We can’t always predict how new friends or cohorts will be, whether or not we’ll get along or agree with new colleagues’ decisions. But we can hope. We can guess, surmise, and be pleasantly surprised when we realize we did make a good decision and these are nice people after all. I don’t know why I’m always surprised when I discover how cool editors are, but I am. And it’s always good.  My most recent pleasant surprise has been being involved with Drollerie Press and the editors and authors.

For one, one of the reasons Drollerie Press does ebooks, besides the fiscal reason that it’s less expensive for all concerned, is that it’s more environmentally sound. It’s a step towards being more environmentally responsible. In addition, however, Drollerie Press has just announced that from here on out, for every book they release – online or in print - they will plant a tree. I think that is just so cool. My sister and I used to plan that if we ever got rich some day, or won the lottery, we’d buy up vacant lots in cities and turn them into parks and greenways. So, of course I think planting a tree for every release is the ultimate in cool.

Though I don’t have the ability to be another John Muir or Johnny Appleseed at the moment, I can support Drollerie Press in doing something similar. The more books Drollerie Press sells, the more likely they will be able to accept more books for submission and then release those books and plant those trees! So, I’m here to hawk those wares and tell you to check out some of their ebooks. Because starting now through October 17 all their ebooks will be on sale for $1.99 AND novellas and anthologies will be on sale for even less! So go check it out!

Drollerie Press (which is having a live chat on Sunday, September 27 at 4 pm Eastern and will be giving away books during the chat) is hosting yet another blog tour and the September theme is how music influences our writing. For this tour, a number of Drollerie Press authors are hosting each other on our blogs. I am hosting Isabelle Santiago.

Isabelle Santiago is a romance writer who likes to mix it up. The author of “Surfacing,” “Cinematic Royalty” and “Dark Hollywood Nights,” she is not content to write the typical alpha male/lady in distress tales of love and/or lust. She instead writes more unconventional, and even uncomfortable, love stories. And while the settings of these romances vary from historical to fantasy to crime to YA to regular old contemporary, they all carry in common the demand from the hero and heroine to be more. As she notes on her website, the heroine doesn’t choose between bad and good, but between good and better. Every decision brings change, and sometimes sacrifice. People get hurt and life doesn’t always offer a happy ending, but not everyone is looking for a typical romance, either.

Isabelle’s upcoming story through Drollerie Press, “Zerah’s Chosen,” is the first of a series and is high fantasy involving elementals, prophecies and forbidden love. It will be exciting to see what she does with it.

For now, I have the pleasure of hosting her here as she discusses how music has influenced her writing. Ladies and gentlemen, may I introduce, Isabelle Santiago.

_______________________________________________________

About two years ago I was introduced to the amazing world of fanmixes. What is a fanmix, you say? Ahhh, well, let me share the incredible magic of this form of fanatical expression.

A fanmix is like a mixtape, devoted to your favorite fandom. It can be about anything. A major character, a couple, an unconventional couple (not someone who ever hooked up in said movie, tv show, or book), a friendship, or even a particular episode or book from a series.

I, being the music junkie that I am, find this whole concept to be deliciously addictive.

Livejournal has a great community for fanmixes. And I’ve seen a mix for just about everything you can imagine. Which of course, got me searching through my music archive for songs I could put together in some sort of fanmix. The mixes usually tell some sort of story. A progression of the story told, or some new story, from the mixer’s point of view.

Mine turned out more like a soundtrack, chronicling the relationship of two characters in my fantasy series. They’re best friends, but he’s very much in love with her, and she’s very much in love with someone else. Ahhh… isn’t that what makes so much wonderfully angsty music? As an author, I use music all the time to help me create moods, but this differed in that I searched out music specific to two people and their character and relationship arc. What I found was absolute magic and loads of inspiration.

Here’s just a sampling of the songs that made the cut:

Near to You – A Fine Frenzy:

Near to you, I am healing
But it’s taking so long
‘Cause though he’s gone
And you are wonderful
It’s hard to move on
Yet, I’m better near to you.

You and I have something different
And I’m enjoying it cautiously
I’m battle scarred, I am working oh so hard
To get back to who I used to be

---

Isabelle Santiago
Because not every girl dreams of prince charming…
website: http://twistedfairytale.net
blog: http://twistedfairytale.net/blog/
myspace: http://www.myspace.com/isabellesantiago

The official cut off date, despite my dithering on the above video, is midnight on Labor Day, September 7, 2009. So, get your comments in on this blog sometime this month to be considered for the contest.

