~Without You~

Thirty pages, that’s how much I have left until I’m officially done with my first edits and rewrite. Just thirty pages to go before I get to send off my baby to school and teach it grammar and punctuation. 

Unlike my real children I can’t wait to see it go.

I’m tired of coddling, and nurturing it’s whiney little arse, and I’m ready to see it all grown up and in the real world.  I love it, I do, and I’m giving it my all… but I’m ready to shove it out of the nest and watch it fly… or crash onto the concrete with a thud and a splatter.  Either or, it’s getting close to the time where it must sink or swim.  And I think that’s a good thing.  Knowing it’s almost ready, knowing it’s time to release it from my hard drive.

And my mind is constantly thinking, “What’s next after this?”  And I know the gun hasn’t even sounded and I’m off past the first marker, or just off my rocker.  But there’s other ideas and needs and wants, clawing inside their shells.  Other paths I want to try… and it’s all hopped up on sugar and caffeine and keeping me up at night.  Each potential avenue and thought dancing around waiting for Santa to arrive.

And I want and I want and I want…

So it’s baby steps of torture, and calling myself off of the chase before I dive off of the cliff head first.  Big breaths and little steps, but allowing the dreams to slam down one more pixie stick before bed.

And it’s about giving thanks to all of you.  With the kind comments and constant encouragement, feeding the monster in my head, the monster that keeps the inner voices at bay, the ones that try to get me to quit it all.  Without you all, the casual readers, the faithful commenters, my friends, I’d still be on page one, afraid to peek around the corner.

Thank you.

~Emily

Don’t forget to sign up for the GIVEAWAY!

Don’t Say I Never Gave You Anything

There’s been a few complaints, eh demands… fine requests to hear a synopsis on the novel I’ve been working on for years.  (okay well, it hasn’t been years of work, just years since it’s start date and today)  I’m not big on sharing, if you haven’t yet figure that out, because I have nightmares of people running away with my work and publishers turning their noses up at me because too much has been posted online.  So this is it, your last glimpse of my novel, until it becomes published in the next fifty years or until I give up and self publish it… either or.  And please note, this is just a glimpse for you, this is not in any way a finished product or what I’ll be sending off to agents in my query letters hopefully starting next month. 

Here’s your Synopsis for Denali:

Vacations are supposed to be the get-away from it all, stress relief, time of our lives. That’s all that Carly and Scott wanted, a break from their everyday lives. Years of saving and planning led them to a backpacking adventure on the side of Denali in Alaska. Two weeks of hiking, fishing, archery and campfires. Two weeks of escape from everyday lives. But two days into their vacation all they wanted to do was to escape back home, far away from that mountain. As animals started turning up dead, and their campsite ransacked, they knew this wasn’t the vacation they had dreamed of.   And then members of their group start to disappear… And when the group leader turns up dead, all blood drained from his body, they knew the great mountain was hiding a secret, a secret that was hunting them down one by one…

And one last snippet:

“I finished up as quick as possible and was struggling to get the gun to stay put in the band of my pants when a loud crash sounded just feet away from me. I bit my tongue to keep my mouth from making a sound, and hunched down against a large tree next to me, carefully gripping onto the pistol.

Two Shadows emerged in the darkness. Human figures, defiantly not wolves. My heart instantly slowed down, people, just people. Maybe even Susan and Gregory! My insides swelled with hope, and my grip relaxed on the gun. But why were they being so quiet, out here in the trees? The camp is just right there, what are they doing here?

Before I could make a sound the skies opened up, and released a threating bolt of lightning. Just enough light, for just long enough to crush every single hope I had of making it back home.

Two male figures stood just 20 feet away from me. I couldn’t make out more than profiles in the darkness, but the way they stood, the way they moved. Every inch of my core told me that these men were not the kind you run to for help. The hairs standing at ends on my body told me these were the type of men you run far, far away from, as fast you can.

I took a slow deep breath, trying to keep my body from trembling. The rain was falling harder, and I was beginning to panic beyond control. I squeezed the handle of the gun as tight as humanly possible, trying to displace the tension from my body to the metal object. The men were still just standing there, not talking, not moving, just… sniffing the air? My mind got lost in the image I was seeing, who sniffs the air? What the hell are they doing? What are they trying to smell out here?”

