Hot Salsa!

This is a salsa post. I'm talking the kind with tomatoes and onions and jalapenos and cilantro and all that good stuff. I currently have a great big pot of the stuff simmering on the stove, and I have to stay up till it sludgifies so I can stick it in containers and freeze it. (I'm to lazy to go the canning route.) And while I'm waiting for it to cook down, I thought I'd come blog. (I told you my life was boring.)

I've been waiting a while for tomatoes to get cheap enough to buy a bunch of them, and finally they did. At this price, I can make a buttload of salsa for a lot less than what it costs to buy the good stuff, and the homemade is LOTS better than the storebought. And I only cut myself once, right at the very end of the chopping portion of the job--cutting oneself while making salsa is Really Bad, because the acid in the tomatoes burns like crazy, and the jalapeno juice isn't that great either. And I don't know how anybody can make it without cutting themselves at all...they're more coordinated than I am.

So, besides the salsa bubbling away in the kitchen, it's been a good day otherwise. The editor liked my answers to her questions in the revision letter. She liked my idea for the option book, and she liked the thought I had about future books set in Adara. Which means that when it comes time to start the next proposal for Luna, I'll be writing sexy Victorian steam-punk...

But first I have to finish The Eternal Rose. Which means sitting down tomorrow to do it. Work, work, work.

A visit from Gena Showalter!

Here's a good read-- Take a look!

Heart of the Dragon
by Gena Showalter
HQN books, 037377057X

He is a Dragon, a rare breed of warriors able to transform into the legendary creature at will. Though the mighty warlord breathes fear into the minds of his enemies and fire into the blood of his women, no one has ever stirred his heart -- until he encounters Grace Carlyle of modern day Earth. He burns to possess this proud, alluring beauty . . . but he has sworn to kill her.

Set in the mythological world of Atlantis, where the gods’ hid their greatest mistakes – the vampires, demons, minotaurs, dragons and too many others to name – Darius en Kragin is the fiercest creature of all. But this immortal warrior is unprepared for Grace and soon finds himself caught between sizzling white-hot passion and duty.

Praise:

Sexy, funny, and downright magical!” New York Times bestselling author Katie MacAlister

Sexy and sparkling, Award winning author Robin D. Owens

Bold and witty, sexy and provocative, Gena Showalter's star is rising fast! Carly Phillips, New York Times Bestselling Author.

Gena's website

Excerpt

Buy from Barnes and Noble or Amazon

Poetry at College

We took the youngest to college last week. It was an experience. Fortunately, I didn't have to do too much of the climbing up and down stairs. I'm a GREAT door-holder. We left the boy heading to marching band practice and returned home. The house isn't really any quieter during the day, when I'm there by myself. But it feels quieter.

Classes started Monday. And Monday afternoon, when I checked my e-mail, I discovered that the boy has WAY too much time on his hands. He wrote us a poem. At midnight.

The Night Before Classes

Twas the night before classes,
And all through the dorms,
Not a student was stirring,
No parties, no porn.
The books were all bought,
And the kids were all ready.
Not one dreamed of sleep,
But all dreaded study.
The money ran thick
In the deep freshman pockets,
The wise parents knew
That this would not stick.
Scrounge the students would
For every nickel and dime 
And find the deals that only kids could.
The girls staked their claim, 
On the unwary young men.
The boys ran for cover
From these apt, prowling dames.
Horomones ran free,
And the competition: Fierce;
Those who weren't there
Must have had to pee.
So the students relished 
Their last night of freedom
The classes would start,
The work would begin,
That which was, is never again.
 
-  Rob Shelton,   Penland 305
 

Protect The Work

> I have listened to too many other
> writers and changed the beginning and ending so many times the story
> was not the story I started out with.

(Someone posted this to a loop I belong to, and I just had to respond.)

I think we have all done this. I know I have, and I remember fussing at critique partners in the early days when they couldn't tell me what kind of story they wanted to tell ("one that will sell" is NOT the right answer) and kept changing it according to whatever the last person to crit the ms might have said. In fact, I have one (now published) crit partner I STILL have to fuss at for that.

You need--we all need to hold that vision in our heads, that heart-deep need to tell THIS story, not that one or the other. We need to figure out the tone and the feel we want the story to have, the kind of person we want our characters to be, and then hold on to it. Characters can have all sorts of jobs and still hold true to who they are. I changed a character from a patrol cop to a night-club owner, but he still had the same personality (I did add a stint in the Marines when he left the police force). That was the second book I sold. (Her Convenient Millionaire, Silhouette Desire, May 2003)

Figure out the things that are important to you, the things that make the story the story, and hold on TIGHT to those. That's what you need to protect. The other stuff can change, but protect those essentials, the things about the story that you love.

I don't care what your critique partner says. The only person who really matters is you. Yes, the editor matters, but you're the only one who can decide whether you can stomach the changes, or how to make those changes, and it's usually a long way to go before you get the editor's input. But if you change the story so much that you don't love it any more, how can you write it?

Now, if your cp doesn't get what you're trying to say, or if the hero you love seems like a brute to her, yes, listen. Add motivation (that usually helps in the brute thing) or explain a bit more. But hang on to the important stuff.

Sometimes, it's just easier to start over and write a new book. If you learned from that story, even if it's just one single thing, then the story was worth writing, even if it slides under your bed and is never heard from again. (And I have several of those...) The main thing is: Keep writing, and Protect the Work.

Death in Books

I've recently read a number of books in which a secondary, or a secondary/almost-main character is killed. And the impact of that death is different in each one. In some of them, it's almost an "oh well, they're dead, too bad, so sad." And in others, the death has much more of a horrific impact.

And it got me to wondering why there was such a difference in impact, and what created it.

Most of it, I think was a difference in staging. In what events were "on stage" when the death occurred. In the ones where the death seemed to hit me less, the main focus of the scene at that moment was not on the death. Other things were going on, and if the death didn't occur off stage, it was in the background. Then the main character discovered--Oh my goodness! George is dead! (or whoever it was that died). And while there is an aftermath of sadness and shock and such, it still doesn't seem to have quite the kick that other deaths in other books have.

But in the books where the death was a huge kick in the teeth, the dying was center stage with the hero/heroine fighting desperately to prevent it, or somehow horribly prevented from stopping it. There was anticipation--fear that it would happen, hope that somehow the hero/heroine will be able to stop it--lots of build-up. And when it happens, in a way, you're prepared for it, even though you were hoping it wouldn't happen, so it's still a shock, but you can feel the full impact of the death because its coming was threatened.

Do y'all agree? Disagree? Let me know. One of my main-ish characters is facing death in the next Rose book...and I want everybody to feel every last pang of the dying...

Drive-by Posting

Haven't had much time to post here for a while. Last week, I went out of town with the spouse to the "garden spot" of Midland, Texas. And we had a good time. He had a conference there so I spent a fair bit of time doing absolutely nothing. Though we went to the Midland Civic Theater "Summer Mummers" performance of their melodrama. Locally written, it was a traditional melodrama merged with a 60s "Beach Blanket" movie: Beach Blanket Buckaroos. Lots of fun and silliness. And popcorn.

The Summer Mummers have been around a long time, apparently. Long enough to have traditions. And rules. Throwing popcorn at the villain has morphed into Giant Popcorn Wars amongst the audience.

Popcorn doesn't throw very far--sorta like throwing autumn leaves--so it's hard to get it to reach the villain up on stage. (The piano player wore one of those hat-umbrellas to keep it off him down in the orchestra pit.) So, to do something with the popcorn, people throw it at each other. Barkers go into the audience selling whole trays full of popcorn and the audience buys it 20 bags at a time. There were popcorn drifts around our ankles 3 inches deep. I got popcorn in my pants pockets, down my shirt (and bra), all in my hair... I had a blast! All those community college presidents throwing popcorn--everybody played, except the high school freshman son of one of the presidents who was too cool to participate... They tend to be at that age.

And I got to have lunch with Eileen Wilks who writes for Silhouette Desire and Intimate Moments, and writes very good werewolf books for Berkley. In fact, she had finished her second werewolf book at 5:30 a.m. before coming to pick me up downtown for lunch. I offered to let her go home and sleep, but she said she was too wired. So we had lunch and talked a lot--it was fun.

And next week, it's time for Romance Writers of America's annual conference, this year in Reno, and the fella's going with me to my conference. I think he's looking forward to doing as little as I did at his conference. (Though mine is longer, and there's a lot more planned activities.)

I've been trying to write--but mostly I've been trying to get things ready for Reno, and for next March's book. I finished up with the copyedits before heading for Midland, so that's not hanging over me. Next thing, the galleys. Hopefully, I'll get a chance to see the cover for The Barbed Rose at the meeting.

Other than that, it's hot and dry. The dirt is like concrete, which makes it hard to pull weeds in the rose beds--but they're blooming...

Whittling down the TBR pile some more

Except I think I bought most of these new rather than taking them off the pile...

