Oh. My. Goth.*

Becky, look at her dress.

It's like so pink.

She looks like Prince Charming's girlfriend.

It's so Disney.

That's right, girls. Disney's princesses--and their resplendent gowns--aren't just for the wee set any more. Now every girl , no matter what her age, can become her favorite Disney princess on her wedding day.

Disney has recently introduced a series of wedding dresses fashioned after their fictional cartoon heroines. In a recent Wall Street Journal interview, designer Kristie Kelly says Cinderella is "classic glamour," Snow White has "sweet elegance," Ariel from The Little Mermaid has a "sultry allure" and is "comfortable showing her body," and Jasmine from Aladdin is "bohemian chic."

Now, consider this tidbit. Word up's Barbie has a new management team. With this concept pushing Disney into national fashion news , could Barbie inspired outfits for grown ups be far behind?

Gag me with a hoop skirt.

______

btw, if you aren't the Barbie kind of girl, you wish black was the new pink, and you haven't read Oh My Goth by Gena Showalter, please do. It's wicked delish.

__

May love always rule in your life,

Liane

A Little Writing Music, Please

'S Probably because I'm still so torn up by Anna's passing, that I've taken to working on Willo-the-Wisp again. I shudder to talk *out loud* about the book, because you see, it's my dream novel--that project that I can't bear to see tank. It's the secret, angsty lit/commerical project I keep hidden on my hard drive, far away from prying eyes. I work on it during those dark days when working on the lighter fare like Stoner and Girls Gone Dead just isn't working.

I wonder how many other writers have those types of books--the secret ones they don't share for fear of jinxing the magic that insired them?

The Fray's "How to Save a Life" has been the perfect song to get me in the zone where Willow's world comes to life. It's also the perfect song to help me sort out my feelings about Anna. Maybe the yearning to work on Willow's story, which I know will take away a bit of me before all is said and done, is all part of the same process of learning to let go. Something I've never been good at.


May love always rule in your life,

Liane

Anna's Free Now

I've never blogged on the road before, so if the formatting is hinky, forgive me. I've gotten some calls and emails regarding Anna, who was the subject of my last post.

For those of you following her heart-wrenching struggle, Anna was declared brain dead last night. Life support was removed this morning, and she slipped away a few hours later as she would have wanted to--in peace and free of pain.

I'm going not to moralize or preach, and as Anna would want, I'm going to move on in the infectious spirit of kindness that she shared with the world--and would want celebrated in her absence.

On Anna's behalf, I do want to leave each of you with this thought:

Our daughters will only grow up in a Barbie World if we continue to let them.

Please hold Anna and her family in your thoughts and prayers.

May love always rule in your life.

Liane

Barbie takes another victim

A writer should never begin a story to try to drive home a message. It doesn't work.

What's really frightening, though, is when something you wrote begins to feel prescient.

One of my characters in my book, Trudy, says something to the protagonist, Katya, which sums up today's (painful) post. "When did my choice to get pretty become a crime?"

In the context of the story, Trudy was right. Pretty is not a crime. Nor is the desire to become "all that we can be". The real crime is committed when attractive young women are encouraged by the people who love them in their quests toward an artificial standard of beauty.

I can't get my husband's best friend Pete* off my mind today--Pete, and his youngest daughter, Anna*.

Pete is a great Dad. Often, when I think of him, I begin to hum the song "Daddy's little girl". He's one of the dying breed of father who has erected his world around his love for his family. There is no boundary that Pete won't overcome to provide for his daughter's happiness.

So before you read further, understand, Pete wears his love for his daughter openly and without reservation. That loves defines him. He loves Anna as she came to him, and as far as I know, Pete has never encouraged her to become more than she is.

Like most young girls of her generation, Anna still yearned for *more*. Her Korean-American genes did not equip her with the DNA for large breasts. Pete's little girl found her flat chest ugly. She wanted to feel sexier. Prettier.

Anna already was. Pretty. Stunning, in fact.

Pete did not hesitate to help his little girl meet her dreams by funding her breast augmentation. He wanted to help his child to feel secure, happy, beautiful.

Yesterday, at the age of 19, Anna's dream of fuller breasts came to fruition...

This morning, Pete's little girl--the apple of his eye--lies in an ICU in a coma, while the tubes that keep her tied to this world protrude from every available orifice. Meanwhile her organ systems are systematically shutting down due to an adverse reaction to anesthesia. Anna's frail, beautiful body is in a race against time. Against death.

In spite of coming into this world looking like the proverbial china doll, petite and golden skinned with gleaming masses of black hair, Anna still felt she didn't measure up to the artificial standard which America uses to define beauty.

Anna was not a Barbie.

