Author Dana Lockhart

Life is crazy, but I've finally hit a little lull with The Un-Life of William Moore . She's in limbo as I wait for the cover to be done (it should be within a week!). So, now that I have some more free time, I've taken up a new writing challenge: PAD. PAD is Poetry-A-Day, or NaPoWriMo . It's the poetry equivalent of NaNoWriMo, only instead of a strict word count spread over a month, you write one poem every day for the month of April. So far I've been able to keep up, albeit posting my poems rather late in the day on Twitter. I will start posting them to Instagram, too, but haven't yet because my background images for IG disappeared and it took me a while to find them. I will post all of my poetry in a blog post at the end of the month to see if I managed to successfully write a poem every day. I prefer to write structured poetry, with beat, rhythm, and rhyme, but when put on the spot like I am with PAD it tends to be a little more free form. And more than a ...

Even though a lot of my author life has been put on hold as I travel back and forth from the hospital to take care of my dad, there are still some things coming out of the woodwork. -Writers Guild Updates- I became vice president of the Hannibal Writers Guild!  Heck yeah, man.  I was originally nominated for secretary, but VP is what I wanted.  Of course I would have loved president but I took the step back from it to let the founder of the guild be president (I probably wouldn't have won the majority anyway). I am almost geared up to go to the  Big River Steampunk Festival .  I will be helping to man the guild booth, but I'm as of yet unsure which days I will be there for it.  I was thinking Saturday and the first half or so of Sunday (I'd stay longer, but I don't want to leave my dad all alone in the hospital all weekend but I also don't want to have to drive back and forth every day when it's such a long drive).  I'll be dressed up in a steampunk co...

Ask me what I write and I will have a little difficulty telling you. There’s a lot of things I like to write, but there does tend to be a focus towards urban fantasy. Bear with me as I try to explain how I feel about this. -Compare and Contrast- I don’t really like what urban fantasy means to me. Mostly just because of the name and the connotation of it. Something about the word “urban” turns me off, especially because I prefer “rural” settings in my own personal life. Urban sounds noisy, modern, crowded, and superficial. It makes me think of “urban myths,” like the crocodile in the sewers, and that makes me not take it seriously in some regard. And then pairing urban with “fantasy.” Fantasy, to me, conjures up everything I love – rich, wild worlds with magic and sword fights and fantastic creatures. How could something so amazing be paired with something so ugh? It seems to me like an oxymoron. I also don’t like urban fantasy because it feels lazy. Those high-fantasy novels I...