Patti O'Shea's Blog

The five pages I wrote on Tuesday are largely gone. I wrote seven yesterday for a net progress of two. Sigh. On the other hand, I took a pad of paper and about half an hour to sit down and make notes. If things go as I plan, I have two scenes for the chapter that have some focus. I hope. It’s times like this that I wish I was a plotter and not a pantser.

I have the CDs from last year’s RWA conference on my MP3 player, so I thought, hey, since I’m stuck at work, I’ll listen to some workshops on plotting. I didn’t find the ones I listened to particularly helpful, but I did discover a workshop about structuring a novella. Guess what I’ll be listening to today?

My friend sent me the link to a test: Are you a Yankee or a Rebel? She’s from AL and scored 100% Southern. I’m from MN and I scored 50% Dixie. Barely in Yankeedom. I think it’s because I say y’all. I use it more often than you guys because it sounds nicer. And I do know that y’all is plural not singular. Or maybe I scored so high on the Southern side because it hasn’t been that long since I finished working with Wyatt, who’s from Texas originally. Believe it or not, I take on the speech patterns of my characters, including their favorite words.

Usually, I have this really clear view of my stories. I might not have it until I’m actually writing that particular scene, but I rarely write stuff I have to trash completely. Until Crimson Veil. I had more false starts on that book than I ever would have believed possible and I found that very frustrating.

Eternal Nights was back to my usual pattern where I rarely wrote something I didn’t use once I got my character issue worked out in chapter 5.

Unfortunately, the WIP is proving to be more like Crimson Veil than EN. I can’t even begin to count how many pages I’ve had to trash because they did nothing to advance the story. And yesterday my frustration continued.

I wrote 5 pages, which is good production for me on a workday and nothing happens in them. Argh! I can’t even think of anything interesting happening on this path. I thought if I slept on it, I’d get some brilliant answer, but that didn’t happen either. Guess I’ll be trashing more pages and starting over. Again. I totally don’t have time to keep going down these blind alleys.

Aside from my heroine dropping her little bombshell on Sunday night, nothing much has been going on. I found my LAPD book while I was looking for my copy of Savage Strikes and it had the information I needed for my hero.

I love my laser printer. It’s wonderfully fast! I printed out all of the WIP and will start a read through to see how I’m doing. It’s so easy to get locked into one scene and forget the big picture. Now it’s time to check for repetition, foreshadowing and other stuff.

Now for the really fascinating stuff. I’m unhappy with the current page that Firefox opens when I logon to the internet. They’ve made change after change that I haven’t liked, but the latest–rotating pictures/headlines–is not only irritating me, it’s slowing my load time. I have dial up. I’ve tried a couple of recommended RSS feed home pages and didn’t care for either of them because I couldn’t find anyway to get scores for my baseball teams on there. That’s critical! Now I’m toying with the idea of trying Yahoo. I’m ambivalent about that, but they seem to be less annoying than what I have bookmarked now.

Still have a fairly heavy To Do List, but I’m whittling that down as I can–after I get my writing in for the day. Looked at the calendar and screamed, but other than that, life is good.

Happy Easter to those who celebrate the holiday!

Made very good progress yesterday on the WIP. I’m still waffling, though, about the end of this one scene/chapter. I kind of did a paragraph that went along the lines of: “after twenty minutes, she still didn’t have any concrete answers.” On the one hand, I wonder if I should have expounded on that instead of summing up. On the other hand, it’s not important dialogue and I hated to waste time/story space on it. Maybe once I get some feedback, I’ll have a clearer idea if it’s okay or if I should change it.

I moved on to the next chapter, and I think that went well. Until I hit a fight scene. I’ve decided those are by far my least favorite things to write. It used to be a toss up between the love scenes and the action, but not any longer. Sigh. Action scenes have so many layers to them and the choreography is daunting at times.

Last night, there was a Jean-Claude Van Damme movie on Spike and I had that on for a while, hoping I could become inspired by some of his moves. No such luck. The fight scenes were relatively short and very specialized for his talents. Talents which my hero does not have. I finally decided to put aside the writing for the day and work on other stuff.

Update to the furniture story I posted yesterday. My dad and his two lodge buddies did NOT get a chair assembled. They adjusted one of the chairs already put together so it wouldn’t rock. So after hours and hours, they accomplished about 10 minutes worth of work. Sigh.

