Anna's Blog
Autumn!
October 15th, 2010It’s autumn here! I love autumn. It’s quite possibly my favorite season. I love the leaves changing colors and the crisp autumn smell in the air. The bright, clear-blue autumn skies and the misty, foggy mornings. Mittens and apples and cozy warm sweaters.
And I love how having little ones around makes even something like the changing seasons new again, seeing it all through my girls’ eyes. I notice so many things I’d never thought about or realized before. For example, did you know that there is a weevil that lays eggs inside acorns? And that if you, say, have a 1 and 3 year old who collect acorns in buckets and carry them home to make a collection, the eggs will hatch in the night and you will wind up with little wriggling larvae all over your living room floor?
You really don’t want to know how I know that.
But I really do love autumn!
Today I’m over at Writer Unboxed, blogging about ways of incorporating backstory into your novel. Stop by!
I have a blog post I’ve been meaning to write all week all about Isolde’s relationship with her grandmother Morgan and Morgan’s voice in Dark Moon of Avalon. Complete with research and thoughts on the Celtic view of spirituality and life after death and the Otherworld.
And instead I’ve got maggots and a redirect to Writer Unboxed. Hmmm. That may say something about my life as a writer if only I think about it long enough. But no time now. I’ve got to go for a walk with my girls in the crisp autumn air and watch Bella climb trees and crunch leaves under our feet. I think we’ll leave the acorns outside, though.
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Extras!
September 25th, 2010I have a whole list of mentions and announcements that I should have made long ago, but . . .
(Me still buried under a pile of curly-haired girls. Who have apparently decided that napping is for sissies).
They’re now out with their dad collecting acorns in buckets on our lawn, though, so I have a minute to type. First of all, I have a new page on the site with an interactive family tree of my Arthurian characters. Many have pointed out that all the relationships in the Twilight of Avalon trilogy get a bit confusing–so here’s a chart that should (I hope!) help make sense of it all.
Also, if you’d like a signed copy of one of my books but don’t live in the DC Metro area? My media department (aka my mum) has designed some gorgeous bookplates that I’m happy to sign and mail to anyone who’d like one. Just e-mail me a snail mail address and I’ll get one sent out to you!
And lastly, I’ve done several guest posts/interviews in the last week or two for the Dark Moon release. More to come shortly, but here are a few:
ttp://www.romancejunkies.com/rjblog/?p=903
http://www.bookdivas.com/blog/2010/09/timeless-romance-anna-elliott
http://novelthoughts.wordpress.com/2010/09/20/happy-endings-with-anna-elliott/
http://bookbitch.blogspot.com/2010/09/healing-hearts-dark-moon-of-avalon.html
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Speak Out
September 22nd, 2010I mostly try to keep my blog a positive, controversy free zone where I talk about my books and how cute my kids are, not necessarily in that order. But there are a couple of buttons that can be pushed to make me step outside of that. And unfortunately Wesley Scroggins, an associate professor of management at Missouri State University, jumped on one of those buttons with both feet this past week.
Many may have heard of this already, but Speak is a novel by acclaimed young adult novelist Laurie Halse Anderson. It is the story of a teen girl’s struggle with the aftermath of a brutal rape. Wesley Scroggins is urging that Speak be banned from schools on the grounds that it is ‘soft pornography.’
Now, when I type ‘pornography’ into my computer’s dictionary ap, the definition that pops up is: printed or visual material containing the explicit description or display of sexual organs or activity, intended to stimulate erotic feelings. In other words, sexy, if you’re into that kind of thing.
One of the themes of Dark Moon of Avalon, my second book, is healing from sexual violence. While I was writing, I spoke with survivors of date rape. I read the accounts of countless others. I have heard rape described as ‘soul murder,’ have heard from women who describe the aftermath as running through the classic five stages of grief over death.
This is not sexy.
To label an account of a brutal rape as ‘pornography’? Good God, this is exactly the kind of attitude that keeps rape victims silent, that causes countless girls and women to spiral into depression and other self-destructive behavior, thinking that it ‘must somehow be my fault.’