If you have a daughter, a wife, a friend, a woman who is considering plastic surgery, love her enough to drag her to stand in front of you right now. Tell her how beautiful she is. Then force her to look you in the eyes as you tell her that in this media saturated age of Photo-shopped images and surgically enhanced bodies, she may never hear about the already beautiful girls who have died in their yearning to measure up to that artificial ideal that their genetics never intended for them to be.

Tell her about Anna.

Remind her that Barbie is made of plastic and cosmetic surgery can kill.

Having experienced cosmetic surgery myself, during a time in my life when I was in no emotional state to make such life altering decisions, I can say for certain that nobody ever sat me down and asked my *why* I was taking such a risk with my life.

I was already pretty.

Nobody cared enough to ask me if I was alright inside of my head.

I wasn't.

Nobody ever considered telling me to get my papers in order and my ducks in a row, because this procedure could kill me. Sure, deep down, somewhere, I must have known that there was a risk--but at that point in my life, I'd have done anything to become one of *them*. And that yearning to look better--more perfect, more polished---more lovable---consumed my better judgement. I just wanted my straying husband to love me again.

I know how Pete's little girl felt when she asked her father for the funds to augment her breasts. She wanted the pain of not being one of *them* to go away...forever.

Its impossible to know whether the knowledge that Anna could die in her quest to become one of *them* would have chanted her fate. But if the worst should happen, and Anna should die, at least her father would have the peace of knowing that Anna not only knew the risks, and understoond them, but that she was prepared to accept them as her fate.

Pray for Anna. And then pray for Pete.

I don't know what will become of him without his princess.

*names have been changed for the protection of Pete and Anna's privacy

May love always rule in your life.

Liane

A Fishy Story and/or My Secret Inner Life.

This entry isn't about Barbie, and it's not about writing--exactly. What it's really about is drawing inspiration from tidbits of other people's lives, and allowing our imaginations to revise our personal realities.

You see, I am a mermaid. Ah, but to say so now is to buy the fish before the aquarium, so indulge me while I digress. Yes, I know. Again.

I came from a family steeped--no, if the truth be told, they were more like marinated--in hard, cold reality. SO much so that I grew up utterly convinced that I was an adopted child. I squandered quite a few Saturday nights searching the house for evidence that would prove me an abandoned or orphaned Hawaiian mermaid princess.

As I'm sure you've gleaned by now, hard, cold reality bores the ever-lovin' hell out of me.

My father, brilliant man that he was and is, has never held much of an appreciation for my infatuation with the stuff of myths and legend. While he's by far the most well-read man I've ever known, my father is not given to flights of fancy. He is a pure scientist--he relies on the five senses to provide him with the information by which he, in turn, forms his practical reality.

Being the imaginative bairn that I was, I'm sure you can imagine some of the arguments my father and I engaged in as I grew up. You see, by some comic turn of fate, I was the sort of child who dwelled within. I believed in everything my father insisted could not enter the realm of possibility--Santa, faeries, ghosts, selkies, unicorn. Compassionate politics. World peace. Oh, and merpeople.

In spite of the fact that my father used science to convince me of the error of my multiple delusions, I've always remained convinced that I am a mermaid. My fascination with merpeople has followed me into adulthood, and the picture that accompanies this post is of the last mermaid that followed me home from a day trip to Captiva (Heaven on earth if you've never been there....for both human women and mer-types.) To me, mermaids are real. I cannot, will not contemplate a world without them. End of story, don't mess with me on this. Got it?

You'd think that as an adult woman with four children, I would have found cause to doubt my conviction of my semi-piscean state. Certainly none of my offspring came with fins. Could it be that my father was right?

I might have begun to wonder--just a bit. Until today. You see, I ran across a bone fide merman sighting. Not an ancient one, mind you. Rather a recent one. Which means that I am, at the very least, not alone in my convictions that merpeople live and breathe (respirate?).

Fishermen have claimed that they've spotted an amphibious creature resembling a human in the Caspian sea. Gafar Gasanof, the captain of the Baku, an Azeri trawler, told an Iranian newspaper: "The creature was swimming a parallel course near the boat for a long time.

He went on to report, "at the beginning we thought it was a big fish, but then we spotted hair on the head of the monster and his fins looked pretty strange, the front part of his body was equipped with arms."

According to Mr. Gasanot, this 'man of the sea' has been spotted with increasing regularity since off-shore oil production began in the Caspian. Other eyewitness say the marine humanoid is about 5ft 6ins, of strong build with a protruding stomach, webbed hands and black-green hair. His lower lip is said to join smoothly to his neck above the gills.

OK, so he's not exactly the hunkalicious merman I envisioned, but he's a merman nonetheless. And you know, he *could* be a long lost relative of mine. Maybe he's green because he's seasick, homesick, or just plain heart sick from missing his long lost mermaid princess daughter....moi!

