The Once and Future Poet is free at Amazon

My newest release is available, and it's free at Amazon today and tomorrow.

The Once and Future Poet: A Writer's Retrospective on Growing Up covers the poetry I wrote between ages eight and thirty-three--twenty-five years worth! Each poem is followed by an essay discussing what was going on in my life or what inspired the poem or current thoughts on the poem's themes. If you liked my last two posts, Poetry and Death and Poetry and Mirrors, those are right out of The Once and Future Poet.

It was interesting for me to go back through all those poems and those years and see what themes I kept coming back to, and which ones still show up in my writing even today, and also the way my writing style has evolved.

I decided to put this one into KDP Select for three months, which means it's only available on Amazon. I did this because my sales at Amazon have pretty much died out, although they are steady (or growing) in other markets. I want to see if putting one book in Select will increase the visibility of my other works with Amazon's algorithms.

But my non-Kindle readers, don't fret! If you buy a copy at Amazon and email a copy of the receipt to mercy.loomis at gmail.com, I will send you an EPUB or PDF version for free! Yes, even if all you do is go to Amazon today or tomorrow and "buy" the free copy.

In fact, I will extend that offer to all of my writings: if you email me a receipt and tell me what format you want, I will email it you. Because you already bought it--why should you have to pay for it again?

Poetry and Death

Here's another excerpt from my upcoming poetry collection.

He Died

The words stilled every heart in the room.

When she was called out of class

by two friends

I had thought nothing of it.

When she came back in,

to retrieve her books,

I did not look up.

I was engrossed in a sketch

of a girl

alone

in a dark forest,

and did not see the pain

till those two words

fell

broken,

from her lips,

as if they had also

died.

“He died.”

She was not a friend,

I knew her name, her voice, her friends,

but no more.

She was not a friend,

but the pain in her voice

brought tears to my eyes.

I still did not see her face,

but her words echoed in my ears.

“He died.”

As she left again,

her friends followed,

sharing her grief,

as sobs floated back to us

through the closing door.

A stunned silence.

Uncertain, unreal.

The fraility of mortality

painfully recalled.

“He died.”

(10th grade, 01/29/1993, 2:00pm)

Comments on He Died

That was pretty much how it happened.

I never found out who it was who’d died, or what he was to that girl.

She left the room, and I wrote the poem.

I can’t decide if I like the line breaks in this. On one hand, they sort of evoke the disjointed, sudden distruption we all felt. On the other, I may have gone a little overboard on a few of them. Eh. That’s the fun with free verse. Easy to do, hard to do well, and very subjective.

I like seeing into people’s houses at night, when the lights are on. I’m not saying I go creeping up to windows or anything, but just as you’re driving or walking past, you can look through the open curtains and see little slices of people’s lives, and remember that those houses are full of people you may never meet, who have lives that have nothing to do with you. It puts things into perspective.

That day in class was sort of the dark side of that reality voyeurism. Here was loss and pain that had nothing to do with me, but I hurt because she was hurting. Yet I could set the hurt aside, whereas for her the wound would linger until the pain became so much a part of her that she didn’t notice it much anymore.

I hadn’t lost anyone myself yet, at that age. I have since. And people will tell you that the pain goes away, that the hurt stops with time. I don’t think it does. I think you just get used to it.

Image by Stuart Mills, FreeDigitalPhotos.net

Poetry and Mirrors

I've been working on an annotated poetry collection, and I thought I'd give you all a preview. Here's a poem I wrote when I was a freshman in high school.

 What Do You See?

What do you see

when you look in the mirror?

Do you see a reflection of your face,

or your soul?

Do you see yourself,

or who you think you are,

or who you want to be,

or who other people think you are?

Do you see beauty,

or ugliness,

even if they aren’t there?

Do you see emotion,

or a cold mask?

Do you see someone else,

or do you see nothing at all?

(02/03/1992)

Comments on What Do You See?

 

Identity. Another touchstone of the teenage experience. Just who is that person in the mirror anyway?

I’m not particularly fond of mirrors. I had one on my closet door, which for most of my life was across from my bed. Maybe I’d read Lewis Carroll one too many times, but it never seemed to adequately reflect reality. Of course, some of that’s from writer’s brain.* I kept waiting for the reflection to be wrong. (I don’t watch horror movies much anymore. The images stick with me in a way that words on a page don’t.)

My husband feels the same way about mirrors as I do. We have two mirrors in the house. One is on the medicine cabinet in the bathroom, and the other is in the guest bedroom. That’s it.