Seducing Mr. Heywood by Jo Manning
Dead Witch Walking by Kim Harrison
The Good, The Bad and The Undead by Kim Harrison
Abby Cooper, Psychic Eye by Victoria Laurie
The Misted Cliffs by Catherine Asaro
Eleven on Top by Janet Evanovich
Crystal Soldier by Sharon Lee and Steve Miller

Liked all of these. I was going to say, especially the Harrisons, but then I'd have to say--oh, and the Laurie book too. And Evanovich's, and the Lee and Miller book! and ... well, by the time I got done, I'd have mentioned all of them.

If anybody would like to see more of the mini-review things, post a comment here that you would. I've got them anyway--just trying to decide whether I want to post them more places than I already do.

"Oh Crap" Mode

I'm there again, in "Oh Crap" mode. I realized yesterday (July 5th) that I had a bunch of stuff I needed to turn in to my editor by July 1st to go with the book coming out next March. And I hadn't done it. Oh crap.

I did send the Dedication, and the "pronunciation guide", but I haven't updated the map, or the glossary, or the List of Characters, and I didn't have a blessed thing to go on the eHarlequin/Luna website for a "web extra."

I only had to turn in One extra, instead of two, like last year. (I wonder if they want a "Writing Fantasy" article again...) And pictures aren't allowed. Strictly text. They suggested deleted scenes or excerpts from the next book or--anything related to the book. And I had this idea for a short story, about the first meeting between Kallista and her bodyguard. I looked all through the letter about the extras, and found nothing about a word limit, so I sat down this afternoon (after another morning battling Bermuda grass and collapsing afterward) and wrote the story.

It came out to 1487 words--not bad for someone who has serious trouble writing short. Then I got an e-mail from the editor. I only get 800 words for the story. Ack! I have to cut over 600 words from the poor thing.

Then I got another e-mail. I only get Six Hundred (600) words! How in the world can I shorten by over half???

Well, I got yet another e-mail. The editor wants the short story really bad. Maybe we can put it on my personal website, and something really short--like the Adaran calendar and the stuff that goes with it--on the e-Harlequin website. I sent her the story. Now I have to figure out how to present the calendar, and actually do it.

Plus update the map. Plus check the ms. to make sure I have all the important characters in the list. Plus look for strange words for the glossary... And copyedits should be arriving sometime the end of this week.

Busy? Who me?

Book Binge

I'm not really one of these "steady as she goes" type people. I try to be, try to write every day, crank out a certain amount of work, but I still have a tendency to do things in surges. The writing is usually steadier, but I am very definitely a binge reader.

I binged last week. Here's what I read.

Survival: Species Imperative #1 by Julie Czerneda;

Straight SF book—heroine is an Earth-centric scientist studying species survival—salmon, specifically—who gets called on to investigate a series of disappearances in space. Stranger than the disappearances is the path they follow—straight from a region called the Chasm where planets that should have been life-bearing have apparently been stripped of all life. And the people are not the only things missing—so is every living thing in a specific area. An alien and his human “escort” come to ask for the heroine’s help. Other aliens seem to want to stop her, and matters escalate. This is a Very Scientific book of science fiction with interesting biological/evolutional plot twists. There’s a faint hint of romance, but mostly, it’s about the scientific mystery. I probably shouldn’t have read it as late at night as I did...

Zinnia by Jayne Ann Krentz;

Picked this up at a UBS, because I thought I hadn’t read it—and I was wrong, but I didn’t remember much of it, until I got to the climax part and remembered where it had taken place because it was a very distinctive location. Anyway, this is one of the SF locale books where most people have a synergistic psychic power. Some have the power, some have the ability to create a psychic prism that allows the other people to focus that power. The power doesn’t work well without the prism. In this, the hero has a Pattern-sensing power—one that tends to drive its possessors insane. And of course, the heroine is the only prism who can deal with his powerful talent. It’s a nice, enjoyable story.

The Perfect Rake by Anne Gracie;

This was a marvelous book with lovely, lovely dialog. It slips between drama and comedy so deftly there’s no sense of dislocation one often gets in books that have both. The heroine and her sisters have been living with a diabolical grandfather who beats them regularly. When the grandfather falls and breaks an ankle chasing the heroine down the stairs, she concocts a plot to get them all out from under his cruel rule. They will go stay with their great-uncle, one of them will marry, and they will be able to access their inheritance from their mother. Except Great-Uncle Oswald won’t allow the beautiful younger sisters to enter society for fear they’ll ruin the eldest’s (the heroine) chances. So she claims she’s engaged to a youthful Scottish Duke who never comes to London. Only he just happens to have come, this season, looking for a wife. So the heroine scurries off to his home to explain things, and mistakes his cousin, a Lord Carradice, for the duke—which is where all the delightful, witty conversations begin—and things go from there. I just loved this book—and wish I’d read it earlier in the day as well.

Angel-Seeker by Sharon Shinn;

I finally decided I hadn’t already read this one after all, and picked it up. It’s a romantic science fiction story, but the romance is slow to develop and the parties to the two romances don’t spend much time together. It’s mostly about how the lives of women in various Samarran societies and how these women develop a sense of self-worth. Elizabeth is a cook on her cousin’s farm after her parents die—an unpaid servant—and decides to leave the farm for a better life in a new Angel town. Maybe even have an angel baby. She finds a job in the angel dormitory laundry, and a place to live in a local boarding house, and even an angel who might give her that angel baby. Then she’s asked to help with a medical emergency and eventually becomes an apprentice healer. The parallel story is about a young Jansai woman, Rebekah, who finds a wounded angel beside a desert water hole. If not for this chance, she’d never have met anyone outside her family for Jansai women don’t leave their homes without escort and veils, and mostly, don’t leave at all. It’s a good story, with a satisfying ending.

Heart Choice by Robin D. Owens;

I had to try two stores before I found this, a couple of days before July started. It’s the 4^th book in Robin’s Heart series set on Celta. In this one, the hero is the last of a family with a defective gene that leaves them vulnerable to a common illness. He’s been hunting a cure without luck, but has decided it’s time to restore the family home and find his Heartmate. As soon as he gets through with his fling with his interior designer (the heroine). Heroine was left sterile after a childhood illness, so she knows no one intending to re-establish his family’s line will be interested in marrying her. She doesn’t want a fling either, but someone seems to be after her. This is a very good, well-written story with multiple, interlocking mysteries, and it’s all about choices (hence the title). A definite keeper, and look to see this one raking in the awards on the contest circuit when the time comes.

Skintight by Susan Anderson;

Hero, a professional gambler who usually wins, has lost an heirloom baseball in a poker game. Except he’s not in possession of the ball—his “step-mother” has it. She’s a gold-digging Las Vegas chorus girl, so he figures he’ll have no trouble seducing his way into her house, grabbing the ball and saving his thumbs and other fingers from breakage. But she’s not anything like what he expects her to be. This is a fun story about expectations and illusions and finding love. It’s just a good read.

Enigma by Dee Davis;

Heroine is a federal bomb disposal expert. Hero is a black ops CIA kind of guy who comes out to work for a private/public coalition-type group when needed. And three Senators just got blown up in a San Antonio hotel, so the government and media are in hysterics wanting to know what happened. The heroine is called in to find out who. The hero is called in to help and to protect her. And of course there’s this attraction between them... Great characters, great story, very satisfying read.

311 Pelican Court by Debbie Macomber;

Another one of those Cedar Cove books. In this one, a divorced couple learns to cooperate again to deal with their rebellious daughter, a single mother allows herself to love the father of her child, despite his secrets, and a lady judge works through her feelings for her ex and her new beau and both judge and beau learn to fight for what they want. Women’s fiction full of nice people struggling with life.

44 Cranberry Point by Macomber;

A couple of books ago, this stranger died—seemingly spontaneously—in a Cedar Cove B&B, but he seemed familiar to the B&B’s owner, a Vietnam vet. So in this book, Macomber finally gets around to solving the mystery. (If it were me writing it, it would have taken me this long to figure out who had done it and why, but I bet Macomber had the solution all along. She strikes me as that sort.) Anyway, there’s stuff going on with all the other town characters—the judge’s mom falls in love. Her best friend tries to win back the beau she alienated. The best friend’s daughter tries to patch up her new husband with his estranged parents. Stuff like that. I think the only real romance in this book is the grandma’s, but it’s a nice, sweet read.

Navy Husband by Macomber;

I still don’t care much for Macomber’s romances. They’re just...not very romantic. In this one, a widowed Navy nurse has to leave her daughter with her single sister while she’s deployed at sea. “Uncle Adam”—the dead husband’s best friend (also Navy)—is living in the area and when the little girl accepts that he won’t marry her mom, she goes to work fixing him up with her aunt. Meanwhile, Mom is attracted to a commander on the carrier where she’s working, and winds up taking care of him after an emergency appendectomy. He never says one nice word to her, but she still falls in love with him. (!) And sis and the best friend are having some nice dates too. I couldn’t figure out when the falling in love happened, and I had trouble believing they really did fall in love. I like her women’s fiction, but I’ve never much liked her romances, and apparently still don’t. It was an okay read. Just not very romantic.

