Patti O'Shea's Blog

Everywhere I turn right now, I have stacks and stacks of reference books. I have books on magical creatures, evil creatures, how to be a PI, my Gaelic dictionary, my books on being a cop. Of course, I can’t find the book I want, my LAPD book. I think Rampart Division is the most dangerous in Los Angeles, but it’s hard to tell from the online searches I’ve done. The stats on the LAPD website aren’t helping me much.

Another Tor author, Jenna Black, talked about needing an esoteric fact, the kind of information that you can’t find quickly on the internet or in a book. That’s the story of my life. I always have these odd questions that are difficult to get answers for.

When I was writing Eternal Nights and I had odd military questions, I could go to one of the guys I work with. There are three of them in Air National Guard, but all had a military career before that. One was in the Army, another in the Navy and I think Jason was in the Air Force so among the three of them, I usually could get an answer. Most of the time, though, I’m not that lucky.

Is finding out which division in LA is the most dangerous according to the police crucial to my book? No. But… But the hero patrolled in that division for a while at the start of his career. Would the fact that I say he’s from the Rampart or Wilshire division going to mean a lot to most people? No. I know that. But I like to be accurate, and I’d use it in such a way that even readers unfamiliar with LA would realize that it was a crime-ridden and risky area of the city.

So my stacks of research books are in danger of falling over from all the stuff I need references for on the book I’m working on and I happen to visit a message board where someone has posted a poll: What type of romance would you like to write? (BTW, as far as I can tell, these are readers, not writers by and large so it was more like a fantasy type question.) One of the choices was futuristic, which surprised me since the posters over there are mostly not futuristic fans.

Anyway, one woman posted telling what her selection was and why. She said she chose futuristic. Why? Because even though she adores historical romance, she wouldn’t want to do all that research, and of course, futuristic romance requires no research at all.

I whimpered.

No research? I know much more about the US Army, Special Forces, nanotechnology, quantum brain nanotechnology, pyramids, the climate of the Maldives, demons and about half a million other subjects than I ever thought I’d know. I’d be hard pressed to think of one futuristic author who doesn’t do a lot of research for her story and the same goes for paranormal authors. Maybe our worlds are fantastical at times, but our need for research is still there.

So does anyone know if Rampart is the most dangerous division in Los Angeles?

One the loops I’m on was talking about superstitions writers have. I’m not sure I have any since I’m not a particularly superstitious person. I love Friday the 13th because I always have a great day! Black cats? Here kitty, kitty. Maybe I don’t walk under ladders, but that’s more because I’m worried something is going to fall on my head rather than it being bad luck.

These other authors were talking about things like what order they do something in and things like that. I really couldn’t relate to any of it because as far as I can determine, I don’t have things like that. I did, however, also start thinking about what I need before I can start writing.

The first three chapters are fun for me. I’m exploring my characters, getting to know them, getting a feel for their story and their reactions and setting things up. But it’s during this stretch that I go looking for pictures of my hero and heroine. I have to have them.

Sometimes it’s quick because I’ll collect pictures of people I think might be h/h material at a later point. If I can find someone on my hard drive that fits the bill, I’m done in minutes. Then there are the searches that take forever before I finally find the one that makes me go, s/he’s the one!

I have a good sense of my characters before I go looking for pictures, but it helps solidify things for me. Like Deke in my WIP. I knew him, but I didn’t have as firm a grip on his personality as I would have liked. Then I found his picture. And I went, ah, yeah, so that’s it. You’re a smart aleck. And he is! My God, he’s driving Ryne insane. But I suspect he’s using that as a shield. My job is to pry it off and expose who he really is–not just to the heroine, but to the readers as well.

This is the only thing that has stayed the same in my writing process. Everything else changes book to book. That’s something else I didn’t expect because before I sold, my process did stay the same from story to story. I was lucky, though, I had an experienced author warn me about things changing, and so I didn’t worry when it happened–I just went with the flow.

Last night, it rained. It thundered. It lightninged. (I know this isn’t a word. I like it, though.) It hailed. It rained so much, it flooded out part of the freeway I take to the day job every morning. They showed pictures of it on television last night and cars were floating. The weather guys estimate it was coming down at 4 inches per hour for a while and the ground is still mostly frozen so there was no place for the water to be absorbed. The big question this morning: is the freeway open? Guess I’ll find out when I reach the area.

The furniture store called yesterday about my damaged table. They’re going to replace it–but they won’t have a new one for me until May! Yes, May. They told me that I can use the damaged one. Isn’t that sweet? Considering my Feb 12th delivery took place on Mar 31st, it could very well be 6 months from the time I bought the table until the time I get one I can keep. Or longer.

