| My Insecure Writer's Support Group post is below Charity's book tour stop. |
| Charity's publisher sure knows how to make a beautiful book. Even this tour thing is stunning. |
| I love the view of the city in this, but the font theychose is another work of art. Lovely. |
Yes?Talia: I’d like for people to accept me for who I am. I’d like to feel love like I did when my family was alive.Speaking of love, what kind of person are you attracted to?
Your eyes are definitely unique. I don’t think I’ve ever seen violet eyes before. Other than eyes, what do you look for in a man?Talia: It doesn’t really matter because they avoid me, but strong personalities—alpha males, the ones who know what they want and don’t take no for an answer. I think deep down I hope they can save me.Save you? You seem pretty independent and capable to me. Tell me what your good at.Talia: Electronics. I can wire almost anything, it’s almost instinctual.What are you bad at?Talia: *laughs* can’t you tell? All things social terrify me. It’s hard for me to trust people and it just goes downhill from there. Surely you’ve had friends, crushes, things that make every life complete? Tell me about your first crush and those friends.Talia: Hm, Ardro Gunik, tall, built, and popular from school. Unfortunately, it didn’t turn out well. As for friends, there weren’t many. Just my family and some unconventional friends.Oh? Such as?Talia: You wouldn’t believe me if I told you. Give us a try.Talia: The trees around my home and a small treeb I named Keeta.*Laughing* You’re right, I don’t believe you. Trees can’t talk to you and treebs are endangered. Even if you were lucky enough to find one, you’d never be able to catch it. Maybe you’ll be able to make some friends now that you’ve come to Joharadin. Let’s move on. Tell us about your greatest regret.Talia: I never told my family all of my secrets.Good heavens! It’s not healthy to tell your family everything. There must be something better than that. Have you ever hurt anyone intentionally or not?
This is the trailer for The Magic Wakes. Watch it and love it.
Talia: I hope not! I abhor violence of any kind. Come now. Not even a catty fight with another woman over the attentions of a man?Talia: Why bother when I know…Know what?Talia: Nothing.Don’t clam up on us now! Here, we’ll change the subject. What are you the most afraid of?Talia: That’s easy. The death from my dreams. Dying alone. I use to be afraid I’d have to watch my family die the same death I see in my nightmares. At least that’s no longer possible.Okay! I’m feeling a bit down after all this talk of death and no lovers. Let’s end on a positive note. What do you find beautiful about life?Talia: There is so much beauty in nature. The colors, textures, the sounds. For instance, have you ever just listened to the sigh of the wind through the leaves and the play of sunslight as it filters through the tree canopy? I can’t say that I have, but the next time I get out of the city I’ll give it a try. Talia, thank you for submitting yourself to our questions. I hope you enjoy our city, and that you find some of the happiness you obviously need in your life.What actresses could play Talia in a film adaptation of Charity's Book? I'm glad you asked that question, because here's a short list of women that could possibly fill the role. Let's take a look shall we? |
| Charity Bradford |
*****
The Insecure Writer's Support Group is a once a month blogfest managed by science-fiction author, Alex J. Cavanaugh.My February insecurity has a lot to do with an almost obsessive compulsive need to get all the details exactly right in my stories. For example, Oculus takes place at Cornell University which as you may know, is an ivy-league school in Ithaca, New York. In order to get all the details right, I must have read fifty student blogs for months. I sat through hours of homemade YouTube videos of anyone that went to the school (because I didn't). I took virtual tours of the rink the Big Red played on, I read sports blogs to make sure I even knew what the bus looked like that the Men's Hockey team rode. I researched scholarships and discovered that the Ivy League doesn't give NCAA athletic scholarships. They only do "need-based." That's it, interesting eh?I also wanted to make sure I understood exactly how a boy with hockey dreams (who doesn't live in Minnesota) gets to play in an NCAA division 1 school, and it isn't what most people think. They are rarely "plucked" from some high school dream team. If they want to make it there, they have to leave home and join a famous Junior League for the majority of their high school career (and stay with a host family) and get lucky enough to attend the NHL draft at 18. Yes, if you are picked by a team at the NHL entry draft you can still go to college. It just means that they've marked you like a dog, but as long as you stay in school, you are not obligated to join up with that professional team.That's how you get noticed and make it to that level of play. It's quite a credit to have been chosen by, I dunno, the Chicago Blackhawks, and it's what NCAA Division 1 schools want on their starting lineup. Sound like an incredibly difficult path to follow? Well it should because IT IS.I've read other books where authors wanted to have a player that made it to a college team, and they didn't do this (went the traditional route of being plucked from high school) and that just doesn't happen in men's hockey (and it made me not really like the book all that much because I thought the author was lazy and uninformed). That's why Jordan spent so much time away from his sister...he chose this life and had to live with a host family at the age of 15. Parents of serious hockey teens don't get to see their sons much, and I wanted to point that out because I don't think people know about this.This is one of the best videos I encountered regarding Lynah Rink
for my book Oculus. College hockey is pretty awesome back east.
I know the campus of Cornell University so well from staring at maps, roads, building schematics, and google earth, that I literally can tell you where to find the Hot Truck (a famous mobile sandwich bus that students hit up late at night). I can tell you what the menu looks like at Collegetown Bagels. And I can tell you what the Men's locker room looks like in Lynah Rink without having been there (including the updated remodeling). I also became a huge fan of Ben Scrivens (who now plays for the Toronto Maple Leafs) and Colin Greening (who I kinda/sorta used as a template for Jordan). And my sports research somehow spilled over to football last year (which I'd pretty much ignored all my life). Two years later, I can quote statistics to you of players like Ray Rice or Andrew Luck, who's playing on what team in the NFL, and I correctly predicted the outcome of the Superbowl a week before the AFC/NFC championships down to Ray Lewis winning the coin toss by saying heads and then having the other team start with the football. My co-workers think I should do fantasy football (which I'm probably going to do) and start betting in Vegas. Now to be fair, I bet my boss that the superbowl would be played between San Francisco and Baltimore and that the game wouldn't even be close. I said Baltimore would smoke SF by at least 20 points because I was banking a lot on the emotions from Baltimore from what I saw last year when their kicker, Billy Cundiff, failed to make an easy field goal. I said, "there is no way those brothers will EVER let something like that slip from their fingers again. They will play their guts out and crush anyone in their way."Now I maintain that if that freakish blackout had not occurred, that I would HAVE BEEN RIGHT. I think SF would have been crushed by more than 20 points. But you are free to argue with me of course since we shall never know. But I think the blackout made the game "close." Otherwise it would have been a blowout.But with all this research, I'm insecure. It would really irritate me if someone said, "Hey this thing you described doesn't match up with the real thing, or you got this detail wrong." I'm kind of a perfectionist. I know that I would outwardly smile and say, "Oh well...it's fiction, ya know?" But inside, I'd be like "ARRRGGGHHH. I spent hours researching this crap!" And I'd find some excuse to drive an invisible dagger through their shoulderblades.I'm beginning to think that this insecurity of mine isn't so much "an insecurity" as it may be a neurosis centered around obsessive compulsive attention to detail. However, I think the devil is often in the details and that in the end, Oculus is all the more stronger for it.
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