NaNoWriMo RE: Cryptids!

Me answering NaNoWriMo Questions once again. This time is was: Cryptids!

For my story, the MCs work for the government to sort of keep the ‘cryptid’ type creatures under wraps. They go wherever there’s a sighting, which is why there are documentaries and shows about these creatures, but no actual hardcore evidence or capture. So for my story, I need a bunch of these cryptid type animals. They don’t deal with ghosts or aliens, though, so those are out.

I need things like Bigfoot, Loch Ness Monster, Champ, Jersey Devil, etc. Thanks for your help!

[quote=Phoomp]One creature not mentioned in the above list is the chupacabra.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chupacabra

[/quote]

HEY! That was what I was going to mention! You beat me to it!

When I’m planning for NaNo I always head to the local libraies and the state libaray and get out as many books on my plot topic as each library allows me to get out on my card, and than I spend the weeks before NaNo reading up on various info about my topic I plan to write about. Part of one of my current plot ideas was to have a Chupacabra attack only it started killing people instead of livestock, so there was now a big rush to track it down and find out what it was and put a stop to it. So, as a result of that plot idea, I right now has out: Cryptozoology A To Z: The Encyclopedia of Loch Monsters, Sasquatch, Chupacabras, and Other Authentic Mysteries of Nature, and believe me, if you are planning to do any serious study into Cryptids, you can not research them without this book! OMG! I may go out a buy this book – there is so much info in in about every single Cryptid in history!

My favorite, which, after reading this book, resulted in some plot idea changes, was the Californian Megalobatrachus or The Californian Giant Salamander. It’s like bigfoot only salamanders instead (and I’ve got this thing for salamanders.) Well, I had never heard of these Giant Salamanders until last week when reading this book. Now I’ve been looking them up, and I found info about sightings of salamanders up to 30 feet long! Most sightings are of salamanders 5 to 6 feet long or 9 to 12 feet long for a few, but always in California.

My personal favorites however are not mentioned in that book: Phookas and Kelpies and my personal #1 fave: MerFolk (this link goes to info about an actual merman sighting in recent years). In spite of hundreds of sightings in the past, because there have been almost no new sightings of these three since the 19th century, they never get mentioned in cryptozoology and are instead placed in folklore.

What’s your take on this? I’d love to hear what you have to say about this post. Leave a comment and share your views!

. . .

Hey, you know what? I sell Avon! I’m an Independent Avon eRepresentative and that means you can buy Avon from me, 24 hours a day, from your computer, from anyplace in the world, and Avon will ship it to you.

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If you liked reading this blog and want to read more stuff written by me, I have lots of websites, where you can read other things I write, here are a few of the ones I like the best:
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NaNoWriMo RE: What’s the killer’s motive?

On the NaNoWriMo forums we find the question: What’s the killer’s motive?

What’s the killer’s motive?
One of my main character’s lives a normal life, but he’s also a killer.

I don’t want his reason for killing to be because he was abused as a kid.

Anyone have any ideas?

This is a very vague question and like several others have already said, we really need to know a detailed background about your character and the plot of your story, and some info about the characters he has killed, before we can actually come to any real conclusions as to why he kills them. If we knew more about him, his situations, and his victims, we could than draw on what we know and try to come to logical conclusions about him.

With the information you have given, all we are able to do is show you examples of reasons which OTHER killers have killed and not reason why YOUR killer has killed. and so that light I will give you three brief summaries of killers I use in my own stories and maybe that will help you to see examples of different reasons why different killers kill.

As for your not wanting it to be because of his childhood, think about this for a moment: Everything you do as an adult, is a result of some event that took place in your childhood.

That said, there are many reasons why a killer would kill.

One reason is that he may have a metal illness – bi-polar, clinical depression, schizophrenia, etc. which causes him to kill others for no real reason at all, other than a chemical imbalance in his brain (which is what a mental illness is – and is different from a birth defect like Autism, Downs Syndrome, etc: a mental illness can be treated with medication, a birth defect can not be treated).

Another reason is that he’s been hurt really bad – beaten by muggers whom the police let off on a technicality, so he took the law into his own hands, for example. Or jilted by his girlfriend who ran off with his best friend, so he killed them both. Or a dad who’s daughter was raped and/or killed tracks down the rapist and kills him. His dog could have been killed in a hit and run so he kills every one who drives the type of car that killed his dog, because he knows eventually he’ll kill the right driver. His wife died of cancer, so he kills her doctor for not saving her. These would be vengeance killings and you could come up with millions of them if you put your mind to it.

Megalomania – always my favorite. Though rather rare in real life, it does make for good fictional killers. Hitler is by far the world’s most famous megalomaniac, closely followed by Napoleon and Moses. Other real life Megalomaniacs have included Vlad Dracule the Impaler, Osama Bin Laden, Brigham Young, the Templar Knights, Jack the Ripper, and The Zodiac Killer. Megalomaniacs have egos the size of Juptier and think they are the right hand of God (or even think they are God made flesh), sent to earth to do God’s will and wipe out all sinners, or to quote Saucy Jack “I’ve come to clean the streets of London”, and Hitler: “The streets are now safe for our woman and children.”

Megalomanicas always go down in history in a really big way, because they go to such outlandish extremes to kill people and kill people by acting out the biggest delusions of grandeur the world has ever seen. These men spoke for God. They boldly claimed to talk to God, hear God’s word and kill in God’s name. They claimed to be making the world a better place by removing all non-believing sinners from it. They took religion fanaticism to new heights and sought out global denomination, crowning themselves as the self-proclaimed leader of the world and set out to building up private armies of religion crazed followers willing to slaughter all non-believers in there name and in the name of God.

