writing

Independence Day Flash Fiction Blogfest

/ Lisa Asanuma / 28 Comments

The rules are deliciously simple. Sign up below, and on July 15th, post an original piece of flash fiction, 250 words or less along this theme (and, FYI, “independence day” can mean anything you’d like it to mean–don’t feel you have to be restricted to the July 4th holiday!):

*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*

I snap my suitcase shut. It’s a classy vintage number—maybe I should have thought about how much space it’d take up in my dorm room when I saw it at the thrift shop, but I couldn’t help myself. It was so pretty.

I couldn’t be more excited about getting out of this town. Don’t get me wrong. It’s not a bad town. It’s just suffocatingly small. And the only person who made living here worth it left three years ago. Not that Kyle Landry ever really saw me that way, anyhow. I got into a good college on the coast and other than holidays, I’ll never have to look back.

A knock comes at the door and my mom pokes her head in. “Just about ready? It’s a long drive, you know.”

An unexpected tear pricks my eyes, but it’s gone in a second. It’s just because Mom is trying so hard to be strong. If she was really so nonchalant, I would be too.

“Yeah, I know. I’ll be there in a sec.”

Most of the car is packed. Pillows, comforter, a box of books and another of knickknacks I didn’t think I could live without. The truth is, I’m not taking too much. This is little girl stuff, a lot of it. Time for something new. A whole new life, far away from here. Then again, my best friend Sheila is coming with me, so that takes up some space.

I lug my suitcase downstairs, and there’s a knock at the front door. Has to be Sheila.

I flick my messy strands of hair out of my face and throw the door open—and Kyle Landry is standing there, his eyes lighting up until he sees my suitcase. My suitcase drops. So does my heart.

*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*

Check out the other participants here:

“It’s Independence Day and something unexpected happens . . .”

This is a Blog Hop! 30 entries so far… you’re next!

This house is full of food.

/ Lisa Asanuma / Leave a comment

I’m not exaggerating.

I’m staying at a friend of my dad’s right now… kind of a long story…  This house is nice. Nicer than the house you’re imagining. Nicer than I know what to do with. This is the kind of house most people dream of. It’s in a gated community that’s similarly dream-worthy. The ironic part is that a lot of the houses in this community are empty 95% of the time, but bygones.

Right now it’s even nicer because we’re staying here alone, pretty much. This house sees a lot of guests all the time, though, so I’m not exaggerating when I say it’s full of food. Kitchen, pantry, fridge downstairs… etc. There is a lot of food everywhere. And I am doing a very bad job of being good and not eating it. My willpower is being tested here and failing utterly.

Utterly.

I’ve been stuck in the house a lot, which doesn’t help, and working on edits and formatting and tasks that involve a lot of sitting and inspire a lot of snacking. In a house FULL of snacks.

This is not a good thing.

I’ve been trying to spend time working it off with swimming and even a bout or two with racquetball (which I’m very bad at, but enjoy a lot—though I spend a lot of time with my arms up over my head) but I’m still worried I’ll be leaving this house with a few extra pounds… which is so far from what I need.

Got to get back on the wagon here… I’m foreseeing a drastic cut down on carbs in my future.

In other news… I’m in between editing projects right now, so hopefully I’ll get a new story up on Tales from the Hollow Tree by next week.

I’m working on Jethro, and I actually have a checklist detailing exactly what needs to happen to finish the story. There’ll be a lot of rewriting going on after that, I’m sure, but I’m looking forward to finally being done with a first draft of something. I’ve started to feel like a faker once in a while, when I look at how long I’ve been writing and how long I’ve been wanting to be published—but not been able to finish something. I’ve felt like one of those millions of people who say they want to write a book, but never do a thing about it.

The thing is, though, I’ve also always known that I wasn’t one of those people. Because I know this is the thing I’ve always wanted to do, and that eventually I’d be able to do it. Really it all comes down to that determination thing. Besides scrambling with day jobs (when they come) to try and keep money coming in, at the end of the day it’s the writing that keeps me going.

I think what’s really kicking me into gear right now is editing. Editing is fun and work that I really love, not to mention extremely gratifying when something you’ve worked on is released for publication. It’s still someone else’s book, though. And I want it to be my book. I just want my book to be ready when the time comes.

A through… ahem…

/ Lisa Asanuma / Leave a comment

So, the A-Z challenge didn’t work so well for me. I didn’t even quite make it halfway through the challenge, and then I stayed away from my blog to avoid my shame. We really do get silly about our blogs sometimes.

