Writers, Dreamers, Inspiration & Words

It's not an exaggeration to say that writers are dreamers.
 
We have to be, if for no other reason than to be able to create rich worlds and characters, and stories. We may dream up our stories at night, or in snippets here and there during our waking hours. We may hear the voices of our characters begging for their story to be told, or telling us the story over and over again, until we have no choice but to let it out, to let them out.
 
Our inspirations come from life, from color and form. Even music or a simple conversations can plant an idea in our head that may grow and blossom into something amazing.
 
Hours spent at a computer or with pen and paper, time that many people would consider wasted, becomes fantasy, becomes prose, becomes an alternate reality... Strangers meet in a dimly lit bar. A damaged warrior seeks solace and peace, and finds so much more. Vampires, werewolves and gods spring to life and off the page.
 
A kind of magic is created by writers. And it takes a special something to be able to create it. For writers, their creations are their life and as important to them as their loved ones, as cherished as a child.
 
I'm thankful everyday that I can find the words to put to paper, the ones that describe a scene or emotion, the characters and all the little bits that individually may seem insignificant but when compiled together are absolutely intrinsic to the worlds that I'm creating. Every day that I can find the inspiration I need to write, I know that I'm alive and while I may not be living the life that many can understand, it is the life that truly makes me happy.
 
Find your inspiration. And you'll find the words will follow.
 
Today this is mine.

Ch-Ch-Ch-Changes

After months and months of concerns, questions, worries and the occasional contradictory moments of feeling success and unhappiness, it's come to an end. In what is still a baffling turn of events (even after a full month of looking back and doubting myself, my previous actions, asking myself "why?", and generally feeling smaller than I've felt in more than a decade), I'm finally starting to look forward again, to tomorrow and next month and to next year and beyond.

And now that I am looking at the future again, I'm beginning to realize that in many ways I've been spinning my wheels. Figuratively, obviously. I've spent so much of the last 6 months waiting. Waiting for this to happen, so that I can do that. Waiting for this person to get me information about something so that I can do that thing. Just - waiting. Now I'm seeing that the holding pattern I was in was of particular design to keep me somewhat busy and somewhat content, so that I wasn't asking questions about what was going to happen next, where I was supposed to be going, or when the next step was going to be presented to me. It's an unfair position to be placed in but I suppose I'm not entirely blameless in the situation... I let it happen to me after all.

I was unhappy, bordering on miserable for a portion of the time, but despite my complaints and grumbling, I never really did anything to change the situation or push for more. As position, work and power was torn from me, as I watched those around me suffer in concert, I started to believe that I couldn't fix things and therefore as more time passed, I hardly even tried. And maybe I couldn't have fixed things. Maybe trying only would have pushed us all into the current situation sooner. But I should have tried, I should have pushed, and I should have realized far sooner that waiting wasn't doing anyone any favors (except those who will remain unnamed), least of all me.

Now ideas for the future are percolating in my mind and family and friends are happy to see and support a change in attitude, a change in goals and plans. But most of all they are happy to be supporting me in an endeavour that will create a better, happier, more stable situation for me, my family and, hopefully, a whole array of other people - young and old, as well.

So wish me luck! And I promise that as things move forward I'll do my best to keep you posted!!

Till next time, be happy and keep looking forward!

So This is What I'm Doing

I once described how I came up with the stories that I write.  (To see that post go here.)  It’s what works for me as a creative process.  Of course there are the inevitable ‘dry’ periods where for whatever reason I’m just not coming up with anything new.  During those times I do whatever I can to keep writing – and being a busy mom, sometimes student, and occasionally gainfully employed person, the time I have to write can sometimes be pretty scarce… Case in point: January through August of this last year.  In the last two posts I’ve mentioned the three stories that I have in the works (as LD Ferris) and I told you little bit about where each of them stood.  Now I want to tell you a little bit more about each.

The Chosen

from http://www.myspace.com/etherealflyer

The idea behind this one is something of a universal good vs. evil plot.  There are a few twists, a couple turns, an (almost) love triangle, shades of grey, and that question that seems always to be asked – how much are you willing to sacrifice to achieve the end you seek? 