In the world of psycho killers, megalomaniacs reign supreme. In the realms of fiction, megalomaniacs are often a bit less religion crazed than their real life counter parts, and can usually be seen running the pages of comic books under the such names as: The Joker, The Green Goblin, Doctor Octopus, ect. They also haunt the sci-fi realms under such names as: Davros, the Daleks, Darth Vader, Emperor Palpatine, etc.

Megalomaniacs kill because they are right and you are wrong and if their brainwashed followers heard your words, they might not want to follow the ego controlled megalomaniac anymore. Megalomania is a very rare and very serious mental illness similar to schizophrenia, big on a much bigger scale. Usually the megalomaniac sees himself as God, the Prophet of God, the One World Leader, or some other hugely overblown delusion of grandeur. The main differance between a megalomanic and a schizophrenic, is the shichophranic stays in his own world of delusions and doesn’t usually start killing people, while the megalomanic tries to pull the whole world into his delusion with him and nearly always kills – often repeatedly – to gain domination and will force his theologies on the rest of the world than kill any one who disagrees with him ideals.

So there you have a few assorted reason why killers kill. There are of course others, but I think the ones I mentioned are the easiest to write about. And for farther examples, here are the three summaries of characters in my stories, that I mentioned earlier:

I had a serial killer once, (The Red Dragon from the Twighlight Manor series) well I still got him actually, I have used him in several short stories and he hasn’t been “caught” yet so I can keep using him, though I haven’t used him in any of my more recent stories, but anyways, he only kills people that look a certain way (certain color skin/hair/eyes, clothen style, etc). His motive is that he was in love with this woman, but she married this other guy, so he killed her and her daughters (only the ones that looked like her) years later, and after that every time he would see a woman that looked like her, he’d kill that woman too for reminding him of her. He mentally unstable as a result of lost love and destroys everything that reminds him of her, so he kills for love, or rather, he kills to forget.

I have another reoccurring killer, (Blackbird, also from the Twighlight Manor series) who is not human, but he looks human, and it’s set in our world so most humans do not believe him when they say he is not human. Anyways he’s from a “superior race” (or so he claims) and when he sees humans who are doing things that “disgrace humanity”, he kills (and usually eats) that human, for the betterment of the human race to prevent said human from corrupting the rest of the humans. He’s somewhat of a “moral” killer, though his morals are a bit radical. Also he eats humans, because they are “inferior”, he thinks of humans the same way humans think of cows – cute on the farm but tasty in burgers. His moral reasons are more to see to it that humans keep in line, stay “domesticated”, and don’t destroy themselves (via man-made sickness, environmental depletion, and warfare) so that his people don’t lose their food supply. So he wants humans good and moral, not because it’s good for them, but because he’s worried they’ll do something to wipe themselves out and endanger his people because his people periodically harvest humans for food. Think of it this way – could you imagine the panic McDonald’s would have should cows suddenly cease to exist? Yeah, it’s like that – kill to survive.

The thing of Blackbird is, that he’s not like others of his kind, most of his people blend in with humans so no one knows they are not humans, and they kill humans all the time too, but they make it look like an accident or natural causes or something else so they don’t get noticed. But Blackbird, he’s not afraid to tell people that he’s not human, and he just comes right out and cuts the human open, so the rest of the human think he’’s a psychopathic nut. They don’t believe he’s not human. They don’t believe humans are only here to feed his people. They don’t believe that he’s only hunting for food. They think he’s a serial killer with mental problems, so he keeps getting caught and dragged away to a mental hospital. He’s not mentally ill, but people think he is, because they don’t believe he’s what he says he is, or that he’s just doing what come natural to his kind – killing lesser beings as a source of food is not murder, he claims, but no one will believe what he says.

Than there is the Lansquin (also from he Twighlight Manor series) and he’s a self proclaimed prophet-savior-religious fanatic who pretty much will kill any one who disagrees with his religious views, because it’s better that the sinners die than corrupt the rest of the world. He’s a multi-billionaire though, so he’s never actually killed anyone himself, he hire’s hit men (via his ultra fanatic ever devoted flock of followers) to kill for him. He went and bought the mental hospital that Blackbird keeps getting dragged off to, and than gets Blackbird out of technicalities, as long as Blackbird never kills any of his devoted followers. He ends up using Blackbird to get rid of a lot of people who disagree with his religion as a result. The prophet dude is a super crazed megalomaniac, who thinks he’s making the world a better place and will eventually (attempt to) get around to killing off all of the approximately 6 billion people in the world who disagree with his religious views, so that he has complete control over the only remaining people: the members of his church.

Okay, so, there you have my, as usual, long winded answer. (And people actually wonder how I reached 50k in 3 days last year!) Hope that helps you out some on your character building. Good luck with NaNo 09!

What’s your take on this? I’d love to hear what you have to say about this post. Leave a comment and share your views!

. . .

Hey, you know what? I sell Avon! I’m an Independent Avon eRepresentative and that means you can buy Avon from me, 24 hours a day, from your computer, from anyplace in the world, and Avon will ship it to you.

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If you liked reading this blog and want to read more stuff written by me, I have lots of websites, where you can read other things I write, here are a few of the ones I like the best:
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The gothic-horror-steampunk-fantasy-Stockholm-romance genre?

I’ve been racking my brain trying to figure out what to write. I know I’ve started a few threads already, about various plot ideas I was tossing about, but none of them has really stuck yet so I’m still searching for a plot. I’ve been trying different angles: create a character, than figure out what happened to them and why. That didn’t pan out. Than I tried: take an event and figure out a background story to it. Nothing. Next I went for: take a fairy tale and turn it inside out. A few ideas came, but quickly flew out the window. Than I thought – well maybe if I knew what genre I wanted to write, that might help me find my plot.