I’ve been up to my elbows in edits for Drollerie the past couple of weeks, and am likely to be there for some time. It’s pushed writing to the corner of my mind, but I’m trying to keep the story talking in my head. I’ve been working on the mythology behind Jethro a little bit, talking it over with Isabelle Santiago. She’s helped me to realize that I still had thrown-out ideas that would work, and that maybe I should re-incorporate them. Previously I had taken them out because they were a little too complicated, but talking them out, I found solutions for a few things I hadn’t thought of before.

In other news, I feel a bit sheepish that it’s taken me so long to do this, but I’ve been given a Creative Blog Award by Deirdre Coppel of A Storybook World.

Thanks Deirdre!

K is for Killer Instinct

/ Lisa Asanuma / 14 Comments

I’ve been trying to wrap a lot of my blogfest entries around to writing, and it took me a while to think of something that I could write about the letter K, but then it hit me.

You see, I have a secret fear when it comes to my writing… that fear being that I just don’t have the killer instinct required to be great. Villains are hard for me to write, because they involve motives that don’t always make sense to me (in an emotional way, not in a logical way). And then my other characters, my non-villains? Well… I like them. I like them too much, maybe. A part of me worries that I’ll always pull punches—that I’ll never put my toys away and play with the big girls.

This is, I think, Stephenie Meyer’s great fault. One of the Cullen clan ought to have kicked it by the end of the series. I was betting on Rosalie being killed off in Breaking Dawn. It would have packed enough of a punch, and torn Emmett to shreds—a depth of character possibly well beyond him with Meyer as his creator.

Good writers—great writers—don’t pull punches. Great writers make you feel every inch of indecision, or hurt, or loss that the character does, and lets the worst of things happen to their characters. My latest favorite author, Maggie Stiefvater, has torn my heart to pieces on more than one occasion, and by goodness do I love her for it.

I worry, though, if I’m capable of that. If I can really destroy a character I love, for the sake of good fiction. It takes a lot to take or destroy a life, even a fictional one.

I want to be able to do that, though. I’m seeing some hope in my future, as lately in plotting I’ve come across ideas that both horrified and excited me—and I think that must be the way it starts.

J is for Jethro

/ Lisa Asanuma / 1 Comment

Jethro, Arizona isn’t on any maps. That’s mainly because it’s plucked straight from my imagination. I was traveling all over the southwest a few summers ago, on business with my dad. Luckily this was made interesting on account of my father knowing the southwest like the back of his hand, and his willingness to travel off the beaten path.

I had a story in my head that, while not exactly just beginning to form (it had been a story before, you see, but it had been demolished and salvaged for scraps when it had gotten out of control and unpublishable), was definitely in the beginning stages in most cases. A lot of my time on this trip was spent writing poetry about desert lizards and musing on this story.

I was looking for a place. I knew it would be in the desert, but it had to be somewhere special, somewhere that was mine. And then I found a place that was almost perfect. We drove through Jerome, Arizona, a small mining town that’s all topsy-turvy and thriving on tourism alone, with intrepid architecture and dangers of mine shafts all round.

I knew that I had found something magically close to where I wanted the setting of my story to be. I regret that I haven’t woven more of its magic into the story yet, as I feel that will be something left up to the rewrites, but it’s all the glory of the modern world in an older western settlement, with the beauties of the hot Arizona desert, a desert I’ve grown to love in my years of traveling across it time and again in my youth. This is a story I love, so it’s fitting for it to have a setting that I love, too.

And I’ve just realized I now have two J entries… le sigh.

I is for Incognito

/ Lisa Asanuma / 6 Comments

So, posting about this isn’t very Incognito of me… but ah well.

I’m a member of a writing group. It is a writing group made up of LDS writers. Not necessarily writers who write LDS stuff, but writers who happen to be LDS. (Like me…)

I don’t talk a lot about my faith here, mainly because I have other places to talk about it, but also because—well, other than keeping my books pretty language-free and otherwise clean, so far I can’t say that my religion has affected my writing much. I consider myself pretty mainstream, and am aiming towards the mainstream market.

I went to my first writer’s conference last year, though, and it happened to be the LDS Storymaker’s Conference, because I was in the right place at the right time, and through that I joined Authors Incognito. Really, AI is a support group. A big network of writers, some published but many not, who are all on a Yahoo listserv.

