Crow's Rest News

I got my finished, author copies of Crow's Rest in the mail today, squee! It feels so REAL!

But that's not the only news--you can also get a sneak peek at the first two chapters of Crow's Rest, either on this blog on the Novels page, or on the Goodreads site (click the "Read Book" button).

And...

To celebrate the release of Crow's Rest, from May 11-14 we'll be holding a blog hop! It will feature an excerpt where Avery shares some spooky encounters at a local haunted castle, and the hop participants can share their own experiences with ghosts or other unexplained events. I'm really looking forward to reading everyone's stories! I'll have a post on Operation Awesome on May 12, release day, and if I can find it I'll include my photographic proof that the Fae are real. ;)

If you don't have a blog and would like to participate, never fear--there are plenty of other ways to take part, including on the Crow's Rest Facebook page. Please sign up for the hop through the Google form.

Crow's Rest is now on NetGalley, so if you want to request a copy before the bloghop, you can do that here.

Hooray for good news!

Show Me the Voice Contest Blogfest

I got a late start today, fighting a cold or allergies! Brenda Drake's Show Me the Voice Blogfest begins today, and I've already sent in my entry. We could either send it now, or wait until we got feedback and send it later; My book has gone through several betas and critiques so I felt comfortable submitting it now. But, in true blogfest spirit, I will still be making the rounds of those who posted their pages to give them some feedback.

I would have liked to submit my first 250 words from Crow's Rest, but the rules stipulate that your sample must be from a completed novel. So I submitted the first 250 from Spirits from the Vasty Deep (from the prologue, actually).

Name: Angela Jackson, writing as Angelica R. Jackson
Title: Spirits from the Vasty Deep
Genre: YA Historical w/ a ghostly twist

(From the prologue)

"Where are you taking me?" I tried to plant my feet, but Miss Bonney roughly pulled me into motion again.

"I'm taking you to the east wing, to put an end to this superstitious nonsense once and for all," she answered, holding my arm in an iron grip. "I will solve two problems with one fell swoop—get some use out of that room, and cure you of lying."

"But I don't lie," I said, my breath coming in puffs as I trotted to keep up.

Miss Bonney snorted. "I suppose you deny telling the other girls the ghost of the groundskeeper and his dog walk the gardens? Or that Tabitha's late grandmother wanted to speak with her? Some of those girls haven't slept in a week. You're nearly ten years old, Olivia, you're getting too old for such stories."

"They're not stories—there are shades all around us, all the time. And I told the others they didn't need to fear these spirits, they don't mean us any harm."

Miss Bonney turned left into a long gallery, raising her candle to get her bearings. Cold and disused, this wing of the school reeked of decay and mildew. Quiet reigned at this end of the building; all the students would be getting ready for bed in their dormitories by now.

My curiosity about the forbidden wing outweighed any misgivings—until we approached the door at the far end. "What is this place?" I whispered, trembling as
I felt the weight of a presence beyond it.
----------------------------------------------

Looking forward to reading people's entries, and "meeting" some new writing friends!

And they're off!

I sent out my queries for Spirits from the Vasty Deep today; everybody cross their fingers for me!

Here's the "meat" of the query I sent out:

As a child, Olivia Herald encounters a malevolent spirit that is beyond any that she has perceived before—one that is so strong it can take physical form and harm the living. After that traumatic experience, she turns her back on her powers to communicate with the dead, fearing any contact with the spirits will expose her to further peril.

Years later, Olivia inadvertently creates an entire ship's worth of sinister spirits by causing the destruction of the Empyreal and its crew. The men are not entirely blameless; after all, they raped and murdered her companions, and intended to do the same to Olivia. An escape attempt is her only option, and she couldn't foresee that the fire she starts as a diversion will doom the Empyreal and its crew.

But now the ghostly crew wants retribution, and so do the authorities. While the prospect of a death sentence hangs over her, Olivia must rekindle her abilities to speak with the dead for the final reckoning with the vengeful Empyreal's crew.

Teaser Tuesday, new section from revisions

I've mentioned that I'm working on revisions for Those Lost at Sea and Drowned, and I wanted to post a section I've redone. The original version had Isabelle hearing her father's voice about a month after he'd killed himself (if you're new to the story, she can hear spirits but has renounced her powers after a terrifying childhood encounter in a haunted room) and shutting him out instantly, but I realized I'd missed a good opportunity to shed some light on what kind of relationship they'd had. So I'm trying this out:



Hoping that a good night's sleep would take the strain from my features, I went to bed while it was still light. As I was drifting off, I heard someone whisper my name.

