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Before I hunker down and finish novella revisions, here’s a little quiz.

You Are Grape

You are bold and a true individual. You are very different and very okay with that. People know you as a straight shooter. You’re very honest, even when the truth hurts. You are also very grounded and practical. No one is going to sneak anything by you. People enjoy your fresh approach to life. And it’s this honesty that makes you a very innovative person.

It ended up being a busier day than I expected yesterday. I was planning to go straight home and get to work, but my freeway exit was closed. Since the next one was almost halfway to the mall and since I needed the fax number for the newspaper to send in the announcement about the book signing that I’m part of, I thought, well, I’ll just head to the mall and talk to the bookseller in person. I’ve been meaning to call him all week, but I don’t like the phone and I have to psych myself up to make calls like this. I hadn’t managed to actually do it yet and time is running short.

Anyway, the bookstore has a nice display right near the registers of books from me and the other two authors signing with me. And I found out that my bookseller took care of alerting the newspaper which is cool because that’s one less thing for me to do. I also found out that he’s having a really hard time getting Through a Crimson Veil in for the signing. After all the problems I’ve been dealing with because no one can find Ravyn’s Flight, this was the last thing I needed to hear. He’s going to try again, and hopefully, I’ll have more than Eternal Nights to sign on September 9th.

BTW, if you’re in the Twin Cities area and want information on the book signing, check out my Appearances Page.

Then, since I was at the mall anyway, I decided to walk over to Penney’s and see what they had for curtains. I need some kind of drape that will work on a traverse rod. Of course, because it was a home sale, the department was packed and no one was available to help me. Call me undomestic (it’s true), but I don’t know what kind of drape goes on that kind of rod. Pinch pleat? Gah! I ended up leaving without anything.

Then I needed to put tabs on my car because August is my month for license plate renewal. That’s something else I’ve been putting off for a couple of weeks, so I decided I better get that taken care of while I was thinking of it.

Now, I finally started working on revisions.

I’m on my last pass through, looking for things to clean up, word better, delete or new places to layer in some more stuff. One of my writing buddies read the whole thing for me yesterday and she said it’s richer and deeper than what I turned in originally. That’s a good thing since this was something I’d worried about, but I wasn’t sure if it was just something I’d have to live with because of the length I was working with. Maybe so because I’m up to 100 pages now. There’s no way I could have gotten this stuff in if I’d had to stay at 80.

I logged on to a ton of email. I’m not exaggerating! And most of it required an answer from me which is rare. So I started working on that and it kept me going until I went to bed.

I printed out a hard copy of the novella to read today. All the big changes are done, but I’ll make one more pass today to see if there are more opportunities to layer stuff in and to make sure I hit everything I needed to. I guess I’ll spend Thursday trying to get this thing into some kind of order to email to my editor. This is going to be one of the uglier revisions to send back because I changed so much in so many different places.

I really like Kimi and Nic. Well, I like all my characters, I couldn’t write about people I didn’t enjoy spending time with. Maybe I guess I should say I like the revisions I made because they brought out more of who Kimi and Nic are. When I wrote the novella back in June, I was pressing hard on another deadline and I thought I only had 80 manuscript pages to work with. (I came in at 87 pages.) It was after I got the contract that I realized I could have had more space, so I didn’t worry about that as I revised and I added what I needed to. (I’m at 99 pages now.)

But I wonder, do other writers sit there and think, wow, these are cool people; I’m glad I got to write them? Or is it because I’m such a character-driven writer?

You see, I don’t create my characters. They come in as fully-formed people. My only job is to get to know them and to listen to them. I love getting to know my heroes and heroines. Some of them will show/tell me all kinds of things. Some are reticent and I have to push them or quiz their friends and families. I’ve had characters lie to me. I’ve had characters refuse to tell me their names. I’ve had characters who like to play with me. See why my motto is Torture the characters before they torture me?

But despite all the grief they give me, there hasn’t been one hero or heroine that I haven’t genuinely liked. They’re why I keep writing when I’m so tired I’m falling asleep sitting up. I want to know what happens to them. I want to see how they find forever together. And I’m totally fascinated by their different relationships. I enjoy watching them change and grow so that they can accept love and live HEA.

