March « 2007 « Patti O'Shea's Blog

Archive for March, 2007

Thinking Time

Tuesday, March 20th, 2007

I think I mentioned that I finished a chapter on Sunday and I wasn’t sure where I wanted to go next. What I started to write wasn’t going to work–too boring–but no other possibilities were coming to me. I spent yesterday with a notepad, writing down possibilities and studying my other notes on what I still needed to do. Late yesterday evening, I finally got an inkling. It will up the stakes for Maia considerably, forcing her to choose between her safe (and boring) existence and the sister she’s always protected. Of course, there’s no real doubt which one she’s going to choose–she won’t hesitate more than a split second–but it’s not going to be a comfortable position for her to be in.

Then I thought, well, this is going to be one very short scene and I still need to get some reaction in to what Creed said in the chapter I’d finished. I think I solved that too. I’m going to back this scene up and have Maia working on her plan of attack. Then hit her with her semi-dilemma.

Right before I left work yesterday, I requested vacation from the EDJ (Evil Day Job). My plan is to take next week off and hit this story hard. The thing is that I can’t waste a day like I did Monday trying to figure out where I’m going next, so I’m going to need to have a plan for the book. Much easier said than done because I’m just not a natural plotter. To this end, though, I’ve printed up everything I have so far and I’m going to read through it and make notes. I know some of it has to be cut and I’m going to lose pages, but is it information that I’m going to need later? If so, where am I going to stick it?

But the big reason for reading through is to get a sense of the story, the big picture. It’s easy to lose that when you’re focusing scene to scene or even chapter to chapter.

Tags: WIP
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Color Coded Chaos

Monday, March 19th, 2007

I was making all kinds of notes yesterday about the WIP. (I’m not calling it the book from hell any longer because that has negative connotations and I’m trying to think positively.) I like the legal pads, but with 8.5×11 paper. I used pink and lilac and I had a set that was supposed to be lilac, but it’s grayer than my other lilac and I realized that I need more colors. I have a list of things I need to go back and fix, a list of things I need to do yet in the story, and my list of chapter goals. I was also writing down a few other things that escape my mind right now, but I was thinking, wow, I wish I had more colors of paper. Do you realize how limited colored lined paper is? If I wanted paper without lines, the sky’s the limit. With lines? Not so much.

I like the idea of color coding this way, but let’s be honest here: I probably wouldn’t remember what the color signified anyway and I’d have to glance over what I’d written. I really miss my memory. I think it was my second book that killed the most memory cells in my brain. :-/

Last night, after my brain had turned off for the day, I began working on my website. I want to load some of the pages for In the Midnight Hour on April 1. I need to find my contract and look up the word limit on excerpts. I can’t remember what it is, but I think I’m over it at about 2000 words. That’ll mean some surgical editing to bring the scene in within my contract’s specifications. I also need my cover. Not just for my website either. I have other promo things that need it and are coming due. And I also worked on my trivia page for the book. TBH, with my thoughts centered on the WIP, I’m having a hard time remembering things to list on the page. I might end up with a really abbreviated version.

Tags: midnight_hour, websites, WIP
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Too Much, Too Little

Sunday, March 18th, 2007

No movie review again this week. It was after 8pm before I was ready to sit down and watch and because the movie was so long, I opted not to start it that late.

Once, not all that long ago, I used to be so organized. I’d have my Christmas shopping done before Halloween, I was 10 minutes early for everything, and everything was put away where it was supposed to be.

Now, well, that’s mostly gone by the wayside. I live my life perpetually running late and racing to arrive on time. I’m lucky now to have my Christmas shopping done by Christmas (and sometimes I don’t!), and my office and spare bedroom are still only partially unpacked from my move. This last one is absolutely driving me insane. I can’t find anything when I need it and I hate wasting time doing a search.

The reason I wax nostalgic is because I was running late for my hair appointment yesterday morning. (And I did have one.) And I was remembering the old days, when I used to have to sit in the waiting area and read a magazine because I was so early. That rarely happens any longer.

