December 4, 2007 | Comments

PHOENIX RISING

They say, ‘The more things change, the more they stay the same’, well we’re about to say goodbye to 2007 and welcome 2008. Change is good, reluctant or planned, maybe both. So being the Phoenix that I am, I’m lighting a creative fire under my website and evolving a new idea.

Beginning January 2008 my Blog page will be replaced with ‘Phoenix Rising’ a bimonthly highlight in writing and life page. My writing, other authors, and information I come across that might be useful to you will be available. Also this page will be interactive – I hope. If there is a subject, opinion, rant, or disagreement with what I’ve said, you email me at YasminePhoenix@aol.com and I’ll respond. No cooking assistance will be provided; you can email SloaneTaylor for assistance.

Of course you can count on the following topics to be addressed, Battlestar Galactica, tennis, and handbags. I know you’re asking what these three things possibly have to do with writing or life. Glad you asked. Battlestar Galactica is one of the most well written and acted television programs to come along in a long time. The opportunity for writers to view the goals, motivation, and conflict of each character is awesome. Plus the hot pilots, Apollo and Helo don’t hurt.

Tennis is my way of relaxing, reducing stress and it provides much needed interaction after I’ve spent a few days bent over my keyboard attempting to find another word for felt. My tennis team is an awesome group of women.

Handbags, please. A writer carries in their handbag paper and pen to jot down ideas, dialogue or snippets of information for their work in progress, a mirror, and protein bars. It is very important we have the correct bag, not too large, definitely not too small, but always fashionable. And women know one handbag can not possibly meet all of the above criteria, so we have to have several to meet the needs of a particular day. If my hubby asks, this is my story and I’m sticking to it. Feel free to use my reasoning if necessary.

So I hope the rest of 2007 is spent writing, enjoying your family and friends, and remember to celebrate every positive thing you did to improve your writing career and life. No matter if you think its minuscule, it’s still a step in the right direction. Even if you gained ten pounds, relax it could have been fifteen! (Not saying I did)

Yasmine

September 18, 2007 | 2 Comments

I don’t meet with my critique partners during the summer. It appears I have less time than in the fall. I miss the ladies and tonight was my first meeting back! Great stuff going on.
Now that September has arrived, I thought I’d share what I learned this summer. No particular order.
1. Model in a Bottle really works.
2. Juking is not a sport.
3. Really nice restaurants leave a bit of the straw paper on the top of the straw when serving your cold drink.
4. Airline travel - SUCKS!
5. If you can’t afford to buy a t-shirt with a saying printed on it, please don’t wear one with a saying written with a magic marker.
6. While driving from Georgia to South Carolina I thought about the Civil War and how long it took for information to travel about the battles. Cell phones and faxes would have been great.
7. If we don’t use our talents, take advantage of them, then they’re wasted.
8. Double toilet rolls means means more tissue on a roll, NOT thicker ply tissue.
9. Losing weight can be as much fun as eating.
10. When your Internet connection goes down, you are all alone in the world.
11. You can’t spend money twice, but you sure can try.
12. There is no such thing as the perfect handbag.
13. JMan is maturing and hiding it well.
14. Eating is fun.
15. I can find a Starbucks anywhere!
16. I’m a vegetarian, but when I play tennis I crave Big Macs and hot dogs.
17. Hot flashes: Johnny Storm of the Fantastic Four has got nothing on me. “Flame on!”
18. If you put away clean clothes, they will be worn and dirty again. So don’t put them away.
19. Law and Order Mondays are fantastic.
20. I love westerns and they’re making a comeback.
21. I can watch tennis matches on the Internet.
22. Why don’t some celebrities in real life, look like their publicity shots?
23. Shopping in Home Depot can be almost as much fun as shopping at Macys. I SAID ALMOST!!
24. Skye, my beagle, loves me.
25. Note to OJ Simpson - Johnny Cochran is dead.
26. Virginia Tech - mans’ brutality can only be exceeded by his imagination of how to inflict brutality.
27. Molly Herwood always has my back. That’s because she’s always pushing me forward.
28. JGirl is enjoying her single adult life and I have a place to visit.
29. During my trip to South Carolina and visiting my father’s family, I tried to imagine what it was like for him to grow up as the son of a sharecropper.
30. I miss my parents very, very much.
31. I’m still married. What is wrong with this guy?
32. You can go home again, however - a. it might be torn down and turned into a Starbucks, b. the neighborhood has changed; c. no one remembers you; d. you don’t remember anyone; but e. your memories will last you a lifetime and make you smile.
33. Reality shows are surreal.
34. Men gossip, they call it sports talk radio.
35. A lot of women look like me, not Halle Berry or some model.
36. About #31, I could never be married to anyone else but him.

There are probably other things I learned this summer, but this is the top of the list.

