I was first a poet. My 'career' as a poet began in 1997 (when I started writing for my own pleasure and not in response to an assigned writing exercise) and runs through the present. I have two complete collections of poetry ready for publication. My unpublished catalog contains over 400 completed works. I won the June 2004 Spyder's Empire Workshop for "On a Class Reunion Cocktail Napkin". "Salvation: a Screenplay" also won this distinction, though the month is unknown. I also recall having won the workshoppe on four other occasions, though I can't know this for sure as the site is now dead. I have thrice won the distinction of "Poem of the Day" given by the Pathetic Poets Society. (will look up the dates and titles soon).
My official bio:
Lacy resides in Southern Indiana where she has been involved in Bean Street Café’s Thursday Night Reading Series. Her creative non-fiction piece “Getaway Anyway” appeared in Bean Street’s best of anthology entitled Where Handstands Surprise Us (Pitchfork Battalion, 2004) In 2002, a collection of Lacy’s poetry, including the title work “Poetry Has Had Its Way With Me,” was published by iUniverse. She also designed the cover art for the book. Her works "Nothing Epic in the Epicenter" and "Will you read me for my beauty?" appeared in the Winter 2003 edition of WordsDance. "On High Where I am Not Welcomed" was published in deComosition Magazine in August 2006. She was also a major contributor of editorials to The NH Underground between the years of 1997 and 2000.
Lacy is an Empire Poet and a member patron of The Pathetic Poets Society. She has been sponsored by the Harrison County Friends of the Public Library and has served as a contract developmental editor for American Book Publishing.
Her works have been used in the writing curriculum at Indiana University Southeast.
I have twice attempted to write a novel, once coming off of my Orson Scott Card obsession, and once coming off of a suicidal bout of depression. The first is a half-finished science fiction novel that still has promise. The second was just too dark for me to want to explore deeper now that I'm well on my way to having a healthier outlook on life. This time, though, I want to at least finish the damned thing, even if it never gets published.
The story I have in mind at the present moment is one part The Historian and one part Twilight
with maybe a little bit of Xenocide/Children of the Mind thrown in. I've decided I'm aiming at a target audience slightly older than the standard young adult crowd. It helps me to keep these things in mind. Some writers will tell you that they write for their own pleasure and not for an audience, and of course I DO write for my own pleasure, but I also try to keep a potential audience in my sights. It keeps me focused on just that: the POTENTIAL of the story to reach out beyond the world I've created and into the hearts and minds of a people starved for literary stimulation. In my world, this is one of the most noble goals a man or woman can have. I've been so blessed by the authors who have chosen to share their talent, it seems small repayment to attempt to duplicate the feat. Besides any type of writing, even this silly blog, is a pleasure to me, such is my consuming passion for language. I also find it helpful to have a target in my head when I write to prevent digression, tangential observations and a general waste of words and time. So, having a college age to adult to precocious teen range in mind will help unfetter some aspects of my prose at the same time as reigning in some of my preachier tendencies. I always enjoy fiction that can teach me something (i.e. Historical fictions that help me learn about eras I know little about, characters having careers I find interesting, environments that I haven't experienced before) and so I am hopeful that my writing can education a reader in some small fashion. I also intend to maintain a rather strong theme of morality in my writing. This is a dangerous tendency of mine, as I'm fully aware that my aforementioned target reader will likely be turned off by my views, or rather the views I give my characters. I can only hope my characters are engaging enough to overcome this.
Stephenie Meyer is totally my writer role model for the moment. I am just amazed at how quickly she wrote Twilight and how quickly it was published. She is just a juggernaut of creativity. The personal stories of Stephenie Meyer and J.K. Rowling are just such an inspiration. I am also impressed by Elizabeth Kostova's decade-long struggle to write The Historian. I haven't read much about her life, but I intend to look into it further as I continue my own journey to write this novel. Also Karl Iagnemma's work ethic and unparalleled research are a model for me. I watched a television interview with him once in which he stated that half of the battle of the writing process for him was just getting his ass in the chair in front of the computer for several hours a day. Sometimes the result was crap that he would delete and sometimes inspiration would hit. Whether it come in the form of a dream as it did for Meyer, a series of remembered childhood stories as for Kostova, or as an outlet for undue stress as it is for Iagnemma...inspiration is an alchemical, mysterious, precious thing that is not to be wasted.
My own inspiration came from an old Time Life book from the Mysteries of the Unknown series. It's horribly outdated, but it did introduce me to some intriguing concepts that I hadn't been exposed to previously and would never have guessed even existed. My mother, I think picked up the old book from a Goodwill store for 50 cents. I was impressed by the quality of the printing, there being an ample number of pages printed in metallic spot ink. Once I got to reading the book, though, I was intrigued. There was one small passage in particular on an experiment undertaken by Eileen Garrett that, for some reason, sparked my imagination. I imagined a short scene and quickly wrote it down in a notebook. I thought through the scene several times in the next few days, re-imagining and extending it, but never actually crafted it into a proper story. But there that scene was, in the back of my head, dormant, waiting for me to discover Cognitive Sciences. A mental bridge was formed and the characters, conflicts and even the settings have all sprang into being rather suddenly.
Now all I've got to do is to write it.
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