The Twins game last night was exciting. I hear the groans, but I haven’t talked baseball since Japan won the World Baseball thing. The rest of this post is all ball, so you can stop reading here if you want.

In the bottom of the ninth, they were trailing the damn Yankees 5-4. Castillo beats out an infield roller. Mauer battles with the DY’s premier closer, Riviera, (I probably spelled that wrong, but the damn Yankees don’t have their names on the back of their uniforms.) and gets a hit. It should have been a single, but the left fielder threw it to third to try to get Castillo who’d been running with a full count. Castillo was safe and Mauer went into second. There were no outs. Rondell White bats next. He strikes out swinging. Torii Hunter is next. He strikes out looking. I thought the game was over then. Morneau, the Twins first baseman, hit a single to the right side of the field and both Castillo and Mauer scored giving the Twins a 6-5 victory! Exciting stuff!

I’ll start with the news first. There is going to be a Crimson City anthology in 2007!!! All five authors from the original series will be part of it. Yea!

Now for the first story. My furniture saga continues. I picked out a new computer desk, one of those kits that need to assembled. My dad began the project on Thursday. He has everything laid out on the left side of the room, but I want it on the right. We move all the pieces over–they were heavy!–and discover that the desk leg is going to hit the vent. Not good because the desk is heavy even without computer equipment on it. He whips out the tape measure and we discover if it’s on the left, it’s clear of the vent, so we move all the pieces back to the other side.

That isn’t the saga part. It’s after we’ve moved everything that my dad points out the damage to the desk top. There’s a slice into the plastic edge covering, one that I’d be sure to hook clothes on–or cut myself on–regularly. My dad says he’ll sand it down.

I’m looking at the desk thinking that would look so ugly sanded down. We start talking about something else and he mentions that the instruction booklet say to call the manufacturer for parts issues not the store. The light bulb goes off over my head. Why don’t we see if they’ll replace the damaged desktop piece?

They will. It will take 2 week to arrive. In the meantime, I have pieces of desk all over the floor of the computer room. Oh, well. Better to have a nice desk, right?

Part 2 of the furniture saga. My dad has two bar stools assembled. One of them really rocks, but he says, the other one is even. (There’s a way to adjust the rocking, BTW, not a flaw in the chair.) So he lowers the one he says doesn’t rock to the floor and guess what? It rocks! Just a little bit, but still…

And the 24 inch bar stools are too short for my island countertop. I’ve been debating whether or not keep them, but I probably will. Reasons: 1) I will almost never sit on them. Guests will have to deal with the short height. 2) Price. I paid less than half of what bar stools usually cost. Believe me, I priced those things everywhere and they’re very expensive! This was a hell of a deal. 3) I ordered them online and do not want to pay for shipping back to Home Depot . 4) Three of the chairs are now assembled and I don’t want to ask my dad to take them apart and pack everything up again.

Yesterday, my dad had a lodge guy come over to “help” him assemble stuff. Another lodge guy came over too–probably because his wife is hosting Easter dinner and he didn’t want to do anymore cleaning. How much did these three lodge members accomplish in the hours they were together? One bar stool was put together. My dad confessed that they mostly stood around drinking coffee and talking about their lodge.

And now my second story. I meant to post about this yesterday, but I was too busy talking about how, well, busy I am. I’m driving home from work Thursday afternoon and I see brake lights coming on. This is unusual to be at a dead stop this early in the day at this spot on the freeway, although it always slows down at this point. It’s stop and go–mostly stop–for miles and miles. I flip around trying to get a traffic report, but why would we possibly report traffic this early in the day even if there is a major traffic event taking place? Minnesota makes me nuts sometimes. They do continual traffic coverage if a big accident happens after 3pm, but if it happens before then, you’re on your own.

I finally see flashing lights up in the distance and realize it’s on the other side of the freeway. This is a good thing because it means my side is only a gawker slow down. Much better than being on the side with the actual accident. When I got closer, I saw why everyone was gawking. Heck, I gawked too. This isn’t something you see very often.

There, stuck under one of the bridges, is a backhoe. Some rocket scientist driving a semi with a piece of heavy equipment on the flatbed, tried to drive a 17 foot backhoe underneath a 16 foot bridge–or however tall everything was.