My stories revolve around my characters. If there’s something I want to do in the story, but the characters won’t do it, they win. (Of course, they refuse to let me move forward if I do something with them that they don’t want to do so it’s kind of a moot point.) At the same time, if there’s something they want me to do that I’m not comfortable with, I’ll do it anyway. (Which I did in the novel I turned in back in June. I’ve also got softer alternatives ready to go for the two scenes that might be too much.)

I read a book a few years back that became an absolute wall banger. It was by an author I’d read occasionally in the past and had enjoyed, but after this book, I’ll never read her again. She sacrificed who her characters were for her convenience and to stick to the plot she wanted to use. The hero acted completely out of character, doing something so stupid at the midpoint of the book, I was like, huh? Before this, the man had come across as savvy and intelligent. The heroine, too, does something completely stupid so that the author can have her dramatic conclusion. Throw in a little convenient coincidence just for good measure. Gah!

Bottom line for me is stay true to the characters–always. If it messes up your neatly plotted story, then go back and replot, but do not force the characters to behave in a way that isn’t right for them. It’s all about the characters.

Probably the title of this post would lead you to believe I’m going to have a political rant. Not quite. At least not the way you’d think. Here’s my diatribe: How many more damn political candidates, their wives and supporters are going to come to my house and ring the doorbell when I’m trying to work?

See? I told you it wasn’t what you expected.

It’s been continual and I’m getting so tired of it. I don’t even open the door, I just look out, see the clipboard and start muttering. After Saturday, I’d taped a Do Not Disturb Writer at Work sign on my front door, but I didn’t put it up last night. It was raining all day, and while it had stopped by early evening, it was still dismal, so I thought the politicians wouldn’t bother me. Wrong. Wife of Politician was making the rounds with her clipboard. Argh! I think I’m going to have to leave my sign out all the time now because I’m tired of the interruptions.

Despite these eager beaver political candidates, I’m actually managing to get work done on my novella revisions. I’ve got all the problems solved, now it’s just a matter of fine tuning and layering. And trying to figure out how to get the changes to my editor when I’ve made so many of them, some little, some big. Pulling this thing together for him is going to be harder than the revisions, I think. :-/

I can’t believe it’s nearly September! I have to call the bookstore where I’m doing a signing and get the information on who to send the announcement to at the newspaper. He wants me to do it because they don’t print anything he sends, but I have no idea who to send it to or what format to use. Then I have the actual book signing on the 9th and I go to see King Tut on the 11th. It’s going to be a short trip since I can’t afford to burn too much vacation, so pretty much I’m going to turn right around and come back home. But I can’t miss King Tut, right?

I made really good progress on novella revisions yesterday and I thought I had all the heavy stuff done, but something I thought wouldn’t take too much work may end up needing to be rewritten. If you detect a lack of enthusiasm in my voice, it’s because I’m not thrilled by the prospect. Not because of the work involved, that doesn’t bother me, it’s because I really like the scene the way it’s written. I mean, really, really, really like it. And it looks like human nature is going to make me have to change it. The trick is going to be keeping the dialogue and stuff that I like and still fix the thing.

After working all day, I watched Armageddon. I know, I’m probably the last person in America to see this movie. Does anyone need a summary of what happens? Probably not, but just in case a large asteroid is headed for Earth. If it strikes, all life will cease to exist. NASA needs to send a team to the monster to drill 800 feet down and drop a nuke and they end up sending a team of deep sea oil drillers to get the job done. These guys are misfits and screwups and clash with the military.

I thought the movie was good, very suspenseful, and at 2.5 hours, about a half an hour too long. Maybe if they’d cut out some of the training stuff or something. I’d have liked to have seen more of the romance between AJ and Grace, but then there’s a reason why I write what I do. I’m very interested in relationships.

It was interesting how the scriptwriters kept making things worse and worse and worse for these poor drillers once they were in space. I mean everything went wrong that could possibly go wrong. It did up the tension, but after a while, even while I was on the edge of my seat, part of me was thinking, oh, come on!

My favorite line in the whole movie was spoken by the Russian. It was something like: Components. American components. Russian components. All made in Taiwan.