Laurie Halse Anderson has blogged eloquently on this topic on her own blog here. And there is also a Twitter feed where people can share opinions.
To close, sexual violence is not pornography. Sexual violence is a crime. To anyone who reads Speak and honestly finds it pornographic, I’d like to offer this quote, from Carlos Ruiz Zafón: Books are mirrors: you only see in them what you already have inside you.
—
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Meet Team Elliott
September 14th, 2010It’s publication day! Dark Moon of Avalon is officially out in the world!
I get asked very often about how, as a mother of 2 young children, I manage to do it all. The answer is, I don’t. I really don’t. I may write the books, but for the rest, I have my entire family standing behind me backing me up and reaching, octopus-like, for all the balls I could never keep up in the air on my own. They’re so great. I can’t honestly remember who came up with the name Team Elliott. Mum? Dad? Husband? All are good possibilities. But without them, my books would never, ever make it onto the bookshelves. So to celebrate the book launch of Dark Moon of Avalon, I’d like to give you a peek behind the scenes and introduce you to the team. (And these are in no particular order, believe me, every member is a key player on this team).
Team Elliott member 1: my husband, Nathan.
When I was an aspiring writer, he always there to dry my tears every time a rejection letter came. Now he’s my webmaster, research assistant, business manager, full-time co-parent . . . he has so many hats I have no idea how he wears them all.
Team Elliott member 2: my dad.
Besides teaching me to write in the first place, my dad is one of my first readers, giving me invaluable feedback at every step of the process. He’s also been known to respond–in the middle of his own busy workday, too!–to my plea for help on writing jacket cover copy. He’s that awesome.
Team Elliott member 3: my mom.
Ahhh, that tiny baby in the picture is now walking and talking! How did that happen?! But anyway, in her guise as Book Trailer Magic, my video-production trained mom makes all my trailers. She designs magnets and bookplates for free giveaways, babysits my children . . . I definitely chose well when I picked her for my mother!
Team Elliott member 4: my mother-in-law
My lovely mother-in-law travels to visit us nearly every month to help out. She plays with my girls, who purely adore her, so that I can squeeze in a bit of extra writing time. And further amazing things happen while she’s here–mountains of laundry in the basement gets folded! Ready-made meals appear in my freezer! My house gets dusted! Truly a miracle.
Team Elliott member 5: My father-in-law:
My father-in-law doubles as a handyman/publicist. He arrives for a visit and instantly starts taking care of all the around-the-house projects we never have time for ourselves. He hands out my business cards at nearly every gathering he attends, too.
Team Elliott members 6 and 7: my curly-haired girls:
(me being buried under a pile of curly-haired girls)
I once heard an author threaten to dedicate her book: ‘To my children, without whom this book would have been finished sooner.’ Which made me laugh. But truly, without my two girls, I would never have been able to write the books I do. My girls make the whole world new again by letting me see it through their eyes, crack my heart open and let me feel a million times more deeply than I ever could have before. They are also very handy at combatting procrastination. Nothing gets me running to the computer like the knowledge that the clock is ticking on the end of nap-time.
I have a whole legion of adjunct team-members, too–like my writing partner Sarah, beta-reader Shanra and so many wonderful book bloggers who have showed enthusiasm and support for Trystan and Isolde.
How do authors without a team of their own possibly manage? I have no idea. I’m so, so lucky to have my team in my corner, though! So I dedicate this release day to you all: Dark Moon of Avalon and I would never have made it this far without all of you!
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Dawn of Avalon
September 13th, 2010It’s here! It’s here! Dark Moon of Avalon will be officially released tomorrow, and to celebrate I’m giving away a prequel story, Dawn of Avalon, for free download here. It will soon be up on the Kindle store and other e-book stores around the web, too.