He sliced through the first metal beam, heavily damaged the second and did significant damage to a third before coming to a stop. When I went by, the backhoe was still stuck underneath the bridge. They had to cut it apart, I heard, to get it out. As I went beneath the bridge myself–and gawked–I look up to where the MNDOT guys are doing repairs. I can see the sky through the bridge. Yes, the backhoe ripped up the concrete street above the freeway as it tore through the bridge.

Traffic on that side of the freeway was down to one lane. It’s very busy heading that direction at that time of night and these people were backed up for miles and miles and miles. And of course, without a traffic report, no one knew what was happening, where it was happening, or knew to get off and take an alternate route.

Anyway, I’m still horribly busy, but I made a decision yesterday to get as much done on my To Do List as possible. That I would feel much better if I didn’t have all these things in the back of my mind while I was trying to write. I did pretty good, if I do say so myself. I finished up my galley for the August book and that will go in the mail today, I took care of a few other issues that were pending and I checked into hiring someone to do the design on my bookmarks for me. I normally do it myself, but I just don’t have time and graphics work always takes me a long, long while because I’m not real good at it. I have to get some info together, but this should take me less time than trying to do it myself.

There isn’t much that I can delegate, but every little bit helps, right?

I am so busy right now, I don’t know which way is up. I’ve delegated what I can, but there’s only so much I can hand off. Yesterday was one of those days where I didn’t get even five minutes to just sit and do nothing–I still feel exhausted.

My goal was to get my galleys ready to mail back today. I read the them twice since I received them and had my mom read them through once. She, BTW, found some missing words that I totally missed, so this was a good thing. Honestly, my brain just inserted the word for me as I read. So I added her markups, put post it notes wherever I made a change, then went to the desktop computer to work on a spreadsheet. Do not get me started about the relic. Grrr. That thing seriously needs to be replaced, but that’s another story.

After much aggravation, I start working on my spreadsheet of galley changes. I’m pleasantly surprised by the small number of them. Crimson Veil had over 100 changes–I think 125?–and I know I didn’t hit 40 with Eternal Nights. Yea!

I finish the spreadsheet, consider whether or not to highlight the changes I really want made, after all with so few, I should get them all, right? Then I look at the clock and realize I was supposed to talk writing about five minutes earlier. I have a standing date for Thursday nights. I hate being late. I’m one of those horribly punctual people who likes to be ten minutes early for everything. Fortunately, I was the first one online. Do I need to mention that my galleys will not be in the mail today? I’ll wrap them up today and get them out tomorrow. If I priority mail them, they should reach NYC in time.

So then I was doing email, checking out some potential reference sites, bookmarking the good ones, talking about the WIP, and giving pep talks. It was 9:45 when I realized it was my turn to blog on Crimson City. Gah!

My Thursday ended up being a frazzled, hurry up day from the time I got home until the time I went to bed. Which if you include writing, is what my evenings are like every single solitary day. Every time I turn around, there’s something else demanding my time–my email is full of things I need to take care of and I just want to whimper.

The morning, I hit the snooze repeatedly. I’m tired.

This ended up being one big complaint. I didn’t mean for that to happen. I was more aiming for explaining how extremely swamped I am. What amazes me is the busier I get, the more demands seem to be put on my time. I even dreamt that I had another demand put on my time and I actually was trying to defer it. I don’t know if that worked or not because the alarm went off before I found out.

I am totally looking forward to the weekend. Maybe I should put an away message on my email so that I can have a break.

I was trying to figure out if I’d ever had a problem before with having a section of book where the characters talked so much, but as I typed this blog title, I realized I had. In fact I’ve said, “I can’t get them to stop talking” about several books. And now that I’m somewhat relieved, there goes my blog post for today. :-/

Okay, I came up with something to talk about. My day was totally boring yesterday, so there was no material there.

Every book I’ve written so far has brought with it new struggles. Part of it is that I like to push myself as a writer, part of it is that each story is different and presents different challenges (Notice how I didn’t say problems?) The one thing they all have in common, though, is that after they’re done and my revisions are turned in, I forget how hard their birth was. I’ve heard that happens with children, that when a woman looks down at her baby, she forgets the hours of labor. It’s that way with books too.

And so I forget complaining about all the dialogue in my earlier stories, and when it happens again, I think, OMG, what’s going on here? Why won’t they stop talking? But there’s something reassuring about having dealt with this earlier. Obviously, I must have fixed it at some point and I trust I’ll do it here too. I hope.