This is entertaining in a way because we’re both very self-aware. It’s not like we’re afraid of confronting ourselves or something; we each did that ages ago. But there’s something about mirrors. You just can’t trust them. They give you the illusion of seeing yourself, but you aren’t really seeing yourself, you’re seeing your inversion. Maybe that’s why they bug me more than photographs. That’s it. A photograph is a moment in time. A mirror is pretending to be you.

I don’t actively avoid mirrors now, and I didn’t then, either. In fact, there were times I spent hours (okay, maybe an hour) staring at the mirror and testing facial expressions. Not only did I want to know what it looked like when I felt a particular way, I wanted to know how to reproduce that expression. This came in handy later when I was in theater (not that I was a very good actor) but it’s also been useful in my writing career.

I notice as I write this that I’m more or less ignoring the poem. And I suppose that’s because even after twenty years, I don’t have a good answer. Not one I can put into words, anyway, other than just to say “me.” I guess that is an answer, come to think of it. The mask is still there when I want it, but now it’s a tool, not a way of life. I don’t wear it for myself. I see me, all of me, the good and the bad, the kind and the cruel.

And I smile and nod, and say, “Good enough.”

*For those of you who don’t have writer’s brain, I will explain. Writers are always on the lookout for ideas, because very often our lives are boring. Our brains find ways of making life more interesting by grabbing up commonplaces and mashing them together or giving them a twist. A lot of story ideas started out with my brain presenting me with a what-if, like “what if I walked into the garage and there was a burgler?” And then I run with the scenario. If it turns out to be interesting enough, I just change the main character and start writing it down.

You can read another excerpt here.

Image: FreeDigitalPhotos.net

Roundtable Podcast and a New Release!

Today I'm the guest writer on episode 18 of the Roundtable Podcast! The guest host is the awesome Abigail Hilton (The Guild of the Cowry Catchers, The Prophet of Panamindorah, Fullcast Podcast) and we all had a ton of fun work-shopping the idea for my next novel, Empire's Shadow. This episode is full of spoilers, so be warned! However, since I haven't written it yet, I reserve the right to change plot points at will. ;) We dive into some of the world-building behind Aether Vitalis as well.

Empire's Shadow starts out in Italy in the beginning of the second century AD, and chronicles the early adventures of Gabriel, Paul, and Isolde from Scent and Shadow.

Do you have feedback on Empire's Shadow? Leave a comment at the Roundtable!

One thing Empire's Shadow doesn't cover is how Gabriel became a vampire. That story is told in the novella Night's Acolyte, which is now available for purchase at Amazon, Barnes and Noble, and Smashwords!

 

All vampires start out as mortals. Gabriel Chapel was no different.

Gaul, 78 BC. When a chance misstep leaves him on the road after dark, Gabrielus Avidiacus wants nothing more than to get safely home to his wife and children. Instead, he is attacked by a blood-drinking demon and brutally transformed. Left to fend for himself, Gabrielus has no idea what he has become. Just one thing is clear: the only way to protect his family now is to get as far away from them as he can.

That, and kill the demon who did this to him.

As he struggles to discover more about his demonic nature and the bloodlust that now rules him, Gabrielus also seeks a higher purpose to his new life. What he finds will set him on the path to becoming one of the most successful vampires the world has ever known.

And last but not least, have you checked out the Smashwords Summer Sale? Use coupon code SSW75 at checkout to get 75% off Scent and Shadow through the end of July! Or use coupon code SSW25 to get 25% off Demon's Asylum, "Encore", or "When the Bough Rakes." And of course, A Wild Hunt, "Not Quite Casper", and "I Burn For You" are always free!

MS Word 2010 For Writers: Top Ten(+1) Tools

I recently took a class on MS Word 2010. Here are the top eleven things I found useful for writers, in no particular order.

Word 2003 to Word 2010
Can't figure out how to do something in Word 2010 that you knew how to do in Word 2003? Do you have an internet connection? No problem! Click on the File tab, and choose Help from the list at the left. In the center section under Support, click on Getting Started. The Getting Started with Office 2010 webpage will open. In the middle of the webpage is a video player, and to the right of that are three headings. Under the middle heading, "Missing the menus?", click Run the Word Interactive Guide. This will open up a webpage that takes a minute to load, and then asks you to click Start. Once you click Start, you will see your beloved Word 2003 interface. Just click on whatever it is you wanted to do, and the interface will flip and show you where to find it in Word 2010. It seems to be pretty accurate, although if you click Insert:Breaks it takes you to the Page Break button and not the Breaks dropdown. For some reason, Micrsoft decided to make a Page Break button on the Insert tab (Pages section). However, that's the only break on that tab. The Breaks dropdown we all know and love (especially those of us who do print or PDF formatting in Word, since we need Section Breaks) is on the Page Layout tab in the Page Setup section.