So here I am sitting here thing: What genre do I want to write? Well, what genre do I usually write? I have no idea.

I write lots of stuff. I have 30 years of various short stories, novellas, chap books, and novels kicking around. I’ve never been able to specifically place any of it in a single genre. Some of it reads like romance, but I don’t writ romance – it’s more: villain tortures damsel in distress and she goes head over heels for him, stuff – very Stockholm freak-out. But than, some of it reads like science fiction, in a very H.G.Wells Time Machine/Crystal Egg/Island of Dr Morue Victorian sci-fi/horror “steampunk” sort of way. Half of my character are not even from our galaxy let alone our solar system and a few alien abduction-UFO-Fox Mulder type scenes find their way into the stories. There’s more than a few morbid goth/emo haunted houses complete with “”Heathcliff” and “Rochester” dark moody freaky guy-with-a-dark-secret characters. Than I’ve got the whole slasher Freddy Krueger high on Stephen King type of stuff mixed in with everything else. To make things just a bit more out of the norm, mermaids, faeries, flying cats, and once in a while a unicorn or three sort of show up for no good reason at all.

So, I’m looking at the stuff I write and I’m asking myself “What the hell genre is this anyways?” It’s a little bit of this and a little bit of that and touch of these and a smattering of those all rolled into one mixed up surreal mess and I can’t make anything I write fit nicely in any of the standard genres! Finally I came up with the answer. I write: gothic-horror-steampunk-fantasy-Stockholm-romance genre

The gothic-horror-steampunk-fantasy-Stockholm-romance genre? I can’t even Tweet that on Twitter! It takes up the entire Tweet! LOL!

Okay, so now I have a name for the genre I want to write. It’s the ONLY genre I ever write, so I’m pretty much 110% positive that it’s the genre I’m going to be writing for NaNo 09. Now all I got to do is figure out what type of plot best matches this genre. Any one got any thoughts? Ideas? Suggestions?

Is any one else writing/planning to write a story that could be considered part of the gothic-horror-steampunk-fantasy-Stockholm-romance genre? Have you got a plot yet? If so, can I borrow pieces of it? I need plot ideas!

Oh yeah — and I’ll looking for any character “ideas” as well.

And I don’t know why but for some reason I just started thinking: “Wouldn’t it be nice to write about a dark traveling side show.” (Thinking of the Tourchwood episode “Into the Rain” or whatever that episode was called – the one with the 100 year old freak show filled with ghosts that survived by sucking the life out of the living. – or sort of Ray Bradbury’s “Something Wicked This Way Comes” evil circus type of thing.) Hey! I like that idea! I wonder what kind of characters I could come up with for a plot like that?

Steampunk-Goth-Stockholm evil traveling circus from hell? oooh, I gave myself a plot idea while asking you guys to help me come up with a plot idea! YAY! Must go think on this some more – I think I could work with this.

What’s your take on this? I’d love to hear what you have to say about this post. Leave a comment and share your views!

. . .

Hey, you know what? I sell Avon! I’m an Independent Avon eRepresentative and that means you can buy Avon from me, 24 hours a day, from your computer, from anyplace in the world, and Avon will ship it to you.

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If you liked reading this blog and want to read more stuff written by me, I have lots of websites, where you can read other things I write, here are a few of the ones I like the best:
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Is it a real paid to write site or is it a scam?

On Factoidz I found the following question:

are www.writingjobs.net a good agency to join?

Here is my answer:

I have not seen this site before you mentioned it – that alone should tell you that it may be a scam, as I am a professional writer and I tend to know all the real sites. I’ve seen other site’s like this one though and as far as I know, every site that follows this “line up” turns out to be a scam in the end, so I would tread very lightly here and avoid them unless you hear otherwise from a fellow writer (whom you personally know and trust) who has used this site with success.

I quickly scanned the site and I saw a lot of dangerous warning signs that indicate scam artist.

First off, let me point out that any site that spends several hundred words pumping itself up, and telling you over and over again they are the greatest and the best, with out really telling you HOW they are the greatest and WHY they are the best, should be avoided. I legitimate site would spend it’s time telling you up front WHAT they do and HOW they do it.

Secondly, the site goes on and one about how much you should join and how much you’ll love it, and ONLY at the VERY BOTTOM does it than decide to mention that, oh yeah, by the way, you got to pay all this money to us so we can tell you how we are going to tell you how to make money writing. BIG RED ALERT there! It reads like a ClickBank eBook ad or an ad for acia berry diets.

Thirdly, a REAL business or service is not going to flash the phrase “60 day money back guarantee” in your face every 5 sentences. A real business, will have a Terms of Service (ToS) page and ONLY on the ToS page will you find any mention of a refund – and you will also notice that they will usually call it a refund, not a money back guarantee. The whole “buy today, make lots of money tomorrow, or your money back in 60 days” pitch just screams scam on a loud speaker. ANY site, no matter what they are selling, if they throw a pitch like that at you, they are a scam – close the page and ignore them, there are better ways to waste your money than this.

Fourthly, what EXACTLY is it that they are asking you to pay for? They don’t say. They dance all over the place telling you how great they are, but they do not specifically tell you what exactly it is that they are going to do for you once you dish out the money. They are making lots of very vague promises with out specifically telling you anything about them or their service at all. If you are going to pay for something, you ought to have a detailed list of what it is you are going to get for your money.

They say you’ll find lots of freelance writing jobs if you pay them money. Okay – HOW? How are they going to find you freelance writing jobs? Are they going to send an agent to your house who will sit down with you and discuss your portfolio and determine which magazines (note – NOT eZizes, but REAL magazines – like O, Glamor, Country Living, Forbes, Popular Science, ect.) are best suited to your writing style and area of knowledge. Why should you expect them to do that? Because, that is what a REAL agent does – and a REAL agent usually charges you BY THE HOUR. An agent actually gets off their ass and goes out there are looks for jobs that match your specific writing style. Are they going to do that for you? They are making claims to being an agent – well, than where is their list of names? Will you get to choose which agent you want to work with or are they going to throw one at you at random?

