Yikes, The Blog Tour is Tomorrow!!!

It's finally here. After months of work and chasing down blogs and reviewers, the blog tour is here. It starts tomorrow.

I'll be visiting a bunch of different blogs to do guest posts, have reviews done, and do giveaways of eBooks and a great Elemental Royals Prize Pack. Take a look at my upcoming events page to see where I'll be this month.

Here's what will be included in the Elemental Royals Prize Pack:

• Signed Paperback Copy of The Forest's Heir
• Forest's Heir mini-button
• Elemental Royals water bottle
• Team Gavin large button
• Team Andrew large button

I will also be giving away several copies of the eBook version of the book as well. You can check out the widget on the Blog Tour Giveaway page to enter the contest to win one of the eBooks or the prize pack.

I'm nervous about my first reviews from people who do book reviews for a "living." Even though they're hobbist bloggers and reviewers, they know what they're doing. I'm nervous.

End of the Month Stress Buster

And, oh boy do I need it this month!

This month's End of the Month Stress Buster is all about having fun. It's about returning to childhood, playing games, and watching cartoons.

Stress is sometimes a good thing. But too much stress makes our bodies and minds feel as if we're out of control. It makes us feel as if we can't solve the problems that our lives are putting in front of us. And one thing we can do to help us feel as if we're able to deal with those things is to allow ourselves to relax, even if it's just for a few hours. So this month, I want to go back to a time when the only thing stressful was choosing what kind of cereal to have in the morning.

So this month, I'm going to spend a day (the day before the blog tour to be exact) watching my favorite cartoons. I'm going to curl up in my favorite movie watching chair with some popcorn and M&Ms and watch Despicable Me and The Little Mermaid. I'm going to pull out my old VHS tapes of the Mickey Mouse Club and laugh at the gags that were hilarious when I was 7, but are so obviously bad now.

I'm going to have Count Chocula and ice cream covered in chocolate sauce and whipped cream. I'm going to sit in the floor and play with my dogs.

Sometimes getting rid of stress is all about taking yourself to a time when you felt as if you were in control. Being a child was all about a time when you could just be a kid. When your only responsibility was to have fun. That's what I'm doing this month. I'm going to have fun.

It doesn't mean the stress won't be there when the fun is over. But it will put me in a better mind space to deal with the stress.

Choosing a Good Title

Titles are important things. They're identifiers, names that bring a story into a world that have their own souls and lives. They're a way of giving life to something that was once just a set of words on a page. It pulls the entire thing together.

But choosing a title is hard. It's like choosing the name of your child. That's what a book is really. It's your baby. Something that is part of you, something that you're letting out into the world to make a difference.

Some books about writing say that you should have a working title when you're writing so that you have something to work with. They strongly suggest staying away from choosing a title from the start of a project. They say that choosing the title should be one of the last things that you do. Well, I don't listen to that kind of advice. For me, actually, the title is one of the FIRST things I do. I tend to build the story around a title that sticks in my head.

Sometimes my titles are inspired by song lyrics or things like that. Lines from movies.

Titles are very important things. And I always start with them. They sometimes change. But I always start with them.

I've tried before to write with a "working title" or no title at all, and it never really works for me. I always feel as if something important is missing. Like I don't truly know my story until I know it's name. And that's really important to me as a writer, to know my story. Even if I don't always know how it's going to end or where it's going to go next, I want to feel as if I know the soul of it. The tone and the ebb and flow.

That's what comes in the title.

The Blog Tour is Almost Here

Okay, now I'm starting to get antsy.

The blog tour is less than a week away.

My first major reviews from book reviewers. My first giveaway. My first set of guest posts on other blogs.

I'm a nervous wreck. I'm afraid of bad reviews. I'm afraid of good reviews. I'm afraid of reviews.

I've done something wrong. I've checked everything off my list, but heavens knows that I've done something wrong. Somewhere throughout the set of blog posts or review copies or something that I've sent out, there was something that went out to the wrong person or wasn't done right. I just know it.

Does every writer go through this? Is this normal?

I suppose I'll feel the same way on the 28th. Oh geeze, that's Friday. This is happening too fast.

Well, this is out there now, isn't it?

This writer is a nervous wreck for her first blog tour. I suppose every writer has been there at one point in time. Nervous. Anxious. Not sure about what's going to happen, what people will think about their work, the work that they spent so much time on.

So maybe all this is natural after all.

