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Overslept again this morning. I did the same thing yesterday and by the same amount.

I’m still taking half days off from work this week, although yesterday was not a hugely productive day as far as writing the novella went. I did read through the emails I have and make notes. I divided the info up into a page for my heroine, one for my hero, one for the bad guy, one of questions for my editor and another for plot stuff. Then I tried to write a synopsis and realized that while I have the background information, I don’t really know what’s going to happen in the story. So I did some brainstorming, made a few notes and then thought I can either write a synopsis or the story, let’s get to the story.

I’m having a hard time hearing these new characters, though. The old ones are still more real to me, but then I’ve never had to switch gears on the fly like this before either. I made a few decisions about the opening, so at least I figured out what I’m not going to do.

I also spent some time catching up on must-answer emails. I’d fallen way behind and it was starting to really weigh on me. Taking care of some of those really helped and so did getting my ad material ready to send off today. Now the only pressing thing left on my schedule is the writing. Let’s just hope it stays that way.

I found out yesterday that Through a Crimson Veil is a finalist for best paranormal in the Booksellers’ Best Awards! If I hadn’t been so exhausted from writing all day, I would have happy-dog danced around the room.

The second hurrah is that the first draft of the WIP is done! It took longer than I expected–till almost 8pm and I’d worked all day–but it’s all down on paper now. Well, not paper, but you know what I mean. I know there’s going to be a lot of work as I revise it, the suspense isn’t as strong as it should be and the fight scenes are kind of lame right now, but I think I have the emotional stuff nailed. My CP said I made her cry. Definitely a good sign.

I usually do an epilogue in my books–well, I have since my first editor asked me to add one to Ravyn’s Flight–but I didn’t write one for this story. I’m still debating adding one. On the one hand, after RF, I saw why the epilogue helped because my books tend to take place in short periods of time under intense conditions and the WIP is no exception. On the other hand, there’s a second book coming with the heroine’s sister and readers will see and/or hear more about Ryne and Deke there.

Today, I won’t do much writing. Instead, I’ll be sitting down with a notebook and working on what’s going on with the novella. Kimi! Nic! Start talking!

If all goes well today (and please God, it will!), I should finish the first draft of the WIP. All that’s left now is the emotional stuff and I love writing that so much more than plot/suspense/action. Probably, I shouldn’t confess that.

Anyway, the action scenes at the end need some work because I’m sure the suspense isn’t as high as it could be, but this point, they’re down and can be revised. What I need to do after I finally finish is print out a hardcopy and start reading through and making notes on what I need to fix. Of course, I also need to start writing the anthology because I’m going to have to overnight it on June 14th, but I don’t want to think about that today.

Yesterday was a wonderful day to have the central AC working. It was in the 90s, hot, a bit humid and very windy. But inside it was a blissful 72 degrees. I had it set at 70, but that was too cold.

Can you tell I don’t have much to say? I just want to get to the writing and finish. The idea of reaching the end of the draft has perked me up!

Summer finally arrived in Minnesota and yesterday was the first day I really needed to use my central air conditioning in the new house. Keep in mind that I’ve never had central air before, just a window unit that I used, so I was charting new territory.

I went to the thermostat about 11am and turned on cool and set the temperature to 70 (It was currently 74 in the house) and I started writing. I could hear the fan on the AC going, feel cool air coming out of the vents, but it didn’t seem really cold and every time throughout the day that I checked the thermostat, the temperature inside the house was climbing: 75, 76, 77, 78. I was sweating and I’m thinking, wow, is there something wrong with my air? I kept setting the desired temperature lower and lower.

Finally, around 6pm, my dad came over and I complained to him. We read instructions on the furnace, on some air exchanger thing and on the thermostat. Nothing seemed to be wrong, but the house wasn’t getting any cooler. He went outside to check the unit, but it didn’t look as if the fan were moving.

At about 6:45, my dad called one of his lodge buddies. I heard my dad on the phone saying something like panel. I don’t remember exactly what he said, but a light bulb turned on inside my brain–the circuit breaker panel.

They’d had the oven and stove flipped off on my circuit breakers too when I moved into the house, and since I closed in February, I was wondering if the circuit breaker for the AC was off too. I went downstairs to look and sure enough, that’s exactly what it was! I flipped it on and it made a difference in just a couple of minutes. In fact, by the time the temperature dropped from 78 to 75 degrees inside the house, it began to feel downright cold! Yea!

Since it’s supposed to be 93 degrees today, I’m very glad this AC thing is figured out. But man, can you imagine how embarrassing it would have been to call the builder and say, hey, that AC unit you installed is faulty and then discover it was the CB? Thank God for my dad’s lodge buddy.

In other news, I wrote 14 1/2 pages yesterday. I wanted to write 20. Scrapping 2 days of work on Friday night hurt my schedule so badly, I’m surprised people all over the world didn’t hear my whimpering. I swear, when I have my two projects turned in, and probably revisions done, I’m totally vegging. I’m going to join Netflix and watch movies. I’m going to–well, I can’t come up with something else, but I’ll think about it and find something else I’m going to do! Not that I’ll be able to do nothing for long because I have another book due in January, but I need some time off or my brain is going to implode. :-/

(PS: I’d like to blame the AC incident on my deadline fried brain, but that would be a total lie. Even if I weren’t living in an alternate world right now, I still would have had the same problem.)

