Patti O'Shea's Blog

I had all kinds of things I thought I’d mention today on the blog–at least I did yesterday–but this morning, my mind is blank. I can mention that I ran to Fed Ex and the WIP is out of my hands and on its way to NYC. Of course, I made the mistake of reading the last few chapters and I found a couple of pages that I wasn’t happy with. And of course, it was too late to fix them before my editor sees them. Gah!

So I got back to work from dropping the mss off and I had time left on my lunch so I joined Net Flix. I hardly ever watch movies and I haven’t in years. The last movie I saw in the theater was Titanic and that was out in 1997. =8-O My goal is to try to watch a movie a week. Me Time. It might be a little ambitious. I have a really hard time focusing on anything except my writing for a couple of hours straight. First in my queue is Sin City. This is the movie that I almost went to see in the theater, but I was waylaid by the scrapbook store.

I had all kinds of wonderful plans for my afternoon yesterday. I was going to take pictures of my deck for y’all because who wouldn’t be dying to see those? I was going to do productive things that didn’t involve writing. Instead, I ended up vegging out in front of the television. I watched a lot of local news, then the Boston/Mets match up. Boston has some dedicated baseball fans. It was fun to see how they appreciate their team and their players. It’s not quite the same in MN.

Today, well, maybe today I’ll get those pictures taken. Maybe I’ll do something besides collapse. Maybe, but it’s questionable. I’ve already overslept this morning.

The WIP is done, printed, wrapped in a Fed Ex envelope and ready to be mailed on my lunch time from the day job! Yea!

I can’t believe it’s done! I’m two for two on my June deadlines! Whoo hoo!!!!

Maybe now I can get some sleep. I think I’ve been brain dead for the past month. Maybe longer. Of course, I didn’t sleep last night. I was too wound up after I packaged it up so I’m functioning right now on about 2 hours of sleep. And of course, I’m working with a new editor so I’ll be sweating what she thinks of the story. Did I mention it here about this WIP ending up darker than I expected? I can worry about that too.

The question now is what do I do with myself now that the book is done? I seriously need some rest before I dive into anything else, so I’m not starting a new project right away. I suppose I could do all the house stuff I’d put off while I was writing. Oh, and I can take pictures of my new deck. I have my camera charged and ready to go.

Speaking of the deck, they did not come out yesterday to pour concrete. They’re supposed to be out this morning, which works better since my construction supervisor (AKA my dad) had a lunch yesterday when the guys were supposed to pour.

Anyway, we can all hope I find coherency in the next week or so. I miss it.

I didn’t get as much done yesterday as I’d hoped, so I’m really pushed for time today. I spent a lot longer fixing a couple pivotal scenes than I thought I’d have to and didn’t get to the foreshadowing that has to be placed earlier in the book for the ending to work. I wish I had another couple of days to polish and tweak, but it needs to go Fed Ex tomorrow in order to make the deadline.

Today they’re coming to pour the cement for the deck footings. I hope this means they’re putting in the final supports in as well. Right now, I just have temporary supports up and that means no wandering out on the deck just yet. The weather has been perfect here for coffee al fresco too. Oh, well. After I mail this book off and the deck is actually safe to go out on, then I can wander out there.

There hasn’t been much else going on aside from trying to finish up this book, so using the theory that less is more, I’m going to end this post and get to work.

I still have some more tweaking to do, and depending on the scene, some of the tweaks are pretty major, but I think I have the heavy work done on the WIP. Yea!

The plan for the day is to finish the rest of the additions/foreshadowing stuff. Then tomorrow, I can read through, polish and cut. I’ll also have to look for the words I have a tendency to use over and over. When did “all,” “just” and “still” become such problems for me? At least it’s easy to do a search since I combined the whole story into one big document.

I wrote a new scene last night to wrap up some of the loose ends. It’ll go nearly at the end. I think I’m going to push what was the final scene in chapter 24 into its own chapter.

