Patti O'Shea's Blog

I wrote about 18 pages yesterday. Switching to Deke’s POV was the magic trick; once I started writing in his head, the pages came fast and furious–for me. I have to tack that on since I am not a fast writer. I really, really wish I was. I’m almost excruciatingly slow. When I hit page 12 or so, my progress slowed down a lot, but I kept on. I’d hoped to do 20 pages Saturday, but it was 10pm and I realized my brain had quit working so I went to bed.

I still feel groggy and almost hung over this morning, but I just finished my coffee, so with a little luck, I’ll be bright-eyed and bushy tailed before too long.

A little complaint this morning. One of my pet peeves is when people don’t answer emails I send when it’s a note that clearly requires an answer. The reason why is I’m left wondering: Did they not get my email? Did it go into their spam filter? Did I say something that torqued them off? Or did they just read it, shrug and hit the delete key?

If it’s the last choice, okay, but I have no way of knowing that, so I’m left pondering the likelihood of the first three options.

Like a couple of weeks ago, another chapter member who does website work asked me to revise one of the pages–a page I don’t handle–because she didn’t know how to do the code. Now I’d already talked with our VP of Communications and explained that I wasn’t going to have time to do much on the site, but she’s out of town right now. So I replied, I’d love to help, but I’m swamped here and I don’t have the time to resize a picture, upload it and code the page. It would take half an hour to an hour for me to do the work, time I need to spend writing. Of course, I was less blunt and explained why I was so busy and sent her the code she needed to hyperlink to a picture.

No reply. None. So now I’m wondering is she thinking, well, I’m busy and have deadlines too, but you expect me to do it? Or did she understand that I’m swamped and don’t have time? I don’t know. I may never know because she hasn’t replied, and after all this time, I doubt she will.

Then I start wondering is it just me that people don’t reply to? Or are other people left with the same frustration, and the same worry whether their email actually made it to its intended destination? I understand busy. We’re all busy, but is it too much to ask for a short response? One or two words would make me happy and alleviate my worrying.

I’ve tried to just shrug it off and assume that my email made it through, but then–at times–the worry gets to be too much and I’ll ask the person if they received my note. The answer has been “no” often enough that I do sweat about this. Plus, I have a huge problem with AOL since my emails frequently get labeled as spam by them. I always worry incessantly when it’s someone with this ISP.

I have given up on some fronts. I never expect an answer when I email NYC even if it’s a note that has questions in it and even if the questions are something I deem important. In a way, it reminds me of when I went to the University of Minnesota. This is a huge college, like 45,000 students, and when I had a question there, I just never got answers. Eventually, I surrendered. It’s easier that way.

Anyway, what started this, is that I sent two emails yesterday morning that I thought required a response even if it was just a couple of words. “Thank you.” “I’m sorry, we’ll fix that.” And while I did hear from one of these people, she didn’t mention my email where I said my name was spelled wrong. So now I’m left pondering–did my emails go through? Did I torque someone off? Did they just hit the delete key?

Technology and the neurotic writer. You just have to love it.

My plan was to go to bed early last night so I would wake up early this morning and be ready to write early too. Since I’m just blogging now, you can guess that I didn’t wake up when I’d hoped. Sigh. So much for that.

I was totally exhausted yesterday and spinning my wheels on the WIP, so I decided to query reviewers for Eternal Nights. That took a lot longer than I expected, but it was cool to see people so excited about reading my book. I’m trying a couple of review sites I haven’t queried before, plus some of my favorites.

I did figure out why I wasn’t able to get too far on the story yesterday. I’m in the wrong POV. I think I need to be in Deke’s head. I’ll try that today.

Have to get moving. If only I didn’t need to sleep, things would be so much easier!

I looked at the calendar yesterday and shrieked. How can it possibly be May next week? And how am I going to squeeze in a trip to Kinkos to get some easels made up with my new cover in time for RT? Gah! At least the proof arrived for my Eternal Nights bookmark and it was perfect so I signed off on that.

Last night, I finished another chapter and I already know I have a fairly big hole to plug. It completely slipped my mind. The positive thing is that it’s simple to fix. A couple of lines of dialogue and I should be good to go. I need to do some chapter goals before I start the next one, but I killed someone yesterday so I feel better now.

And a series of miscellaneous asides:

I can walk on the sidewalk now, but I still can’t drive on the driveway till next week.

