reading – Page 8 – Noreen Lace

How Your Book Becomes a Finalist…

Published on June 28, 2019June 27, 2019 by Noreen LaceLeave a comment

As a writing community, I believe we need to help one another. There doesn’t need to be a competition or an unfriendly or unhealthy antagonism between us. We are people who share a love of the written word, a desire to share our stories.

When one of my writer friends introduced me to one of her writer friends, I was happy to join and jump in to help.

I had the honor of helping Dan Rhys bring The Lone Escapist to publication life.

When I heard he’d become a finalist in the Chanticleer Awards, I knew his book would be a great success.

It’s a detective, sort of mystery, sort of noir of old. I think Hitchcock would have loved it. The baser of our human needs and selves sometimes win out and cause us larger problems. Where exactly was Kelton when a school shooting took place in his very own classroom?

Wracked with guilt, he wants to find the shooter himself.

Released just this week – the writing is tight and the topic is contemporary – The Lone Escapist is available on kindle and in print. Audiobook to follow.

How do you get your book to become a finalist? to win an award? – Read Dan’s and find out!

Successful Writing

Published on June 21, 2019June 21, 2019 by Noreen LaceLeave a comment

Okay, so not bragging, but….. I’ve been hard at work….

The Healer’s Daughter in The Ear

The Healer’s Daughter is a departure for me. It marks a turns in my writing that came about just this year. It’s more mystical. Risky, maybe. A woman’s daughter describes her mother’s gift and discovers she has her very own gift, but will she actually use it?

The Healer’s Daughter will be featured in my summer release of How to Throw a Psychic a Surprise Party. It’s a book of short stories, all of which have a special or surprising twist.

Friends, Lovers, and Liars in Home Renovation

Originally titled Deception, it didn’t find a home. In fact, the topic of lies and cheating offended one editor. I think it may have hit too close to home. It, too, will be released in the summer release of How to Throw a Psychic a Surprise Party.

How to Throw a Psychic Surprise Party in The Electric Press Magazine

The title story for the book of short stories. Inspired by a show in which I saw a television host throw a “surprise” party for a psychic. It struck me – How do you throw a psychic a surprise party?

This story may answer that question. Maybe not. How much empathy can you muster?

Hunger and other poems as well as some photography in Voices of Eve

Not in the book of short stories. But well worth the read. Hunger is one of my favorite poems.

Also in the book of short stories –

The Crier: In a time when emotions are unheard of, people need a release.

The Mirror People: Ever wondered what’s inside the mirror? You know there’s something, right? Here’s a woman who collects them – she knows.

Bowie and the Basket Case: Anna’s things keep disappearing and reappearing. At first she thinks she’s misplaced them, but then she’s sure she hasn’t!

How to Throw a Psychic a Surprise Party is available for Pre-order!

Dad Shines

Published on June 16, 2019June 14, 2019 by Noreen Lace2 Comments

“‘Dad Shining’ is a terrible name for a story.,” said a certain someone.

I replied, “The Chicago Tribune must have liked it. They’re going to publish it.”

I worked on “Dad Shining” for some time, not quite knowing what the ending needed. Then it struck me:

We grow up not really understanding our parents or why they do the things they do. When we become adults, if our maturity doesn’t lend itself to that understanding then it should lead us to empathy.

We can’t possibly know our parents challenges in the same way we comprehend our own. Therefore, we must let things go, forgive, and move on. (Whatever that forgiveness means to you. Don’t be tortured by the past)

My father passed four years ago this month. The story “Dad Shining” was published two months before he passed. (For which, I’m happy.)

It’s not a story of my father, nor of me. But it is a story of a child coming to some sort of peace with himself and extending compassion to the father he never quite understood.

(A little trivia for you – the cover was taken in Virginia where Poe’s mother is buried)

Summer Writing Goals

Published on June 15, 2019June 14, 2019 by Noreen LaceLeave a comment

Throughout the year, I set and reset goals. I feel it’s a waste of time and energy to wait until the first of the year of the 6 month point. I set them when I feel the need.

Last June, I set a goal to write six short stories for the month. I completed four, finished the rough draft on the fifth, and started the sixth. Not bad. Two of those stories were accepted within the next thirty days and all of them have been published by this June.

This June, however, I feel I must set other goals. I have multiple projects going and have been too distracted and busy – finals, family, travel – to get anything significant work done on them; therefore, by the end of this week, I’ve decided to set new goals for my summer writing.