Enjoy!  And don’t say I never gave you anything!  lol.  Now back to editing.  And don’t forget to enter my GIVEAWAY!

My Blog is Crying a River

I’m editing, make that rewriting, and I’m on a roll, not that necessarily means much, besides the fact that my brain doesn’t really want to think outside of the box right now.  And that’s fine with me.  (ps I hit the halfway mark!)

But my blog keeps calling me in the middle of the night, sobbing big old tears about being soooo lonely.  And it won’t accept the fact that my brain is too busy with mountains and vampires…

And I’m sure you’re dying for something from me.  (humor me okay?!)  So to fulfill everyone’s needs we’re going to be doing some flash backs from the archives.

Start Here, with She’s Not Ready, The love and dysfunction between a father and a daughter.

And Then, The Bully and The Bullied, It’s about reconciliation and mending hearts.

Also too, I’m looking for some Guest Posters who’d love to share some thoughts with my readers, to get me through this edit or die thing I have going on.  Please contact me via email (barefootcoffeegirl (at) gmail (dot) com).

And to drag this out even longer, there may or may not be a game (think giveaway) in the works to celebrate finishing the first round of edits and my new awesome readers!  (again email me if your interested in plugging your stuff or helping out)

And (to abuse starting paragraphs with the word AND) I think that’s it. 

Don’t forget to check out them there links!

~Emily

Blood, Carnage and Being a Good Hostess

Today marks my first official day of my “Edit or Die” mission.  And I’m starting to wonder about the negative effects this might have on me.  Is it normal to be up at 4:30 am, sipping your first cup of coffee and submerging yourself in death, and total carnage?  Eh, so maybe it’s not all that gory, but still, not quite my ideal way of waking up.

So almost two hours of death and arguments and I’ve found myself at a stand still.  I want to keep going, but my muse is getting bored, or rusty, or a wee bit a.d.d.   I’m gonna have to have a talk with her.  Or cut back on her caffeine allowance.  Deadlines don’t allow for slackers.

Unfortunately deadlines don’t have much of a say when company is coming from out-of-town to stay over for an extended weekend.  And I’m betting it might be in bad form to be sitting at my laptop all weekend with my guest staring at the back of my head.  And I probably should get all those dishes out of the sink, and the toys out of the tub sooner than later.

And I really hate trying to get ready for company.  I like having them, but can’t we all go to hotel where everybody gets taken care of, ’cause this momma’s plate is full and she’d love to have someone else fold the sheets for her just once.  *Dreams*

Back to the carnage, here’s a clip for you, feel free to critique:

Dead wolves. More than a dozen of dead wolves heaved along the forest floor.

The wretched smell and brutality of everything instantly had me dry heaving, on my knees. I stopped trying to fight the reflexes of my stomach, and waited for my insides to allow me to take a breath. As I panted on the ground, clutching my mouth with my shirt in hopes that the foul air wouldn’t dig deeper into my stomach, I could see Dennis exploring amongst the corpses.

“No, really, I’m fine. Thanks for asking.” I grumbled, still shaking slightly from the workout, inflicting as much sarcasm as I could without risking anymore heaving. With slow and calculated shallow breaths I stood back up, backing slowly away from the scene.

With a muffled chuckle Dennis carefully turned back towards me, stepping delicately over the bodies. If I had been interested in him in any way, he would have just lost all points right there. What, you can check out bloody corpses but you can’t help the girl you’ve been hitting on as her guts try to escape out her mouth?! I’ll remember that one.

I could not help from thinking out loud, as my eyes darted from one bloody corpse to another, “I wonder if I’ll get a refund?” This wasn’t a cheap vacation after all.

And before I get anymore random or rambley I’ll wrap this thing up, because just like edits, dishes don’t do themselves.  ;p

 

Go Time

Funny things about breakthroughs, they seem brilliant in the moment as they’re spawning, but the next morning they tend to dim and tarnish.  This is my attempt to stop that.

It was one of those self condemning moments, where I was fighting with myself over my lack of confidence in my wip, and how I’d rather start a new project, one I could feel better, one I could fall in love with, but why can’t I finish the first one… when it hit me, make yourself fall in love with this one.  Give it what your heart is missing in it.  Duh. 

