Strange Fangs is Up and Running, Chapters 1 and 2

Today I received word from JukePop that my serial vampire novel, Strange Fangs, is up at the website. 

You can find it here:

http://www.jukepop.com/home/read/2058

To read what's on the site, you need to complete registration. It's free and gives you the chance to read lots of new fiction by new authors. You can leave comments and support your favorites both with +votes and monetarily if you so choose.

As it is, my story will be up for the next month. On April first, the NaNoWriMo contest that Strange Fangs is a part of ends. With that ending, the writers of the top 3 stories (judged by number of votes alone) get cash prizes.

Being that most writers on the site participating in this thing have had their stories up since January and the top three voting scores are in the triple digits, I am unlikely to win this specific contest. Hopefully, after the contest, JukePop will continue to publish my work and it will gain enough popularity to really mean something.

We'll see.

We're still a bit shaken up about the crazy stuff going on in my mom's neck of the woods. We're all saying our prayers and hoping for the best.

It's all I can think of to do.

Fire and Numbness, Non-fatal

Right now, I have this strange empty feeling, combined with odd tingling down my neck. It isn't unfamiliar, but I haven't felt it in a while. This is the same feeling I used to get as a kid when my parents would fight, but there's something new here. A slight state of shock. My parents fights never came out of nowhere-- it was always building up like summer humidity before a Texas thunderstorm. Afterward, everything would be cool and dry, the tension released. But this isn't like that at all.

Because this came out of nowhere. A day better than the one before. A day in which I talked to the people I was scheduled to talk to, washed the dishes, folded the laundry, and had a little free time. A day in which I already knew what I was going to make for dinner.

And it's not the end of the world. No one died. There's just a threat. Some sad excuse for human waste has violated my mother's property, broken into the yard of a home I was living at only a few weeks ago, and literally set fire to the deck where we shared my wedding rehearsal.

This happened late in the evening. Luckily none of the animals were injured and a neighbor came to wake my mother who, with the assistance of her beau, tended to the matter and had the fire nearly out before the firefighters arrived. It was contained to the deck and there was no damage to the house. There will be an arson investigation and I hope to any and every higher power listening that they catch this disgrace and justice can be served. Mind you, justice in my mind has me waiting in the backyard of my mother's home with a shotgun at 2AM, begging the sad sack to emerge.

That said, my brand of justice is also an impossibility. I cannot afford another airline ticket, especially any time soon. I cannot put my family through the strain of watching me fly off with the baby again so soon. Likewise, I don't feel right about staying put and doing nothing when it feels like the home where I spent the most sustained years of childhood is under attack.

So I am at a loss. I can't stay and I can't go. The only path I can take at the moment is feeding my baby and making dinner. After that, Monty Python. Maybe by then the problem solving parts of my mind will have shown their usefulness.

Progress on Strange Fangs and a List of Awesome Things I Did in Texas

Yesterday, I finished editing the first chapter of my vampire novel, here named Strange Fangs, and resubmitted the cover, which was redone by my good friend Nate Sherwin, so it looks a lot closer to professional than it did. Now we wait on Jukepop Serials to OK it for publication. Then we'll see where this goes.


Also, further notes on my Texas trip follow.

• I spent one day on the campus of my alma mater, TCU, seeing my favorite professors and chatting at them despite awful jet-lag. 
• The next day, there was a party that I was abhorrently late to, but hopefully my friends will forgive me. 
• The day after that was a massive trip to the Fort Worth Zoo, which was spectacular despite the weather. I should have planned better for time so that my father and my friend's four year old son would not have been soexhausted by the time we could finally leave. That night, I had the privileged of seeing Fort Worth's Stage West Theater's production of Avenue Q which was amazing and hysterical.
• The day after that was Sunday, which held the Super Bowl and a huge ice storm, so my parents and I grabbed supplies from a nearby grocery store and stayed inside all evening, enjoying barbecue and a warm fire. We were not so much enjoying the game, as it was a blow out and not at the hands of the Dallas Cowboys. I guess any game that started off with a safety within the first few plays can't end in too much of a surprise.
• Then came Monday, which held a trip to the stockyards for one of my dearest friends, Courtney Goode, and me. We wound up having amazing beer and ground sirloin nachos at the White Elephant. When I bought a t-shirt afterward, the awesome barman became the first person to sell me a t-shirt while suggesting a larger size and not offending me. Since the only other place that has happened is Tokyo, I suppose this isn't too surprising, but for me it was wonderful.
• Tuesday was our family outing to the Fort Worth Stock Show and Rodeo, where we wound up with free tickets to the rodeo, which we enjoyed immensely. 
• Wednesday ended with me having a large family dinner with the Ceron family, which was terribly enjoyable.