From reading their site, my conclusion is, that they have no agents who are going to come over to your house and discuss job options over dinner with you. It appears that they are asking you to pay money in order so you can read a list of classified ads for writers. Yeah, you know what, these pay to find job sites are a dime a dozen. Pick a career, any career – contractor, waiter, writer, nurse, babysitter, whatever – no matter what career it is, you’ll find dozens of scam sites telling you to pay them money to tell you where to find a job. You know what? Monster is FREE and they do the exact same thing, and 9 times out of 10, these pay-to-read-my-list-of-jobs sites copied their lists right off of Monster or CraigsList or some other free listing site and the scammers are now asking you to pay them for something you can find and read for free elsewhere!

So basically all you are paying for is for them to do your Googleing for you, which if you don’t like surfing Google for free and finding free listings 100% free – than, yeah, go ahead and pay them the money and get the list. Just know that, you could have gotten the same list yourself for free with ten minutes surfing Google. Heck, if you are really just into the writing business because you want to make money, you could make more money surfing Google and compiling lists and asking people to pay you to read the list. The average freelancer makes under $12K per year – which is nearly half what they would make in a minimum wage job at the mall. Only a rare few ever reach the $25K income and you are hard pressed to find a freelance making more than $30K. If you are looking at the big names and thinking you could be a millionaire with writing, think again: the big pay writers like Stephen King and JK Rowling got their money off movie rights. Sure, it was a spin off of their writing career, but still, it was not the writing itself that paid big. Remember: if you want to make writing your career than you must first love to write more than you love to eat or have a roof over your head, because a writer’s pay sucks, and every writer is going to tell you that. The fact that this site is making big promises of big pay from doing nothing but writing, should be a huge warning sign that it is NOT run by a writer, because no REAL writer is going to make those kinds of claims.

Additionally, why pay for services like this when there are sites like AbsoluteWrite, WritersWrite, NaNoWriMo.org, and so many others that offer listings/help/advice for freelance writers at, get this: 100% free. You don’t even have to be a member to read their listings! The horror of it – you can scan sites without paying a penny or even joining the site – who knew? What will they think of next.

You should also read SFWA’s Writer’s Beware, which is a list of all the scams their writers have uncovered over the years.

Okay, here’s the deal: if you are really serious about becoming a freelance writer, go to your local book store and buy a copy of this years (2010) Writer’s Market. It’s a directory of EVERY single REAL and Legitimate publisher who is looking to pay freelancers. The Writer’s Market is like a phone book – and it HUGE – well over a thousand pages, and thousands, upon thousands of listings, posted by the publishers, editors, and agents themselves. As a general rule, if they are not listed in The Writer’s Market, than they are not a real publisher/editor/agent. (The Writer’s Market costs about $20 – $30 depending on with you get the big full edition, or wither you get one of the smaller “children’s writer”, “non-fiction writer”, “poet”, “song writer”, or “short story and fiction writer” editions, and depending on wither the book store sells books at cover price or at discount.)

What’s your take on this? I’d love to hear what you have to say about this post. Leave a comment and share your views!

. . .

Hey, you know what? I sell Avon! I’m an eRepresentative and that means you can buy Avon from me, 24 hours a day, from your computer, from anyplace in the world, and Avon will ship it to you.

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If you liked reading this blog and want to read more stuff written by me, I have lots of websites, where you can read other things I write, here are a few of the ones I like the best:
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Should we omit "under God" from the Pledge of Allegiance?

Someone sent me this question on FaceBook. The link the question went to opened a heated discussion about how organized religion was out to control the government and how “under God” was nothing but brainwashing and mind control on the part of organized religion. I found that view on the debate interesting considering how the question itself never mention religion at all.

Here is my answer:

You don’t have to belong to a religion or even be a religious person to believe that somewhere out there there is a Great Spirit/Creator/God/Being/etc, so I don’t understand how everyone automatically thinks the words “under God” are religious control – that said:

I don’t see a reason to change what’s already there, likewise if it was NOT already there, I would say the same thing – Why change it? Why add what is not there or take away what already is there – doesn’t the government have BETTER things to worry about like getting starving families access to food?

If there REALLY WAS a God , what would HE want them to do? Fight over wither or not his name was in some quote or feed the hungry? Think about it. God doesn’t care wither His name is in there or not, all He cares about is how you treat your fellow man. We should be worrying about things that ACTUALLY MATTER and stop fussing over trivial petty things

What’s your take on this? I’d love to hear what you have to say about this post. Leave a comment and share your views!

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If you liked reading this blog and want to read more stuff written by me, I have lots of websites, where you can read other things I write, here are a few of the ones I like the best:
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ABC bashing abductees???? WTH?

I was just reading Jeffrey Morgan Foss’s comments about ABC’s alien abduction interview, earlier this week.

I don’t have a tv so, didn’t see the show, but after finding out more about the Agugust 19th episode I came to the conclusion that every one wither they believe in alien abductions or not, should write a complaint to ABC, because regardless of with you believe in the phenomenon or not, what JuJu Chang did/said was completely uncalled for and more than unprofessional on her part. An interviewer should know better than to take sides and start harassing someone on t like that. The interviewer is ALWAYS supposed to ask the questions, get the facts, and LEAVE THEIR PERSONAL OPINIONS OUT OF IT!

