I wish I could write but. . .

I'm waiting for my goat to go into labor.  Yep.  you heard me.  She's pacing a lot and panting and all of those things that let you know that soon something wonderful and miraculous and disgusting is about to happen.  Why does this stop me from writing, you ask?  After all, I'm pretty much just looking out the window and occasionally skating, er, walking, up the hill to check for external signs of dilation.  And you'd be right.  Except.  Except it's cold here.  Really cold.  Like, I could have sore I saw a polar bear trundling by.  That means the methods we use to keep the livestock warm aren't sufficient for an itty bitty.  Which means that I'm going to have to bring them inside and bottlefeed.  That means that I have to prepare the milk replacer just in case Barbie Goat doesn't take well to milking or I lose the motivation to go out twice a day in the Arctic cold and pull on the teats of a grumpy caprine.  Also, we heat with wood and the solarium where they will be kept needs to be toasty.  So, I'm also hauling wood inside and poking at the woodstove (I'm fire-maintenance impaired) trying to make sure it's all cozy.

Goat Nursery

Oh, and I have kids.  I have a small herd of children and we homeschool so I'm trying to get reading and writing and mathematics done early so that they can get bathed and their hair dry before it's time for them to come up on the hill and watch the kids enter the world.  Please understand, I'm not complaining it's just. . . well. .. I have this story pounding in my head.  I mean, truly, I've never had a story do this to me before, take over like this and it's spooky and wonderful and will possibly become the best thing I've ever written.  If I ever get it written. What a lot of people don't realize is that writers, well, that side of us is kinda our alter-ego.  It's who we turn into when we disappear into a phone booth, or when someone makes us angry.  It's our sidesidesidesideSIDE job.  The one we all desperately hope becomes our full-time job in the mythical someday where people are begging me to attend their conventions instead of the other way around, ice cream makes you lose weight, and Rupert Grint shows up on the movie set for Hunter the Horrible and falls madly in love with me.  But I digress. So, today, I present to you the peek inside the BatCave, what happens when DaVur takes off the corset in heels (because have you ever delivered a baby goat in stilettos)?  Keep checking back today for, erhem, progress, and comment below with your suggested names.

Update: It's 2:50pm.  Goat has stopped acting uncomfortable and even ambled over to munch on some leftover grain.  That's bad news.  Laboring animals generally don't stop to eat.  I'm sure she is doing this to ensure that she goes into full labor at exactly the moment I decide to go to bed. 

Update 2: 7:43.  Still no active labor.  As a former midwife, I always had disdain for those OBs who were rushing things along based on their convenience and schedule.  I'm not going to lie though, as the temperature is dropping and my sleep time is disappearing (best case scenario, I will be walking up every 90 minutes to stoke the fire and check on the blasted beast), I find myself wishing desperately for a pitocin drip and wondering if "stripping the membranes" is really that different in goats.  Oh believe me, I wouldn't do anything like that, for the sake of the goat and because there are certain aspects of my former career I do NOT miss,  but give me another hour and I may have the darn thing walking the hallways paddock. 

Update 3: 5:39am.  Thrice damned beast still won't kid.  She is getting really ornery,though, attacking her penmate Pigasus repeatedly if the shambling porker gets too close.  I managed to fight the horns long enough to "bump" her, though.  For those of you who don't know, "bumping" is a prenatal goaty Heimlich maneuver. You wrap your arms just in front of the udder and kinda "bump" them up.  If there is something that bumps back, there is a baby.  If the bump moves, it is still alive. Everything appears to be well. 

Update 4: Saturday 10:30.  Still no baby.  It's time to swallow my pride and admit to the blogosphere that it was a false alarm.  Really, though, I know the second I leave the blasted house it's going to happen.  I mean, her girlybits are all bulgy and her udders have distended and her tail is disjointed.  IT'S TIME.  Except it isn't.  Trust me, though, when it happens, I'll be sure to let you know. 

Update 5: 4:00pm Monday.  I take back everything bad I said about the goat.  Yesterday, on a warmish day, during daylight hours, while my husband was home, Barbie goat delivered adorable twins!