"Papa?" I was still half asleep, but even in my groggy state my father's death seeped into my memory. "No—"

A pressure in my ears, and the voice came again, "Isabelle, listen . . ."

"No, I won't listen." I curled the pillow around my head. "Not even for my own father. That way madness lies, and I can't bear it."

"Filial ingratitude! In such a night to shut me out! Your old kind father . . ." His dramatic delivery ended in a chuckle and I wondered if he'd gone mad.

Despite myself, I sat up and was about to question him when I recognized his words from Shakespeare's King Lear. We'd made a game of it since I was a child—entire conversations trading lines from literary works.

"No, I will weep no more," I said, keeping to the same passage. "The tempest in my mind doth from my senses take all feeling. No more of that."

He must have gotten my meaning that if I let him in it would open the way for other spirits, for Papa did not speak up again. I squeezed my eyes shut and rolled into a ball, and eventually I dropped off to an undisturbed rest.

--------------------
P.S. go to the Novels page above or click on the Teaser Tuesday label to see more teasers from this book

"Hornworms" Live!

My middle-grade short story, Hornworms, is online with the newest issue of Hunger Mountain. Check out the other great YA and MG fiction and more--I feel my hornworms are in great company!

Teaser Tuesday!

I'm having a harder time selecting teasers that aren't also spoilers! This section picks up shortly after the disastrous dinner with the captain.


After that disastrous meal, Captain Lee invited us to dine in his cabin quite frequently. Repulsed by him and his friends, I rarely accepted again, but Doña Catherine often went by herself or with the other women.

I was given permission to go above as long as I stayed out of the crew's way, so I spent most of my evenings on deck. I found a spot in the bow where I could nestle down among the coils of anchor rope. From there, I could watch the sea roll to either side of the prow, or look up as the clouds streamed amongst the stars. Anyone climbing in the rigging could probably see me if they looked, but I could not be seen from the deck.

If conditions were just right, the crew's words fell on me like cinders on the wind. Too bad it was mostly ugliness I heard from the men. The longer we were at sea, the meaner and baser the crew became. Coarse jokes, petty quarrels, and drunken fights were the norm.

A typical example was a man called Taylor, a braggart who thought himself an artful wit. His group of hangers-on treated every one of his words as if it were on a par with Mr. Beau Brummel’s. If Taylor made a jest and someone didn’t laugh, he was bound to take his annoyance out on the humorless man’s flesh—his knife being much quicker than his intellect.

I felt safer walking the decks in the morning, when the watch changed and most of the crew were too groggy to bother me. I always stopped at the stall that held Doña Catherine's horse: a white Moorish stallion, gentle and patient. Doña Catherine loved Alud because he had faithfully carried her husband, not just for his value as a stud. Devoted to her in turn, the horse would nuzzle me all over, searching out every last essence of her scent on my clothes.

Tease from Ch. 3

Kind of a low-key section today, featuring an early conversation between Isabelle and Duncan (the Love Interest). The rescue ship is nearly to Jamaica, and Isabelle is worried about finding a way to support herself and Sonia, and a place to lodge, while they wait for word from the States on the sinking of the Empyreal.



"If you go to Antigua, my mother sometimes takes in boarders," Duncan said. "She can be very flexible about the rent."

She would have to be, since I had no money and little chance as yet of making any. "I should like to meet her," I said, "but I'm not sure how we'd even get to Antigua from Jamaica."

"Can you swim?" He sounded reasonable, but there was that mischievous light in his eyes again.

I had to smile. "Not well enough for that, I'm afraid. Besides, aren't there large fishes in these waters?"

"That depends on your meaning of large—there are certainly large whales, but they eat creatures small as your fingernail. To see a big fish, though, you should've been there when I caught the biggest grouper ever seen in the West Indies. I was just a boy and it outweighed me by fifty pounds —"

And so I was treated to an account, illustrated with gestures, of his ultimately unsuccessful encounter with a giant fish. At one point, another crewman walked by; he must have recognized the story.

"The big fish story. May the Lord have mercy on you, Miss—he's not even halfway through."

I laughed, but the crewman's comment only earned him a scathing look from Duncan as he continued. By the time he was finished, I had gotten into the spirit of the thing and he accomplished his mission of making me forget my cares momentarily.

Teaser Tuesday: A Little Exercise

I'm in the midst of a dialogue and point of view writing class with Naomi Williams and I thought I'd tease today with the results of an in-class exercise.