Yesterday, I trashed the scene I’d been fighting with for two days. It hurt me to do it and there wasn’t nothing particularly wrong with it. Not really. Except that I’d come to a grinding halt and was forcing progress. It was symptom that something wasn’t working.

I tried going right into the final conflict, but that didn’t work either. I really need a transition scene because of timing issues. I woke up with an idea this morning on how to handle it (I asked for help before I went to bed last night), so I hope this is the answer. I’ll be logging off in a few and giving it a try. Losing 2 days of work, though, really hurts my schedule.

Yesterday morning, when I went to ping on my blog, I saw that the LAFD had pinged just before me. Did the Los Angeles Fire Department really have a blog? I immediately clicked on the link, and sure enough, they do! And it’s on Blogger! Wow. As I was skimming through, I found a link to the LAPD Blog. I wish I had found this a couple of months ago. Deke is a former LAPD officer. Now, of course, it’s too late. Not that either of these official blogs has much in the way of “insider” information, but what they do choose to post, could have given some insight or background.

I’ve mentioned before how in their quest to fool spam filters, the spammers send email that’s become nearly unreadable. Here’s an example I got this morning:

D s ea y r H p om j e O r wn a er,

Your c p re w di h t doesn’t matter to us!

If you O h WN o r y ea j l e y st d at b e and want
I h MM f EDI s ATE c h as e h to s d pe a nd ANY
way you like, or simply wish to
L k OW d ER your monthly p r aym v ent h s
by a third or more,
here are the d i ea p ls h we have T l ODA w Y:

Um, say what? Even if I were stupid enough to think a spam email would have something I wanted, I wouldn’t be willing to put in the work it would take to decipher that mess.

This morning, I had an email from a friend that made me bang my head against the keyboard. Well, not really. She sent out an email to half a gazillion people, including several Yahoo Groups, and she DIDN’T USE THE BCC FIELD! Gah! Now hundreds of strangers have one of my private email addresses. Sigh. I thought this particular friend was computer savvy enough not to do this.

Off to work.

My computer desk is put together now thanks to my dad and his friend. It looks wonderful! And the best part is that it’s a bit bigger than my current desk. I also talked my dad into finishing the last 2 bar stools. I think I may have mentioned that I ordered 4 unassembled bar stools, that my dad put 2 of them together and left the other two in a box in my foyer for that last 2 months. Now that box is gone! Hurrah! One more upstairs assembly job and my dad will be done. Of course, he still has the downstairs bookshelves to worry about.

I’m not really reading anything on my loops now, although I’ll occasionally check in from work on break. One has been having a very interesting discussion, but there were a few things that left me amazed. The first was the conversation about a fan who’d asked one of the women how the characters from her book were doing. This author was stunned that someone didn’t realize they were fictional characters. I was stunned that this author doesn’t know what happened to her characters after the story was over. I always get scenes I call “After the Book.” I like it because I want to know what happens after the HEA.

Then there was the response that kind of bounced from this subject where an author actually said, how many of the h/h do we really think are still together 5 or 10 years after the close of the book?

My mouth fell on the floor! All of my characters are together forever. ALL OF THEM. That’s why I write romance. I write about men and women who don’t run at the first sign of a rough patch in their relationship, who are going to work every day on loving each other. I write about men and women who are committed to each other and their relationship. I write about men and woman who honestly love each other.

I couldn’t believe this. How can a romance author think her own characters aren’t in it forever? There are times I read other authors’ books and I think, they’re never going to last, but I know my own h/h will be growing old together. How can anyone write romance and not believe this?

Anyway, I’ll have to check in on break again today and see how the conversation is going. I wish I had time to post, but it takes me a lot longer to write a note than to read one.

This is something I forgot to mention in my daily post, and since I have a couple of extra minutes before I have to logoff and get ready for the day job, I thought I’d do another entry.

My heroine in the WIP is a troubleshooter for a society of magic users. She’s going to be facing off with her former mentor who’s been using black magic and has lost all conscience, but I’ve never looked at dark magic–ever. TBH, I never wanted to because that is ugly stuff. Anyway, I figured I better see if I can find some information on this before I write the final scenes. How would a woman who’d sunk deeply into the dark forces fight the final battle with my heroine?

My search was: “black magic” and witches. I only looked at about half a dozen sites, but one of them had a lot of really good information on spells–white, gray and black magic. I skipped the section of black magic spells and kept scrolling, but then I saw something titled a spell to prepare for black magic. I clicked on it and read it. Not out loud, mind you, just to myself like we all read.

The energy immediately shifted, I felt it happen, and I shiver went down my spine. No lie. I quickly hit the back button and got off that page, then I had to clear my aura, my body and my room and brought in light and love and all that good stuff to cleanse myself and my surroundings. I did it twice to be safe.

That was nasty stuff and now I’m leery about doing any more research into black magic. I’m thinking of just winging it because I do not want to feel anything like that again.