February 14, 2007 | 1 Comment

I live in the Midwest, Chicago area, and we’ve been hit with snow. For a lot of you, you say ‘So What? Join the shovel committee’. Well, I’m originally from Virginia and even after twenty-six years of living here I’m still adapting. As a writer, I know well the story about how Nora Roberts got started. It was winter, cold, and she was snowbound with her kids. It’s a great story and we unpublished writers use it for inspiration. I was thinking about Nora as the snow keeps falling, and falling, and falling around here. We’re not exactly housebound, but it is an opportunity to work on my novel. Edit some more, polish it and get it the frack out of this house. I figure that’s what Nora would do. However, I don’t know, and I’ll have to ask her at the next Romance Writers of America Conference, if she had access to cable while she was snowed in. I mean, if the power died and the cable went out I’d have to first find other living arrangements and then without anything else to do, I could write. However, that’s not the case, the cable is working, and Law and Order, NCIS, Law and Order Criminal Intent, and Law and Order SVU still come on. So, what I have to rely on my staying put at my desk and working is pure sheer will and a Nora saying. “I can fix a crappy page but I can’t fix a blank one.” Which brings me to the second part of my blog.

I can’t bake. I’m not talking about a box of prepared cake mix. Oh that I can do with the best of them. I’m talking about baking from scratch, like my mother use to do. At Christmas she would bake German Chocolate cakes, using real coconuts she’d crack open, use the milk and grind the meat. She’d melt chocolate. It took me until I was almost thirty to eat her cake, mainly because I didn’t like coconut. Trust me, I still don’t particularly care for coconut, but I had no problem eating it in her cakes. She also make pineapple cakes from scratch. Those I’d eat heartily, which could explain my fat cells now exploding at my advanced age. No instant, canned fruit. Yeast rolls were also made with real yeast, hot water and the smell of bread rising was yummy.

Now what does baking have to do with writing, Yasmine? Well I’ll tell you. You have to have the basic ingredients for baking. Same with writing. If you’re going to bake a cake, from scratch, you know you’re going to have to work at it. You can’t rush, you have to study what you need and purchase the items because you can’t stop in the middle of mixing and run out to get it. Some ingredients require research, it may not be available at your local grocery store. So you have to figure out where to get it. Same with a story setting. It may be local, or exotic, or another world you’ve created but you’ve got to set the scene. When you decide what type of cake you’re going to bake, you should set all your ingredients out on the counter. Your story has to have a heroine and a hero and they are your main ingredients. They’re the base of your story. Plot is the other ingredients, sugar, salt, flavorings. If you’re using a receipe, it’s been tested before you bake your version, so you can follow the written directions. We read books on how to write a romance, and when we first start out, we do it by the book. The more we write, the more we discover our voice and vary the receipe to suit our strenghts.

Say you’re baking a butter pound cake, of course you may prefer to use a bundt pan, and you may want the cake to have a tart lemon taste. Are you going to use real lemons? Take the time to slice and squeeze them or are you going to take the fast route and use lemon juice and extract? What if your family wants a chocolate pound cake? Are you going to use real chocolate, melt it and add it to your cake? What’s your objective with writing your story or baking your pound cake? To please your family, tempt an agent or publisher, or for your own enjoyment? The more you experiment with your writing and your baking you may find you have a talent for making cakes that are decadent, rich, and ‘can’t enough of it’, i.e. erotica. Or you may have a talent for baking cakes that are delicious, memorable, and made from a receipe that will be handed down from generation to generation, so your name will always be associated with it. Jane Austen, Terry McMillian, Octavia Butler, Josh Whedon.

So my conclusion is, I may be snowbound, like Nora was, and I will continue to use her as an example to keep writing. I may not be able to bake a cake from scratch, although after reading that last paragraph, I make have to try it, but I will keep creating, editing, polishing my work, and meanwhile bake cupcakes and watch Law and Order.

January 23, 2007 | 6 Comments

The last time I blogged, me, myself, and I were discussing how to be on the same page instead of running around in different directions. It’s taken some time, apparently one of us forgot to blog, but we’ve worked out a very good relationship. I decided we would blog once a week, the topic must be writing related and sometimes personal, depending what’s going on. Me wanted to add links of all the great shopping sites she and myself were hanging out, while we were supposed to be writing. I think the Fedex guy loves me.

Someone had to take control, bring our focus back and make our deadlines. I voted to give that responsibility to Molly Herwood, but me and myself, dismissed that bright idea. So, we’ve reworked our writing schedule, making it primary, every fracking day for four hours. We have set hours but we discovered our weight was increasing faster than our page count, since we took a sabbatical from tennis for a couple of months. So, we agreed to return to tennis in February and still make sure to get our four hours of writing in. Myself has a list of agents and publishers we’re submitting our query to in February. Of course, I was the last to know. No one wrote it down on our desk calendar. But apparently we will make that deadline.

We also collaborated on submitting a story to Amber Quill. We joined forces made the deadline and will know by March first how we did. Sloane, Beth, and Virginia liked the part I brought to our critique meeting. Trust me, I don’t think they’ll ever look at cucumbers the same.

Sometimes my unedited pages resemble the writing of a deranged housewife. Oh wait a minute, that’s me, or all of us. Never mind. But there are words on those pages, words that are good, terrible, and just plain stupid, but they’re something I can work with. Now that I’ve outed myself to my friends and family as a writer, my ego won’t let me back down. Damned, another personality to deal with, the ego. Let’s try to keep the id out of this, okay.

Okay, so once a week blogging will occur. I’ll be back next Tuesday. Also, this year I’m going to do something new with my favorites page. Last year I interviewed authors, so stay tuned and I’ll let you know when it premiers.

Keep Writing