In Eternal Nights news, I received a couple more great reviews! I haven’t had time to add them to the website yet, and I probably won’t until after the WIP is finished, but Romantic Times said:

Loosely connected to her first novel, Ravyn’s Flight, O’Shea’s terrific futuristic thriller packs in large quantities of action and multiple storylines. Besides the protagonists dealing with both current danger and past-life experiences, concurrent storylines involving secondary characters add depth and flesh out the story. A real winner!

And ParaNormal Romance Reviews said:

I read this book in a single day because I simpl[y] couldn’t put it down. Patti O’Shea is a unique voice in the genre, and a force to be reckoned with.

How cool is that?

Now I need to get to work. Lots to do!

Three more days to revise the WIP then it goes out the door.

Yesterday I made it up to the beginning of the final fight. You know, the part that needs the most work out of anything in the entire book. Guess what I’ll be doing today. The fight is actually two scenes that straddle a couple of chapters. First scene is in Ryne’s POV and the second in Deke’s. My goal for the day is to get this fight fixed.

In other revising news, I cut a fairly big section out of a scene because it slowed the momentum and didn’t seem to fit. I thought about putting it in somewhere else, but I decided I really didn’t need it, so it’s gone permanently. It had one of my favorite lines in the entire book. I’d share it here, but it wouldn’t be interesting without the explanation of why I like the line so much, and if I explained that, it would give huge spoilers away on the book.

The deck is up on my house! Yea! I’ll take pictures as soon as I have some time. Probably after the WIP is mailed to NYC. I’ll have to stain the railings–more work–but that’s also an after-the-book project. Okay, everything is an after-the-book project.

My feed is apparently down because Bloglines says so. Since a bunch of other Blogspot blogs are down too, I figure Blogger doesn’t need me to tell them–even if it hasn’t been working since Friday evening.

I think that’s it for today. I need to get moving because the earlier I finish the fight, the better. I still have a lot of work I want to get done.

Revision work continues. I made some really good progress yesterday, but I’ll probably have to go back and rework part of this one scene again. I can’t get it to come out the way I want it, but I figured I’d keep going and come back to it again later. I also have the worst fight scene I’ve ever written ahead of me and that will probably take a full day’s worth of work all on its own. Then there’s the scene I think I’m going to add toward the end, so lots of work left to do.

Last night, after I was done revising for the day, I updated my website. Check out the review quotes for Eternal Nights at Patti O’Shea.com

The guy who’s supposed to build the deck said he’d be here today (not Saturday), and even thought it’s after 9:30, he’s still not here. Good grief.

And in the good grief category, I look out my bedroom window yesterday and there’s hedge clippings in the back of my yard. Can you believe my neighbors tossed their crap in my yard??? What a pair of jerks. These are the same neighbors who said they didn’t want to see any parties at my house. Who the hell are these people? They’re not living next to an empty lot anymore so they better adjust and get over it.

For the geeks, WordPerfect has a macro to save the file to the A drive at the same time it’s saved to the C drive. This is a really cool feature except that I do not have an A drive. Do any computers still come with a floppy? My jump drive plugs into the USB ports and gets a drive letter based on which port I use so I rewrote the macro. Now it saves to my G drive and my C drive simultaneously. I’ve never worked a whole lot with macros or writing scripts, but this was painless since I took what they did and fixed it.

I think that’s it for today. I need to get to work.

I received an email with a wonderful quote this week.

“How does one become a butterfly?” she asked.

“You must want to fly so much that you are willing to give up being a caterpillar.”

~Tina Paulus~

This immediately made me think of writing, although clearly it applies to anything in life that we want to do. It all becomes a question of how badly do you want to do it. Change isn’t easy for most people. It’s much more comfortable to stay a caterpillar than it is to go through the difficult–and painful–metamorphosis to butterfly.

The reason it made me think of writing is because it takes a lot of dedication to actively seek publication. To make ourselves sit at the keyboard for hours and hours each week in order to get our stories down, to finish one, revise it, polish it, submit it and start the next story requires incredible passion and desire to write. It’s so much easier to be a caterpillar.

And the desire to share stories with the world has to remain a passion even after that first sale. If I thought I was dedicated when I wrote Ravyn’s Flight and the unpublished second book, I was wrong. In the nearly three years since then, I’ve learned what dedication really is.

