I Need to Erase a Few Images, Thanks

 This week we're supposed to talk about an iconic scene from a book or movie or show that galvanized us and influenced our writing. I'm going to make it easy. It's the fight scene from The Princess Bride. Okay wait. Maybe the Iocaine Powder scene. Okay. Maybe the whole movie. (It really is the fight scene - the fight choreography and the quick quips and one-upsmanship.)

Then I'm going to leave it there to relay the images etched into my brain after Hurricane Ian came ashore yesterday. The family and I are fine. We were incredibly lucky. Ian came over us as a weak Cat 3 and we never got hit with the eye wall where the strongest winds were.  Still, we're shaken. The torrential rain and the wind we had (top gust clocked at 97mph nearby) was more than enough to cast fear into all of us. The worst part was watching the news streams of the monster storm destroying places I know and love - long ago, we declared the key lime pie at RC Otters on Captiva Island the best we'd found in Florida. The Ding Darling Wildlife Reserve on Sanibel Island was unmatched for wildlife spotting hikes. Yesterday, I watched those islands vanish beneath 18' of the Gulf of Mexico in real time. Yesterday, in real time, I watched while water swept into Fort Myers up to the roof line of single story homes. The friend who lives there and I checked in with one another just as Ian was approaching. She and her elderly mother hadn't been able to leave the area. They were at 11' of elevation. Storm surge was 18'. I haven't been able to raise her.

The worst part (for me) is that storm shutters turn homes into dark, blind boxes. It's as if you've taken shelter inside a ready-made tomb. You know weather is going to hell in a hand basket, but you can't see anything. If you can't see anything, you can't begin reacting until it's already far too late. Maybe that would always have been true - that even if you did see something bad coming (storm surge, for example) you aren't likely to be fast enough or have the option to change the situation. This may be one of those 'tell me you're a boater without telling me you're a boater' cases - I'm trained by boating to live with the illusion that if I see a bad situation developing I can mitigate it if I think and act quickly enough. I'm not sure storm surge has gotten a copy of that memo.

I'm privileged.

I slept in a dry bed last night in a house where the power never went out. Entirely. The worst privation we suffered was losing internet and cable TV. That felt bad enough because we couldn't go on keeping tabs on the storm and the people out there in it. But this morning, I could go outside. It was still windy. The rain had stopped. My climbing roses had beaten themselves to shreds. All the leaves are gone. The canes are shreds. A neighbor lost a tree. My oak tree is leaning and will have to be removed. The plants at the front of the house are all laid down to the south. The plants on the south side of the house are all laid down pointing due west. Part of our downspouts ended up in a neighbor's yard. My feral cat (who I desperately tried to catch before the hurricane came ashore) showed up for breakfast this morning. There are bright spots.

Because there was so little damage, I left to salvage what remains of the vacation that Ian nearly preempted. As we drove north out of the swath of Ian's destruction, vast caravans of rescue equipment and supplies passed us, heading south into the heart of the devastation. My chest hurts. I want to help, too, and have no skills to do so. I want to find my friend. And I have no skills to do so. And I'm afraid of what I'd find. It's a very mixed up place to be: Aware that but for the grace of the gods there go I, because if Ian had drifted a few miles north . . .; sad for all that's been lost, guilty for going on vacation, and relieved that my extended family in the area are all safe. There's no good or easy way to make the early part of this week okay. It won't be okay for a very long time. For some people, it will never be okay again.

Three of the four of us in the  house had never been in a hurricane before and the one who had admitted that his previous experience had left him with an offhand attitude about what hurricanes were. Until now. For context, Hurricane Charlie - the last hurricane to take the same path ashore. It hit in 2004. The entirety of Hurricane Charlie fit inside the eye of Hurricane Ian. 

 

Stu Ostro, a senior meteorologist at The Weather Channel produced this image. He published it to Twitter during that time that everyone was holding their collective breaths about whether or not this Godzilla parked off shore would ever move. Check out the original.

The Same...Yet Different Scenes

Writing inspiration comes from many places—as many as there are people in the world! But does an author have an iconic recurring-scene that inspires their writing?

I had to give this topic some thought. Even though I only have one book (audiobook) out in the world I have a number of complete manuscripts and to add to that, some are science fiction and some are fantasy. Each book was inspired by a different emotion, character, or scene. And they all, save for two of the fantasy ones, take place in different worlds. 