I spent a lot of time on the edges of the group because there are so many emails that come through that they can be a little overwhelming, but eventually I dove in, and while I’m still not super active in the group (I’m a bad blog-reader, and mostly a lurker as yet) I’ve met some fantastic people in it, and what’s more, I always feel like I’m connected to writing, and I think that has actually helped me a lot, creatively.

It’s something that’s true about other things, too. If I socialize with crafting people, I craft more. If I socialize with writing people, I write more.

Really, it’s as simple as that. If you’re trying to write, connect with other writers. It’s a great way to start. Or to dig yourself out of a hole, or through a wall. The great thing is, there are lots of ways to find other writers out there online. Be careful who you share your writing with, but if you’re just trying to figure out the whole writing thing in the first place? Get talking to other writers. The creative energy will nip at you more than it ever has, I promise.

H is for Handmade Movement

/ Lisa Asanuma / 8 Comments

I’m a little late in the night, but I have to give a shout out to the Handmade Movement. As an Etsy seller, buying handmade is something that’s pretty important to me. Handmade crafts are something that I grew up with. My mother is a quilter, specializing in Hawaiian and Jacobean applique, and creativity has always been encouraged in my family.

There are really a lot of reasons to buy handmade, though. Firstly, buying directly from artists and artisans means that you know that your money is going to the people who put together the product that you’re getting, something that you can’t be sure of in almost any retail situation. Secondly,with websites like Etsy and Artfire, it’s easier than ever to do.

Maybe one of the biggest reason to buy handmade, though, is because in today’s mass-produced world, one-of-a-kind pieces of self-expression can only truly be found in the handmade market. Buying handmade is also a great way to support local artists instead of big chains, and a vote for quality—something that has been sacrificed in the mainstream markets in favor of price cuts.

The coolest thing about the handmade movement, though? Is that it also means that YOU can make things. Today learning how to knit, crochet, sew, make jewelry or whatever it is that interests you is easier than ever, because the internet literally has endless information on all of the above subjects (and lots more) available with just a Google search or two. Want to learn how to make soap? How about how to do embroidery? Or how to spin yarn? If you’re more of a visual learner, I’d suggest looking through Youtube. I personally learned how to spin, crochet, and bind books off of youtube.

Maybe selling online isn’t for you. Maybe selling at all isn’t for you. But there’s nothing like making something useful of your own.

This is also why I write, by the way. I have to be creating something all the time, whether it’s literally putting together a journal or notebook, making something wearable out of yarn, making the yarn itself, or telling a yarn of my own. 😉

B is for Belief

/ Lisa Asanuma / 2 Comments

Since today was General Conference for the LDS church (which I happen to be a member of), my natural thought when I was trying to think of a topic for today was to write about belief.

But when I sat down to actually write the blog post, another facet of the word came to me—something much more tied to my usual topic of writing and/or fiction.

What I thought about, was Firefly. Actually, Serenity. About how the reason the Operative in it is so dangerous, was because he believed. More to the point, he believed that what he was doing was just and right. And I remembered a paper I very nearly wrote for a Classics course I took in college, where we read Antigone. The “villain” here too, Creon, the one who has decided Antigone’s fate, believes that he has made a just call, the only thing he could do, under the laws of the gods.

Another example is Javert from Les Misérables. Javert too is a man of justice, a man who believes in exact punishment. He believes he is a servant of God, but he (like Creon) doesn’t understand the subject of mercy, and therefore is limited in his view of the world—he sees only in black and white, wrong and right.

In these cases, belief can be a scary thing… especially belief without questioning. Devoutness can be admirable, but it can also be taken a little too far. It makes for some great villains, though. 😉

Belief makes for great heroes, too, though. Think about Harry Potter, Frodo, or even say, Indiana Jones. Each of them have a strong belief system, a goal that they will not stray from, and it is those beliefs that give them the courage to take on the things that might scare or intimidate the rest of us into complacency.

This makes me wonder a little what my characters believe in… do they believe in anything strongly enough? What about yours? What about you?

Writing bumps (and successes!)

/ Lisa Asanuma / 4 Comments

Sometimes writing feels like walking in the dark down a bumpy road. I’ve had a lot of bumps in my writing the past few months, mostly in the form of minor freak-outs that I just can’t cut it. I’ve been lucky, though, that I always have someone waiting to listen to me as I worry, and miraculously a lot of my worries have been followed immediately by a light clicking on, and my being able to see that much further of my path.

