I’m pleased to see that my clustermaps is showing some nicely varied dots. Thanks for sticking by me when things got quiet. I’m still working on Mistletoe, and, in fact, I have my official author webpage about to go online! I’m quite excited. I went to deviantart.com to commission an artist to fashion banners for the site, as well as a book cover for Mistletoe that’s sure to impress. I’m excited to share it, and will do the official reveal later on.

Meanwhile, I’m glad that spring is here and I can finally start walking outdoors again. Not that I’m afraid of the cold of winter – I’m a true Canuck! – but many people do not clear their walks of ice and snow and I hate falling. When I lived in Romania, I was black and blue from falling so much in the winter. I don’t like it. It’s called “Happy Treadmill Days”. The trees are just barely beginning to bud, the air is cleaner than usual, and once in a while we get a true whiff of spring.

I’m just about to read “The Lamb” for the first time in ages. I feel the need to reconnect to the story that is the parent of Mistletoe. Besides, I’m kind of sick again, and The Lamb is what was my great solace in my illness of a few years ago. I pray that it can be so again.

I guess that’s all I need to say for now. I’ll reveal my official webpage as soon as I can! Until then, happy Springtime!

Here are my two cents:

Stephen King “Salem’s Lot”: chilling and intense read, which actually kept me up at night. One of his earlier works, it is one of his best. I thoroughly enjoyed the “classic” vampire, who is created by rite, sleeps in coffins, is repelled by garlic and holy water. Fantastic book.

L.J. Smith “Nightworld”: derivative and boring, with predictable plots and insipid characters. Don’t get me wrong, I thoroughly enjoyed her “Vampire Diaries” back in the day, but these are not her best. The laws of the Night World (don’t fall in love with humans) are seemingly broken in every story.

Bram Stoker “Dracula”: the classic that started it all, and a terrific read. A bit more difficult, as language has evolved since it was published, but I really enjoyed the stark characters and the story. You almost felt sorry for Dracula in the end, and had a lot of empathy for the other characters as well.

Elizabeth Kostova “The Historian”: a bit more challenging, but also very good. Historical in nature, and thankfully nothing to do with cutesy vampires one would fall in love with. This is a harrowing tale of Dracula’s curse, and very well researched and written.

Stephenie Meyer “Twilight Saga”: has once again brought vampires into the collective consciousness of society. These books are a fast read, with little redeeming value in the grand scheme of classic literature. It’s hard to resist the relationships, but the mythology is a tad shallow.

So why am I worrying about vampires?

I’m worried that Mistletoe (which is the novelization of “The Lamb” which many of you are familiar with) will have a hard reception because of the glut in the market. Though it has little to do with vampires, really, they are a principal villain. I had considered various ways of modifying the mythology in order to make my vampire stand out from those in current circulation, but then I decided not to. I am going back to the classical vampire, the one feared by the Catholic Church as being a body inhabited by a devil, to be handled in the classical methods. These vampires are soul-less, incapable of empathy or emotion, and exist only to gain more power.

In short, you would never fall in love with one of these vampires.

Still, I worry. I wonder if I should focus on The Apothecary instead. That concept, at least, is completely new, and I’ve never seen anything like it anywhere.

I’ve invested a lot of time and energy in Mistletoe. I think I’m going to finish writing it at least, try to sell it to publishers, but if I can’t get anyone to buy it, I’m not going to be that miserable. I’ll just write The Apothecary. I know that one will sell.

Still just a little worried…

After Yellowknife and Nashville and Boston, Cheryll and I went to Mexico! Yes, I understand that this is more South than Nashville, but I didn’t want to mess with the theme. She has family that stay the winter in Mazatlan, so at the end of November we were off!

I get Mexico, now.

I also got a tan.

We spent our days in the sunshine, walking the beach, shopping, eating guacamole and drinking Strawberry Fresca, going deep sea fishing, and having a marvelous time! I got to speak my very tiny amount of Spanish, and picked up a few more words here and there. It was fun spending time with Cheryll’s family. I couldn’t believe that it was above twenty degrees every day, and that I could get a sunburn in December. I could see myself spending weeks on end in sunnier climes once winter hit with a vengeance up north, would I be betraying my blood and country?