I’ve been remiss in posting this, but I think you’ll like this new issue of Chocolate Zoom. In it are articles on how to grow chocolate, make chocolate treats and give chocolatey gifts.

Crossposted from Blogetary

Crossposted from my Blogetary:

Hey! Hey! HEY! It’s arrived! Presenting the April 2009 issue of Beyond Centauri, which just happens to have a flash fiction (very short short) story of mine in it. In honor of its arrival I am going to have another blog contest. Just leave a comment on my Blogetary blog by May 15 and on May 16 I’ll check in and draw a name and let you know who has won!

As anyone who reads my blog knows, poetry is important to me, and April is poetry month. In honor of poetry month, the folks at Drollerie Press are having an author blog tour where writers are asked about how poetry has influenced them and their writing. We are sharing those influences on each others blogs. It is my pleasure to host Sarah Avery on my blog today.

Sarah Avery, author of Closing Arguments and Atlantis Cranks Need Not Apply, knows poetry. After all, she earned a doctorate in English with a dissertation on modernist poetry before going back to her scifi/fantasy roots. After a life of travel, study, and experiences many people only think they understand, it is not surprising that she would use these two very expressive and imaginative genres for her writing.
But Sarah didn’t just get a piece of paper indicating her expertise in poetry, she also taught poetry, has seen the fear and misunderstanding some people have of poetry. She “gets” how poetry is important not just as a field of study or genre, but in every day life, as a way of expressing feelings and moments that are bigger than we are. What follows below is one of best essays I’ve read on how basic and important poetry is to everyone.

“Woof! Squeak!”

by Sarah Avery

What blew my mind the one time I got to teach a course on poetry was how terrified my students were. If my class hadn’t been specifically required for all English majors, and satisfied several requirements for the university’s core curriculum, none of those students would have chosen it. For me, poetry had been by turns a comfort, a friendly challenge, a game, and very nearly a profession–the bell before my bowl of Alpo. For most of my students, poetry had been the occasion of their worst moments in high school English classes, moments of judgment and humiliation–the buzzer before their electric shock.

What could Pavlov’s dog have to teach Skinner’s mice? To be less afraid, to perceive the thing itself despite their fears, to allow for the possibility that a poem might be delicious.

It was both more and less than I’d expected to teach them. I had a carefully balanced syllabus full of lineage, form, and technique. The day before the semester started, I’d congratulated myself on its rigor. The hour I had to face all those wide eyes in pale faces, I found myself selling it to them as a menu full of delicacies.

Things started looking up when one of the students read ahead on the syllabus and raised her hand. “You’re not really assigning Dr. Seuss, are you?”

It was the same question I’d been asked in the department copy room. One of my fellow grad students saw that I was copying pages from Green Eggs and Ham and said, “Either that’ll be the coolest thing you do all semester and they’ll talk it up for years, or it’ll blow up in your face and they’ll hate you for it. Nobody likes condescension.”

In the copy room, my impromptu answer was:

I’ll teach it flying through the air
With long lines by that dude John Clare.
I’ll teach it climbing up a tree
With paeans by that chick H.D.
I’ll teach it creeping on the ground
With Cantos penned by Ezra Pound.
To get those clueless kids to scan,
I’ll teach that book, Green Eggs and Ham.

(That's what immersion in a genre will do for you. I couldn't knock couplets off that fast now, good or bad, with my head full of novellas.)

In any case, my goofy run of couplets wasn't the answer I could give a real live student in the moment when she was deciding whether I was condescending to her or not. Instead, I said something more or less like this:

Poetry happens in the body. Everything about it is something the body does. The body has a pulse, so poetry thumps. The body breathes, so poetry pauses. What is all that sensory vividness our high school teachers wanted us to pay attention to doing in the poem? It's there because the body senses the world. If you have a body, you can get something from poetry--and bring something to poetry, too. Robert Pinsky (the Poet Laureate the year I taught the class, but long before that an undergrad at the very same big state school my students were attending), likes to say that the true medium of the art of poetry is not the page or the written word, but is rather the column of air in the body of the person speaking the poem. The instrument of the poem is the body of the reader. Dr. Seuss never tries to disguise the physicality of his poetry. That's why you get him and not e.e. cummings when you're a child first learning to read, and that's why you get him and not e.e. cummings early in the semester.