I’ve gotten more than my share of an earful from people who basically think I’m crazy when I tell them what happened to me (which is why I don’t talk about it very often anymore). They don’t understand it so they resort to bullying and humiliation to make themselves feel more comfortable with the situation, by making the victim even more victimized. It’s wrong on so many levels when you get it from friends and family, but I couldn’t even imagine how hurt that wife must feel when an interviewer (someone who SHOULD NOT be taking sides either way!!!) takes to harassment right on live tv before millions of people! That JuJu Chang is a disgrace to her profession.

Only 30% of all abductions happen at night or during sleep – the remaining 70% happen during the day and when the person is wide awake. Maybe SOME of the 30% CAN be attributed to “sleep paralysis”, but even if all 30% of them WAS “sleep paralysis” how do they go about explaining the 70% that were abducted while wide awake????

So how do they explain me – I’ve never once been asleep when it happened – in nearly every instance, I was playing in the woods, catching frogs, running on the beach, etc, etc, all in broad daylight! (it started happening when I was 4 years old and continues today 30 years later). What, was I catching frogs in my sleep? The people who say it’s all nothing but sleep paralysis are uneducated idiots who need a cop out. People like that just piss me off.

What’s your take on this? I’d love to hear what you have to say about this post. Leave a comment and share your views!

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If you liked reading this blog and want to read more stuff written by me, I have lots of websites, where you can read other things I write, here are a few of the ones I like the best:
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100 Books

BBC believes most people will have only read 6 of the 100 books here. How do your reading habits stack up?

Instructions:
Copy this into your NOTES. Look at the list and put an ”X” after those you have read. Tag other” Book Nerds”.

1 Pride and Prejudice – Jane Austen X
2 The Lord of the Rings – JRR Tolkien X
3 Jane Eyre – Charlotte Bronte X
4 Harry Potter series – JK Rowling X (do I get to add 7 x’s for this one?)
5 To Kill a Mockingbird – Harper Lee
6 The Bible X
7 Wuthering Heights – Emily Bronte X
8 Nineteen Eighty Four – George Orwell
9 His Dark Materials – Philip Pullman
10 Great Epectations – Charles Dickens

Total: 6 or 12

11 Little Women – Louisa M Alcott X
12 Tess of the D’Urbervilles – Thomas Hardy
13 Catch 22 – Joseph Heller
14 Complete Works of Shakespeare
15 Rebecca – Daphne Du Maurier
16 The Hobbit – JRR Tolkien X
17 Birdsong – Sebastian Faulk
18 Catcher in the Rye – JD Salinger
19 The Time Traveler’s Wife – Audrey Niffenegger
20 Middlemarch – George Eliot

Running Total: 8 or 14

21 Gone With The Wind – Margaret Mitchell
22 The Great Gatsby – F Scott Fitzgerald
23 Bleak House – Charles Dickens
24 War and Peace – Leo Tolstoy
25 The Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy – Douglas Adams X (all 5 of them – 5 more x’s?)
26 Brideshead Revisited – Evelyn Waugh
27 Crime and Punishment – Fyodor Dostoyevsky
28 Grapes of Wrath – John Steinbeck
29 Alice in Wonderland – Lewis Carroll X
30 The Wind in the Willows – Kenneth Grahame X

running total: 11 or 21

31 Anna Karenina – Leo Tolstoy
32 David Copperfield – Charles Dickens
33 Chronicles of Narnia – CS Lewis X (all 7 of them = 7 more x’s?)
34 Emma-Jane Austen
35 Persuasion – Jane Austen
36 The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe – CS Lewis X
37 The Kite Runner – Khaled Hosseini
38 Captain Corelli’s Mandolin – Louis De Bernieres
39 Memoirs of a Geisha – Arthur Golden
40 Winnie the Pooh – AA Milne X

Running total: 14 or 29

41 Animal Farm – George Orwell
42 The Da Vinci Code – Dan Brown
43 One Hundred Years of Solitude – Gabriel Garcia Marquez
44 A Prayer for Owen Meaney – John Irving
45 The Woman in White – Wilkie Collins
46 Anne of Green Gables – LM Montgomery X
47 Far From The Madding Crowd – Thomas Hardy
48 The Handmaid’s Tale – Margaret Atwood
49 Lord of the Flies – William Golding
50 Atonement – Ian McEwan

Running total: 15 or 30

51 Life of Pi – Yann Martel
52 Dune – Frank Herbert
53 Cold Comfort Farm – Stella Gibbons
54 Sense and Sensibility – Jane Austen X
55 A Suitable Boy – Vikram Seth
56 The Shadow of the Wind – Carlos Ruiz Zafon
57 A Tale Of Two Cities – Charles Dickens
58 Brave New World – Aldous Huxley
59 The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Nighttime – Mark Haddon
60 Love In The Time Of Cholera – Gabriel Garcia Marquez

Running total: 16 or 31

61 Of Mice and Men – John Steinbeck
62 Lolita – Vladimir Nabokov
63 The Secret History – Donna Tartt
64 The Lovely Bones – Alice Sebold
65 Count of Monte Cristo – Alexandre Dumas X
66 On The Road – Jack Kerouac
67 Jude the Obscure – Thomas Hardy
68 Bridget Jones’s Diary – Helen Fielding
69 Midnight’s Children – Salman Rushdie
70 Moby Dick – Herman Melville X

Running total: 18 or 33

71 Oliver Twist – Charles Dickens X
72 Dracula – Bram Stoker X
73 The Secret Garden – Frances Hodgson Burnett X
74 Notes From A Small Island – Bill Bryson
75 Ulysses – James Joyce
76 The Inferno – Dante
77 Swallows and Amazons – Arthur Ransome
78 Germinal – Emile Zola
79 Vanity Fair – William Makepeace Thackeray