I wore one pair of my new shoes yesterday and they didn’t aggravate my stupid foot. I plan to try out the second pair today.

I can give a big thumbs up on the glass nail file. I love mine and wish I’d bought several of them so that I could have one at work and one in my purse in addition to the one I have now. One drawback is that I really have to pay attention because it seems to saw down nails faster than an emery board. With the board, I had to use two different colors–one to shorten and one fine to clean up the mess. The glass nail file does a smooth enough job that I don’t need to use anything else. The second drawback is that my nails grow faster since the glass file is doing less damage to them.

And I give the non-glare coating I’m trying on my glasses a big thumbs down. I won’t pay for that again. Smudges up much easier than regular glasses and is much harder to de-smudge.

I can’t remember the full quote from Ferris Bueller’s Day Off, but that’s good enough.

The driveway is in and I’m not allowed to drive on it until at least Monday. Because of the time of the year and the way it’s drying or something. The sidewalk to the front is in too as well as a slab outside the garage door. That means the only way to get in and out of the house is to climb up the side of the front porch. That’s pretty damn high too. Sigh. They’re supposed to come and grade the yard next week which then leads to putting down sod and all that other fun stuff. My dad will be bugging me to get going on that.

We’ve had some visitors to the Crimson City blog come in on some really interesting search parameters. Interesting to me at least. One of them was Mahsei, the name of Mika’s demon branch, and another was Crimson Jim, the name of a nightclub in Through a Crimson Veil. And that name was totally an inside joke. The search I found kind of funny was the one for whiner dog. That’s something that developed solely on the blog.

Did anyone read Dilbert today? It made me think of the Raft Cities from the 2176 series, and specifically, The Power of Two. Dogbert wants to build a floating city on the ocean. Another one of those interesting things because I was just thinking about Jake and Cai the other day.

I wonder if other writers do this? Think about characters from past books. Not in a craft kind of way or as a book, but actually think about the characters. Jake and Cai were just so sweet together. He was so gruff, but with her, he was just…well…sweet. If I had time, I’d probably do a quick revisit with them, but I don’t–too much to do.

In other news, the shoes I ordered arrived and I think I’m going to keep both of them. I was hoping just one pair would work, but both seem to be okay. Those of you who’ve been around for a while will remember that I had surgery on my foot last summer. (Or maybe not since it’s not that interesting, but I whined about it often.) Anyhow, my foot healed flatter than it used to be and I can’t wear any shoes that have arch support now–not even just a tiny bit. This has wiped out about 75% of my shoe wardrobe and almost all of my casual stuff which had become mostly Birkenstock. I gotta tell you, the idea of not being able to wear so many great shoes broke my heart.

I think that’s it for today.

The good news has been coming fast and furious this week. Through a Crimson Veil is a More Than Magic finalist for Best Paranormal!

Hugely overslept again this morning. In fact, I woke up just in time to chug some coffee and post here–quickly. :-/ I heard the alarm at one point, but I opted not to move and fell back asleep.

The reason I overslept is I was up late finishing the chapter I was working on. I wrote and delete so many times, I was ready to lose my mind, but hopefully what I did worked and I won’t have to do anymore deleting and rewriting.

Driveway is in and the sidewalk. It’s going to be nice to actually have something solid to drive and walk on, but I have to find out how long it needs to set before I can do either.

I received the news yesterday that Through a Crimson Veil is a finalist for Best Paranormal in the Write Touch Readers’ Choice Awards! Very exciting!

I had more news yesterday too, the builder called and he’s going to put in my driveway today. Originally, he was saying June so I don’t know if his schedule freed up or the weather was better than he’d thought. I think the sidewalk is going in too, but it’s only 36 degrees here this morning and I don’t know if they can do cement if it’s that cold.

I reworked the second scene in the chapter I’ve been writing. I think this is better, but I’ll reread today and see what I have. I also found a tiny little problem. My heroine has a headache in this chapter, but she doesn’t heal it. I think I’ve got an answer for that, though. I love that time before I fall asleep–ideas seem to fly then.

Yes, once again, I did nothing but write yesterday.

The one thing that truly amazes me is how fast the time goes. I swear, I was working at 11am, the next time I look at the clock it’s 2pm. What happened to those three hours? How many pages did I do in that time? 5. It seemed like I was writing and writing and writing. How could I only have 5 pages? How do fast writers do it?