What do I mean? Well, I’ll tell you.

Firstly, I had a BIG block on Jethro… I’m talking about a month and a half’s worth of block. I knew who my bad guy was, I could see him, I just didn’t know how to get him to find out about my characters… and how can he hunt them down, if he can’t find out about them?

I avoided this block for a long time. I basically didn’t even open my manuscript because until I knew how to connect point A to point B (or more like point Q to point R, in relation to the story) I was sure I couldn’t get anywhere else. I was in California living with my sister at the time, and she basically called an intervention, worried that I wasn’t doing any writing, which I was specifically there to do. I flipped out on her pretty much, spilling all over to her about my seemingly impossible situation. Then after talking through the complexities of it to her and virtually draining myself of anything I could even think on the subject, the answer popped into my head a few days later. And it was the simplest thing in the world. So obvious, in fact, that I was really tempted to knock my head against a wall like they do in movies sometimes. (Movies? TV shows? Does anyone ever do this anymore?) (Maybe I should say, I literally wanted to headdesk.)

I had a similar freak-out on my Secret Project. I was worried that the middle wasn’t exciting enough, and there was a lot of middle. A part of me thought that this was going to have to be the story I shelved for years and years until I was “good enough” to write it. I talked to Isabelle Santiago about this one, and she assured me that what I had was good, that I already knew what I needed, just like I had before, and that this was a story that needs to be out in the public. (It’s so nice to have a friend who fangirls your WIP unabashedly.)

Starting in January I joined a critique group through Authors Incognito, a group of LDS writers (that’s writers who are LDS, not necessarily writers who write LDS books)(and yes, I’m LDS too). I’ve been having the chapters of Jethro critiqued—so far just the first chapters of Jethro, the ones which flowed like water onto the screen that I’d thought were so good. I’ve gotten them back torn up and abused, with red ink all over them… and then I had another freak-out, this time needing both my husband and Isabelle’s assurance that firstly, Jethro was good, and secondly, this is a first draft… all the little things get fixed in the editing, which is way more fun than writing. (Would you have ever believed that back when you were in school? I sure wouldn’t have.)

Part of me wanted to run into a corner and hide, and bury my poor little manuscript under a shroud of anonymity so that it would never be critiqued again. But most of me was starting to realize, yeah, these are things I need to address in my writing. I have good, gripping prose in me, I know I do… but maybe I don’t have it in my first drafts, and that’s okay, so long as it’s in there by the end.

My latest flip-out experience was also Jethro, and it was just the other night. I’d been reading a bunch of blog posts about writing the book from the right character, and even though Jethro is really an ensemble piece, suddenly I was terrified that the character I’d chosen as the “main” was wrong. And I’m talking about thinking  this nineteen and a half chapters into writing it. One of my secondary characters just sparkles so much more, and I know she has some serious demons that’ll be in her path very, very soon, and I thought maybe the character I’d picked just couldn’t hack it, couldn’t carry a full-length novel that would keep teens and adults reading.

This was maybe my biggest heart-attack yet. How could I have so misjudged? How could I have gotten it all so mixed up?

But then logic kicked in… the character I’d chosen had to be right. Considering who she was, what her personal history was, there was no way she was wrong. She was the one. The only one who could tell the story as a hero. Well, maybe one of two… but that’s a bit of a secret.

Still, this presented me with a problem. Luckily, this problem also turned out to be a solution. You see, I knew the answer to this question, too. The question being, “How to make my main character be more exciting,” or more to the point, “How to torture my main character just a bit more?” I knew because it was already in an earlier version of this story, but it was something I’d thrown out because I’d wanted to involve another character in that story arc, a character that it was vital to the plot that she be involved.

So again, I panicked a little bit. I had 1+1+1, and I needed it to equal 2, because in this case, 3 just wouldn’t cut it. 3 would be preposterous.

I ranted at my husband about this problem for a few minutes, but he was working on other things and I was talking too fast to really understand probably, anyhow. In this instance, I pulled out my trusty notepad and just started scribbling. I basically did a web-diagram, in the messiest, fastest cursive that I can claim.

And you know what? My problem worked itself out. In a way that not only was simple and logical, but that actually solved another little problem I’d had with my plot, and had me feeling like standing up and cheering for my characters, because they’d just proved to me how awesome they really could be. I jumped from that to writing almost a full scene, only stopping because it was late and I was bone-tired.

