Weaving Words releases today. *grin*

It’s a few hours before it goes live, but you can find out more about it here on my Samhain author link.

Easy part of his day? Resurrecting the dead. Hard part? Keeping them alive.

Kaede is a witch whose family has been bound to a powerful House for over a thousand years. And he hates it. Despite the fact that his lord, Tarou, murdered his mother, Kaede is sworn never to harm the man who could kill him with just seven words. Now he’s been commanded to use his unique powers to resurrect Tarou’s wife from the dead, and he has no choice but to comply. Things go horribly wrong when he accidentally pulls the wrong soul back. Now it’s not just his own life he must try to save.

Vara’s day couldn’t get much more bizarre. One moment she’s a captain in the Temple Guard. The next, she finds herself transported into a world of magic and witches—and stuffed into the body of a lord’s wife. Unwillingly plunged into middle of a deadly power struggle, the only one Vara can turn to is Kaede, the witch responsible for dragging her into this alien world. A witch she finds far too attractive…

Warning: This book contains the following; magic, witches and more body-swapping than is safely sane.

Excerpt

The corpse’s heart juddered and then began to pump fresh, slow blood through its decaying veins.

“Not decaying any more,” Kaede murmured.

“What was that, witch?”

Kaede ignored his lord’s question. His eyes stayed with the body on the altar, watching as the blood flushed the exposed skin not covered by its simple white funeral shift. “Nothing, lord.” His fingers dipped into the liquid gold, sweeping intricate symbols over her face and neck. The symbols writhed and Kaede snatched his fingers away. He winced. These were the final rushes of power. She was almost there, almost returned to bright life. Almost. He risked a look to the arched entrance of the ancient cavern. Light edged over the sky in a soft pale grey. It was only dawn. That knowledge had tiredness eating into his bones.

Had he only been bonded to her for a few hours? It felt like forever.

For the hours of darkness, he had stood over the Lord Tarou’s dead wife and worked his skill. A skill he shouldn’t have, and certainly not one his lord should know about. The shadows cast by the twisting patterns covering the woman’s skin danced over the cavern wall. Kaede kept his gaze fixed on his gold-smeared fingers. Tarou knew what he was and that scared him more than bringing a dead woman back to life.

How had his lord known?

Kaede’s jaw tightened. He knew his mother had to have talked in her final hours. Tarou had presided over her interrogation, obviously wrung secrets from her. The old soured anger swelled again, tasting bitter on his tongue, but he cut out those thoughts. They had no place in his head. He had a job to do.

He forced his gaze back to the woman’s face—her features calm and delicate even as she fought her way back to life. He hoped the Lord Tarou knew what he was doing. His wife couldn’t be that vital to him. The rumours ran that she was only a bartered woman from a wealthy Northern family. She had no connections, no special talents. To risk a resurrection was insane. Kaede said a silent prayer for his own soul.

Her lips parted. Dry. Cracked. With a cry, her spine arched away from the cold slab of the altar, her limbs twisting. Kaede grabbed at her arms, and held her down as her soul clawed its way back into her body. The witch willed all of his strength into keeping her still. Her soul had to settle. That fact the scrolls had stressed, stressed in blood and bone.

“Witch, what is happening?”

Kaede gritted his teeth. “She is almost back with us, lord.”

She shrieked, the cry piercing Kaede’s heart. That hadn’t been in the scrolls. A soul was supposed to crave the touch of its body. But he couldn’t panic. Not now.

She fell limp to the stone in a sudden rush. Kaede fell forward, pushing hard against her arms. She groaned. He released his tight grip and took support from the raised lip of the stone dais.

Her breathing was slow, even and there was a slight, living flush to her cheeks. The Lady Annaliese was the most beautiful woman in the king’s court. Kaede’s eyes flicked to the hovering lord. He stood taut, grim, his stark face intent in the candlelight. Tarou wanted more than just his pretty wife. It was there in his narrowed, black gaze, the whitened fingers that gripped the dagger at his hip.
Kaede stared back at Annaliese, watched as her eyelashes struggled to release the oil clogging them. He’d assumed that she was just the vacuous smile gracing Lord Tarou’s arm. He’d seen nothing special in her. Nothing at all.

