doesn't matter if he posts about taking a vacation or attending conventions to promote his writing. It honestly doesn't even matter if he posts about writing A Dance with Dragons. If he's not done, he's done these people wrong.

This line of thinking actually offends me. It's a huge breach in the fundamental respect one should afford another human being, not to mention being remarkably self-centered and crawling with entitlement-crazy.

Luckily for us, one of these creeps e-mailed Neil Gaiman to demand his opinion on George R. R. Martin's "slackness" in "letting [fans] down" by not delivering on his commitment to the fans to finish A Song of Ice and Fire (no, really). Neil Gaiman took the case and he did us proud:

I love Neil. And I really love George's A Song of Ice and Fire, but I never have and never will think of him as my bitch. Nor will I reprimand him like one. I'm interested in A Dance with Dragons being the best it can be; not churned out in a paroxysm of guilty workaholism the creeps would inflict on the man if they could.

Today's wordcount: 1505 (1113 usable)
Current project: "Child of Midnight"
Description: "At midnight, every stone was a poet." - Mia Nutick.
Reason for stopping: Some pieces rattled around and fell together in a way that will necessitate immediate revision, plus there was dinner.

This isn't the story I'm supposed to be working on! I'm supposed to be working on "Burier" and then I'm supposed to be researching for another story that's due very soon. However, this one leapt on me last night and I could not say no.



I also have a new Word Cloud to share with you, this one based on "When Death Dances," a Dia de los Muertos fairy tale I currently have sent out:


"When Death Dances"
(click for larger version)

In today's edition of Green Man Review, my review of The Princess and the Goblin by George MacDonald is a featured review!

If you're interested in literary fairy tales, please do read it.

(This edition also features reviews of Ekaterina Sedia's The Secret Life of Moscow, Patricia McKillip's Moon-Flash -- lovely volume!-- and Here There Be Dragons-- something I've been meaning to read.)

I finished the second edit on Green Dream and mailed it out to all of my beta readers. (Thanks for taking the time to do this for me, guys!)

Andy and I found Cherry Chocolate Diet Dr. Pepper at the grocery store today. He bought one for us to try and it is truly awful. As I find cadhla's review to be quite accurate, I will simply quote it here:

Take a Tootsie Roll. Now, through methods currently unknown by modern science, turn it into a liquid. Not a viscous goo, like when you roll it between your fingers, but an actual liquid. Mix it, in equal proportions, with NyQuill. Pour the resulting mixture into a bottle of Diet Dr Pepper. Add a sprig of PURE UNFETTERED WHAT THE FUCK WERE YOU PEOPLE THINKING ARE YOU ON GODDAMN CRACK OR SOMETHING?! and garnish with OH LORD IT'S IN MY MOUTH IT'S IN MY MOUTH I THINK MY TONSILS ARE MELTING AHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH.

In other news, the second bottle is being kept in case of alien attack.

If this won't kill the bastards, nothing will.

That is it exactly.

Besides editing my story and trying Cherry Chocolate Rain, the most I got done today was cracking open Tithe. It's rather more "adult" than I expected so far... interesting!

Now, to make sure that this post is more other people's words than my own, I will quote something matociquala posted today that I love. It's a perversion of the opening soliloquy of Trainspotting:

Choose a novel. Choose a title. Choose an epigraph. Choose a protagonist. Choose a fucking opening sentence. Choose supporting characters, pets, backstory, and electrical tin openers. Choose heartbreak, repetitive stress injuries, and a lack of health insurance. Choose mounting credit card debt. Choose starving in a garret. Choose writing sex scenes instead of dating. Choose a laptop with a flickering screen. Choose a three-book contract with a crushing deadline and fucking basket accounting. Choose dying alone and wondering who the hell you are on a Sunday morning. Choose sitting in that chair writing mind-numbing spirit-crushing hackwork, stuffing fucking junk food into your mouth. Choose rotting away at the last of it, pishing your last in a miserable home, nothing more than an embarrassment to the selfish, fucked-up Hot New Things who will rise up from your ashes. Choose your future. Choose a novel.

