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Life On The Fringe: Yasmine's Mirrored Blog The caffeinated ramblings of author Yasmine Galenorn

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Yasmine Galenorn

Yasmine Galenorn


Last Updated: 7/3/2009

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Gender: Female
Sign: Capricorn

City: Seattle Area
State: Washington
Country: US

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July 6, 2009 - Monday 
Okay, several things today, quick-like.

First: on Twitter, my assistant Justine is now using this account: http://www.twitter.com/GeekGyrlFriGEV to carry out her official work for me. I’m not following many people, due to time constraints, but will be answering questions sent to me on the blog.

Second: I keep getting questions on Facebook, MySpace, and Twitter about who my publisher is, what my books are about, etc.. Peeps, please check my website for information before asking . Every book I’ve written is listed, along with the publisher of said book, you’ll find info about me, about my forums, about the fan club, everything there. That’s what the website is for—and it saves both my assistant Justine and my husband time if they don’t have to answer these same questions over and over. A little legwork is not going to hurt you. Writers have to do research all the time. It’s not difficult. ~grins~

Third: When you enter my contests, please READ the directions/instructions. And please do NOT enter after the contest closes. You won’t be eligible and it just makes more work for us. I also get annoyed because that means you didn’t bother reading the rules and probably didn’t enter correctly. And if I’m giving away what are –at times- expensive gifts, then I expect people to at least abide by the contest rules. The winners of the Dancing in the Streets contest will be announced later this week.

Fourth: I got a question about playlists today. Yes, I use a different playlist for each book, and each playlist shakes out over the writing of the book. Some songs get added, some get deleted. You can see the final lists for each book on my website, on the page for that particular book. The most recent two are: Bone Magic and Night Myst. How do I create them? I have to have it done before I write the first page of the book. I go through and think about the book to come and what I know will happen and what I think will happen. And certain songs will ‘stand out’ to me as I look through my WinMedia Player. I’ve got all my music burned on my computer. As I write the book, some songs never get played so I remove them. Others get played over and over. Still others get added.

As far as a suggestion on Facebook to use classical music—while I enjoy a lot of classical music, it doesn’t play into my writing much at all. The music has to fit the feel of the book to me.

So, here’s the first draft picks for the Harvest Hunting playlist (Delilah’s third book). Enjoy!

Yasmine

3 Doors Down: Kryptonite
Aerosmith: Sweet Emotion
Al Stewart: Life in Dark Water

Beck:
Farewell Ride
Nausea

Bob Seager: Turn the Page
B.O.C.: (Don't Fear) The Reaper
Bravery, The: Believe
Cher: The Beat Goes On
Cobra Verde: Don't Play With Fire
Cream: I Feel Free
Crosby, Stills & Nash: Woodstock

David Bowie: Golden Years

Doors:
Not To Touch The Earth
Strange Days

Everlast:
What It's like
Mercy on My Soul

Fleetwood Mac: The Chain

Gabrielle Roth:
Black Mesa
Zone Unknown

Gary Numan:
Innocence Bleeding
Dominion Day
Down in the Park
Dream Killer
Hybrid
My Shadow in Vain
Prophecy
She's Got Claws
Stormtrooper in Drag
The Angel Wars
Tread Careful

Heather Alexander:
Blood Brothers
Fallen Angel
March of Cambreadth
Wolfen One

Jace Everett: Bad Things

Jethro Tull:
Mountain Men
No Lullaby
Rocks on the Road

Lee Dorsey: Give it Up
Little Big Town: Bones
Low: Half Light
Neil Young: Ohio

Nirvana:
Lake of Fire
Plataeu

Ringo Starr: It Don't Come Easy
Simple Minds: Don't You (Forget About Me)
Stealers Wheel: Stuck in the Middle With You

Tangerine Dream:
Beaver Town
Dr. Destructo
Grind
Hyde Park

Thompson Twins: Sister of Mercy
Tina Turner: I Can't stand the Rain

Tori Amos:
Blood Roses
Muhammad My Friend

Zero Seven: In the Waiting Line
8:04 PM 
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July 3, 2009 - Friday 
I've got a new post up on my Gluten Free Kitchen Witch blog.

