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Archive for March, 2007

Nirvana

Saturday, March 31st, 2007

At some point yesterday, I hit writer’s nirvana. That place where you don’t want to stop writing–you just want to keep going and going and going. I’d been hoping to find it much earlier this week since I was off from the EDJ, but it remained elusive. I’m not sure when I reached it yesterday–late afternoon? Early evening–but I recognized it.

At 6:30 last night, I was sleepy, but I couldn’t quit writing now! I had a second cup of coffee and I kept going. It was 11:30 when I had to concede it was time for bed, and as I lie there, what should come next in the book played through my head. (I’ve forgotten most of it this morning, damn it!) When I woke up this morning, I’d had less than 8 hours of sleep, but I got out of bed anyway, made my morning internet rounds while drinking coffee and I can’t wait to pick up where I left off.

I can’t even begin to tell you how good this feels! This is the first time since I last June that I felt this way and I’ve missed it. Desperately.

Baseball season starts tomorrow! Yea! I like to write with a game on and the sound muted. It doesn’t matter that much who’s playing, although I prefer it to be one of my three teams. I can generally find someone to root for (or sometimes against if it’s a lesser of two evils situation) and I’m just happy to have it on.

You see, this is how I get into trouble on QVC. I like to write with the television on, but I don’t do sound. That means it has to be tuned to something that I don’t have to pay attention too for very often and that limits the selection. Without baseball, my fall back is usually QVC and sometimes when I glance up, there’s something cool on. Gah! Thank God baseball is back!

It’s been raining and raining here. I wish it would go back to sunny and warm again. Not that I can enjoy it since I’m chained to the computer until the WIP is done, but it was so nice to open up the windows and let the air in. It was so nice to have sun shining in and to be able to wander around the house barefoot. Right now, it’s like 41 with a wind chill that drops us into the 30s and that means no bare feet and no open windows. Sigh.

Now, it’s back to nirvana. Later.

Tags: baseball, weather, WIP
Posted in writing | 4 Comments »

Another Step Forward

Friday, March 30th, 2007

In the Midnight Hour is up for preorder now at Barnes & Noble.com! It’s really starting to feel real now. Four months now and counting. Wow.

I’ve mentioned it before, but this is the book that I wanted to write forever before it sold. Ryne just came in and demanded I listen to her while she talked and talked about her people.

For those of you who haven’t listened to me talk about this story half a million times already, this is a paranormal romance and the blurb I use is:

When a troubleshooter for a society of magic users rescues a private investigator from a dark spell, she finds more than an ally as she faces down her former mentor.

The official Midnight Hour pages will go up on my website April 1st, including an excerpt. I’ll post a link here on that day.

I’ve been hard at work on the spin off book this week. It hasn’t been going as fast as I’d hoped, but it is going. I finished another chapter yesterday, which is both a blessing and a curse. Blessing because I’m glad to have it done. Curse because then I have to figure out what to do next.

Let’s see. I’ve started talking to the microwave. It really irritates the hell out of me, though. It keeps beeping. So there I am hollering things like, “I heard you the first time.” And “Hang on, I’ll be there in a minute.” Damn, I wish there was some way to turn off those reminder beeps. I don’t want to hear them.

My neck and shoulders are so stiff that my right thumb goes numb, so I’ve been hollering at my body too. I’ve developed a stabbing pain just under the elbow of my left arm and my left thumb is aching, probably from the rain. (I injured it in a car accident about 8 years ago.) So there you have a it, a litany of my woes.

Tags: life, midnight_hour, WIP
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Email Hell

Thursday, March 29th, 2007

Email is making me crazy right now. Let’s totally leave Yahoo loop mail out of it because I’m ignoring that. I’m talking about plain, regular email. Over on MySpace, I finally turned on the Away feature on messages because I’ve got a queue of notes to answer and I have no clue when I’m going to get to them. At least I won’t have any new messages to worry about over there which is one step in the right direction.

Then there’s my personal email, the stuff coming in directly to me. Yesterday, I received a note from someone I was friendly with when we worked together. She left NWA, and when I tried to send her an Xmas email card, it bounced. Now I have her new email address and a really nice note from her that I’d like to answer. No time. I’m really, really slow at composing email.

Let’s not even mention all the notes I have from friends in my inbox. It’ll be a miracle if they’re all still my friends by the time I get around to replying to them.

Then there are the emails I’ve had to send. The ones that I get no reply to. These are all important notes–I wouldn’t have sent them if they weren’t–and I get nada back. This leaves me in a quandary. First, did my email even arrive? Spam filters, the note going astray in cyberspace, whatever. Second, if it did arrive, did they decide to answer it later? Did they decide it required no reply at all? (If so, they were wrong.) Are they on vacation? Is there some other reason why they’re not answering? Do I follow up at the risk of sounding like a complete pest? Did they reply and I didn’t receive their note? Gah!

I already took time to write the emails once, the last thing I want to do is have to keep following up, but I really, really need answers on a couple of them. I’m starting to obsess and I don’t have the energy for this.

I love email. Usually.

