Patti O'Shea's Blog

It’s raining.

I predicted this with more accuracy than the weather people. You see, my dad got back from Chicago yesterday and resumed sod watering duty. It didn’t rain even once while he was gone and I never wanted rain more than I wanted it then. Just one day off from tromping through wet grass hauling hoses and sprinklers. But no. The storms went north. The storms went south. The storms disintegrated before they reached the Twin Cities. But I knew it would rain now and it is. Sigh.

After oversleeping yesterday, I never felt awake all day. How weird is that since, in essence, I had an extra hour and a half of uninterrupted sleep? So I went to bed early last night. Creed and Maia came in again and blah, blah, blah.

Okay, so I shouldn’t complain. I need them to talk to me since I have to start writing their book pretty darn soon. But I was trying to sleep! Creed, BTW, is using Ryne as bait without her knowing about it which really pisses Maia off once she figures it out. Ryne is her little sister even if she is a troubleshooter.

So couldn’t fall asleep right away and then I wake up before 3am. Grrr! I don’t know if that’s because my body is so used to such a small amount of sleep that it just automatically woke up or if I was subconsciously concerned about oversleeping again. Then the storms rolled through.

Oh, BTW, y’all be thrilled to know that my dad gave me the stamp of approval on my watering efforts. He officially told me I did a good job, which I think might have shocked him because he knows I have a patience problem and that I’m indifferent at best to the outside of the house. He, of course, did an inspection within a few hours of arriving home and he hand watered the edges of the yard because the sprinklers just don’t get them good enough.

This should be about the end of the lawn watering stories now that it’s not my responsibility any longer. Just so you know it should be pretty safe after today. What can I say? Keeping that sod alive was my life for five days.

I hugely overslept this morning. Maybe the worst in many, many years. I woke up about five minutes before I need to leave the house, so I jumped in the shower, got dressed and raced out the door. And a couple of blocks from home, I couldn’t remember if I’d shut the garage door or not, so I turned around and went to check. Yep, I’d closed it, but that pretty much obliterated any hope I had of making it on time. Still, I punched in only 5 minutes late, so I think I did pretty good, and now that I’ve had coffee, I feel human again. Or at least I’m getting there.

Last night, I finished making notes on the novella. When I get a revision letter, I read through the whole story, then I take the letter and go through with that and mark up the hard copy where I want to incorporate the suggestions. At least that’s how I’m handling it this time. I honestly can’t remember how I do revisions on a full novel. Sigh. Anyway, I made the last markups last night and comments in the letter that I didn’t think were going to work, suddenly made sense.

I don’t think the changes I need to make are going to be too bad, but I won’t really know until I start writing. And because I overslept, I forgot to grab the laptop or my handy dandy mini-laptop, so no writing at lunch today. I’ve got a couple of other things I need to work on, though, and I’ll do those.

Still no rain. Still hauled hoses/sprinklers around last night. Enough said.

I know no one cares about this except me, but they finally, FINALLY finished the bridge over the freeway near my house and reopened my street! For about a year, I’ve had to weave my way through other neighborhoods to reach the main thoroughfare and it was getting old! Now if they’d just finish the freeway construction, life would be good.

I think that’s it for today.

It happens every time I get revisions. I look at them and I think, OMG, I can’t do this? How do I do this? I can’t remember how I did it last time!

For some reason, I can never retain how I tackle my revision letters. I don’t understand it, but it’s like every letter is the first. But I know the near-panic will recede and somehow I’ll manage to figure out how to do it and what to do. That’s the nice thing about having a few books out–the fear can’t really take root because I know I’ve made it through this exact same situation on my earlier books.

I printed out my revision letter, after I made the font bigger. (10 pt font? Gah!) Five pages in 12 pt font. Not too bad. Of course, the story did come in at 87 pages. I should figure out the math somehow, but I think I’m happier believing it’s not too much when, on a percentage basis, it’s probably worse.

My normal Minnesotan interest in the weather has become an obsession. I’m constantly watching the Weather Channel now and that’s just sad. Last night before I went to bed, I see this huge patch of green off to our west and it’s headed right for the Twin Cities! Yea!!! I swear I happy dog danced. Then I saw the forecast–scattered showers.

Scattered?!? How can they be scattered? There’s a big, huge, enormous patch of green out there. It has to rain!

It didn’t. I turned on the Weather Channel first thing this morning and the radar showed my beautiful patch of green disintegrating. Which means I’ll be back outside dragging the sprinklers/hoses around this evening. I’m seriously looking forward to my dad getting back into town so I can happily abdicate this duty. It does give me a huge appreciation, though, for his effort. Who would have thought that new sod would be such a pain?