I’m not sure yet what those will be. I have a novel that needs rewriting, a novella that needs editing, and some other projects begun. I need to set a schedule – again – and to focus on one project or another.

I don’t find a problem with enough time, to focus on multiple projects, but when other areas of my life have infringed on my writing schedule I do find it difficult to focus on so many.

What are your summer writing goals?

Seeing Stories

Published on June 14, 2019June 13, 2019 by Noreen Lace2 Comments

A Writer’s Soul

Published on June 11, 2019June 9, 2019 by Noreen LaceLeave a comment

When I’m Not Writing

Published on June 8, 2019June 7, 2019 by Noreen LaceLeave a comment

Conjure images of the old David Banner/Incredible Hulk, “You won’t like me angry.” That’s the way I feel when I’m not writing. Not that I’m angry – I just feel, “you won’t like me when I’m not writing.”

When I’m not writing, I’m fidgety, distracted, and I don’t sleep well. There’s too much going on my head for me to relax.

Do other writers feel the same?

Presto, Chango, Story time….

Published on June 6, 2019June 3, 2019 by Noreen LaceLeave a comment

Ron Terranova wrote, “we writers are fortunate in that we can take a traumatic event and, presto, there’s grist for a story…”

True!

Traumatic or not – it’s got to come out.

Many writers share some commonality of a twisted sense of being.

Before you grab your pitchforks, people, let me explain.

Someone asked me quite recently if they would end up in one of my stories. I said, that’s not the way it works. I rarely pick up a whole person and plunk them into a story. It’s smaller than that. It’s the way they stand, their scent, the sideways slide of an eye. It’s an essence coupled with other impressions that becomes something in my novel.

Whether big or small, the event or person or tragedy goes in one way and will come out in a, sometimes, completely different form.

Ron was talking about my monkey bite, which many friends and family seemed to understand as more traumatic than I did or do. Not to downplay the incident, but life happens. Some people get into car accidents, I get bitten by a monkey.

In Alaska, at some strange and lonely crossroads, there was a reasonably nice hotel whose smallest rooms were rented regularly to truckers, and only the honeymoon suite remained available. The water came out boiling hot and we needed to wait for it to cool down unlike most places in the country where we need to wait for it to heat up. There stood a single but large restaurant, and a small video store run out of someone’s small home behind a gas station. Whom I was with and what we were doing there became lost in the haunting images of a lost crossroads; those images remained and found their way into West End when the heroine escapes her madness into this sort of waiting room between life and death.

Twisted.

Writing Out the Darkness

Published on June 5, 2019June 3, 2019 by Noreen LaceLeave a comment

Dark, Dark, and a little darker. This is how someone described my writing recently. They’d picked up Here in the Silence.

I think I’ve lightened up a little since then. My writing is (as I am) more ironic or sarcastic. I’ve always been – it’s just coming out in the work more than ever before. (If you’re at all interested in reading both in a fun little story, try Of Strays and Exes).

I’ve always had a dark sense of humor. That’s how some of us make it through life. Someone once said to me, “it seems writers have more odd experiences than most.” I remember I wanted to pop her at the time. However, she was my best friend and she was trying to cheer me.

Some writers do share that common trait of strange and unusual backgrounds.

Writing out the darkness allows me to be the light and happy person I am.

Author Quarantined After Ape Attack

Published on June 4, 2019June 3, 2019 by Noreen Lace1 Comment

Returning to the country, I imagined myself held hostage by the CDC in plastic tents on some far away airfield with my family left wondering what had happened to me.

I imagined it in different ways – maybe I’d get all the way home before men in white coats and gas masks would show up, or maybe they’d come in full contamination gear and yank me from the yard to whisk me away, question me, and – oh my gosh – pull aside everyone I’d come in contact with.

The whole of the passengers on the plane, my family, the taxi driver. I cringe when I think how upset everyone would be with me or with the fact that they had the misfortune of sharing a space with me.

I wonder – would the Pandemic Control Team let me have my computer? I actually have a ton of work to catch up on. Would they let me facetime or skype with family? friends? Would they let me wave through the clear plastic tents to onlookers?

And then – from one of those speculative fiction novels – what if I started an outbreak? What if a monkey virus mixed with some other virus and the whole of the population was at risk. I was patient zero.

You see – I have a very active imagination.

I told you I had about six ideas. That was the first.

Think about this as a writing prompt: What if you had 30 days in a tent with three squares a day? What would you do? What would you miss? Would you write? Exercise? Catch up on reading? Or go absolutely insane?