Check out my first venture into YA fantasy! Jon’s a regular Earth kid who wants something more. After he stumbles through an interdimensional …
Check out my first YA Fantasy book: A Door into Evermoor!
I will be interviewing special guests in the coming months.
How and when are still in the works, but I’ve got three amazing fellow indie writers lined up, and I wanted to feature them early.
Click here to go to my page and get a preview and link to their books.
Do you insert references to your favorite music through the lives of your characters? (I fondly refer to them as my pod people. After all, they’re extensions of my alien-seed-planted mind, so why wouldn’t they love my music?)
I love doing this. It plunges me into the atmosphere of my scene, and I hope it does the same for the reader. I have extremely eclectic tastes in music, so it’s a lot of fun peppering my writing with just the right note to insert at the right moment. Check out book one, Ursus Borealis, for a great scene with Andras and Selena, while she’s wearing a t-shirt with SRV’s beat up Stratocaster stretched across her… chest.
My husband and I were going down memory lane over breakfast and discussing the concert-going highlights of our youth. He has vivid flashbacks of “Terrible Ted” at the Sacramento Memorial Auditorium in ’79. Yes, decades later, he is still grateful for witnessing in person Ted Nugent leaping 15 feet off stacked amplifiers as they swayed precariously under him, landing in clouds of backlit smoke, while tearing out “the riff of all time.”
As we talked and he described it just today, I found this newspaper clipping and it reports it just like he remembers. Made his day. Who said music doesn’t leave a life-long impression? Of course, our parents did not in any way think this was music. “You’re going to see Terrible Who?” (Actually, I think that moniker comes later in his career. His personal life was as shocking as his music. If it still is… I wouldn’t know. But he’s still killing that riff.)
Granted, our combined excursions weren’t extensive, which makes the handful we managed to partake in more special. I think my highlight was David Bowie at the Oakland Coliseum in ‘83 for his Serious Moonlight Tour. We were smack in the middle of the huge field, and Mr. Bowie was a speck, but his penchant for drama came through… Bowie performing MacBeth… and singing? Oh yeah!
Or is it that they are tortured souls? No matter how dark the pod person is that was seeded in my brain by alien’s with questionable intent, I can’t seem to allow them to be pure evil. Is that a flaw in me, the creator, or just the way my pod people want to grow? Are the aliens in the universe trying to tell me something?
No matter the reason, my vampires, faeries, shifters, or megalomaniac aliens are a hell of a lot of fun to write.
Is there a rule that they must always be the monsters humans are driven to slay? Or can they simply be tortured souls forced into circumstances requiring evil deeds, always searching for a way out? An inspiration to the human struggle? I don’t think I’m alone in the desire to make my pod people redeemable. So many fabulous characters in fiction follow that path. So, I won’t feel guilty if my fingers push out a story over my keyboard with a light at the end of the tunnel… but the story isn’t finished yet…
Click here for a wonderful poem encapsulating the human experience by Dr. Marie Dezelic that I just happened to find in a Google search. A snippet follows:
In that lonely place where no other human can actually accompany him. He is never fully understood to the capacity he wants or imagines he can be.
dr. Marie dezelic
I am excited to share that I submitted my first attempt at pure horror in tiny bits for a 100-word horror short story submission to Shacklebound Books, a small press that publishes anthologies and collections in the science fiction, fantasy, and horror genres. Check them out. I have no idea if my three stories about vampire brothers will be accepted, possibly not dark enough, but I’ll keep you posted and share them when I’m able.
It was a totally fun exercise, never-the-less. Fingers crossed!
For my published stories populated with redeemable… maybe… monster pod people, click here. I’d love to know if you think they should have a light at the end of their tunnels.
One of my pod people is a…wait for it… conflicted alien prince…
https://bydllewellyn.wordpress.com/2022/07/21/one-of-my-pod-people-is-a-wait-for-it-conflicted-alien-prince/
— Read on bydllewellyn.com/2022/07/21/one-of-my-pod-people-is-a-wait-for-it-conflicted-alien-prince/
So close to finishing book three in my series, I must keep sharing!
If you were a pod person (aka burgeoning character) just beginning your adventures in an amazing world of fantasy, would you want to leave it for the harsh reality that belongs to your creator? I surely wouldn’t. That’s exactly why I dive in there with them every damn day and come out only when I’m forced to pay the bills or feed myself.