Yasmine
8:09 PM 
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July 1, 2009 - Wednesday 

Current mood:  busy
Bone Magic now available for pre-order and Inked now available for pre-order!

I'll have more of a blog up later this week. :)

Yasmine
6:25 PM 
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June 28, 2009 - Sunday 
If you can't see the video, here's the link. And yes, as usual, I made it. *grins*

Hope you like it.

Yasmine




9:07 PM 
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June 27, 2009 - Saturday 
Hi again. Been awhile since I did a regular blog so here we go. I’m so glad you all love the cover for Bone Magic—I’m over the moon ecstatic about it and so happy. It’s perfect, and fits the mood of the book so well.

Next: for my Facebook friends, please do not IM my assistant when she’s taking care of my account. I’ve instructed her to ignore any IMs because her time is to be spent helping me, not chatting. Please leave all questions on the wall or in a message for me and she’ll relay them to me for answering in blogs.

Which brings me to: I’ve reached a point again where I’ll be answering most questions I get from MS, Twitter, and FB on my blog. Please rest assured, I’ll see them, and answer what I can here. I’m exhausted from finishing Night Myst and the Demon Mistress promo, and need to consolidate time, and time is a valuable commodity for me anymore. Also: there is far more information on both my website and the fan site than you will ever, ever find here, on MySpace, or Facebook or any other social networking site so always check if you don’t know. Check before asking simple questions like ‘when is the next book out’…and if you look on my MySpace profile—really look at the banners—you’ll see the dates there.

So yes, I did finish Night Myst, and it’s on my editor’s desk and I so hope she likes it because I love it. I’m going to start work in about a week on Harvest Hunting—Delilah’s third book.

Time for Reader Questions:

First: rumor control time again!

No, the OW series is NOT ending with book number 9, not if everything falls into place when it comes time for a new contract. Just because I’m only contracted through book 9 doesn’t mean that’s the last one. Please, sign up for my newsletter on the front page of my website and you’ll get current news each month, plus a few little extras. Or check my website when in doubt. If the news doesn’t come through me or official channels such as Samwise or my assistant Justine, then don’t repeat or believe it until you find out for sure.

And no—Bone Magic is not going to be hardback—it will be paperback. Yes, I’d love to go HB—it’s such a cool thing to hold a HB in hand (I love them and buy my fave authors in them), but that is not what’s planned for me at this time. It’s up to the publisher, not the author, and I asked and they said paperback so yes, you’ll be able to pick up both Bone Magic and Inked instead of thinking about one or the other.

And no, Demon Mistress was NOT a standalone book in the OW series—it was definitely in the story arc and was book 6. Bone Magic is book 7, and follows on the heels of Demon Mistress.

Now to reader questions:

Question: When will you put your Sims characters/houses up through Sims Exchange?

Answer: Well, I’ll at least do screenshots as soon as I recreate them in Sims 3. The one problem I have is that sometimes, they don’t have the variations I really need, but with Sims 3, it will be much easier to make them. And I’ll think about the Sims Exchange in the meantime.

Someone on Twitter asked Delilah (yes, the sisters have an account there): What’s your favorite catnip toy?

Answer: I can tell you that Delilah’s favorite toys are catnip fuzzy mice, and bugs that are crunchy and oh-so-good-to-munch! ~grins~

People have been asking how Morgana’s doing. Our vet agreed with me that she was a good three weeks younger than we were told when we got her, which would have put her at around the tail end of 5 weeks when we picked her up. I figured that—she was soooo tiny and still looking for Mama. She’s blossomed out over the past month since we brought her home. She’s happy and perky and loves her sisters, and she follows them everywhere. Everybody’s accepted her now—I even caught Meerclar and Morgana (whom we call Morgan for short) playing the Chase-Me—Chase-You game today! It’s wonderful to have a full house again. I put together a slide show the other day of the Gurlz. Enjoy! (in case the show doesn't load, here's the link: HERE.

..