I had some highlights put in yesterday. My hair has been so blah from months of winter that I said okay when my stylist suggested it. I almost choked, though, when the total for a haircut and some blond streaks was $100. Gah! Guess I won’t be getting streaks just for the heck of it again. From now on, there’ll have to be an event for me to shell out that kind of money. I thought maybe $80, which is still a lot of money, but yikes!

The POS laptop has been home instead of locked in a filing cabinet at the office because it needs some major TLC. I pretty much need to wipe the drive and reload everything, but I can’t find all my disks. (see previous paragraph about office only being partially unpacked) I did stumble over the rescue disk for that computer, but it won’t boot itself automatically, and when I opened the drive in Windows Explorer, I couldn’t find a run command. I’d like to get this done before I go to work tomorrow because I can’t really use the POS laptop as it is right now. I don’t know how I’m going to manage this.

And I saw some preseason baseball this weekend! Yea! Unfortunately, my beloved Chicago Cubs lost both games despite all the money they spent in the off season. I hope that they do better once the season actually starts or it’ll be a long year.

Tags: baseball, busy, computer, organization
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Happy St. Patrick’s Day!

Saturday, March 17th, 2007

I’m supposed to get my hair cut this morning. I think. I remember making an appointment and getting a card with the date and time on it from my stylist. I also remember throwing it in my purse. Sometime last month, I thought, you know, I should really mark this on my calendar so I don’t forget. But when I dug in my purse, I found a handful of cards from my stylist with appointments written on them. I was able to throw away the one that had a date from the fall, but I’m not sure the one for March 17th is the right one. I probably should have called and confirmed, right? Only I’ve been so busy this week, that I never even thought of it until this morning and it’s too late now. If I’m wrong, I can just turn around and go home again, so not too big a deal.

Of course, I’m behind again. I’d hoped to be showered by now, but I just finished coffee. It’s that time travel thing. I can’t figure out where the last hour has gone, but then what else is new? This is like the story of my life.

I realized yesterday at work that I’d made an incorrect correction on my galleys, and of course, they were all packaged up at home, ready for my dad to pick up and bring to the post office. I didn’t want to waste time opening it, correcting it, resealing it and then having to run back to the PO–all after work on a Friday afternoon, so I emailed the info. It was a quote from a review and I had the attribution wrong. So many of these sites have similar names and I got confused.

I finished the project I was working on at the EDJ–at least until my maintenance specialist comes in and looks at it on Monday. I figure I’ll be tweaking stuff for him, but the big lifting is done. Metaphorically speaking.

Happy St. Patrick’s Day!

Tags: galleys, holidays, life
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Pedal to the Metal

Friday, March 16th, 2007

I finished my second read-through of the galleys yesterday, did my spreadsheet and packaged it all up to go back to NYC. BTW, I was thrilled because my spreadsheet is only about a page and a half and it’s setup landscape, so that means even fewer rows of corrections since the paper is on its side, not up and down. Hopefully, whatever I (or my mom) didn’t catch, the publisher’s proofreader did. I have this thing about perfectionism and I hate missing mistakes in the galleys.

Life has been absolutely, pedal-to-the-metal hectic for me this week. Y’all have heard about the galleys and that I had to have them ready to mail today, but the EDJ (Evil Day Job) has been totally crazy too. I usually try to catch up on a few emails while I’m there, but I haven’t had time! One of my specialists has a huge project that he needs first thing Monday morning and I’ve been working nonstop on that all week.

Take yesterday. I thought I was winding up on the project. Everything had been proofread, the formatting fixed and all I had left to do is add a PDF to the end of the report. I transform the PDF into a TIFF file, insert it into the document and breeze through one last time. Only it turned out not to be one last time. The PDF/TIFF document didn’t scan well. Of the 5 pages, only 2 were readable. And 1 of those had parts of it highlighted which had the same effect as dragging a black magic marker over the words. Clearly, I needed to replace this version with a clean version.

