Musings of Two Creative Minds

Recently I was on one of the buses that I regularly take to get to my university.  As I was riding I was taking in the scenery and smiling to myself.  A girl who had taken the seat next to me noticed and said I must be having a good day.  I responded by telling her I was observing the scenery and thinking about some of the trees.  In particular I drew her attention to the Spanish Moss growing on several of the trees.  "Is that what's growing on them?  I've heard of Spanish Moss but I never saw it before," she told me.   I nodded and replied, "Now picture that stuff moving on its own, maybe reaching down and grabbing a someone as they're walking by." That freaked her out a bit as she looked at me with wide eyes and said, "That's creepy!  You must be into horror movies and such." At that point I explained that I was an author who had two books out already and a third coming in December.  From there she relaxed and I told her a...

Hello everyone, today I want to give you all a little insight into how things are going with my latest novel. Some of you may know that I had started working on "The Door" some time back, but then set it aside to work on "The Vampyre Blogs - Coming Home".  I did this originally, because I'd hoped to get the vampyre book out last October, but of course that didn't happen.  My classes at CSU Monterey Bay got crazy with the workload so I couldn't finish in time.   Now, the vampyre book is set around October so I wanted to keep with the whole Halloween timing, so after finishing the 1st draft I've set it aside and gone back to "The Door".  This is actually beneficial since "The Door" will temporarily wrap things up for the heroes of my first two novels "The Bridge" and "The Ship".  So by going back to "The Door" I can have a sort of trilogy to put out as a box set come Christmastime. With thi...

Okay fellow writers, here's a question for you all.  How many of  you find yourselves working and reworking a scene because something just isn't right?  In your mind, you know what you'd like to happen, but something just doesn't seem to be working right.  You make a change here, then a slight a tweek there and suddenly everything goes KAFLOOEY!    You suddenly hit a dead end, or the entire plot has taken a detour to No-wheres-ville.  When this happens to me, I get the same feelings I had whenever I tried to solve a Rubik's Cube.  I know all the parts and where I think they should go, but they're just not in the right spot.  And trying to get them in their proper place can be a nightmare some days. Now this has happened to me on a number of occasions.  Some people tell me to have an outline, but that never works for me.  Why?  Because my characters start going in other directions by saying or doing things I hadn't original...