Despite all the differences, they do all share an iconic scene. Inconceivable, you may say. But these pivotal scenes are all rooted in my author purpose, that moral-of-the-story theme that’s at the heart of every tale I weave. 

So, my iconic scene and my author theme are aligned: it’s the moment you face an incredible terror and instead of looking to the side or reaching out for help, you face it head-on and discover the true depth of your own strength.

In The Mars Strain that happens when Jules realizes she knows how to defeat the strain and that, as much as she depends on her team, she knows the key and won’t stop, no matter how much she looses, until she has it. Yes, a little ambiguous, but I can’t spell it out too detailed in case you haven’t listened yet! 

Do you have an iconic scene that keeps showing up? Is it tied to your author theme? 

Jeffe and her Iconic Scene

SHADOW WIZARD releases tomorrow!! Preorder price of $4.99 will be good into tomorrow, then it goes up. (Along with my grocery bill, alas!) The audiobook is being recorded now and should be available in about 2 weeks.

       

 

This week at the SFF Seven, we're asking: Do you have an iconic scene that inspires your writing?

 

I think most of my stories arise from certain pivotal images. For most every book I've written, I can almost certainly identify what the core image was. It's more than visual, however, and feels more like a snippet of a moment: a character in a situation. For a long time I have had an iconic scene. I started drawing it when  was a little girl and it's found its way into any number of stories over the years. I've never quite felt like I fully wrote the story of it, though it's haunted me less recently, so maybe I've come close enough for it to leave me alone.

 

The scene:

 

A woman stands on a cliff overlooking the ocean. Waves rise in whitecaps, dashing themselves against the rocks below. A wind off the water blows back her hair and gown. She's waiting...  Perhaps for an enemy to arrive on her shores? That's my usual feeling. Sometimes a large wolfhound is with her. Sometimes I think she's a sorceress, other times a queen.

 

If you've read a lot of my books, you'll probably recognize ways that this scene appears in various forms. I might've finally worked it out of my system with the Forgotten Empires trilogy, although it still didn't feel precisely like that iconic scene. Maybe I'll wend my way back to it someday!

 

For the time-being, however, I've been in the marshes and woodlands with the denizens of the Renegades of Magic world. SHADOW WIZARD takes us to a new high house (if you're familiar with the Bonds of Magic trilogy), and increasingly wild adventures. In this book, this snippet of a scene is one of my favorites:

 

She flung herself against him, embracing him with fierce tenacity, face buried against his neck, her chin digging rather sharply against his collarbone. For a slender, barely-there wraith, Seliah possessed a surprising amount of tensile strength. And she smelled of water in the moonlight, her tough, tense, thin little body vibrating with spiky silver magic, her breasts surprisingly—and distractingly—soft and full pressed against his chest. He couldn’t help a tiny fantasy of how it would feel to be buried inside that intensity, to have that passionate body surging against his, embracing and engulfing.

It's never going to happen, he told himself firmly.

Are you sure? part of him whispered back slyly.

Yes. Ruthlessly banishing the image, he refused to touch her any more than he already had. Holding his hands out, even more awkward than ever, he kind of waved them around as he waited for the hug to end.

It didn’t. Instead she held on, a buzzing bundle of intoxicating magic and tempting woman. Jadren tried patting her back, thinking maybe that would satisfy her enough to encourage her to go away, but she only purred, snuggling closer, like a cat who’d found the one cat-hater in the room and had no greater goal in life than encamping on his lap forever.

       

New Fantasy Romance Release: CITY OF RUIN by Charissa Weaks

 🎉📚💖🎉We're celebrating Sunday blogger Charissa's newest book baby today! It's the second in her Witch Walker fantasy romance series. Grab a copy today and get lost in a tale of swords, sizzle, and sorcery! 🎉📚💖🎉

CITY OF RUIN
Witch Walker, Book 2

The night the Prince of the East razed her village, Raina Bloodgood’s life changed forever. Forced into someone else’s war—and into the arms of the Witch Collector, Alexus Thibault—Raina discovered that everything she believed was wrong, and that she was capable of far more than anyone imagined.