I mean really. I haven’t met a single person who says, “get me the hell out of Hobbiton!” or ” I can’t take another day in Rivendell…” Oh wait… forgive me. Those are real, historic places…
Still, to fan the flames of creativity and keep the hearth fires lit in their lovely little fantasy homes, a different light needs to be shed on their lives. This means the creator needs to publish their stories.
The creator has tried hard to do that, publishing a short story filled with wonderful characters in a world that begs further exploration. It even won a writing challenge. Feel free to venture across the portal to the Tsuga Kingdom and meet Priss, Sam, Fern and Ebun, and even the notorious ancient crow, Old Murdock, in my free story available here. More of their adventures are in the works… if only they will come into the alternate light.
If anyone has tips on how to invite fantasy lovers to download a 20-minute free short story and give it a quick review, I would love to collect them here… and happy to pass them on.
I recently got swept up with an amazing group of indie authors from around the globe, all at different stages of their writing careers, in the genres of fantasy and sci fi.
Granted, I’m on the fringe of the group with my writing that focuses more on the romance and relationships forged with amazing beings in a fantasy world created within the human world we know…. or think we know. But I’m having a blast learning from and sharing support with so many fellow shepherds of pod people (aka developing characters). The worlds they build are staggering.
And the help we offer each other is phenomenal.
We’re doing a writers lift today on Twitter. You can join us, support us, and find some great books by checking out #fsfwritersalliance on Twitter, Instagram and TikTok. More about the alliance can be found on my Writer’s Alliance Page.
I will be interviewing members and other indie authors I’m privileged to meet every few weeks. I’m starting this exciting feature in August with fellow member and Swords and Sorcery fantasy author from New South Wales, Australia, Douglas. T. Smith. I will keep you all posted on the details!
Thanks for checking out my books before you leave, and happy reading… happy writing, and have a happy day.
How can I keep Mondays from being the imagination killer? It’s an awful feeling when that first alarm clock of the week goes off, and my pod people (otherwise known as my developing characters as illustrated in my previous blogs), who have been living full lives and acting out full scenes in my mind all weekend, run screaming into the shadows at that annoying claxon, cringing from the harsh light of the “day job.”
My ten-hour shift seems endless until I can return home and try to coax them out again. But they’re usually too traumatized from the violent interruption to their existence.
Every Sunday afternoon, dread for the Monday alarm builds like a weight on my shoulders. My pod people start milling around, searching for their best scenes, which means Sunday afternoons are my best writing day, all of us striving to get the most on the page before the Monday death knell.
Sigh… Enough of that. I’m going to finish my allotted 16 ounces of coffee, engage with the real world for ten hours, work hard, maybe go for a walk before it’s blazing hot, and be grateful for my three-day weekends.
For more Writer’s Life musings, check out my blogs. You can find my thrilling, fun fantasy romance adventures on My Books page. Have a great Monday!
I cleaned my desk today. It was the result of a cascade of cleaning, beginning with my computer files.
I recently had to reset Windows 10, and OneDrive swooped in like an invading spaceship and hijacked my files and has been syncing and copying huge volumes of data since. It’s nuts. Our internet literally came to a crawl as soon as I booted up. I had to do something.
I was fortunate that my nephew (he has a great podcast, Cosmic Castaway) built my computer with a separate Mass storage drive. Everything got moved there and, of course, it was agonizingly slow because I couldn’t pause the sync, or the files I was trying to move would disappear into the cloud, completely inaccessible. But I got it done, then I backed it all up to my external drive. No more OneDrive! Which means I’ll have to transfer files to my phone and laptop some other inconvenient way. Microsoft… please… let us take back control of our own files!!
Anyway, as I cleaned my desk, totally neglected since I started writing novels two years ago and piled with stuff I really didn’t need (aka trash), my attention was drawn to my monitor stands… and I got pensive.
Does anyone else use nice chunky old reference books to raise their monitors like me?
As I dusted the still beautiful tomes, their undignified state got me thinking. I once believed having information at your fingertips meant owning a thorough reference library, arranged handsomely and conveniently on shelves. I loved collecting dictionaries, thesauruses, and encyclopedic volumes. But now it means bringing up information instantly on a screen, fingertips dancing over a cold, plastic keyboard, instead of rifling through warm paper that smells divine (more like musty these days).
One thing still remains true, however, whether it be books or computers. It all needs dusting!
If you like my blog and have comments about the woes of OneDrive and memories of hardback paper reference libraries, please drop me a line. While you’re at it, check out my other blogs for more thoughts on a Writer’s Life, and find your way to my riveting paranormal/fantasy romance fiction series on My Books page. I’d love to stay connected!
By D. L. Lewellyn 