Total Package by Cait London;

Heroine is a photojournalist slumming at a swimsuit calendar shoot because she doesn’t want to run across the boyfriend who just dumped her to marry a fluffy blonde. She and boyfriend used to bond on the battlefield or the slopes of erupting volcanoes. Hero is the son of a Russian immigrant who’s moved to the NE coast to stay near family—his brother runs a resort there. He’s on a sea cliff making life decisions when the heroine comes up to commune with nature and ask the sky why the bf dumped her. He decides to pretend he’s just coming up to the cliff, and the minute she sees him, the heroine decides he’s climbed the hill intending to jump. I found her wild conclusion a bit hard to swallow, but they were an interesting couple of characters, so I enjoyed the story. She’s a very different sort of personality—a bit schizo, but interesting.

A Good Yarn by Macomber;

A women’s fiction story, revisiting the yarn shop of A SHOP ON BLOSSOM STREET. (A Good Yarn is the name of the shop.) A whole new set of ladies come to the yarn shop for classes to learn to make socks: a recent divorcee who can’t pick herself up again, a teenager spending her senior year in high school with her grandmother while her father works in Brazil, and a retired librarian who’s lost her retirement money to a bankrupt developer. It’s just a nice novel about some nice-ish people who get nicer by the end of the story. A nice read. (And sometimes nice-ness is just what a body needs.)

Metro Girl by Janet Evanovich

I finally found Metro Girl in the local library. Don’t know if it’s because I had to wait till people left it long enough for me to check out, or it just took them this long to get a copy, but... I liked it. Barney isn’t Stephanie, exactly. The story was different—I got a real kick out of NASCAR Guy—but it had the same Evanovich voice—which makes sense, since Evanovich wrote it. Barney’s brother vanishes while he’s on the phone with her. She heads to Florida to find him. He’s stolen—er, borrowed—the boat belonging to Sam Hooker, a NASCAR driver, and Sam decides to stick with Barney in case she figures out where his boat is. And then things get really complicated. Fun story with a number of LOL moments. (The bakery thing was good for several.)

and It's In His Kiss by Julia Quinn

The last Bridgerton girl has her book. There’s still a boy left before we have to start on the next generation. Anyway, Hyacinth hasn’t acquired too many proposals. She’s a little intimidating. The lady she admires and tries to model herself after is Lady Danbury, a scary dowager with a cane she likes to whack people with. Lady Danbury’s grandson has a reputation as a rake, is estranged from his father (because he’s not his father’s child, which is revealed very early on), and is now the heir since his older brother’s death. But since Hyacinth and Gareth St. Clair are the only two people in the ton who actually like Lady Danbury, they become acquainted. And then, when Gareth acquires his other grandmother’s diary, written in Italian, Hyacinth undertakes to translate it for him. And the plot thickens. Thickly. There’s lots of fun, witty dialog and all the hallmarks of a Quinn novel. I liked it a lot.

What have you been reading?

Tension of various sorts

This is my second attempt to post something this week. I had a really great post all typed in and everything on Tuesday, and then it vanished somewhere in the internet/computorial ether. And it made me so mad, I didn't even want to bother to try to recreate it. So I didn't. And by today (Friday) I don't remember a thing I wrote. Probably about my busy week last week. (The one before the one that's ending now, in which I sat in a hospital waiting room while the M-I-L got her knees replaced, then rushed down to get the last-son-at-home registered and indoctrinated for college, then rushed back to check on the M-I-L (and babysit the grandboys) before rushing home again...)

So. Now I need to come up with a new blog post. Preferably not having to do with the Fourth of July doings here in town this weekend, though I'm sure you'll find them eminently fascinating--turtle race, stick-horse rodeo, Depression dinner and all.

Read a thing this afternoon (or maybe it was still morning) claiming that much of what prevents a romance from being a compelling read is a lack of sexual tension, and I'm still trying to decide whether I agree with that. Sexual tension is important, I agree, but I think there are things that are more important.

Before I go farther, let's define sexual tension--it's "wanting to have sex, while not actually getting to have it."

That done, I have to say that I have read a number of very successful romances without any sexual tension at all, because they are having sex all over everywhere, like little bunnies. (Well, maybe not everywhere, but you get the idea.) I have written some books that I thought were rather successful, without any sexual tension. I'm sort of in the middle of one right now. (I say sort of, because it has gone on hiatus for the next little while.)

For instance, in Linda Howard's To Die For, the heroine is completely incapable of resisting the hero. She melts every time he nibbles on her neck (or something like that) and falls into bed with him. (Or onto the floor, or the sofa, or...wherever.) And yet, the book is successful. (I know some people don't like the heroine--maybe this is why--or the tone of the book, but you have to admit the book has sold well.)

I think the reason is Emotional Tension. If you don't have sexual tenstion of the "want to but can't" variety, you have to have something else. It's part of the conflict, yes, but much of the time, if there is no sexual tension, you'll find a lot of emotional tension. As in "I want to love him/her, but I can't."

Much of the time, when the characters fall into sex with each other early on, you wind up with a lot of conflict/tension of the "I didn't mean to, and I shouldn't have, but I did" variety. Because, after all, these are novels and we have to have conflict.

Anyway, I guess my point is that you don't always have to have sexual tension. But you DO have to have Some Kind of tension of some sort.

Okay, dh is home, and promised to take me to some movie or other tonight. Now we just have to negotiate for which one...

Hopefully, the next time I try to blog, it won't lose my post.

Don't forget my contest. Lots of prizes to win!

The "Already Been Read" Pile

Many authors and readers have commented about their "TBR" or to-be-read shelves/stacks/shopping bags. I have one of those. It's in the vicinity of about 50 books, on the actual bookshelf itself. Then there are the books still in their sacks on the floor, the ones in the box from the mail-order folks (not Amazon), and the books on the big "keeper" bookshelf stacked in front of the actual keepers. Probably another 50 there. It's that small because I read fast and can read several books in a day...if I don't do much of anything else...and sometimes if I do.

However, I'm not sure many readers have an "ABR" stack.

About three or four years ago, I picked up a little blank booklet at our local library titled Personal Reading Log. Or something to that effect. It had one page for each book read with spaces for Date Read, Title, Author, Publisher & Date, Comments and Disposition. I filled up one book (which wound up needing a rubber band around it when the pages started falling out) and decided it actually might turn out to be a good way to keep track of what I'd read in hopes of helping me keep from buying the same books twice (hasn't helped that much--just accidentally bought a second copy of Hawken's Way by Brockmann--donating it to the library...) and a way of tracking what the various publishers were buying and publishing. So I started keeping the log on the computer.

Last fall, I was on deadline, trying to write--well, I had about 60 pages of partial for The Barbed Rose, but my editor wanted me to start the story on page 50. So I wound up writing 567 pages (or however many it turned out to be) in about 4 months. I still read, but I didn't do much other computer work. So I just started stacking up the books under my worktable next to the computer desk. And they stacked. And stacked. And stacked. Because I didn't stop reading.

Sometime in April of this year (the month after Compass Rose came out) I gave up trying to catch up with last year's log and just started over. I decided I was going to post comments on every book I read and NOT let them stack up so bad--the books would sit on my desk till I got them listed. And every time I posted comments on a new read, I would pick up at least ONE book from the ABR pile and post it too.

Slowly, slowly, slowly the stack is being whittled down. Very slowly. Some of the books I read so long ago I basically have to re-read them to remember what they were about. And when I go on a reading binge--which I frequently do--they tend to stack up on the desk. (Or the end tables in the den or the kitchen counter...) (I have four stacked right now--no, five. (One is hidden under the photo paper box))

I have GOT to get these into the computer today, because this next week is going to involve a lot of travel (not that I can read in the car, I'm one of those who gets headaches (after a childhood spent getting carsick) if I try to do anything but stare out the window or sleep or talk...) and sitting around in hospital waiting rooms, which means lots and lots of books. Because, remember, I read fast. And it's impossible to write in a waiting room, because there's always another relative who wants to talk to you. Not that I mind. But I just know better than to attempt it. So...let's see which books I want to take with me...

Remember the contest at my website. I'm going to put the spaghetti recipe in my newsletter, if you want to sign up. And if you want to see my short-and-sweet book comments (not long enough for reviews, really), let me know. Maybe I'll post them here as well as to the Romance Readers Anonymous loop... I might get by here more than once a week...

Read:
16 Lighthouse Road by Debbie Macomber
211 Rosewood Lane by Macomber
One Way Out by Michele Albert
He Loves Lucy by Susan Donovan
To The Edge by Cindy Gerard
The Color of Death by Elizabeth Lowell
Regrets Only by Nancy Geary
Scandalous Passion by Emilie Rose

Life Outside of Writing

I read somewhere that one ought to blog (is that a verb? I know it's a noun now, but is it a verb? I guess it is...)--anyway, one ought to blog about things other than just "I'm writing a book, and I did X number of pages today." (I did two pages today--which is very disappointing, because I wrote almost 30 pages in longhand last week, which will probably come out to around 35 pages once I type them in--about six pages a day. Two is not going to give me thirty pages by Friday, and I have to head to DFW on Friday, so I doubt I'll get any writing done then...)

