Tag Archive | The Viking’s Highland Lass

Sunsets and Bears and Books!

Feb27

I went out to get the mail and saw this sunset and had to capture it!

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Every day is a day filled with a goal or six.

I recently read a post where the author said she was bored. I just can’t even imagine.

I have 3 Matheson bear orders I need to complete–they sent me the wrong fabric from Scotland yesterday–my fault. They changed up a scarf for a square and it’s too small to use to make a sash for the bears. So I had to reorder. I received another clan bear order this morning, different clan, MacPherson–headed for Australia, and luckily, I do have that fabric.

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I’m still working on a trip to Minnesota to see a fan and friend who is taking me to see the International Wolf Center in Ely. I was also interviewed in their magazine once, which was really cool, given I write about wolf shifters that are based on wolves, and setting up a book signing at a store up there also, and making sure they’ll have my most current release on hand!

I’ve been trying to come up with a more exciting opening on The Viking’s Highland Lass. I had to rewrite Cougar’s Mate for that same reason. Sometimes I have to get to know my characters a bit before I can figure out where to take them. In this one, it’s action packed, lots of humor, romance and suspense, much like my other books, and not at all how I started it before. Well, some of it is. Because some of the scenes did have that forward movement and lots of what I like: action, humor, romance and suspense.

I tried writing for one publisher once, but I had too much suspense in the story. I tried writing for another and I had too much humor. 🙂 I tried writing for another and I had too much romance. All three of those lines folded. No more.  Crashed. Burned. Vanished.

Maybe, just maybe, readers would have loved those stories that had action, adventure,  humor, romance, and suspense all lumped in one. Oh… yeah, they do!

Anyway, so I got the final critique from one last reviewer, and so need to make the changes and then Cougar’s Mate will be ready to go!

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So though  I thought my main focus today was The Viking’s Highland Lass

I have to revise my plans and spend the day revising Cougar’s Mate, then getting it ready to publish. 🙂

I have no time to be bored!

What about you? Are you ever bored?

Terry
“Giving new meaning to the term alpha male!”
www.terryspear.com

What’s Next???

Feb18

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Onward and upward! Next on the agenda is The Viking’s Highland Lass, but  I had to finish listening to the audio book chapters for The Trouble with Demons to proof it and then make the suggested changes, so was working on that since 0-dark thirty this morning. I keep running out of WiFi time, *sigh*, and some of that is from having to download and proof the two audio books I’ve been going over. And some of it is from downloading pictures for book covers.

So I finished and sent it off, then remembered I’d received another interview I have to fill out. No wonder I wonder where the day has gone to and I haven’t gotten any writing done. But that’s okay, since all this other stuff needs to be done also.

Okay, so one of my beta readers is going over Cougar’s Mate and asked if the time would be right for the heroine to run as a cougar. To make sure it is as accurate as possible, I made certain the time was right. So if you read Cougar’s Mate, I will let you in on a secret. She can’t tell you how far she went and how long it took her each day because she has no idea. No watch, you see. And no pedometer.

So here’s the story–a cougar’s range is usually 50-150 miles. But they don’t travel during the day most of the time. They make day beds and then hunt at dusk and dawn. One cougar they know of had traveled 1500 miles, but they had no idea how long it had taken him. They travel around 15-20 miles per day. Which would make sense if their rage is only 50-150 miles.

Now, she would be moving a little faster to leave her area, but on the other hand, she’d have to be really careful not to be spotted either by humans or trespassing in a bear or wolf pack’s territory. She has to hunt for food. She doesn’t even really know where she’s going.

So, now the place is fiction, but if I said she went from Canyon, Texas to the Rocky Mountain National Park, and she’s only able to travel 15 miles per day, that would be 33 days. If 20, then 25 days. They travel in a zig-zag path looking for prey.

Isn’t that cool? 

And here you thought I just made all this stuff up. 🙂 

Have a super great Tuesday!!!

Terry

www.terryspear.com

Really Bizarre and Totally Fascinating

Feb5

At least to me.

I’m usually fairly observant about things around me. So yesterday when I was taking photographs of birds being birds, I suddenly saw the tree in front of me. Not the birds. Not anything else, but the tree. It had character. Age spots. Old moss, new moss, it was beautiful. More interesting at that moment than anything else in the world.

I wondered why I  hadn’t noticed it before. How could I have missed it? It’s big as day standing right in front of the window! Well, I did what I usually do when I find something fun and interesting, I took pictures, still not believing I hadn’t seen it before.

Have you seen Limitless? It’s violent, but it has an interesting premise–that a chemical substance can tap into all those unused brain cells of ours and make us see more clearly. The man whose story is being told is an unpublished writer who has an advance to write a book (remember I mentioned fantasy??? And how sometimes we just have to go with the story???) and he’s not written a single word and can’t. This had been going on for months. With this pill, he suddenly has the clarity to write the book in four days. And it’s brilliant. Well, it’s a dark story, but I felt like him yesterday, looking at that tree and wondering why I had never seen the beauty of it.

