SYTYCW 2015 Entry

This year's competition is being done in a different manner than the ones I have previously participated in. The books are being uploaded to WattPad for the preview, voting, and reading portions of the competition. They started accepting uploaded books already and I have thrown my hat into the ring yet again. This will be the third SYTYCW I've entered. So far, no love, but I have faith that my writing will get noticed.

Since Drawn to Darkness is already uploaded, I would love some input and feedback from readers. Please check out the book below and don't forget to vote and leave comments.

Thanks for your support!

All The Words

Do you ever look at your life and wonder what the hell you're doing? Wonder what's going to happen if you don't stop reaching for a dream that seems so far out of reach and so destructive that it should be lost?

My whole life I wanted to write. I've told myself stories since I was a child, first acting them out with my Barbies and then writing them down when I learned how to form the pictures in my head into words. I've written something nearly every day of my life. Stories, journals, articles, books, scripts, notes, emails, texts. It's all words. But shouldn't there be more to a life than a series of ink spots on a page?

All those words. The hours it took to move them from inside my soul to the paper and then to the digital world. What else might I have done with those hours? How might I have better spent that time? What do I have to show for it now? 

Reams of paper containing stories no one wants to read. An empty room where I hide from the world because I can't face being the failure I've become. No one to hold me close and tell me I'm their one because I shove people away, afraid they'll see my failure and believe I'm not worth their time.

Digital files full of more words I've never even bothered to print out because why should I waste money I don't have on them? 

Handwritten notebooks full of notes and transferred words. Projects begun, stories to be told but never finished. I have boxes of these things. And what value are they? They're fire traps waiting for the errant spark to send them up and take those words somewhere to release them. Maybe if I let them go, someone else can use them and they will be of value rather than the horrible, dead things they've become on those pages.

I'm surrounded by words and yet there are days when I speak aloud only those words my dogs need to hear in order for them to go outside. Days when the only words I have are shoved onto a screen so I don't scream them aloud. Words that should be my salvation have become my damnation and I don't know how to escape the walls they've built.

What if it is my journey to have these words. To collect them. To keep them together and yet never to see them enjoyed by others? How dreadful would that be? To know that the words that comforted me as a child would be only bars to the cell I live in as an adult?

Perhaps this is all there is. A pile of words with no other purpose than to be strung together into something I believed was good when they crowded at the tips of my fingers only to learn later they were muddy and dead before the letters appeared on the screen. And if this is it, is it enough? It is enough to know what I've done and finally let go? Go out and find another soul-sucking job that pays the bills and destroys my heart each and every minute?

I don't know. The only thing I really do know is that the words are still with me. They still jerk me from my dreams, invading them when I refuse to wake. They drag me out of the darkness and close the blinds when the sun is too bright. They lift my soul and cushion its fall each time I end a page.

Words are my blood, my sweat, and my tears. They are my reason to be here.

Thoughts on Men and Romance

I've been single for a while. Actually, I've either been single or in an unhealthy relationship for the majority of my adult life. I look at myself and the men I've been involved with and I wonder if I haven't completely ruined my chances of being happy with a relationship because of my love for books and writing.

I've been reading romance novels most of my life. I've always been drawn to the alpha males with the little edge of compassion who can sweep the woman off her feet while keeping the evil bad guys from getting her. These are the men I'm drawn to in fiction but do they really exist in life?

I've dated a lot of alpha men and most, if not all, of them had little to no compassion and rarely did anything for me that could be considered caring or courageous. Mostly they took from me everything I was willing to give including money and sex while giving almost nothing in return.

As for the men I write, I try to write strong men who are loving and compassionate, but I honestly work harder to write strong women who can love these men but who do not need them to save them.

I want to be more like my heroines. I want to not need the man but it sure would be nice to have one around. It would be nice to find a strong man who is secure enough to not need to demonstrate his strength by bashing everyone around him into pulp. It would be nice to be with someone who valued me and my strength more than anything I can give them.

So until I find this nebulous ideal, I'll keep writing the men I wish I could love and the women I wish I could be.

Don't forget to check out my Facebook Page at

https://www.facebook.com/ShariRichardsonAuthor

And my big project (written under my real name Shari Malin) Immortalz Atlanta

https://www.facebook.com/Immortalzatl

Image courtesy of http://www.sampaikini.com/love-couples-in-romance-wallpaper/

Added Immortalz to my Blog

I justed added the link to the Immortalz Atlanta Facebook Page to my blog. This project feeds so many parts of me and I am excited and honored to be a part of it. I hope you can share my excitement.