One ought to blog about things in the larger world, the "blog experts" say. (What made them experts anyway? And just who are these experts? I read it somewhere, but names fall out the holes in my brain faster than anything else.) The problem is that I'd really rather not, thank you.
Yes, I have my opinions on public events and politics, and while I realize that I have the right to have opinions and I can even share them with other people if I want to--inevitably, they seem to stir up arguments and ugliness (and as a Southerner, I'm a firm believer in the fact that Ugly is Behavior, not appearance. I grew up being told to "Stop acting ugly to your brother", so I'm here to tell you that the reason ugly goes clear to the bone is because it's all in how you act.) and people insulting each other, and I don't want to listen to it. I won't listen to it from people I know, so why would I want to listen to it from people I don't?

I don't mind blogging about issues regarding the writing and publishing business. I just can't think of any I feel strongly about right now. Well, except for the tendency of people to run around yelling "The sky is falling!" at the first raindrop, before they know whether it's a little shower or a thunderstorm with grapefruit-sized hailstones and tornados.

Apparently the book-reading public is shrinking. Or at least they're buying fewer books. Publishers are caught in the catch-22 of having to print enough books to make a bestseller list, but still allow returns from the booksellers, which puts the authors in a bind too. But there's not a whole lot I can do about that. All I can do is write the very best book I can and hope an editor will buy it, and then--if they do--hope the public will buy it and love it as much as I do.

However, I'm not loving this book right now. It's not loving me either. Frankly, I think it's thumbing its nose at me, daring me to figure out why it's not getting out onto the paper. It forgets that I'm the boss, and if I don't write it, it won't get written. I'm the boss. Maybe if I repeat it enough times, it will feel real. As for the rest of it--you think if I ignore it, it will go away? Me neither. Unfortunately.

Books read since last post:
Urban Shaman by C.E. Murphy (really good)
The Love Affair of an English Lord by Jillian Hunter (pretty good)
The Shop on Blossom Street by Debbie Macomber (pretty good--what I was in the mood for)

Stuff

Someone asked about my roast beef spaghetti recipe. It is a family recipe, but only since, oh 1970 or so, and Mama got it from a dear, dear friend, Sue Reich (pronounced Rich). Sue died a couple of years ago, in her 70s, from ALS and we miss her a lot. It calls for a chuck roast and a buttload of spices, but once you measure out all the spices, you just stick it in the oven (or crockpot) and let it cook. And cook and cook. It's really good, though quite spicy. (Which is probably why I love it. Though I don't eat plain jalapenos for snacks, I am enough of a Texan to put chili powder in my meatloaf...) I will try to get it up on my website in the next week. If I don't, and you really want it, nag me.

I have The Eternal Rose off to the agent. Friday, I put Uncurse My Heart, the curse book with a ghost in it, in the mail to the agent. Now I can concentrate on just writing for a while. Once I clean up my worktable (I junked my workspot all up hunting something on the junky table so I have to clear that out again.) I can sit down and write the Desire proposal.

I like to have a "writing plan"--in terms of what to do next--laid out in my head, even if nowhere else. (And I should have it laid out on the calendar or something) That way, I waste less time dithering around trying to decide what to work on next. (Believe me, I'm really, really good at dithering. I can dither for days on end.) Once I finish the Desire proposal, I'll go back to an older story and work on revising that till I hear about the Rose book. Then it will probably be "pedal to the metal" to get that puppy finished. And that should finish out the year. ;)

I did update the website this week, so go by and check it out. It's got some new hunks for the "Hunt the Hunk" game and some fun pictures and a Contest! The contest doesn't officially begin until June 15, though, so don't get too excited about it. Still, some cool books and lots of stuff to go with them, cause there are 6 or 7 of us hosting the contest (hey, I do words, not so good with numbers).

Books Read since I last posted:
Thursday: Bait by Karen Robards and Superstition by Karen Robards (both very good)
Friday: The Hallowed Hunt by Lois McMaster Bujold (fantabulous!)
Saturday: Area 51 by Robert Doherty (quite good--better than expected, which sounds like "damning with faint praise", but really, it was quite good. It's a straight adventure/near future SF story--I tend to prefer more romance of which this had None--but I liked it anyway. Fast paced, lots going on, and it made sense.)

You Don't Have "It"

I'm a big fan of The Gilmore Girls, which is unfortunate, since I usually have a class on Tuesday night when it airs and have to remember to record it and often don't find time to watch it when I do. Anyway, the other night I saw (finally) the episode where Rory is told that she "doesn't have what it takes" to be a journalist, and it crushes her.

Old as I am (and I'm not tellin') I identified with her because 1) she apparently didn't have "it" because she was behaving like a "good girl"--trying to do everything that was asked of her, but nothing more because she didn't want to get in trouble, and 2) I was once told something very similar when I was just a bit older than she. It didn't have anything to do with being a journalist (which is what I got my undergrad degree in) but it was for similar reasons. I was too quiet, not out-going, not agressive enough. And that much was true. I am quiet and reserved. At least I was when I was 21. I've been living for almost 30 years with a man who knows how to mingle, so I've improved a bit since then.

And I got to thinking about peoples' reactions to that sort of news. I wanted Rory to get mad and decide to show him he was wrong, rather than giving up her dream, rather than accepting his rather facile assessment. It made me think of that old story that's told about dancers and violinists, about the maestro who tells a student they don't have "it" and the student gives up and becomes a teacher of dance or violin instead. Years later the maestro and student now teacher meet again, and the maestro says he had no idea back when whether the student had "it" or not, but obviously he/she didn't because if she did have "it", she wouldn't have given up. A large part of "It" is determination and the refusal to give up.

On the other hand, thinking back to my own degree in journalism and my rather checkered career in the field, it's pretty obvious that although I got my degree, I really didn't have "it" myself. Not for a heavy-duty career in the news business. What I really wanted, and what I refused to give up on was writing novels. The two are not exactly compatible.

For one thing, in journalism, making stuff up is frowned upon. I love to make stuff up. I make it up every day of the world--people, places, events, even whole universes and cultures. And other people give me money for doing it, instead of reprimanding me and firing me from a job.

For another, novelists get to hide from the world. Journalists have to be out there in the middle of it, willing to harass people for the information they want and need, or at least call them up and ask them questions. I don't like doing that. I can do it, if I have to. But I don't like to. I'm perfectly happy sitting in my office (now that I have one) staring out the window, or staring at the computer screen or the paper on my work table. I'd rather not talk to people all the time, thank you.

But I was lucky enough to know that this was what I truly, madly, deeply wanted and needed to do from a fairly early age. Everything else was material. Subject matter. Life.

So what is "It" and where does it come from? I think a lot of it is indeed that persistence and determination not to let the bastards get you down, if it's something you truly, deeply want to do. What do you think "It" is? Isn't it different things for different people? Different jobs?

After a Break

It's been a while since I posted. We've had visitors. Our son graduated from high school last Friday and a horde of relatives descended on our little town, increasing its population--up over 1850, anyway. I served grilled margarita pork chops and potato salad to nine, roast beef spaghetti and green salad to sixteen and leftovers to eleven for lunch before everybody headed home again.

On top of all that, our daughter and her 2-year-old spent the week before graduation with us. I love the grandboy dearly, but he's a big two, and he wanted to play on the computer. Or with the CDs in the rack on the desk. He would take two or three out of the cases and carry them around, look through the holes, lick them, scrape them together, carry them with his sticks, which he also loves... And he didn't want the old CDs I gave him. Nooooo, he wanted MY CDs. The Important CDs. Sigh. And because he's so big, (this is the boy who weighed over 10 pounds when he was born) he's strong and heavy and hard to drag off the desk chair when he goes limp or fights to stay. Of course, he did fall asleep on the computer chair with his face on the seat and his knees tucked up under him. He'd had a hard day that day.

But we had fun sharing oranges and jumping off the arm of the couch onto Gigi (me) and Granddaddy. When cousin Ben (3 years old) came for a short visit, they chased each other and had a great time. The house has several circles a little guy can run, sorta like a track. Of course, once everybody went home, I collapsed and pretty much slept all day Sunday.

And now it's time to go back to work. And I have to figure out how to get the brain back into gear. This isn't an unusual occurence. "Breaks" happen all the time in a writer's life. We may be writing one story and have to leave it to write another, or deliberately leave it, as often happens when we send in a proposal and stop to wait and see what its reception is. Then, when the editor or agent wants to see the rest of the story, or even buys the story on proposal and we have a deadline to meet to write the rest of it--we have to get our head back into the story.

There aren't actually many ways that writers do this. Mostly, we get out what's been written already and read over it again. If there's a synopsis, we might read over that. Some can hop right back in at that point. I usually have to think a little more, depending on what I have to get back into. If it's just an edit or revision--depending on how extensive the revision is, I might be able to start in at that point. But often, I have to "think out loud."

I have to write stuff down, usually in the "blank book" I keep for my version of the Artist's Way morning pages. It's not as big as Julia Cameron says you need to write in, and I don't always write in the morning and I don't always write every day, but I do write in the thing on a semi-regular basis--especially when I'm actively creating. I've found that it's a good place to brainstorm with myself, to work out plot problems, develop character and conflict. (I write the title in the margin so I can find it again, or the character's names if the story has no title yet.) Somehow, thinking in ink like this is more creative to me and easier to remember what happened.