Running total: 21 or 36

80 Possession – AS Byatt
81 A Christmas Carol – Charles Dickens X
82 Cloud Atlas – David Mitchell
83 The Color Purple – Alice Walker
84 The Remains of the Day – Kazuo Ishiguro
85 Madame Bovary – Gustave Flaubert
86 A Fine Balance – Rohinton Mistry
87 Charlotte’s Web – EB White X
88 The Five People You Meet In Heaven – Mitch Albom
89 Adventures of Sherlock Holmes – Sir Arthur Conan Doyle X
90 The Faraway Tree Collection – Enid Blyton

Running total: 24 or 39

91 Heart of Darkness – Joseph Conrad
92 The Little Prince – Antoine De Saint X
93 The Wasp Factory – Iain Banks
94 Watership Down – Richard Adamson X
95 A Confederacy of Dunces – John Kennedy Toole
96 A Town Like Alice – Nevil Shute
97 The Three Musketeers – Aleandre Dumas X
98 Hamlet – William Shakespeare X
99 Charlie and the Chocolate Factory – Roald Dahl X
100 Les Miserables – Victor Hugo

Total: 29 or 44

What’s your take on this? I’d love to hear what you have to say about this post. Leave a comment and share your views!

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If you liked reading this blog and want to read more stuff written by me, I have lots of websites, where you can read other things I write, here are a few of the ones I like the best:
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I’m "evil" because I write books? WTH? Anyone else ever get this?

Okay, so some of you are on my FaceBook friend’s list and may already know about what’s been going on these past few weeks, so you’ll know what I’m talking about, but for every one else, I’ll explain. For starters, I come from a very, really, super-strict, super-Christian, they are saints and the rest of the world is going to hell multi-generation family of which I am one of 264 members. Aunts, uncles, cousins, you name it, they are all one big group. (One of my friend’s said that this sort of close-knit no one can make a move with out the rest of the family’s permission thing is highly unusual for a family, and often asks me: “Are you sure your family isn’t the Mafia and they just haven’t told you yet?” and another friend says: “You do realize your family is a crazy whack-job cult group, don’t you?”) Okay, yeah, I do realize my extended family is nuts, that’s why I try to stay away from them as much as possible, but with their stalker have to know every move I make attitudes that’s not always easy to do.

So, I’ve always been sort of the black sheep. I never fully “conformed” to their way of practicing religion, and I always pretty much did my own thing. When I was 4 and again when I was 8 I had what I’m now told was an alien/UFO encounter, but which I called contact with faeries. This resulted in accusations from relatives stating that I was “evil”, “demon possessed”, needed and exorcism, was a “witch consorting with Satan”, etc, etc, etc. Whenever I told any one about what had happened to me, my family was quick to tell the person I was “possessed with an evil spirit”. Anyways, because they would never let me talk about it, I started writing about it instead, and that is how I got started on my career are a writer.

So, 30 years and many books later, I still write, I still avoid my relatives, and they still say I have an evil spirit. Twelve years ago they took to bombarding my email with their accusations, so I got myself a new email and let them spam my old one. I’d been doing good, about avoiding my relatives for about 4 or 5 years, and it looked like maybe, finally, once and for all, I was rid of their endless accusations and weird nut job freak outs. Than I joined FaceBook, and all hell broke lose, because as soon as they realized I was on FB they all sent me friend/family/relative requests. I approved them, not really knowing what FaceBook was, because I had just joined it. For the first few months everything was fine. Than in February the demon accusations started coming on my FB Wall. Well, I had been talking with my FB friends a few months now, and when they saw the sudden, odd and completely inexplicable demon possession accusations, they asked me what these people were talking about, and since it was too long to explain in a FB post, I wrote this instead and told them to read that, and than explained that these people leaving the comments were my relatives and members of their church, and that they believed that because I had had an alien encounter 30 years ago, that I was therefor demon possessed, and that was what why they were saying the weird things they were saying about me on my FB Wall.

Well, from there, me and my FB friends just ignored the comments and kept on as usual. Than a few weeks ago, my bishop tells me I’m being excommunicated from the church because of what I wrote on that website. Okay. Whatever. He also thinks I’m a witch, and says that witchcraft is apostasy again the church, and used my website as “proof” that I am a witch. Yadda, yadda, yadda. Like I haven’t heard this all before? I think they are all freaking crazy, for translating what happened to me into “proof” that I am a witch possessed by demons.

So these past few weeks, the whole kit and kaboodle of them have been in an complete and total uproar, and my FB Newsfeed has been a flurry of thousands of posts starting how I have been putting curses on the local church members! They are accusing me of everything from evil eyes and whammies to voodoo dolls and spell casting. They are “coming forward” with “proof” that I caused deaths, car accidents, illnesses, disease, crop failure, 2 members died in the last month and I’m accused of having killed both of them with curses, people’s dogs have died and I’m accused of having used my evil eye to kill them, one guy got cancer and I some how gave it to him, . . . ect, ect, ect, ect . . .

I’m reading their messages and comments and Wall posts and going: What the hell???? Are they serious? Do these people actually believe the things they are saying? Are they freaking nuts? OMG! What kind of a freaking cult mentality do these people have anyways? How can they be so brainwashed as to believe that I have an evil spirit and can cause all these things to happen? Did I wake up in the wrong century or something? What are they time travelers from the 1500’s? What the hell is wrong with these people? I don’t get it. I really don’t get it. They are completely off their rocker, every freaking one of them.