Now, the Prince of the East has taken the Frost King as a pawn in his war against the Summerlands, causing Alexus’s life to hang in the balance. To thwart the prince’s endgame and prevent the Tiressian empire from returning to an age of gods, Raina, Alexus, and a band of Northlanders race against the sands of time to reach a mystical desert land where merciless assassins lurk around every corner.

In the midst of tragedy, Raina and Alexus fight to stay together and alive, all while a nefarious presence follows them straight to the jeweled gates of the Summerland queen’s citadel—the City of Ruin. With much to fear, it’s the terror of a past she shouldn't remember that Raina cannot cast from her dreams.

A past that's determined to find her. One way or another.

BUY IT NOW: Amazon | BN 

Buy Book 1: The Witch Collector 

Iconic Scenes and A New Book Release

 

Happy Sunday, all! 

I've been buried under writerly tasks getting City of Ruin out in the world. It releases this Tuesday, though, 9/27! I kind of can't believe I'm going to have two book babies in the world in the course of less than a year. As a slow writer, I'm utterly amazed by that! Like... who even am I? ;)

Today's topic for the SFF Seven is: Do you have an iconic scene that inspires your writing? 

I can tell you of one main scene (from books and film) that affected me as a writer. 

At the Prancing Pony from The Lord of the Rings, we meet Strider, aka Aragorn.

“a strange-looking weather-beaten man, sitting in the shadows near the wall… He had a tall tankard in front of him, and was smoking a long-stemmed pipe curiously carved. His legs were stretched out before him, showing high boots of supple leather that fitted him well, but had seen much wear and were now caked with mud. A travel-stained cloak of heavy dark-green was drawn close about him, and in spite of the heat of the room he wore a hood that overshadowed his face.”

I can't say that this impacted scenes that I write, save for the importance of character introduction and how it can either be memorable or not. But it did impact how I write heroes and how I introduce characters. This moment, for me, was perfect. I saw him, I was curious about him, and I was intrigued. Then I was in love for the rest of my freaking life, but we won't talk about that haha.

But! If you like Aragorn mixed with a little Geralt of Rivia, you might like Alexus Thibault from my book, The Witch Collector. Again, book two, City of Ruin, is out Tuesday, and I'm so excited! Signed copies are available in my Etsy store, and it's in ebook and print everywhere online too.  

I hope you all have a good week! I'm going to watch the new Rings of Power this week and CHILL!

~ Charissa

My Wacky Senior Project

 

Like a surprising number of writers, I have a technical background. Or maybe it isn't surprising for those of us with an interest in sci-fi and fantasy stories since the nerd/geek overlap is pretty heavy in those fandoms. In any case, my college degree is in mathematics and I've always had a bit of an analytical bent, which helps me with the business side of writing, but not the creative part so much.

However, I don’t believe I would be a published writer if it weren’t for my college education. Though I’d always been an avid reader, I had written very little fiction before taking a creative writing class in college. That class opened my eyes to the art of writing in ways I had never experienced before. I considered changing my major at that point, but I wasn't excited about adding another year of schooling to my degree. So instead I remained a math major, and simply took every class on creative writing that I could fit into my schedule.

My alma mater also had an interesting senior thesis/senior project format, in that seniors were allowed to choose any "substantial work" as their project as long as they had a professor to guide it. I had friends who made movies or wrote and directed plays for their senior project, so it was not a stretch at all for me to write a novel--especially since I had a great relationship with my creative writing instructor. It was a little out there for a math major to choose a creative project, but technically allowed. (The head of the math department pointed out that it wouldn't help me get into grad school, but since grad school wasn't my goal...*shrug*)

I'm not particularly proud of the novel I wrote that year--it was poorly plotted melodrama, with strangely flat characters. Frankly my writing skills were still in their formative stage, and when I think about my books that will never see the light of day, that one tops the list. Still, writing it--especially under the guidance of a mentor, with regular check-ins on my progress--was an incredible learning experience, and helped me become the writer I am today.

So even though my degree doesn't obviously have anything to do with my writing, I still give my college experience a lot of credit for nurturing my interest in creative writing and literature.

Jaycee Jarvis is an award winning fantasy romance author, who combines heartfelt romance with immersive magical worlds. When not lost in worlds of her own creation, she lives in the Pacific Northwest with her spouse, three children, and a menagerie of pets.

