Royalty Checks…..

"The Zar Tales"

I  want to thank all  who have bought “A Seasoning of Lust” and the new “The Zar Tales”.  I just got a first quarter royalty check and was pleasantly surprised.

Wow!  Baby’s got new shoes!

Last year was a  challenge.  I was growing as a writer and had to pick carefully what influences came into my life.   I had to learn to ignore the bad, tempting though it could be.   Especially the dangerous.  There usually is more than a touch of madness  in this last category.

It was difficult but I learned discernment.  It was not an easy battle.  Some people exist  as human potholes.  They need to be avoided but sometimes you see the hole too late.  You can fall in, but the point is to climb out of the muck.  Shake yourself off and go on.

I had to readjust my sites and purpose as a writer.  I moved away from erotica in the main. There is good erotica….and then there is the horrendous.  Mostly fanciful literature of the bdsm nature.  But too inhuman by far.  At least for my nature.

Writing isn’t something I started out to do, but over the past 5 years it has taken a big part of my life.  I have met some absolutely marvelous people who helped me in too many ways to count.

I think being a writer is in  part about influences.  I have had the great guidance and friendship of really good writers. Bill Penrose, Nick Nicholson, Steve Isaaks and others have helped and encouraged in ways I didn’t foresee.  I had the support of people who were dedicated READERS and that made all the difference to me.  I could chart what worked and what didn’t through their eyes and opinions.  It all went into the mix of becoming a writer.

Readers of this blog know  I have been writing a novel about feudal Japan.   “The Kimono” is also a time- warp story and the research for the 16th century parts (which is 90% of the novel) has been all consuming.  It’s thrown my life, and my husband’s…into new territory. With a novel like this, it should.  We are planning a trip to northern Japan for next year and to do some observations of the Yamabushi cult somewhere around Gassan (Moon) Mountain.  Yamabushi figures in strongly in this book.

Recently I exchanged correspondence with Lucia St. Clair Robson, the author of “The Tokaido Road”.  She published this novel in 1991.  It is a heavily-detailed and researched book.  Having some of the same issues in writing, research, we have a lot to talk about.  Lucia has been very open and encouraging on “The Kimono”.  We find that we also have a lot of opinions in common about writing.  That really helps because sometimes writing historical fiction seems like the most lonely thing one can attempt in life.  Research, the foundation for these kind of books….is never ending.  You just settle in and hope  what you read doesn’t contradict what you read before- but it usually does.  You learn about different cultures, and you learn  there are no “Chinese Walls” between people or cultures.

This is a really exciting period for me.  I’ve shaken the restricting and ridiculous influences of the past and feel  I have grown in my potential: as a writer but more as a woman, a human being.  I expect more of myself, and forgiving folly and fools is on the list.  I am also on that list.  And like “Earl”….I have a list.

I have received so many emails and phone calls of encouragement and congrats on the publication of the first two books.  That people are buying them and LIKING them! is a source of amazement to me.

“The Kimono” will take time to finish and rewrite.  There is always the necessary rewrite of things.  But “White Cranes of Heaven” is piecing together nicely and hopefully by this fall it will be published.  Though “A Seasoning of Lust” was an ‘adult’ book, and I learned a hard way it wasn’t suited to rabbis/nuns/and 90/92/97 year old readers,…. I am toying with the idea of a section in “Cranes” called “Bad Cranes of Heaven” for those poems which are mostly erotica.  Perhaps a ‘tear-away’ section that could cover it’s tracks???

Lady Nyo