Kaede rubbed gently at the muck and oil the ceremony required, erasing it from her skin in the reverse of how he had drawn it. With a final Word, the ash circle protecting them both swirled into the air and vanished.

Her eyes flickered open. They were a dark blue—evidence of her Northern Clan. There was no focus, just wild fear. Kaede blinked. He had never seen that before, none of the lords’ wives showed any emotion other than perfect serenity and happiness.

“Lady?” Kaede whispered, bending to catch sound from her parched mouth. His hand gripped the dais, helping to support his exhausted body.

Her lips moved and there was a rush of nonsensical syllables. She searched his face for understanding and her panic grew.

Pulling in his control, Kaede pressed his thumb into her forehead and forced out tired Words, grimacing at the pull of them in his flesh. He murmured a silent prayer, needing his final spell to work. Maybe he was wrong. Maybe—

“What is this place? Who are you? Why…” She reached up to tug at his thin, silver robe. Kaede lurched over her as she caught him by surprise. He stared at her as her voice faded away. A knot tightened in his stomach. What had he done? He’d failed. That failure would see her dead again. And him right along with her.

“Is she well, witch?” Tarou demanded, pushing forward to stand beside his silent wife. Annaliese simply stared at her moving fingers, examined her palm, ignoring her husband.

“Yes, lord.” Kaede pushed back the hood of his robe and held the woman’s staring eyes. “The resurrection was successful.” The lie soured his mouth.

Thanks for reading

The Talar murdered her mother and her sisters but to save her city from their attacking armada, Alena Petrova Dubov, Imperial Princess of the Rodin must put aside her hatred and sleep with the enemy.

It’s an ancient ceremony, shared with two men bred for her pleasure. Or it should have been. Her generals had chosen Vadim, son of a Talar captive, to satisfy her, joining her oldest friend, Sacha in bringing her to exquisite ecstasy.

The ritual will change her, transform her flesh until she becomes one with her city. With the prospect of her enemy’s power flowing within her, Alena is terrified of what she will become. But first she has to complete the ritual…and hope that her overwhelming attraction for her enemy doesn’t destroy the city she’s so desperate to protect.

You’ll find it here at Liquid Silver Books

And there’s an R rated excerpt in my the blog

Enjoy!

Blurb:

The Talar murdered her mother and her sisters but to save her city from their attacking armada, Alena Petrova Dubov, Imperial Princess of the Rodin must put aside her hatred and sleep with the enemy.

It’s an ancient ceremony, shared with two men bred for her pleasure. Or it should have been. Her generals had chosen Vadim, son of a Talar captive, to satisfy her, joining her oldest friend, Sacha in bringing her to exquisite ecstasy.

The ritual will change her, transform her flesh until she becomes one with her city. With the prospect of her enemy’s power flowing within her, Alena is terrified of what she will become. But first she has to complete the ritual…and hope that her overwhelming attraction for her enemy doesn’t destroy the city she’s so desperate to protect.

You see, I hold two jobs. One full time, 13-14 hour a day, 5 day a week job plus a part-timer on the weekends. In addition to that, we have our son who is showing signs of delayed learning and gets frustrated easily by being unable to communicate. My husband is a full time work from home web writer. Our schedules weren’t always this hectic, but 2008 was apparently the year of upheaval. LOL.

The hardest part is finding a balance. I don’t mean absolute peace and tranquility. (In my house? Not likely!) I mean you have to know your limitations. This means you don’t have the luxury of waiting on the muse to come out and play. You see, if your muse is flighty, trade her in. You need a workaholic, one that will be working in the background of your mind while you go about your daily life. If you don’t, you’ll be unable to write in chaos and that, my friends, is the hardest part about my life.

So how do you do it? How do you find time to write when there isn’t any?

I wrote down my schedule, from wakeup to bed. Every time I had a break during my workday, I wrote it down. When I was at home and writing, I wrote down the amount of time it took for checking email and replying, the amount of words I was able to write at any given hour, and the number of times I had to get up and go take care of something related to the house. This was during a looming deadline, btw.

And I noticed a few things.