You see, I want to be a butterfly. I want to share my stories and my heroes and heroines with the world. I want people to be touched in some small way by my characters and find them memorable. I want it badly enough to stay inside and work on the laptop even though Minnesota summers are so short and I’d rather be outside. I want it badly enough to push myself into mental and physical exhaustion to make my deadlines.

But I’ve learned something else. I need to remain balanced. My life can’t be all writing and nothing except writing. I used to have all kinds of other interests–I need to rediscover some of them. Like scrapbooking or watching movies. I can’t even remember what else I liked to do, but maybe I can discover new stuff.

So that’s my new quest–finding balance. After this current project is turned in and I have things finally unpacked and setup in my house, I’m going to explore. Archiver’s, a store dedicated to scrapbooking, has some really cool one-day workshops. I’m going to sign up for some. I also want to find a class called Drawing for the Artisically Challenged. I have a huge desire to sketch, but little ability. I decided that doesn’t matter. I don’t have to be good at art, I just have to have fun!

Before I sold RF, I did a one day workshop to build my own drum. I loved it! I can’t make more because I have no place to put them and I really don’t need more than one, but there must be other classes like that out there too. I’m going to see if I can’t find some of them.

Of course, there’s always the chance that I might find it easier to stay a caterpillar in this regard. I’m shy–very shy–interacting with strangers is difficult for me. And I can’t take that much time away from writing because I have another book due at the beginning of January. I’m going to try, though. I’m going to try.

I have less than a week now until I have to bundle off the WIP and send it to NYC. Counting today, six working days left.

I have eight chapters left to revise on my heavy run through, then I’d like to run through the entire book again and polish. I’ve got some days off from work next week, and a lot of work to do, but everything is looking good right now. If I can fix the worst fight scene I’ve ever written. I’m not looking forward to that at all.

Yesterday was another day free of Dad projects. Yea! And I haven’t heard a deck report, but I’m assuming they’re going to dig the footings and put it in this weekend which should keep my dad busy while I’m pounding away at the WIP.

Watch. As soon as my deck is finished and my book is turned in, the temperatures and humidity in MN will shoot into the extremely icky range and then I won’t want to sit out and enjoy it.

Short post for the day. Sorry. I’m just thrilled I woke up semi-on time today.

Late post today. I overslept so badly that I only had time to shower and run out the door. No coffee. No internet. Not a good start.

I arrived home from work yesterday with great trepidation. After the past few days and my dad’s projects at my house, I didn’t know what I’d find. Fortunately, he had a lodge meeting yesterday and was unable to undertake any big jobs. Whew! I think he needs more lodge meetings! He should be excited, though, because they delivered the lumber for my deck yesterday, so sometime this week, they’ll have to dig the footings because it’s supposed to be put together this weekend.

I am excited about the deck! It’s going to be so nice after it’s built to go out in the morning–probably weekends only–and have coffee out there. Or to sit outside in the afternoons when I get home from work and read. This is all after the WIP is mailed to NYC, of course, but I’m really looking forward to this. Plus, it’ll give me access to the backyard without having to walk around the house to get there.

I hit the rougher stuff on the WIP now and I didn’t get as much accomplished last night as I was getting done earlier. I knew this would happen, though, so I’m not surprised or disappointed. It didn’t help that my insomnia has been wild this week and I keep falling asleep sitting up. Sigh. Hopefully, the extra hour I had this morning will help tonight. :-/

The weird thing is that I have this song going through my head and it’s one I haven’t heard in a really long time. It makes me wonder if I picked it up while I was sleeping and my alarm was going off. Subliminal? Subconscious? I’d love to know if the radio station played it this morning.

Maia talked to me some more last night while I was trying to fall asleep. She’s Ryne’s sister. For visitors who don’t know, Ryne is the heroine of the WIP and Maia will be the heroine of the next book. I didn’t get too much information, but it was helpful stuff for getting a handle on her. Now if only Creed would start talking! That’s Maia’s hero. I’m not pushing it right now, though, just letting the information come in as it wants to. The focus is on Ryne and Deke right now. I’m taking a few days off from work next week to power through more revisions and actually have some sleep!