"So," I concluded, "it looks like everyone here has a body." I waited a moment. No one contradicted me. "In that case, you've all come prepared."

That was my story. I stuck to it all semester. Green Eggs and Ham, with its thumpy pulse, took all the fear out of scansion marks, which apparently had been the source of a lot of high school trauma.

The physicality of poetry is one of the things I miss. I've been writing fiction seriously for six years now, and short essays for my blog for five years. A background in poetry does help on the sentence level, and to some extent on the structural level, but the intense focus on sound and breath is very difficult to sustain in a novel-length work. You do sometimes find those weird exceptions, novels in verse, and some of them even prosper-- like Vikram Seth's charming The Golden Gate, or Toby Barlow's current werewolf hit, Sharp Teeth. But not every story wants that form, and a writer who cares about publication and audience can't expect a verse novel to find a home out in the world. I expect to return to poetry from time to time, but prose fiction's where I live now.

But back to the students. (I miss them, too.)

What could Skinner's mice have to teach Pavlov's dog?

It was something I should have known, something I'd heard and read before. The poet who mentored me often quoted Muriel Rukeyser's aphorism, "The fear of poetry is the fear." That is to say, one of the intimidating things about poetry is that, in order to understand the good stuff, you have to open yourself to it, and ours is a culture that punishes true openness. For that matter, being open to the world lets in all kinds of suffering, along with the beauty. Numbness has it advantages. The very physicality of poetry makes it that much harder to resist feeling and thinking whatever the poem offers for you to feel and think.

Ultimately, it wasn't just the memory of humiliating ignorance in front of a classroom full of peers and a judgmental high school teacher that had zapped my some of students. The ones who had been able to connect with poetry a little bit, despite their educations, had found there something that demanded they bring, and therefore find, much more of themselves than they were accustomed even to acknowledging. Prose fiction, which was much more comfortable to them, invited them to lose themselves in story. Prose fiction does that for all of us, though the good stuff drops us back off at the end with more than we embarked with. It's a sweet deal, but very different. In most poetry, especially in modern and postmodern poetry, escape is not on offer.

Now, as a fantasy writer who brazenly embraces escapism as part of what stories ought to do, I look back on my students' predicament with more sympathy than I had when I was teaching them. The tools of sound and rhythm, breath and pulse, still matter, but instead of using them to demand the body's attention, I use them to direct the body's attention into the imagined bodies of characters in some other world. What is the medium of fiction? Not the page, not words, but the reader's identity.

Crossposted from Blogetary.

So, today’s prompt at Poetic Asides was rebirth. There are so many ways you can go with rebirth, so many possibilities. In the end, I went with what was, for me, the most basic. This challenge takes a lot of creative stamina and I’m running out of ideas.

Rebirth

Renaissance

All I wanted was a best friend.
Someone to listen to me,
be with me,
love me –
no matter what.
That’s what they told me I would have.
Then they dunked me and called me
born again.

They didn’t tell me
once reborn
it never ends.
Once reborn
you constantly die
again and again and again.

Wow, almost halfway there! Since today was Tuesday, it was a two-fer challenge again and we got two prompts. We could do either or both, as we chose. The two prompts were Love and Anti-Love. Here was my attempt:

Love -

Is it love?

He dogs my every move -
never far away.
I see him wherever I go -
he’s constantly on my tail.
Sometimes I look up –
to meet his baleful glare.

Ignore him though I try
as he rubs his cheek against my leg
I have to wonder why…

Is it love?
Or is it food?

Anti-love

Revelation

Bubble rises in my stomach,
as the words go on and on and on and on…
“Love inspires me!”
Bubble does its job, shoving food aside -
shoving it up inside…
as you swan on…
“I’m whole when I’m in love!”
Bubble reaches my mouth and I cough,
feel food in the back of my throat
and swallow down acid.
“Being in love is the only way to be!”
The bubble bursts.

Leaning over the toilet,
burning from the inside out,
I remember what you were like
when you were in love with me.

Today’s Poem a Day challenge was using the prompt, “Friday.”

So, here’s my entry:

Friday

Then–
Friday, Fryday, Freya’s day, FRIIIIDAY!
Day of possibilities, the unopened present.
Day when anything can happen and nothing proved wrong.
Frypan food day, Freya’s date night,
Drink with friends and dance with all your might.

Now–
Friday is laundry day, stay at home eat pizza day;
Sleeping in on Saturn’s day and wondering about Jupiter’s day.

In the end, though, Friday is my day.