I’m tired. Really, really tired. I just finished revising REDEMPTION. I have numerous commitments looming, National around the corner and another book to turn in by July 15th. I have only the rough draft complete. I have 6 contest entries to judge and turn in by August 6th. I have writer friends who need a little help from me right now.
I spent the day in Monterey yesterday and came home to over 200 emails, most of them personal, and needing attention. My youngest daughter got engaged earlier this week and just thinking about wedding plans and venues and, dear lord the expense has my cringing. Then there is my business.

I feel like I am being pulled in twelve different directions and am having difficulty prioritizing.

I know what I need to do. I need to write it all down, prioritize, then tackle each item one at a time. But I want to sleep for two days first. Can I make that my priority? Recently there has been a lot of talk on a few loops about writers and depression. While I’ve never suffered from depression I do get these jags of feeling completely overwhelmed. I deal with it, because I know if I don’t things will only get worse. And I have to admit, I work so much better under pressure. My efficiency rating skyrockets.

But still…I’d like to disappear for a few days. Whah, but I can’t! But I wanna…
Okay, so sorry for the whine, but I know we all feel like this at times. And I have probably asked this before, but what do you do when you feel the weight of the world on your shoulders and know you must forge onward?

Now, on a much lighter note, I wanted to let you all know a good friend of mine, Virna DePaul, a criminal prosecutor, will be guest blogging over at my place Monday. www.karintabke.com then click on the blog link.

Here’s a little bit about Virna, and she will be answering questions.

Virna has been a criminal appellate prosecutor with the California Attorney General’s Office since 1996. Before that, she spent a year in the trenches handling misdemeanor trials as a Deputy District Attorney. Her first romantic suspense manuscript, Trial By Fire, placed second in the 2007 Smokey Mountain Laurie’s single title category (w/a Nina Meyers) and landed Virna her dream agent, Kimberly Whalen. Virna’s current wip explores repressed memories, sexual fetishes, and crimes of passion. She juggles her job and pursuit of publication with the support of many friends and the four men in her life (ages 2 to 38). www.virnadepaul.com

Wow, what a busy lady! Stop by Monday and say hello. I’ve already read her blog and it’s fascinating and informative.

Virna will also be giving away a $10 Borders card to a lucky commenter.

And ps, thanks for letting me dump a little today.

K*

First, I wanted to tell Deb that yes–I do think that other forces are at work sometimes! I have already ordered MORBID CURIOSITY because I am totally hooked by the premise. I’ve been doing some research on similar subjects. Kids today sometimes don’t realize what they’re getting into. The occult is dangerous, perhaps even more dangerous than online predators which right now are a huge threat to young people, emotionally or physically. You can’t “undo” the damage when a kid gets a sicko emailing them porn, or when a kid starts playing around with black magic. The experience will definitely impact their entire lives.

Okay, short stories. I wrote a few months back about how hard it was for me to write the short story for the Killer Year anthology I’m in. It’s 5,900 words and getting a full, complete story out in such a short amount of time was frustrating, but at the same time freeing–I did it, and I can do it again.

One of the problems was that I had too many characters. I was trying to take one of my traditional ideas and condensing it, and that simply doesn’t work. You need a complete story, with a beginning, middle and end, but it’s not a novel, or even a novella. It’s a snapshot of a single pivotal moment in a person’s life.

Stephen King is the master of short fiction. He said in his book ON WRITING that the “art of the short story” was lost, or we were on the verge of losing it. Maybe for others, but certainly not for him.

THE SHAWSHANK REDEMPTION is one of my all-time favorite movies, and one of my all-time favorite short stories. The adaption was so wonderful, and it’s a testament to King’s brilliance with depth of character, emotion, and a sparing use of words that a short story can be converted into a full-length two hour movie without filler. If you haven’t seen it, watch it. If you haven’t read it, pick it up. Like ONE FLEW OVER THE CUCKOO’S NEXT, TSR is told from the point of view of a secondary character who is changed by the actions/beliefs/values of an individual who comes into the “prison,” someone who shouldn’t be there.

