Rough Draft Progress -- Empress Game

Wow, it's been a while since I've posted the progress on my latest wip, Empress Game. I've made great strides, and I'm closing in on the end! okay, I'm closing in on the "holy moly I need to start wrapping this up" spot!

78,000 / 100,000 (78%)

Lady Notorious -- Unmasked

Looking to meet the woman behind Lady Notorious? You can find me on by website at http://www.rhondamason.com/.

While there is a short bio section about me, the important part is an interview with that devilish charmer, Sir Reginald.

You can also find information about my books and the authors I love to read.

Come on by!

Pitch Opportunity With Entangled Publishing! July 16th

How neat is this idea? Check it out, an online opportunity to pitch your novel to editors at Entangled Publishing on July 16^th! Read the details HERE.

An Advantageous Scramble – Writing Prompt #43

Today I had to work the early shift at work, which means being up before 4:30 am. That’s unholy, imo. Now it’s almost 8 am and I’m considering my morning snack. I wish I could say that’s led me to a writing prompt, but so far I’m coming up blank!

That said, I still feel the need for a prompt, so here we go. It’s a total free-write. Write a paragraph that includes the following words, in any order:

Tweet
Log
Snack
Advantageous

Okay, so the snacking did prompt a prompt…

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Here’s mine:

He glanced at her with something of a sneer, the loving look she remembered being easily replaced. Had she thought him handsome? Kind? Fool. He was none of the above, and no one she knew.

“What now?” she asked. She set the snack tray down on the kitchen’s island. The sliced gouda, pita chips and hard salami rounds in their neat rows were at odds with the chaos inside her.

“Now? Now you leave.”

“Leave?” she repeated stupidly.

He chuckled. “Yes, leave. As in, get out of my house.”

She looked past him to their guests gathered in the doorway, trapped in silence, mid-interruption of John’s dumping her. Beyond them she could see the Yule log in the fireplace. It was cheerily decorated and ready to be the centerpiece of their Christmas party. He hadn’t seen the guests, and went on without interruption.

“Now.”

The suspicion had slept inside her so long she had almost forgotten it was there. Now it reared up to full life. “The governor’s daughter?”

“Mm-hmm. We reconnected at as charity dinner last week.”

“Only last week?”

He shrugged. “This time. The meeting was, shall we say, advantageous.” He lifted a finger and ran it over the edge of the snack tray. He stared at the tray, seeming to study it. “We got this on our wedding day, did we not?” He hooked a finger under the crystal platter and pulled it toward him—toward him and off the counter. It slammed onto the floor like a dropped cannon ball, sending glass chunks and finger food skittering.

One startled guest gasped and another whipped out his phone, snapping a picture. She could already imagine the tweets incoming.

Can’t Not Stare – Writing Prompt #42

I’m stuck on my current WIP for a wide variety of real life reasons that are really just thinly veiled excuses, but I feel the need to create. I didn’t want to let my disinterest with EG’s current scene keep me from writing altogether, though. There’s no rule that says I have to work on EG and nothing else in my writing time, so I’m giving myself permission to free write on anything.

Thus, it is time for a writing prompt.

I got the idea for this prompt while I was reading through Justin Formanek’s website http://www.aberranthology.com/. He’s a wonderful writer of horror fiction, a genre I’m pretty bad at, and I love reading his work. I thought, what better way to be creative then do in a prompt working outside of my normal SF or romance genres? I’m not sure my writing today is truly a horror piece, but I set out with that goal in mind and this is what I came up with.

What’s horrific to you?

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Here’s mine:

I have the urge to cut my belly open.

Every time I look down at it, feel how full and fat it is, I want to amputate it. It’s a symbol of all that’s wrong, all that I’m doing to myself. I imagine slicing it open in one smooth stroke. A cut drawn across its roundness. A smile that releases all the built-up pressure.

Innards burst forth. Dark, green-black innards of I don’t know what. Twisted knots. Ropes of putrid nastiness. They burst forth and my belly empties like a lanced boil spewing its vile infection fluids. Instant freedom from the pressure. The guilt. The self-hatred. My belly hollows out and the mass falls to the floor. Somehow I know it is built up of more than normal intestines. The pile is the size of a volleyball.

Oh god, the release.