General Musing

I want to do some things here with the blog that will require republishing the whole thing, and it just seems silly to republish (whatever that is) without doing a new post. So here I sit, trying to think of whatever it was that I wanted to talk about when I thought I might do a new post the other day and the mind is TOTALLY BLANK!!

Probably because it's got so much stuff rumbling around in it. The daughter is coming tomorrow with the middle grandboy for a visit. I was supposed to be at the library fifteen minutes ago for a meeting about Summer Reading and totally forgot until this minute. (Oh hell. Oh well.) I have a workshop I'm doing for the North Texas RWA chapter in -- I think they meet in Grapevine, but it's down there on the Fort Worth side of the Dallas-Fort Worth Metromess...on Saturday. Need to go through the workshop and update some of the exercises. Then we're trying to figure out whether the daughter is going with me to DFW to visit her brother while I'm doing the workshop, or if he's going to make it to the youngest boy's high school graduation--which is next week with multiple other relatives coming in to town--so that she can just visit him here, without having to travel 300-plus miles immediately after traveling several hundred more miles from Colorado.

I'm trying to decide if I have enough conflict for the Desire proposal I'm trying to put together--actually, right now, I'm just trying to do a contest entry. I like my chapter, but it's the overall story I'm wondering about. I'm also waiting on a critique on the third Rose book for LUNA before I send it off, but with all the visits in the next week or so, there's no hurry on that.

And I talked to my agent today. She had a conversation with an editor who remembered a book of mine she'd read over a year ago--they'd really liked it, except the middle seemed a bit claustrophobic (the setting doesn't move much), and if that could be opened up... A more-or-less straight contemporary romance, with elements of suspense. So now the mind is buzzing with "how can I open up the middle without changing the good stuff about the story?"

We also talked about another story I sent her--the paranormal/curse/ghost story--and it needs a bit of tweaking--which actually will require less thinking than the others, because it's mostly tweaking. I need to send all these things down to the swamp and let them ferment a while, since I have time to do it.

And hey, look! I've written a whole blog entry!

Okay, now I have to get that package ready to mail for the contest starting next month on my website (it's a multiple author/multiple website contest--information is going up around June 15), and the bookplate sticker I promised, and that other thing I have to mail that I can't remember right off hand--

If y'all want a bookplate for The Compass Rose or one of my other books (Hide-and-Sheikh or Her Convenient Millionaire), send an SASE (that's self-addressed, stamped envelope, for those few of you who might not know) to POBox 176, Clarendon, TX 79226, and I'll send you one.

And then I have to trim up that bush the guys moved Saturday so it doesn't die, and think about baby-proofing the house and...

Geez, it never ends, does it?

Contests--good or bad?

Lori Devoti, in a comment at Romancing the Blog, claims that what's wrong with Romance Novels just now is all the contests for the unpublished that currently clog RWA chapters. She says:

The problem, as I see it, is the rules. Too many rules. I don’t want to read a book written by the rules, but when I am asked to judge for a contest I am handed a little check sheet telling me what makes a good romance - no head hopping; no back story; hero and heroine appear in first chapter; goal, motive, and conflict apparent; and my personal favorite - properly formatted

She goes on to say that following these little check-sheet forms often winds up with the judge scoring down on the better entries, those with a unique voice. I'm not sure I agree. I did post a comment there, but I have more to say, and I might as well say it here.

First off, I never did all that well in contests. I finaled in a lot of them. But never won any. Best I ever did was 2nd place, which I seemed to do on a regular basis, but never 1st. And I never ever finaled in the Golden Heart. But I still sold a book. In fact, I've sold five. Which is not saying a whole lot, since it was 5 books over 5 years, and I know people who've sold 5 books in 5 months. But my point is, I probably don't know everything about contests.

I do judge a fair number of them, and I've found that if an author has written enough that she has a distinctive voice and can write a good story, it's good all round. The voice leaks over into all those check-boxes. If the voice is there, the characterization is there. The motivation is usually there. Most of those other points are there. Really, it comes down to the judges--and that is where it gets tricky. I've found--in my previous unpublished career and since--that the unpublished are harsher judges than the published, generally speaking. Because they are so caught up in The Rules.

At the same time, most contest entries are mediocre. There's nothing really wrong with them--but there's nothing really good either. The voice is stilted. There's no real connection with who the characters are or where they are or why they're doing what they're doing...there's usually a lot of potential--the story idea is good, but the execution isn't quite there. Frankly, if a story has a unique voice and it's "Good"--it stands above the other entries--I'm going to give it the points it needs to rank high.

As far as I'm concerned, there are Two Cardinal Rules to writing fiction.
1: Thou Shalt Not BORE the Reader; and
2: Thou Shalt Not CONFUSE the Reader.

The "boring" rule is the more important. You must keep them engaged. And then you must make sure they can follow what's going on. The "confusion" rule tends to be the more difficult rule to follow, because this is where all the grammar and structure stuff comes into play. Grammar was invented to foil confusion.

But if you can follow these two rules, the rest of them don't really matter.

Starting Anew

So I'm sitting here, trying to think what I can blog about, and thinking what I've done in the last week, and one of the main things that I've done is: I have started a new book.

This makes the third one I've started since the end of January, when I turned in the completed manuscript for The Barbed Rose. And I got to thinking about the process of finding new stories, and how I did it.

And they're all different. Which is good, I suppose. There's always a tiny, tiny little seed that starts everything off. Sometimes it's a concept, something really intellectual. Like the Conquest of the Americas--technology overtaking the primitive--but what if the "primitives" had magic rather than technology? And thus was born the One Rose trilogy.

Sometimes, I start with what I don't want to write. I want to do a paranormal, but I don't want to do vampires and I don't want to do werewolves and I don't think I want to do ghosts. What else is there? So I wrote a hero who's cursed--only he's not dark and dramatic looking. He's blond and lanky. He's against type. (We shall see if this book finds a home.) I wound up with a ghost in this story, even though I'm not real fond of ghost books, because the ghost kept coming back. Couldn't get rid off her, so...there she is.

Sometimes, I start with a character. And yes, sometimes, the character starts nagging me after I've been to see a movie and seen someone very inspirational on the big screen. However, it's rarely the lead actor/actress in the movie that inspires. Usually, it's one of the "bit" players-- the guy who drowns in the shipwreck or gets burned up by the evil arsonist. But it's never the character in the movie whose story I want to tell. It's somebody else. Somebody who pops up from the swamp in the back edges of my brain and glowers at me. Or nags me. Or starts telling me a story.

I recently made a trip to the college where my son will be going next year so he could try out for the theater department to see whether they would admit him as a performance major. And of course, after driving all day Friday to get there and going to see Kingdom of Heaven, I woke up in the stinkin' middle of the night and couldn't go back to sleep. Stress, I guess. So I'm lying there in the bed, going "Okay brain, here's this character--big guy, hard, cold, aggressive-warrior type--I want a story to go with him. A contemporary. A romance. Okay? Ready? I'm going to go to sleep now, and you're going to come up with the story while I sleep. Ready? I'm going to sleep............ Okay, I'm not sleeping. So who else could be in this book?"

I would much rather have turned it over to the brain while I slept, but the sleeping wasn't happening. Till about 5: 30 a.m. (The son woke up too, but got back to sleep first, after many pushups and situps--oh, and he aced his tryout and got admitted.) But I came home with another story idea (talked it over with my critique partner who lives there).

Of course, once I have the idea, I do a lot of other stuff to get it to the point where it's ready to start writing, but how much of that I have to do depends on what kind of story it is and how much world building I have to do. Fantasy in a different universe obviously requires a lot more than a contemporary romance set in a city I know. And it's all good.

What's Reality

My browser has gone beserk, so I can only hope that this is the proper place to type in my blog entry for today. (For this month?)

I intend to post blog stuff more often, but somehow, just don't get by to do it. Even when I have something to blog about.

For instance, this time, I want to comment about Reality Television. I don't watch it. At least not if I can help it. Well, except for the house-building/remodeling/decorating type shows. And "What Not To Wear."I have to confess I have a pretty good Jones for the HGTV channel, and TLC. But most reality television leaves me cold. Because really--think about it--just how real can it be?

Face it, Not ONE of us is going to reveal all to our significant others, much less a zillion strangers out in televisionland. We're just NOT. There's some secret, vulnerable part of each one of us that we're going to keep hidden and secret simply because it IS so vulnerable, and who knows what somebody would do with that information if they got their little hands on it? Oh, we might tell part of the truth. But we're not going to tell ALL. Nobody would.

Which is why I think scripted television/drama is more real than reality TV. Because the actors in scripted (fictional) TV aren't giving away their own secrets. They're opening up somebody else's vulnerable underbelly. It's not them--it's like them, but it isn't them.

Actors use their own experiences and emotions to portray the characters, but the experiences are disguised. Perhaps more extreme--but maybe not. But because it's not them in the story, they can cut loose and give it all up. So, even though the stories may not be "true", they're more "real." Or at least that's my opinion, and I'm sticking to it.