Bookstores, Credit Cards, and Me

I love going into bookstores when I go to the local mall. It's actually almost physically impossible for me to go into the mall and not take a detour into the mall just for a few minutes. I love the smell of the bindings and the paper. (And maybe the coffee shop that sits right by the door.) It makes me feel at home to be in the bookstore.

But it's dangerous to let me in a bookstore with money. Because there's a very real possibility that I'll come out of there with a bag full of books and absolutely no money. And I literally mean no money. It's happened before. Something comes over me when I go into bookstores with money. It's like I have a compulsion to spend every penny on the written word.

If there's someone with me--like my sister for instance--it's much harder for me to do something like that. I hold on to my money, and I don't end up spending it all on books. But I usually leave the store feeling frustrated that I saw so many wonderful titles that I don't get to take home with me. It makes me sad. And being sad around books is not something I like very much.

It's a bad idea to let me anywhere near a bookstore to start with. Mostly because it's easy for me to spend hours just browsing, even if I have no money to spend. I've been known to take up residence in an aisle and start reading summaries one after the other, snapping pictures of covers so I remember to put them on my reading list. My local bookstore has a couple people who know me, so I can get away with it without getting yelled at. Much.

I'd love to have my own bookstore. But I'd never sell books. I'd loan them out to people. Borrow a book, trade a book. Share a book. But I'd read every single one that came through my doors.

That's just what kind of reader I am.

"Coriolanus" from the Donmar Warehouse

So I've just gotten back from my viewing of Coriolanus through a broadcast from the Donmar Warehouse through National Theater Live. I've thought about what I would say throughout the drive home, and I find that I'm more than a little flabbergasted about what to say and how to put this thing. In simplest terms... it was breathtaking.

I'll be honest and say I wanted to see the play because Tom Hiddleston and Mark Gattis were in it. But I made myself read the play before I went to see it, and I found a new play in Shakespeare's repertoire that I could come to love. Just reading the play was brilliant, but seeing it performed, even on such a small scale as the Donmar, was wonderful.

The setting was grungy, but in the best possibly way. It was visceral and raw, and it captured the spirit of the play beautifully. There wasn't anything unnecessary on the stage or anywhere in the costumes or props. It was a play stripped down to its bones, and it was beautiful. I think it was perhaps the best way to do this play because that's what Coriolanus was. The story is about blood and pride, envy and the violence of battle. The stripped down bareness of the play made it more real and pulled me easier.

And while the play is billed as The Tragedy of Coriolanus, there were plenty of comedic bits in the play. Tom and Mark played up every chance they could to get a laugh, and it was often at a time to break up a great feeling of tension in the play. It was also a way for Coriolanus to present his scorn of the people, and it was enough to set the entire theater to laughing.

The staging, the casting, the interpretation of the words, everything was beautiful and perfect. It was Shakespeare done the way it was meant to be. Not flashy and on a scale that takes away all imagination, but as the Bard himself would have done it. Simple, yet powerful beyond imagining.

I had thought my favorite Shakespearean production from Tom was Henry V. But Coriolanus gives Hal a run for his money.

Why I Love Shakespeare

In honor of my chance to see Tom Hiddleston performing Coriolanus today, I thought I'd blog about the Bard himself. The man who changed the face of theater for the entirety of the world. William Shakespeare.

Like everyone, I had to read Shakespeare in high school. Probably Hamlet, Macbeth or Romeo and Juliet. I'll admit that I liked all of those plays, even though my classmates would moan and groan about how horrible it was to read this Elizabethan language that was so hard to understand. But I loved it. I enjoyed reading Shakespeare. Especially the histories. My favorite play of all of Shakespeare's plays is probably Henry V, although Much Ado About Nothing comes in a very close second.

Shakespeare's comedies were funny and tragic at the same time, his tragedies were so tragic that it broke your heart, and his histories were so sweeping that they were breathtaking. His characters were real and relatable. Hard to play but easily understood.

My favorite thing about Shakespeare is that he was an amazing storyteller. He could describe human nature in ways that no one before him had ever described. It was something that made his plays so popular, especially among the common people.

I definitely don't want this to become something like a high school essay on Shakespeare, so I'll end it here. But I will definitely be blogging tomorrow to let you know how Coriolanus was. Although I thoroughly expect it to be fantastically amazing. 

And just to clear up a very long-standing misconception that is a pet-peeve of mine, Romeo and Juliet is NOT a love story. It's a tragedy. That's why it's called The TRAGEDY of Romeo and Juliet.