1. I wake up at 4:30am every morning. Some days my day doesn’t begin until 6:00am so during that time I could easily catch up on email. (Especially since there’s NO WAY I can write that early. I’ve tried, I waste more time trying to focus on the screen than writing)

2. I have an hour for lunch. Not every day, but most days I have unimpeded writing time. Hmmm.

3. When I get home the world is in chaos. I’m home, the house is in an uproar (even the basset hound gets into it and you know how hard it is to get them excited about ANYTHING), and the clamor continues on well into dinner. So before dinner I can get no writing done. As a matter of fact, any time I’ve attempted it, unless the boy’s asleep (which is rare), my word count over a few hours barely breaks 1K. That’s not efficient. Yes, every little bit helps, but if I’m staring at the screen for 2 hours and nothing gets written, it’s not helping. It’s frustrating.

4. My day ends at 10pm. I might have those extra special nights where the spark of creativity will guide me into the wee hours of the morning, but those are rare and I have to overcompensate the next day due to lack of sleep.

5. My weekends are easier to grab snatches of writing time but they’re not predictable, easy to manage, or always available.

So now that I’ve carved out snatches of time I can write in, let’s see what it does for me.

Morning…email only. I did a couple of things to make this easier.

1. I culled through my many many yahoo groups and switched to digest on those that I adore and avidly read and dropped those I ignored in my inbox.

2. I put those priority emails, those from people I’m in constant contact with on an email basis in their own folder. So when they email me, it flags and I can handle those, at least.

Lunch…I stopped coming home for lunch. It prevents my son from going crazy for the entire hour I’m home and keeps Dad on a steady schedule. His writing time isn’t interrupted due to my abrupt arrival and departure and that means he’s happier too. Instead, I now write at lunch. I bought an ASUS eee laptop that I take with me and power up just for those moments. So 1 hour.
Get home…I don’t even think about writing. It’s family time. We hang out, we talk about our days, the kiddo climbs all over and around me. We color, we read, we play games or we’ll watch a movie. Then Dad and Mom chat about stuff while the dinner’s getting prepared. I vent, he vents, and then we feel better. Some days the kiddo is wound so tight nothing will calm him down.

After 8pm is my writing time. I have two hours of productive time at this point. By this hour of the night my mind has been racing like crazy, working to fill in all the details I’d wanted to put in the story. I sit down and my fingers fly. Two hours=1.5-2K words for me. It’s the rough draft, so I’m not worried about editing. I take notes as I go in order to remind myself about mundane things, the clothes the heroine is wearing, how long the hero’s hair is, where the spaceship is parked LOL. It’s important to note…I don’t write at my desk anymore. I write wherever I can. My ASUS comes out and I write outside, or in the living room, or once, when the kiddo had a bad dream, I was writing in his bedroom when he kept waking up just to make sure I was there.

On a bad day I get 500 words done. On my best, 3K or more. If I only wrote during the work week I’d have 2500-15000 words. This is before my unpredictable weekend starts.

With my new schedule I’ve been able to do two things…

1. Give my family a predictable time in which I’m slow to respond

2. Take a day off on Saturday (from writing at least) and just enjoy some family time

For 10 long (or short now that I look back at the time) years I was able to come and go as I pleased (around the school schedule.) Learning that a nap in the middle of the afternoon is no longer acceptible is hard. Even harder when your child wakes during the night. Even harder still when your youngest is three. I find it more upsetting to see my son having fun with his babysitter (going to the pool and playground) than I imagined. It’s not that she takes him places, it’s that she is the one spending time with him. She’s become the fun one. She’s the one he talks about now. *sighs*

Jealous? Not a little bit. A lot! But he’s being well taken care of so I should rest easy knowing he’s fine while I’m at work, right?

But then I get home from working and it’s time to start dinner (Working 8-4:30 seemed like a nice time frame at the time. Til I realized that is when you actually get to leave work on time!) and spend time with kids and then it’s off to bed. Yep. Miss Night Owl who slept 2 hours a night last summer now is in bed by 10 even if she’s not asleep. I feel like I’ve aged in the past month. I don’t like it. What I do like? The steady paychecks. Writing out a payment for my mortgage and knowing I still have money leftover for food. Health care, dental care, vision care.

