Hanorah Words

It's better than it looks... I think Everyone has their favorite Christmas movie. I liked them all well enough though I had a particular soft spot for the Rankin and Bass movies. I liked Rudolf the Red-Nosed Reindeer and all the other related movies in that universe, but there was one particular movie that didn't fit into their particular Santa Clause mythology that Rankin and Bass created and perpetuated with their movies and that one was my  personal favorite. It was called The Life and Adventures of Santa Claus . It first aired in the United States on December 17, 1985 on CBS... three years before I was born. The story is based on a book of the same title written by Frank L. Baum... the same man who wrote The Wizard of Oz . I've never read the book because I didn't want to ruin my childhood by finding a bunch of differences between the book and the movie. I mean, the movie is 55 minutes long and the book is a small children's book, but look at what they ...

So, I saw on a Facebook post today a guy was talking to a gay friend who was encouraging him to put alternative relationships in his fantasy worlds because there's a huge market in LGBT fantasy or something like that. The person's response was along the lines of "I don't write relationships" the friend responded, "So your fantasy world is populated by single white men?" On one hand, thinking about that sort of thing (non-heteronormative relationships in fantasy) is a good idea. On the other hand, don't heckle a person because they don't like to write relationships for their main character. Most of my main characters do not have a romance subplot and will not have a romance subplot because when you're busy saving the world or saving your ass, who you want to spend the rest of your probably short life is kind of the last thing on your mind. Heck, the stress of dealing with life, loss, and other things and then the struggles of a relation...

Hey readers! Do you remember Intrinsic ? Yeah you remember that post abut revamping everything and all that and how I never followed up on it? Well, I have decided that once I'm done with The December Project (first draft left now) and in the middle or Rewriting Eight, I'll start outlining this to fix it. As I no longer care about the writing about my family part (though some of the subplots were really good and will stay regarding the family the rest of it will just change a lot), I'm going to focus on Ariadne's story because I chose to tell her story and that's where that story is. Besides, it'll be easier to improve on culture and magic system, cut out a lot of the family stuff, and focus on one thing than to come up with a whole new plot and story. I even have some ideas on how to tie Ariadne's story back  into the idea of family being you're greatest blessing and your greatest curse in a way that probably sounds more clever in my head than it...

This is Luke Goss from Hallmark's Frankenstein My original look for Azrael with some... Notable Exceptions So, the first story I ever came close to finishing, I began writing ten years ago... roughly. I was a Junior at Greene County Career Center and I'd been writing for about five years and nothing ever worked. Then, that summer, I found out one of my closest friends had been talking about me behind my back. It was a bit of a brutal awakening to the fact that people were two-faced double-crossing assholes that I keep getting bitch-slapped with even to this day. You could say I just refuse to learn that lesson because I have too much faith in humanity. Anyhow, for some reason this led me to write a story that I called "Eight". It wasn't the eighth story I ever tried to write. In fact, the only thing eight-related was the first thing I threw out. The main character and her best friend were supposed to be born on 8/8/88 or the day after or something. The ...

Looking through pictures on the internet, I found this picture and thought of Achlys... Then I found out this was the crazy girl from The Following... Okay? So, in the middle of November, I got this idea for a story. It just sort of hit me WHAM! out of no where one day at work. Granted, I've had this idea on and off for years , but this time it was immediate. In fact it wanted to be written now , but I was in the middle of NaNoWriMo and I promised myself I would stick to one story for at least a month. So I wrote the idea down and went back to writing The Appalachian Method like a good little girl.  However, the idea persisted . It would not  be dismissed! I needed to tell it NOW .  I said to the story, "You wait your turn, jimbo!" The rest of my brain thought that such a turn of phrase was weird and out of character for me, so they all backed off including the story even though I continued to imagine it the whole time I wrote The Appalachian Method. Then Nov...

A lot more useful than it looks... So, while I was doing NaNoWriMo, I looked into the lovely world of books about writing to get my creative juices flowing. I learned several things. First, most of those books are useless unless you know what kind of advise you're looking for. Second, most of those books are very generic unless they're by unique or cool authors like Stephen King or Ray Bradbury. I also learned that most of those books are written by editors rather than fiction writers who have more of an idea of what editors and publishers want to see than the way people write. I also learned not to pick books about writing out because they look good on the library website because they're probably completely useless. Okay, so I mostly learned that books on writing were useless. I'll admit it. Everyone has their own writing style. Each writing style is different. Learning that Stephen King tries to write 10,000 words a day does not make me want to write 10,000 ...

Look at that view! So, you're probably wondering what I wrote about for NaNoWriMo. A lot of people have asked me in person and this is online where a reader can't exactly ask unless they comment and no one comments on here. So... I'll assume you want to know. Here's the blurb I put on the NaNo site: After the death of her beloved aunt, Ellie Brown finds that she possesses some serious magical powers.  With no prior belief or knowledge of magic, this is a  big  problem. Ellie just wants to be normal, but as the Council of Thaumaturgy tracks her down, a thing (she refuses to call IT a man) in a purple suit appears in her life, and everyone knows what's going on besides her, her prospects of normalcy seem to be very,very,  very  small. Can Ellie find sense in all this madness or will the madness drive Ellie to the same fate as her aunt? And here's the excerpt I put on the same site:                 ...