Hamilton V. Laurens

I've written (um, wait--I have to count and math is just NOT my thing) 18 pages so far this week, but I did not write a lick or a promise yesterday. This is because the brand new Laurell K. Hamilton book in the Meredith Gentry series, Stroke of Midnight, came out on Tuesday, my day in Amarillo, and I was able to go by Barnes & Noble and buy it.

I took it with me to my doctor's appointment to read in the waiting and exam room during all that waiting one always winds up doing, and to Dairy Queen for a reward after, and made myself leave it in the car while I went to art class, then came home and finished it. Wednesday (yesterday), I picked the book up and read it all over again. I gobbled it down so fast on Tuesday, I had to read it again just to be sure I got all the good stuff.

I realize that there are a lot of readers out there who do not like Hamilton's sidhe series and don't much like the direction the Anita Blake series has taken, the last few books, but I'm not one of them. I love the books. Every single, blessed one of them. And I too (like Hamilton in her essay) find it funny that more people get all squidgy over the sex than the extreme violence.

Anyway, I got to thinking about these books which are just floating away on sex, and I got to thinking about another author, Stephanie Laurens, whose historical romances are also heavily laden with sex (though somewhat less kinky, she said in great understatement) which--well, leave me flat. I've read a number of them, and always wind up skipping huge chunks of the love scenes. So why do I love Hamilton's books and not Laurens's?

And after a fair amount of thought, I have decided that the difference is what those love scenes do, the purpose behind them. In Laurens's books, they seem to be part of a layering process to show the hero seducing the heroine love scene by love scene into doing what he wants. The problem for me is that after the first one or two, it becomes overkill. "Oh geez, are they doing it again?" The love scenes stop adding to the story, or at least that's how it feels to me. I'm sure there are plenty of others who disagree with me.

But in the Hamilton books, every love scene does something. It may create metaphysical bonds between vampire, human and shapeshifter, or awaken new magic in a sidhe lord whose magic is long dormant, or even "merely" deepen the relationship between two characters. In the latter case, Hamilton usually just gives us the one love scene and doesn't repeat it again and again and again. At least not in the same book. Then again, it could be that each love scene lately seems to be with somebody different and that's what I love about them. It is one of the things I like--but I don't think it's the main one. Again, lots of you will probably disagree with me, which is fine. Nobody has to like the same things I like. But I really do like Stroke of Midnight, and I'm glad Ms. Hamilton will have lots more coming. (And I've read it a third time since yesterday. I know, I know. But I did.)

Excitement, and thoughts on blogging

I'm all excited because my friend got a call from an editor she'd pitched to at a conference in San Antonio--at the appointment, the editor wouldn't even let her run ideas by her because of a protocol matter--but the editor thought about her all weekend, went back to the office, looked up her previous proposal, looked at her sales numbers (she sold 3 books to Silhouette Romance, then didn't sell anything else for over three years), cleared up the protocol issue, and now she wants her to submit something to a different line that we've all thought my friend was a better fit for than Sil. Romance. After so long feeling like she was butting her head against a brick wall, she's so excited, she's practically hyperventilating.

So, see? Even if you've been published once, or twice or three times, that's no guarantee that you'll get published again. Depressing thought, isn't it?

I've been reading a lot of other blogs, and it seems that so many of them involve outrageous opinions that result in a lot of insults getting thrown around--or a lot of people agreeing with the outrageous opinion. So I thought I might try to make my blog more exciting, outrageous, or at least interesting. (My life is so BORING) The problem is, I'm not sure any of my opinions are outrageous, nor am I fond of arguments.

I can do conflict in my books. I HATE it in real life. I go far, far, FAR out of my way to avoid conflict. It's the "peacemaker" in me. I'm an Enneagram 9. (I use the enneagram in character development, and of course, knowing oneself always helps in that--more about that another time.) Anyway, we shall see how things progress. I do have opinions. I'm just not sure how outrageous they are.

My books? Yes. They're pretty outrageous. At least some might think so. The Compass Rose did get a mention on someone's blog. I'm still not sure whether this is a good thing or bad. But at least one person did mention picking up a Luna. 'Twould be nice if she picked up MY Luna...

Trips to Dallas, Starting Books and Other Sundry Stuff

So last weekend (not the one that today is part of), I went to Dallas for the Dallas Area Romance Authors and the North Texas RWA's Dreamin' in Dallas conference. This has been a very good conference every time I've gone (met my agent at an appointment there) and this year was no different.

I left home extra early so I could slither into Dallas a) ahead of Friday Afternoon rush hour traffic and b) in time to see a movie that probably won't be playing in Amarillo, which is the closest place I can go see movies even if it's still 60 miles away. Dear Frankie is a wonderful, non-sentimental but very sweet and tender movie about a deaf boy who writes letters to his father sailing the world on a merchant ship. Except that his mother made up this sailor father because Frankie's real father is abusive, and now the "dad's" ship is docking in town, and she can't bring herself to confess her deception, so she hires someone to play the father. It's just a fabulous movie. If you can't see it, rent it when it comes out on video.

So, after I went to the movie, I wound up having to drive in bad traffic anyway, but at least this time I didn't have to go over a nosebleed-high highway ramp. I do not like those things. I met up with the roommates and scarfed down some free appetizers during happy hour, cause I didn't think I'd have time to go anywhere else and eat before the book signing. I of course dropped something on my T-shirt, but was smart enough not to change into my signing clothes before I ate.

The book signing was very good--I was rather intimidated to begin with, because the stacks of my books on the center table (for convenience in shopping) were VERY high. But by the end of everything, there were only seven (7) copies of The Compass Rose left. Quite a few people came by to tell me things like "I don't usually read fantasy, but I want to read your book." Hope that extends to a larger audience.

And Saturday night, after the conference was over, we did our brainstorming thing. I got some good ideas, figured out how to make the ideas I had work and fit together--probably ought to check with the editor and make sure she approves before I get too much farther into it.

So, instead of starting the writing immediately, Monday morning, I wrote down the plotline as I thought it ought to go, stuck in whatever seemed needful. I did some character work, mostly involving Tarot readings for the characters. A "horoscope" layout can bring a lot of insight. And I did a plot arc reading. And on Thursday, I finally actually began the writing. I wrote one page. Then I wrote it again.

I kept the opening line, and the 2nd paragraph was all right. After that, it needed some work, though I changed less than I thought I would have to. Still, one page, twice, isn't going to get me far if that pace keeps up. Fortunately, on Friday, things came unstuck, and I got six pages. Whether they're good or not remains to be seen, but they're down on paper. So...

On to greater things (hopefully) next week. I have a full week of not much but writing to do. The next week, the son's one-act play will go to regional competition. Last hurdle before going to State, so of course, we're going to go watch. But that's a few days away.

Busy, busy, busy

It has been a busy, busy few weeks. I'm running way behind where I wanted to be in certain things, but I did get the revisions on The Barbed Rose finished and sent back to New York. It's looking good, I think.

Next week, I'll be starting on the last book in The One Rose trilogy, which has no title yet. I have a few things I want to have happen, but beyond that, I'm not clear. Which is why I'm glad I'll be meeting up with my critique partners in Dallas this coming weekend at the Dreamin' in Dallas conference. We always brainstorm for each other when we get together. They helped me with the main plot outline for Barbed Rose, so I know they can help me with this one. And they're a lot of fun to hang out with besides.

I've spent a lot of time out of town over the past month. I went to New Mexico for a week (well, one day going and one day coming home again) taking kids skiing for spring break. It was early here, so we were a week ahead of the big spring snow storm. The weather was fabulous--the boys in the group skied without shirts the last day of the trip. And then we got over a foot of snow after we got home.

Got to go to visit some of the grandboys over the Easter weekend--it was fun, but exhausting. All this traveling has really put me behind in things like updating my website or clearing away the stacks and stacks (and stacks) of "already read" books I need to go through, list in my computer and sort into keeper, trade-in, and library donation stacks. The keepers are the ones I know I want to read again (and have probably read again already). The donations are the ones I think I might want to read again, so I'll let the library keep them on their shelves, since I don't have room, and the trade-ins are the books I'm pretty sure I won't want to read again. Although sometimes I pick them up at a bookstore and buy them again. (sigh) Did that this week with Suzanne Brockmann's Hawken's Heart. I didn't realize it was one I had in the original edition, and bought the reprint--because I didn't even look at the inside. If I had, I'd probably have recognized the story, but I didn't. I did read it again. :) Do any of you do this? Probably all the time. Ah well.

More when I manage to get here.

Back again

I really ought to post on a more regular basis, but... well, I don't even keep up with my journal or "morning pages" (from Julia Cameron's The Artist's Way) on a regular basis. And the journal is where I work out problems with the writing.

Hmmm. So does that mean I don't regularly have problems with my writing? Must be. ;)

It's confirmed. The Barbed Rose will be the title of the second book in The One Rose trilogy. I'm working on revisions for it now. Almost halfway through. I ought to be able to finish them by the end of next week. Probably a good thing, because we're going to go visit two of the grandboys (and their daddy) for Easter.