As you can see just reading this little tidbit has my muse working overtime. And I'm sure my Daddy is sitting out there somewhere, wondering how on earth any daughter of his (even adopted) could possibly believe such a thing possible.

The point? Allow your world to enchant you and magic will find you.

*Sigh*. So many stories. So little time.

May love always rule in your life.

Liane (who still believes in Santa)

My Amazon Short is Live!

Eeek, my Amazon short, Imprint in the Ice is out. I can't believe I'm this excited over such a teensy publishing credit. But I am. And I got my first blurb, too. :)

According to William Stillman, author of Autism and the God Connection, "The poignant prose with which Liane Gentry Skye crafts her uncommon love story makes Imprint in the Ice a vignette about not only the universality of love but the inextinguishable bonds we forge with one another no matter the variation of our human experience."

Now that's a mighty big blurb to live up to, but since my story centers around the love of an autistic man for a developmentally challenged woman--William's endorsement means a lot.

I hope you enjoy the story.

As always, allow love to rule in your lives.

Liane

A Fact Checking Morality Tale....

I think this is one of those posts that requires a disclaimer before I eat up any of your day.

I'm about to embark on one of those "OMG, Liane is such a whack-job" stories that won't make a bit of sense unless you're a writer trying to sell a book manuscript. So if you aren't, and that kind of thing doesn't hit it for you, feel free to move on.

No, really. I won't hold it against you.

Nor is this post going to do much to reassure my regs that I have recovered from Weird Al day. And for those of you who still hold Weird Al Day against me, read on, because when I hang this post, I'm pretty sure good old Al will fade back into cyber-oblivion, where I'm fairly sure most feel he belongs. (:::wistful sigh:::)

I queried my number one most favorite literary agency in the world late last week. For those of you who don't know, a query is an author's sales pitch for an unpublished book. The goal of the query is to get an agent or editor to say--girlfriend, if you don't get that book in my inbox pronto, I'm going to hunt you down and pilfer your hard drive until I find the goods myself.

Now before you get your thong in a twist, I'm not saying TKA is my favorite literary agency because I'm fond of brown noses. :).

The Knight Agency is my favorite agency in the sense that I'd so party with the gals at TKA even if they snapped my pencils in half, stole my paper and urged me to run, not walk, to 101 reasons to stop writing.

TKA places some really good books--the kinds of books I like to both read and write. They also go the extra mile and work hard to soften the face of the writing community. If that's not enough to give you the warm fuzzies, try this--they also make the world a better place while they're doing it by raising funds for breast cancer research.

So what's not to love, right?

So, anyhow, there was a point, and I must find my way back to it. Which was.....uh......er.....:::reads backwards::::

Oh,right. My query.

Since TKA represents some young adult (YA) titles I have enjoyed--and one of the books on their list actually *inspired* It's (so not) A Barbie World--it only felt natural to give them a shout and ask them if they'd like to read my brand new dream child.

Let me tell you now, a writer never worked so hard honing her pitch. That one page letter took me longer to cook up than five chapters of the original manuscript. And in the end, I think I wrote a totally killin' query.

At least I thought so until 4:23 a.m, this morning. That's when the hot flashes/OCD/Panic Attack that are the hallmarks of Post Query Stress Disorder set in. I sat bolt upright in bed, shivering against a cold sweat, worrying about something I'd said in my query.

You see, I cited one of my YA writer heroes who wrote a fun, fresh, high-concept title called "I was a Teenage Popsicle". I read about it first on TKA's blog.

But at 4:23 this morning, as I fanned away my hot flash, it dawned on me that I wasn't quite exactly for sure POSITIVE that the agency actually *placed* the book. I just remembered reading about the book's release on the TKA blog.

Can you say heart thumping agony? So here I am, up in the wee hours, cussing like wild woman. Sweat is dripping onto my keyboard as I pound my way across the net to Publisher's Marketplace to find out what agent actually PLACED I was a Teenage Popsicle.

And it wasn't TKA.

THUD.

Now in my defense, in checking the agency website, I found that Bev Katz Rosenbaum truly is their client.

So....I'm thinking she may have switched agents.

Now I'm praying when TKA opens my query and see's me so confidently comparing my work to "I was a Teenage Popsicle", which I in turn attribute to TKA. they don't automatically say.....good grief, what a whack job.... "Here's another one for the 86 file..."

But if they do?

Well, if I get an automatic rejection....then dammit, I deserve it. Because in my eagerness to hit the "send" key, I didn't thoroughly check the facts. And I know better than that.

And I'd still love me some TKA.

Moral of story? My high school band director was absolutely right when he said.......Let me tell you something about the word ASS-U-ME....

:::sigh:::

This too shall pass.

So many books to write, so little time to sell them....