We were talking about the part that tense (present tense, past tense, etc) has to play in POV. The assignment was to share a true story (but it didn't have to be your own experience) and start out telling it in past tense, and then move into present tense. I immediately thought of this story, because it is still so vivid in my mind all these years later. Some details have been changed to protect the shamefaced.

In this assignment, we could choose to tell the story in past tense and then retell it in present tense, but Naomi told us to switch tense after five minutes of writing, right when I was going into dialogue. So I chose to make the dialogue in present tense and leave the exposition in past tense.

And I hope I don't have to keep posting warnings or disclaimers for my posts, but this does have some scatological crudeness in it.


I saw part of this play out, or I might not have believed the rest. Me and Joe were working the checkout near closing time, and the store was quiet even for a bookshop.

Then a girl came in, set down her duffle and struck up a conversation with Joe. Her accent struck me immediately: French with a nasally undertone. I stifled a grin; Joe wrote comic books, and the sexy villianesses or tramps often sported a Pepe-le-Pew dialect, so I knew she had his attention.

They left together, every fantasy he'd ever had about exotic foreign women writ large on his face. The next morning, he gave me the dirty details:

"She says right up front that she needs a place to crash, and she's willing to share my bed for the night. I take her back to my apartment and ply her with frozen burritos and St. Pauli Girl beer.

"The whole time we're eating and talking, there's this weird stench in my apartment. We both comment on it in passing. I check the garbage can, run the garbage disposal, sniff the refrigerator--nothing.

"It's not til I go into the bathroom to rummage for a condom that I see it, a giant turd that's been stewing in the toilet since this morning.

"I flush it (three times) and I feel like I have to say something about it when I go out. So I do, and I follow it up with "I understand if you don't want to stay now . . ."

"And, unbelievably, she does."


A note: when they left together, I genuinely expected his story the next day to include, "And when I woke up, she was gone, along with everything of value in my apartment."

Teaser Tuesday (Part 4 of 4)

And now, the conclusion of "Never Buy Another Self-Help Book Again!™," my short story. Some sexual language in parts one and three, so skip those if you're put off by that sort of thing.
Part One
Part Two
Part Three



I was still on the phone with Tammy when Steve came back in the door. He looked upset, so I got off the phone quickly. It turned out he wasn't mad at me; it was the cruise people.

One of the kitchen workers was diagnosed with hepatitis and all the passengers had been exposed to it. The cruise line was going to cancel the trip and give us vouchers for another ship, but the passengers raised such a stink that the new plan was to bypass Catalina and just cruise on to Mexico. Since we were going to be stuck on this ship together, Steve and I called a truce and tried to get along.

I thought we were doing fine until my phone rang at dinner. Before I could even find out who it was, Steve snatched it out of my hand. He ran over to the rail and pushed the talk button before he threw the phone over the side. I didn't say anything, though, because I hadn't heard him laugh like that for weeks.

Steve suggested that maybe he could do the planning from now on, and I agreed. I said I didn't care what we did, as long as it was spontaneous. He wasn't sure what I meant by that, so I told him all about the article I'd read and how it gave me the idea to plan this cruise. He goes, "Let me get this straight—the author says that to be spontaneous you have to make plans in advance?" I ignored his smart-ass comment for the sake of our truce.

The next day was better between us, but then the captain announced that because of the hepatitis we couldn't go to any of the cities we planned. One little coastal village was willing to overlook the chance of infection for the chance at some tourist dollars, but they would only let us anchor offshore, and we would have to go to town in lifeboats.

The first day in the pueblo we went to an old colonial church and then got something to eat from a street vendor. I ordered a burrito, but I got some kind of tough, grilled meat. The second day we went to a religious art museum, and that about covered the points of interest in town.

We did a lot of walking in the park instead. At first I was really bored—I mean, when you can start to tell the pigeons apart, you’ve spent too much time watching them. I kept wanting to pick up the remote and change the channel.

It was good in one way, though, because Steve and I talked and listened to each other better than we had in a long time. I rediscovered that in his way Steve is kind of wise, like Yoda but without the funny voice.

Steve told me there wasn't a self-help book in the world that held the secret to perfect happiness and that I would have to find it on my own. He even made a joke about how much money we would save by me giving up my habit of buying every new book that came out. When he put it that way, he almost made it sound like my relying on self-help books so much was some kind of addiction.