I have so much to do right now, but tomorrow is my chapter meeting. I want to go. My resolution this year was to get more involved with my local writing chapter, and so far, I’ve only missed 1 meeting. Of course, that’s out of a grand total of 3, but hey, I’m still on the plus side! The problem is the time on the weekends is so precious. On the other hand, I want to share my cover for Eternal Nights now that I have cover flats and touch base with people.

Decisions, decisions. Sigh.

It’s 53 beautiful degrees here! Whoo hoo! I might even be able to wear my spring jacket today. I need to see the forecast to make sure the temperature isn’t going to plummet through the day. This is Minnesota after all.

One last weather thing. They said it was supposed to rain all night and today, which didn’t make me happy because my driveway is still dirt. It had just dried out and I didn’t have to worry about getting stuck, and then here we go again. Looks like we didn’t get the rain overnight, now lets see about the storm track for today.

So speaking of the house, I had two big boxes on my doorstep yesterday. My bar stools had arrived! Unassembled. Oh, well, they didn’t look too bad to put together and my dad will get to play with tools. He should be in guy heaven, right? The thing that was cool was these stools perfectly match the chairs from my table, right down to the color of the wood and the color of the seat cushion. The bad news? They’re 24 inch stools and I don’t know if they’re going to be tall enough for the counter. It’s hard to tell when they’re unassembled like that. My dad thought they’d be fine because of the height of the cushion. We’ll see. The second drawback is that I haven’t received word on my table yet. I posted a few days ago that if the furniture store can’t find a replacement, I might have to return the entire set. That will leave me with bar stools that won’t match anything.

I received my Gaelic dictionary yesterday and was immediately paging through it. Found a couple of things I can use, although the word I really wanted wasn’t in there. I wasn’t sure it would be since it’s a pretty modern word, but I was hoping anyway.

My weird sleep patterns since we went on DST continue, but I figured out last night–after I went to bed early again–what the problem was in the chapter I’m working on. It was frustrating the hell out of me, but it was like this light bulb moment. It’s going to take a little work to fix, but at least the damage is confined to this one chapter and it really isn’t that much work.

Today was my day to blog over at 2 B Read. I talked about soul mates in romance fiction and reincarnation stories. This has been something I’ve been thinking about for a while and I hope I had something interesting to say on this. Sometimes it’s so hard to come up with a topic!

So something weird has been going on ever since Daylight Savings kicked in–I’ve been waking up an hour before the alarm goes off. Now I could see it if we’d “fallen back” because my body would think it was time to get up, but we did a “spring forward” and I should be sound asleep. One thing that’s nice about it is that I have more time in the morning and don’t feel rushed. The bad thing, though, is I get sleepier earlier. Last night I went to bed at 7:30 and missed The Unit! (And I also missed the Twins season opener!)

Yesterday was one of those days. First, my dad wants instructions on how to logon to the internet. Never mind that I’ve walked him through this about half a dozen times, he doesn’t remember a thing. I gave him what I thought were simple instructions and went back to what I was working on. Then the SOS came from my mom. Sigh. When I got over to see his computer, I couldn’t believe my eyes. He had like 6 different windows open, none of which involved the internet. Two or three of the windows were Windows Explorer. He had some kind of wizard open and other things that I just clicked closed and didn’t look at too carefully.

The thing that was so hilarious was he thought he was on the internet! I had to tell him two or three times, that no, he’d never made it online, that none of the windows he had up had anything to do with www. I suggested he wait until July 1st to try to get on the internet again because I have projects due in June.

I also gave my mom a copy of my galley and a red pen, and asked her to proof for me. I’ve never done that before, but I just don’t have time to read it as slowly and as carefully as I’d like, and since my mom has never read the story before and isn’t familiar with it, I’m hoping that means she’ll spot things I’d miss because of my head fixing the mistakes. I’m still going to make one more run through, but this will help.

I’m feeling overwhelmed and stressed again, so I’ve been working to eliminate what I can. There were a couple of small things that were looming, and burdening me, so I took care of one of them, and I’ll try to get the others done too. I’ll still have my big projects looming, but at least with not so big stuff done, I shouldn’t feel quite as frenzied. That’s the theory at least.

I received this quote in my email this morning:

DREAM

today’s dreams are tomorrows realities,
and remember, when you dream
there are no rules.

~Julia Stöpel ~

Pretty cool, yes?

Think of it. In our dreams, we can do anything. We can imagine ourselves going to the moon. We can imagine living in a 2 million dollar home in a tropical paradise. We can imagine world peace and even accept the Nobel Peace Prize.

But I think dreams are more than that. I daydream my stories. I know I don’t do as much of that now as I did in the past, but I’m working on increasing that time. Engineers are out there dreaming better ways to get into space, better ways to handle our day to day life. (Have I been brainwashed by my engineers?!?) I think this is how things change, by someone dreaming about what ifs, about possibilities.