And click here to watch the Dawn of Avalon trailer:
The internet and the development of e-books have truly revolutionized the publishing world, and now offer so many new ways for writers to connect on-line with readers. It’s fantastic! I’ve been able to offer these short stories, and a fellow blogger of mine at Writer Unboxed, Sharon Bially, has come up with the revolutionary idea of turning her whole novel into a blog! Her serialized novel, Veronica’s Nap, goes live today. It’s the story of a young mother and aspiring artist living in the south of France who’s stuck in the habit of procrastinating and indulging in naps while a nanny watches her two-year-old twins. Stop by and read the first post–I did, and I was hooked!
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Dark Moon trailer
September 9th, 2010With all the excitement about the short stories, I’ve nearly forgotten to post here about Dark Moon of Avalon. But it’s just hit me today that the release date is less than a week from now! And I really am so excited to share this story. I shouldn’t play favorites, but it many ways it was my favorite of the three Trystan and Isolde books to write.
I’ll be posting more as the release date gets closer, of course. But for now here’s the Dark Moon of Avalon book trailer, just to give everyone a peek at what’s to come.
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For more information . . .
September 5th, 2010I get asked quite often about the research I do for my books. Now, I LOVE research. Love it. If I weren’t a writer, I would be a historian, I love diving into the primary sources and scholarly studies and archaeology reports SO MUCH. I can go to the library and come out with a 3 foot high stack of books (just ask my poor husband who has to carry them home) and feel like my birthday has come early.
So, yes, I do tons of research. Tons that never even makes it into the books, because of course as a writer you want to avoid at all costs the dreaded ‘info dump’. Or as Diana Gabaldon famously puts it, the “I’ve done the research and now you’re going to pay” mentality.
I have all these ideas for pages I could make on this website: all sorts of articles and essays with the research that doesn’t make it into the books. More on Dark Age history, more on the settings of the Twilight of Avalon trilogy. But . . . I have these two little curly-haired girls:
(me with curly haired girl #2)
And I also have this part of my brain that demands writing time each day. A part of my brain that sits in a grumpy huddle if it does not get to spend part of the day immersed in a story. I keep trying to convince this part of my brain that making new non-fiction pages for my website counts as writing time. This grumpy part of my brain is not convinced. In fact, it threatens dire consequences if it is asked to go without writing time on days when I have to nurse the baby while taking a plunger to the toilet that my three year old has clogged while also helping said three year old to untangle herself from the shirt she has gotten stuck over her head. (True story). So . . . I don’t yet have any fancy new pages with in-depth essays on the history behind my books. Not yet.
BUT, this is when it is amazingly wonderful to have friends. Because my fantastic writing partner Sarah Woodbury runs a blog in which she posts weekly about various topics related to Welsh history. And for these weeks leading up to the release of Dark Moon of Avalon, she is blogging about topics related specifically to Dark Moon. I’m going to make these links permanent on the Dark Moon page, but for now, take a wander over to her site to read more about the position of women in Dark Age Britain, Dinas Emrys, where Merlin famously uncovered warring dragons buried under the ground, and much, much more.
Thanks, Sarah! (from me and my grumpy writer brain). You’re the best!
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Stay Tuned . . .
September 2nd, 2010Thanks so much to everyone who has downloaded and read The Witch Queen’s Secret! I hope you’re enjoying it! I had such a wonderful time writing it and am so excited to get to share it with the world.
My husband designed the cover art. Did I mention that? And I didn’t even have to coat his fingers with jelly to get him to do it. He is just so great. Do I deserve him? Wait, don’t answer that.
And now he’s created another gorgeous cover, which is coming VERY soon! Here it is if you’ve missed seeing it on the site elsewhere:
The title is Dawn of Avalon, and it’s a prequel featuring Morgan and Merlin. Now, my husband, though clearly the best husband ever, is not really much of a fiction reader. If he weren’t married to me, would he ever voluntarily pick up a fiction book? Kinda doubtful.