I didn’t think I was on space patrol yesterday, but apparently I was because I totally forgot about the mail. Forgot, heck, mail didn’t even exist in my world. Until about 10:15 last night. Then I went, oops! We’ve had a few issues with mail being stolen out of mailboxes in my city, so I hunted up a flashlight and traipsed outside to get it. Usually, Saturday is a very light mail day and I was surprised that I had to keep pulling things out of the box, including a very large, padded envelope. Hmm, I wondered as I walked back to the house, I don’t remember ordering anything. Maybe it’s an award certificate–I know I have at least one more of those coming.

So I get inside, ditch the flashlight and my shoes and start sorting through the mail. The big envelope is from Tor. Then I remembered. Anna, my thoughtful and sweet editor, had emailed to say she was sending the catalog with my book in it!

It looks beautiful! First of all, it seems as if my title is going to remain IN THE MIDNIGHT HOUR. Second, I now know my ISBN numbers. And third, I know when my book is coming out. Watch for it August 2007. Whoo hooo!

I know I’m posting way late today, but then I slept way late. Kind of. I was up the first time around 6:30, stayed up for an hour, then went back to bed and slept until 11. I feel so much better now, but half the day appears to be wasted because I’m just getting around to blogging, haven’t had a shower yet and I have a lot of work to do today.

Still no rain in sight, so I was out hauling hoses again last night. I started earlier with the intention of finishing earlier, but that’s not how it worked out. Since I had extra time, I decided to water the part that had been seeded, but not sodded. That’s the very back of my yard. Big mistake.

This is another piece of evidence I was on space patrol. The dirt was dry, bone dry, and I figured the grass seed could use a light sprinkle. I wasn’t going to give it the amount of water I’d been giving the sod, just a little bit. I completely didn’t think about my having to walk back over the now muddy ground to retrieve the sprinkler. Gah!

I think I did more damage to parts of the yard than the lack of water would have caused. It was last night, while I was in bed, that I figured out how I should have set up the sprinkler. If I’d set it on the edge of the sod, it would have shot over into the seeded section and I wouldn’t have had to walk in the mud. Next time, I’ll know.

My moccasins, BTW, are completely ruined. I’ve had the darn things forever, but I totally love them. They’re easy to slip on and off and great for quick trips to the mailbox or the store or wherever. Not any longer. They’ve been absolutely soaked three days in a row. I don’t think they’re dried out yet. Now I’ll have to buy another pair, but you know they won’t be as great as this pair for a long time to come. These are worn in and mine.

I ended up working on the proposal yesterday, but I think I’m switching to my novella revisions today. I’m not sure about where I want to go next in the proposal pages and this will give me time to think. I did try to do some mulling about this last night, but Creed and Maia were talking. I’m not complaining about that, believe me! That’s the next book I have due and I was getting a little panicky about not having much to go on for them. All I have to say is thank you Kansas! (The rock group.) It was hearing their song Carry On My Wayward Son in the car one day that got me thinking and one thought led to another until I have a big plot idea that not only should carry this book, but if I wanted, it could carry a lot more. Yea! Now to work out the details. :-/

I don’t know why my full posts have been truncated on Bloglines. I do have it set up to send the entire thing; I just double checked that. I use Bloglines myself and I know I get annoyed if I have to click over to read the day’s post on someone’s blog, so I am sensitive to this. I hope whatever the issue is between Blogger and Bloglines gets resolved soon.

I’m not sure what to start out with today. There are two things of equal prominence in my mind–one is writing related, one isn’t. Maybe, since I’ve spent so much time talking about the writing lately, I’ll start with the other.

It didn’t rain yesterday! I know, you’re thinking, oh, hell, she’s going to talk about the weather again. Kind of, but only in relation to watering my darn sod. (You can skip down to the writing stuff if that’s what you’re interested in. I do go on for a little bit about my yard and the rain.) You see, I was counting on the rain to hit the spots I know I’m missing as I try to water my brand new lawn. It’s difficult to tell what’s wet enough to be good watering and what’s damp, but still needs water. Besides, my shoes get all wet, I get wet as the sprinkler hits me and it’s just plain a PITA. I have brand new appreciation of my dad doing this for me for six days. Clearly, I need to get him a gift for all that work.

So all the weather geeks have been swearing up and down for days that we’d have rain on Friday. I was counting on this rain. The first storm was huge and it was headed right for us. Hours of rain. I sighed in bliss. No need to water.

It dropped south and missed us entirely. Iowa stole our rain.