...but first, you have to choose an epigraph.

Love it. Might have to icon it.

Speaking of icons, be sure to check out copperwise's latest icons (featuring quotes by Neil Gaiman, Charles de Lint, Terry Pratchett, and others) at this entry over at little_shinies. They're fantastic!

I did a first-pass edit on half of Green Dream tonight. It gave me a headache. There are parts which I actually feel are good and like I know what I'm doing. And then there are the parts where I can't even tell if I know what I am doing and then the whole house of cards starts to tremble.

Is this any good? Would anyone care about this story? Do I care about this story? Is this getting across what I wanted to evoke? Who uses those words? Do I usually use that word? What the hell is up with that contortion act of a sentence? Am I ever going to get this right? Does this even have a chance of being good enough for submission in a week? Are my amateur panties showing?

Then: headache.

With my relative level of self-confidence, it's probably miraculous that I manage to get anything done.

I should draw solace from that and use it to build up self-confidence. ;)

Anyway, the current plan is to finish the first-over pass (tonight? hah! tomorrow, at best). I suppose I will then mail out the first-pass edit for beta-ing while independently continuing to tinker. At my discretion.

I would put this story in a drawer for a while, to gain some distance, but I'm working under a deadline.

The current word-count is 6942, and I'm willing to edit it down to approximately 6k, which I feel is pretty solid for a short story of this type. I compared it to a few anthologies I have encompassing a similar genre and my notion was borne out. It looks like my story would end up being about 12 pages.

Now, I am going to read something for pleasure and something for school. And take some advil.

I'm so close to the end of this story that I can taste it.

Of course, in a way, then the real work begins. I only had the barest idea of who I was writing about and how I wanted to accomplish my vision of the end when I started. Now I get to go back and fill in some blanks, tuck in some places, fill out others, and in general make it a more compelling story.

In spite of my awesome progress on Sunday, Monday saw me bogged down and distracted by the application process. So I only wrote 41 words yesterday.

I don't have much of an excuse for today, other than that running around took too long this afternoon and then I dragged my feet on getting my schoolwork done and then Andy and I watched a movie during dinner. This carried me right past my target writing time of 8-10 PM and left me on the other side of 10 PM, feeling exhausted and vaguely sick (headache, emotional miasma). The best I could manage was 576 words and most of that was cheating: I typed up a scene I'd written for this story months ago. It'd been biding it's time in a notebook, waiting to see it's turn in the narrative.

Today had the unpleasant quality of feeling like a brick wall that I had just run into. Repeatedly.

On Tuesday, I gave my World Lit kids some easy homework. I really do not subscribe to the practice of giving homework just to give homework, but I wanted to get them back into the mode of actually doing homework and hopefully expand their horizons a bit. So I asked them to research some non-American winter holiday traditions and write me a short essay reporting on their findings.

No one did it. One student said he couldn't find anything because when he typed his search into Google, it kept giving him American traditions. Another student claimed he didn't know they had to write anything. I know this is not the case considering I wrote the assignment on the board, talked about why we were doing it, and then explained how much their grade would decrease with each day the assignment was late.

This was not a very heartening way to start the semester.

They went on to be incredibly unimpressed by the Epic of Gilgamesh and unable to understand where Sumer was located.

My composition class was surprisingly better today (sadly due to the absence of a couple of individuals). They took notes and did as I asked them, although it's still going to be a major uphill battle. (An example of what I am dealing with: "What are the building blocks of sentences?" "Paragraphs?" "Of sentences? What are the pieces that make up a sentence?" "Uh... subjects?" "A little closer, but not quite. What are the things that are coming out of my mouth...?" "... ... words?" "Yes, words are the building blocks of sentences!") We managed to go over the basic structure of a paragraph and types of paragraphs and their positions in the basic 5-paragraph essay. Then we started practicing writing introductory paragraphs, though I think I might scale that back to just working on paragraphs in general next week.

In my free period, I managed to get all my grades submitted. I was even extra nice and prepared them in a document indicating the relevant semester average and credits each student received. That should make the office lady's job easier, later, when she actually has to prepare transcripts.