The Iron Writer 12 Days of Christmas Challenge - Day 4

Continuing in The Iron Writer's 12 Days of Christmas Challenge.  Today's prompts:

Euphoria
4 Colly Birds





My story bit for today is as follows:

Ryan reached out and touched the door and it swung open easily under her fingers.  Tinkling piano music spilled out and engulfed her, cloaking Ryan in the perfect joy of recognition.  She stepped forward onto the pink shag carpeting that lined the train car.  Sunlight spilled through the windows, curtained in rose-patterned gauze.  Porcelain birds covered every surface, posed in flight, nesting, perched calling on branches.  Those birds had been Nana’s pride and joy.  In fact, the only time Ryan remembered being scolded by her beloved grandparents was the time that she had broken one, and then lied about it.  The tears in her Papa’s eyes at the lie had been almost more than she could bear. 

At the piano, oh at the piano sat her Nana and Papa themselves, lost to Ryan now for five years when Nana finally gave in to the dementia and illness that had claimed her completely two years before.  Still, here they were, playing Heart and Soul as a duet as they always had.  Ryan cried out and they turned, smiling widely, their dark eyes twinkling as they always had. 

“So,” Nana said, exactly as she had when Ryan was a girl, “I see our girl has come for a visit.” 

Ryan ran across the room, flinging herself into their arms, breathing in the scent of Nana’s rosewater, and Papa’s pipe tobacco.  She scrubbed her face back and forth across the rough polyester of her grandfather’s cardigan, and stroked Nana’s long white hair where it spilled down her back. 

“What are you doing here?”  she asked. 

Please, wander over to the website and see the offerings that the other Irons have left.  While your there, read what this Iron Writer thing is all about and, if you think you have what it takes, sign up for a challenge.   

Twelve Days of Christmas - Days Two and Three

This is my offering from Day Two of the Iron Writer's 12 Days of Christmas Challenge.  The required elements were: 

Magic Beans

Two turtle doves

She had always suffered from sehnsucht.  She had planted magic beans in hopes of a beanstalk, had opened and explored every closet and wardrobe she could find.  It had all led, predictably, to naught.  Still, though, maybe, oh maybe this time. . .  She walked up to the tracks. The wind was blowing harder now.  A veritable gale, Ryan had to work hard to not to be pushed sideways, to be sent skittering across the gravel.  Oddly, the American flag at the post office beyond the tracks was flaccid, hanging limply against the silver pole.  The ground vibrated and slowly the air itself began to moan.  Ryan thought she could see a shimmer in the crisp winter nothingness before her.  This was it, then.  It was time.  Suddenly, she found herself paralyzed, her feet rooted to the ground.  What if it were all just foolishness?  More than that, what if it weren’t?  What if she really were abandoning everything she had ever known in order to become a Rider?  And that was the best case.  There were other stories, too, tales of the wretched frostbitten souls who were caught in the wind but denied passage, doomed to be forever yanked from one time and place to another, to be bitten by the bitter wind, but never allowed inside.  What if that were to be her fate?  Ryan took a deep breath and leapt, wrenching her feet from the ground.  The wind crescendoed, the world spun around her, a nexus of color and light.  There was a thump, and all went dark.  When Ryan opened her eyes, she was sitting in an open boxcar, filled with fragrant straw.  A pair of doves greeted her with coos. 

Day Three
Anticipation
Three French Hens

In one corner of the car a magnificent rooster with a great green plume of a tail, and three hens pecked contentedly in the straw.  Ryan’s makeshift pillow moved and she sat up, turning to look into the placid, long-lashed eyes of a massive bovine.  The cow looked back, unperturbed, and curled its prehensile tongue around a wisp of hay, pulling it into its mouth.  Next to the cow lay a donkey.  Ryan stretched out her hand and patted its soft muzzle; the creature nuzzled her in reply.  Closer examination of the boxcar revealed only a single door, latched securely against the rushing winds.  Was this it, then?  Then, Ryan spotted it, a small wooden table tucked between some bales of straw.  On it laid a silver plate, covered in filigree.  In the middle of the plate, seemingly impervious to the rocking and jostling of the massive machine, was a small bottle, stoppered with a cork, and containing a small amount of powder.  Ryan felt a tickle in her stomach and an involuntary grin split her face.  She picked up the bottle and uncorked it.  It smelled spicy, exotic. Her hands began to tremble as she turned the bottle upright onto her tongue.  There was another of the dizzying spins, not so bad this time, and when she opened her eyes a door, ornate and incongruous among the steel and livestock, had appeared. 

