When I don't WRITE FIRST

This is the granddog. Dolly wanted me to throw her bone for her when I took her picture. She's not jealous of her toys at all, though she does like to play tug-of-war. She was just home for the weekend when I took the pic. She's spending the summer with us now, and has filled out a little more. She's just now getting to be a year old. I've enjoyed having a dog to play with and take out to walk.

We went walking this morning and she worked me hard--didn't pull or anything. She was very good on the leash. But she likes to walk fast, and I hate to hold her back, so I walked a little faster. Which is good for me, so I probably ought to take her out more often, huh?

I was fussing at her, trying to get her to hold still in this other picture, and she dropped her bone and put on that "I'm in trouble?" look... No, I didn't crop or compress the pictures. Should have, but I didn't. I was mad at the computer, because it wasn't downloading the pictures the way I wanted it to. I did finally get them downloaded--after only a little cussing...

I've been wanting to share pictures of the granddoggy--and to put some pictures on the blog just because they look nice, but, well... Mostly I blog at the dayjob these days, and I don't have my pictures there. I e-mailed these to myself. I'll have to do that more often. :)

Don't know what I have to blog about. Went walking today. The beach was lovely. Not so much seaweed today.

I did get six good pages written yesterday...and today, I wrote a paragraph. I think it had more than one sentence in it.

See, I've listened twice now to a workshop on Writer's Bootcamp, which discusses lowering goals to raise production. If your goal is one sentence, and you write two, you've achieved 200 per cent of your goal. (Right, math person?) Anyway, I'd like to write more than one paragraph, but --and I do know exactly what I did wrong.

I did not Write First.

I've learned over the years, especially when I got to write full time, that if I am going to get any writing done, I have to Write First. Before I look at the computer, package up books to mail, print out critiques for writing chapter meetings--any of it--I have to write.

Now, it is permissible to shower and have breakfast, and even to go out for a walk with Dolly (or without) (in which case, the walk comes between breakfast and shower, 'cause, you know, one must wash off the sand and salt and sweat--this IS Texas. The temp may only be 87, but there's, like, 900% humidity which makes it feel like it's 418 degrees...) before I start writing. I can also put dishes in the dishwasher, or put laundry on to wash (preferably not both), or make necessary phone calls before I start to wash. (The phone calls really need to come before the writing, because otherwise the phone calls get forgotten and my meds don't get renewed, or my hair gets longer and longer and longer--which state it is in right now. Way Too Long and Shaggy.) But those are the only permitted chores. Otherwise, the writing HAS to come first.

And today, I didn't. I needed to send an important e-mail, and I needed to see if another e-mail had come in. (I hadn't checked e-mail since Monday, so there were a lot, and I didn't read very many of them.) I needed to download pictures from the camera. I needed to print some stuff out, except I couldn't remember where I'd put the files. Then I got out the pages I wrote yesterday. Then there were the books I finished that ought to go on Shelfari (I know. Time-wasters...) Then I looked at what I wrote yesterday.

I added a phrase here, moved parts of a sentence around there to give it the highest impact. I clarified that bit and took this other thing completely out. Then I had to put a sentence in another spot. I tinkered. And when it was time to go on, I wrote my two sentences. (I'm pretty sure there were two.) And came to a stuttering halt.

I HATE this. I want to be able to sit down and just write. And I'm fumbling all over the place. Summer usually sucks when it comes to the writing. There's a lot of stuff going on. I'm traveling a lot, have commitments in the evenings, more people at the house. But those are just excuses. Because if I remember to Write First, I can get it done. Sometimes it comes slow, but it does come. I just have to Write. First.

sigh.

Graduations, sisters and seaweed

So, we went to the niece's graduation last Friday. I took the day off work so we could arrive early enough to help out with the shishkebab party, and got to cut up potatoes, peppers, melons and strawberries to go on skewers. The potatoes and peppers were cooked (with some pretty cool marinated meat). The fruit (which included both green and orange melon and pineapple) was not. (Though I did put some pineapple on to cook, actually.) I got to visit with the sister AND the brother and various in-laws. The nephews condescended to at least say hello, though not much else. They're mostly at that monosyllabic teenaged or pre-teen phase. The nieces did chat more. (There are only two of them, and one is only 8. But her almost 18-year-old sister did visit quite a bit.) It was fun to get to see everybody. This leaves only 5 more kids on my side of the family still in public school. These kids are growing up.

My sister has graduated from college with her teaching degree--just three or four weeks before her daughter finished high school--and has a line on a job in the school where they live. We've all got our fingers crossed.

We came on back home Saturday, because we've got a lot going on this week. And now I try to think what it is, I can't. Lots of church stuff going on. We've been experiencing house shopping with the daughter--they have now made an offer, and it was accepted, so they'll be moving soon if all goes as it should. Hopefully I won't have to go help them move. I've moved too much already this year.

I've been trying to get back in synch with the writing. It's going a tiny bit better. I got 3 pages written today, rather than the 2 pages I wrote yesterday. Maybe I can write 4 pages tomorrow.

I went walking on the beach Monday and took the granddog. I'd been nervous about taking her with me, not knowing how she would behave, but I broke down Monday morning and just did it. Dolly did jump over the seat to sit in the back seat, rather than the back cargo area, but didn't move any farther than that in the car. And when we got to the beach, she was a perfectly behaved little doggy. She didn't even chase the birds, much less try to play with the few kids out that early. We didn't walk in the water much. The seaweed has come in.

Oh BOY has the seaweed come in. It made an ankle-deep blanket about 3 or 4 feet deep right at the water's edge, because there was so much of it, the water couldn't push it any higher on the sand. It kind of dammed the water up, and if we wanted to walk on the water side of the sargasso, we were almost knee deep in the water when the waves came in. And it was this thick along the whole mile course that we walked, and all the miles we drove past.

Dolly's a medium-sized doggy, so she walked a little faster than I do, which got me walking a little faster. Not as much faster as to keep up with Dolly, but faster. I'm a tad sore today.

So, that's the news--pitiful, isn't it? But I'm going to leave things at that.

Blown Away

The wind has been blowing like crazy the past few days--knocking over the glider-swing in the back yard every night (as well as the big trashcan) and scaring the granddog into barking. There's sand blowing across most of the streets in town and piling up in intersections or along curbs or the risers of the stairs up the seawall.

My hair, which needed cutting about 6 weeks ago, is at that awful length where, when the wind gets hold of it, it makes this Dutch-Girl-Paint-girl-hat curl over my ears and nothing I do can make it not stick out in that stupid Bozo-the-Clown curl. The wind is very damp, and has salt in it, and that combines with the hairspray (if I didn't glue my hair down, it would hang straight down in my face and make me CRAZY) and makes the hair even more impossible. I really need a haircut. Bad. And can't seem to remember to call anywhere or squeeze out time to go to a walk-in place. I'm either going to have to get used to looking like Bozo every time I set foot out in this wild wind, or manage to get this mess cut off.

I went out to walk this a.m. Right At High Tide. Usually I'm an hour ahead of the tide turning, or an hour behind, or sometimes smack in the middle. But today, I was on the beach for the only turning of the tide today, as high tide hit and then started back out. Not that I really noticed the turn of it, but I certainly did notice that it was high, especially since this wild wind--enough to make cars rock--is blowing straight onshore and pushing the water in more. I had to go almost to 39th street to find stairs that led to sand rather than water, and even then the water was almost knee deep a time or two. And since the tide was so high, the water was over sand that spends most of its time out of the water. Only the very top layer was wet. Immediately underneath, the sand was soft and squooshy, so I was sinking into the sand rather than pounding along the hard surface you usually get with wet sand, because it wasn't wet enough. All that sinking in makes for quite a workout.

The wind is so strong, the birds were flying at an angle. I saw a few pelicans flying southwest, but pointed south (the direction the wind was coming from). Kind of like you have to drive your car in a strong wind, with the steering wheel pointed into the wind to keep the wind from shoving you off the road. The gulls were flying like crazy just to stand still. It's been this way for days.

I'm waxing so poetical (or maybe obsessively) because there's not much else to report. The fella and I did go out to see PRINCE CASPIAN last night, finally. The boy had to work, or we might have gone to see Indiana Jones. That's the one he wants to see. I forgot to take my sweater, but didn't get too cold. The folks behind us in line had obviously been to the local theater before, because one had a huge fleece robe, and another had a big jacket. Man, they keep that place cold.

The writing, it also sucketh. No real excuse for it, except that I keep finding excuses. People visiting. Errands needing running. Granddogs needing to be played with. Nieces and nephews graduating. The nephew's done. The niece is tomorrow. Have to/want to go. Get to leave early enough to go eat shishkebab at the sister's.

I think I've written a grand total of 5 pages this week. That's five more pages than I had last week, but they're all...transition. Getting from the morgue to the murder scene kind of stuff. Bleah. I mean, we have to get from one place to the other, but it shouldn't have to take 5 pages to do it. Of course, I'm disposing of an excess character (indisposition, not death) and switching POV in the process, but it doesn't feel like anything's happened. Suppose that's because it hasn't. And I'm still not sure where the villain will show up and cause trouble. I'd really like a bit of a frothing-at-the-mouth scene. Especially since I have two potential frothers. Maybe I can use the alternate frother here... Hmm.

Anyway--there's the News Of The Week So Far. Enjoy, and watch out for that wind. :)

Sandcastles and such

We had houseguests this weekend. The in-laws finally made it down to the island and we had a great time. I keep telling people we love having people come and visit and we want all the brothers and sisters and cousins and nieces and nephews to come--and nobody believes me. But we do. We don't have a lot of time available for them to come--but we do want them to do it.

Anyway, the fella's folks got in Thursday afternoon--the day the boy started his first shift at work. He's waiting tables at one of the nice restaurants on the seawall--it was that or construction work, and he was in favor of the place with air conditioning. He was still at home when they arrived, so it worked out well. Friday, I went in to work in the a.m. while the others got a tour of town and hit the fish market, so we had a shrimp boil for supper.

