Tara Maya's Tales

While Tyranosauros Rex sleeps, I am taking the time to try to write. I'm finding it hard to concentrate on my WIP (work in progress). My rule for myself is that I have to write something every day, no matter how crappy it is or on what story. So I am working right now on a short sf story set in an sf universe I call the "Xenophile" universe after my main storyline there. This particular story is about parents who are trying to raise an alien baby. Hm. Is that scaple a little too close to the artery? Hee hee. It's really terrible, I've wanted to do a Mother Gives Birth To Alien story ever since I was pregnant. The premise of tv series like "Smallville" and "Roswell" is that every teenager feels like an alien just trying to fit in at one point. This is the same thing, but from the parents' point of view. Maybe it's just me, or maybe all parents at one time feel like their offspring are the first wave of an alien invasion. Trying to unders...

My little boy crawled for the first time on January 7, 2007. Yes, I wrote it in my calender. :) He was only four months, three weeks old at the time. Now, five months and counting, he's crawling all over the place. Well, specifically, he's crawling under my office chair, squeaking to be picked up. His idea of a good day is one spent entirely in my lap, alternated only with periods of time spent in his daddy's lap. Since we both work at home, he sees no logical reason this can't happen. What are parents for? My mom says I'm spoiling him. (Ha! She should talk. She raised two of the most spoiled kids ever!) But I'm not spoiling him! I am more than ruthless enough to let him cry himself silly on his playmat until he figures out that he can entertain himself with his toys for at least one fifteen minute period during the day. But we have no playpen for him yet and no matter how often I return him to his playmat and the company of his toys, HE JUST CRAWLS BACK UNDER M...

Obviously, I haven't been blogging much recently, so what have I been up to? Mmm. Well. As all you millions of die-hard Tara Maya fans know, my stories Drawn to the Brink and Portrait of a Pretender are set in a world where magic can bring paintings to life. So it's probably not surprising that I also paint. You can even visit my eBay store, Lau Studios. I write under a pen name, but I paint under my real name, Christine Lau. Recently I started a new series of paintings of urban fairies, called Mimsykins. I will start putting them up for auction in February. You can also see some of my paintings in the Saatchi Gallery. * * *

My short story, "Portrait of a Pretender" is now available from Amazon Shorts. Portrait of a Pretender Right now it is on page 11, rank 124 of 2,892 results. Please buy a copy and help move it up! It's only 49 cents. A while ago, I started another story in the Brink universe, but I never finished it. I didn't expect this story to be available so soon. I supposed I had better start cracking on the sequel! Remember, the other story set in the same universe is still available too, in WomanScapes The Amazon Short Portrait of a Pretender is less than two quarters, and WomanScapes , while a bit more at $16, goes to help starving orphans. * * *

Sorry for the long silence. I had numerous obligations in November, and then on top of it all, I entered NaNoWriMo with three or four days to go. Sadly, I didn't win... ;) I'm doing the edits for a novel under another pen name right now. In addition, I have yet another name and career, as a visual artist. That career is taking an interesting turn: I'm opening a eBay store. Up until now my sales were all commissioned work (wedding portraits, mostly). Ebay has less certainty than commissions, because I paint first and sell next. Portraits, I sell first and paint later. It's a different kind of stress. With portraits, I am always worried that the client will look at the final product with that expression you sometimes see on Trading Spaces. The couple comes home to their new living room, which has been painted pepto bismo pink with hay glued to the walls, and they have this expression that says, "Oh god, this is so aweful it deserves to be burned, but I don't dare...

"Small numbers of pigs are easy to keep. They run free during the day and return home at night to receive their ration of garbage and substandard tubers, particularly sweet potatoes. Supplying the latter requires little extra work, for ths substandard tubers are taken from the ground in the course of the harvesting the daily ration for humans. Daily consumption records kept over a period of some months show that the ration of tubers received by the pigs approximates in weight that consumed by adult humans, i.e., a little less than three pounds per day per pig. "If the pig herd grows large, however, the substandard tubers incidentally obtained in the course of harvesting for human needs become insufficient, and it becomes necessary to harvest especially for pigs. "...The work involved in caring for a large pig herd can be extremely burdensome. The Tsembaga herd just prior to the pig festival of 1962-63, when it numbered 169 animals, was receiving 54 per cent of all the sw...

Some authors prefer writing short stories. Some prefer novels. I'm a novel girl myself. I tend to ramble too much for shorts (although writing flash fiction is excellent discipline for me). And besides, once I create a world sufficiently interesting that I want to spend the time of a short story there, I'm inclined to stay long enough for a novel to unfold. Unfortunately, it's difficult to convince an agent or a publisher to take a chance on a novel if the author has no previous publishing record. Thus having a few short stories published first is a good career move. This created a conundrum for me. I peeked at what other authors had done. Take Mercedes Lackey. She had a series of loosely connected stories set in her Valdemar universe. This allowed her to publish shorts in anthologies such as Sword & Sorceress. The same characters reappeared in each story, using the same world as her novels. Or how about Phillip Dick. Many of his short stories later turn up bundled toge...