There were also some huge problems with the logic in the movie. Some of the space stuff was wrong, at least I’m pretty sure it was wrong. I don’t think you can have explosive decompression in space. I decided to overlook all the nitpicky details, though, and just go along for the ride. It was a pretty fun one.

My overall rating 4 out of 5 stars.

I’m not sure whether to label yesterday a good day or not. I made progress on my revisions, but not as much as I’d hoped/wanted to. It always seems to work out that way, though, and my dawdling yesterday morning was really bad, so I got a later start than I’d planned. However, I did get one of the hard changes completely done–I think it turned out well–and I’m about half done with the other hard one. After I finish that, it should be much easier to take care of the rest and to layer these changes I made throughout the rest of the story. For the first time since I finished the novella in June, my head was in the characters and their story and that’s a good thing.

The Twins won yesterday, making it a stellar baseball day! I know, I know, but I haven’t mentioned baseball here in months! I’m due. They’re playing the White Sox–our arch enemy–and both teams are vying for the wild card in the playoffs. Because the Twins had won on Friday night, they had a 1/2 game lead.

Johann Santana was pitching for us and he’s a Cy Young candidate. He gave up a couple of runs, but when he came out of the game, the team had a 6-3 lead. Our bullpen is normally totally reliable, but not last night. Both our setup guy and our closer gave up runs, including the tying run. Our manager had no other options in the pen left for extra innings except for a pitcher they normally only bring in when the team is either way behind or way ahead. And this pitcher did it! He pitched two shutout innings and the Twins won in 11 innings. Yea! The team was totally stressing me out last night, though.

One side note, the game was also being broadcast on WGN last night and when that kind of thing happens, I usually like to spend a little time watching the opposing team’s game coverage because it can give an interesting perspective. My opinion on the Chicago White Sox announcers is that they were extremely obnoxious and such devout homers that they can’t call themselves professionals. Yeah, all broadcast duos obviously lean toward their team, but never to the extent that these two did. Ugh! At least pretend to be semi-professional, guys–you’re breaking my journalism major’s heart.

Okay, no more baseball talk, although if I had more time, I might have to do a baseball blog during the season. I love to talk about the games.

I mentioned this earlier in the week, but it’s a problem I’ve been dealing with for days. The reprint of Ravyn’s Flight is apparently available nowhere except from my publisher right now and stores can’t even order it. It’s very frustrating for me. People can’t buy the book if they can’t find it. Even Amazon and BN.com don’t have it and they’re usually the best source for backlist that the stores don’t carry. So I’ve been in contact with my editor about this and it’s gone up the chain of command. I’m hoping something happens to get it fixed, but TBH, I’m not holding my breath. In the meantime, I’ve set all my Order Your Copy links for RF to the Dorchester website.

Title for today’s blog is because it was absolutely beautiful here yesterday. Warm, but not humid. Sunny. Gentle breeze. And instead of being outside, I was working on the computer indoors.

There’s an interesting blog discussion about cover art from the art director at Tor/Forge that got me thinking about my covers this morning.

On my first book, Ravyn’s Flight I spent hours and hours filling out the art facts form I received. I described my characters, their clothes and the scenery in a fair amount of detail. (Lots of detail for the characters, a medium amount on their clothes and sketchy on the scenery. I included pictures of what Ravyn and Damon looked like and described some scenes I thought would make a good cover. None of which involved the h/h in bed.

Here’s my cover. Beautiful art, but it didn’t match the tone of my book. Cherif looks nothing like Damon who was in the army and had short hair. The woman is much closer to Ravyn, though.

I do use pictures of all my characters as I write. I have to have them before I get too far in a story. To check out the heroes and heroines of the books I’ve finished, you can go to my Characters Living HEA page.

Now, I’m not unrealistic. I knew there was no way in hell I was getting Lucky Vanous or Kristin Alfonso on my cover, but I did expect a cover that was made for my book. This wasn’t. It was already drawn/painted art that my publisher bought the rights to use on my book. I’d include a link to the original art, but I can’t find my bookmark.