BUt wait! Wasn’t I a writer too? Somewhere in there I know I used to write. Didn’t I? *scratches head* Finding time to write when you work full time and have kids is really hard. When I was a SAHM I worried I neglected my kids too much to spend time writing. Now I neglect my writing to cook, clean, and spend time with the kids.

Is there a balance? I’m looking for it. If I find it I’ll give a hollar!

Michelle

Many writers require silence for concentration to write. Parents know that silence is absolutely golden. It’s rare. When you get silence, there may be so many things you need to do, but all you really want to do is sit and relax and enjoy the anomaly.

I love to blare music when writing, but I absolutely need silence when editing. Even the phone ringing can drive me to frustration.  My family and friends will tell you I never answer the phone, and they are correct. Don’t dare interupt my concentration

Married Mother of Three Seeking Scientist for Dinner, Movies, and Possible Cloning

By: Emma Ray Garrett

All right, I’m kidding about the dinner and movies - but not the cloning. Mostly because I don’t have time for wining and dining anyone right now, not even myself. For most working mothers, this is a common problem. There’s just not enough time in the day for everything that needs our attention. However, a majority of working mothers actually leave the house for employment.

I don’t.

Twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week, I’m on call as mother, as wife, nurse, receptionist, counselor, housekeeper, and so many other occupations. Hell, if I received a wage based on my skill set, I wouldn’t need to worry about another thing in life - something I’m sure most mothers would surely agree with me on. I’ll be honest, there are days where I wish I punched a time clock, so to speak, at any number of the aforementioned jobs rather than be a work from home mother.

However, for me, and for a lot of stay at home or work from home moms I know, choosing employment outside the home isn’t a logical option. When the cost of daycare can, in many places, exceed the income a mother makes working in ‘the market’, it’s simply more responsible - and economical - to stay home. With the rising cost of food and gasoline, I wouldn’t be surprised to see telecommuting become the wave of the future, complete with more moms and dads working from home and raising children at the same time.

Telecommuting, though unusual, isn’t abnormal. If my work revolved around IM troubleshooting for an insurance company or providing customer service through an internet interface, I wouldn’t worry too much about breaking up the inevitable ‘she took my toy/he hit me’ argument between my kids. After all, the person I would be helping wouldn’t see or hear me tell the kids to knock it off or go take a time out. They wouldn’t know I was taking care of their problems while in my pajamas with “Go, Diego, Go!” blaring on the
television.

Being a writer though, takes working from home to a whole new level. Readers don’t know I’m sitting in my pj’s and arbitrating whatever dispute arises - and truthfully, they probably don’t care, which is for the best in my opinion. If I got fan letters asking what I was wearing, I think I’d change professions. That said my children don’t need to read over my shoulder the more mature content of my stories. Considering they are ten, eight, and five years old, I imagine you can understand why I do almost no writing when the kidlets are at home. The five year old can’t read complex words yet, but the eight and ten year olds certainly can and they are way too nosy for my own good.

Don’t forget, I’m also married. Ten years and still trucking, though I’m honest enough to say sometimes I’d like to hit him with that truck. Regardless, my husband and I also need time together and, much as our children, he also needs attention from me. He needs me to listen to his day, be a sounding board for his grunts and groans, and show him affection and interest. Since my husband works a hectic schedule of irregular shifts, I find myself with very little time for personal grooming - if I hope to do it alone. That’s not to mention sleep and, oh yeah, writing. I’ve sacrificed a lot of sleep over the last three years since I began freelance writing as a vocation and not a hobby.

By now, you’re probably wondering why in the hell I do it? Maybe how I do it (in just less than two and a half years I’ve written fifteen novellas with an average word count of approx. 27,000 words)? You might be asking why I’d continue to go on five or less hours sleep a day, maintaining hearth and home, entertaining spouse and children, all the while never having time off or a vacation? What’s it all worth?

To answer the why question, well that’s easy. It wouldn’t matter whether I were published or not, I’d still be creating stories. Some of them would stay in my head, daydreaming sojourns to take when the boredom wears me down. Others would go into yet another journal, tablet, binder and join the hundreds I already have in boxes. I never aspired to be a writer. I’ve been writing, making up stories to tell, creating worlds and characters, for as long as I can remember. I wanted to be a vet or a cop when I grew up, not a writer
because I already was a writer in my young mind. Not being a writer would have been like not being a woman - it’s how I was made. I do it because I don’t know how not to do it and because even if I learned how not to write, I’d never use the skill.