12 Days of Christmas Challenge

I have decided to join The Iron Writer's "12 Days of Christmas Challenge!"  Every day for the next, well, now 10 days (I'm a little behind), we will be given special prompts, modeled after The Iron Writer's weekly challenges, but specially made just for a little bit of Christmas cheer.  For those of you unfamiliar with The Iron Writer, where have you been?  It is only the most amazing way for writer's to prove their chops, all the while engaging in the kind of smartmouthed banter that we artist types do best.  You don't have to be an Iron to take part in this challenge, though.  Simply meander over to http://theironwriter.com/twelve-days-of-christmas-quickies-challenge  and submit in the comments section your piece of flash fiction (200 words or less!) based on the following:

Element: A partridge or a pear tree
Emotion:  Infinite Possibility
Image:


I decided to link all of my stories together into one cohesive piece.  The first installment is below.  Enjoy, and I look forward to seeing you in the lists!

The Time Train

Ryan hunkered in the woodline next to the tracks, mentally inventorying the items in her rucksack.  The pack contained, amongst other things, five pairs of socks, four pairs of underwear, two canteens, three books of matches, “and a partridge in a pear tree,” Ryan sang softly.  It was frigid, and Ryan shivered even inside the layers in which she was cocooned.  Thick, heavy snowflakes collected in her lashes, making prisms out of the streetlamps that shone in the distance.  Still, if this worked, if the legends were true, everything – the cold, the months spent planning, even the life she left behind, would be worth it.  There were tales of a train, a train that traveled not just from state to state, but from world to world, in and out of time itself.  One every hundred years, on the solstice, it was said to travel through Decatur, flashing by the cornfields and rattling the decrepit old depot.  Ryan had dreamt about the train for as long as she could remember, would send her Barbies leaping, their matted hair flying, onto the train tracks that she’d lay across the kitchen floor.  A noise.  Was it the wind?  They said that it sounded like a tornado. They said that you didn’t try to board the train; they said you just jumped, that the wind would pull you in. They said. They said.  The wind blew harder, pulling at the strands of hair that had escaped Ryan’s woolen cap.   

Guest Post!

Hey everyone, it's Mackenzie.  Sorry I haven't posted in a while.  It's been crazy here.  Jeanie, my social worker, took me out for burgers and shakes.  She always acts like it's some big treat, like I don't know what it means.  Its gotten to where even the smell of burgers makes my head hurts and makes me feel like I"m going to trow up.  Sure enough, it turns out that my foster family has decided that they "can't meet my needs at this time" and that they want to "pursue permanent placement with a child for whom they are a better fit," which is a bunch of buisiness-y words that mean that I had to move in with a new family.  Again.  The new foster family is okay.  I guess.  I dunno.  I spend most of my time in my room , anyway.  School is another story. 

Jeanie was gong on and on about this teacher that I was supposed to have, Mrs. Harker. How she was SO great and SO fun and how everyone loved her.  Then I get here and guess what  Mrs. Harker is gone and instead I have this. .. thing.  Her name is Miss Hunter and she is absolutely, totally horrible.  Everyone knows it.  They know that she yells and trips kids in the hallway and is like a million years old.  But they don't see what I see.  I see things like how pale she is, or how much time she spends sleeping in class.  I see the dirt on her clothes and how she never smiles and she never goes outside.  When they say she's out for blood, they don't know how right they are.  But I do.  I've dealt with them before; they're the reason I'm in this mess to begin with.  I have to do something to stop her before it's too late.  The question is what. 

