K.E. Skedgell

T his post goes hand in hand with my last post, Can You See Them? Your Characters, That Is. A few days ago as I was mindlessly browsing my Facebook news feed, I came across a post from an author I'm following who posts photos of people and ads and such things from the era of the book she had written, which is the early 1900's. For the curious. The post was of this photograph of a handsome young man. Dapper! Swoon! I think I could look at him all day. Um, herm. Okay, back to the post. Anyway, as I was saying, when I got done drooling (I wasn't really drooling, you can't prove that I was), I realized that this young gentleman, or dandy, or whatever he was, resembled what I pictured in my mind's eye the character Josef Reichardt in the current novel I'm working on. A little about Mr. Reichardt. Born in Germany in 1803 to a wealthy baron, Josef lost his inheritance after his beloved father's death to his uncle when he married Josef...

QUILTBAG. What does that mean? Here's the definition according to the Queer Dictionary : QUILTBAG is an acronym. It stands for Queer/Questioning, Undecided, Intersex, Lesbian, Transgender/Transsexual, Bisexual, Allied/Asexual, Gay/Genderqueer. It is meant to be a more inclusive term than GLBT/LGBT and to be more pronounceable (and memorable) than some of the other variations or extensions on the GLBT/LGBT abbreviation. When I first came across this acronym, I thought, what the hell does QUILTBAG mean? It can't mean a bag made out of a quilt, because, you know, silly me, that's the first thing that popped into my mind. So I looked it up and it all made sense to me. The acronym itself is befitting, like a quilt it represents patches of the different aspects of queer life, all wrapped up into one acronym like a bag. The representation of queer folks in entertainment has grown in the last several years as the world becomes more accepting: from books to TV and mo...

Coat of arms of King Mátyás (center left) and Queen Beatrice (center right). T oday marks the 570 th anniversary of the birth of one the most revered kings of Hungary, King Mátyás (Hunyadi) Corvin. Born this day in Kolozsvár (now Cluj-Napoca) on 23 February in 1443, second son to one of the greatest of Hungary's military heroes, János Hunyadi , and his wife Erzsébet Szilágyi , little did either of them know their pink, wrinkly infant boy would one day become the first native born Hungarian without royal ancestry to take the throne in centuries. The honor, if he hadn't died by the axeman of King Ladislas V Posthumous, would have went to his older brother and only sibling, László Hunyadi . On Easter of 1490, after biting into a rotten fig, spurring a fury of foul words from his lips, a sharp, searing pain struck Mátyás's brain and sensations worse than the taste of a spoiled fruit overwhelmed him, and two days later on the 6 th of April, the Hungarian Renaissance k...

I decided it was time to begin work on the second draft of my novel today. It has been nearly two weeks since I finished the first draft, which was the time frame I gave myself to wait before I began work on draft two. I had started on book number two of my series, but came to a halt on chapter three where now I must start digging into some research before I can go much further, and since I was in no mood today for research, I began the second draft of book one. The first thing I did was opened a second file and left off chapter one and went straight to rewriting chapter two. Chapter one could be looked at as back story, where the real story begins in chapter two. Everything that happens in chapter one is discovered throughout the book by my main character Vlad anyway, which is what had happened to him that led to him being taken in and raised by peasants. He finds the answers, sort of, when he goes back to his old man, but he is reluctant to give Vlad very much information. Late...

W ith the passing of the craptastic year that was 2012, I'm going into this year with a more optimistic outlook. Yeah, I was like that last year, had plans to finish the first draft of my novel by summer, have it edited by the end of the year and ready for querying by this time. Having my novel finished was my one big goal and I was positive I could accomplish it. Then shit happened, as it always does, and for much of the year I had dealt with a bout of depression. I didn't finish the first draft (though I am one chapter away from finishing it), I certainly didn't edit it, and querying for representation, well, you know. But this year, gosh darn it, I will have this book finished. I will have it edited and read by Betas, and I will start querying. And I will begin work on the second book of the series as well. I have chunks of it written already because I had thought I would be able to merge the two halves together into one. Nope. Not gonna happen. By the time I finish...

S o I took a break from writing yesterday because I had the itch to draw something, but when I got pencil in hand and paper on desk, I couldn't get my hand to draw what my mind was seeing. Hate that! I wanted to draw this image of my character Izsák, servant boy to my main character Vlad, sitting in a window seat gazing through the window with a leg bent upon the seat of the bench and his foot tucked beneath his other leg, holding onto a pillow. I can still see it in my mind, but I'm so out of practice with drawing the human form, which used to come so easily, that I couldn't get the position right. I drew comic book characters back in the day, all the time, and that was how I got used to drawing the human form in many positions. Nope, couldn't do it today. I made several sketches trying to get it right but I gave up and went to trying to draw his face. Key word, trying . Eventually, though, I hit the jackpot, sort of, and came up with this profile sketch: Izsák, ...

H is portrait, that is. For the past eight days I had been working on my latest art project, a graphite portrait of Oscar Wilde. My writing was put on the back burner for the entire time I worked on this, the reason because I was just too caught up into drawing this picture, and I was anguishing over the current scene. Nothing was coming out like I wanted, so a little time away was in order, and what better way to take a break from writing than to draw something, especially if that something is Wilde. So, without further ado, I will take you on a photo by photo progression of my work. Also, the photo quality is pretty crappy, not professional in any way, just so you know. Days 1-2: Outline of Oscar complete. I started the outline by doing some minor tracing (yeah, I cheated a little) with my light box just to get the major lines down, then I drew in the finer details of which even those changed as I progressed with the drawing. I started that on Dec. 1st, but couldn't fini...

So, I got tagged for this about a month ago by writer  Katie S. Pendergrass   but I had been too lazy to participate. Shame on me! But now I will finally participate.  What is your working title of your book? Draculești has been the working title for many a moon, but since my story is going to be a series, I thought it might be better suited as the over-arching title for the series, and have individual titles for each book. For the first one which I'm still working on, the idea for the title just came to me the other night: Draculești - Blood of the Dragon, Tooth of the Wolf . Where did the idea come from for the book? Way back in the day when I was a young lass (19), I had an idea to write a book on how the son of the Impaler came to be a vampire and his vampire exploits after his "turn". It was only meant to be about a hundred page story, instead it grew into a crappily written 190,000 word novel. At the time I thought it was some pretty go...

 Lakeview Cemetery, Nash ville MI. Photo by Rhonda Cook   V ampires have been a passion of mine for twenty plus years, ever since my friend Jennifer introduced them to me in our early teens (and to Ouija boards and ghosts and other fun things). Her and I would go for walks through the local cemetery, a place we often hung out since it was so quiet and peaceful, and one of the prettier small town cemeteries I've been in, but I could just be partial. Another friend, Samantha, and I often walked the cemetery too, and it was her and I who wrote vampire stories together and stories about many other things, spook and non-spook alike. Something about the mythical creature has always allured me, perhaps it is my fear of blood (and needles) that, in some ironic way, has kept me intrigued with them. Or maybe it's their immortality, or strong yet weak nature. Maybe because they are denizens of the night. Whatever it is, I don't think about why I like them, I just do. Lake...