I’ll skip the how I do it and answer the why I keep going question. And I won’t lie. There are times when I struggle. Struggle to meet deadlines as much as I struggle to keep the house clean, the laundry done, and
dinner made. I fight with characters, with my husband and children, with myself because I have extremely high expectations and goals and I really work myself over when I ‘fail’ to accomplish a task.

In that, there is no one else nearly as good and making me feel like shit than myself. Being honest, I’m not some huge mega star in the e-book world. Of my fifteen novellas, I have five that would be considered best sellers. I have seven that aren’t quite bestsellers but have made my publisher’s money back for the publishing as well as a tidy profit. And I have three, which are, in my opinion, flops. My publisher disagrees with me on one of those three, since the book broke even and turned a small profit, but I think its sales sucked. I’ve made close to ten thousand dollars in the three years since I signed my first e-book contract. Not much, though it’s a hell of a lot more than many freelance writers make in their lifetime, but more than I could have made working my accounting job and paying out over seven hundred dollars a week in childcare expenses. Seriously though, I don’t keep going for the money.

I keep going despite the personal sacrifice because I get a high no drug can deliver every time I sit down at the computer and bring one of my fantasies to life. I keep going because I have some of the most fantastic, wonderful, delightfully wild fans that show me unbelievable support all the time. I keep going because quitting simply isn’t an option for me and thankfully an eighty-percent sell through to profit ratio is damn good and my publisher keeps wanting more books.

What’s it all worth to me will undoubtedly show you all my selfish side. Writing is priceless to me because it is the one thing in my life that is mine and mine alone. It’s what reminds me that I am mother, wife, and
Emma Ray. Without writing, in whatever form, I wouldn’t be able to be the spouse and mom I am because I’d be withdrawn, irritable, frustrated, and depressed. Everyone gets down, but if I couldn’t write, I’d be way worse than in the dumps.

When I write I’m not just Mrs. Garrett or Mommy. Being creative helps me maintain a small part of me that I was as a child, an adolescent, and a single woman. The me before hearth and home, diapers and bills. And I think that every woman should absolutely, positively, retain some bit of the woman they were before family. In that way, we don’t drop into the pitfalls that can come from living through our children and their achievements or from identifying ourselves so completely with our spouse that we don’t know how to go on without them, should that ever happen. In short, writing is worth as much to me as my children and my husband and my family, which is to say it’s worth everything.

Finally, the how do I do it. Simply put, I do it as I can. I steal time here and there. I stay up into the wee hours just before dawn, knowing full well I will have to be alert and functioning in too few minutes. I growl at my husband and tell him to take the kids out for a couple of hours. When I’m in deadline hell, the laundry slides a bit and the kids eat easy to prepare meals. Occasionally, I tell them all to leave me alone so I can work. And sometimes, I don’t write, though I’m dying to inside. Because working from home means that I can’t always work. People get sick, bad things happen, hell, life happens. And it’s okay if the clothes in the dryer don’t get folded tonight. It’s all right if I leave the dishes until morning. Neither my husband, nor I, will die if we can’t have ‘mommy and daddy’ time for the third night this week. On the flip side, it’s okay to go outside and play with the kids and not hit my word count goal for the day. It’s okay to watch television or read a book or play a game and not finish the chapter I started. I’ve found a balance that works for me and that’s my best advice to other writers in a similar situation. Find your balance, don’t sacrifice all of yourself, and the writing will flow.

This coming year, my youngest will join the school-going crowd and I will find myself alone for more than a couple of hours a day for the first time in my adult life. This year is the year when I finally put writing first and I see how far I can go. If I hit it big that will be fantastic. If I don’t hit it big that will be fantastic too. Because I’m doing something I love, surrounded by the people I love, and no matter the outcome, there’s not a single thing I’d change.