Want to know more?  Get your copy of "Hunter the Horrible" at http://www.amazon.com/Hunter-Horrible-Hausman-Guild-ebook/dp/B00G4LNFGU/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1383224357&sr=8-1&keywords=hunter+the+horrible

or 

http://www.amazon.com/Hunter-Horrible-Hausman-Guild-Novel/dp/1492905437/ref=tmm_pap_title_0?ie=UTF8&qid=1383224357&sr=8-1

Help for Houseless Authors

If you spend any amount of time talking to authors, and I have had the joy to talk to a lot, you'll find that the vast majority has a horror story or two about a former publisher.  Small press publishing houses are often run by one or two individuals, and often as a side job to the one that actually pays the bills. Poor health, financial obligations, or even the stress of running a house can cause a publisher to close with little to no warning.  Or, in the worst case scenario, a publisher may just lose interest.  When this happens the writers who were signed to the publisher are left a bit out to sea.  Their titles are no longer able to be purchased or printed or, if they are, they find themselves no longer receiving adequate communication or representation.  All of a sudden, their careers are at a standstill as they find themselves having to reshop their manuscripts and scramble to meet prior obligations.  I was unfortunate enough to have this very experience this fall.  I signed with a publisher in April, and in August was informed that said publisher would no longer be releasing new titles.  In the hubbub that followed, I was forced to seriously reexamine my options.  After a great deal of thought, research, and planning, I have decided to join forces with Marian Allen and T Lee Harris to open a new publishing house that focuses on not only producing books of amazing quality but actively promoting our authors and conducting our business in  such as manner that we ensure, insomuch as we are able, that our house will be here for each other for a very long while.
The house has two imprints: Line By Lion Publications is dedicated to the children's line, and Three Fates Press will be the house for works written for adults.  We currently have a groupfunding campaign to help us with this process, and hope to have Facebook and webpages by the end of this week.  We are so very, very excited to embark on this venture, and hope that you will join us.  Keep your eye out as we update our author and event lists!

 

The New Chef in Town - His Food is Killer

Yesterday a new contender his the literary ring as Tony Jaeger released his Freshman novel, "Chef."  Read more about "Chef," and meet Tony below.

-Q: Tell me a little about your book?    

-A: Chef is about a hometown vigilante who tries to defend his family by removing criminals from the streets. When tragedy strikes, he is faced with losing everything he has sought to protect.

-Q: I'm sure you hear this a lot, but that sounds a bit like Dexter. How is it different?

-A: That is a great question. Dexter is the exploration of a sociopathic character who kills and knows it's wrong on a textbook level, but feels none of the human impact from it. Chef is the exact opposite of this; his is an intensely emotional journey. Don't get me wrong, the comparison to Dexter is completely justified.The serial-killing component is more of a framework to tell the story in, rather than the focal point of it.

-Q:I've always wondered how those of you who write these stories find inspiration. Do you picture people walking around dismembered or something?    
-A: Heh. From the moment I put the first word on the page, I've been a little afraid of how I would answer this one. This actually started out as a story about a cannibal, but as I thought more about it, and really started trying to figure out the kind of story I wanted to tell, the whole eating people thing kind of faded into the background as the real story started to reveal itself to me.

-Q:Who is your favorite character in your story?

-A: I really like Liam, Chef's best friend. I mean, he's kind of a terrible person, he's really selfish, disloyal, and the worst kind of man. For all that, though, when things get really tough, he's there for the people he loves. He's kind of like Pinky, from Pinky and the Brain, and that makes me kind of happy inside.

-Q:Great. You said you're from Salt Lake City, tell me, is floating in the lake as cool as they say?      

-A: People don't really recreate in the Great Salt Lake, and there are two reasons for that. The Lake is a sacred landmark for Utahns, those of us who are Chosen to be warriors are bathed immediately after birth in the Sacred Water, and it makes them nigh invincible in battle. The second reason people don't recreate in the Lake is that it has the most putrid water in the whole world. It's the water equivalent of a Nicholas Cage movie.

-Q:Have you ever thought about importing sharks? Cause that would make it even cooler.    

-A: To be fair, sharks make EVERYTHING cooler. Even tornados.

-Q:When and where can we find your book?        
A: Chef is available on no on Kindle, and I am working on getting it on Nook, Google Play Books, and directly through my site at CreativeWritingTime.com - I will have details of my progress up on that site, as well.

-Q:Can we find you anywhere else?

-A: I have been publishing a fair amount of work on TheIronWriter.com lately. Those are all flash fiction stories. Anywhere else? I dunno, probably down at the bar. Or a card shop, playing Magic.