For The Power of Two I didn’t spend as much time on the art form as I did the first time. Still, I did put forth a fair amount of effort, especially describing the characters. Do you see a trend here? I’m not too into the scenery, but very into the people. I did say they were undercover and not wearing their army uniforms. I described their clothing as khakis and whites because it’s an extremely hot and humid climate and they’d want to stay cool.

Jake is wearing a military uniform–including a sweater with insignia. Cai is in long sleeves. I think both of them are going to die of heat stroke. I added the red shirt when I did revisions to TPOT because I wanted the characters to match to some extent.

Overall, I really like this cover. The red pops against the bright blue background and if you look closely, you’ll see that Cai is wearing a ring on her right hand, exactly as I described in the form I filled out. That was hugely exciting for me and I ran around the office with a cover flat pointing out that ring to all my coworkers. They smiled, nodded, and started looking up the number for a mental health facility.

For Through a Crimson Veil I spent less time on the art sheet, but I included more pictures of Conor and Mika. )Six of Mika, five of Conor.) This is my favorite cover so far. The people are very close to how I envisioned my hero and heroine (he just needs to be taller). I know, I know. Everyone who knows anything about cover art is thinking it doesn’t matter if the people on the cover match the characters. I know that too, but I still want them to look the way I see them. This time I mentioned that Mika always wears bright colors.

I added the all black outfit to a scene toward the beginning of the book on revision. BTW, I love this cover so much that I had it blown up to poster size. When I get around to decorating my house, it’s going up in my computer room. (BTW, I also love the lettering they used for the title and my name. Way cool!)

One of the things I find interesting is that in the Crimson City series, my book is the only one with both the h/h on the cover. I love that they’re both there, but I’m curious why. Is it because in my stories the h/h are always a team against the world even if they have problems with each other? Or am I reading way too much into this and it was just a fluke?

When I filled out the art sheet for Eternal Nights I added more pictures–pyramids, crop circles, military uniforms, insignia and characters.

I really love this cover! The colors are cool, the model is hot (and the longer you look at him, the sexier he gets!) and the pyramid and city give it a real mystical, futuristic feel. IMO. I’m debating getting this one enlarged too, although not to the size of TACV.

When I filled out the art sheet for my book for Tor, I took the lessons I’d learned from my previous four books. I included pictures, tried to get the tone across, gave a real general idea of some scenes in the book and I’ll leave the rest up to the art department. I’ll admit to getting excited to see this cover. Tor has done some fab work for their paranormal romances and I’m sure mine is going to be way cool too!

Anyway, I need to get going. I have a lot of work to do today. Bottom line for me on the art, I guess, is that as long as it sells books, I’m happy. But I’m happier if the characters look like I imagine them and if the cover matches the tone of my story.

These results were a huge shock. Not.

Your Taste in Music:

80′s Alternative: Highest Influence 80′s Rock: Highest Influence 80′s Pop: High Influence Classic Rock: High Influence 80′s R&B: Medium Influence

I did it. I plogged on Amazon yesterday. Even after signing up and getting my books verified, I still wasn’t sure I wanted to do it, but this situation with Ravyn’s Flight pushed me off the fence. So I blogged on the RF page about how the book is available new. I didn’t dare link to where they could buy the book, so I linked to the page on my website–the one with the Order Your Copy link that will let people buy the book. I’m wondering, though, if this will stay up or if Amazon will yank it since I’m taking business away from the people trying to gouge readers with $10 used copies when they can buy it brand new for $6.99.

I’m still not sure I want to do this and I don’t plan to do it regularly because I find it irritating as all get out to be looking at a book and have to scroll past long and numerous entries. But right now I have an entry on RF and on Eternal Nights and I’ll probably do one for my other books and leave it at that.

While I’m kind of talking about web things, I added some printable files to my website. Not last night, earlier. One of them is a list of my books in PDF. I debated whether or not to add my upcoming releases or just the books that are out. I decided to go with just the ones that could be bought. When I have some time, I’m going to explore adding some more PDF documents to my website. Maybe y’all would like to see my extensive character sketches. I don’t do them for every book, and if I do use them, I don’t necessarily fill them out completely, but if I need something thorough, I have it.