Hmm. Betrayal, here I come!

It was hard to come back home in December. All too quickly we fell into the habit of winter clothes and darkness outside. I’m definitely looking forward to going to Mexico again, maybe this time to Mexico City, where I would visit the pyramids of Teotihuacan and learn about the battle between Quetzalcoatl and Tezcatlipoca and the Mayan Suns.

All for research, of course!

The writing of Mistletoe’s second draft is going strong, and I plan on submitting it to agents and publishers by summertime. I will need readers of the second draft, and to compose a third draft before submitting, so I better stop writing this blog and start working on the book!

Adios!

I thought I was about there. After my trip to the north (Northwest Territories) and then my trip to the South (Nashville, Tennessee), I embarked on yet another trip. This time to the east – one of my favourite cities – Boston.

This was my third trip to Boston, but it was my first big trip with my girlfriend in tow. Cheryll and I went to Boston – me for work, she because she’s never been. Autumn on the eastern seaboard is really spectacular – crimson red leaves you’ll never see in Alberta. The weather was phenomenal as well. It was really too bad that I had to work.

It was the 2009 International Genetically Engineered Machines competition, and my company had sponsored three university teams that were competing there. I went as moral support, and Cheryll came as moral support for the moral support. All three of my teams won gold medals (woot woot!) and the University of Alberta team even won a division prize.

Besides work, Cheryll and I ate tons of seafood (lobster on the prairies really has nothing on lobster that’s come in from the harbour just that morning), went to the aquarium (those little penguins are soooo cute!), watched the World Series in our hotel room (rooting for the Pennsylvania team, not the Yankees), and ate some spectacular kheer (an east indian rice pudding dish).

But if that wasn’t enough traveling, we are off to Mexico on Friday. Hmm, can I call that West? (It’s the only direction I’m missing at this point!)

Ciao!

No wonder it’s called Music City. The main drag (Broadway) is full of honky tonk bars playing live music and souvenir shops, many of them decorated with a plastic Elvis. There is even music piped through speakers located on street corners, and you better like country, because that’s what they play.

Until the Sweet Adelines International Convention, of course.

Suddenly, Music City was awash in barbershop. And my chorus, Gateway Chorus, was off to compete in the Harmony Classic. There were five choruses invited in the mid-size category, and we were one of them. We competed on Oct. 20, replete in false eyelashes and rouge, dancing shoes and cupid wings. And when the night was over, we had placed third! Not bad at all, though first would have been better. We missed second place by a mere 6 points.

However, we do have another crack at International competition, this time with the “Big Girls”. The Harmony Classic is for those choruses who are good, but not good enough to get into the Internationals on their own. This past spring, when we won in Calgary, we won the opportunity to compete in the Internationals with the rest of the world, one step above the Harmony Classic.

I know this not make much sense for everyone (it barely does to me!), but all in all, it’s good news.

Gateway is on the way up!

By the way, we’re on a membership drive. Anyone wanna join?

Life has showered me in deliciousness, and I’ve been feasting upon it. My new relationship is still going strong, as evidenced by how much I miss here, now that I’m up north.

I am writing from Fort Smith, Northwest Territories. Yesterday I flew from Yellowknife to Hay River in a DC-3 aircraft with Buffalo Airways. The flight was nearly entirely over the Great Slave Lake, an enormous body of fresh water. The crew were amazing – they allowed me to view the cockpit in flight, and I even took the jump seat behind the pilot for the landing! The three hour drive from Hay River to Fort Smith was somewhat eclipsed by the spectacular nature of that previous ride.

I am here on business, to do a presentation for a water workshop. I have great personal interest in the north – one of my future stories will be based here. It will be called “Aurora”, and I’m deeply excited about the project – whenever I have time to get to it!