I did not, however, manage to put the finishing touches on any of my job applications during my free period. I was having a real problem with my blood sugar and my hydration today, so my mind was twitchy and scattered.

Only half my class showed up for Southern Literature. Again. Only a third of Andy's Government class showed up. The weather was worsening this afternoon and several counties had let their schools out early, but that didn't touch Montgomery county. It wasn't even raining when school let out (at it's normal time). I suspect that might have had some bearing on why our students didn't show up, though. Regardless, I still got my students through an introduction to Southern literature and started them on Twain's "The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County." They had difficulty reading the Southern dialect and didn't twig as quickly as I expected they would to the fact that you can read it aloud and figure it out. "Ms. B, what does 'solitry' mean?" I waited, sure she was going to get it now that she read it aloud. "Ms. B, what does soli..." "Solitry. Solitary." "Oh... oh!" I figured she had it then. But she repeated it with "calk'lated" later.

I had originally intended to submit applications after school today. Instead, we had lunch with my brother. Then we beat the weather home. And I worked desultorily on one grad application while attempting to stave off a bad headache, etc.

I am tired of this post now and I am sure most others are as well! I will close with my sadly low wordcount and take myself off to more water (hydration!) and reading.

Today's Goal: 750 words, and still owing 961 due to previous shortages.
Goal met? No. 272 words were written, leaving me owing 478 for a total of 1439.
Reason for stopping: I feel unwell and just don't have much in me.

Project: Short story, title of "Green Dream."
Status of project: Carin on transport down to Dunwain, sleep-deprived and awash in despair and delirium.

Today's Goal: 750 words, and still owing 1028 due to previous shortages.
Goal met? Met and exceeded at 795, leaving me owing 983.
Reason for stopping: Exhausted + it's bedtime.

Project: A review of George MacDonald's The Princess and the Goblin + a short story entitled "Green Dream."
Status of project: The review is finished, pending a final read-through tomorrow. Carin didn't make it much farther than actually onto the transport ship itself tonight and is reflecting on Trellan in spring.

I didn't get any work done on applications or syllabi, but I did get off to a fantastic start on writing my story tonight. I mean, I still feel like everything is one step to the left of right, but one step away from what I'm shooting for is much better than nonexistent! I'm tentatively excited over a few parts of what I wrote, though I'll probably return to the glum humdrum when I work on it tomorrow.

A few highlights from tonight's writing:

- I've almost settled on actually calling it "Green Dream." It was a placeholder title at first, but some things that suddenly occurred to me as I was writing tonight revealed that it might be more apt than I thought.

- I almost pulled something out of the following Christina Rossetti poem for the title, but concluded that it didn't quite mean what I'm going for:

( The poem. )

- On my new planet, florists sell temporary stasis chambers in single-blossom and bouquet sizes. It's only legal to put plant matter in them, but some off-worlders are trying to adapt the technology to be suitable for other organic matter (it's better than deep freezing and the new technology wouldn't necessarily be looked for yet by the law, making it easier on smugglers who are into organics).

- the_red_shoes is an awesome cheerleader!


Today's Goal: 750 words.
Goal met? Met and blown away, baby! 1345 words.
Reason for stopping: A scene change stymied me and I wanted to spend a little time with Andy, snuggled and watching a movie, before we go to bed.

Project: Short story, tentative title "Green Dream."
Status of project: Carin has left a meeting with an Aide to the Elders with a curious flower I had not foreseen and is on her way back to her ship for the journey to Dunwain starport. Irritated pirates and wondrous alien cities imminent.

To close, Andy and I totally just sat through Balls of Fury together. It was made fun by fun-making, a few funny jokes, and conversation.

My personal favorite moment was when I turned to Andy about 30 minutes in and said, (insert Walken accent here) "Wait a minute, wait. What I need here is... more Christopher Walken. This is not working for me... without the Christopher Walken. Please, guys, more Walken."

Ah well. If you can laugh at yourself, you'll never cease to be amused. Am I right?

P.S. Who (besides sirandrew and without Googling) can tell me where the quote in my subject line comes from?