Currently listening:
True Blood
By Original TV Soundtrack
Release date: 2009-05-19
4:13 AM 
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June 26, 2009 - Friday 

Current mood:  blissful
Bone Magic 

I LOVE IT!
12:38 AM 
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June 23, 2009 - Tuesday 

Current mood:  hyper
I’m on the last mile, the last gasp. Somewhere, ahead, is the buried treasure and I’ve got to get there and rescue it by deadline or I’m in trouble. Along the way, I’m fighting off the Maleficent Seven—Exhaustion, Temptation, Backache, Eyestrain, Tendonitis, Sleep-Deprivation, and Self-doubt. Yep, we’re meeting at the corral, and it’s either me…or them.

So yes, once again I’m down to the wire with a book. No matter how much time I have, I seem to fill it with the current project. Although to be fair to myself, this was the first book in a new series and they always take longer—in my opinion—because of the worldbuilding and finding the new characters’ voices and so forth. Especially when you’re an organic writer and you don’t really follow an outline or much of a synopsis.

I’m at the end, though, of Night Myst, the first Indigo Court book, and am just finishing up final revisions before I send it to my editor. At this point, sleep becomes moot, my mind is totally filled with the book, and I'm going through looking for everything that could jar the reader out of the world. I'm fine-tuning, editing, revising, nitpicking...making sure the damned thing works, and I'm working a good 14-16 hours a day on it.

And I’m proud of it so far—it’s what I wanted it to be, though not what I expected it to be. How’s that possible? Because I go in with a mood in mind, a vision of a painting or scene and the basic knowledge of the main characters, and I try to create that mood, the ‘feeling’ that the idea tackled me with. And even though along the way all sorts of characters join the dance, and events happen that I never planned to happen, if I come out with a story that’s solid and strong and where the mood resonates with my initial vision, then I know I’ve done my job.

Each book I write has a playlist and that begins before I even put one word on the page. The playlist is usually long, and built around the mood I was talking about, and it too, evolves, through the writing of the book. Songs are deleted, songs are added, one or two songs will come through as the theme songs for the book. You can find the playlist for every book that I’ve written since Witchling on my website, by the way, under the individual book’s description. Before Witchling, I didn’t write much to music—I wasn’t writing in a genre in which I was all that comfortable with and couldn’t focus on music and the work too. But over the past few years, that’s all changed.

For Night Myst, the three main ‘theme’ songs became:


Half Light by Low and tomanandy (the main song from the Mothman Prophecies, a freaky-assed movie I saw that has a similar mood to what I wanted to evoke from the book)
The Angel Wars by Gary Numan (my fave singer of all time…sigh….)
Social Enemies by Orgy




(http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dY-LaFHAfQc if you can't see the video).

When I get to this point in the book, I want it done. All done. And yet, I inevitably begin to cry when I’m finished and press that ‘send’ button and ship off the manuscript to my editor. It’s like opening the door and kicking your baby out into the wide, big world and you pray that you’ve given it all that it needs to not only survive, but thrive.

And since I make it a rule to write clean, I want my editor to call me after she’s read it and say, “Great job! I love it!” This happens each time, each time revisions are few, but it’s because I’ve worked my butt off to make sure that I write tight, that everything is consistent, that I’ve caught as many of the potential gaffes as possible.

And then, I play for a little bit. Because facing the Maleficent Seven isn’t easy, and by the end I feel a little like a punching bag. My back hurts, my arms ache, I have the concentration of an ADD kitten on espresso, I want pampered, I’m lonely for my characters and missing them already (which goes away the moment I start the next book on the other series), and I desperately want to get out of my head—take me away, anywhere but where I have to make decisions that can shatter worlds and lives. At this point, I just want to spend my time watching movies, gaming, eating chocolate and comfort food, dragging my husband into the bedroom--all activities where I can feel but not have to really think.

So yes, I’m almost to the end of revisions on Night Myst, book one of the Indigo Court Series, and I’m going to be desperately frantic till my editor reads it and tells me I didn’t miss the mark. And I’m going to play hard until, about 7-10 days from now I suddenly realize the voices in my head are speaking loud and clear, and there’s a new deadline on the calendar, and it’s time to dive back into the sisters’ world and begin Harvest Hunting, the 8th OW book--Delilah’s new adventure…and then, once again, I’ll immerse myself in words and worlds, and I’ll make lives and shatter lives, and lose myself in a different reality for another few months.