But there was another storm off in North Dakota and that’s the one the weather people said we’d get. It’s not as wide and as wet as the first storm, but it was still rain. It would be here around midnight. Okay, so I water on Friday and I can take Saturday off. I can deal with that, plus Saturday will be a heavy duty writing day anyway, so if I don’t have to waste precious time moving sprinklers around, this can only be good.

The first thing I did when I woke up this morning is look out the window. It didn’t look very wet out there. Heck, it didn’t even look damp. My heart sank. Maybe, I thought hopefully, it rained and quit early enough that it dried up already. Hey, you have to be an optimist to be a writer! All that rejection–even once you’re published–takes someone who eternally believes that the sun is around the corner.

I turn on the television and find a local station showing the weather. My beautiful rain storm went north of the Twin Cities. Duluth stole our rain!

The rest of the forecast is for dry, sunny weather. So I’ll be out every day hauling sprinklers and hoses around.

Okay, for those who’ve waded their way through my rain/yard story, here’s the writing stuff I promised.

I received my revisions for the novella yesterday and I have two weeks to get them done. The timing isn’t the absolute worst it could be. It’s only pretty bad. I really was going to town on my proposal. The arc overview was done. The synopsis was done. And I was writing story at a pretty good clip. I wanted to finish it this weekend, at least the first draft of the proposal pages, and mail it to my agent next week some time.

This leaves me with a dilemma–do I keep writing the proposal this weekend and start on the revisions on Monday? Or do I drop everything and work on revisions now?

The revisions aren’t huge ones, but they could end up being time consuming because of the tweaking I’d need to do throughout the story. They’re also going to require writing a couple of new scenes and adding to several others.

On the other hand, if I drop the proposal and work on revisions to the novella, I’ll be delayed two weeks. I also expect revisions on my novel any day, so that could mean more than a two week delay. We could be talking deep into September before I’d be able to pick up Flare’s story again. By then, my connection to the characters and story would be cold, and even with my notes, I wouldn’t be 100% sure exactly what I’d meant to do next.

I’m leaning toward writing my butt off this weekend on Flare and then moving on to the novella on Monday whether I have the proposal done or not.

But then I think, wow, what if I get revisions for Ryne and Deke and the deadline is tight on that. I’ll be sorry then if I spent 2 days working on the proposal when I could have gotten stuff done on the novella.

In other words, I’m completely torn. What would you work on if you were in my place?

It rained here yesterday morning, but not enough to let me out of watering the new sod around the house. Let me tell you, getting the sprinklers in the right position wasn’t easy. I had to make sure I got as much sod as possible wet without soaking the street. It took nearly three hours to get most of the yard and I still missed a couple of patches on the north side. Sigh.

BTW, my dad wrote out instructions on how to do the watering and at the bottom, in all capital letters, he writes: I hope it rains! I’m thinking he doesn’t have much confidence in my yard care skills. He might be right.

So while I’m running around, watering the yard, my dad calls from Chicago. NINE TIMES! I had nine voice mail messages. Not because he talked all those times, but because he didn’t hang up the phone until after the beep. Arghhhh!!! He knew I was going to be outside because I told him when I dropped him and my mom off at the airport. I’d also told him if he didn’t get me, not to leave a message, to just keep trying. Nine voice mail messages. I hate the phone.

Despite my dad’s attempts to drive me insane, I got a lot of work done yesterday on my proposal. The synopsis is revised and basically good to go. All I want to do now is print it out and look for more typos and missing/extra words. I’ll still miss some, I always do, but it’ll be as clean as I can make it. I also have the arc overview document almost ready to go–barring one of my writing buddies taking it apart.

My editor asked for a 7-10 page synopsis for the book. What’s she getting? A 9 page arc overview document explaining what’s been happening on Earth and on J Nine, introducing the characters from the three books and a short summary–complete with book goal–for each of the three stories. The synopsis came in at 11 pages. It was 12 after I revised, but I cut it back to 11 again. So this totals up to 20 pages, double what she asked for. Um, is there any question now why the print in my books is so small?

I also managed to write 5 or 6 pages of actual story last night, but that was the last thing I did and I kind of petered out toward the end. But considering how tired I was, how much mental energy I’d expended on the synopsis and arc and how much time I was wasting running around the yard, dragging hoses and sprinklers, I think I did pretty good.

Yesterday, as I was driving home from work, a song came on the radio that I haven’t heard in a good long while–”Carry On My Wayward Son.” I don’t even remember who sings it, but that sparked some ideas for my next book–the one I need to start writing very soon. If I could finish the arc proposal, I could spend more time thinking about Creed and Maia, but this idea shows a great deal of promise, and if it’s as strong as I hope, it could spark more books in this world.