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An Uh-Oh Moment

Wednesday, March 28th, 2007

So I had one of those uh-oh moments last night. I had all the lights off and was getting ready for bed when I realized I hadn’t checked to make sure the front door was locked. I thought, well, why bother? I never forget to lock it. But on the heels of that came the thought that it would only take a minute, so I might as well just do it and I’ll sleep better.

Guess what? Yep, the door was unlocked. When I’d come back from my parents’ house, my hands had been full, and between that and kicking off my shoes, it must have just slipped my mind. Yikes!

I live in a safe neighborhood, but a few months ago, one neighbor had their car broken into and the thieves used the garage door opener to help themselves to stuff there. And the neighbor two houses down had their SUV stolen by the same thieves. The car was recovered the next day, but with damage. So if I’d slept with the door open, I would have been totally freaked out this morning. Luckily, I found it in time and I was only partially freaked out.

I’ve also been watching QVC this morning while I had coffee. I know, it’s dangerous, but they had the exotic plant people on and I love that stuff. Anyway, they happened to show two different types of lilies that are hardy to -30, so I could leave them in the ground over winter even in MN! Hurrah! I ordered both of them and they’ll ship in May. I tell you, my need to garden and plant flowers is like the most bizarre thing ever. Trust me on this one. I’m a certified plant assassin and yet I’m buying them like crazy.

Right now, I’m watching an eye makeup kit and trying to convince myself that I really don’t need to spend the money on it. Okay, I really don’t need it, but boy, it should would be nice. Help me before I shop again!

Tags: garden, life, plants
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Update

Tuesday, March 27th, 2007

I don’t have much interesting to say. It was 81 degrees here yesterday, a record high temperature, and I had my windows open till 10:30 at night. How great was that?

I’m trying for deep immersion on the writing. I haven’t read any of my Yahoo Group digests since Friday. I’ve read personal email, but I’m way behind on answering it. I hit a few late last night, but I’ve got more to get to. I also have some other stuff I need to get going on for ITMH promo, so I’m going to try to read through the agreement before I start writing this morning. I need to get that rolling.

My mom’s out of the hospital. Still weak, but feeling better than she has in months. I’ve been spending some extra time over at my parents’ house even with all the writing I need to do. The last five days have given a little perspective on what’s really important.

And pretty much that’s all that’s been going on. Writing, writing and more writing.

Posted in writing | 6 Comments »

Legally Blond

Sunday, March 25th, 2007

Needless to say, I didn’t watch a movie last night. :-/ I did see one on television, though, on Friday night, and while I missed parts of it, I think I can review it.

Legally Blond stars Reese Witherspoon as a sorority girl in love with Warner. He chooses another girl and both he and his new fiancee are off to Harvard Law School. Reese decides that she’s going to attend too. Everyone discounts her ambition, but she gets the score she needs on her LSAT and Harvard admits her.

She ends up getting a plum assignment with 3 other first year law students (Two of them are Warner and the new financee) and ends up helping with a murder trial. Along the way, Reese learns that she’s smarter than she’s been given credit for and she gains confidence.

I didn’t expect to like this movie. It sounded silly and lame, but I surprised myself and really enjoyed it. In fact, I added it to my NetFlix queue so I can see the whole thing without commercials. I had a few interruptions that night and missed big chunks of the movie. Reese Witherspoon did a fabulous job making her character someone likable, someone I could root for and cheer on. And how she exonerates her client at the end of the movie was cute.

It’s not Oscar material, but it’s certainly an entertaining way to spend a few hours.

My rating: 4 stars

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Light Warriors

Saturday, March 24th, 2007

Since I first came up with the idea for In the Midnight Hour, I’d tried and tried to think of a name for the series. Okay, it’s only two books right now, but hey, that’s a series! And it has the potential to go on indefinitely depending on how it’s received.

I’d thought about calling it The Gineal Series after the name of Ryne’s people, but that was pretty boring and certainly not catchy. Besides, it says nothing really about the books. Then I thought The Troubleshooters because Ryne is a magical one of those. Except I think Suzanne Brockmann calls her series Troubleshooters, doesn’t she? If not her, then there’s someone. It was so frustrating. Today, though, it came to me.

The Light Warriors.

I did a search online, both on a search engine and at Amazon and the only thing I turned up was a role-playing game and a book from a vanity publisher. Hurray! The Light Warriors can be used!

I can’t believe I didn’t think of it before. Ryne’s official title is laoch solas which means warrior of light in either Gaelic or the Gineal language–whichever works. I’m all excited about this now. I actually have a cool series name!

And in other news, I have all the windows open in my house–the first time since the cold weather set in last fall–and it’s heavenly. I love getting some fresh air in here.

Tags: light-warriors, midnight_hour, series, spring
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Odds and Ends

Friday, March 23rd, 2007

Guess what I have over on my MySpace page? A movie trailer for the third Pirates of the Caribbean movie! Pretty darn cool what you can do now, isn’t it? If you want to see a preview of POC3, and if you have a high-speed connection, head on over and watch; it’s under the section marked “Movies.” The movie looks like it’s going to be fun, but how can it miss with Johnny Depp and Orlando Bloom?

