“Promise you won’t tell anyone?”

When those dangerous words left her friend's mouth, Alexandra had no idea that they'd result in her telling a lie that could get her killed.

But with her childhood friend's life on the line, and a front-row seat to a battle between aliens within her reach, it was a chance she wasn't about to miss.

In fact, it was something she'd wanted for a long time.

Ever since the extraterrestrial superhero and his nemesis entered the scene, she'd suspected that hers weren't the only lies being told. Something is off about this otherworldly rivalry, and she's going to find out what.

Today, in an excerpt from Heroic Lies, a friend's perilous secret throws a mischievous reporter, an enigmatic alien villain, and a shapeshifting superhero into a room together.

Click the button below to download the excerpt and see what happens.

Sometimes, truth is funnier than fiction. Until, of course, truth becomes fiction, and then gets even funnier.

A few years ago, my family bought a weasel ball for our cats.

It was supposed to provide them with hours of fun while its floppy stuffed body frolicked with its motorized plastic ball, inviting the violent attentions of a house full of small predators.

Instead, their eyes bugged out, their ears went back, and they retreated into our arms until they couldn't mash themselves any further into our bodies.

​Having reached the limit of that method of escape, they flailed their way free from our attempts to reassure them and fled into the basement, never to approach the weasel ball again.

Needless to say, when I started writing Catgirl Roommate, that was one of the many incidents that made its way onto the list of things that Nyla and Sam were going to inflict on each other.

She got bored.

He got a weasel ball.

She got scared.

Funniness ensued.
 
If you want to pre-order a copy of Catgirl Roommate, you can do so for only 99 cents by clicking the button below.

There's a common dilemma that writers face when they first start putting pen to paper, or fingers to keyboard:

"Should I write the whole story in order and just let it flow spontaneously, or should I map out the entire plot and key scenes first?"

For the first ten or so years of my writing career, I took the first option.

I didn't want to sacrifice the spontaneity, the authenticity, and the natural feel of just letting things happen as they happened. I wanted to just write what I felt like, without being chained to a pre-mapped plot.

Unfortunately, this came with four unpleasant side effects:

1. Amazing scenes went stale in my head, because I was writing events in the order in which they happened, instead of typing out those scenes when they came to me.

Moments that were vibrant, touching and beautiful when I first conceived them went unwritten for so long that they atrophied, leaving only a sad shadow behind when I actually went to write them.

2. I had to store the entire plot in my mind. Despite my desire to maintain spontaneity, I wasn't just writing haphazardly; I did have overarching plots in my had.

The trouble was, that's where they were - in my head. Taking up brain space. Forcing me to be more careful while I wrote, so I didn't derail my carefully memorized plot.

Ironically, the very thing that was supposed to set me free in my writing actually made me work harder and more carefully than I needed to.

3. My plotlines tended to be less intricate and well-thought-out, because I never got to take a bird's-eye-view look at the entire plot before submerging myself in it.

As it turns out, assessing and improving a plot outline is a LOT easier when it spans ten pages than when it spans over one hundred and ten.

4. I got writer's block more easily.

Another piece of irony was that my attempt to stay spontaneous by staying linear actually limited my spontaneity, resulting in writer's block.

Restricting myself to writing whichever scene came next meant I only had one scene available to write, and if the scene just wasn't flowing or I didn't feel like writing that particular mood - too bad.

But once I started writing out a plot outline ahead of time, I was able to pick and choose.

If I didn't feel like writing the scene that came next, I could pick from ALL the scenes I had outlined and write what I wanted to. Or, if a scene later in the book was tugging at my mind, I could just go ahead and write it.

What if I wanted to go in a different direction than what I'd mapped out?

There have been a several times when I've gone completely off the rails of what I'd originally planned. My experience with Catgirl Roommate's Jack is a good example of this.

Just because I have a plot outline, that doesn't mean I'm bound by it. If the plot outline was a code, then in the immortal words of Captain Barbossa,

Which method do you use?

Do you tend to write your stories in a linear way from start to finish, sticking to whatever scene comes next and storing the plot in your head?

Or do you tend to map things out in advance?

I'm interested to hear which method works best for you, so please feel free to share it in the comments.

Once upon a time, there was a song and a story.

The song was beautiful and evocative, but it made very little sense. It was like a pretty tossed salad made of randomly tossed words.

​The story was also beautiful, stirring and complex. But there were many incarnations of it, many of which had never come into being.

One day, a tragic incarnation of the story poked its head into the room of an artist and said, "I could be something real and wonderful, if you paired me with that song.

"I could make the tossed-salad lyrics make sense, and the song could give shape to the untold story that is me."

So I brought the song and the story together into the cathedral of Windows Movie Maker, and through repeated clicks of an editing mouse, they said their vows and were wed.

Then they joined in the holy union of the "save video" feature, and soon thereafter, a new music video was born into the world of the internet for you to enjoy.

​So enjoy it.
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