To wrap up, I’m praying rain for this afternoon (and there is a story behind why I say praying rain instead of pray for rain, but it’s from something I read and it’s long so I’ll skip it). There’s a big storm off to our west, so fingers crossed.

Boring title for today’s blog, but I think I’ve mentioned I suck at naming things. And if you think this is bad, you should see the titles I put on the poor books in my futuristic proposal.

I finished a first draft of the synopsis yesterday. I was shooting for 5 pages since I have the overview arc to go along with it. I believe the synopsis came in at around 11 pages, which would put it at more than double what my goal was. I honestly don’t know how this happens, it just does. Today I’ll polish it up a bit, maybe manage to do some streamlining and get it down to 10 pages, and work on writing the story.

I did about four pages of that last night before I went to bed. I’m not sure whether or not it’s working. It’s that damn balancing act between grounding the reader in where they are and not boring them to death with the world. And IMO, this balancing act gets worse in connected books. I mean, it was easy in Ravyn’s Flight–or relatively easy considering I loathe description–to give the reader enough info to visualize for themselves. It was harder in Eternal Nights because I had a third factor in the balancing act–readers who were familiar with RF. Now I’m dealing with that factor times 2 in Flare’s story.

How much is too much? How much does the reader need versus how much slows the story? Is there a better way to get the info across without leaving the reader lost?

The struggle with these questions will continue today. The goal is to have this package wrapped up and ready to mail by the weekend. If not the weekend then on Monday. Revisions are coming. (And doesn’t that sound ominous?)

I had to get up early today because I have to take my parents to the airport before I go to the day job. I’ve been tired all week and this is just making that worse. This also leaves me with sprinkler duty for the new sod. I know, I’m spoiled, but my dad is obsessive about my yard, and in all honesty, I don’t care much what the outside of the house looks like. Of course, I’m not going to let all that brand new grass die, so I’ll diligently water, but it’s going to be such a PITA. I’ve been told to move the sprinklers every half hour and that I have to turn the water off on the south hose before I do that because it uncouples from the sprinkler otherwise.

This basically means that while I’m trying to write a story that I’m struggling with anyway, that I have to stop every half an hour, go outside and spend 5-10 minutes jockeying the hoses. Um, yeah, sounds really conducive to writing.

And just to put something non-writing related on the blog for a change, why are all the movies so long? Everything I’ve gotten from Netflix has been over two hours! What happened to 90 minute movies? I’ve had Armageddon for like a week now, but it’s hard for me to commit 2.5 hours of my life to a movie. I don’t know when I’m going to get around to watching this thing.

My goal for yesterday was to finish up the overview for the three book arc and get to work on the synopsis for book one or start writing pages–one of the two. I failed miserably on both scores.

I can see the opening scene of the book. Flare’s on his front porch, he just got in from nearly four weeks outside the city walls, he’s tired, wants to relax and then Wyatt shows up and tells him Alex ordered them to an early morning meeting. Somehow, though, I can’t seem to get this on paper (or screen) in a way that’s interesting and it’s leaving me frustrated.

Oh, I’m used to the scenes in my head not matching what I actually get down in words, every writer is. I think this is why we keep writing, in the hopes that one day we’ll actually capture perfectly what we see/hear/feel/sense. This is different. I almost wonder if it’s because I’m trying to do everything in this draft the first time I write. By this, I mean that I know I have to set up that we’re on another planet, give the reader some sense of place and time and still tell a story. Maybe I’m trying to do it all on one pass through and I should be concentrating on one layer at a time.

The other thing that’s leaving me frustrated is trying to convey the three book arc. I know basically what’s going to happen in book one, my writing buddy and I talked it out. I have an idea what’s going to happen in the other two books, yet when I try to write up a short, few paragraph summary for the overview, it sounds lame. Worse than lame, it sounds too vague. I at least wanted to get that done yesterday. It’s three books, a few paragraphs per book, maybe a page, or at most, a page and a half worth of writing.

I just couldn’t get it done. Amazing, I think. I’ve written entire books in four months and I can’t one page done in four hours.

So y’all know what the goal is for today, right?

I’ve probably been talking about this project and its characters for too long now. It is my focal point right now, though. I know revisions are coming on the two projects I turned in earlier this year (June) and I need to get this done before the revision letters arrive in my inbox because once I’m done with them, I have to get hopping on the book that’s due in January. That’s also why my lack of progress yesterday is so disappointing.