Angela St. Clair-- paranormal, fantasy, romance author: June 2013

Thursday, June 27, 2013

MSHP Week Five: Top Ten lists!

This week is incredibly hard for me to write. Our mission for this week's blog post is to write our top 10 best and worst books that we have read. There are so many that I could put on either list, it's really hard to choose! However, I will try my hardest to narrow it down.

Top 10 Favorite Books, in no particular order.

1. The Harry Potter series by J.K. Rowling-- I can't even begin to pick a favorite book out of the lot. Growing with the characters, watching the conflict build throughout the whole series, it was amazing! I could read them all again in a heartbeat!

2. Southern Vampire Mysteries/Sookie Stackhouse books by Charlaine Harris-- They remind me a lot of Pringles, you can't just stop at one! Sure, they're quick and easy reads, but they really do build on each other, and before you know it you've lost an entire week or two on a dozen books!

3. Sense and Sensibility by Jane Austen-- I adore this book, even after reading it for a college paper. I'm also in love with the Ang Lee movie starring Emma Thompson and Kate Winslet. Alan Rickman makes a stunning Col. Brandon.

4. Outlander by Diana Gabaldon-- If you have never read this series, go do it. Right now! Sure, looking at the print copy is a little daunting; I believe the paperback copy has somewhere in the neighborhood of 780 pages. Even still, the details she uses are amazing, and really make you feel like you're in Scotland during the Jacobite uprising!

5. Interview with the Vampire/The Vampire Chronicles by Anne Rice-- This is the book that started my journey into the horror/paranormal type genres, and really inspired me to write on my own. I'm a sucker for details, I love a book that makes me feel like I'm sitting right there with the main character and feeling the way they feel.

6. The Stand by Stephen King-- Yes, it's a big book, but I read it two summers in a row as a teen. It felt so real!

7. Daggerspell by Katharine Kerr-- First in a series, I remember devouring this series (Daggerspell, Darkspell, The Bristling Wood, and Dragonspell) in about a week. I love a good fantasy series that doesn't make a reader question the validity of the setting.

8. Beyond the Highland Mist by Karen Marie Moning-- Another favorite where I got sucked into the storyline and couldn't let go!

9. Life and Death of Lily Drake by T. Michelle Nelson-- Anyone who can write about vampires in my hometown earns instant cool points. I never thought Mount Vernon, Ohio had much potential as a book setting before now!

10. The Rebel Spy by April London-- Maybe I'm a little biased because I've watched Rebel go from a little rough draft to published e-book. Or maybe because April is my writing buddy and cheerleader/butt kicker/shoulder to cry on, and she's making sure I follow in her footsteps...but it's a favorite all the same.

Now...Top 10 Least Favorite. I'm sure some of these are favorites of someone, somewhere, and I do apologize for that. However, just like the title says, these just weren't my favorite. Feel free to try them out on your own, though! Like the old saying goes, one man's trash is another man's treasure.

1. Fifty Shades of Grey by E.L. James-- I wanted to see what the hype was all about...and I'm still trying to figure out what all the hype was about. To me, it was too heavy on "oh wow" and "so hot."

2. A Farewell to Arms by Ernest Hemingway-- I tried. I really did try to like this one, because Hemingway is huge! However, his writing style just was too dry for my liking, and it was a rough read. I only managed to finish it because I had a paper to turn in for class.

3. Breaking Dawn by Stephenie Meyer-- I actually kind of liked the first three books. This one, however...somehow fell flat to me. I don't know if it was the focus on the pregnancy or how the "imprinting" among the werewolves came off as more creepy than sweet, but it wasn't my cup of tea. Crazy as it sounds...I liked the movie better.

4. 1984 by George Orwell-- Another book that I muddled through for a grade.

5. In loose general terms, e-books that are maybe 20% book, and 80% ads and teasers for other books. If you're going to "publish" a book like this, please acknowledge that it's a sampler instead of a full book!

Really, there's not too many books that I dislike!

How about you: What's your favorite book? Your least favorite book?

Sunday, June 23, 2013

Week Four: Pet Peeves with Stacey Bee!

This week, I'm hosting Stacey Bee in the Mountain Spring House Publishing Blog Tour! Stacey is a mother of four on the coast of Florida, who writes a little bit of everything-- screenplays, short stories, animation, fiction, children's stories, and more!

Our theme of the week: Pet Peeves! This is what Stacey has to say about hers.

Pet Peeves, we all have them ranging from something small to outright rage instances. For a writer pet peeves are major distractions that disrupt our flow of creativity, and can result in a meltdown.
For me, pet peeve #1, begin with missing pens and paper!

I love to write free hand then transfer my writings to my Mac. However, having four kids things like pens and paper have always seemed to have been a free for all for them and a luxury for me. It don’t matter if it is notebook paper or printer paper when my little Picasso’s have art on their mind I can kiss my paper good bye. Then like a mad woman I am running around looking for more, praying to keep my idea fresh in my mind!

Pet peeve #2, When I am happily (or not) writing along and my Mac, iPad whatever decides that it is going to freeze for some reason or shut down because I wasn’t paying attention to my low battery and I cannot work any more. Worse yet, suddenly and all my work is lost. I am forever grateful when I have that hard copy to fall back onto! If not, I will surely loose my mind, and cry at all I have lost.

