There are songs I love. So many songs. When I was a teenager, I would write lyrics into my diary, or onto my school notebooks. Pages and pages of song lyrics. Don’t for a minute believe they were my own songs, though. They were the Beatles, the Bee Gees, the Monkeys, and others that for the life of me, I can’t remember. Shoot. I wish my memory would evade me like this.
These songs inspired me to write some poetry. However, my teenage angst never brought out any poetry that was very good. I do write better poetry, now, but probably won’t ever publish any in a book. People don’t buy poetry much. However, we shouldn’t stop writing this lyrical stuff, because if we do humanity will lose the beauty of this kind of writing. Besides, songs are poetry.
TJ writes sci-fi/fantasy–I heard it called speculative fiction recently. Those are the stories about what if? What if we could conquer other planets? What if there were aliens. What if they were civilized and good; what if they weren’t?
I, for one, have a difficult time working inside that type of world-building. TJ’s mind conquers those planets and those ideas. Mine are more earth-born. They grow up inside possible scenarios. The Civil War, the Underground Railroad, emigrants from other countries, crossing the plains to find new lands, new homes, new hopes. What to do if your husband divorces you…? (This is not about me and TJ. We have terminal marriage.)
I know TJ is proud of each of his stories. They were born out of bedtime yarns he told our kids… those nights long ago when I worked evenings, and he was home with the kiddos. I didn’t even know these were a thing until years later when he handed me a thumb drive.
“Could you edit this document? It’s a story I wrote,” he said. “Sure,” I said. But when I opened the document, there were over 300,000 words. In one document. With run together sentences, and bad punctuation… Terrible sentence structure, and misspelled words. Over 300,000 words.
“No,” I said. “You have to break this into three stories.” So, he took the thumb drive back. When he returned it to me, there were four stories. Each one was well over 80,000 words. As some of you know these stories turned into the first four books of the Mirror Gate Chronicles. Now he has eleven stories all within that genre and that storyline. I’m proud of the work he’s put into them over the years.
During that time, I realized I wanted to write, too. That is how Memories of War, and the follow-on stories began. That’s where they sprung from. Historical fiction is a genre I love. I read actual history in order to get to my own fiction. Realizing I had more books inside me is eye-opening? I am not sure what metaphor to use, or am I thinking of adjectives? Anyway… I love to write. You can probably tell by my blogs. I hope you find them at least amusing, if nothing else.
Currently, TJ is finishing his vampire/war book. Yeah. An interesting combination, right? I am rewriting our steampunk novella. While I do that, I’m also stalling out on our new murder mystery… This one is a second in the series of Death at Hell’s Canyon Quarry. I’ll be reintroducing the characters from that story but making Becky Tsosie the primary lead character as she tries to figure out who’s killing students at Yavapai Community College. Why are these young men singled out? What do they have in common? Yeah… Mystery!
You can see our events coming up on the Events & Appearances tab, TJ’s books on his tab, and (not surprisingly) my books on my tab. We’d love to see you at an event. If you pick up a book, please leave us a review. We need as many as possible.
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Mirror Gate Chronicles 