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What I've Been Doing

I have always been a writer. I began writing in the third grade and have continued without stopping since then. But what I've written has changed significantly over the years. What started with an article detailing what a great president Ronald Reagan would be has morphed through short stories and non-fiction to novels and screenplays.

I remember telling myself stories as a child while I acted them out with my Barbies. In middle and high school, I made the shift from live action drama with dolls to strictly paper tales. I wrote horror because I wanted to be Stephen King. I wrote a play about a drunken, neglectful father because that was the social cause of the day. I vilified those who hurt me and canonized those I loved. I lived in those lines and adored my step-father's cast iron portable typewriter for the freedom it game me to keep pace with the stories in my mind.

When I participated in the process of writing a play on drunk driving and the adult writers used many of my lines verbatim, I thought, perhaps, I was pretty good at this stuff. I remember being furious when the playwrights gave only passing credit to me and my fellow thespians when the play was written. When I was deemed to look too old to play the part I'd essentially written, I was crushed, but I worked hard on that play and ended up directing it when our advisor quit suddenly.

I tried out for a play in college, but found that acting really wasn't my strength. I walked away from the theatre and focused on journalism and non-fiction. Except for those two movies my friend and I made during those years.

All Zombies Wear Sunglasses was an idea a friend and I came up with during the summer between our freshman and sophomore years. It was a parody of Evil Dead, right down the evil book and the running camera shots in the woods. Our camera, of course, wore sunglasses. It was a blast to write and film. Even editing it in the days of VHS camcorders was fun. It was so much fun, in fact, we decided to make a Kung Fu movie over Spring Break the following year.

The Kung Fu movie was meant to be done in the vein of the Sunday Afternoon Movies shown on local television stations in the 70s and 80s. We also threw in some Monty Python and a little Inigo Montoya from The Princess Bride. In keep ing with the Sunday Afternoon Movie theme, we wrote and filmed parodies of the Energizer Bunny and Jimmy Stewart Campbell's soup commercials.

The Kung Fu movie was far more complicated than All Zombies Wear Sunglasses and included a much larger cast. The one constant was that I wrote and directed them both. And then I walked away from screenwriting for many years.

I can't say I'm proud of my next foray into writing and directing because that would be a lie. I'm not ashamed that I wrote, directed, filmed and edited pornography, but I know it wasn't my best work or even the best use of my skills. At the same time I was working on the pornographic material, I was working on educational videos for the Leather and BDSM community and I am more proud of those than I am of the porn, though I still recognize I could have done better. I worked on several projects during this time, but then shifted my focus form film to print for the next part of my journey.

It started as a conversation with a man I admired and became the first non-fiction I wrote. That blossomed into a few more relationship-based non-fiction books before the fire went out. I became disillusioned with the community for which I was writing and I turned to fiction.

I finished a novel that had languished for twelve years. Then I wrote a young adult paranormal series. I also started but didn't finish several other books during that time before dropping my pen for almost four years.

Those years were dark for me. Writing is the light that burns inside and illuminates the path to my dreams. without it, I succumbed to depression and very nearly lost myself for good. And then I got brave. I turned my back on what kept me from writing and I picked up the pen again.

I've written a new young adult novel, finished a historical romance novel and wrote a romantic thriller this year. I started or pushed forward a few other projects as well. And then a friend asked me if I would be interested in writing some episodes for a television series. I calmly said yes and then did the happy dance so enthusiastically that my dogs and roommate became convinced I'd lost my mind. While I waited for the project to begin, I worked on other writing, including a concept for a series of my own.

And then it happened. I got the first set of "gotta haves" for the second episode of the show and the go ahead to start writing. I was back to that place of telling stories but instead of Barbies, I was writing for real men and women who would take my vision and breathe life into it. Writing for the show has been a lot like coming home. Everything I loved about telling stories with my dolls, performing the improv so those playwrites could create the drunk driving play, and writing and directing parody films in college has come back. I'm excited about the writing and looking forward to seeing how these enormous ideas translate into images on the screen.

My dreams are big and my vision stretches far beyond what I can do alone. I am so blessed to have found the people with whom I'm working and I look forward to this new chapter in my life becoming everything I dream.

A little bit of The Walking Dead Fan Fiction

I haven't written fan fiction since that time I tried to change the ending of Return of the Jedi in middle school, but my little obsession with The Walking Dead and Norman Reedus prompted this little foray into the pre-walker world where Daryl and Merle first discovered the dead walked.

Any comments?

I'd love some feedback and input on the possible cover for Scream in Silence.

I may yet decide to go the traditional publishing route, so the Astral Plane log would go. I'm open to other comments and input!

Thanks!