We’ve been married long enough to communicate solely through raised eyebrows and twitches if need be and I can spill my heart and soul to him, but I don’t usually talk to him too much about the details of whatever I’m in the process of writing–any more than he talks to me in detail about the computer program he’s working on. (He works on computational models of hypersonic fluid dynamics. I’m pretty sure. And you now know almost as much as I do about it). So anyway, he is always–and I find this hugely funny–always kind of surprised when he reads one of my books in its final form. A typical conversation:
Nathan, having just read something I’ve written: Wow, that is just really, really well phrased. Did you come up with that yourself?
Me: Um, honey? Remind me what it is I do for a living again?
However, in addition to making the cover, my man has now READ Dawn of Avalon. And he says he thinks it’s ‘some of my best writing’. And Nathan, the scientist/physicist/mathematician who would never voluntarily pick up a fiction book, pronounces the language ‘really pretty.’ That may be my favorite compliment EVER!
So anyway, please stay tuned for Dawn of Avalon, I really am so, so excited to share this story!
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I’d Know You Anywhere
August 30th, 2010I usually dream in novel plots. Is this a writer thing? I just assumed everyone dreamed this way, but then I asked my husband and he looked at me like I had two heads. So, writer thing? Just me? I’m not sure, but I would say that in probably 90% of my dreams I’m not actually ‘me’. Instead I’m a character in whatever novel plot my sleeping brain has come up with.
Last night my brain fiddled around with the usual few short flashes of dreams that the kids are crying or whatever, then settled on High School Romance for the night’s story. I was . . . hmmm, now that I’m actually writing it down, it’s a bit hard to explain the dream logic. I was more ‘me’ than I sometimes am in dreams. But I was in high school again, and it wasn’t the real high school I actually went to but some fictional school. So this dream-me, Anna-ish sort of person had a best friend, who was a dream-my husband, Nathan-ish sort of person. (My brain was conveniently overlooking the fact that we didn’t actually know each other in high school). Anyway, he was my husband but not, if that makes sense. To the dream Anna, he wasn’t even a love interest, he was a best friend who happened to be in a mental institution with some sort of severe condition that made him lucid only part of the time. (There was a whole sub plot with an evil nurse who was over-medicating him, too–very exciting, but I’ll spare you the crazy dream details). So me, the dream me, that is, arrived at the mental institution to visit, and the dream Nathan, my husband but not, was drugged almost unconscious. But he woke up a little when I came in and said, “I got you some roses” and sure enough there were red roses all over his antiseptic white walled hospital room. He’d had some sort of violent episode the previous time I’d come to visit, and he’d been afraid I wouldn’t come back.
Like I said, to the dream me, he wasn’t a love interest, just a best friend, but he was getting agitated, so with perfect dream logic I climbed up on the bed and rested my head on his chest. And then . . . it was the strangest feeling. I could feel my–my consciousness, soul, whatever you want to call it–I could feel my spirit sinking down, down, through and past the layers of whatever mental condition he had, through the layers of his physical body, even, until our souls, spirits, whatever you want to call them, actually touched.
And that’s when I recognized him.
In my dream, the Anna-ish high school me thought, Crap, this is going to be really tough, because I’m going to marry him, and it’s going to be hard to convince my parents that I should marry a mental patient while still in high school. But that’s it–I can’t marry anyone else.
And then I woke up. It was pre-dawn, which meant I had just a couple of precious hours before the girls woke up. But strangely I lay there, in no hurry to even try to fall back to sleep. I mean, it was a relief to realize that it was just a dream and my husband is not, in fact, a high school student in a mental institution. (Honey, I’m here and now sparing you the trouble of adding the obvious joke in comments that you may become a grad student in a mental institution if getting your PhD drags on much longer. You know you totally were going to).
But anyway, I lay there, staring at the ceiling, because I wanted to hold onto that strange spirit-to-spirit, I’d know you anywhere feeling as long as I could. Which is why, too, I’m writing this down. Because just like the vividness of a dream fades so quickly it’s often gone almost before you can remember it at all, it’s so easy to get caught up in the day to day busy-ness of work, kids, life, chores, no matter how much you love your husband. But . . . I really do love the guy, you know? I really would know him anywhere.