Lynora Montgomery is the oldest of three sisters who grew up in Massachusetts.  She’s an honor student at Yale, a kind, caring, and generous individual, who is popular, serious, and most importantly, a witch; a really powerful, really ‘good’ witch.  There are a lot of extenuating circumstances, a few complete surprises (even to me) and some really good friends.  When the darkness of evil starts to thicken, she and all those around her know that they must do what they can to snuff it out. 

But what do you do, when the only way to save the ones you love is to give up everything that you are, and everything that you have within you?

Immortals

In many ways my fascination with the paranormal, the fantastical, the mythological and (lol) the beauty of Greece combined in to a dream, an idea that then became Immortals.  The immortals, or the Athanatos (thanatos=death in Greek, a-thanatos=undying) as they call themselves in this story, were created, bred and born by the ancient gods and goddesses.  Though the primary mythological backgrounds in this story are based in Greek mythology, there are also aspects of Celtic, Viking, Roman, Egyptian, Mesopotamian and Sumerian mythology as well.  

Identifying Mark of the Athanatos

This story is centered on Alexis Vasilios, a young woman born in Greece and raised in the USA, who discovers that she has strange abilities, powers that exceed the imagination, when she is in a car accident with her best friends.  Through her extraordinary efforts she is able to save her friend, thus making her realize that somehow, someway, she’s different from every one she’s ever known, although she doesn’t, indeed can’t recognize how truly different and superb she really is.  It is Xander NIkitas, the Athanatos seeker who manages to track her down and explain her remarkable heritage to her.  Yet as they learn more about her history, they are both shocked by the depths of truths that they find.   

Alexis’s story is about her self discovery, not only of her abilities but of a place and a people who she feels she can belong with.  Through her incredible journey she also manages to uncover a secret power play within the Athanatos community, she forges friendships that will last forever, and finds the one man who she can see herself loving through time immortal.

The Gifted

This story is set close to home… literally.  With settings near Magrath, Pincher Creek, Lethbridge, Calgary, Red Deer, Edmonton, Vancouver, and Victoria, as well as some locations throughout Europe, this story is told, more or less, about right here at home.  Interestingly enough, though not really surprising when you think about it, when imagining and describing some of the characters personalities, I’ve found bits and pieces of myself and the people actually in my life appearing on the page in front of me.  (You may have noticed in the introduction of Dawn McKenna that I said she took a job teaching dance at a studio in Lethbridge… And everyone who knows me knows that I danced for years, and still consider teaching.)  It’s been an interesting process, so far, telling a story about places that I actually visit all the time – some more than others. 

Photo from www.dumbweek.wordpress.com

As for what the story is actually about, well, to put it simply: the gifted.  Individuals, and whole groups of people, that are gifted with supernatural and extraordinary abilities or talents.  It’s not about witches in the way that The Chosen is, or beings created for a specific purpose as those in Immortals, but it’s about a world, our world, that exists along side a whole host of other similar worlds, all connected together.  From those other worlds, beings of supernatural origin have come across into our world and over the millennia have congregated in groups for survival.  There are vampires, fae, were-creatures (including lions, cougars, panthers, bears, wolves, etc.), sprites, brownies, leprechauns, berserkers, and other species.  

The Gifted tells a story about six people (the three Tallant siblings, Dawn McKenna, her cousin Shayla O’Conner and her best friend Bradford Lawrence) and how their lives come together and change, until they aren’t just six people, and they aren’t just siblings, or cousins, or friends.  Through their experiences, through the challenges of responsibility and even fate, they become three couples, and they become a family. 

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

So that is what I’m working on, most of the time anyways.  It’s so much fun creating these stories – the ‘worlds’ that they exist in, the characters and people who inhabit them, the things both real and amazing and those that are fantastical and imagined.  It can be aggravating, frustrating, annoying, complicated, mind numbing and hard, difficult work, but it is so worth the effort and the time it takes.  To read, even an unfinished work-in-progress, is so rewarding and enjoyable, and really, really, just fun.  I honestly love it.  Every single part of it.  And now, I’m going to get back to it! 

See you again soon!

Getting Back In To Things

Surprise! Amazing I know, but yes… I’m back again with an update.  It’s probably going to be short but it’s an update. 

