S.O.L. Air Excerpt

Why yes, it is another release day! It's hard to believe this is the 9th story I've released for my Baker's Dozen Experiment. What a ride.

Well, I started out the experiment with releasing Fractured Fairies, and today we get to read more about Grinka, Syndago, and the fairy brats! The humorous antics continue in S.O.L. Air, which you can now nab from Amazon. As always, this was fun to write. I hope you enjoy it as well! You can find an excerpt below.

And the next Fractured Fairies tale will be coming at the end of November - A Very Grinka Christmas! It'll be longer than the previous stories, but there's plenty of humor to keep things lively. What, you thought I'd stop publishing after the experiment was over? Never! I'll be writing until my body no longer allows it. You're stuck with my stories and characters for a good long time.

Anyway, onto the good stuff!

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I take a deep breath as the plane engines rev louder and the flight attendant buckles herself in. Maybe I can jump out of a window. Nope, no way to open this sucker, and someone was smart enough to not seat me in the emergency row. I peer out the window and gulp. Maybe I should have given Syndago the window seat.

I see a flicker of movement to the right, outside the plane, and crane my neck to look closer. “You’ve got to be kidding me.”

There on the wing sit the two fairy twits. They wave when they realize I notice them. Guess they’re willing to risk being ground into a sticky pulp so they can make my life more miserable.

“There are pigeons on the wing.” At least my voice is now dry instead of panicky.

“I told you you couldn’t leave them behind.” Syndago frowns. “They deserve a vacation, too.”

“Every day of their lives is a vacation! They drink and drink and drink, and play pranks, and make rude comments, and drive me up a wall, and--” If it weren’t for Syndago insisting we can’t abandon them, the little snots would be living on the street, like proper pigeons, and not with us. The bulb above my head bursts. “And I need a vacation from them.”

“Calm down, Grinka.”

I open my mouth, ready to tick off several reasons why I don’t need to calm down, but the plane lurches forward and fear shoves the anger down my throat.

We’re taking off. No, we can’t. Stop the plane. I need to get off.

“Your mouth is hanging open.” Syndago’s brow wrinkles with worry.

I squeak.

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What’s a sea nymph got to do to get a vacation around here?

That whole “life is a journey, not a destination” nonsense doesn’t hold water with Grinka. Especially when she books a flight to Vegas to get away from those two fairy nitwits. She doesn’t quite consider the aquatic ramifications of a sea nymph in the air. Nor does she plan on a chance encounter with her goblin ex-boyfriend, Hrelm. Seriously, what’s it going to take for Grinka to get to Vegas and gamble away her meager savings?

Castle - Series Finale

***WARNING: Yes, there are spoilers. So if you haven't seen the final episode of Castle and don't want it spoiled, move along.

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I know it's been a couple weeks since the Castle finale, but I've been planning to post about this for a while. And damn it, I'm still going to post about it, even if I am a bit tardy (at least I'm not a couple months late).

Anyway, I was clearly a fan of Castle - love Nathan Fillion as an actor, and the humor is what kept me coming back each week. Now, though I enjoyed watching the episodes, I do agree the last couple seasons weren't the best. They definitely had their flaws. My husband would usually fall asleep while I watched most times. Perhaps my love of writing kept me more hooked on the show than him (though, really, it didn't have much to do with writing - lol).

Well, when I heard that Castle was going to be cancelled instead of the original 13-episode planned send off, I was sad. I totally understand though that when you lose one of the main characters, played by Stana Katic, it's hard to go on. Someone mentioned to me, though, that in case this happened, they had filmed an extra episode, just in case (and if it wasn't cancelled that episode would be destroyed). This made me feel a bit better. I was hoping the show would have a decent send off at least.

That "extra episode" though wasn't actually a whole episode. Nope. It was a tacked on 30 seconds. And it was horrible.

The final scene of Castle reminded me how so many TV writers have issues sticking the landing with series finales. As a matter of fact, there's only one series finale that comes to mind that was done extremely well, and that's Six Feet Under. I'm sure there are more that were well done, but they're few and far between.

I honestly don't know why it's so hard to end a series well!

For Castle they tacked a seven years later thing on, a little monologue from Castle, and the happy family with lots of kids. This is done just after they're both seen dying on the kitchen floor.

First, the transition is crap. Utter crap. Dying to happy smiling family. Clearly they didn't have a whole episode recorded as a just in case. If we would have gotten a next season, we would have been left with them dying on the kitchen floor. And then next season would have started with Kate dying and castle surviving. That would have been horrible too, mind you. Especially since Castle couldn't be all about the vengeance since Kate's killer was already dead.

Second, it's wrapped up in too neat of a bow. Way too neat. That final flash forward didn't need to happen. Unnecessary.

You think I think I could have written it better? Well, I do think so!

For one, both of them dying on that kitchen floor would have been a better ending. It would have. Admit it. You know it in your heart of hearts.

But I have something better than that. I do! And it wouldn't have taken more than that thirty seconds or so.

End scene with them on the kitchen floor, then into the next with them both being rushed to the hospital. They both survive. Yay! And Kate finds out while in the hospital she's pregnant. Then we could have cut to Castle's monologue. The end.

So simple. And it makes more sense, in my opinion. We don't need to know exactly what happens after seven years. We just need the hint, the hope that they're going to have a wonderful future together.

Enough said. I'll get off my writerly soapbox now. I hope you enjoyed the final episode better than I did!

For The Hippocampi!

Eek! I forgot to blog last week. Sorry about that. I was taking off a week from writing due to a lot of other events going on, but I was still supposed to write up a post! Well, that post will come later this week (I must express my opinion on the series finale of Castle).

For now, I'll give you a glimpse at what distracted me last week. Yup, I was bad. A game did it.

I'm currently taking part in a breeding competition on the Magistream site. My team is in second place! Woo hoo!

We are Team Hippocampi, and we're breeding the Sun Callisto Family. It's fun and crazy times in our team forum. We're all super supportive of each other, and we know that every new egg added to the family helps (and understand if some people can't contribute as many babies as others).

Anyway, Magistream is a creature click site. So, to breed new babies, we have to grow our babies up!

Would you like to help me and my team in this crazy endeavor? If so, please click on the eggs and hatchlings below! (The Snap Links or Linkclump browser add-ons are quite awesome to be able to select more than one link at a time to open them.) The quicker these grow, the more we can breed, and maybe we'll jump into first place!

I will try to update these codes once per day at the least to weed out the adults. Please come and click at least once per day if you can! The competition ends on June 18.

Once the competition is over, I will remove the links and announce what place my team ends up in.

EDIT: We...tied! Lol. It was a crazy race between us and one of the other teams, and we kept going back and forth with who was in the lead. When the proverbial buzzer sounded and the dust settled, the points for our team and the one other team were the same! So, we won, but we just have to share the limelight. Both of our teams got the first place prizes. That was a blast!