Thursday, I left Texas on a severely delayed plane, and the rest was explained in a previous post.

Now, some of these things were perfectly planned and some were not. As I travel, I tend to dwell on the plans in play to make sure that I don't waste all of my time at my destination. That said, with this trip in particular, I found that having some time off with nothing in particular planned really benefited me. Saturday, for instance, I had lunch at Jason's Deli with three of my very best friends. This was planned all of maybe an hour before it occurred, but it was necessary and awesome all the same.

So it is of key importance, I have found, to allow some down time during any vacation or indeed ever to simply be and breathe in your surroundings. The most interesting adventures we have are often those we did not count on having.

Now, I need to engage in present distribution and the general reorganization of things.

Thanks so much for reading.

The Kindness of Strangers and What to Call my Vampire Novel....?

Before I write a recap of my fantastic trip back to the states, I want to take a minute to share something I wouldn't have believed if I hadn't been there.

This starts with missed flight, which was caused by a several-hour delay stateside waiting for maintenance checks and de-icing. When I finally got out of customs in Japan, I had a total of less than half an hour to get my insanely heavy luggage onto the connecting bus, to the next terminal, off of the bus, and to the gate. I stopped and an information kiosk to try to find a better way but the language barrier was too much for the poor girl at the desk, who wasted 5 minutes of my precious time to tell me to just go take the bus I already knew I needed to take. Even after seeing the lack of time, she didn't think to call the gate and I felt so defeated by her lack of understanding that I was reluctant to demand it in any language. So I went out to meet the bus and a young man behind me offered to help with my luggage, which of course I appreciated.

For this return trip, I had two checked bags, each weighing more than 40 pounds. I'm not used to carrying anything that heavy and have to make this journey with a baby strapped to my chest while also carrying a computer bag, diaper bag, and extra souvenir bag. The last three were stack-able and roll-able so it wasn't as bad as it could have been, but moving that much heavy luggage was definitely a struggle.

So I get to the ANA desk area just as the lights dim. It's been five minutes since my flight to Sendai took off. Luckily my husband already knows of my predicament and is already driving to a bullet-train stop roughly halfway between Sendai and Tokyo. I decide to go ahead and get a Skyliner train tocket to Ueno station in Tokyo, from which I can easily board the bullet train. I consider briefly whether or not I should ship my bags but realize after I've bought my ticket that there is no time. If I am to make that train, I don't have an extra 15 minutes to fill out paperwork and pay to ship this stuff. I decide to take the elevator down to the basement level so that I can do what I can to get my heavy crap onto the train, only to find that the elevator doesn't go down that far, probably to stop people like me from trying to bring luggage carts onto the train. Once I figure this out, I run to the escalator where a woman insists I return to the elevator and take it down to the train departure level. As I insist that this is not possible, two foreign men appear and offer to help me move my bags on to the train. The one of them with English skills explains that I should really have sent my luggage back, which I could have done if I hadn't bought my tickets for the train so early. I no longer had time to do so, so the men helped me move my bags onto the train and left.

Then at Ueno a woman in her forties or so helped wheel my bag while I wore my duffle bag as an extremely heavy backpack on the walk from Keisei Ueno station to the other Ueno Station where I could buy a ticket for the bullet train and get on it.

While on the train, two younger ladies helped me stow my luggage and a conductor-type guy found me a seat.

About an hour later, I was departing the train and another woman helped me wheel the same bag down to there my husband was waiting.

Just two hours later, we were finally home, where we spent the next day sleeping and coming to the slow realization that I somehow came down the with flu.

Now we're all better and I am finally cracking open the mystery that is Jukepop Serials. The first chapter of the vampire novel should be online within a week. My problem now is that I need to find a better title than "The Vampire Novel" and finish editing the first chapter to something really readable. Also, some other details through the narrative need to change, just for the sake of becoming manageable.