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I just want you to know it has NOTHING to do with me. Today when I went to get my cup of green tea, it is a gray tree, nothing more.  I need another one of those pills!

In reality, what happened? Somehow the sun and the moon and the shadows and nature revealed the beauty of that tree, and then, the combination of these things went away. And now it looks like it usually does. Nondescript and the birds have all the attention again.

So if something like that catches your eye, and you think how utterly bizarre that you hadn’t noticed it before, capture it, because it may never happen again. 🙂

Terry
“Giving new meaning to the term alpha male!”
www.terryspear.com

Multi-Tasking

Feb4

Are you the type of person who has to finish a project from beginning to end? A linear type of person?

When I was playing RPGs, role-playing games, I hated the ones that were super linear. My mind doesn’t work that way. If I get stuck, I’d want to be able to either figure out a different way to solve a puzzle, or be able to solve another and then go back to that one.

That’s how I am with everything. I have a ton of things I’m working on at any given time. I love it when I accomplish something, but I always have several more things take its place.

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So the day before yesterday, I worked on The Viking’s Highland Lass and added another 4,000 to it. And yesterday, I made edit changes to Cougar’s Mate, and I just went to town on it. So I ended up writing 6,000 words on it.  This is the story that I threw out 20,000 words of the 30,000 word beginning of the story. 🙂 I saved the “cut outs” because I will be using some of it. But I needed to start over and write it differently. Now it’s working. I do that every once in a while. Write 1/3 to a 1/2 of a book, and then decide I need to go in a different direction. It’s not action packed enough, not enough of a mystery, whatever. 🙂

Sometimes when something isn’t working, and I mean with anything, I take a break and work on something else. Like I took pictures of all the birds in the bird feeders. Yes, I know that one isn’t a bird feeder, but the birds don’t know that, so we’re good.

I would have written more on Cougar’s Mate, but I needed to take a break, so I worked on two bears for a bear order.

Now it’s time to read the last of the Rita books I’m judging.

So do you ever do something different so that you can come back to it and then all of a sudden it all falls into place?

Is it really Tuesday already?

I need more hours in a day.

Terry
“Giving new meaning to the term alpha male!”
www.terryspear.com

 

In the Beginning

Feb2

Yesterday, I had a winning start on the next book. Well, actually, I  have several in process right now. But I was reading a medieval romance and it finally got me into the mood to write The Viking’s Highland Lass and so I wrote 6,700 words yesterday. It doesn’t always happen that way. Often, I’ll be thankful to write a 1,000 words, 2,000 words being my goal for a day. But one scene led to another, and I finally had to quit, well, printed off pages of that and Cougar’s Mate, and edited them last night so I’m working on the revisions next, hoping to have 10,000 words by today.

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Sometimes, we just need a little inspiration–seeing a movie, or reading a book. Some writers say they never read. Ever. How can  you not read a book? And be a writer of books?

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The joy to me is in creating a story, but I love jumping into worlds other authors have created too. To lose myself in the conflict and the fantasy and just enjoy. Sometimes I’ll watch a futuristic story and think, oh, what if my character has a similar vice or strength? Not that it would be futuristic in nature, but just something about the character resonates and I want to make my character like that.

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The temperature went from a high of 73 yesterday, to a high of 37 today. There should be a law against temperature extremes like that. But in the story, a snowstorm is wreaking havoc.  Did you know that a storm or a setting can be as much of a character in a book? Anyway, we have 80% of rain, with 25 wind chill right now. So you know what that means? Perfectly stormy weather to write my snowstorm in.

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The other day I saw the movie Shadow Recruit with my daughter and son-in-law. Lots of action, CIA is soooo perfect, it’s funny, but it has a lot of suspense, thriller, cute love story, and I enjoyed it.

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Sure, it’s a total fantasy that they can take a guy who doesn’t know how to be a real agent–despite that sure, he’s an ex-marine, and really, really smart–but it’s fantasy, folks. LOL

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Have you ever noticed stories that say: Based on a true story? Based on actual events?

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But how much of it is true? Okay, so the sun sets every night, and it rises every day. Now, we know that’s true. So if we have a story where it shows the sun setting and the sun rising, then we can say it’s based on actual events, right? Those are two events that truly happened. Really.

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So here’s my rendition of a true event:

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trees with moss in magic light and haze in background
The bears and the girl and the forest are real.

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The fantasy? She is not sitting in that forest. And the bears are the same height, 10 1/2″ tall.

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I rest my case. And now I’m back to creating my fantasy worlds!

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Stay warm if you’re cold and cool if you’re hot, and I’m off to write!

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Terry
“Giving new meaning to the term alpha male!”
www.terryspear.com