That was when I got my best idea yet for a career. I came up with a whole motivational workshop and video series on breaking the addiction to self-help books and called it "Never Buy Another Self-Help Book Again!"™ After we got back from the cruise and I started mapping out my plans for the "Never Buy Another Self-Help Book Again!"™ workbook, Steve seemed really supportive at first. But when he got to preview the finished video and workbook, he totally lashed out.

He had the nerve to say I wasn’t curing people of their addiction to self-help books, I was just regurgitating a bunch of ideas from other people’s books—in video format. And then he topped it off by mocking my workbook, laughing hysterically at the way it’s called "Never Buy Another Self-Help Book Again!"™ and it just happens to be a book. All he had to do was open the cover to see that it’s not a self-help book, it’s an individual-support companion to my videos.

Kristal was there for Steve’s tirade, and she warned me that I needed to get his bad spirit out of my life. So I divorced Steve, but I’m not alone on the road. Kristal quit her job and goes everywhere with me. Officially she's my manager, but emotionally she's my anchor. She even handles all the finances so that my math phobia doesn’t kick in and undermine my self-image. And who cares if we’ve been audited two years in a row—it’s got to be a government conspiracy.

Poetry today

Instead of teasing on this Tuesday, I'm spending the day submitting some poems and an article for reprint. While going through my files, I found this one that I wrote just after our dog Blue passed away. It's probably one that I'll never sell (too many sentimental dog poems appear in editors' inboxes!), so I decided to post it here.


Feeling Blue


The cat has her pick
Of the overlarge beds.
And at the dinner table,
My hand falls on empty air.

Teaser Tuesday--Prologue continued

I realized that a line got dropped in last week's teaser, so I'm backing up a bit and then finishing out the prologue this week. You can see the first part of the prologue here



I froze in place, holding my breath and straining to pick up the slightest noise. Suddenly, there was a flurry of whispers around me, dry and fluttery as the cries of moths. The voices of three girls, overlapping and swirling together, so agitated that I could only pick out a few words.

"You shouldn't be here—"

"Get out—"

"There is still time—"

My mouth was dry; it took me a few tries to ask, "What happened here?"

"We'll show you—" they said together.

Since I ordinarily could hear spirits but not see them, their cascade of images caught me unawares. I struggled to make sense of the pictures: this room filled with moonlight and candlelight, three girls weeping over a bloodied woman lying still on the carpet. And the figure looming over them, coming out of the shadows with axe raised and ready to strike.

I must have fainted; I came to on the floor, the scent of dust and old blood filling my nostrils. As I tried to re-orient myself, the whispers started again.

"You see? He's too strong."

"We tried to tell you—"

And then, "He's coming," and I felt I was alone again.

But I was not alone for long, as I saw the dust motes by the window begin to swirl and coalesce. The very air boiled, blood-red and seething as it took on the outline of a human form. I didn't wait to see more, stumbling in terror as I ran to the door.

I pressed my lips to a crack. "Miss Bonney, Miss Bonney! Please, you have to let me out!"

The steps on the other side were muffled, and far too slow. "Hurry!" I called. I spared a glance over my shoulder; the figure was becoming solid, I could see the man's wild hair and demented grin. This spirit looked substantial enough to do me real harm, and I scrabbled at the door in panic.

The key scraped into the lock, but Miss Bonney asked, "Are you ready to admit you were lying?"

"Yes, yes, I was lying," I cried. "Let me out!"

"I want to hear you say, 'There are no such thing as ghosts and I cannot communicate with the dead.'"

I heard a dragging step behind me as I repeated, "There are no such thing as ghosts and I cannot communicate with the dead."

The key rasped in the lock and the door opened in front of me, spilling me into the corridor. I rolled to my feet and ran down the gallery, hardly registering the sound of the door closing to muffle the frustrated roar beyond it.

I ran until my shaking legs would no longer support me, and one of the other teachers found me and took me to the infirmary. I lay in bed, raving, for four days, crying over and over, "There are no such thing as ghosts and I cannot communicate with the dead."

And with time—and much practice—the latter became true for me.

Nearly Haiku

Short post today, since I inflicted two long ones in a row on my readers. I'm always inspired to write poetry at the turning of the seasons, and despite today's weather feeling more like February than late May I thought I'd post a few of my short poems. I call this form "nearly Haiku":



After a rainstorm,
The grass comes alive
With earthworms and robins.


Lonesome mockingbird
Fills warm nights with his longing---
I would give him rest.



That last line should be read with a certain wry tone, which I'm sure you know if you've ever had a mockingbird singing outside your window ALL NIGHT LONG. My husband says it's only the bachelors that sing at night, so here's hoping our lonesome guy gets lucky.