The Lorem Ipsum Generator
Type =lorem() in Word 2010 and it spits back lines of Latin. You can put numbers in the parenthises to indicate how many paragraphs and sentences you want. So if you want one paragraph with five sentences, type =lorem(1,5) and then hit enter.

Embedding Fonts (File:Options:Save)
If you use custom fonts, you can embed them into your document by clicking on the File tab, choosing Options from the list on the left, and then in the Options window choose Save from the list on the left. The very last set of checkboxes deals with embedding fonts. I can only assume this makes your file larger, so pay attention to that.

Format Painter (Home tab, Clipboard section)
On the Home tab, all the way on the left, is the Clipboard section. There's a picture of a clipboard for Paste, and then next to it are three small icons: a scissors for Cut, two documents for Copy, and then a paint brush. That paint brush is the Format Painter. Click on a style from the Style section, and then click the Format Painter. It changes your cursor to a paint brush. Any text you highlight or word you click on will be changed to the style you selected. Once you finish your selection, the cursor changes back to normal. If you want to the Format Painter to stay active, double-click on the Format Painter icon.

Style Sets (Home tab, Styles section)
If you have a particular set of Styles you use when doing ebooks, and another for print, and maybe another for something else, you can make a Style Set. On the Home tab, in the Styles section, right under the Change Styles button is a tiny little mark, sort of like a page-turn indicator. Click that to open the Styles Task Pane. This shows you all the Styles in your current Style Set. You can then put the Styles the way you want them, and save it as a new Style Set.

Navigation Pane (View tab, Show section)
On the View tab in the Show section is a checkbox for the Navigation Pane. This thing is surprisingly useful. The Navigation Pane has three tabs. The tab on the left shows all the headings in your document. So, for example, you have a bunch of chapters, and the chapters are all in a heading style, you will get a list of your chapters. Click on a chapter heading in the Navigation Pane and it will take you to that chapter. So much nicer than scrolling through the document! The tab in the middle shows you a thumbnail of each page in your document. The tab on the right lets you search your document, and it's way better than Find. The search function tells you how many times it found the search item and lists all of them in the Navigation Pane. You can not only see the whole sentence to get the context, but you can click on each entry to go to that section of the document. Perfect for late editing passes where you want to see how many times you used the word "smiled."

Customize Ribbon
If you truly can't stand having to flip between all these tabs, or maybe you really only need a few tools, you can customize your ribbon. (The ribbon is the annoying fat strip along the top of the page where the menus used to be.) Left-click on the ribbon and choose Customize Ribbon. You can access this also by clicking on the File tab, choosing Options from the list on the left, and then choosing Customize Ribbon in the Options window. You can also customize the Quick Access Toolbar from here. That's the little row of icons at the very top left of your screen.

New Window/Arrange All/Split/Synchronous Scrolling (View tab, Window section)
This part is so cool that you really have to play with it to get the full effect. Basically, you can have more than one document open in your Word window, or have two seperate windows. (This also works in Excel!!!) If you turn on Synchronous Scrolling, both windows scroll whenever you scroll one. This is very nice for when you're comparing two versions of the same document--say, your master file and the edits you just got back...

Check for Issues (File:Info)
Click on the File tab and select Info from the menu on the left. Under Prepare for Sharing is a button labeled Check for Issues. By clicking this button, you can check your document for hidden text, comments, annotation, custom XML, and other stuff that you may not want in your final version. (Note that View Comments is turned on by default, so even if you turn it off on your end, it will likely be on when someone else opens the document.) Also note that File:Info is where you find the document Properties for when you want to add tags and other metadata.

Blog Post Template (File:New)
For you bloggers out there, this is a template that's already formatted for blog posts. I haven't tried it yet, but hey, some people might find it useful. Not only does it default to block format, it apparently can even post the document to your blog for you when you're done.

Text Audio Player (Review tab, Language section, Translate, Mini Translator)
The best way to find missing words in your text is to listen to it, and Word 2010 includes this feature and doesn't even realize just how useful it is. On the Review tab, in the Language section, click on the Translate dropdown. Select the last option, Mini Translator. It will ask what language you want to translate into, but you can just leave it on Arabic, the default, unless you want to play around. Once you've selected your language, click Ok. (It might skip asking you which language if you've chosen one before.) Highlight the text you want read, then click on Mini Translator again. (You can highlight the entire document by clicking Ctrl-A.) Hover your cursor over the highlighted text and you should see a ghostly box appear. You may have to click Mini Translator twice; I sometimes have a hard time getting it to come up. Put your cursor over the box, and you'll see the Translator. At the bottom of the Translator is a row of icons; click on the green arrow and the Translator will read the highlighted text.