Pet peeve #3 of mine is when people THINK they KNOW what it is exactly that us writers do… WE JUST WRITE! Sure we are intelligent and well educated but good things take time! They have this grand illusion that we walk up to our computers and pour out our souls like it is nothing to whip up complete books, or movie scripts in minutes. Nothing could be further from the truth. It is painstaking, creative torture some days to get perhaps even a single complete sentence out, let alone everything we wish to accomplish! Some days we are just a plethora of great ideas or page after page of writing that is sunshine for our souls!

What people don’t realize is that most days to even get to the picture perfect story written or edited or simply get a decent amount of pages we wish to get out of our brains is impossible enough, let alone have someone discredit our abilities. Let’s see them create the worlds in which we do!

Pet peeve #4, when a writer looses their writings! It is tragedy when a writer looses their writing. We just want to drop to out knees, pulling a Marlon Brando only we scream “Why, why me?? Dear God why me??? What ever have I done to deserve such malice??? “
It ain’t easy being an non-paid, under paid, under appreciated, not feeling the love writer……

Stacey's personal blog can be followed at Stacey's Blog.

Saturday, June 8, 2013

Blog Tour, week 3: My Routine!

Week Three of the Mountain Springs House Tour for Mountain Spring House Publishing is kicking off today! The theme:

"Describe your writing routine. Are you more creative in the morning, evening? Do you write when you can? On your commute? Do you have your own workspace or share an area?"

I am a total night owl. A good 90% of my writing comes out after 9pm. I do try to write whenever I can, letting no spare moment going to waste, but I am most productive after most of my household is asleep. I've always been like that: sporadic writing during the day, heavy writing after dark.

It's really hard to focus on the task at hand, immersing myself into the plot, setting, or conflict, when I have a toddler, teenager, and husband all jockeying for my attention. They are all supportive-- well, some more than others, because the toddler doesn't understand-- but that doesn't mean that my writing is more important than them. The silence in my house after everyone is asleep gives me the uninterrupted window to finish a thought process, at least until my contacts start to flip out of my head or I nearly pass out at the keyboard.

I wish I had my own workspace, but currently I do not. My computer is set up in the nook by the kitchen, off of the dining room and living room. If inspiration strikes while I'm doing my daily tasks, it's no big deal to walk by, type something out, and go back to my routine. It's a bit of a problem if I want to write or do school work while everyone is milling about, though, since I don't have the privacy or seclusion that I need to write my best. I'm hoping to replace my broken laptop this next semester, so that I can take my writing with me into another room or even to the library, but until then, my desktop is it.

I have a dream, though. Someday we will move to the middle of nowhere with a nice house, and I will have a writing cabin on the property. Kind of like a mother-in-law cottage, some place where I can lock myself away from the hubbub of my daily life, but not so far away that I have to actually run away from home.

Bio:

I’m an Army wife, mom to two beautiful girls, and our diva English Bulldog named Duchess. I’m also a full time student working toward a BA in English Literature from Grand Canyon University, set to graduate in 2015. For the moment we call Virginia home, but I’m originally from Central Ohio. In the last 13 years we’ve lived in Germany, Tennessee, Ohio, Hawaii, Texas, and now Virginia.

I hope to have my first book completed before the year is out, if the stars all align correctly. From the first time I opened a book, or maybe as soon as I learned how to write, I have wanted to become a writer. No matter how often I tried to plan something else to do when I grew up, I always came back to writing.

Sunday, June 2, 2013

Introducing: Veronica Cronin!

BIO:

Veronica Cronin received a Master of Fine Arts degree in Creative Writing from Full Sail University and a Bachelor of Arts degree in English from Florida Atlantic University. While writing into the wee hours of the night as a wife and mother, Veronica found success with the publications of her short story, “Bean Talk” in Second Chicken Soup for a Woman’s Soul, her poetry, and her photography. She taught high school writing, wrote the light-hearted “Forty-Something Relationships” as a columnist for theexaminer.com, and worked for The Walt Disney Company before writing her dramatic screenplay about a woman with bipolar illness, All My By Self, which earned her the Advanced Achievement Award in her graduate program. While pursuing writing, she’s hoping some of the pixie dust from being a Fairy-Godmother-in-Training at the Magic Kingdom’s castle hasn’t worn off.

She’s So Bipolar, Non-Fiction

That’s me! I decided to write She’s So Bipolar, because I could never find practical information on how to handle the illness. There are chapter titles such as, “Telling Your Children,” and “I’m Manic Now, An Experiment in Writing.” Most of my feedback has been very good, as people are learning. That was my main goal, to enlighten people about what it feels like to have it and how a person can handle it.

Putting a book out there about your own illness is scary and risky. I did it for my daughter. I wish there had been a book like mine at the time I was diagnosed in 1998. There wasn’t. I had Kay Redfield Jamison’s An Unquiet Mind, and the medical book for Bipolar, the main source for doctors! It was a difficult read, but I read it anyway. Mine is easy-to-follow, straight forward, and honest. It’s real.

I had to write the truth of the illness to make it believable. I utilized my own photography, taking pictures of myself in different moods, as I was studying for my Master’s degree, and used them to show, not simply tell what the illness is like. Some of the pictures may be shocking to see, if you know me, but I had to include them. The book wouldn’t be the same without them. It makes more of an impact with my words.

There are a lot of bipolar books on the market, but I had it in me to write this one and I had to do it. There are non-fiction and fiction books. There are movies and television shows. However, any attention to the plight of those with mental illness in a positive light should be written or filmed. There is entirely too much stigma surrounding bipolar illness. I had a student ask me once, who did not know of my illness, “Aren’t bipolar people murderers?” I couldn’t pass up the opportunity to write what I know, and what I know is that there are millions of us out there that are hiding their illness because of that very reason.