Anyway, in just shy of 8 hours worth of work, I had like 13 pages. Of course, now I’m debating the need to cut some of them. Sigh. Ryne is a little wounded (emotionally) in the scene, but I’m not sure she’d show it in front of Deke yet. I have to think about that. It’s also a scene where they’re both sharing stuff–particularly Ryne. Again, would she do it that soon? She’s big on not letting anyone see weakness because they’ll just go for the kill, and it might be too soon for her to trust Deke enough.

I didn’t want to be bugged yesterday, so I put a post it note on my front door: Author at Work. Please Do Not Disturb. So I’m really, really deep in the story and what happens? Yep, you guessed it, the doorbell rings. After talking to the neighbor lady, it took me forever to get back into the story. Non-writers have no clue how big a deal a “short” interruption really is.

Today it’s back to the day job. Enough said.

PS: I’m posting so late because Blogger has been unwilling to work today. I completely relate–it is Monday.

Edited to Add: It looks like Blogger posted each and every attempt I made to get my day’s entry online. Sorry for the repetition. I’ve deleted the other 4 copies of this post so that there is just one.

I wrote like 14 or 15 pages yesterday. Writers who go much faster (and there are a gazillion of them) are probably laughing right now, but for me, this is a high number. My brain shut down somewhere around 6:30–about the same time I finished the chapter–and when I tried to do a little work on the next chapter, I didn’t get too far.

So I woke up this morning and my brain is still all foggy and sluggish. Sigh. I’m hoping to do another 15-20 pages today so it better straighten up–pronto!

And believe it or not, I don’t have anything else to talk about. I could complain about Windows Live Update, but I won’t.

I think I’ve talked about my To Do List before. I only make one up when I feel completely overwhelmed by the amount of things I need to do and I’ve been at that point for a while now. I think I’ve also mentioned that I’ve been making a good-sized dent in the list, crossing items off at a good clip. Yesterday, however, I added a lot more than I managed to complete. Most of it promo stuff for Eternal Nights.

Some authors are really good at promo, and since I was an advertising copy major in college, you’d think I would be too. I’m not. Give me a multi-million dollar budget and ask me to map out a traditional advertising campaign encompassing radio, television, newspapers and billboards and I could do an above average job. Give me the kind of budget I have to work with and I’m at a loss.

The options that don’t take a lot of money, take time. That’s the one thing I don’t have. I’m so darn swamped right now that I don’t know which way is up. I don’t have hours to spend on promotion.

A very wise author on one of my loops said she’s stopped driving herself crazy. She does what she can promotionally and just lets the rest take care of itself. I’m working on developing that attitude. It’s healthy, and since I work full time and have two June deadlines, it’s definitely something I need to adopt.

On the plus side of the ledger, I hired someone to design my EN bookmark and it turned out beautiful! When I think of the way I struggled with the graphics program for my first three books, I want to kick myself. I should have had someone who knew what they were doing, take this on immediately. Next week, I’ll contact the printer (on my To Do List) and see about getting myself some bookmarks to take to the RT Convention in May.

The only two things I can think of to talk about are writing or the weather, and since some people don’t understand the Midwest fascination with discussing atmospheric events, I guess I’ll talk about the writing. (And it’s really a shame because we got all this hail yesterday afternoon. Small stuff, less than pea size, but a lot of it. Almost looked like snow.)

So on the writing front, I’ve been spending a lot of time thinking about the bombshell my heroine shared Sunday night. It’s about her past and it isn’t pretty stuff. It’s the kind of thing you don’t see many writers using as background on a h/h. It’s also a driving point in my heroine’s life, affecting almost everything, which means I’ll be putting a fair amount of focus on it.

I started wondering why these things always happen to me. Why can’t I have a nice, easy h/h who don’t come with a ton of baggage? (Okay, Wyatt and Kendall didn’t have anything too dark in their pasts, but still…)

Will I pull my punches because I’m worried about reader reaction to Ryne? No. When it comes right down to it, I owe it to my characters to write them exactly the way they are. If it makes people uncomfortable or if they don’t like that, so be it. And maybe I’m wrong, maybe people won’t get freaked about her past.

Oh, well. I never did write a light, humorous book. Even Crimson Veil with Mika’s sense of humor was dark and Conor had all kinds of issues with his past. Another difficult backstory. As my writing buddy said, It’s not like you’re writing Regencies. It’s not a pretty world and it’s not a pretty story. Of course not. In the big picture view, the WIP is basically about the war between good and evil and Ryne is on the frontlines.