I also discovered a new music group that I like–Pink Martini. It was so funny how I found them too. I popped over to someone’s MySpace page to leave a Happy Birthday comment and “Let’s Never Stop Falling In Love” was set to play automatically when the page loaded. Normally, the automatic music annoys me and you’ll notice on my MySpace page it requires the play button be clicked before anything comes on. But I digress. So this song comes on automatically and I loved it. I listened to it a couple of times, then I clicked over to the artist’s MySpace page and listened to the other songs they had up on their site. My next stop was Amazon to order both of their CDs. I’d never heard of this group before, I don’t even know exactly how to describe their music because it’s a blend of styles, but it was fun and I haven’t been this excited about new music since I discovered Loreena McKennitt years ago.

I also bought some really cool planters on QVC. At least I hope they’re cool. They looked like they were on TV. These planters are made to fit over a railing, which would put them at the perfect height for tending plants on both my front porch and my deck. Every time I type something like that, I just think: Whoa! I’m so totally not into gardening–a response to being expected to weed my parents’ huge gardens as a kid–but this year all I want to do is plant flowers. Nesting, maybe? It’s just bizarre.

If I don’t blog daily like you’re used to over the next week or so or if I’m really slow on answering comments, it’ll be because I either don’t have time or don’t have energy. My family has a medical issue going on and it’s fairly serious. And I think that’s all I’m going to say on that.

Tags: movies, music, myspace, shopping
Posted in Uncategorized | 3 Comments »

Imagine a Catchy and Exciting Title Here

Thursday, March 22nd, 2007

I needed a high res image of my cover for In the Midnight Hour and I finally received it yesterday. There were two images attached to the email, one smaller and one big one. The big one opened without any problems, but the cover only had the image and my name and title. I was hoping for a version with my quote and with the paranormal romance graphic my publisher uses. I decided it must be on the smaller image and worked on trying to get it open. This was a jpg file, but I kept getting an unsupported file type message.

I think this might be one of those situations where being pretty good with computers isn’t a good thing. Most people would have tried a couple of things and given up, but not me. I knew I could get that damn thing open–somehow–but even my graphics program wouldn’t show the thing. After much mucking around, I did get it open, but it was just a smaller version of the same picture in the big file. So all that for nothing. Sigh. Anyway, I sent the big image off for the postcard and resized it for the website.

That’s been the other project I’ve been trying to do this week–get the Midnight Hour pages ready to go up on the website. It isn’t horribly time consuming as far as creating the design/layout goes. That’s already done for other book pages and it’s just a matter of replicating it. The place where I am running into an issue is with the excerpt. First, I had to choose a scene. With the help of a friend, I did. Then I had to find my contract and refresh my memory on how many words I’m allowed to post. 1500. Seemed like a lot when I read it, but it boils down to about 6 pages and the scene is something like 8-9 pages. I started trimming. I’m close to 1500 words now, but I’m wondering if I cut too much out.

This started me thinking: Why 1500 words? Why not 2500 words? I could have gotten the entire scene up with 2500 words. Why the limit at all? Were there writers posting too much of their books?

Anyway, I’m finding this very restrictive and it’s taking up too much time. I wanted these pages up by April 1, too. And I don’t think I have a 6 page scene early enough in the book to have it make any sense to someone reading it. Actually, I’m not sure I have a 6 page scene in the book. I write a little long. In fact, in Crimson Veil, I had scenes that were 26 pages long!

Tags: computer, midnight_hour
Posted in Uncategorized | 2 Comments »

Action!

Wednesday, March 21st, 2007

I love the vernal equinox. From here on out, the days keep getting longer and I love that. When I was younger, one of my friends told me that at the moment of equinox–7:07 last night to be exact–you can make an egg stand up and stay up. I tried it and it worked. Of course, I did it on berber (sp?) carpeting so maybe the ridges helped it stand, but it was still really cool. I didn’t do this last night, but I thought about it.

This morning I woke up thinking about starting a book with action. I’ve read a lot of contest entries over the years that have begun that way and I can’t think of one that worked. Quite frankly, I didn’t care what happened to the characters because I didn’t know them. This morning, though, I thought about how In the Midnight Hour starts with action. I don’t know if this was something that was working it’s way through my subconscious or what the deal was because it wasn’t anything I was actively worrying over, but I had an answer when I woke up: I don’t start immediately with action.

Yeah, the first chapter has a fight scene, but I think I begin it early enough that the reader gets to know a little bit about my heroine and there’s some interaction with another character before Ryne confronts her assignment. The first chapter contains a lot of world building and a lot of characterization, but it’s done through action and not an info dump, so that’s why I think it works.

Sometimes it amazes me what’s going on in my head–especially the stuff I don’t know about.

Is anyone else really tired still? I don’t know if I’m still adjusting to the time change or what, but I’m still exhausted. I couldn’t get out of bed this morning and now I’m typing this entry as fast as I can because I have to get ready for work in a minute. I just couldn’t move. I hit the snooze as many times as I could and still laid there, not wanting to move. It’s been this way all week and I’m getting tired of being tired.

Tags: midnight_hour, sleep
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