The one other bump I’ve had recently had nothing to do with writer’s block, but more with my laptop charger, which died on me unexpectedly about a week ago. Without a charger, my laptop turned into a big ole’ paperweight for a few days, and stealing time on my husband’s desktop wasn’t fully cutting it. I got my new shiny charger in the mail from Amazon the day before yesterday, though, and while I was out pretty much most of the day yesterday, I got on today to find that Jethro had actually crossed 40K while I wasn’t looking. I’m excited! Secret Project has over 55K, but not in a solid, chronological block like Jethro. I can’t say this is the longest thing I’ve ever written (I was a fanficcer, once upon a time… ssh… it’s a secret!) but it’s the longest I’ve had of a wholly original story.

Success suddenly seems a lot closer in hand than it ever has before.

(And hey, while I’m here, check out my contribution to The Hollow Tree today. We post free reads there every Friday, don’t forget!)

Romance Blogfest: First Sight

/ Lisa Asanuma / 22 Comments

romance blogfest badge

This is a very first for me—a blogfest! Hosted by Jordan McCollum and backed by Authors Incognito, this is the first of what will hopefully be a (monthly?) tradition for AI members, of which I’m lucky enough to be. As we were starting in February, romance seemed like a fitting subject, and more specifically, the challenge (which can be read by clicking the link above) is about “Love at First Sight, or Not So Much.” There’s an option to use a scene from a WIP or write something original. I’d never really written a “love at first sight” scene, so I wanted to try my hand at it. Here you go! And make sure to click on the link and read through the other author’s answers to the challenge!

~*~*~*~*~*~

It was a hot day for February. A Saturday, too. A million people or more littered the beaches of Southern California, which was usually enough reason for me to stay away—I liked my beaches better quiet, something akin to private. It was the first day in months that my friends Wes, Ky and I all had off work the same weekend, though, so we did the same as everyone else, and took advantage of the heatwave. We were seventeen and after graduation we’d all split ways, it seemed natural to hang out as much as we could.

The funny thing is, at first I didn’t even see her. There was a whole gaggle of girls playing volleyball, a couple of whom I’d seen before from school. I noticed because Katie Huxley was there. I’d always had a thing for Katie. We sort of grew up together, and she was nice. She reached “out of my league” status around freshman year though, and I’d always been content to admire from afar.

The three of us were walking down to the water, but we slowed to watch the game a bit. We weren’t the only ones—it’s not everyday you see the volley nets used at all, much less by a group of teenage girls. Katie was serving the ball, and it went high over the net. Some girl on the other side lobbed it back, and it went out of bounds—knocking the girl on my left right into me.

“Oh hey, are you okay?”

Petite and blonde, she threw the volleyball back into the game before answering me. “Yeah, I’m fine.” She rubbed the spot on her arm that the ball had hit, and looked up at me.

Bang.

That’s the closest I can come to a description of how I felt. Her eyes were big and brown and seemed to hit me in the stomach like a physical force.

I can’t explain it. I’m not a flowery kinda guy. But man… I felt something. Right away. Not a flutter or whatever, but like I said, a bang.

“Um, hi,” she said, looking at me like she wasn’t sure what was going on in my head—I wasn’t either. I was probably staring at her. Probably creeping her out.

“Hi,” I said, shaking myself out of whatever trance I was suddenly in. “I’m Cole.”

She gave a polite smile and reached to shake the hand I hadn’t even realized I’d extented—who shakes hands? “I’m Leela.”

She only came up to a few inches above my elbow. She looked like she weighed maybe 90 pounds, soaking wet.

“Hey Cole, c’mon, we wanna get into the waves,” Ky said from behind me.

I gave a quarter turn towards him, but turned back to Leela first. “Look, I don’t ever do this… but do you want to come hang out for a bit? Maybe go get a boba later?”

She glanced over at the guy next to her, someone else I didn’t see until this very moment. Her boyfriend, maybe? But he shrugged his shoulders at her, and a second glance said maybe it was her brother. “You have your cell on you?” he asked. She nodded with a check of her back pocket, and he shrugged again. “It’s your life.”

I held up my hands. “No pressure or anything.” But I wanted her to say yes. I don’t know that I’d ever wanted anything else more in my life. I didn’t even know why.

Leela gave a shy nod and took my hand, sending another physical slam down my body. I think one more and I’d be in shock. Without a word, we followed Wes and Ky down to the water, two people in a bristling crowd.