Yeah, a little philosophical for this time of the morning, but what can I say? If I’m going to go off on this kind of tangent, it generally is when I’m tired. And certainly this is more entertaining to write about than my trip to the dentist yesterday. Although, I did have something happen yesterday, but I’m not sure I can talk about it yet. How’s that for a tease?

Speaking of the dentist, I’m up early because I have to makeup time at work that I took off for my appointment. I don’t know why I bothered because I was left sitting for half an hour in the waiting room. Sigh. They never leave me waiting. Then the hygenist chick attacked my mouth with sharp implements. Parts of my gums still hurt.

See? I told you that talking about dreaming was more interesting!

Since I couldn’t think up anything to rattle on about this morning, I thought I’d continue the after the book thing today.

After the close of The Power of Two

I didn’t get as much about Jake and Cai as I normally get about characters after their book ended. I’m not sure why, unless it’s because Ryne (the heroine from my current WIP) roared in then and wanted her story told, but I do know a few things.

Cai’s father warmed up to Jake fairly quickly, but her mother didn’t. In fact, it took quite some time for Jake to win his mother-in-law over.

Cai and Jake waited a long time to start a family, like 7 or 8 years, my guess is because Cai was so young, but they didn’t tell me that. Their first baby is a girl and she wrapped her daddy around her little finger immediately. Actually, it was really sweet to see this big, tough commando all mushy about his daughter.

I actually know more about Gnat after the close of TPOT. He talked to me for the entire drive down to Chicago when I attended Celebrate Romance that year, 2004–I think.

I finally remembered it was April last night and updated my website by adding an excerpt from Eternal Nights. I’ve been discussing which scene to use with a friend of mine this week, but as I read through the galleys, the one to use became pretty obvious. It’s from chapter 3 and it’s in Wyatt’s POV.

The repair person from the furniture store came out to look at the table and chairs. She was able to fix the chairs–there’s some mechanism to adjust the leg height–but she agreed that the table needed to be replaced. Except she doesn’t know if they have anymore of those tables and I might end up having to return the entire set. Great. After waiting months, I might have to start all over again. I’ll know more on Wednesday.

My Gaelic dictionary finally arrived, but I’m going to need to return it because it is only Gaelic to English. This is the first time I’ve ever heard of a foreign language dictionary that only goes one direction, so when I ordered it, it never occurred to me that this one wouldn’t have English to Gaelic as well. It doesn’t. So another long wait proves frustrating. I ordered a couple of replacement books–this time from BN.com. I’m hoping for faster delivery from them.

I’m not a huge fan of Daylight Savings. It’s going to take my body weeks to adjust to this time change. TBH, I don’t care if we stay on standard time or DST, I just want the powers that be to pick one and stay on it year round.

I finished my first read through of the EN galleys yesterday. I didn’t see too much, but there were a few things that jumped out at me. Today I’m going to work on the WIP, then tomorrow I’ll start a more careful read through of EN. I like to go through the galleys at least three times because it’s so easy to miss mistakes.

One of the things that really amazes me is how the typesetter makes some of these mistakes. I mean, I could see if it was a section that was revised from the disk I sent in, but sometimes it isn’t. Like this one area it said: “arguing” Ravyn. It should have been angering Ravyn. I know that paragraph didn’t change. I know it was right in my original. So how did angering become arguing?

I can’t tell you how much I appreciate the job the proofreader who gets my galleys does. I miss stuff no matter how many times I comb the pages, but fortunately, I’ve been blessed with proofreaders who’ve caught most of what I’ve missed.

I’ve just read through this post and realized how choppy it sounds. Sorry, everyone. I’m blaming it on Daylight Savings. And hoping to sound smoother tomorrow.

The winner of an autographed copy of Ravyn’s Flight is Joyce. Congratulations!!!

Please email me at: so that I can get your address.

Thank you to everyone who’s been commenting! I’ve enjoyed talking to all of you.

March is still winter to me, but April means spring. It’s a little optimistic since Minnesota has been known to get snow in April, but right now, I’m just thrilled that the worst is over.

My galleys arrived for Eternal Nights yesterday afternoon. I started reading in the evening and I’ve found myself really drawn into the story. I could hardly stand to put it down to go to bed, and first thing this morning, I picked it up again. In fact, that’s why this blog post is coming at nearly 11am–I didn’t want to stop reading.

I’m taking this as a good sign. It’s so hard to judge a book while I’m in the middle of writing it or in the middle of revisions, but it’s been nearly 6 weeks since I worked on this story last and it’s given me some distance. It also helps that the galleys aren’t too messy, which allows me to simply read without doing too much marking up. With Crimson Veil, I marked half a gazillion things. Anyway, I’m very much enjoying Wyatt and Kendall and Stacey and Alex, and fingers crossed, hopefully readers will as well.

The blog-only contest to win a copy of Ravyn’s Flight ended yesterday. I’ll draw the winner later today–after I finish EN–and post the name here. Check back later this afternoon.

Now, sorry, but I have to go read.