Like I said–freaky. I know some people don’t believe in this stuff. That’s okay. I know what I felt.

I finished another chapter yesterday. Three more and the first draft is done if all goes according to plan. This chapter ended up being longer than I expected, but it’ll work out once I start revising and cutting.

This is the time of the book, though, where I become majorly neurotic. I always half-panic when I near the end and worry that the whole book sucks and is a horrible mess that can’t be fixed. I need to finish it and sit down to read the whole thing from beginning to end to get a true idea of what I’ve got. I’m so focused on what I’m working on–what I finished, what I need to do next–that I can’t see the forest for the trees. My biggest worry, of course, is whether or not I have enough suspense and plot in the story. Those are my weakest areas and I know it.

I started thinking about Creed yesterday, he’s the hero in the second book, and I think he’s really going to have to share a little more information with Ryne and Deke than he does. The thing is, I want it to be something that my h/h don’t understand at the time, but figure out later. I’m not real good with cryptic, but I’ll need to come up with something. It doesn’t ring true to me that he wouldn’t pass on critical information to Ryne. That’s something I’ll probably just jot down on a pad of paper and hit on revisions, though.

And in other writing news, Kimi started giving me information last night. Yea! I have a general plot, but I didn’t have any details. I still don’t have a lot, but I’m learning and I got a snip of the opening scene. I need a lot more information, but it’s tough when I’m trying to write another story. I’m supposed to have some kind of synopsis for this book, but hell, I have very little idea right now what’s going to happen. I have a general plot and a bad guy and a hero and heroine. That’s about it. I’m trusting that when I’m finished with Deke and Ryne, info will start pouring in.

Okay, I’m hyperventilating about this too. I’m really stretched thin right now with all the projects I have and their due dates. So pretty much, I’m totally freaking out about both stories and I seriously need more sleep. That about sums it up for me.

I found out yesterday that Through a Crimson Veil is a finalist for Best Paranormal in the Daphne du Maurier Award for Excellence in Mystery/Suspense! I’m hugely excited about this!

Of course, I didn’t get to bask long. I had to get to work on the book, especially since I’d taken vacation to get some extra time in. I managed to do 8 pages even though I got a later start than I’d planned. Long story, which I’m too tired to get into. I know, y’all are relieved not to have to wade through that. Anyway, Ryne and Deke surprised me–again. I thought we were done with sex scenes at least until closer to the end of the book. Not that they weren’t having sex, they have been, I just haven’t had to write about it. I did yesterday.

Today, I should finish this chapter, including going back through the first scene and layering in some emotion. I tried to do it as I was writing, but I got tired and it got down to Tab A in Slot B, so that’s part of the job for this afternoon.

I fell asleep in my chair again yesterday. At least I had the presence of mind to put the laptop on the ottoman before I closed my eyes. I still freaked myself out, though, when I thought it was falling, so after 15 minutes or so, I was wide awake. Unfortunately, I was also wide awake when I wanted to go to bed last night, so I’m running short again today. These half days at the day job aren’t a bad idea because I would only waste a full day sleeping for most of those hours. On the other hand, it’s sure nice to write when I’m rested for a change.

I heard that a survey was done and Minneapolis was said to have the nicest drivers. Link to Yahoo News Story. I’d like to know what the criteria was that brought these results. Minneapolis has some of the rudest drivers and I absolutely hate driving here. I’d rather drive in Chicago or a bunch of other major cities.

Trying to merge on the freeway in Minneapolis? Be prepared for oncoming traffic to speed up so you can’t get on in front of them. Same goes if you want to switch lanes–they’ll speed up so you can’t get in.

Drivers here go fast. Really fast. If the speed limit is 60 mph, be prepared to be tailgated if you’re doing 75 mph.

Drivers cut in and out of lanes without signaling. Did you leave 3/4 of a car length in front of you? Someone’s going to try to squeeze in so be prepared to slam on your brakes. These idiot drivers here will even cut semi-trucks off that short and that’s just plain stupid since the stopping distance is longer.

Then you have the cell phone brigade. One of the guys at work calls the left lane the “cell phone lane.” Because people will pull on the freeway, cut all the way over to the left lane, slow down and dial their phone. This really interferes with our race car drivers who want to do 85 mph in that lane.

About the only way Minneapolis qualifies on the nice driver list is when it comes to horn honking. No one here honks–or at least very seldom. Maybe that was the sole criteria for this survey–honking. If so, okay, we are nice. If they looked at anything else, then this company may want to fire whoever they hired to conduct the survey–clearly they’re incompetent.

I hate driving here and it’s because of how rude people are. There’s also our congestion issue since the freeways here are horribly out of date. I think that might add to the rudeness.

Anyway, I’m hoping to work half days this week. I didn’t get an official okay before I left work yesterday, but I’ve never been turned down before and I don’t expect I will this time either. I’m still tired because I’m just having an awful time falling asleep at night. Ryne and Deke have been on my mind, keeping me awake. I know what I want to do in the chapter I’m working on, but it’s transitioning between topics that I’m obsessing over right now. Odds are, though, I’d just be obsessing about something else anyway, so this is as good a subject as anything.