Our family--both sides--is all about shrimp. Even those store-bought, previously frozen limp-shrimp rings will be inhaled in ten minutes flat (depending on how many cousins are inhaling). And if one of the little cousins proclaims a dislike for shrimp, the standard answer is "Good! More for us." (One of my grandboys doesn't like shrimp. His little brother has loved them since he started eating real food. But then he's like "Mikey." He will eat anything he can chew. The daughter's boy has recently decided he will eat shrimps too. Alas, fewer for us. And time spent peeling them for the little guys that can't be spent peeling our own.)

But, much as we enjoy those grocery-store variety, they pale--absolutely fade away--in comparison to shrimp fresh off the boat, bought at the fish market the same morning they are boiled, chilled and eaten. It's been a while since we hit the market, and it reminded me that we need to do it more often. (Especially since the fella de-headed the shrimps that came with their heads on and I didn't have to do it. I hate getting stabbed by shrimp spines.) We don't need a special occasion. Just shrimp. Oh MY, those babies were yummy.

Mostly, that's what we did for the weekend. We ate. We also rode the ferry over to Bolivar Peninsula and back, and went out to look at the sandcastles. There's an annual sandcastle building contest sponsored by an architectural association with all sorts of categories, plus "Best of Show." The castle that won first place was a literal castle. With ARCHES.

I have no idea how they built those arches. I don't think they can use any building material other than sand and water, so the arches totally impressed me--and the judges too, obviously. (I'll get a picture from the fella as soon as I can.)

We also went to dine at the boy's workplace and I got to try the famous pecan pie. It was almost more a pecan cake, because the filling had flour in it, but it was yummy. I ate way too much, but I'm not sorry. Except that it will take several more power walks (if my walking had any power) to work it off. Sigh.

I got no writing done last Friday. None yesterday, and today I eked out a whole two pages. But it's better than nothing I guess. (sigh)

So what cool thing did y'all do over the weekend? Or what yummy thing did you get to eat? (I do talk about food a lot here, don't I? What does this tell you about me???)(I know.)

The Mommy Voice

I love what the daughter posted at her blog, and I just have to share it.

There are many women who claim that there are few forces as powerful on this earth as the mommy voice. This mythic force compels all persons within hearing range to cease all activity, revert to the mental age of 5, and say to themselves, "my god, I hope she doesn't mean me." It is an elusive and hard to describe power. Though God, in all his goodness, bestows this mighty gift on all women who claim young humans as their own.

However, since my child is beyond the scope of normal human children, God has deemed it necessary to provide me with a vocal power that completely transcends the mommy voice. You might call it an obey me or die voice. It is a voice that would put drill sergeants to shame. It is the faintest shadow of the voice that God used to call creation into being. It is even enough to make C stop running away and turn around.

It is a gift I am very grateful to have.

I know all about that voice. Moms generally only bring it out for the "I really mean what I am telling you and you had better pay attention NOW" occasions, because I remember far too many occasions when they would look up and then just go right back to what they were doing.

I did get tickled not too long ago... We had the youngest son in the car--the one who is still in college and has no kids--and the older son's two boys also in the car taking them for a visit to Gigi and Granddaddy's. They were goofing around in the back-back seat (it's an SUV with 3 rows of seats), getting out of their seatbelts and generally misbehaving when "Uncle Bob" turned around in the middle-back seat, pointed at them and roared "Sit your butt DOWN in that seat NOW and put your seatbelt ON your body."

"Uncle Bob" looks and sounds much like their daddy, so we had instant quiet and scrambling for seatbelts. Meanwhile, our son turned around to look at us with this horrified look on his face and said-- "Oh my God--I'm channeling Dad."

So, yeah. Not only does God give us a mommy/daddy voice--it's inherited.

Summer Crazy Season

Yes, it has started. The Summer Crazy Season. It begins with graduations, so for us, it started this past Saturday when we went to watch one of the nephews graduate. That meant a trip to Fort Worth, then sitting outdoors (fortunately, the ceremony was in the morning before it got Really Hot and under a tent, so there was less threat of sunburn) for a couple of hours, then off to a family party and much eating of barbecue and shrimps and cake. This is not particularly crazy, but it did involve driving long distances and sitting outside in the heat (they had little cardboard fans on sticks with a photo of the graduating class to stir the air) and lots of very loud children. We have pictures of the grandboys to post--but I don't think they're uploaded yet.

But no, the craziness does not end there, because the very next day, we had to go load up the boy--who is not so boyish any more--and move his stuff to storage, then move the rest of his stuff, and the granddog, home for the summer. This meant lots of climbing up and down stairs and vacuuming and re-packing of overstuffed boxes. (He didn't inherit the packing gene which his father and sister have...That's my boy...) And then driving again.

We had a party/potluck barbecue Monday night I made a bushel of potato salad for. (Other families don't eat potato salad like mine does. Five pounds of potatoes is only the beginning--and if the other folks at the pot luck don't eat much, all the better. They can have it for breakfast.) (Yes. Breakfast.) Also made the flour-free peanutbutter cookies, AKA the easiest cookies ever.

Much of the rest of the time has been spent trying to get the boy's internet up and running. I have internet. We're just trying to branch it off the main modem for him. The router we used in the Panhandle is refusing to work. You can only buy wireless routers now--though the one we got does have wire hookups for four computers, plus the wireless thing. But it's extremely slow when it does work. So I think he's taking it back and picking up another one. (Things are beginning to feel expensive.)

I did use the trip to the mainland to pick up the router as an excuse to stop off at the mall Waldenbooks and snabble up a copy of Blood Noir. I read it too. I'll wait a day or two before I go through it again and make sure I caught everything. I also bought a bunch of new romances because, hey--Waldenbooks has a "buy 4 get 5th free" thing, and I'd already picked up 3 of them. So I got 5 in all. The new Quinn, the new Layton, the new Chase, an Elizabeth Bevarly and ... one other I can't remember right now.

Let's see--this coming weekend, we have company coming. Tomorrow. The next weekend, a niece is graduating and we're going up for that. Then there's stuff during the week. Oh, and it's time to get ready for hurricane season on top of everything else. We live on a Gulf coast barrier island, so this is not something to ignore. So we have to put together a couple of hurricane kits--one for evacuation and one for riding it out in place (for the Category 1-2 size hurricanes).

Then I think we're here for a weekend, and then it starts again. Ack!

All of this makes it very hard to get much writing done. I'm creeping along this week at about 3 pages a day--on the days I get there. Friday will be hopeless this week. I just have to keep plugging.

Beach reads and Bookstores

The daughter was being snide and sarcastic in the comments below, saying "Like you need an excuse to hang out at a bookstore." But I DO! I need excuses.

Thing is, excuses are extremely easy for me to come by. For instance, "I NEED New books" is a valid excuse. Or "The new Slither Grimblethorpe book is coming out, and I NEED it!" That's a valid excuse too. (Not that Slither Grimblethorpe is a real author. I just made that up for an example.)

Of course, there is always the "I'm going to be in the area anyway, so..." excuse. That's the one that gets me off the island to the Big Bookstores where they actually have more of the books I want. The Hastings bookstore is closing down. It's still in the process, which means it still has a lot of old books nobody wants to buy, and it's not shelving any of the new books being released. Then there's the independent store downtown, which leans Heavily toward lit'rachure and very little commercial, mass-market fiction. Or even commercial, mass-market hardbacks. There's a used books place semi-downtown. And then there's Wal-Mart and Target. See, it's not the "hanging out in the bookstore" excuse I need.

It's the Driving 30 miles to the Bookstore to get the Books I Want NOW excuse I really need. Because the new L.K. Hamilton book comes out next week. (I know bazillions of you hate what LKH has done with Anita Blake. I don't care. I need the book. I will read the book. Probably three times before I put it down. Maybe only twice. Deal with it.)

Also, the new Julia Quinn novel comes out next week. And I think there's also an Edith Layton. And maybe the new Jack Campbell Lost Fleet book. The Quinn and the Layton might be available at Target. But they might not be. I doubt the LKH book will be there--though it might. And I KNOW the Campbell book won't be stocked. And there may be others I want and crave and NEED like Whoa and Darn. (I know. But I'm old. I can't curse with impunity.) (Unless it's necessary for a character in a book. Or I've worked my way up from Dagnabbit, because I'm really mad...)

Yes, I know I can order them from Amazon, or Borders or Books-a-Million online. But see, then I would have to WAIT. I am not good at waiting. I used to order the LKH books from the science fiction book club. But they would take a week to 10 days to arrive. Meanwhile, I'd go to the bookstore and sit and read chapter after chapter in the not-so-comfy chairs. I would make myself crazy with the waiting and the wanting. So I don't order any more. I'm just going to have to come up with a reason to drive into town. Or something. So there it is. Excuses and addictions and books I want to read this summer.

While I live at the beach (sort of--it's about 2 blocks away), I don't read there. I sunburn in about 10 minutes flat. Or in an hour or so, if I have good sunscreen. And anyway, if I'm actually on the beach, I'd rather be in the water (which is not good for books) or walking (which usually winds up being in the water, this time of year). And if I'm walking, I need to watch where I'm going, what with the sharp shells and baby jellyfish and stuff on the beach, since I walk barefoot...

If I'm going to be reading, I'll sit on the glider under the big magnolia in the back yard, or at the table under the covered porch, in the shade. :)

What books do you want to read this summer? Where is your favorite summer reading place?

The Tuesday Blog

It's Tuesday and I'm blogging again. I seem to post a lot of blogs on Tuesday. Mostly because Monday tends to be really crazy and I never manage to make it by here but I Really want to post at least one blog a week so y'all won't think I've forgotten you, and Tuesday seems to be when I can make myself get over here and do it.

The problem is that many times, by the time Tuesday gets here, I can't think of anything to blog about. I've forgotten whatever it was I did over the weekend. Maybe because the weekend seems so far behind me. Anyway, it's Tuesday again, and I'm blogging.

About what? Um--we went to see Iron Man a week ago Sunday, and out to dinner for Mother's Day. This past weekend, I overdid it a little on the flower beds and pretty much slept the rest of the weekend--though we did buy some "previously viewed" movies and watched American Gangster Sunday night. I want to go see Prince Caspian, but haven't found the time yet, and since we're moving into Graduation Season, I'm not sure when we will. Maybe we can go on a Wednesday, or something.

I did walk on the beach yesterday morning. Still haven't looked up those silly plover birds, because I can't find where I put my bird book. I think it's in my office, but where??? No special observations yesterday--seagulls, shells, sand, water--the beach is always great, and before 8 a.m. on Monday, I pretty much have it to myself.

The writing is moving ahead. Only 3 pages yesterday, but I got 6 today, and now I need to think about my book's theology before I can forge ahead. Since this book is about spirits, and demons have cropped up already, and ghosts and "ascending"--I have to think about that sort of thing. I know how it works--I just have to figure out how to explain it, and decide how much explaining I want to do at this point.

A fantasy novel requires a lot of explaining, and I've set it up so that the explaining makes sense--one of my characters doesn't know much about the magic and has to be told. But I do sometimes feel as if the story's getting bogged down in all the explanations. Today, though, it went well. I didn't expect this particular scene at this point, but it works well, does what I need it to go and sets up one of the major complications that will come into play later. So yeah. I'm feeling good about the writing.

RWA chapter meeting today. I'm totally not interested in this program, but I'm going anyway, because hanging out with other writers and talking writing gets my writerly juices flowing, and I need as much flow as I can get. I also get to hang out at the book store. Yay!

My first Art Contest

Okay, here's the painting that made the cut, that will be in the show. In this light, you can see some of the brush strokes that don't show in artificial light (I took it outside to photograph), but this is the painting. (Didn't win a prize, but it's in the show! Not bad for my first try ever.)

You can't see the one that didn't make it, because I haven't taken its picture yet. Sorry. It's a painting of three little boys playing at the beach. With sucky hands and feet. I could stick it on an easel and try to fix the hands and feet, and the arm that's ... just wrong. But I don't think I will. It will just have to be wrong. (sigh) I still like it anyway.

Um. I've signed the contract, so it's official. I have definitely sold three books to Tor. There. That's my news of the day.

Thursday Thirteen

I stumbled across this recently and thought I'd participate, even though I don't quite know what it is. I'm guessing 13 random things I want to put on my website. So here's mine:

The last 13 new books I read (I am not counting re-reads or the book I just skimmed)
They are, in the order in which they are stacked up on my desk:
1. THE SPYMASTER'S LADY by Joanna Bourne (Excellent!)
2. A DANGEROUS LOVE by Brenda Joyce (Good)
3. YOU'VE GOT MALE by Elizabeth Bevarly (fun)
4. PERSONAL DEMON by Kelley Armstrong (Good)
5. HEROES ADRIFT by Moira Moore (Good)
6. MYSTIC HORSEMAN by Kathleen Eagle (Good)
7. THE TYCOON'S ONE NIGHT REVENGE by Bronwyn Jameson (Also good)
8. THE DUKE NEXT DOOR by Celeste Bradley (fun and good)
9. PRIVATE ARRANGEMENTS by Sherry Thomas (pretty good)
10. THE STOLEN PRINCESS by Anne Gracie (Don't remember, but I usually like Gracie)
11. FORGOTTEN MARRIAGE by Paula Roe (forgot this one too, but ...)
12. VOWS OF A VENGEFUL GROOM by Bronwyn Jameson (another Australian goodie)
13. SIMPLY PERFECT by Mary Balogh (Excellent)

Some of the others may deserve excellents, but I'll have to look at them again. Enjoyed reading all of them--I skipped a fair portion of the Thomas book, but that's because of all the flashbacks. Not because they were flashbacks, per se, but because it was looking back at previous misery. Or maybe because it was looking back at previous happiness which I knew became misery.

I skimmed most of THE VANISHING VISCOUNTESS by Diane Gaston, and I really can't pinpoint why--it just didn't grab me like the Balogh and Bourne books did. I've liked the other Gaston's I've read, but this one--maybe because it was a traveling story. Don't know. And my re-read was KINSMAN'S OATH by Susan Krinard. I even bought a new secondhand copy to re-read it...

Now to get these all up on Shelfari and GoodReads, and in my computer log, and on the Romance Readers Anonymous loop...

Pelicans, and other thoughts

The thing about living at the beach is that you have to LIVE at the beach. All that regular, everyday stuff still has to be done, even though the beach is only two blocks away. Cooking, laundry, scrubbing bathrooms, going to work--all that stuff takes up going-to-the-beach time. So you just have to go anyway, and still, somehow get everything done.

I was thinking about this as I walked on the beach today. Tide was in-ish. (Didn't look for the times in the paper this a.m.) I could walk around the boulders, but the waves still came up--just not too high. I was thinking about how I still had to go home and do stuff, but wasn't it great that I could spend this little amount of time out communing with nature.

The sargasso seaweed is starting to come in. In places it looks like a crinkly, crocheted blanket, it's so thick. I'm not sure if the birds eat something on the seaweed, or if they eat the stuff that's tangled up in/hiding in the seaweed, but the birds--seagulls and sanderlings and plovers and willets--seem to hang out near it and hung through it.

Today, I found the biggest shell yet. Most shells that wash up on our Gulf coast are small. Mostly they're scallop-type shells in white or black or yellow-stripes, an inch, or maybe two across. The vast majority are much smaller, some smaller than my tiniest toenail. But this one is at least 4 inches across. Maybe 5. Bigger than the palm of my hand, and deep, and almost black. Part of the rim was broken off, but it's pretty much whole. I also found what I think is a piece of coral. I think it might be brain coral, from my minimal research. No picture of it yet...

I only saw one pelican flying today. Monday, row after row flapped by overhead. Usually I see at least one line of pelicans heading east--maybe it was a wind thing. Yesterday and Monday were very windy, today was less so. Anyway, Monday, I decided to count the numbers of pelicans flying in their lines.

When I was growing up not far from my beach, and would come down to swim and ride the ferry and such--I never saw a single brown pelican, much less a white one. They were quite endangered. One reason I decided to count how many I saw on Monday. I think I've also mentioned here that pelicans like to fly single file. I assume this cuts down on the headwind issue, like the wild goose V, but I've never seen pelicans fly in an actual V, just single file.

Anyway, I counted two lines of eleven pelicans each. Then one of thirteen. Then one of seventeen pelicans. That's a lot of pelicans. I was beginning to think that pelicans had a thing for odd numbers--but then I saw two separate lines, flying somewhat close together, of eight pelicans each. One had seven at first, but there was a singleton flying really hard to catch up and fall in at the end of the line. Now I shall do math.

I had to get out a pen and write on the bottom of a cutline page. I saw in one thirty-minute walk sixty-eight (68) brown pelicans. (If I added wrong, please correct my arithmetic in the comments. thank you.) That's a LOT of pelicans. They were all flying the same direction, so I'm reasonably certain it was 68 different pelicans, not the same ones flying in circles. Which to me is absolutely totally cool, since it was my own childhood when pelicans were so endangered you just did not see them on the island. At all. Oh, and I didn't count the single pelican I saw flying in to land beside one of the jetties. So that makes 69.

The beach belongs to the birds from dawn to about 10 or 11 a.m. I may go out walking at 8-ish, but the beach is still theirs. They tolerate me grudgingly.

I got started writing a little late. The plumber guy came and fixed the toilet from its intermittent running (which can be shocking while in the shower, since it would run every five minutes and alternately scald/freeze you while it ran) and I took my sweet time cleaning up after the walk. But I still got 3.5 pages written. Did 6 yesterday. I'm not sure I'll keep what I wrote today--or that I'll keep it in this location, but it's written.

Oh. I just remembered. I entered my very first juried art show Saturday. The very first one where I took paintings in and let other people (who are neither relatives or friends) Look at them and decide whether they were worthy of hanging in a show. They were judged in the non-professional category, of course, which probably helped, but there are some very good non-pros. Anyway, one of the two paintings I entered made the cut. (I suck at painting/drawing hands and feet. And arms. Some arms, anyway.) I didn't win a prize, but I made the cut.

So my painting of Robert is going to be hung in this art show. (It's in the blog archive if the other link doesn't work. I can't figure out how to post it on the blog with this work Mac. Just scroll down till you see the painting of the person near the bottom...)(If you want to see it.)

I'll take a picture at the show, so you can see it hanging with other people looking at it. ;)

High Tide

First things first, here. I'm donating the prize to be given away at the 2 B Read blog this week. This is the blog of the published authors chapter of RWA, and I'm blogging over there on Thursday. (I'll remind you again on Thursday. ) If you comment at the blog, you will be eligible to win the contest. So go read the blog posts, and comment!

High tide was at 7:12 a.m. today. I went out to walk on the beach at 7:50 (approximately). So the sea was very, very close to the seawall when I climbed down the stairs. I drove past the seawall parks (wide areas with benches and picnic tables and big piles of pink granite boulders extending way out into the water) to a place where I could walk more than two jetties without having to walk waist-deep in the water to get around the big piles of rocks--and the water came right up to the bottom of the stairway. I stepped of the concrete step into water.

I tried at first to walk around the rocks--because the sand did not cover those right at the base of the seawall. But the water was just too deep. Up to my knees. And I couldn't see the sand, so I couldn't see the places where the water had washed it away. It wasn't safe walking there. But I could carefully work my way up right next to the seawall and walk through the maze of rocks pushing up through the sand. High tide was really high...

But after I got through the rocks and to a section of beach where the waves didn't wash quite so close to the wall, I was able to notice all the giant rows of giant pelicans flying down the island, ten and twelve in line one behind the other, and the sanderlings and another type of sandpiper-like bird picking at the seaweed. I thought the other birds were kildeer, but I just looked up images of kildeer, and what I saw was different, so I'm going to have to go home and hit the bird book to figure out what they are. I think the birds were probably selecting little bits of the crinkly seaweed to use for nest building, but I'm not sure.

Had a busy weekend. I had hoped to stay home, but ended up not getting to. Wound up having three softball games to watch on Saturday, since the college team -- well, they lost their very first game, but won the second Friday game, which meant they got/had to play Saturday morning at 11:30. They won that one, which meant they had/got to play at 2:00. Then they won that one, which meant they had to play again at 4:30... We didn't stay for the third game. By that time, the team was so exhausted, they didn't win again. But they had a good run in the regional championship tournament. I enjoyed watching the two games we did watch.

And somehow, even though I stayed under the awnings and shade all morning and afternoon, I somehow managed to get enough sun to burn. My face and neck turned bright red, enough to show through the makeup, which at least toned it down a little. I wasn't in the sun! Okay, maybe 10 or 15 minutes, because it was cool enough that the sharp wind made it downright cold. And I burned in that 10 or 15 minutes. Good grief. Okay, so no more going anywhere without sunscreen. Especially at midday.

I've been able to get back into the writing this week. Except I had to get into my file cabinet to dig out some research. (I am pretty sure I have some more somewhere, but couldn't find it yesterday.) Which meant I had to get down on the floor to look through that bottom file cabinet drawer. Which meant I had to get back up. Which is a huge production, given the state of my knees and the rest of myself. And since the file cabinet is behind my desk, creating the walkway between desk and closet, I brushed against the lampshade of the lamp on the desk and sent it slowly crashing over to dangle from its electrical cord in front of the desk chair. The lamp knocked over the Coke Zero I'd been drinking, which dampened the page I'd been writing on, which fluttered to the floor. The Coke dribbled across the desk and onto the floor... Big mess.

So today, I re-copied the page that got all wet, because the ink ran on it, and I revised it, and I went on with the scene...and then I couldn't decide where to go next.

I kind of think I need to summarize a bunch of stuff here and move back to the main mystery, but I keep getting bogged down in logistics. My heroine has no girl clothes. She needs girl clothes before she can really do many of the things she needs to do. She's rooming with the girl wizard. Do I need a scene to set up how that's working? How would that contribute to the furthering of the story? Maybe if later the heroine stops showing up at the rooms...? Bleah. Hopefully I can figure all this out by the time I need to start working in the morning.

And I need to come up with a profound--or at least profound-ish--topic for a blog on Thursday, at 2 B Read. I want lots of comments, so I can give away a book. To YOU, perchance--

Street Dunes

Beach Report: Since I did go out and ride this morning--squeezed the bicycle out between all the boxes and old dressers and stuff in the garage--I thought I'd begin here, because there was quite a wind last night.

This is not unusual. The wind blows a lot on our little island, and not always from the sea. In the winter, it comes from the north, which is landward. More northwest-ish, but still, north. Last night, this fierce wind came out of the south. And it blew the sand up over the seawall.

I had to ride through a little drift of sand to get up on the sidewalk by the Rainforest Cafe, and there was sand dusted all over their grass and flowers. The petunias in the streetside bed were more tan than pink, from all the sand on them.

On the beach, a pair of bulldozers were pushing the sand, which had been piled up to a foot below the top of the seawall (when it's usually 5 to 6 feet below), back into the water. And later, when I was driving back from the Radio Shack (Radio Shack has a waterfront store!) from picking up a new cable for my portable hard drive, the whole right-turn lane at our turn, by the Rainforest, was covered over with sand. And the big plastic garbage cans down on the beach (they're plastic because metal rusts overnight) had not only been turned over, but one of them had been turned completely upside down. That's some fierce wind.

So. That's the report from the water front. I didn't ride very far at all on my bicycle, because I hadn't ridden in over a week, and had become all feeble again, and because the wind was still pretty stiff. I'm going to have to keep up the bike riding, as well as get back out to walk in the warm water. My knees will thank me.

Oh, and the website is under construction. Not under redesign. It's still going to have the same self-made design as before because I do not have time to fool around with programs I barely know how to use. What I have done is switch my web server account to a different plan, which will ultimately be easier for me to use, but in the meantime requires me to re-upload everything, including the fiddly little bits like the roll-over sidebar buttons and such. Yes, I have an old-fashioned website. Because I did it myself and I don't have time to learn how to do the dropdown menu linky things... does it work? I think so, but then I'm the one who put it together. Maybe when I get paid for this new contract, I'll pay somebody else to design one for me...

The writing feels stalled out. Probably because it is. I spent last week revising and re-writing a whole big chunk of the story, and this week, I went back to New Blood and hunted up all the places where I'd explained the function of magic and marked them with those cute little flag Post-Its, because I got a set of them in the gift basket from the RWA chapter where I spoke a couple of weeks ago. So now I can go look up what I said about what in the previous book. I do wish that I hadn't said wizards could have animal familiars, but I did, and I don't think I can change that much of the story now. I didn't give out many of them, so maybe I can set it up that it's difficult to acquire a familiar... Conjurers have spirit familiars, sorcerers have human familiars, alchemists don't have familiars at all, and wizards have animal familiars, but it's tough to acquire one.

After all the marking of the magic, I typed in all the revised chunks so it would all be in the computer and I wouldn't have to do the jumping from insert to original and back again when it was cold. I wanted everything smooth and flowing and at least semi-organized before I went on. So now I have to start writing brand new, original stuff on Monday. I should have been doing it this past week, but I didn't, and I think it's good that I did what I did, but... I'm feeling very behind again. Ah well. I am up to page 92. That's not bad, actually... Okay, I don't feel so bad, now.

And I won't be able to do what I thought I could do this weekend. We've got to hit the road again, but it might not be as bad/busy as I thought. The college softball team is in the regional playoffs, and it all depends on how many games they win and/or lose as to whether we have to go to a game on Saturday or not. If there's a Saturday game, we'll leave straight from the ball game. If there isn't...I'm not sure when we'll leave town. But it ties up my weekend with a bunch of stuff I hadn't planned to do (like upload all the image files to the new web server). Oh well. You gotta do what you gotta do...

Thirty Two Years

That's how long the fella and I have been married. I have trouble remembering the exact number from time to time, actually--that's what age does to one, after all--and then I have to Do Math to calculate it. But that's the number. 32.

We delayed celebrating on our actual anniversary, Thursday, and went to church band practice instead. New songs every week can be a lot to learn. Friday, there was a faculty awards banquet the fella had to go to, and of course, I dressed up and went along. Stayed after and had a giant margarita while chatting with various faculty and spouses. And then, Saturday, we made reservations at one of the best restaurants on the island. I'd been wanting to go there for a while, so at last, we did. They do seafood with a Central American flair...and yes, you know I'm going to share our menu with you.

I like calamari, at least the fried appetizer kind. I even like the ones that have all their little tentacles. I have never had calamari flavored like this, though. It was delicious, fried up like those other sorts, but dressed with sweet banana peppers and caramelized onions and red bell peppers...pretty sure they were cooked in olive oil, and then all mixed up together in a sweet/hot/crunchy/calamari-tasting deliciousness. Oh, and they also serve--like you get tostadas with salsa at a good Mexican restaurant--this place serves plaintain chips with salsa and a green sauce--I think they called it chimichurri. The salsa was milder, with other flavors than in a Mexican salsa casera. Anyway, very good.

We had what one of the other waiters described as a signature dish of the restaurant. Red snapper with a plaintain crust served with raspberry chipotle sauce and Parmesan scalloped potatoes. The plaintains weren't sweet and only faintly banana-y. Nice and crunchy, and wonderful with the sweet-hot of the sauce. Not very hot, just ... right. And then we succumbed to dessert. I had a pecan ball, which is a giant scoop of ice cream coated in pecans (I thought it would be a little smaller) drizzled with butterscotch. They didn't...quite...have to bring out the wheelbarrow to roll us out of the restaurant. It is really a treat to live where there are so many wonderful places to eat. We still haven't made our way through all of them...

And then we went home to watch Charlie Wilson's War, and enjoyed lying around like overfed slugs to watch it. And that was our anniversary celebration.

Oh. And okay, let's just confess my native dorkiness here. I dropped, dribbled and/or dripped every single course on myself, beginning with a banana pepper slice, continuing through a piece of Caesar salad dressing-coated Romaine, to a droplet of chipotle sauce and ending with a major dribble of ice cream and butterscotch, right down the front of my red blouse. Sigh. Can't say I didn't enjoy my food...and I really tried hard not to wear it too...but, well, somehow these things always seem to happen to me. It has become a family joke. Years and years ago. Sigh.

Beach Report: I am now a seagull voyeur. I caught a pair of seagulls Doing It, and did not look away and give them privacy. I figured if they were going to Do It right there on the public beach with a dozen other seagulls watching, they probably got off on exhibitionism.

The male was standing on top of the female, who looked rather long-suffering, squawking like a little boy doing sound-effects for a slow machine gun, sort of an ah-ah-ah-ah-ah-ah-ah. In seagull voice, of course. And in perfect rhythm, every dozen ah-ahs or so, the female would give off a little high-pitched squeal while he wriggled his butt against hers. The squeal was the only thing that convinced me she wasn't totally bored by the whole affaire.

Now I have to wonder where the seagulls nest. Probably over in the marshes on the bay side of the island. It's sure not safe to build a nest on the beach with all the beachgoers exploring.

And now I must add seagull porn to my oeuvre. Ah well. This, I think adds either to my geekiness or my nerdyness quotient. Nerdyness, I think. Geeks tend to be monomaniacs. Nerds want to know everything about everything, and since birds are not my only fascination... Yep. I'm a nerd.

Beach Reports begin again

Not that they'll be any better than sporadic until I get my time organized a little better. But I did get out to walk on the beach yesterday. It was in the evening, so quite a few people were out still enjoying the day. I found my new shorts I bought for my friend's visit that I didn't get to wear because a cold front blew in and we had to wear jackets to walk on the beach. I found my flip-flops. And I drove to the beach and Walked.

The water is WARM! YAY!!! At last. It's not bathwater warm like it will be in September, but it's warm enough for a pleasant swim, if the sun's out and the wind's not blowing too hard. I admit it. I'm a wimp when it comes to swimming water temperature. It comes from living in Texas so many years. If it's not at LEAST 90 degrees (32+ C) air temp, I'm not going in, and 95 F (35C) is better. Either that, or the water had better be warm. I've been swimming in hot springs pools when the air was "brisk" and that was acceptable. But I don't like to be cold when I'm wet. So, now that the water's reaching the 70 F (21 C) range, and the air's pretty consistently close to 80 F (26.6 C), I ought to be able to go out one day soon and enjoy a little wave action in the water.

The thing I like best about the Gulf coast surf is that there isn't much of it. We just don't get the big surfing waves that they get on the Pacific coast. Have I said this before here? I just really like the fact that the surf doesn't beat you to death, and that it's easy to go out past the surf, where the water is still just chest deep, and let the non-breaking waves just rock you. It's infinitely relaxing to touch sand between the waves, then ride gently over them as they come rolling in to break (not too violently) twenty or so yards farther in toward shore. Soon. Maybe this weekend. (Though I have plans--Saltgrass Potters spring art show and sale, and maybe the garden club plant sale over in Bayou Vista.) (And getting the car washed. I did get the license plate and its holder put back on my car. Had a bit of a close encounter with a large trailer hitch in the parking lot at Fish Tales... But the beast (aka, my vehicle) is still filthy.)

About the beach--okay, the water was warm. Swimmers were out. Not much seaweed, and it was mostly the little crinkly stuff. No jellyfish yesterday. Lots of shells, and I even found half a sand dollar. First hint of a sand dollar I've seen in the 7 or 8 months I've been here. So I took it.

Today is our 32nd anniversary, and the fella was, as usual, up to par. I received a lovely arrangement of yellow roses (he knows I like other colors better than red) and some very interesting purple bud-like flower before I had to leave for the paper. (Where I am currently sloughing off by writing this blog post.) I think we're going to celebrate Saturday with dinner out, and Charlie Wilson's War at home. We meant to go see it in the theater, and never did make it, and I don't think there's anything out now that we really want to go see. I will try and remember to report back in... TRY.

Think I'm through the "going back to fix" pages in the writing, and can start forging ahead with new stuff. If only I can remember where I thought I was going from here... Hmmm. Well, I can write it, and then if I have to, fix it.

I Haz Furnishings

I mentioned, in my only blog last week (because I was really, really tired) that I traveled up to the Panhandle to supervising the packing and loading of the vast majority of our furniture so we could bring it to the Island where we now live. It is a VERY long way from the Texas coast to the panhandle and back again. Took a long time to drive it.

But we did--took out most of a week with no writing or even thinking about the book--and now all our stuff is Here, and I have to figure out where to put it. ACK!

The spouse is laying claim to the boy's book space, so now I have nowhere to put the boy's books.

There is Stuff all along one side of the kitchen counter, but we do have all the boxes out of the kitchen now. They are all in the den. Where we do a lot of our living.

I told the packers NOT to pack ANYTHING on the bed we weren't moving--and I carefully put my new teddy bear (because the stuffed whale I had been sleeping with had lost all the felt on his mouth in the past five years of life with me) in the middle of the bed so he wouldn't get packed...

And they carefully packed not only Marvin the Bear, but the one red throw pillow I'd deliberately put in the middle of all the gold matchy-matchy "set" pillows to make it not quite so matchy-matchy. I still have not found Marvin. But I did find Balou the bear (yes, the one from Disney's Jungle Book) so all is not lost. I have a bear to sleep with. (Some people hug pillows. I find bears (or killer whales) much more amenable for sleeping.)

So now, we have a little furniture left in the house we still own (I do miss that house...) to camp out in when we go up that way, instead of camping out here where we spend most of our time. The fella is Very Happy to have his recliner back.

I have re-discovered that I really cannot do Anything before I start writing in the morning. I tried to empty a box yesterday, and discovered books. They were books I'd had on my keeper shelf--and I couldn't remember if I still wanted to keep them. So I opened one of them to skim, and wound up spending the rest of the morning reading them. My mother says I just have no will power. And yes, this is true. Hence, the need to start writing first, before doing other stuff that will suck me into the Not Writing.

I can't read e-mails either. Or look stuff up on the internet. Nor should I hunt for stuff in research books, though I'm a little better about stopping that and getting back into the writing. I can, however, clean the kitchen, or bathrooms, or do laundry, or any of a hundred other household tasks, because Those Things aren't Fun. (Had to pick up a dead roach this a.m. Ick.) I sorta have to make myself to those things before writing, because they are SO not fun. I have to research house cleaning services on the island...

That said, I have had to go back and do a LOT of tweaking, because I wrote stuff before I figured out how the process worked of transferring a murder investigation from the Ordinary Police to the Magic Police, and because I realized my hero would rather do pretty much anything--except let a murderer get away--before asking his father for assistance. So I had to go back and make everything make sense.

I know there are many, many people who claim that one should Just Write the first draft, and go back and fix things After the whole draft is finished. And to a certain extent, I do that.

"But--But---" you are saying, "But you just Said you had to go back and tweak. That's not writing straight through."

No, it isn't. Because 1. I am NOT a multiple draft writer. I Hate writing the same stuff again and again and again. By the time I write stuff out in longhand, and then put it in the computer, it's pretty clean. Rarely do I add things--like emotion or description--when I type story in. Mostly, I cut stuff out. That's not the same as "layering" in things on subsequent drafts. And 2. I'm a linear writer. Not a plotter, not a pantser. I have to write from beginning to end, and I build on what I've written before. So if my hero's not motivated correctly--if he tells the heroine to do the right thing for the wrong reason, then I really can't keep going. Or if I have things out of order, I can't keep going.

That was part of my problem this time. I had to move some things later, and bring some things earlier, and if I don't do it NOW, when I know how things have to work, I'm not going to remember what I intended/needed to do when I come back to it later, no matter how many notes I write to myself. It's just too big a problem to save till later.

I realized a while ago that I'm having problems because I'm still figuring out how the magic works. I'm also having to figure out how magic fits into Victorian society...and it keeps slowing me up. The story is working, but it's just coming slow because I keep having to figure stuff out. But it IS coming. (cracking whip.)

My Dad is in the movies

So. I've been away. I'm home now, and my furniture has arrived. I have a real desk now. I had to disconnect my internet to get the desk into the room, and am having trouble getting it back, but that's not what this blog is about. See, my dad is gonna be in the movies.

On my way to the panhandle to supervise the packing and loading of all our stuff (of which we have WAY too much), I drove through Smithville to check on the parents. They've been in their house three weeks now, and the remodel of their demolished bathroom is on track. Mama called me one day to tell me they'd picked out tile for the bathroom, but she couldn't remember what it looked like. It looks nice.

I went with them to the county courthouse so they could register to vote at their new address--and we got horribly lost, because we turned left rather than right in downtown Bastrop--and we went to look at carpet to replace the stained carpet they have now. And then, when we got home, Mama took a call.

Seems that the movie that is currently filming in Smithville, starring Brad and Angelina, wanted Daddy to come for a wardrobe fitting.

When he came back in the house from wherever he'd been, he protested that he hadn't volunteered to be in any movie, and the brother-in-law said "Sure, you did. Don't you remember? At the parade, when you held up that poster board with your name and phone number on it and they took your picture?" Daddy remembered that.

So he went in to get fitted for their wardrobe, and went back the next day to be in their movie. I, unfortunately, had to leave before he went to wardrobe--but it's not like they'd've let me hang around anyway.

When I asked him how it went, he said he got pretty hot walking up and down the street in a wool suit. He kept forgetting what he was supposed to do, and asking the other old men if they could remember. He was one of the "men who tip their hats." He thought they finally put him out of the way so he couldn't mess anything up if he forgot, but then again, if everybody is just milling around in the street, it's hard to mess up milling... He got a free haircut (he was needing one) and a free meal, and a few bucks.

I asked if he saw anybody famous, any of the stars, and he thought one of the red-haired ladies might have been somebody. But if Brad Pitt was there, he couldn't tell it.

So that's my dad's movie-making adventure. He's not real sure he'd do it again, because he got awfully hot and tired, but he's glad he did it once. And when the Brangelina movie "Tree of Life" comes out, we'll all have to go and watch for Daddy's hat tipping.

I'll post a picture of Daddy when the opening comes, so you'll know who to look for. ;)

Writer's Weekend

I had a wonderful weekend. A Writer's Weekend.

My best friend--the one I went to New Mexico and Arizona on a research trip with a couple of years ago--came down to the island on Friday with her husband, because she didn't want to drive through the big-city traffic by herself. My fella was out of town on business, but her guy did very well staying out of the way. ;)

I took them out to lunch at my favorite "local's hot-spot", and then we went downtown to see the hawk show they were having for FeatherFest. (This bird is actually a Sea Eagle, and he's checking us out.) After the hawks and a walk around town to look in a few shops, we had ice cream at the son's favorite ice cream parlor. (Mine, too. But I won't let myself go there unless we have company in town.) We drove around the historical district a little bit, and then headed back to the house for a little while.

B and I (we sign our e-mails by initials only--I think I started it because I'm bone-lazy, but our little group all started doing it, since we all have names with different initials--and now we call each other by our initials) had exchanged a few pages for critique, so we went out on the back covered patio to go over our pages, and while we were out there, it rained. We were under the roof, so we didn't get wet, but after an hour or so, it started getting cold and we went in. Had supper at Tortuga's Mexican Restaurant and watched the wind blow the palmettos around. Then we went back home again and plotted a book for B.

She brought her sticky notes and her big foamcore plotting board and her tape recorder (which kept stopping intermittently unless she smacked it--we decided it had become masochistic...) and a spiral notebook and her AlphaSmart. I never realized just how much equipment was necessary for plotting a story. ;) She had a huge cowboy boot box for the sticky notes, because the first time we tried plotting with sticky notes, we kept saying things like "We need more colors--we need a color for the villain, and for the hero's internal conflict, and for the suspense subplot, and for--" So every time she sees sticky notes in the store, she checks to see if they're a color she doesn't have already. I think she has enough sticky notes to last the rest of her life.

By this time, we were really tired, so we went to bed. Her fella had crashed a while back--the driving stress tuckered him out.

Saturday, we got up, drove to McDonald's for some breakfast take-out, and after we ate it, we plotted a book for me. Of course, I have more books plotted than I have time to write, and am having to take a week off working on Old Spirits to drive back to the panhandle this week and supervise the moving of the rest of the furniture, so I'm going to be writing even less (which upsets me no end), but we plotted yet another book for me. While we were plotting, her hubby went out walking down the seawall. He went into every souvenir shop along the way, and wound up walking all the way to 6th Street. Which is almost 5 miles from our street. And then he had to walk back. We'd have come to get him if he'd called, but he never did...

B and I went out and walked a couple of miles on the beach-or maybe only one. I was too busy talking and looking at all the birds to pay attention. I even saw some terns. We did walk out on one of the jetties--one with a paved walking path. It was quite chilly, or we might have gone walking earlier, but we wanted to wait for it to warm up. And we still wore out windbreakers to go walking. We weren't really hungry, so we went back to the house and had peanut butter cheese crackers and watched movies, then went out to one of the better seafood houses on the island for supper. (Had the charcoal grilled/fried shrimp combo--very good.) The man in the house was snoring by 10 p.m., because of his 10-mile hike...

Sunday, we got up and did speed-writing drills. We wrote 10 opening sentences. Not opening sentences to anything in particular, just opening sentences. Then we switched pages, and drew numbers, and wrote scenes to go with the opening sentence that matched that number. I got one that said, "Oh, honey, with a package like that, I'll do ya for free." (B is a stinker, because she KNEW I would have to write from her sentences, and put that one in just so I'd have to write something beginning with that... :P) It was a lot of fun, and we laughed a lot.

After that, I had mentioned a free reception and tours of one of the big mansion museums on the island, so we went to that--looked at all the stuff on display in the basement, and went upstairs to look at the living area and take pictures on the spiffy-cool front porch and such. (This is B and her fella on one end of the porch--yes, it's a round gazebo-y area.) Then we went to eat at a Louisiana-style seafood place downtown, and look at the stores on that end of the street. And then, alas, it was time to say goodbye.

Most of the time, there are at least three of us on our Writers' Weekends, but our third couldn't get away this time. But since, despite his ten-mile hike and aching legs, her husband had a good time on the island, I don't think I'll have a lot of trouble convincing them to come back. Maybe if my fella's here next time, the guys can go fishing. I know mine likes to fish, and I think hers does too... We didn't even ride the ferry or go out to the state park. And maybe our third can come next time too... Can't wait.

Now I have to just get busy writing Old Spirits, so I can write another couple chapters of Thunder, and get a little farther toward finishing it, and then I can write Time Catch, and then I can write the third, still-nameless blood-magic universe book, and then I can write this book we just plotted. Sometime in 2010, maybe???

Stuck!

I don't know if I've mentioned it here before, but I usually don't get writer's block. I'm not going to say I never get it, because sure as shooting, I'll come down with a raging case next blink of my eyes, but I can't remember having a lot of trouble writing, except once when I got into a knock-down drag-out argument with my hero who refused to do something until I pointed out to him the situation, and he finally admitted that he probably would do what I wanted him to do--but he'd be real upset with himself the next day.

There you go--I'm queen of the run-on sentence. Anyway, like I said, I don't usually just come to a complete and grinding halt and find myself unable to write another word. I get the stupids. That's where every word that flows out of the pen is just ... stupid. The narrative is stupid. The dialog is stupid, the characters are Stupid and everything is just Stupid, STUPID, STUPID! However, this week--okay, today--it's been rough going. I kept having to stop to figure stuff out.

It wasn't so much that I had to stop for research, though I did need to be sure that people have to go before a magistrate to have a bail set, and that solicitors are the ones who accompany someone for bail, in England. But I could have fudged that. Left gaps till I had time to do more thorough research. (Besides, I have a source in the newsroom--Ian the Brit answers all kinds of questions willingly for me.)(And I'm going to have to break down and get a historical map of London. Sigh.)

Where I really ran into problems was when I realized I didn't know exactly how the magic worked that I was using. I hadn't thought things through, and I needed to. I needed to know how magicians interacted with the spirits they call, and what the morality of the magic was. That stuff was important. And I figured out that conjury was as inherently moral as sorcery, in my universe. I even had to understand the rules for heaven and hell.

I still don't know everything about how this magic works. I need to look up some of the stuff I figured out for the previous book, but took out of the pages. I can't find it in notes or deleted materials--I may not have typed it into the computer. In which case, I KNOW it's in the first draft tucked away in its 3-ring binder...somewhere. I don't think I've moved the binders yet. In which case, they'll get moved down here in the next couple of weeks, when we move all our furniture to the island. But it might be here...

Anyway, it's frustrating when I have to stop and work out stuff I really should have worked out earlier--but I sorta thought I already had. I mean, I wrote a whole book set in this universe. It just didn't occur to me that I'd be writing about a different kind of magic in more detail than I had in the previous book. And honestly, even if I had worked out stuff about conjury ahead of time, I would still be discovering things about it as I write. I never know all the secrets till I get there. Sometimes, I do make them up. But sometimes, they just sort of...come.

All kinds of things bubble up out of that swamp, and I never know what it will be next.

Manticores have made a recent appearance...

Oh! AND, I have ridden my new red Schwinn bicycle all the way to 39th Street today!! That is 53rd Street to 39th Street, plus the two blocks from the subdivision--and back again. Farther than I've been able to take myself before. My knees may whine for the next few days, but I got past 45th Street, which means I rode more than 2 miles.

Oh noes!!

The only commercial fiction new book store on the island--Hastings--is closing!!

Oh noes!! Or, if I want to be a bit more literary, alas and alack! There is another new book store downtown, but it's an independent, and it pretty much carries only lit'rary books, or books about the island, or maybe books written by people who live on the island. It does not carry books that will feed my jones for fantasy, science fiction, mystery, or--most especially--romance.

Yes, both Target and Wal-Mart are on the island. (Yay! It's been forever since I haven't had to drive either 15, 30 or 60 miles to get to one or the other.) But their book shelves lean heavily toward best-sellers, and Target only has one shelf of mass-market paperbacks. They have another shelf-row of trade-sized books, but most of those, I'm not really interested in reading. And the Target shelf is heavy with reprints and really hard, scary thriller-type books. Those are too scary for me. (I've had to stop reading Colleen Thompson's HEAT LIGHTNING for a little while, because it's getting so scary.) Wal-Mart's book section is two to three times bigger than the Target section, but I really don't like going to the local Wal-Mart. It's nastier than most others I've been in...And they still only have one shelf-row of mass market, now that I think about it. They do have a larger selection of romances, though...

I'm not sure how I'm going to deal with this. I used to drive the 60 miles into Amarillo once a week, but I'm crossing the causeway only about once per month, these days. I may be buying more from catalogs or on line. We'll see how it works out.

Meanwhile, I guess I'd better get a Blockbuster card, or sign up for Netflix...We get all our rental movies from Hastings too...

Beautiful Day

Actually, it was a whole beautiful weekend. Saturday was Absolutely Gorgeous, here in island-land. A cold front blew in on Sunday, but it was still really nice. Just jacket nice, instead of shirtsleeve nice.

Oh, I have to share--I went out one day last week to walk along the beach, instead of riding the bicycle. Wore the flip-flops, since it's been warming up, and did my usual "walk barefoot on the sand, put on flipflops to cross the jetties" trick. The weather was beautiful--just breezy enough to be cool and comfortable. But that water was COLD!!

And I didn't even get into the water. I just walked on the wet sand. Still cold. Cold, Cold COLD!

Interesting tidbit--I was walking along and noticed swirls and waves of what looked a little like those flat-bottomed glass beads you can get at the craft stores to glue on stuff. (They had some on the wall at Tortuga's Mexican Restaurant.) But they weren't beads. They were little bitty, thumbnail-sized jellyfish. Every so often, a big twelve-inch jellyfish would be washed up, but mostly, there were just these waves of baby ones. I was very careful not to step on even the little ones, because those jellyfish can sting like wildfire, and I didn't have my shoes on. There were so many of them, it was kind of hard not to step on them sometimes...

The boy and his girlfriend and the granddog came to visit and they actually went to the beach and got in the water. Brrrr! I have pictures. (Of Dolly the dog, not any people) I'll have to download and post them.

And we all went bike riding. The fella brought the last of the bikes down from the panhandle house, so we had a bicycle for everyone. And I made it past 61st Street before the knees gave out! That may have been partly due to the fact that the seawall sidewalk was very crowded and I kept having to slow down to get around bunches of people taking up the whole sidewalk, but I rode Past 61st Street. That's at least as far as riding past 45th Street going the other way, so I made my goal. Went out the very next day to ride again, and didn't make it that far, so I obviously have more "building up" to do on the legs, but it's a start...

The writing is chugging along. I feel like I'm not getting anywhere, but really, I am. I guess I feel that way because I keep having to go back and fill things in. What I wrote today, I'm worried I may have to take out and condense. I feel like I ought to Know what to leave out and what to put in when I write it...but I don't. I just throw it all in, and then have to slash and burn when it comes time to revise. Less planning, less clothing, more doing.

Onward and upward.

New-to-me Bird

Birdwatching stuff--skip this if you're not interested, but I just saw a pair of birds I'd never seen before.

It was apparent they were dove--dove have a pretty distinctive appearance. They were sitting in my driveway when I got off work today, and fluttered up to the neighbor's fence as I drove up. They were quite reddish-brown, but even more distinctive--the outer half of their wings were a rusty red. Even redder than their bodies. And they were small. a fair bit smaller than Mourning Dove and a whole LOT smaller than Rock Dove, AKA Pigeons. So I came inside to look them up, and found that they are Common Ground Doves. You can't see the red wings in this picture, but the color of this guy's beak--that's about how red the wings were. Ground dove mostly live in Mexico, but they come this far up into the U.S. and they don't migrate. Pretty cool, I think.

Adventures in Parent-land

I'm still tired. Went to help unpack the parents. Totally forgot sticky notes, but the sister had them at her house, so my niece made them out for the cabinets.

We worked like mules trying to get boxes unpacked and things put away, at least in the kitchen, trying to get the living room usable and the beds put together so we'd have a place to sleep. The sister and I worked. Mama was having chest pains. (She does that when she gets overworked.) The sister-in-law came over and worked too. She was the driving force to get the living room organized.

The house will be good for them, but it needs more work than I realized. For instance, the master bath was demolished for remodeling, only the remodeling never got done. So the master bath has no walls, no shower stall to go with the shower head, no floor... You get the idea. The other bath works, but it's pretty worn. Then they had sewer trouble the day after I left to go home. And I'm worried about them being able to coordinate things and remembering to get it done. It really needs to be done as soon as possible.

My brother-in-law is disabled, so he's home most of the time, and if the pain's not too bad, he can make phone calls and help them out some. He was there organizing--we had to watch him like a hawk to make sure he didn't try to move anything, though.

Downsizing will be a struggle for them--and we'll be working on some downsizing too, I think, in the next few weeks.

Finished my character interviews this morning, so I'll probably get back into the writing (I hope) tomorrow. This is for Old Spirits. Got to get rolling on that.

Weather's kind of iffy to go out to the seawall today--lots of wind, clouds. Maybe even rain--can't tell through the windows at the newsroom. Maybe just fog or mist. We'll see how it is thirty minutes from now. I do think it's far enough into spring that it's safe to put all the houseplants outside if I put them under the covered porch where the wind can't get them. I just hope the salt fog can't get to them either. It gets to the cars every so often...

Oh! The house has azaleas outside the breakfast room window. I've always loved azaleas, but have never lived anywhere they would grow. I'm going to find my clippers and go out and cut some. Maybe a rose, too, if one of them looks good.

Stuff

My life is full of stuff. Stuff I have to do. Stuff I want to do. Stuff I want to read. Stuff I have to do something with. Stuff I have to clean or put away or fold up or...something.

I really need to start writing Old Spirits, but I have too much stuff to do. Tomorrow, I'm leaving to go meet the parents at their new house and help them get unpacked and organized. I need to remember to take lots of Post-it Notes to label their kitchen cabinets and drawers, so they can remember where they've put things. A large part of this move is because both of them are starting to have trouble with their rememberers. They did pretty good while it was just Mama forgetting stuff, but now Daddy's started having trouble, so we're happy they can move so close to one of us children. But I really need to be there to help with the unpacking.

However, going to help them means I don't have to go to the panhandle for most of the week. It's either a really long 12-hour drive back to our old house, or a two-day trip, and since the fella has next week of for spring break, he's making the trek to turn the water on and get stuff ready to move the rest of our furniture to the coast. More stuff. And way too much moving. But we're tired of camping out. I want my dresser. And my own bed. (We bought a new queen-size, which will move into the guest room, but I miss my king-size...)

Anyway, there's a lot of traveling and a lot of moving in my future. I have confirmed that I'm going to ApolloCon, the SF/Fantasy con in Houston, in June. I will probably go to RWA National in San Francisco at the end of July (need to find a roomie). I'm still debating whether I want to go to ArmadilloCon in Austin in August. There's a FenCon in Dallas in September, but I have to see if the dates conflict with a potential trip to New York the fella's invited me on.

There is the possibility that Tor will have galleys/ARCs of New Blood for me to sign at the Tor booksigning in San Francisco. I'll let you know if that pans out.

I did get all my RITA books read and judged. An interesting experience, to say the least. I read a lot of books outside my usual reading comfort level--and liked them.

Next week. The writing will begin, next week. Definitely. The fella's out of town. I've caught up on all the stuff. (I think.) I can write.

Geeky Fan Girls

There is no age limit. On either end.

Hello, my name is Gail and I'm a geeky fan girl. Woman. Whatever.

So, yeah, I didn't make it by last week. I tell ya, this dayjob is really eating into my time. Along with everything else in my life.

I did get 14 pages of Thunder in a Cloudless Sky written, enough to earn my charm this month. I think I've made it to the halfway point. This book may turn out to be 8oo pages. (sigh)

And I went to Austin over the weekend to try to help my parents get ready to move. They're leaving the big city Austin traffic for a little house behind my sister's in a little town about an hour away. I spent most of my time going through decades of pictures and sorting them into piles according to which sibling had the most kids in the picture. Then we bought photo boxes and put them in with divider cards, etc. Not hard work, in the least, though I did help carry a dining table down the steep driveway to a trailer. (That driveway is another reason for them to move--it's hard to climb up and down that thing!)

It just so happened that this weekend in Austin was the opening weekend of the South by Southwest film festival. SXSW is more famous for the music festival part of it, but the film festival is becoming more important. I think "Knocked Up" had one of its early screenings there last year--maybe its premiere. And this Saturday night, the midnight movie was the world premiere of a film with a villain played by an actor whose career I've been following for a lot of years. And since I was there...

So I trekked downtown to see if I could get in to see the movie. And maybe, just in case, some of the people who worked on the film might possibly, maybe show up. Hadn't seen anything anywhere saying that anybody would, or even might, but what the heck. I was there...

Met up with a friend who's also a fan. Hung out on Sixth Street, listening to music and watching all the wannabes and gonnabes and already-ares mingling. And the guy showed up. And I got to chat with him a bit. And take a picture of us together, just to prove that, yes, I met Tony Curran. I don't care that you don't know who he is. I do. And I was such a totally geeky fan girl, I forgot 3/4 of the things I wanted to ask him. But I was there.

Try to guess what movies he's been in before you go off to look him up on the Internet Movie Database...

I didn't get in to see the movie. They let in people with badges before they let in the peons who only want to see one thing, and there were too many with badges who wanted to see it. At one point, someone came out asking whether there was any more press, and I almost claimed to be a stringer for the paper I work for... And I found out today that I should have, and that the paper would probably have published any story I wrote about it.

I have to go back this weekend to meet the folks at the house they're moving to, so I can help them unpack and get organized. The movie is playing again this coming Saturday night. I could go again, and get in to see it this time, and write an article next week... I'll let you know what happens. I may be too tired. I may go back home to my island.

I saw bluebonnets today, blooming on the island! Spring Is Officially Here. YAYYYYY!!!

BIG NEWS!!!

Nothing has been signed yet, but I think it's safe to share my Big News.

Tor Books has made an offer to buy New Blood and the next two books in that universe. I don't know if they will keep my titles--though I really like New Blood and Old Spirits. I do know that as of right now, they want to bring New Blood out in March 2009. That's right at one year from now.

Then Old Spirits will come out in February 2010, and the third book, which is still nameless, in September 2010. This means I'd better get busy writing Old Spirits pretty quick, because I'd like to turn it in enough ahead of time that I have more than seven or eight months to write that third story. The deadlines will be Feb. '09 and Sept. '09, which makes that last one a little tight. If I didn't write so dang long, this wouldn't be an issue, but... I guess I'd better learn to thin things out a little better.

Needless to say, I am VERY excited. Tor has been one of my dream publishers, because of all the wonderful fantasy novels and fantasy romances they publish. I really like what they do, and I'm thrilled to be in their ranks.

So, there it is. New books from me will be coming. Eventually. :)

New Toys!!

We got new bikes!

Yep, the fella and me went out last Saturday, and got ourselves brand new, matching, red Schwinn bicycles. The old-fashioned coaster-brake, upright-handlebars, balloon-tire, wide-load-seat kind for riding up and down the seawall. Or wherever.

I think it was a Christmas present. When one gets cash money, sometimes one has to think a while before deciding what to spend it on. Bicycles make good Christmas presents. On the other hand, they could be Valentine's Day presents. Or even anniversary presents, since that's coming up in another month or two. Or maybe they were "just because" presents.

The deal the fella made with me was that "if you get a bicycle, you have to ride it." See, I had a bicycle I never rode. It had a teensy little hard seat that hurt to sit on, and racing-type handlebars that I didn't like leaning over to hold onto. I just didn't like riding that bike. So I didn't. But this one, I already have, and enjoyed it a lot.

Sunday, we went out and rode along the seawall. The weather was gorgeous, people were out everywhere and it was a really nice ride--except I was a nervous wreck for dodging all the strollers-along-the-seawall. Next time we ride that direction, we're going early in the a.m., when there will hopefully not be so much pedestrian traffic. Or else we're not riding on the sidewalk.

I went out again Monday, and my legs are wet noodles. The knees are a little sore too, so I'm going to take today off to let them recover a little. Then back out again on Wednesday. Maybe later in the day, so I'm not so worthless...

I will try to remember to take a picture of me and my bike (which may be named Ladybird... It reminds me a lot of the first bicycle I had, which was a fabulous, well-loved bike, and was named Speedy Gonzales. We will see what name this bicycle answers to.) and post it here for y'all to share.

Until then, me and my noodle-legs will toddle back off to work.

Thinking about titles

Comment from AG:

COLD IRON makes me think about faeries. cold iron is supposed to be one of the things that can really really hurt them, I guess kinda like vampires and garlic, only it hurts the good guys instead of keeping the bad guys away.

It's only really in that context that I've seen "cold iron" instead of just "iron."

Yeah. Which gives it a fantasy sound--and then you read it and there's a twist... Maybe.

The first book is blood magic, hence NEW BLOOD, because 1. there's a new sorceress, so she's "new blood" in the magicians council, and 2. blood magic has been essentially lost for 300 years, so it's new. I like that title. (Dunno if it will fly with editors.)

The second book, I want to call OLD SPIRITS, because the hero is a conjurer, so it looks at a different type of magic used in this universe (though in terms of how it mixes with blood magic). And the older a spirit the conjurer can conjure, the more powerful it is and the more magic can be worked. So I think OLD SPIRITS works for that one.

The third book, will have an alchemist, who works magic with physical elements and forces (water, metal, earth, electricity, etc.), and a wizard, who works herbal magic. I have NO clue what to call that one, which is why I thought COLD IRON might work, because there IS magic worked with iron. But there are no faeries.

Fantasy/paranormal books with "blood" in the title generally are assumed to be vampire books. This one isn't. Not a vampire in sight. So, in that way, the cold iron reference would be a similar twist. The titles I came up with that had something referring to the wizardry sounded squishy. Iron Flowers? Deep Earth? Rooted Deep? The adjective-noun pattern doesn't necessarily have to be followed, but it would be nice if I could...

Sometimes the titles just come (like SPIRITS--Floated up with the opening line and scene...). Sometimes I have to wrestle with them. A lot.

Mini beach report: The seagulls are growing in the black feathers on their heads. No more smudgy-white headed seagulls. They're going back to black. Mating season is at hand.

Valentine's Day

Since I spent Valentine's Day whining about the crud, I thought I would mention that despite both of us being cruddy, we did do a bit of Valentine-y stuff. I got a couple of roses--kinda bedraggled, but roses nonetheless. (One of them has recovered after being put in water, the other I think is a bit beyond hope.) And I got a chocolate-caramel heart and a little heart-box of chocolates. I gave the fella a card. (He doesn't do chocolate--though I did get him a rubber tree one year that he really seemed to like.)

So there you have it. Valentine's Day 2008 at my house.

I've been a total slug about writing this a.m., so-- Yeah.

The Spring Crud

Friends all over the states are coming down with the crud. (Crud sounds like a much more realistic name than something mellifluous-ish like flu...) And yes, I've got it too. I came down with a cold just before I started the new job, which turned into bronchitis (colds/flu almost always does with me). I was pretty much over it by the official first day. Then I went to Waco to visit friends and talk writing--and some kind of pollen or something blew in. My friend had an asthma attack, and my allergies flared up. And since I was barely over the bronchitis, it instantly turned back into the same crud.

I've been to the doctor, have new different meds, but dang, I think I may cough up a lung here. My stomach muscles are getting sore. I pretty much always have a deep cough, and it sounds Terrible. The girl at the next desk in the newsroom is a bit of a hypochondriac and my cough has made her nervous all week, because she's getting married this weekend. I'm told I'm not contagious, though.

So, yeah. Pretty much I'm whining online. Poor pitiful me. Even stayed home from music practice tonight because I can't take a deep breath without coughing.

Oh, and the fella came home from his trip to D.C. with the crud. He's going to the doctor in the a.m. Last night, we had chicken and rice--with Ginormous chicken breasts--too big to eat in one sitting. So for the leftovers, we each got individual zipper bags for our piece of chicken and I wrote our names in Sharpie on the outside so we don't exchange germs. Of course, we sleep in the same bed, so I don't know how much good it will do, but...we're trying. He actually tried to accuse me of giving him my crud over the phone. He's been out of town over a week, so we haven't seen each other to share germs, but you know guys. If they can possibly blame somebody else, they're going to try. :)

Oh well. It really is getting better. I just wish it would get better faster. I'm pretty sure you can't build up your abs by coughing.

Hope y'all have had a great Valentine's Day. Except for the coughing, mine's been pretty good. But I'll tell y'all about that later.

What do you think about COLD IRON as a book title?

Living in the Future

Working at the newspaper has had all sorts of weird affects on me. I'm having a WHOLE lot of trouble keeping track of the date. You'd think it wouldn't be difficult, since newspapers are all about dates. Thing is, at the newspaper, it's all about TOMORROW'S date. See, all the stuff that's going in tomorrow's paper has to say "Today," which means that today is tomorrow...or something like that. I'm a bit confused. On my desk is a sheet of paper that says TODAY IS Saturday, Feb. 9, but I know darn good and well that it's Friday, so... well, let's just say that I'm having trouble remembering what day it is, and leave it at that. It's sort of like living in the future.

I have also found myself suddenly very aware/picky about commas and capitalization and word choice. Organizations never "hold" events. They "have" an event or the event will take place. You hold hands, not meetings.

Words are tricky things. Especially English words. So many of our words sound alike. Here and hear, led and lead (the metal). Their, they're and there. And a lot of times, we spell what we hear, knowing better, but the fingers somehow move faster than the brain. I judged a contest entry (or maybe it was a critique I was doing--don't remember off hand) where the author wrote "make due" instead of "make do."

I am terrible about writing ALL OVER the contest entries I judge. (I use black or blue ink pens, so it doesn't look bloody.) I write a lot, because I want to explain why I'm marking what I'm marking. I give the rules for dashes and ellipses. Sometimes, when I want to know more of what's going on inside a character's head, I'll ask a series of questions. What does he think about what she just did? Is he mad? Curious? Relieved? Why? Why not? So most of it's not "You did this wrong and you're a terrible writer." None of it is meant that way, but hopefully, it doesn't come across like that, unintentionally.

When the dialogue doesn't seem to be leading anywhere, I'll say so, or say something like "This is an awful lot of chit-chat, you might want to focus on your purpose here." But I'm afraid I do tend to get a little impatient when I bump up against chit-chat again and again. Or when the dialogue sounds stilted and unrealistic. Or when I get POV whiplash. And I'm not even a POV purist. I think people ought to be able to change POV in the middle of a scene if they want to, as long as the change is clear. And as long as the switches don't happen every other paragraph. That can give a reader whiplash.

Ah well. I could write more, but I'm out of time, so...

Picture for fun

Got into a discussion of whether men without hairy chests really existed. And since I married into a family full of them, in which the hairy-chested sons are exceptions, I thought I'd share with friends a picture of one of the sons and one of the hair-free cousins. It's a few years old, but the chest hair hasn't changed.

(Since hair atop heads is also pretty rare with our crew, these two now shave their heads...)

And yeah, I'll post something else later.

Settling In, Not Down

I don't think my life will EVER settle down. But I'm trying to settle in to things.

Our mattress is still on the floor, and probably will be for a week--unless the fella decides to put it on the box springs and frame on the one day he'll be at home this week. I opened 6 boxes this morning, hunting the dryer fabric softener sheets so I wouldn't have my underwear stuck to my socks. The cable guys came to put in my internet cable (YAY!) but basically re-wired the whole house, and they were here till about 12:50--and the new job starts at 1 p.m. I barely made it.

I typed in about 15 cutlines for "Look what I did" photos--they go in the Applause section, and mostly people mail them in. It was tough remembering all the little codes they want for the titles and this little thing and that, so I kept having to go back and put them in, but it worked. I got them all in. Hopefully, I'll get the hang of things and be able to catch up on stuff. Still don't really know how the phones work there, but I doubt I'll be using them much. And tomorrow, maybe I'll get to be myself. ;) I'm still the girl I'm taking over for, because the computer guy has a new grandbaby. I'll forgive him today, because I know those grandbabies are IMPORTANT!

So. I guess I'd better go finish my judging for this contest. I'm Late! I hate being late. I even worked on these while I was at Mom's. I got them really late, because somehow, my new addy didn't get in the system, and the entries went all the way to West Texas, then all the way back to the coast. LOoooooong Way.

Oh yeah. This was the last weekend of Mardi Gras. The island celebrates--and has for at least 80 years--though since it's a smaller place than New Orleans, it doesn't get quite as wild. But, after we made the son come down from college to help us move (he brought his girlfriend, too, who was great help!), we took them downtown to watch the big evening parade and have dinner. The place we went to eat wasn't crowded, (probably because we got tired of waiting for the parade to show up and went on to eat, and everybody else was out in the street begging for beads from the balconies and getting drunk) and was very good. And we caught a good bit of the parade. And beads. I caught a few strands, anyway. This was the Knights of Momus Krewe parade, and we were standing under the Knights of Momus party balcony, so the people on the floats were all focused on throwing beads to their friends on the balcony above us. But I had some very cool dolphin beads, and caught some other neat strands. I had a hurricane. I ate fish. It was a good day all round.

Keep your fingers crossed. There is interest in New Blood. And maybe Old Spirits too. And...whatever the third book in the story might be called... Deep Earth? The third book will be about alchemy and wizardry--non-living magic (water, rock, electricity, etc.), and living, non-human magic (plants & animals). It will have two magics in it. Flowering Earth? Suggestions are welcomed. :)

Quick, Quick Post

'Cause we're moving. Faster than we might have thought. They turned the water off before we thought they were. Like, already. It was supposed to be just a switchover, from us paying the water to the rental company paying it, but they turned it off. So I guess we're moving a bed, and dirty dishes (because I was waiting till after lunch to wash them), and staying there tonight till we can move the rest of the stuff.

Went in to train at the new job yesterday. I think I'm really going to enjoy it, though there's a lot of technical tricks and style things I'm going to have to learn. Probably need an AP style guide for a few days. Anyway--more later, after we get the internet cable hooked up on Monday.