…and found this link which made my day in laughter. It’s  by travel writer Matt Gibson, and it’s on the dangers of picking a foreign language name when you don’t… quite… get the associated content of said name.

Though I must defend one of the names, Cash, as something that I have used for a character in a novel. But in my book, it’s the nickname of someone who’s real name is Cassius (a Latin name pronounced CASH-us (or CASS-ee-us in old, old Latin, but most people use the medieval Latin pronunciation now)), not a name in it’s own right. And if my name was Cassius, I might shorten it, too.

Otherwise… I’m finally at work on my epic fantasy of Heaven and Hell whose name I’m not telling the general public because I’m so dern excited about it. (I usually am lukewarm on my titles, but this one was so obvious and perfect… and I keep checking Amazon because I’m frankly shocked that it’s not already the title of a book.) Anywho, I was having a rough time because in the story there’s this initial brouhaha that happens… and then there’s a loooong time where stuff happens which is important, but the enormity of the stakes aren’t yet evident. And as any writer knows, stakes are key. But, thanks to my spate of fantasy reading, I’ve figured it out. Multiple plot threads. Der… I’ve been reading too many urban fantasies and romances where the plot necessarily centers on one or two people, and really, that’s not gonna work for this story. So now I have the plot line that’s going on in Heaven (the original one) and the plot line that’s going on in Hell (the new one that’s got very obvious stakes)… and eventually they are going to come together at the magical twisty moment in which the intensity of the stakes for all concerned get ratcheted up to epic.

I think I’d been worried that I wasn’t capable of balancing multiple plot lines (I almost wrote plot loins… I must be in RWA), but now that I’ve accepted the challenge, it’s really exciting and words are just flowing onto each new blank page. I’ve found that I need to work on one story and then open a new document and write another one, and then I’ll start putting them together. But I LOVE characters. I love their diversity and their strengths and weaknesses. I love bad guys with bits of good and good guys who fail. I love how viewpoint often determines who’s the hero and who’s the villain. And in a story about betrayal and forgiveness, having multiple viewpoints is exactly what I needed to add facets and shadings to questions of what is good and what is evil.

So… I’ve started on a blurb already, and here it is (and, OK, nobody reads my blog, so I’ll include the title):

The Judas Club is an epic fantasy of Heaven and Hell where angels, demons, the damned and the blessed struggle for identity and meaning after the worths of their souls have been judged – and the story of the Black Angels who straddle both worlds, braving Hell to offer the lost a second chance at salvation. (Here I need to figure out how to sum up in one or two sentences what the main characters’ GMCs (goal/motivation/conflicts) are (and there’re six of them – two Black Angels, a soul in Heaven, a soul in Hell, a demon and an angel). I’ll likely have to pick a couple and leave out the rest.) Until Jeshua of Bethlehem brings them all together to once again turn the establishment on its head – and dare the most dangerous rescue mission in the history of Heaven or Hell.

Wanna read it? I know I want to write it! It’s my fourth novel, and I’m drafting it now!!

The Way of Shadows by Brent Weeks

And I mean LOST. If you like urban fantasy or you’re willing to try fantasy but you’re not big on monsters or you just really want something to completely suck all of your time and existence for about a week, you really need to read Brent Weeks’ The Way of Shadows. It came out about a year and a half ago, and I just read it on the rec of one of my ex-students and wow. SO good. The only problem with it, is that it’s 688 pages.

And it’s the first book in a trilogy.

And you won’t want to stop after the first one.

So I’m almost done with book 2 Shadow’s Edge (which is also well over 600 pages and I started last night immediately after turning the last page of TWoS and will finish before I go to sleep tonight and, I’m sure, start book 3), and I’m shocked I got my nose out of the book long enough to write this. It has one of the COOLEST protagonists I’ve read in a looooong time. I am completely lusting over Kylar Stern, and this isn’t even vaguely a romance novel – it’s a fantasy about assassins in a fictional world called Midcyru and awar that is raged between a mafia run country and the invading barbarians from the north with their goddess of death. So wicked awesome (and does at times require a pretty strong stomach).

This book has also made me think about a lot of writing type things and what is Weeks doing so right.

This book is a great study in the power of secondary characters. If I had one issue with this book it’s that I wish I’d written down a list of characters as I encountered them because omg there’s like five million. And I should have crossed them off as they die (which would be most of the list, but you know, that’s apparently the way of fantasy now… Thank George!).