So, to keep you updated on my writing life, as spare as it currently is, I am now working on the second draft of Mistletoe. I had begun the third draft of Revenant, but decided it was too soon, and it needed to sit a while longer. With my new commitments (my new relationship!) I’m finding it more difficult to find time to write, but I certainly don’t mind. I’ll do my writing here and there and try to find a new routine.

While this entry isn’t very awe-inspiring, it will at least prove that I am alive, I am well, and I’m even happy! I’m in the north! (And I miss my girl.)

It’s mind-boggling.

Part of me always wondered if romance writers (um, not including me, of course) and those who wrote romantic comedies for movies were always just a little high on crack or just plain disillusioned. The love they speak of, the love they celebrate – I thought it a mere fairy tale, a human invention for the rest of us who just couldn’t have anything like it. So remote, so out of reach, so plain impossible – because the real world just doesn’t allow bliss like that. That’s why so much time is spent in fooling us, right? Showing us love that is impossible, unattainable, out of reach; because we have to believe in something, might as well believe in this, even though it’s only a fairy tale and paper thin.

You, gentle reader, may have gathered by now that my attitude has changed.

Oh, yes.

My personal fairy tale, but it isn’t really, because it’s real, it’s mortal, it’s my minutes and my hours and my overwhelming addiction to a phenomenal woman, a woman who is spinning my world, who is teaching me about the simple joys of kissing and touching and pleasure. A woman who makes me hot, who makes me wish I could just stay in the comfort of her space all the time, instead of having to subject myself to the mundanity of the real world, with my job and my chorus and such things.

My personal apothecary.

And I couldn’t be happier. If addiction it is, bring it on.

Last night I went with a group of girlfriends out to our favourite restaurant, Japanese Village. It rocked as always – good food, and good company. From there four of us made our way to Whyte Avenue and the Fringe Festival. A friend of a friend’s son was in one of the plays, but not all of us managed to get seats. In the end it was just Cheryll and I, and we saw “The Art of Being a Bastard”.

I love Fringe. The play rocked, and Cheryll was amazing company.

Back to the bar, and the night was all chewy and wet with new rain, and I was surrounded by friends, and I was surrounded by beauty. Truth and beauty everywhere, like I’m drowning in it. Life really is beautiful. Even the parts that suck can be transformed into beauty if you have the right frame of mind.

I’m learning how to play pool. I like pool. I still suck at it, but the suckage is less than when I started.

I still woke up way too early this morning (8 am), a rather annoying chipperness to my step that led me inevitably out the door and into another washed blue Edmonton summer morning. Off to Louise McKinney park, where my brother was part of the Dragonboat Festival.

His team, the Oil City Crew, won. Of course. I cheered.

Then the downtown Farmer’s Market, and FINALLY the first Taber corn of the season. I could remember growing up in Southern Alberta, and how the corn harvest was the dread harbinger of imminent school. Okay, I’m kidding. I loved school. (I know. Shock and surprise.)

People and pets and pitas and hummus, and taber corn and kettle corn and corn dogs and cakes, jewelry and music and an enormous bouquet of wildflowers for only $10. I love flowers. I bought it and hung the bouquet by my side as I walked home and pretended for a slim moment that I was back in Romania, in the piata, with the wasps buzzing at the ripe fruits and the brown icicle teeth of the vendors and the smell of dead dogs a whisper in the air.

Watermelon. How I miss Romanian watermelon.

And what an amazing start to a beautiful weekend.

Rachel grinned. “Come here, you goof. Wash your hands.”

Julia got up and washed her hands, her skin tingling in anticipation. This was one of her favourite things, and always reminded her of the very first time they cooked together. It had been a lesson in stuffing a turkey that day.

Rachel remembered as well, and gently tugged until Julia was standing in front of her. Her arms encircling her from behind, her warmth tangible, her scent bewitching as ever, Rachel carefully took Julia’s hands in her own, and then plunged them both into the ingredients. “You always mix by hand, you know,” Rachel said, the words beloved and familiar and so reminiscent of that long ago day.