So... I finished NaNoWriMo with (according to the NaNoWriMo word counter) 55, 696 words. Microsoft Word placed it at 55, 720 words, but I'm not complaining. I finished the book so now I can sit back, relax and wait for next November, go back to ignoring my blog, pretend that I'm a writer at heart when I'm really just a crazy person whose brain sometimes makes stories... NOT! So, I have come up with some goals that I have related on my Facebook personal account that I will now tell to the one person who I don't know who actually reads my blog. I'm going into more detail here, however. This means people who read my blog will know more about my plans than people who don't. My Goals For Writing: By January 31 ,  I will have finished revisiting, outlining, and possibly rewritten a project from high school called "Eight".. By February 28 ,I will have finished writing the  outline  and  first draft  of a story I'm calling "The December...

Born Jack Kramer, Jack Cain (who I used to call Achan) is the aberration-vampire brother of  Benjamin Kramer IV, great-nephew of Benny the Cat, and owner of a bookstore called Ripper's Books. He appears to be in his late twenties, early thirties, with short dark brown hair, blue eyes and the same well-built form of his younger-older brother. He's devilishly handsome, tortured, and a lot of trouble. Jack didn't set out to be a vampire with eternal youth. He just wanted to practice magic with his brother, but Benjamin Kramer IV fell victim when one of their rituals went horribly wrong (in the original story). Jack needed to save his brother at any cost because he loved his younger brother who he had  to protect. They were the only family they had left, you see. So, Jack performed another ritual, sacrificing a random homeless woman to save his brother, turning himself into a vampire. He must  drink the blood of others, sacrificing them, or Benjamin Kramer IV will die of t...

After I thought up Benny, I'm not sure when, I sort of had this idea for a pair of brothers. At the time I was trying to flesh out my Council of Magic (now called the Council of Thaumaturgy). So, my first idea was that there were two brothers at odds, one worked for the Council and the other was a creature that ought to be hunted down and killed by the Council. Benjamin Kramer IV (My brain couldn't decide if he was the fourth or fifth for a long time. I chose fourth because it just seemed nicer.) is the brother who is actually a high-ranking Council official (in charge of the North American Chapter) who happens to be the brother of Jack Achan, a creature that is considered and "aberration"... and a type of vampire. I had this idea going in my head that Jack became a vampire to somehow save Benjamin's life. Benjamin couldn't handle it, so he enlisted in the help of the Council to kill Jack. However, Jack knew this, and he couldn't allow his brother to ...

Benny the Cat is a big, fat, orange tabby cat I came up with during my first year of college... sometime around the time Nemo and Cassandra Troy were created. He looks something like... This. Well, he's fatter and his eyes are usually green in my head. The picture above is some stock photo I found somewhere once. Benny wears a black collar with a watch instead of a tag or bell. This is important. You see, Benny was once a human named Benjamin Kramer III, who grew up around Civil War Era... somewhere in America. Not really sure where.  Anyhow, on his eighteenth birthday, he received a fob-watch that looked like just like any other except if he wound it a certain way he could teleport and even do some limited time travel. Well, that's because Benny's watch wasn't any watch. It was The Watch, a receptacle of power supposedly from the creators of the universe holding power over time and space within its gears. It's one of the most powerful items in any un...

So, I have signed up for NaNoWriMo. For those of you not in the know, that's National Novel Writing Month. Basically, starting on November 1 until November 30th, I'm going to sit down and try to write a novel, or at least 50,000 words of a novel. If I win, I submit what I have to the site and there can be prizes and such though mostly I just want to have the flush of victory of having written 50,000 words in a month and probably being done with something worthwhile. I have the next... twenty four days to decide what I'm going to write and get together an outline. On the bright side, going over all my permanent characters in my universe is giving me ideas for stories and making me go back and look at stories I stopped writing ages ago to see ideas I had that I could rework if I wanted to. Basically, I have the whole month to plan how I'm going to write 50,000 words (that's roughly 2,000 words per day) in a month and what the content will be rather than me starin...

Yes, she was that  Cassandra... Cassandra Troy was a character that I created. She didn't pop up like Azrael or Nemo. Instead, I needed a character for a very specific purpose and... because my brain connects things in weird ways, Cassandra Troy became the right peg to fit into the hole my world had at the time. See, I was working at a senior living facility ( not  a nursing home) called Sunrise Senior Living ... or I'd moved on from working there to Crestwood Nursing Center . I'm a bit fuzzy on when she was created, it was in my early college years. In fact, Cassandra Troy may have existed before Nemo. I don't have very clear notes from that time with dates on them. Either way, I had this crazy/genius/silly idea: a sort of hospital for the supernatural beings that populated the world... that looks like a nursing home to everyone else. The patients are even disguised to some of the lower-level workers as residents ... especially the long-term patients because...

So... One of the first criticisms I received about my short stories was that it seemed impossible that a character who had suffered long periods of torture could save himself from a vampire as powerful as Gaia without a hitch. They were right, but I didn't have to be happy about it. Around the same time, I had these weird... dreams. A couple times I woke up and I could swear I could see some woman's face above me... almost like she was sitting on the ceiling. Usually I'd wake up again and realize that I was dreaming. Either way, the two stimuli... literary criticism and bad dreams led to the next character I created: Nemo. For those in the group who are young, under-educated, uninterested in words, ignorant, or just plain stupid, "Nemo" isn't the name of a fish from a Disney movie... Well it is, but first it was a name used in The Odyssey  by the clever Odysseus to trick a cyclops. You see, "nemo" means "nobody". So, Finding Nemo , the...