Last night I saw 1408 and once again, was impressed with the adaption. It was true Stephen King, without the insanity of Hollywood. Hollywood has screwed up so many adaptions that I’m always leery, but this one hit all the right cords. It was of the caliber of TSR, but that story is (or should be) a classic that will transcend time, like CATCHER IN THE RYE or TO KILL A MOCKINGBIRD. 1408 is what it is: the salvation of one man.

Stephen King has always written compelling characters, flawed, not always lifed, but always real. Mike Enslin writes about haunted places, but he doesn’t believe in ghosts. Until he stays in room 1408.

Fabulous hook, fabulous premise. And frankly, I wasn’t sure John Cusack could pull off the role, but he was fantastic. Much of King’s work are “one-man shows”, where there may be minor secondary characters (often catalysts for change, mentors, or tricksters) but the story is about one man’s journey. Sometimes he is redeemed. Sometimes he’s not.

1408 is scary. My daughters wanted to see it and it’s PG-13. I didn’t have a problem taking them because we often watch scary shows, they love SUPERNATURAL, etc. But my 11 year old woke up with a nightmare and couldn’t get back to sleep for awhile, and I ended up putting a nightlight in their room. So go to it with that in mind.

But if you can handle scary, see it. It’s more psychologically scary than anything else: 1408 is “an evil room,” but it’s a devilishly fabulous story.

My sister is married to a preacher. He’s a nice enough guy, pretty down to earth, and has a fairly large and growing congregation. Their faith is a mixture of Baptist and Assembly of God. In other words, as some folks around my parts would say, they’re Holy-Rollers with a governor on the engine.

Anyway, due to the steady influence of ‘church folks,’ surrounding her, Sis has a tendency to blame every occurrence in life on either the devil or God. I keep trying to remind her that when she was a teen, she was the devil, but that sorta goes in one of her ears and out the other. That being said, though, the subject came up again when I was completing my last book, MORBID CURIOSITY.

I basically went through hell writing that book. Although I had the subject down pat, the outline in prime order, the characters clearly envisioned, every time I sat down to write it, something in my life would turn upside down and pull me away from the computer. And I’m not talking little annoyances, but major, life-altering crap. Although I did finish the manuscript, it was seriously late and got lost twice by Fed Ex when I attempted to send it to my agent, which delayed it even more. I finally had to send the manuscript through email to my editor. He received it all right—along with a virus that infected his computer.

Even weirder, when I gave a copy of the manuscript to the artist who draws scenes from my books for the literacy challenge, the guy damn near didn’t do the job. The way the process works is he’ll read the book, then we discuss what scenes I’d like drawn. That always worked well, until this book He must have called me forty times while reading the manuscript to say, “Deborah, I don’t know what you tapped into here, but it’s freaking me out. I can draw a scene about ‘this’ or ‘that’, but CAN’T draw one with that ‘thing’ in it because it feels too real.”

Well, while all this is going on, my sister calls, and I relay the events to her. She, of course, spent the next hour telling me that the weird events could be God’s way of telling me to use my talents for ‘Him’ instead of ‘wasting’ it on the weird stuff I do write. As usual, I rolled my eyes, set the phone on my shoulder, and did other stuff while she blabbered on. It was my fault. I should’ve known better than to tell her about the ‘strange’ things surrounding MC. But it did get me to thinking…

What if it wasn’t the Big Guy telling me not to write this stuff, but the horn-sprouting punk who lived wayyyy down south? You see, Morbid Curiosity revolves around a set of sixteen-year-old twin girls who get involved in Chaos Magic, something they know nothing about, think is the answer to all their problems, and it damn near kills them. The story is fiction, but Chaos is very real. It’s sort of a bastard-child and off-shoot of Aleister Crowley’s ‘work.’ Thousands of teens around the country ‘practice’ Chaos and wind up either seriously injuring themselves and others or dying. I happened upon this secret world by ‘accident’, while researching something completely different. I was so blown away by the number of kids practicing it and the extreme nature of the practice, I felt ‘compelled’ to write a story about it so the ‘truth’ about its dangers could be revealed.
So that’s exactly what I did, only the story damn near didn’t get told.

Could it be ‘someone’ or ‘something’ didn’t want that truth revealed?

