Let us all greet 2012 witha cheerful smile,an enthusiastic heart,an open mind,and hope thateverything gets betterin the coming new year.
A Special Thank Youto all who regularly visited(¯`•¸,.-Geca's Realm-.,¸•´¯)and for 'liking'
Cheers to health, success, loveand more blessings for all of us!
What time is Santa Claus coming to bring my presents?I said,
No one knows. He comes around when everyone is asleep.
On the second thought, what if everything was lost just a few days before Christmas? How would you feel? If it didn't happen to you, what do you feel for them? Would you still buy or crave for an expensive present, party all day and pig out on Christmas dinner? I wish a lot of people do their fair share of helping not only for and on Christmas Day. But also, to keep helping tragedy survivors (e.g. Typhoon Washi survivors) at least, until they can build their homes again. This Christmas day, I didn't want to prepare something extravagant because I feel bad that a lot of people in Southern part of Philippines are starving and worse, lost their homes because of typhoon.
Mommy, I'm hungry. When are we having lunch?
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| Waggy and Rhian |
Monica: Oddly enough, I don't have a hometown. My parents were in the Air Force and I was born on an air base in Germany. During my childhood, we moved around a lot, mostly internationally. I came to the US more permanently around 13 years old, and have been here ever since. I've lived in seven or eight different cities since coming here though, most recently Chicago. After living so many places, I'm convinced that I'm a total city girl.
Monica: I have wanted to be a writer since about third grade. I've wanted to be other things over the childhood years too, but "author" was the one that seemed to stick. I considered myself a writer when I finished my first novel, probably. Before that, I'd written regularly in a blog, and I'd put together a business book, but novels are my true passion.
Monica: I started writing Silver Smoke in Atlanta in 2010. At the time, I was pretty depressed, to be honest. I had always planned to write a novel, but never could seem to find the time. I was working in Atlanta at an agency as a marketing director, managing some of the digital marketing for some really huge brands. Every day when I got home from work, I would fall asleep and not wake up until the next morning when I had to work. It was pretty insane. I was alive but not really living.
I couldn't express my feelings in writing just due to being a professional and not wanting to risk my job, so I started writing about this girl who was extremely depressed because her mother died. The girl had lost everything, her friends, her home, etc. I wrote like 40 pages of this super depressing manuscript, almost none of which made the cut to the actual book. But at the end of all that, I was not depressed anymore and I had Brie van Rossum, the main character of Silver Smoke. The book starts about two months after her mom dies, but those 40 pages I wrote are the in-between--what she goes through before the book actually starts.
Monica: The title of the book is a spoiler, so I can't say exactly. I'll just say that it's explained in the book. All of my titles are, actually. In the second book, Tin Soldier, you meet a guy who is the Tin Soldier. As for the series name, Seven Halos, there are seven books and seven main characters (who will all have their story lines resolved throughout the series. The "halo" is a reference to the fact that they are angel novels.
Monica: I wrote the majority of this novel over the summer next to beaches, actually. I lived in Florida for a few weeks and wrote some of it there, then we moved to West Haven, CT. Two very different types of beaches. It's often useful to write a book with similar setting to wherever you are. It's currently winter in the Seven Halos universe and they are primarily in New York.
Monica: I'm a fairly logical person, so I have a hard time believing in the supernatural. I'm not particularly religious either. That said, the book is heavily rooted in Christian mythology.
Monica: All of the characters have a little piece of me in them. I would love to write a character that was more like myself, but so far all of my main characters (especially the girls) are really different from me. There's a girl in my other YA series, Socialpunk, named Ima. She is maybe less like me than Brie, even. And Brie is far too popular without cause for me to ever really relate to.
Monica: oh gosh. Maybe a dog? My little westie seems to be happy most of the time. She just wishes she had a yard.
Monica: Well, write, for one :). also, write with an idea of how you plan to market your book. and learn as much about the traditional book publishing industry as you can, even if you plan to self-publish.
Monica: I have no idea! I'm still trying to figure it out. Though word-of-mouth marketing is probably the most effective, it's harder to make it happen than you would think. I was watching this Guitar SEssion on Grace Potter and the Nocturnals and she said that the way people fall in love with your work is by you hitting pavement and making an effort to share it with them. I think she's right. No one is going to discover you on their own... you have to reach out to them and ask them to give you a chance. You have to develop a relationship with them and share your passion with them. So that's my current strategy.
Monica: No, not really. I definitely write a lot about the moral dilemmas of good and evil--for example, if you a bad guy and save a good guy, are you a hero or a murderer? I ask the questions but I don't give my answers. I don't ever want to be the author who shoves her own views down her readers' throats. It's enough to ask the question.
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