Then she changed it up, saying, “You know how they all say the extra ingredient is love? Bollocks. It’s the hands.”

Her hands wrist-deep in the pan, turning the ingredients over and over, feeling the long smoothness of Rachel’s fingers entwined with her own, Julia turned to look at Rachel, ostensibly to tell her lover that the word “bollocks” could only be used by the British, and that she was in copyright violation since she was not British, but found that Rachel was kissing her instead.

It didn’t matter how many hundreds of time Rachel had ever kissed her before, imprinting herself on Julia’s skin, her scent, her soul, a tattoo over her very heart; every time was a beloved recitation of the first time. That first kiss had also been in a kitchen, surrounded with the fragrance of Rachel’s cooking, and their lips had been coated with hot cocoa and cream.

Nine years later and Julia was still entirely in love.

Rachel completely surrounded her, their fingers woven together so delightfully in the pot of yogurt and spices, Rachel’s arms about her in this embrace, Rachel’s lips kissing her in a slow and languorous fashion. With her tongue she traced the swell of Julia’s lower lip before pressing deeper with gentle insistence; Julia could feel all her nerves igniting, one by one, each racing downward, inward, spiralling top the core of her, a hotter, wetter place.

Julia let herself go, relaxing in the sensation, giving Rachel the opportunity to see what sort of sounds Julia could make by pressing here, by stroking there, exploring her as if it were the first journey and not one of thousands.

She could have wept for the glory of it.

To feel hot, to feel young, to feel desired and wanted and needed. Rachel’s fingers pressing into her palms, her lips and teeth fastening lightly on Julia’s lips before their tongues danced in greeting. Julia tilted her chin, recapturing Rachel’s lips now, kissing her fiercely, drawing Rachel deeper inside, feeling that heat, that wet, begin to blaze outwards from her core until it must spill from her fingertips. Every part of her felt connected to her lover; Rachel’s breasts hard against her back, Rachel’s legs pushing harder, pinning her to the counter.

Oh, they could kiss like this for hours, pressing deep, giving way, retreating and then hungry and then wickedly insistent for more. Stolen, heated breaths, the soft rustle of clothing, the far ticking of the clock and the rest of the world non-existent, in a world where twilight and impending death simply did not exist.

Turned thus in Rachel’s embrace, Julia became aware that Rachel’s eyes were open, and looking at her. Her own eyes fluttered open and were struck by the universe of warm brown earth in Rachel’s eyes, a chocolate deep and sensuous, where the most precious and miraculous heat was written; a wanting, an undeniable and volanic urge.

And more.

The connection, an unseen chain of immense strength, baptized in seawater and anchored in love. The gift of making love to each other over the years had only strengthened their bond, so that in these times of doubt and fear, when twilight was a menace and dawn the only hope, Julia could look at Rachel and know she was alive.

It was Rachel who was revenant.

Some brief history: I wrote the first draft of Revenant as part of NaNoWriMo, which meant I wrote 50,236 words in 30 days (roughly 1667 words per day). When I finished, I gave it to 2 people to read and took three months off to work on my new novel project, Mistletoe.

I wrote the second draft of Revenant in 85 consecutive days, from April 13 to July 6. It topped out at 131,754 words (roughly 1550 words a day). When I finished, I gave it to 6 people to read and took over a month off.

Well, I have begun the third rewrite. I can keep a lot of the second draft, but I will be physically rewriting every single word. The goal is rather ambitious: 135,000 words in 30 days (roughly 4500 words per day).

I’ve been told I need a hobby. I just want to sell this book before the end of December, that’s all. It would pretty much preclude that this year has been the best of my life.

I’m on day 4, and have written 18,808 words so far. I think I said in a post down there somewhere that writing the second draft of Revenant was like a marathon. I may have a different song to sing in thirty days, methinks.

I may, from time to time, share excerpts of the book with you, because it’s just plain fun to share! Wish me luck!