I sigh, free. I’ve done it. I’m empty and new. Free.

If only it were that easy. 

I create the image again and again. The clean slice, the emptying, the freedom.

It doesn’t free me. I only imagine me free, like I imagine me exercising or writing or reading or doing anything constructive. Imagining isn’t doing, and the mass inside me grows.

I watch my willful self-destruction like a horrified observer from the backseat. Every day I decide to change it. Every day I make it worse. 

Can it ruin me? Can I catch myself from the slide? Or will it come again and again.

“Come” isn’t right. Nothing comes for me. No outside force inflicts this destruction on me. I create my new old-self, inside out, from a tangle of putrid, black-green innards. 

How will I free me? Can one change at a time buy me back?

Or will it be the slice, the opening of the belly and the spewing forth. The mortal, freeing, oh-I-wish-it-were-that-easy, clean-slate wound.

I know I should, but…Writing Prompt #41

Whew! Looooong hiatus, but, I’m back with another writing prompt!

Here it is:

Choose some of your characters: List something that they know they should do, but in reality, they won’t, and list why not.

 Tae
I should tell Kieran that I will never be with him and that he needs to stay with Amathayon and leave me alone.
I won’t because I would rather be near him, despite the pain it causes us both, than be apart from him.

 Kieran
I should care more that we lost Aislin to Solak, or at all.
I won’t because all that I care about is Tae waking up. Until she’s all right, nothing else matters.  

Malkor
I should, as his close friend, tell Ardin that Isonde was injured, and that the Isonde he sees now is not the woman he is in love with.
I won’t because I need him to be functioning and hold up his end of the charade. I don’t trust that he can hold it together if he knows what happened to her, and he’ll blow everything by exerting every imperial resource to get her healed and find Janeen. That kind of attention would not go unnoticed but he’d be too upset to think of the consequences.  

Kayla
I should not bring Corinth to the arena to help shield me from the other Wyrds. His safety should be my top priority all times, and exposing him is a risk to his freedom and possibly life that his ro-haar should never make.
I will bring Corinth to the arena because I now care about winning the Empress Game, and need his help.  

Malkor
I should call the whole Empress Game charade off and get Isonde even better medical care.
I won’t because I know she would rather risk it with mediocre care to become the empress that would shape the fate of the entire empire and perhaps engineer the alliance that brings the cure for the TNV to the empire.  

Sindel
I should forget about Khelbyn and my days with him. He is forever gone and the past will never be again. I should find a new purpose to life before I waste what time I have left.
I won’t because I can’t recover from his loss and I don’t want to. I want to keep him with me always, even if it means ignoring every mission I should be on, every promise I had made before, and everything that had ever meant something to me.  

Janeen
 I should go to the head of IDF and bring my evidence of Malkor and Isonde cheating the Empress Game in an attempt to get the disqualified and Divinya be named the de facto winner of the Kayla-Divinya match. I have an obligation to my people to do all I can to put Divinya on the throne.
I won’t because I don’t want to face the punishment for my actions.

 The Buri
I should stop barking at other dogs from the safety of my balcony because I know my mumma doesn’t want me to do it.
I won’t because I…must…bark!

SFFS Snipet -- February 11th

I was trying to think of what to post for my SFFS snippet this week, when a writing prompt struck me. I didn’t get a chance to finish the prompt (work, you stink!) but I wanted to post what I had started so far. Here goes!

Snippet --->

The shadows came and went. They weren’t waves and they weren’t predictable. It was the shielding of a body on the upper walk here, a momentary cloud over the sun there; each no more than a puddle. If she knew the pattern she could skip like a stone across them all, finding a way in darkness to the street’s other side.

Instead she hung back under the awning, waiting like a starving child for a crust of bread that was never going to come.

She’d have to gamble.

The pennants atop the buildings undulated in the breeze, their fairly stable shadows offering her the best entry point. They’d betray her in a strong gust, but if the wind held steady she could make it halfway across the street without too many acrobatics.

She checked the charge on her transparency generator: still getting the orange “go” light. The mini-field was big enough to surround her and her alone, and while it offered decent cover in low-light areas, the cheap photon emitter couldn’t hold up an illusion under sunlight.

…more to come! :)

Check out the other fabulous snippets at http://scififansat.blogspot.com/