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Eat Pray Love
August 27th, 2010Have you read The Witch Queen’s Secret yet? Oh, please, please go read The Witch Queen’s Secret! It’s free! And I love Dera SO much, I just want everyone else to read about her and love her, too.
But that actually wasn’t why I was blogging today. I was blogging because this week I finally read Eat Pray Love by Elizabeth Gilbert. And I know Elizabeth Gilbert is (probably) not staying awake nights waiting to hear what I thought of her multi-million copy selling book. But it seems like everyone is talking about it just now with the movie coming out and everything. And since I only just picked up a copy for the first time this week, I thought I’d add my two cents:
I really, really loved it. (Yes, yes, I know, Elizabeth Gilbert is even now breathing a huge sigh of relief.) But I really did. And not just because it is funny and smart and touching and well written. Though it certainly is.
Apart from the fact that we are both writers from Connecticut (and as I’m sure you’ll agree would–clearly–both look really great with Julia Roberts playing us in movies), my life could pretty much not be more different from Elizabeth Gilbert’s during the year she wrote about. She had four months of focusing on the experience of pleasure in Rome. The other day, I asked my husband to watch the girls (ages 3 and 1) for five minutes so that I could run into the pharmacy and buy myself a new bottle of shampoo. And practically danced my way up and down the personal care products aisle singing ‘I’m on VACATION!’ She spent 4 months in a spiritual retreat in India praying and meditating for hours on end every day. I typically have 10 seconds to utter a prayer for patience so that my head doesn’t spin around like the girl in The Exorcist when my 3 year old drop kicks the training potty all over the carpet.
But here’s the thing: I still found it incredibly uplifting to read her book, and not just in a ‘I wish I could do something like that someday’ kind of way.
I was talking to my dad (who hadn’t read the book) about the whole idea, and he said, ‘So basically she just pays attention to herself for a year.’ And on the surface, I suppose that’s true in a way. But that’s really not the point. Yes, she spent a year focusing on herself and rebuilding her life after a painful divorce. But through that year, she got to a spiritual place that most of us only ever dream of–and then she turned around and gave that year BACK to everyone who reads her book. Gave it back 7 million times, or whatever the exact sales figures are. And it’s a really, really powerful gift, wherever you are in life, whether you’re recently divorced or happily married to your best friend.
I read the ‘Rome’ section, and I started to think, This all sounds amazing, all this focus on the experience of pure, unalloyed pleasure. But would I trade even one single day with my husband and my girls for a whole eternity of being on my own in Rome? Not even for one single second would I consider that trade. So, okay, given that I would chose my husband and girls in a heartbeat every time, how about I try to focus on experiencing that same pure, unalloyed pleasure in my life with them, every minute of every day. I mean, when the baby is enchanted by the delight of playing in running water from the sink faucet for the very first time, what if I just focused on sitting there, in that moment, purely loving her delight. Instead of half purely loving it, half purely thinking, Okay, after this I have to fold the laundry, then answer those three e-mails, and maybe if I hurry I can . . .
What would happen if I did that every day, just focused on how much I love being a wife and mama and writer?
I’m pretty sure I’d need that ‘please stop my head from spinning around like the girl in the Exorcist’ prayer a lot less often, for one thing.
And prayer? She has this wonderful section where she talks about the highest form of prayer being pure love. And there’s a line of writing in my own religious tradition that talks about ‘prayer that shall rise above words and letters and transcend the murmur of syllables and sounds.’ What if I tried that more often, even in those little snippits of time I have to think about spirituality and conversing with the Divine? Better yet, what if I tried to make my entire LIFE–mothering my girls, writing my books–into an act of pure love, one that transcends the murmur of syllables and sounds?
I only read this book last night, so the jury is still out, but I’m going to go out on a limb and guess that it would be pretty freaking powerful.
So there you go. I loved the book. Elizabeth Gilbert can now sleep at night.
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