Well, as you know, every year once August comes around, I put my regular writing projects on hold to start plotting for my NaNoWriMo contest entry. This becomes my vacation from my writing career. I know, I take a vacation from writing books to write another book. Yep, that’s me, addicted to writing. So, I have once again become active on various writing forums and of course on NaNo itself, and as usual for this time of year, my Writing Blog has once again been pulled up and gone active. Off line I am surrounded by papers and note books and reference books and pens, and Moxie and I pretty much eat, breath, sleep, think, and talk about nothing but my NaNo entry for 2009.

Okay. So yesterday I took a break from NaNo plotting to check my FB account. My friends still sending me game requests/challenges and I send more back to them, and my relatives and church locals are still spamming me to death with their witchcraft accusations, I’m still supposedly killing people and their pets left and right (boy at this rate, I’ll be the only one left on the planet!). Yep, all is well with the world – everything going about as usual. Than I see it – the accusations, they are not the same as usual. Oh no, no, now they have changed, it’s no loner just evil eyes and curses, nope, now it’s my books too!

Apparently, my “evil spirit” or “demon” is making me write books so that I can control the minds of innocent teenagers and make them do my bidding. Warnings are now being posted, telling people not to read my books because they are evil and have the ability to control the minds of others. According to one accusation, I am writing my books to build up an army of evil minions which I will send out the kill every one, because I will not stop until every one on the planet is dead. Other accusations call my books perverted tools of Satan.

Lovely. It’s good to know my books are capable of such great power. I do wonder though, if they can do these things, how come I was not aware of it? I mean, I did write them after all, shouldn’t I know if my books are capable of taking over the world?

You know, the really funny thing is, my books are not mass produced. I write chap books. Little 75 page pulp novellas that are not even sold in any major bookstores. You’d be hard pressed to find a copy of one. I write because I like to write. Money was never a goal in my writing career, so I never pursued getting my books mass produced. Now, if my goal was to build an army of teenage boys to destroy the entire population (as one accusation stated) wouldn’t you think I would have mass produced my books on some large grand scale? I mean, how big of an army can I build up by printing off 10 or 12 books a year?

What is wrong with the books I write? and why is that the latest “reason” for today’s round of “proof” that I am a demon possessed witch putting curses on church members? If you don’t like my books you don’t have to read them. . . heck, as far as I know the people saying these things have NEVER even read ANY of my books! So where do they get off saying these things about some books which they never even read????? and for those who aren’t on their friend list and thus did not see what they said: their “proof” is the fact that I write horror and romance books. uhm . . . yeah . . . I’m thinking there must be a heck of a lot of demon possessed witches putting curses on church members, because romance and horror novelists are a dime a dozen. Their are a lot of us out there you know. I’m guessing Stephen King and Danielle Steel must be really, really, REALLY wicked what with all the horror and romance they write.

I have to ask – if these people hate me so much, why did they send me a FB friend request to begin with? It looks like the only reason they are on my friend list is so that they can harass me online, since their harassment offline sent me into an agoraphobic state which now makes it difficult for them to get in touch with me in person. And do they say these types of things about EVERYONE who had an alien/UFO encounter and EVERYONE who writes horror and/or romance, or are they only saying these things about me, because they know me personally and therefor feel justified by that fact alone? Do other writers have to go through this? Are nut jobs who accuse writers of being evil wide spread or did I just happened to run across a fluke of wackos?

Sorry, this post got so long, but I just needed to vent. I mean, you’d think after 30 years they’d get tired of accusing me of being evil. Why can’t they find some one else to pick on? I mean, 30 years! Come on, give a rest already! You hate me, you think I’m evil. I know. You’ve been telling me for 30 years now, can you find something else to do with your life beside harass me? Oh, wait, I’m sorry, I forgot. You don’t have a life, that’s why you spent the last 30 years focusing on mine. How do I get these people to leave me alone? How do other writers deal with situations like this? Do other writers have to deal with situations like this? Is there a time machine around somewhere so I can send these people back to the 1500’s where they belong? Shhheeeesshh!

What’s your take on this? I’d love to hear what you have to say about this post. Leave a comment and share your views!

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If you liked reading this blog and want to read more stuff written by me, I have lots of websites, where you can read other things I write, here are a few of the ones I like the best:
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NaNoWriMo 2009 Plot Started

Okay, so I know it’s early, and I’ve still got 3 months before NaNo gets started, but I’ve suddenly got the urge to get started in my planning. I’m still with no idea what I want to do for 09, but that hasn’t stopped me from studying various reference books look for ideas, nor has it stopped me from rereading all the writing how to books out there. I’m kind of waiting for that “one thing” to pop out at me and scream :”Pick me! Write about me!” but it hasn’t hit me yet. I’ll let you know what it is when I find it though.

Oddly for some reason though, my mind keeps telling me “rewrite Rapunzel – the original is all wrong” though I’ve no idea how I should rewrite it yet. I’m not sure yet if I’m going to go the whole Rapunzel road yet or not, but I figure, while it’s in my head I should start planning it out anyways, that way at least once November rolls around, I’ll have at least one plot to work with.

Okay, so hear’s my question(s):

What are you general thoughts on rewriting Rapunzel?
What if the story took place today? How would I pull off a modern day Rapunzel?

What about role reversal? Say if Rapunzel was really a man, and was rescued by a princess?

What if Rapunzel didn’t WANT to leave the tower with the prince/guy and he had to kidnap her and the story is her trying to get back to her tower instead of trying to escape it?

I don’t want to use an “evil witch” in my version of Rapunzel – so who is it that has locked her away from the world? I was thinking her father or the King at first, but than that doesn’t set well with me. Who would have reason to lock her up and why?

I thought about this too: what if it was a sci-fi or something of that sort, and she wasn’t a princess locked in a tower, but rather a political figure/spy/alien/etc locked in government prison or something to that effect?
I like mermaids and I do a lot of writing about them, so I was wondering, how about a Rapunzel under the sea type of thing?