I've got a bazillion other things to do, but first, I need to get past the company coming this evening. We had a big batch of people over for Sunday dinner, now I'm resting up for the next batch. Then I can do my other Tarot readings and work on the website (which has not been updated since the book came out. Did I mention that? The Compass Rose is out and available in bookstores everywhere. And it got some pretty good reviews too.) And I know there's at least another dozen and a half things I need to get done. Ah well. The brain gets lost when I'm working.

Stuff happens

The writing has begun to move along. Probably just in time for me to switch to something else for a deadline. I typed in the opening pages of the new book, and decided that I needed to trash the first 3 pages (an improvement over the 50 pages that had to be dumped from the One Rose book I finished last month). I can feed all that information in--and probably ought to--while the story moves along. And some of it probably doesn't need to go in.

Thursday night, I took seven local kids to a Mercy Me concert in Amarillo. Because we're an hour away, we had to leave by six to get there on time. Problem was, several of the kids didn't get out of baseball/softball practice till right at six, and understandably didn't want to go to a concert in a dirty practice uniform. We left town about 15 minutes late with an Excursion full of hungry kids--some did eat ahead of time, but most of them had no time to do it. They scarfed down the few Girl Scout cookies I had, a small bag of Chex Mix and a small bag of green salsa Doritos one of them provided.

Of course, by the time we got to the "big city" (hey, compared to our little town, Amarillo IS big...) all the close parking was taken, so we had to hike a ways, then while I ran around to pick up the tickets, they ran to the concessions for food. Anyway, it was an excellent concert. Okay, even when I was their age (high school or younger) I never did like bass cranked up so loud it made the body vibrate. I still don't like it. But other than that, it was great. We saw most of the rest of our town there--lots of visiting went on during intermission, and lots of singing along with the bands. Lots of fun.

School night, I was trying to get them home as early as I could, so--since they were still insisting they were starving--we drove through at McDonald's. I'm truly impressed they could keep our mass order straight. One young lady got an ice cream cone. When they handed it to me, the very tall ice cream proceeded to topple over, and I had to catch it in my bare hands. It didn't melt too much before the clerk brought me a sundae cup I could fold the ice cream in and stick the cone on top. And the sweet child who ordered it was sitting in the farthest back seat in the vehicle. Even with all the napkins, my fingers tasted sweet all the way home.

And I still got some good writing done on Friday, even with all the late hours.

The son (a high school senior) is acting in the college's spring play--last performance is this afternoon, so I'll sign off now. I am finally taking the camera with me so I can get pictures.

The State of Being a Bum

I am wallowing in bumness. The writing--when I do it--is going well. Problem is, I'm not writing like I should be. Hoped to get a proposal done this month. Ha!

I know I usually take quite a bit of time off after I finish a book, but I had hoped to manage to take a bit less this time. And I have started the new book. The time off has been sporadic and sprinkled into the midst of the attempting to write, and filled with vital and utterly boring things like taking the computer to the shop after a power outage killed it. And playing online games. And reading books. (I'm almost caught up on all the Luna releases so far...still have 2 to go, I think.) And making chicken 'n' dumplings for a bake sale. And stuff.

Tomorrow, I have to get serious. Wish me luck.

Starting New is Always the Hardest

I'm trying to get untracked on this new book. Wrote 6 pages Monday, was going great guns, had lots more that I knew where it was going. Tuesday was a bust, because Monday afternoon, the computer died (more on that in a minute) and I had to cart the computer into Amarillo to the fix-it shop to get it fixed. Today, when I went back to write, I got a whole page and a half out of all that stuff I knew about. Then it was time to switch POV, and Phhttbbbttt! Nada. Everything I thought I had I didn't. No clue what needed to happen next. So I quit and went to play on the internet and let the brain percolate.

The reason the computer died--apparently the garbage truck driver (this is a small town. There's only one. Only one truck--there may be two drivers) was either hungover or--well, something, because a block or so down from my house, he clipped his second power pole of the day. This time, instead of just leaning the pole over on its lines, the power lines snapped. He was lucky he didn't electrocute himself. (I have it on good authority--from the mother of a young man who did this to himself and didn't die--that you just ain't the same after.)

Anyway, even though the electricity just blinked off for a few seconds, my computer wouldn't boot back up. At all. I had all my story stuff backed up, but I hadn't backed up things like website bookmarks or e-mail addresses, or things I needed to reply to, or notes for articles. ACK!!

So, I'm doing this on the backup computer. Because it lives in the son's bedroom, he thinks it's his, but it isn't. I miss my split keyboard (if there are typos, it's because my hands feel all squished together and I keep sticking them on the wrong keys) and my trackball mouse.

And I'm still not writing.

ACK!!! It's been too long!

I've been away too long. After the Christmas craziness, I vanished into the Deadline cave--you know, that place where you eat, breathe, drink, sleep the book, when you never leave the house, forget every appointment, meeting and whatever you're not dragged to bodily, all in order to Get The Stinkin' Book Done On Time.

Yes, I did get it finished, I finished it on time, and it's not so stinkin' after all. In fact, it's pretty good, if I do say so myself. We shall see what the editor says.

Now it's time to start another book. I hope I manage to do better next time. I really didn't intend to cut off ALL outside contact when I descended into that cave. The next one's about curses, and though I'm not a real fan of ghost books, it may have a ghost in it. If I can't figure out a way to get rid of her. Wish me luck.

A New Week

Okay, I don't think I posted a single thing here last week. I was working on a BIAW and the NaNoWriMo, and writing lots and lots--I didn't even write my newspaper column last week. Everything focused on the book. Well, mostly everything.

I got about 40 pages written last week. Not as much as I wanted, but more than I expected. The story is moving right along.

Then I went with my son's French Class to Dallas on a one-day trip to see Cirque du Soleil. We left at 7 a.m. and got home around 1:30, with about 6 hours in Dallas. Want to hear panic in a teenager’s voice? Just sit in on a game of high school Truth-or-Dare during a school trip and let them suddenly recall in the midst of all the uproar that one of those listening in writes the weekly column for the hometown newspaper.

Cirque du Soleil was fabulous. I can't describe it--just go visit their website to see what all they do. But now I want to write a circus story even more than I did before. Someday, maybe.

Meanwhile, it's back to work on the book. I got 4 pages done this morning, but I really need to go back to work on it. I'd like to have a couple more pages to the good today. It's time to rescue the guy and get out of town. I'm on the downhill side, but...

Getting sidetracked

I've been pretty good this week about getting the writing done. I didn't always write all I wanted every day this past week, but I wrote every day, and reached my page goals most days. Thursday, I think it was, I got an e-mail from the editor that they were going to be working on cover art.

Of course, this being me, I was reading the e-mail faster than my brain could compute, and skipped over some of the pertinent information and began to panic that they were re-doing the cover to The Compass Rose. Then I read the e-mail more carefully--the way I should have done to begin with--and realized that no, this was for the cover for Book TWO of the One Rose trilogy. The book I'm still fighting to finish. Immediate reaction: ACK!!!

I'm only a little past the halfway point (I think). I have no idea whether any scenes will turn up in the end of the book that will make great cover scenes. (There is a pretty cool one in the middle, though.) So I put together descriptions of the settings where most of the book takes place (and will have to go back and beef up the descriptions, because I tend to skim over those, even though I have definite ideas about what things look like) and descriptions of the characters, and a couple of scenes and which characters are in what locations, and we'll see what happens.

I spent most of today (Saturday) doing this, so I can get back to the writing tomorrow. Only have two things I have to do next week--no, three. But I can get that done. I can make it.

Need to go buy new bulbs to put in my flower bed, too. The ones I had rotted before I could get them in the ground. (sigh)

National Novel Writing Month

The point of NaNoWriMo is to write a whole, 50,000-word novel in one month. Why they chose November with Thanksgiving smack in the middle of it (okay, at the end), I will never know...Maybe because the guys who started this are guys. Who don't cook. Or do Thanksgiving for their families.

Anyway, I'm not doing a start-from-scratch novel, so I didn't sign up on the "official" website. I've got this book to finish. And it's one heck of a lot longer than 50,000 words. If I can keep it under 150,000, I'll be happy.

But I'm doing my own unofficial version, on a couple of loops, because, as said, I have to finish this stinkin' book. Got 5-1/2 pages written yesterday. Found my way out of the corner the characters boxed me into, and got into the next scene...and had to stop because I had no clue where it was going.

Worked that out in morning pages over breakfast, and wrote six (6) pages today. Met my goal. And I'm still in the middle of the scene, so I know (sort of) where to pick it up tomorrow.

It's snowing today--election day. It does snow more often in this part of Texas than further downstate, but it's unusual to be snowing this early. Though now I think of it, it snowed here on the last presidential election day... Hmm. Is this some kind of sign or something? I voted two weeks ago, just so I wouldn't have to think about politics and could ignore people picking at me.

I can't be worrying over that kind of unimportant stuff. I have a book to finish!

Cornered

Got four pages today--and they went in a totally different direction from any I expected. I wrote myself into a corner. It's not a bad corner, but I think the only way out is through, and I'm not sure I want to go through this love scene. I may have to though.