Anyway, it’s mostly been a boring week. I’ve been struggling with the major revisions to the novella because I have to write new scenes and the characters aren’t really talking to me. Kimi, however, finally gave me some insight last night before I fell asleep. Or I guess I should say that she reminded me of some stuff she’d shown me when I first started the novella and I didn’t use it. I only had 80 pages (I thought) and I didn’t think I could afford to waste space on it. Now, though, I’ll go back and use it. Um, it’s going to be another weekend locked away from the world while I immerse myself in this story.

Ravyn’s Flight was out of print for two years. During that time, I fielded a ton of emails from readers asking me where they could find a copy. I always felt bad that I couldn’t tell them exactly where to get one. I know how it is to want an author’s backlist and not be able to find it. (I’m still looking for reasonably priced copies of JAK’s McFadden stories!) So I was eagerly awaiting August and RF being back in print.

Last week, I notice that Amazon has RF shipping in “7-13 days.” I figured that meant they’d sold out of their initial order and were waiting for more copies to arrive. Okay. Over the weekend, I heard from a reader trying to get RF. Her bookstore couldn’t order it, and it wasn’t available at Amazon. I directed her to Barnes & Noble.com since they still had copies up.

Monday, I think, Amazon switched RF to “available from these sellers” which means they weren’t getting anymore copies. Around this same time, BN.com has the book become unavailable. “A new copy is not available at this time.” My first thought is that they couldn’t have printed so few copies that the book is already out of print again, right? I check my publisher’s website. RF is still available there. Whew! But I drop a note to my editor asking what’s going on. Why couldn’t Amazon reorder? Why didn’t BN.com reorder? Clearly, there’s some demand for these books and these online retailers are pretty good about keeping backlist available.

Then I hear back from the reader who emailed me. She can’t get RF anywhere and was very frustrated. The only place I know she can get it is from my publisher. I give her the website, I give her the phone number, I apologize profusely for her difficulty and tell her how much I appreciate her efforts. And I’m cringing because no reader should have to go through this much work to get a copy of a book she wants to read.

My guess is there’s some glitch that told Amazon and BN.com that RF wasn’t available. I let my editor know there’s a problem, but I have no clue who else to contact and tell. There are plenty of copies of RF. I have a rough count of how many are in the warehouse. So why the heck can’t readers get a copy? Grrr!

I’m through with the easy revisions to the novella now. All that’s left now is the stuff that’s going to take some work and then layering those changes throughout the story. I’ve been so tired this week that I was hesitant to tackle the big things, but I’ll have to start tonight.

To continue with my frustrations, yesterday I checked email and had the same newsletter twice on two different email addresses. I didn’t sign up for this author’s newsletter even once. I didn’t enter a contest on her website. Nothing. But I am on the same loop with her. I found this irritating because now 1. I had to take the time to unsubscribe–twice. 2. I don’t have time to read and answer email from friends and I’m no mail on most of my loops. Now I’m getting not just one, but two newsletter emails from a historical author and I don’t read historicals. 3. The newsletter was for a chat. See previous mention of how little time I have. I wish authors would figure out that other published authors are not their target market–especially those of us who hold full time jobs.

Then, right before I head to bed last night, I received a fan email. Yea!!! (Normally, I don’t mention fan mail here because that seems a little braggy, but there’s a reason why I bring it up now). I hit reply and answered the note–and got a mailer daemon thing. No such user it says. I tried again, sure it was a tech glitch, but it came back a second time. I looked at the header and this is the address it was sent from (sometimes emails will have a different reply to address specified in the header). So I’m not sure why this is happening. I’ll try again and hope it goes through. I’d hate for anyone to think that I didn’t answer their note. I answer every reader email I receive.

Okay, just popped into email to send it again while I was thinking of it. Keep your fingers crossed for me! Darn, note came back again as no such mailbox.

Anyway, a writing buddy did a “things she’s learned since she first started writing” entry on her blog this week. I learned a lot of things since I first sold, (school went into session, fast!) but one of the biggest was that the more books I have released, the more time I have taken up with things that don’t actually involve writing. If I ever have time, (Hahaha!!!) maybe I’ll work up my own list of things I learned.