Edited to add: I finally got my laser printer installed! I had to burn a new CD and do the install process twice, but the relic (aka the desktop computer) finally accepted it had to deal with new hardware.

I overslept this morning. Not just a little–hugely! I woke up at 5:15, just in time to jump in the shower, get dressed and race out of the house. No email. I didn’t even have coffee!

I made it to work ontime, made my coffee here, and on the first sip, spilled on my shirt. Not just a little–hugely! Now I’m sitting here with a big damp spot, but I think the water and a little scrubbing got the stain out.

Since I heard the alarm and hit the snooze, I spent some time thinking about what might have happened to prevent the alarm from retriggering. Then it dawned on me. I didn’t hit the snooze. I hit the off button. Sigh. I have a feeling this is just going to be one of those days.

Anyway, I’m still finishing the jumbo cup of coffee and trying to wake up. When a morning starts like this one, it always seems as if I feel discombobulated the entire day. (I love that word!)

Yesterday, I mentioned my printer issue. Last night, I took the disk over to the laptop and tried it out there. Worked perfectly. My disk drive works on the desktop, I know it does, so it just must be some issue between this CD-ROM and the computer. I tried to transfer everything onto my jump drive to transfer the printer software to the computer, but even with the size of the drive, I couldn’t fit everything on there, so I burned a new CD. I wasn’t sure that would work, but it did.

Kind of.

The computer locked up and wouldn’t install. I’m thinking, though, that I might not have everything on the new disk since it froze up just before it finished writing to the CD. Sometimes I wonder if I’m cursed. I’ll try burning another CD and see how that goes tonight.

In writing news, I trashed everything I’d written Monday and Tuesday and started over last night. I made up all the pages I lost, but I’m worried about how heavy I am with dialogue in this book–at least the last few chapters–and this scene has even more dialogue. For right now, though, I’m just going with it. I can flesh it out with the other stuff later.

Did anyone watch The Unit last night? I didn’t because I was trying to make up those pages I cut, but I flipped over in time to catch the very end when the colonel joined the cheating wife at the motel. Was someone observing the tryst from outside? The camera angle made me wonder, although I figured they’d milk this for a while longer before letting it all hit the fan.

And Eternal Nights is up for preorder now at Barnes & Noble.com. Hurrah!

Yesterday was going so well until I decided to setup my new printer.

It all started innocently enough. I had to get some copies of my galley ready to go out and my old printer was continuing to pull its usual tricks. I’d had enough. Time to hook up the new printer.

Everything went slick–until it was time to load the drivers. My computer can’t read the disk HP sent me. I tried to load it manually and my computer can’t even see a single file on the thing. I mucked around with that for a while and tried to download drivers online, but never got the thing to run. Grr!

While I was waiting for the drivers to download, I did finish my second pass through my galley for Eternal Nights. Found that “diary” had been turned to “dairy.” I missed that the first time through and a few other things, so now I’m wondering what else I’ve missed. I sure hope the proofreader catches these things. Yikes!

Overall, I can’t complain, but one of my transitions between paragraphs ended up being cut. Now it reads very abrupt to me, and I keep thinking, it really needs some kind of transition because it just looks ugly. But. But this is the galley stage and changes need to be few and far between and I made some other changes and I can’t think of a short way to transition between subjects. I had a nice long sentence there to take Kendall from thinking about the lack of food to her stringy hair. I miss that sentence.

BTW, it ended up being 79 beautiful degrees here yesterday! Hurrah!

Why are weekends so short?

This morning, I woke up and it was quiet. My first thought was that I was still waking up an hour before the alarm, and curious about that, I looked at the clock. And sat bolt upright because the alarm should have been going off–for a while–and wasn’t. For the first time in a million years, I’d forgot to turn it on! =8-O Gah! I’m lucky I woke up at all!

On the plus side, it’s supposed to be 72 here today so I can wear short sleeves and my spring jacket! Yea! Winters are always long in Minnesota.

My new computer desk is supposed to be delivered today. My dad is already eager to get tools out and pull it together. When I talked to him on Saturday he was telling me his plan of attack. Men can be funny, can’t they?

And speaking of funny, he was using the typewriter again even though he has the computer. Mom said he couldn’t remember how to turn it on and didn’t want to bother me again. Sigh. I can’t believe how many times I’ve shown him already. Next time, I’m going to make him take notes so that he can refer back to them.