It's not that I don't like writing love scenes. This one may be a little tricky, but it ought to be fun as well. It's that I write them so slowly. It takes my page production way down because I want to get them Right and I spend twice as much time weighing words and making sure what they do is actually physically possible. These people aren't gymnasts. (Though sometimes I think they'd like to be.) And this one is definitely tricky. Very, very tricky.

If they refuse to cooperate unless I let them do this, maybe I can write it, then cut it later... (grumble, grumble) Characters are SO uncooperative...

Stinky Day

I'm trying not to use...questionable language in my blog. But today was not the best day for me. Got a rejection on a romance--deserved, I think. Which will require some thinking as to the next step to take. But not now. I'll think about it later. (I'm very Scarlett O'Hara that way) It's still da** depressing. (Yeah, I know. I used one of "those" words. I can't help it. I'm in a questionable mood.) I do know that everything said in the rejection letter is 100% true. I know that I have sold books before, and will again. But it's still depressing, and I'm still in a stinky mood.

And I only got 4 pages written today. Got six pages yesterday--didn't post that yet. I was pleased with yesterday's stuff--and today's is pretty good. Just didn't get as much done as I would have liked. It would probably help if I knew what needed to happen. Didn't do "morning pages" today, which is where I usually work this stuff out. Guess I'd better not skip them tomorrow. Got to get on the stick and get my writing done. Don't want to be finishing it January 31.

A Week's Worth of Writing

It's been a good week, once I managed to get into it. Mondays and Tuesdays always seem to be so hectic, for some reason. But I was able to consistently get pages written, though not always as many as I wanted. I did four to four and a half through Wednesday, then Thursday, I got five pages. Friday, I got six, and yesterday--though I usually don't write on the weekends--I got seven pages done. It was a "working Saturday".

I think I've reached the half-way point in the book. I hope there's enough adventure up to this point--I know there's set-up--I just want it to be right. I love these people and this story, and I want to do them justice.

Starting slow

Getting back into gear slowly. The 4 pages I wrote yesterday feel a tad slow--I'll have to see when I go back over them again. The 4-1/2 pages I got done today, before heading to town, went better. Big fight scene. Now I have to do the wrap up, and figure out what happens next. I sort of know, but not sure how much transition I need in between.

But that's what "morning pages" are for. Figuring stuff out.

Can't think of anything else to blog about, so I'll just quit. Done here.

Back to Work (I hope)

I haven't posted here in a while. Haven't done much of anything, actually. I went to Waco a week ago Saturday to for that workshop on characterization, and came home exhausted. It wasn't until Wednesday afternoon (after I fixed lunch for the Friends of the Library) that I realized I wasn't just tired. I'd come down with some kind of creeping crud. I've been fighting it ever since. And I still had to organize breakfast for the high school band Saturday morning before marching contest. I only had to make phone calls and ask people to do stuff, but you may know by now how much I hate doing that. I'd rather eat worms than make phone calls. I'd rather get bit by fire ants than make phone calls. I'd rather...well, you get the idea.

Finally went to the doctor today for drugs. I hope it will go away soon, because I was worthless when it comes to writing. I did type all the stuff I already had into the computer--I'm up past p. 200 now, but new stuff is coming slowly. The brain is definitely in a fog.

About all I've done is read books. I read Shield of the Sky by Susan Krinard, the October Luna book--very good. I read Karen Harbaugh's The Vampire Viscount and The Devil's Bargain--paranormal Regencies--and enjoyed them a great deal. I also read the new Laurell K. Hamilton, Incubus Dreams about 3 times--my usual practice with her new releases. I'll let it wait a bit more and go back and read the good parts again. I really like her books...

I read more than that, but don't want to take time to post them. I may do a "Recent Reads" page on my website, or something.

I did get 4 pages written so far today. I want to do six--but don't know if I can get the brain in gear or not.

Off to the Waco Workshop

Today, I typed in more of the story into the computer. I'm up to p. 160 and still have lots to go--and I'm not sure I'm halfway in the story yet...I mean, even with the stuff I haven't typed in. And in the afternoon/evening, I wrote up this characterization workshop I'm doing in Waco on Saturday--which meant I had to figure out just how I do my character creation. Frankly, I don't really have a clue--but I do have a process. And I don't create characters. I get to know them. They somehow already exist. They live in the primordial stew that's called my subconscious.

And then, once I figured that out, I had to do all the handouts and visual aids for the workshop. Hope they appreciate them.

Hope it works.

Oh, and then I had to dig out some childhood/baby pictures for the boy for his last senior year pep rally. I couldn't find his toddler pictures--when he had a thing for wearing sun visors upside down and backward, or deely-bobber antennae. I tried to scan one from a photo montage thing we have on the wall in a frame--didn't work too well. But we did find some cute pictures. Had to do it tonight, because they're due in the morning.

It's coming together

I think I have converted the whole of the new opening, typed it all in, added in scenes from different places that needed to be moved into the new bit, and managed to get back to the main story already written. I think it's working.

I typed it in and converted the stuff I already had typed--I started on about p. 53, but with the new opening bits, I only lost about 26 pages. Not bad. Lots of stuff coming. I'm up to p. 123 or so. This one may not be quite so long as the first one.

Didn't do diddly-squat yesterday as far as writing goes--well, except for the newspaper column and another little news tidbit. (Didn't look to see whether I got it in in time to make the paper...) I went to Amarillo. Went early so I could go see Wimbledon, because I knew I couldn't drag the men who live with me to see it. They have to see manly movies. I really liked this movie. Lovely romantic comedy, nice tennis stuff, great scenery. Oh, and England was pretty too.

Finished a painting, but didn't bring it home because it was raining. I really need to take pictures of these things. I write it on my "to do" list every day, and never get it done.

Tomorrow, I have to put together a workshop on characterization for the Heart of Texas RWA chapter. Driving down to Waco for it, and to brainstorm with my best buds. Don't know what I'll brainstorm, but will come up with something.

Exhaustion Sets In

Actually, being as it's Monday, and I've had all weekend to rest, the exhaustion is beginning to pass. I left home shortly after I posted Friday's entry to this blog thing, and didn't get home again (except for rushed trips to change clothes and visit the little girl's room) till ten o'clock that night. And I didn't get to sit down until the football game that evening. My knees are still killing me.

I did almost nothing on Saturday. I couldn't. I did get up and go to the $5 quilt club thing at 9 a.m. Turns out that two of my new neighbors (I'm actually the new one.) are also doing this quilt, so we decided we might try to get together and work on it if we need to. Then I came home and went back to bed. When I woke up a couple of hours later, I read a book (The Mountain's Call by Caitlin Brennan--fabulous read) and then decided to get out the sewing machine. So I've already finished this month's quilt block. And a bunch more blocks for the Indian Hatchet quilt I'm doing. Now my back is killing me too.

Sunday, we did church and then I came home and sewed some more, and was generally lazy. So we come to Monday, and I was able to get back to the writing.

I was entirely and totally right to cut that second beginning and start on this third one. It's going much, much better. I'm wondering whether Kallista is getting a bit histrionic, but given her stresses, I suppose she deserves it. Only one of them gets to lose it at a time, though. It's her turn. Didn't take but four new pages to catch up with what I already had. Now I have to do a scene break and figure out what's going on with the rest of the crew.

Tomorrow is "going to the city" day, but if I get my newspaper column done tonight, I should be able to work on the story before I leave.

The week from Heck

If this has been the week from heck (and it has), today is the day from you-know-where. This is the day all the stuff I've been trying to pull together all week MUST come together. And I have to look good too! (Or at least dressed nicely.)

Last night, the luncheon hostesses (including moi) decorated and set tables for the luncheon today, and of course it started raining before we left, so we got wet. (One of the ladies won't be able to come today, because she got so much rain out on her ranch, the roads are too bad for her to make it into town.) I came home and burned a CD with Italian opera music so we could have music with our lasagna today, and then I went to type in some of the story, and figured out what was wrong with the new opening I've been working on all week.

It's too dang slow. So I'm dumping another 6 or 8 pages and going with the heroine's POV and the scenes that begin when they arrive in town. Which means I now have to find more ways to work in character introductions and set-up. Which means I have to go back and re-write Again. Ugh.

And who knows when I'll have time to do it? Maybe not till Monday. Because after I go to the luncheon, serve and clean up there, I will have just enough time to come home, change into my cooking clothes, grab the 30 pounds of browned hamburger and run up to the school to start working on the band dinner. I do have someone bringing change. I have someone cooking--and I imagine I'm going to have to cook too, because the other person I'd asked won't be able to do it. And somewhere in all this madness, I want to go out and watch the Homecoming parade, since I haven't seen a single one since the son started school in this town, and he's graduating next spring...

Oh, and my parents are arriving in town sometime today to spend the night. They always stop off on their trip from Austin to Colorado, or vice versa. (This time they're heading south.) And today's the day. So somebody needs to come meet them at the house and escort them to dinner at the school. (They've come to the Mexican pile-on several times before--somehow always seem to be traveling through during Homecoming...)

And then tomorrow, we're loading up all the leftovers from the garage sale and carting it to Goodwill or the library. (They get the books.) Which will probably take all day. I might be able to get to the rewrites by Monday. I hope.

Thanks for listening to the lengthy rant.
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