Laura's latest fantasy

He's strapped to a chair in the middle of a darkened conference room. My PowerPoint presentation is ready to roll, and I've included passages from my latest WIP. I run my laser pointer along the green squiggly line beneath the sentence on screen.

"This is not a fragment!" I yank the ball gag from his mouth. "Say it, Mr. Gates."

He pants and turns away.

"Bill! Up here! Do you see that noun?"

He nods, his odd bowl-cut hair style making him look more like a bobble-head figurine than the most the powerful man in the techno world.

"And do you see this verb?" He squints. I slap my riding crop across the screen. "This verb is functioning as the predicate." He nods, but slower this time.

"I asked your annoying little paper clip friend to explain this, and he said, 'If the words marked are an incomplete thought, consider...adding a subject or verb....' Hell-o! Am I missing something here?"

"No, Miss Laura."

"Then what are you going to do about this?"

"Tweak."

"Tweak?" I ran my hand down his shirt, found a nipple, and did a little tweak of my own.

"Yes, Miss Laura."

"Damn straight, you'd better tweak." I uncuffed him.

Word 2006 ver.LB was delivered to my doorstep the very next day...

***

Join me next week, when I bitch-slap Bill for changing my spelling when I damn sure know it's right...

(Yeah, I know. I can turn this feature off, but it's saved my ass a few times. Oy! What's a girl to do???)

Surprise!!!

Wow.

I just popped the new Neil Simon in. It was produced by the almighty Brian Eno. I can guaran-damn-tee there won't be much writing going on tonight.

www.paulsimon.com

Another surprise today was seeing Part IV of Educating Ian up at Ruthie's Club. It was slated to be featured in June (unless I read the author schedule wrong - which is entirely possible), but I'm glad it's up. It's a tad on the brutal side, and, when I finish the whole thing and start looking to publish it, I wonder if this chapter can stay.

We'll see...

It just ain't normal

I'm in the process of wrapping up Taming the Tiger, my paranormal novella for Midnight Showcase. It's rough going at this point for two reasons:

1)It's set in ancient China.
2)It's a paranormal.

The first one is tough because, as I go through and edit what I've written, pesky modern words and phrases keep popping up. I find it really challenging to stay in the right kind of mind-set to avoid these anachronisms.

The second, well, I probably deserve a beating from all the talented paranormal authors out there. For some fool reason, I've been under the impression that magic and psychic phenomena would be easy to write. Not so.

Making the unbelievable believable is awfully hard. How out there am I allowed to get? Can I honestly pull this off? Self-doubt creeps in and makes itself at home. But things have gotten considerable easier since I started thinking of the mystical stuff like I think of world-building for a futuristic tale.

As I enter the home stretch, wish me luck.

Here's how I imagine my hero, Zhong Li. In my head, though, he's older and a bit more built.



And here's my heroine, Ju Hua, as played by the beautiful actress Kathleen Luong: