BioBooksAwardsComing NextContactBlogFun StuffHome

House Hunting Part One

June 18th, 2013

With a closing date set for my home in Minnesota, it was time to go house hunting in Georgia. Being the obsessive/compulsive person that I am, I’d begun watching houses online about a year ago and that picked up in earnest a few months ago. I knew what area I wanted to live in and I knew what things were important to me in a house.

TBH, I didn’t expect to find anything for a long, long time. You see, I really, really loved my house in Minnesota. I’d picked out the plans, I had it built, I chose everything from floor to ceiling, and it was a totally awesome home.

Last Wednesday, my agent and I looked at a house under construction. It was above my price range, but it had a basement and would be a brand new house. Two pluses for me.

When I got there and saw the lot, my heart sank. The road sat high and the house sat really low. All I could see was rain hitting the ground and streaming for the house.

We went in and walked around inside. It was a nice floor plan and had a lot of similarities to my house up north, but it was cramped. I swear it had to have less square footage because so much of the total was in the bonus room over the garage, not in the rooms on the main level.

Still, it wasn’t too bad and it had a basement. We went down to look at it and there, against the front wall, was water. In fact, the red Georgia clay stained the entire length of one of the basement walls.

My agent called the builders agents and got some more information. The basement had been poured a long time before the walls and roof went up and that was probably where the water had come from. Also, the steep lot we saw wasn’t what the final version would look like. There was a lot more grading to be done.

This left it on the list of possibilities. If the builder was willing to take less than what he was asking for. I didn’t, however, want to commit to the first house I saw, so my agent and I made a date for Saturday.

To Be Continued.

 

 

Dark Matter

June 16th, 2013

The stuff we can see is only 5% of the universe. The rest is dark matter or dark energy.


TL; DR

June 13th, 2013

Another recent article on the internet was about long articles. Sorry that I’m not linking to it, but I read it last week and I didn’t save it. Of course, I can’t remember which site it was or even narrow it down.

The gist of the article was that people don’t read long posts. He gave the stats, like so many will click away almost instantly. I’m guessing those are people who ended up there by mistake. I accidentally click on stuff all the time because of my impatience.

Of the people who stay on the site long enough to read something, most last one screen length. They don’t scroll, they leave. The author ran through how many people he lost at each point. They can actually measure how many pixels deep people read. Which is maybe taking analytics just a step too far for comfort.

The thing is that this has been common knowledge for a long time. It was one of the first things I learned in journalism school and it’s why when you read the newspaper, the most important information comes first and it’s been this way for decades at least. For all I know, maybe centuries.

This article also made me wince. I know my blog posts tend to be long, not quick and snappy. I suppose I have a ton of people who take a look and think TL; DR. (Too Long; Didn’t Read) Sorry, y’all.

 

 

Saying No

June 11th, 2013

Someone tweeted a link to an article on Sunday that I thought was really interesting: Creative People Say No.

The one thing I’ve learned is how important it is to guard writing time. It’s hard to come by and easily sacrificed by others. I can’t tell you how many times people have argued with me saying, it’s just one evening or it’s just a few hours.

But it’s not that simple. First of all, there are a lot of people who only want “just a few hours.” Without the word no, there’d be zero writing time left. They discount the days when the words all have to be cut because none of them are the right ones. They discard the way life has a way of throwing little emergencies at people.

Right now I’m on deadline and panicking because I have to close on my house in Minnesota–it’s sold–and find a house in Georgia. Um, there is no extra time in my schedule. I’m like hyperventilating on this deadline, so just an evening? No, sorry. I can’t do it.

 

The Night Watch

June 9th, 2013

This is totally awesome!

And if you’re as interested as I am, here’s the Making Of video. You’ll have to click the CC button on the bottom and select subtitles in English.

More Stories Coming

June 6th, 2013

There will be more stories set in the Blood Feud world! I sold two stories to Nocturne’s Cravings. This is their novella length, ebook line.

The first story is tentatively titled Phoenix Burning. The hero, Ivar, is a vampire enforcer in Los Angeles, sent by his clan lord to find the man who centuries earlier killed the clan lord’s human beloved.

The heroine is this guilty man’s daughter and Ivar plans to stick close to her until she leads him to her father. Only things don’t go quite the way Ivar planned. He’s so attracted to the heroine that he can’t see straight or think about anything except sex.

I don’t have a release date yet or a for sure title, but I had to share my awesome news! Stay tuned.

 

 

Spinning Wheels

June 4th, 2013

I’ve been working on this proposal. I had two chapters done before I went to Minneapolis and I figured another two chapters would give me about fifty pages and I’d be good to go. Only I got stuck.

There was a lot of stress involved with the house stuff up in Minnesota and even after I got back to Georgia, the stress level continued to soar high. I chalked the stall up to that. After all, when your fingernails are buried in the ceiling, it’s hard to type. ;-)

But when the stress level eased back and I still couldn’t write anymore in this story, I knew something was wrong. You see, I only get wheel spinning stuck when I’ve written something my hero or heroine don’t like or that they would never, ever do. This has happened often enough that you think I’d get it faster than I do. Despite all the experience I have, this wasn’t my first thought when I got stuck.

No, my first thought was maybe there’s something wrong with what I’m planning to do in the next chapter. I ran it past my writing buddies, but they didn’t see anything off in what I had planned.

Another week of frustration passed before the light bulb went off over my head. Duh, I’d messed up somewhere. Now I just needed to figure out what was wrong.

I found some little things and changed them. Still stuck.

I ran the previous chapters past my writing buddies with the focus on what I’d already written. I tried fixing their suggestions. Still no forward progress.

This called for complete story deconstruction. I questioned everything, and after a conversation with my hero, I realized that the entire setup was completely wrong. He wouldn’t do what I had him doing, not after his temper cooled off.

Not good news. It means rewriting everything from the ground up. And it means figuring out another way to open the story. Unfortunately, I’m still mulling because the original opening was strong and nothing else I’m coming up with equals it. More contemplation is needed, but it’s just a matter of time before I conquer this.

 

Brain versus Computer

June 2nd, 2013

Waiting Out Insomnia

May 30th, 2013

The final blog written in Minnesota: While I was home and dealing with insomnia, I spent time playing with story stuff. I did a synopsis for the Work in Progress (WIP). Summing up a book I haven’t written yet is a special kind of hell all the time, but for this particular story it was worse than usual. I think I finally put together something decent. I hope.

I also played around with other things. I created a spreadsheet with formulas to add up word count as I recorded each scene. I’m not sure I’ll actually remember to use this, but it might be a helpful tool. When I see progress, it encourages me to keep going while I’m writing and get back to writing when I get home from work or am on lunch or something.

I bought a couple of books on plotting. People who know me just fell out of their chairs. It’s not that I don’t plan things or know generally where the story is going, but I’m hoping to have less false starts. If I ever added up all the scenes I’ve trashed, I probably have enough word count for like ten more books. I thought if I had better focus, I could produce stories faster.

To shock those who know me further, I read both books. Some of what I read are things I don’t think I’ll be able to do—like the 3×5 index cards. I had a bad experience with a how to be a writer book and index cards.

Then I played around with PowerPoint. I created slide shows for each of my series using pictures of the characters. Yes, this is a total time waster, but the cruel thing about insomnia is that even though I can’t sleep, I am tired enough that writing is impossible. I’m hoping to create a Book of Knowledge for the series I’m writing using PowerPoint slides. I can fill in highlights about characters and storylines and facts about the world and have them all in one place.

And yeah, I’m trying to pretend that I really wasn’t wasting hours of time.

I really wish I could have written while I was home. When I left Atlanta, I only had two more scenes to go to have the proposal pages done. I even lugged my writing laptop to MN along with my everyday laptop because I was sure I could finish the project during my downtime. It just didn’t happen. I worked so hard on the house, that I was mentally exhausted every night even before the insomnia kicked into high gear.

I’m still calling my time a writing win, though, because I have a synopsis for the WIP. Maybe it will need some tweaking, but I think it’s close to ready to go, and hopefully, by the time you’re reading this, I’ve finished the two scenes. ::fingers crossed::

 

Lessons Learned

May 28th, 2013

Another blog written in Minnesota: I learned a few things while I was getting my house ready to sell. I thought I’d share some of my (ahem) wisdom here.

First thing I learned (big time) was to get rid of stuff instead of hanging onto it. I spent monster time going through my house last year and clearing out things. I can’t even tell you how many boxes of clothes and other things I gave to charity. I do know that I donated more than 3,000 books to the library.

With God as my witness, I swear I will never let things accumulate like this again. It felt really good to get rid of old things, even the books. I felt like this burden was lifted from me with each box that went out the door. I wish I’d had more time because if I had, I think I could have gotten rid of a lot more stuff.

Second lesson learned was that Mr. Clean’s Magic Erasers are 1) Awesome! and 2) don’t last very long, so have lots on hand for big projects. (I receive no consideration of any sort to mention the Magic Erasers and I bought the box myself.)

I don’t know what is in those things and I don’t care. There wasn’t much the Magic Eraser didn’t do well. By the way, beyond awesome for taking smudge marks off walls. Just have a damp cloth to wipe the wall afterward because it leaves a slightly white residue behind. I couldn’t see it on my really light walls, but on even slightly darker ones, it was noticeable.

The thing is that I’d tried to get those smudges off by washing the walls. That lightened them, but didn’t get rid of them. I didn’t even have to rub very hard with the magic erasers. They handled just about every tough job I had. Highly recommended.

Third lesson learned: Don’t store candles inside a white drawer without wrapping them in something first. Unfortunately, I didn’t realize that the dye from the candles would permeate the wood and nothing—not even the Magic Eraser—could touch this problem.

The fourth lesson learned I guess ties back to the first. I’m happiest when I have fewer things in the house. I confess to dumping a boatload of stuff at my parents’ house to get my house to look as good as it did and I like the less cluttered feel. When I find a house in Atlanta and start unpacking boxes, I’m going to make an effort to get rid of more stuff.

I know, it’s silly to move it to begin with, but like I said, time in Minnesota is so limited that I just don’t have any more days to spend going through things to get rid of it before it gets put on a moving truck. I will do what I can, but I want to make a concerted effort to shed more things.