I’m trying to put all my blog updates onto a schedule this fall so that I don’t end up with one blog having updates all the time, while my other blogs stand lonely and, more or less, dead. If, and I really stress that if, things go according to what I’ve worked out for myself, then you should see at least one update a week here on Inside My Mind.  Actually you should see about an update a week on my reviews blog and my other writing blog too. 

[Me? I’m keeping my fingers crossed…]

About that other writing blog I mentioned… Becoming Dawn is a new blog that I’ve started that is going to showcase the contemporary writing that I plan to do – it may be romance, mystery, suspense or just plain old fiction (which, let’s be honest, includes all of the aforementioned aspects).  Because that writing will contrast somewhat sharply with what I generally write I’ve decided to write it (and publish) using a penname.  To see more on this, or to find out what I’ve got going in that direction please feel free to visit Becoming Dawn anytime.

For the writing that I talk about here and whatever I may showcase or spotlight here on Inside My Mind, I will continue to use Lacey Ferris, or LD Ferris.  It’s just easier for me to separate that which I write as fantastical from that which I write as reality if I ‘separate’ the authors’ identity.  Even if I and everyone else know that they are actually the same person.

So what did Lacey write this week?  Hhmm… She wrote this blog.  Which granted isn’t much but I’ve had kids going back to school, extra-curricular’s to organize and schedule, and started on a cleaning sweep through the house.  Exciting, huh?  LOL – I was sort of a boring but busy woman this last week, and everything that I was doing seemed to revolve around someone else.  This next week is mine though… right?

I am diving back in to The Gifted soon though.  So, realistically I should have another one or two character profiles that I could put up soon. (Click here to see the first of the character profiles for The Gifted.)  And I’ve been thinking of trying to scour through celeb pictures online to try and find faces that come close to what I’m seeing in my mind.  I haven’t decided whether I want to do that yet though because I’m always scared that I’ll slack at describing them because I’m thinking to myself ‘it’s the girl/guy in the picture.’

I’m still working on the edits for The Chosen too.  That story is by far the most done and closest to being complete.  It still has a ways to go but with a good 60,000 words I have it at that point where it’s comfortably uncomfortably waiting for me.  I’m going to have to turn my focus back to it soon though, I think, because I actually had another dream about my characters there and what they’re telling me now is something slightly different from how we began.  I’ll manage to straighten it out though, I always do.

And Immortals is merely waiting for me.  Once I get some more out of Gifted and Chosen though it’ll be full bore ahead on this one, especially since it was only meant to be novella length in the first place.  And yes, my immortals are growing as impatient with me as my witches and shape-shifters are. 

Can’t you hear them yelling?

“Hurry up and tell the bloody story Lacey!”

I guess I better listen.

Talk to you again soon… (next week if all goes according to my plan!)  

Tootles! Lacey :-)

How Do You Write?

For anyone and everyone who writes - whether you do it purely for pleasure, as a profession, or somewhere in between the two - how you write can be nearly as important as what you write.  Primarily because the how can so great affect the what.

Have I confused you?  It's writing, right?  Just words on a piece of paper or on your computer screen.  Thoughts that move from your mind, through your arms, out your fingers and to the page.  Simple.  But no, it's not.  Not always.  

Some times it can take all day to get just one sentence written down.  Other days the words just pour out of you and it's more difficult to stop that it would be to just keep going.  Like in anything else, there are good days and bad ones but it's how you deal with it, how you cope, how you work around obstacles and through ideas that make you a better writer.  Those words, as important as they are, are only as good as the idea that forms them.  

I was chatting with Laurel Kriegler (@pegasus_za - follow her on Twitter!!) earlier today about just this concept.  We were talking about how we use our daily experiences and our observations of the world to feed our writing.  What we see, hear and live becomes fuel for our imagination to then create something, maybe entirely different, out of it.  For example Laurel wrote a very short story based on the rescue of the Chilean Miners earlier this week. (You can read her brief story "They've got one out!", it appears on her blog The Quarzite Columns.)  But that's only one way to come up with story ideas.  As I've mentioned often, my ideas come primarily from my dreams and Laurel agrees that dreams can be a very effective medium for mining story concepts.  

I told her that sometimes we just write what we know but she made an important correction to my statement.  She said that we write what we know and then modify it.