And then came the cast iron pan over the head… make yourself do it.  Do IT.  Seems simple enough, unless you’re raising young children, five million animals, a garden on a rocky ridge, landscaping and trying to remodel your home, and, and, and… 

I keep waiting for the right time, but truth is, there will never be a right time.  And I need this done for me.  Forget showing anyone else, I need to show myself.  I need the proof.  ME. 

I need to do this, before my inner voice wins and says I can’t do it at all.  And I can’t look to others to lean on.  So here we go, or here I go, and here it goes. 

One month is what I’m giving myself.  Unreasonable?  Probably.  One month to finish this round of edits, and hopefully get some critiques.  I will be writing my queries in July… no matter what.  Even if my inner voice is screaming at me to quit.  This is it. 

And I’m not so sure how I will be able to keep up with the blogging and everything else during this time, but I can’t worry about that, not too much.  Okay so I’ll probably be worrying a lot about it all.

Do you have a goal you’ve been avoiding that you want to crack down on?

Do you have tips, hints and advice that might help me or others make this happen?

Do you need my address so you can send me lots of encouragement, chocolate and coffee?  (I need pretty office stuffs too, maybe some flower and new tunes)

Do you want to guest blog for me so  don’t have to neglect this space for too long?

NaBloPoMo and Page One

I don’t know what’s going on today, but my interwebs are defiantly out to get me.  Or its wordpress, still cranky from that time I called them out for deleting links I added into a post.  Either way every time I publish this post, 90% of it gets deleted… so some of you have already seen the incomplete version, gah.

I do believe there was supposed to be a lot of me rambling on about how a four-day weekend is in front of us, and how I try not to work on weekends, in the interwebs sense, because honestly it’s impossible when my family is around.  And so that all brings us to the fact that I’m trying to write the entire weekend’s post, TODAY.  And Obviously, it’s not going all that well.

In desperation of trying to succeed this NaBloPoMo I decided to share with you a wee sample of my novel I’ve been working on. 

Sorry, I had to get that picture out just one more time, but it really is what happens in my book!   Okay, for real now, page one of Denali…

The night all too quickly disappeared into a brightly lit morning with birds singing loudly about the rising sun. Had I not been wrapped in a damp sleeping bag, alongside a mountain, who knows how far from home or a single Starbucks, I might have been excited. Maybe.

But this morning I wasn’t waking up in the safety and security of my own warm bed, I was waking up in Alaska, on a week-long back packing excursion up the side of the mountain, Denali. If anyone needed proof as to how much I needed a vacation this would have to be it. Miss city girl booked a camping excursion in Alaska, I obviously had lost my mind.

Yesterday had been a whirl wind of flights, bus rides, instructional videos and safety wavers. Somewhere in between the odor from the bus and instructions on how to avoid a bear attack our backpacking group had been herded out to the first stop in our “tour”. It had been almost dark when we arrived and I couldn’t even tell you where we really were. Somehow our tents got pitched, sandwiches were served, and quickly the night air became filled with a symphony of snores scattered about the camp.

The crisp North air had a slight chill to it, yet not quite cold, yet the tent still held that stale, humid air that tents were famous for. I pushed my way closer to Scott, my boyfriend of two years, curling up in his warmth, trying to snatch back my peaceful sleep. The vacation to Alaska, to Denali, had been my idea, actually I had picked out some all-inclusive resort with catered tours and spas featured on some travel show on television. Scott choose the camping and backpacking excursion, and I being just dumb enough agreed. I’m not sure if it was dumb, or me just being desperate to have a vacation, away from Missouri, away from my job chasing around 20 four-year-olds all day and away from life in general. Not that my life is hectic, me being a teacher and Scott being a radio personality for a local station, it tended to be just on the boring side.

So here I was, at the base of a mountain, in Alaska, in a damp tent, but at least I was with Scott, maybe things wouldn’t be so bad after all. There could be fun out here, or something.

A second later I began to eat that thought. My eyes were jolted open by a sound so horrific, I could only describe it as an animal being dragged through the depths of hell, and back again. The screaming grew worse than nails down a chalkboard and sent my spine crawling for an escape from the loud torture. Scott and I both sat up with a jolt as a human scream sounded out, knocking our heads together.

Clearly I’m still knee-deep into edits, and YES Melissa I’m working on it!

NaBloPoMo Day 4 1/2, ’cause I’m still not counting Day One.