Find her at http://www.jayceejarvis.com

Alas, Poor College Degree

I used to say that my college degree was as useless as burnt plastic. While I was working at a major software company that shall remain nameless, it might have been true in the most literal sense. In the less than literal sense, however, I was using the skills I'd learned all the time. Still do. Especially in writing. My degree is a BFA in Acting from Cornish College of the Arts in Seattle.

What the heck, you might be asking yourself, does an actor do with an acting degree while writing novels (or working in software)?

Fair question. Think of the acting degree as the most expensive three years of intense therapy you can imagine. It's so intense that of the 20 people who started the acting conservatory the same time I did, only 8 made it to graduation. (Our graduating class was 10 people - we'd picked up a pair of students who'd taken a break and were coming back to finish up their degree work.) Yes, Cornish taught us craft and technique, but above everything, Cornish dumped us face first into the sea called "Acting requires enormous emotional effort." The conservatory's job was to crack each of us like nuts and open us up so we could finally see inside. It wasn't easy and it was often unpleasant. But it was necessary. We had to be able to name every nuance of emotion whether we felt it or believed we saw it in someone else in class.  To do that, we had to rummage around inside our own emotional lives and examine every shadowy don't-want-to-admit-we-feel-that feeling we had. Ask me sometime about the incidence of raging nightmares in students during this work. I'm not trying to make it sound like a torture chamber because if you come to the work with a sense of curiosity, it's a lot of fun finding out what makes you tick and learning to parse yourself into useful bits of a toolkit. 

In regard to using the degree off stage, it turns out that once you've learned what you've learned at Cornish, it doesn't go away. The ability to name emotion or to reach for a part of yourself as if it were a wrench becomes inextricably bound up in the fabric of who you are. That means that in working for corporate America, it's easier to approach public speaking, to convey confidence, and to identify the surface emotions of the people around you. 

It's no stretch of imagination to think of using an acting degree for writing novels. They are both (for me) character-driven work. I suspect if we polled all the writers in the world who were or are also actors, we'd find they're all character-driven. (I'm willing to be proven wrong.) For me, though, it's more than that. Yes. I'm entirely character-driven. The emotional work means better depth and breadth of emotion in my writing. When I'm doing it right. The technique work means I dedicate time to working on each character's unique voice and physicality - how they perceive their world and how they move through it. For me, a scene is a stage. It means I'm responsible for clear, crisp stage directions in my work. I will always mess this up a little - this is why editors are so important - having that objective audience who can say 'whoa what just happened there?' I came away from Cornish with a stage combat certification that I put to work for every single fight scene in a book.

If pressed to pick the one thing that has had the single biggest impact on me, I'd say the emotional work. Hands down. It's also the work that has had the biggest impact on the people around me. Certainly I wrote before and during school, but I do feel like being published would have been far less likely without the work.

How My Education Levels Up My Writing

It can seem as if all writers have degrees in writing or literature. Professionals who knew they wanted to author books and have the certificates to say they are legit. But that’s not the only way into this industry. 

My formal education was in Clinical Laboratory Science and yes, it comes into play when I write! How fun is that?! Absolutely geek out fun, for me! Especially since I don’t lab it up any more.

So, what parts of my lab degree do I actually use as a writer? In The Mars Strain it’s pretty obvious. I wrote that story about a lab girl who saves the day. I used real technology, lab lingo, and testing—sometimes with a dash of imagination thrown in. But I actually use my medical background in all my writing. 

My current WIP is another sci-fi thriller about a biologically engineered drug. Even though my main characters aren’t lab people, they live in a society that has been genetically altered and are dealing with an attacker that is exploiting those traits. Once again I’m balancing the line between giving enough real-life medical detail and suspending belief in the futuristic. 

Wait, don’t I write sci-fi and fantasy? Why yes, yes I do. And I have to be careful with my anatomy descriptions when I’m crafting fantasy. But what magical tale is complete without a healer? Healers know a lot about the body: how they work, how to mend them, and how they break. 

I still love the medical field and find it fascinating. And I’m grateful that I chose my lab background because it has given me a great base for me to spin my tales from. But degree or no, I wouldn’t have any books written without an imagination. 

If you have stories to tell, it doesn’t matter what educational background you have. It may mean you’ll need to self educate on the technical aspects of writing, but stories come out of living. And only you have your perspective. 

How have you used your background in your writing?