I didn’t know what picture to put in this blog, so I went with this dude. These are photographs I took a few weeks ago of a ghost magpie. They aren’t great but in my defense the magpie didn’t stick around long enough for me to get any awesome angles LoL Though these leucistic magpies have been spotted all over, Edmonton seems to have the largest concentration of them, and some people call it the “capital of the world” for ghost magpies. I love them. I love corvids of all types, of course, but these imperfect albino magpies are so beautiful… Also, because they are much more rare than their ‘normal’ brethren, it always, always, always makes me incredibly happy to see one. You feel… privileged. It’s almost like rarity adds value or something 😉

Anyway, I love them so much that I’ve been stalking them with my camera for a couple years now (and only have these two photographs to show for it so far — they seem a bit camera shy), and I even wrote one into the YA horror novel I’m working on, Hollow. And *that* is the connection between these photographs and this blog post, because this blog post is about three things I write and three things I don’t 🙂

Cory Cone tagged me in this blog hop and promised to be patient if I took a wee bit longer than I should to participate. Since Cory made his post back in May and I’m just doing mine now, I would say he’s been more than patient! I met Cory through Niteblade, when he sent me one of my favourite zombie stories ever, Compassion, During and After the Fall. Cory is also contributing to both A is for Apocalypse and B is for Broken and his work has been published in plenty of other places too. Because he’s awesome.

Anyway, Cory tagged me in this hop so I’m supposed to talk about three things I do write, and three things I don’t.

Three Things I Don’t Write:

I’m struggling with this one. I really am. I write a lot of things across all sorts of genres and styles… I was going to say ‘I don’t write mysteries’ but I do, I just wrap them up in a fantasy setting first. Or ‘I don’t write MG’ but I used to… and still do on occasion to give as gifts to nieces and nephews… Tricky!

I don’t write… oh my gawd. This is really *hard*!

I was going to say I don’t write 2nd person point of view, but then I remembered the website I made on Geocities way back when that was a choose your own adventure page “You find yourself in a giant library…” and so I couldn’t go with that. Then I was going to talk about how I don’t write the kind of fiction my daughter likes to read but even though it wasn’t meant to, that just sounded all self-pitying… so… what don’t I write?

Uh… I’m going to come back to this.

Three Things I Write:

I write poetry.

I write a fair amount of poetry, actually. And I’ve been paid more for and received far more recognition for my poetry than I have my prose, and yet I still don’t have the confidence to call myself a poet or to talk about my poetry in the same way as I do my prose. It’s because poetry is intimidating, dudes (I wrote a guest column about that a couple years ago). It’s scary. Scary in a way prose just isn’t. I don’t write super deep poems, and maybe that’s part of it, and (don’t tell anyone but) sometimes when I read poetry that other people love, it totally goes over my head. So maybe that’s the thing, it’s so much more subjective than prose? I don’t know…

And that has turned into a bit of a ramble, but the point is, I write poems. I’ve had a lot of them published (I think my zombie poems might be the most popular ones) and even had two nominated for awards. So there’s that.

I’ll even share one here. I submitted this one to one market and they said they’d publish it… except that they were closing their doors >_< Sadly, I haven’t been able to find another suitable place to send it, so I’ll post it here instead 🙂

Eowyn
She enjoys her petty power
clings to it tooth and claw,
terrified of what she’d be without it.

A wall of pride protects
her soft heart, deep insecurities,
camouflages her unique flavour of crazy.

My cat. Myself.

I Write Fantasy (Mostly Dark)

This covers the bulk of what I write. Even most of my poems fall into the fantasy genre. Usually my work is on the dark side of the spectrum, but still fantasy. It’s tough, sometimes, to figure out where the line between dark fantasy and horror is and I suspect some of my stuff straddles that line while other stories stomp on it. I seem to especially love giving sentience to things that usually lack it. Fun!

I Write Horror (Including Zombies)

I don’t seem to write the sort of straight-up horror I grew up on (I wrote a book report on Stephen King’s book Christine when I was in grade three. Have I mentioned that my mother never censored what I read? LOL) but as I said above, a lot of my work falls on the dark side of the speculative spectrum (heh, spec spec) and some slips over the line between fantasy and horror. It’s not goretastic horror though. I enjoy reading that from time to time, but I don’t seem to write it much. Even when I’m dealing with zombies there isn’t very many entrails spilling from guts like slippery eels or blood spurting fountain-like from severed limbs. Sometimes… but not much.

Which, I suppose, I ought to have put under

 

Three Things I Don’t Write:

I Don’t Write A Lot Of Gore

Now, I may have to re-read my shelved zombie novel, Deadmonton (set, you guessed it, in Edmonton. Because I’m just that clever :-p) to be sure I’m not lying here… but I don’t write a whole lot of gore. I’m not averse to reading or watching it but it’s not something that makes its way into my work very often. It’s not a conscious decision, it’s just kind of how things have worked out.

I Don’t Write Science Fiction

I often feel like this is a bit of a waste, really. After all, I’m married to a freaking scientist, but I don’t write science fiction. What’s up with that? Somewhat like the poetry thing, I think I find writing science fiction intimidating. The details are SO important, and if you’re going to use real science there’s no real room for error. It’s kinda scary… So that’s probably the biggest reason I don’t write it… though I also doing think I have many sci-fi ideas, really. If I did have a fantastic story to tell that could best be told as science fiction I’d like to think I’d be brave enough to give it a shot, but so far that situation hasn’t come up.

I Don’t Write Book Reviews

I know, this one is a bit of a cop-out, but I’m going with it anyway. I don’t write book reviews. Not really. I’ve tried in the past and it’s just not a skill I have. On the surface it’s like, “C’mon, how hard can it be? You say what the book is about and then what you thought of it.” but really it’s much more complex than that. I’m not very good at it. So though on Goodreads I will occasionally give my opinion of a book I’ve just finished, I wouldn’t ever really call myself a book reviewer. Because I’m not.

 

Yay! I found three things I don’t write and I managed to refrain from posting more than three things that I do. I’m going to call that a victory 🙂

Now, to end this blog hop I get to tag some more people to participate. All my tagees (which should totally be a word) volunteered for this when I put a call out on Twitter 🙂

First up is Doug Blakeslee who wasn’t sure exactly what he was getting himself into, but was a good enough sport to volunteer anyway 😉

The lovely Ms. Alexis A. Hunter also said she’d participate. I met Alexis through Niteblade as well, when she sent us a great apocalyptic story. Later she came on staff as a slush reader (and a great one at that!) and we became friends through that and social media.

I met Warren C. Bennett on Twitter, where he has shown himself to be clever, friendly and a huge fan of tacos. What more could you possibly want?

Last, but certainly not least (and possibly ironically since she was the first to volunteer), Stephanie Faris has offered to participate in this blog hop. I met Stephanie during this years Blogging From A to Z Challenge and found her to be one of the most amazing people and bloggers. She’s the kind of blogger who even though she gets dozens of comments on every one of her posts still finds time to visit her commenter’s blogs and leave intelligent, insightful comments. My hat’s off…

Do be sure to check out their blogs over the coming weeks as they’ll each be writing about Three Things They Write and Three Things They Don’t. (Why did I capitalize those words? And perhaps more importantly, why am I writing this out rather than just going back and un-capitalizing them? #ThingsThatMakeYouGoHmm )