Or what if she was locked away in the tower so long that now she deranged and ready to kill any one who crosses her path? – sort of an 80’s slasher movie thing or something, I don’t know.

Those are just a few things I’m tossing around at the moment, but so far nothing is really jumping out at me yet. I keep thinking I’ve got something here with this Rapunzel thing, but I just can’t find the right way to present the plot. Basically my plot such as it is now is:

Damsel in distress, locked away for years in complete isolation by the villain, and needs rescuing.
Not much is it?

So I guess what I want to know is: any one got any ideas on which direction I should take this and how to flesh it out? I’d love to hear any thoughts you had on this.

I had an idea for this story, but I’m not sure how plausible it is, you know, if it could happen or not, so thought I’d ask if any one knew the answer.

Okay, before the story takes place this happens: A teenage girl is abducted and gets pregnant. For whatever reason, she has no memory of the abduction and is unaware that she is pregnant. With-in the first few weeks or months, before she realizes that she is pregnant, she has a miscarriage, and so never finds out she was pregnant.

Okay, now moving on the my story and my question. Twenty or so years later, say she’s now in her 40’s, still single and never had any children, but now she’s having vivid dreams of having been pregnant and having a miscarriage – so vivid that she begins to wonder if these are more than just dreams, but actual memories. So she goes to a doctor and asks if a test can be down that will tell her if she was ever pregnant.

Okay, so you can tell it’s sort of a supernatural, spooky, (maybe even horror? – what am I saying – since when did I write something that WASN’T horror?) story about a woman haunted by the ghost of her long dead baby. Here’s my question:

I want her to go to the doctor and the doctor runs a test and tells her: Yes, 20 years ago you were pregnant and this test proves it. But here in lays my problem, I can’t find any information on wither or not there really is a test that could tell a woman that.

Is there such a test that could tell an otherwise childless woman, wither or not she was pregnant 20 years ago, even though she never knew it because of a miscarriage before it occurred to her to think she could be pregnant? If there is such a test, what is it called and how does it go about determining if she had been pregnant years ago? I’ve been Googleing all morning and have not found anything about such a thing yet.

I realize, in a book, I can make up such a test to meet the needs of the story, but I’d really like to be accurate and use a real test if such a thing really does exist. Has any one here ever heard of such a thing?

I just started looking up about miscarriage and was just reading some pretty awful horror stories these women had to say about what happened to them, even early on. Most are saying how bad it hurt physically, and than emotionally (for years afterwards). Some of the stuff is pretty hard to read – which is what I specialize in writing – stuff people have a hard time swallowing, so yeah, this is right up my alley of graphic “repulse the hell out of my readers” type of thing folks have come to expect to see me write.

This is still in the planning stage, and will probably be the plot I use for NaNo09, so I’m not sure yet what exactly I’m going to write. I’m still trying to figure out why or how she’d forget about the abduction too. Amnesia or something, I guess, post traumatic shock, maybe? Abducted by aliens – there’s a possability. Still working on that. I’ll figure it out sooner or later. I’ve got three months to figure it out.

I’m thinking of it being like Rapunzel sort of, in that she’d held captive for a long time, but than when she escapes she just black out everything that happened, and than years later, she starts reliving it, only she doesn’t know it it’s real or just dreams, but she keeps remembering this baby and it causes her to go back and try to find out what happened to her.

I don’t know, maybe, she doesn’t have a miscarriage, maybe she was held captive until the baby was born, and it’s still alive and somehow they have a psychic connection that causes the dreams? Baby torn brutally from her womb just a few weeks before birth – that’d certainly traumatize her into amnesia. I’m still exploring the possabilities of where I want to go with this. In any case I want it to be a highly emotional story, in the same graphic brutal, bloody older man tortures younger girl, villains always win, heroes always die horribly story that pretty much is the only thing I ever write about. Rage at the injustice of it and shock the hell out of the holier than thous who would turn a blind eye to the harse reality that life is hell. I can see this going very Love, Lust, Maddness on a more toned down not quite so graphic more R-rated and therefor publishable scale.

At some point she has to find out she was pregnant, because than she has to start asking herself questions about: “What happened to my baby and why don’t I remember being pregnant and who did this to me and why?”, so that she will head off and find out what happened, and most likely get killed in the process – you know me, no female has ever made to the end of one of my TM books alive. So, right now I’m working on figuring out how she finds out about the forgotten pregnancy from her past and why she forgot about it to being with.

I don’t know yet who would do this to her or why, still working on that too. I got a lot of planning to do before November rolls around!

And yes, for those who thought they recognized the plot, this is me once again writing a new version of the 1993 edtion of Friends are Forever from The Twighlight Manor series. Same basic underlining story, just taking it into a differant direction. Not sure if this is heading to be a new segment of the Twighlight Manor series or not, as I’ve only got a fragmented plot at the moment and no characters picked out yet. It’s doubtful that it’ll be any less M rated than any of my other TM and TM type stories, as it’s certainly headed towards a violent plot already and I haven’t even got the full plot thought out yet. No idea yet if Etiole will end up in this one, if he does it’ll probablly go the same X rated road Love, Lust, Maddness did. But than I did throw in that thought about mermaid version of Rapunzel didn’t I? Hhhm. . . yep, I can see Etiole sneaking into this one, just like he did with The Pearl Necklace (which is nearing it’s final stages of editing – I promise – you will see The Pearl Necklace published soon. . . I’m pretty much just debating on traditional verses self-publishing it at this point.)

What’s your take on this? I’d love to hear what you have to say about this post. Leave a comment and share your views!

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If you liked reading this blog and want to read more stuff written by me, I have lots of websites, where you can read other things I write, here are a few of the ones I like the best:
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