But from a writing perspective, he’s done a great job of giving them the work of making this gritty world real – so that even when our assassin hero does crappy things, he is still a hero compared to the rest of the world. And I can’t BELIEVE how much I let the main character get away with… and I still, as I’ve mentioned, love him. He’s a freaking assassin, for crying out loud. I have never in my life thought that was a profession I’d get behind, even fictionally.

But the secondary characters can do… anything. They can be depressingly hopeless… and teach the hero a lesson. They can make the completely wrong decision… and then when the hero goes with them out of love or loyalty, it’s no longer the protagonist’s fault for being too stupid to live, it’s his strength for being so connected. They are so useful to a writer. I need to think and concentrate on that. I guess in my writing world we’re so encouraged to have the hero and/or heroine on every page that it’s hard to give secondaries their glory.  But dang, Weeks does it. And I’m always excited to see the protagonist again… but I’m not sorry when I’m involved with somebody else, like I so often am in other books.

I’ve rarely read a book with so dern many well fleshed out, fascinating secondary characters. Like, I need a map with all of them sometimes, but once I remember which one this guy is again, it’s awesome.

So… if you have a reasonably strong stomach, read this book!

Finished the rough draft of my 3rd novel on Friday; I’m really excited about that. I have 2 novels complete, including edits, 3 in various drafting stages, and now 1 with a rough completed. I’ll need to sit on it awhile before I can look at it with a fresh eye and be anything resembling useful at editing, but it’s a major step to have written that awesome The End.

Now it’s on to a short story that I started awhile back think I can finish pretty quickly. This one I think I’ll actually try submitting around to see how it goes…

It was a weeding the yard sort of day; not very exciting, but quite productive. Eventually I’m going to have a house with curb appeal, and that’ll be sweet. Now if I can just make myself vacuum on a regular basis.

Have you been watching Alex Reads Twilight? If not, here’s the first one, but if you want a good laugh you should check ‘em all out. He’s done through chapter 13 and they’re pretty much a riot.

We do things differently where I come from, but this is the second time now I’ve attended a Catholic funeral in New Jersey for my husband’s family. This time was worse than the first because it was for my husband’s 34-year-old cousin. He was a great guy. Always made me feel welcome. He will be greatly greatly missed.

But in Jersey (maybe it’s a Catholic thing? Or a… I don’t know some people who aren’t my family thing?) they do this thing where there’s a viewing, and the family goes and hangs out at it and greets people. This viewing was seven. hours. long. Maybe my generation just can’t admit that we’re dying, but time and time again, there I’d be casually conversing with my husband’s relatives. We’d be talking about vacations or, I don’t know, something mundane, and I’d get into the conversation, then I’d happen to look up, and I’d see… it (no offense Chris, but if there’s anything open caskets have taught me, it’s that that is not you lying there)… and I’d remember that I was laughing and there’s a corpse in the room not fifteen feet away from me. And it’s weird and suddenly I’m so sad. And it would happen again and again and again. For seven hours.

To me, saying good-bye to a body is a private thing. I don’t want witnesses. I don’t want semi-raucous crowds and that guy discussing the craptastic season the Mets are having behind me. I don’t want baseball scores. I want a moment to remind myself that I can’t go to this face for this person anymore, that he is somewhere else. And then I want to leave quickly to better remember him the way he was when I last saw him alive, laughing with me and Scott and Ernie as we failed to skip rocks across a river.  That’s Chris. Not this… this inanimate thing surrounded by nine-million crucifixes that also scream of death and the suffering of the world.

I know everybody deals with death differently, and some of the family seemed heartened by it – certainly, it was wonderful to see the extraordinary number of people that came to honor my cousin. Then again, there was my husband who I think wanted to crawl into a hole and hide, and there was his other cousins that pretty much did just that – we found them downstairs hanging out by the bathrooms just to get out of the room for the majority of the seven. hours.

But it’s over. We did it. Made it through the wake/viewing, the funeral, and the post-funeral lunch (that was much more what I’m used to – everybody gathering at a home or restaurant to eat together without, you know, a dead body in the room with you).  In addition, I met several of Scott’s relatives that I really liked. My husband has a wonderful family.

I wish them all – Honey, Ernie, Greg, Tom, Howie, the Cippolanos, the Hinsons, and all the rest – some sort of peace with the garish hole Chris’ much-too-early exit has caused. And I wish Chris a great time “living” it up wherever he is now. If there’s any justice in the universe, it’s some place amazing.