Yasmine
3:55 PM 
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June 21, 2009 - Sunday 

Current mood:  blissful
Photobucket
6:55 PM 
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June 16, 2009 - Tuesday 

Current mood:  bouncy
Good morning. Okay, a few things for the blog today.

First: I’m on major deadline crunch now—down to the wire, so this is short.

Second: thank you again, everybody—you’ve all been so enthusiastic and supportive about me hitting the short list of the NYT. And yes, I most definitely DO have a goal of hitting the top 10—but that takes a widespread audience, and I’m knocking wood it’s not too far in the future. ~grins~

Third: I’m so glad you guys love Demon Mistress! I was hoping you’d have fun with it. I’ve heard one or two grumbles about it not being as intense as Darkling, and I’m sorry that the readers felt that way, but here’s the facts: my characters evolve.

They don’t stay the same. And Menolly shed a huge chip on her shoulder when she offed Dredge. So, she’s free to move forward and make her life more than just a dark, angry existence. All the characters evolve and grow in my books—or at least, I hope they do, because for me, it keeps the storyline active and thriving. I’d be bored writing the same exact mood over and over.

Fourth: A rumor came up and someone left me a note that she heard Bone Magic would be hardback. As far as I know, this is false.

Bone Magic will be paperback like the others, unless something drastically changes. I checked on this and want to quell the worry now. Of course, as an author I’d LOVE to have hardback releases—I love hardback and buy my faves in hardback whenever I can. But for my books, that’s not the case right now. (And no, authors don’t have control over getting into the book clubs where you are released in hardback editions).

Fifth: Don’t forget my party/contest on my contest blog! It’s going on till July 5th.

Sixth: You can now follow not only me on Twitter (http://www.twitter.com/YasmineGalenorn), but the D'Artigo Sisters on Twitter (http://www.twitter.com/SOTM_Sisters) and my cats on Twitter (http://www.twitter.com/GalenornGurlz)

And to answer one reader question:

Question: Why do publishers have to release books on the same day? Seriously. All I can think is Demon Mistress or Skin Trade. How do you choose which book to read when the authors are both your favorites?

Answer: Because it simply is easier for the publisher to release books in groups. I believe each imprint has a specific ‘day’ when their books for the month are released. For Berkley—the house I’m in—it happens to be the first Tuesday of each month. My advice would be to read Demon Mistress, of course. *grins* But in actuality—it comes down to what you want to read most at the time, or buy both and read both simultaneously. My TBR pile keeps growing and growing and I just add the books on as they come out.

Okay, must get to work.

Bright Blessings,
Yasmine
Currently listening:
Fear of Music
By Talking Heads
Release date: 1990-10-25
5:37 PM 
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June 12, 2009 - Friday 
WOOOOOOOOHOOOOOOO!!!!

I’m having a party with the D’Artigo girls to celebrate our jump onto the short list of the NEW YORK TIMES!!! It’s going to be a blast, and you’re all invited. And because the actual list will be printed in the paper on the 21st—Litha, the Summer Solstice, and since Demon Mistress takes place right around Litha—we’re having a theme party with one hell of a great door prize.

Why a prize? To thank everybody who helped me by buying the book when it came out—because y’all are the reason I HIT the short list. And to thank all of my readers over the years who’ve stuck with me, through the various genres, watching me slowly manage to find my way into the genre I love and have wanted to be in. And to thank my new readers, who read the latest book and ran out to buy the others. So yeah, a party and a contest. ~grins~

Now, the actual contest takes place on my contest blog because this is for one hell of a cool prize—and because the contest will run from now through midnight July 5th. So hop over to my contest blog to enter. And enjoy Demon Mistress—and when you see Bone Magic, it should have “New York Times Bestselling Author” above my name, which is something I’ve been working toward for so very many years. (Remember: do NOT enter here, go to my contest blog)

*Dances off singing “We’ll be dancing in the streets…..”*
~the Painted Panther~
~Yasmine~
8:36 PM 
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