Except that damn ban on cloning. I could sure use another set of hands around here…

With hindsight, writing with a small baby was easy. It didn’t feel like it at the time, with night feeds and the crying and the worry. However, small babies sleep a lot—and I know the rule that you have to rest when your baby does, and I did—but those few minutes when you’re awake and he’s making the really cute baby snores that you could listen to all day, you grab your chance. I used to sit up in my bed and scribble in a notebook while he was in his Moses basket. Maybe I’d get an idea for a new story, attack a dreaded synopsis, or scribble down a few new lines of dialogue. Before my first son was one, I’d managed in about four months to write a 50 000 word short novel, by grabbing those few moments in the day when he was a sleep and I didn’t have to be.

My first son as a toddler has a slightly different story to most people’s, as he’s special needs. He was a very quiet boy who couldn’t talk or understand language in return and was reluctant to engage in social interaction, though he did like me to read to him. So he’d sit on my knee and I’d read him books…sometimes the same one four or five times, before we moved onto the next one. I can still recite Whiff – the Beautiful Big Fat Smelly Warthog from memory.

Again when he was asleep, I’d grab my chance to write. Or if something engaged him, like bashing on his toy piano, I scribbled.

I was getting more serious about my writing. Any chance I got, I wrote. I had to.
By the time I was pregnant with Monster Number Two, I had another 50 000 word short novel and had sent out the polished partial. I got a request for a full on this one…however, I’d sent the partial without completely finishing the story. Big mistake. Huge. Massive. In fact, almost as massive as me.

I asked my mother for help. She came around for a few hours each day to play with Monster Number One while I finished my book. Which saw me at eight months pregnant, lying on my bed like a beached whale, scribbling in a notebook. Getting behind my desk with my bump was almost impossible and my arms were at full stretch. But in a fortnight I had it finished and out the door. On the day I went into labour, I made sure my mother, who was looking after Monster Number One, knew that there could be a call from a publisher. She had to tell them I was a little busy…

Okay, I could dream. The call didn’t come, but I was to be prepared.

Monster Number One was old enough to go to nursery a few mornings a week and luckily Monster Number Two slept in the mornings, so I had my writing time back. I bashed out a 1000 words at the kitchen table while Number Two slept and before I had to pick up Number One from the nursery a few streets away.

I got a 100 000 word novel written in six months this way.

Thinking about it, ‘Sleeping children helped me write’ should be the title of this piece. When they were sleeping, I didn’t have to join in the singing and dancing on Cbeebies (the BBC’s channel for the under 5’s), crawl around the floor being a horse or build Lego castles.

My monsters are older now and don’t sleep during the day. I write at night, usually after eight when they’ve gone to bed. I play and chat with them.  Monster Number One’s language as come on. He’s still behind and becomes very frustrated and angry at times, so he needs a lot of attention.  And I also discuss the merits of different Doctor Who monsters. A lot

Both of them love Doctor Who, Monster Number Two especially, and he talks about it endlessly. Okay, it’s completely my fault. But David Tennant and John Simm? I suffer through watching the DVDs of the Master…

I still scribble when I get the chance. I’ve written vampire love scenes as I join in a game of delivering milk to the end of the universe in our time travelling milk float (ie the sofa in the play room) with Monster Number Two and his five invisible guinea pigs. I’ve written on my Dana in a soft play centre, trying not to let passers by read the screen as I’m inevitably writing sex when I’m there. I sometimes even scribble in the schoolyard as I’m waiting to pick up Monster Number One from school. The small spiral notebook and pen is my best friend, after all.

I think what I’m basically saying is that if you have to look after small children, seize the chance to write any time you can. Ideas, a few lines of dialogue, character motivation, write them down, because if you’re like me, zombie children ate your brain and you forget something as soon as you’ve thought it. Then when you have a longer stretch of time, read through, add to your notes or type them up. Write after they’ve gone to bed…and for the people who can do it (I’m not one of them, lol) write before the monsters get up.

Writing, and my realised dream of becoming an author, means I have to fit it into my life anyway I can. I’m making the most of it. Soon, with them both at school, I’m beginning the new challenge of writing, children and a full time other job.

Wish me luck

Kim Knox

I’m looking forward to chatting with you all and as always, comments and discussion are welcome. Thanks goes out to the fabulous Lynn Viehl* for launching the Virtual Workshop tour.

See you tomorrow night!

Dawn