At the end of the day every writer's method is slightly different, just as everyday that same writer's method may differ slightly.  We have to use what works best for us at any given time.  If you write fantasy or paranormal's you may focus on dreams for your ideas, but the characters in your story are still living (unless of course they aren't...) and so incorporating aspects of the everyday-world is important too. 

So where do you get your ideas from? Do you look around you and see something ordinary and know that you can make it something extraordinary in a story?  Do you hear your characters in your head, demanding that you share their life with others?  Do you dream of a world entirely different than the one we live in and use it as a basis for your writing?  

How do you write?

A New Story?

Image by lrargerich via Flickr

When I finished up classes and got back to doing some of my own writing last month I picked up on the stories that I was working on last fall.  I'm still working on them and they are coming along nicely but about a week ago I had a dream.  Not a nice fantasy or dreamscape, no this dream threw me full-bodied into a new story, a new world and introduced me to a whole host of new characters... I woke up at 4:25am with the visions I'd seen still dancing in my head and after trying and failing to fall back to sleep, finally decided to get up, make some coffee - a very important thing at 5am - and start writing.  

This particular story I'm going to introduce here on this site.  It's still untitled at this point but I'm going to keep plugging away at it and post it in short segments.  First I'll do installments that introduce the main characters as there are about half a dozen of them.  Then I'll move on to the story.  I'm hoping that I'll get some feed back from readers - what they like, and who, what they hate, and who, and what they'd like to see happen to the characters and the "world" that they live in.  Keep an eye out for it...

Thanks for visiting and I hope you'll come back. 

:) LD

I'm A Bit Crazy Sometimes

To anyone who knows me that isn't really a shock to hear.

To those who don't, it's probably not the greatest of first impressions to make but, somehow, I think we'll manage. I'm not entirely crazy, I did say 'a bit' remember, and I'm not crazy all of the time, see the 'sometimes' up there... but, yeah.

"How?" you might ask. I'll try to explain...

For as long as I can remember I've had vivid dreams. Some of them are short, some are long but all of them are full of details: names, places, descriptions. Some of the dreams are about everyday things - going to school or grocery shopping, and others are different, they're fantastical. A lot of the dreams only come once and, I think, those ones are just dreams like anyone else's.

It's the 'other' dreams that have meaning to me.

Not in the "10,000 Dream Interpretations" sense either.

These others dreams are the things that make me feel crazy. Or part of what makes me crazy anyways. They repeat, over and over again, until the whole story's out. And whether it's just consciously thinking about them during the day or having to literally say to myself "so this happened and then she/he did this," I have to see the entire story. Then, just to make things a bit more nuts, sometimes I'll see the same story from different perspectives. I have to know it, you see.

Once I get it though, the story is always there just tucked away in a corner of my mind. I've always wondered why I remember them in such explicit detail. I've always been curious why I have to remember the story and why those details stay with me months and even years into the future. Now I think I know.

Some people are meant to be teachers. Or doctors, or scientists, massage therapists, farmers or dancers... I've considered being all of those things, I've deeply wanted to be (at least) three of those things, but the fit just didn't feel right. There was always something that didn't click.

And then one day I was sitting at home with my kids, playing on the computer and, sort of, watching a movie when I opened up a new Google Doc and started writing down my dream from the night before. The words came pouring out. The story building on the page, scene by scene just as it had in my dream.

3000 words later I stopped and stared.

Of all the things I've tried to be, all the things that I've considered doing, somehow it never crossed my mind to be a writer. I'd always been told that I was good at it - but that was for school, for essays and reports and research papers, things all firmly in the realm of real. It definitely wasn't for something that I was making up (or that my subconscious had made up), or something that I created.

So to be perfectly honest, it scared me. Not only because when I went back and read it, I thought it was good but because of how easy it came to me. Here was something that I'd never really thought of doing, and it felt right.

It fit.

Now I'm starting to take all those dreams out of the corners in my mind and I'm going tell them. I'm going to write them and, hopefully, publish them. Now when people ask me what I do for a living I don't have to wince and say "Nothing," or tell them that I'm just a stay at home mom (though I am that too and I'm damn proud of being able to be). Now when people ask me what I do, I'm going smile...

And tell them I'm a writer.

(And isn't that just the craziest thing??)