Regardless, the deal’s done. The story’s out, and the book hits store shelves in a week. Funny thing is as soon as it hit the point of no return, i.e finally got to the printer, finally was sold to buyers, it’s like everything surrounding the book did a three-eighty. Preorder sales for the damn thing sky-rocketed, and I’ve had more interview requests regarding this book than I had for any other book I’ve written.

Kinda makes you wonder doesn’t it? Is the stuff we write only a product of our imagination or is our imagination really a conduit for something/someone bigger?

The sad case of missing Ohio woman Jessie Davis, played out the way many of the regulars here at MSWs thought it would. Her body was found about 25 miles from her home, in a remote national park. It was in an advanced stage of decomposition, which means she was most likely killed in her home, possibly in front of her young son.

Arrested and held on a $5 million dollar bond is her boyfriend, Bobby Cutts, Jr., a police officer. Also arrested and charged with obstruction of justice is an old high school friend of Cutts’s, Myisha Ferrell.

Authorities are still holding back many of the details, but it ended like most of these cases do. The boyfriend appears to be the suspect (I’ll say allegedly), and the motive, as of yet, is unknown, but likely involved money (my guess, she wanted support for the new baby).

The baby who was found on a doorstep, about 40 miles from Davis’s home, turned out to be a coincidence. If one can call an abandoned newborn a coincidence.

And now, I am left to explore this. How can a man brutally and callously kill a woman? Even worse, how can he kill a woman knowing she is due to give birth to HIS CHILD. Any day. That baby could have survived outside the womb, which means that Cutts is also facing charges for murdering the baby, as Ohio law allows.

Even more, that WOMAN is the mother of one of his LIVING children. A child that is now motherless, and basically–if he is found guilty–parentless, all because of his actions.

Apparently, Cutts does have a record of domestic violence, although details of that are sketchy at this point.

So what do you think motivated Cutts? Why did he kill Davis? Why did he callously disregard the lives of his own children?

The other day on the news I heard that a study had been done on the relationship between alcohol consumption and cases of Rheumatoid Arthritis. The conclusion? People who consume three or more drinks a day are less likely to get RA.

Umm. Hello? If I consumed three or more drinks a day, everyday…I wouldn’t CARE that I have RA! I’d be drunk enough to not FEEL the joint pain, and of course, I’d be dealing with a pickled liver.

Seriously—who dreams up this stuff?

People who want grant money, that’s who.

Sheesh. Over the years of coming downstairs in the morning, getting my coffee and turning on the news, I have heard so many randomly stupid studies—meaning either that they were pointless or that I could have answered the question with a simple ninety-cent phone call instead of the million dollar study, that I have decided I am missing the boat.

It’s time for me to get off my ever-growing duff (and yes, they’ve done a study—women do gain weight in middle age….grrrrr….no shit, Sherlock!)

So…I’m going to apply for a grant to do my own study! It sounds like easy money, right? But of course, I must come up with a burning question that society will pay to answer. I’ve given this some serious thought:

1) How do writers waste the most time? (Duh, whining and Internet.)
2) Whose idea was it to package PMS medicines in containers that are impossible to open? (MEN.)
3) Do kids really give their parents gray hair? (Do you KNOW how much I spend to cover my gray? I have three sons! I spend A LOT!)
4) Where does the missing sock in the dryer go? (Answer: Only women know.)
5) Why do we believe our kids won’t do what we did when we were kids? (Child birth obviously causes parental brain damage)

But here’s the REAL question: What is the REAL reason a person will slave for years writing book after book? It’s hard to write a book; to take an idea, develop it and follow it through until the end is (metaphorically) back-breaking, sweat-popping, headache-inducing, sleep-destroying work. Then to keep doing it over and over, for not all that much money, and people often end up criticizing the author instead of the book. Why? What makes us keep doing it over and over and over? We could be out there with REAL jobs, making money and contributing to society. But no…we choose to spend the bulk of our time with pretend people that we talk to as if they were real.

Is that even sane?

I don’t know, but I bet I could do a study to find out!

So if you could grab some of that grant money for yourself, what would you study?