My challenges on this endeavor? My maintenance specialist was on vacation and won’t be back until Monday, so I clearly can’t ask him for the article. The magazine was dated Jan-Mar 1996. That’s right. The magazine was 10 years old.

An online search turned up nothing useful, but I did figure out that “Airliner” magazine was a Boeing publication. I headed to the Boeing website, but couldn’t find anything. To shorten the story considerably, I finally found a hard copy of the issue on another floor, tried to scan it in, ran into huge problems, and settled for copying it and getting the gray scale to work so everything was readable. But when I tried to scan it in again, 1 of the 5 pages remained illegible. I ended up scanning it in full color and printing it on a color printer. It took me almost the entire day to get these 5 pages in and it involved something like three trips to another floor.

So I didn’t have even five minutes to answer email or even read my work email. Today, things should calm down. I hope. And with galleys done, I can get back to work on writing the WIP.

You know, I exhausted myself just reading my litany. Time for another day of fun and frolic at the EDJ.

Tags: EDJ, galleys
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Back Cover Copy

Thursday, March 15th, 2007

I realized late yesterday that after talking about my back cover copy for In the Midnight Hour I didn’t post it. I meant to. Blame my lapse on lack of sleep.

Ryne is a magical troubleshooter, sworn to protect the innocent from being harmed by magic–and she’s been chasing Anise, her former mentor, for six years.

Deke is a private investigator who knows something key to defeating Anise. But Anise cast a dark spell over him, and even though Ryne has managed to temporarily lift the curse, Deke can’t remember what it is that he knows.

Ryne has sworn to never get involved with a human, but Deke is sexy, charming, brave and irresistible–and as Ryne and Deke are pulled further into Anise’s evil schemes, it’s harder and harder for Ryne to resist the attraction.

But dark magic has its own attraction, and in order to defeat Anise and lift Deke’s curse permanently, Ryne will have to risk following in Anise’s footsteps and succumbing to the lure of the darkness…

The font/lettering they used for the copy (and actually for my name and title, too), give the idea that the book is humorous. It’s not. While Deke is a smart ass and there are some funny moments from that, this is probably the darkest book I’ve written. I hope people who pick it up without knowing anything about it aren’t expecting a romp because they’ll be disappointed.

I don’t know. When I filled out my art facts sheet, I mentioned that the tone of the book was dark. That’s why this font just blows me away. It just screams fun. I’m probably worrying about nothing. I’m sure the copy makes it clear this isn’t a light-hearted, humorous paranormal. Right?

I have to finish the page proofs for Midnight Hour tonight and have them packaged up and ready to mail back tomorrow. I thought I had so much time to get this done, but the time disappeared before I realized it. I didn’t finish my second read-through yet, although I’m not finding much, and my mom read through it twice for me.

That reminds me. On one of the author loops I’m on, another author talked about hiring someone to go through her galleys for her. At first, I thought what a great idea, but I realized that would never work for me. I find things that no one else could find because they don’t know what I’m trying to say. It could be something that shades the nuance of the sentence. Like in Ravyn’s Flight, I had a sentence that said “poke at her.” As in baiting her. When I received my galleys, it said, “poke fun at her.” Someone else reading it would think that sentence was fine, but I knew it totally changed the meaning of what I was trying to say. (BTW, it didn’t get fixed and the book was published with “poke fun at her.” Sigh.)

Tags: galleys, midnight_hour, perception
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Surprises In the Midnight Hour

Wednesday, March 14th, 2007

Wow. Yesterday I had a huge, heavy box from Tor. The only thing I could think was that it was ARCs (Advanced Reading Copies) of In the Midnight Hour, but I was sure I must be wrong because I know most houses don’t send their authors many ARCs. I opened it up and it was ARCs! A boatload of them! I’m still amazed and trying to figure out what to do with so many. I started soliciting opinions, then I realized that I better email the publicity woman at my publisher and coordinate with her so that I don’t mail them to the same places she does. I have a few review sites that I want to hit and I was reminded of bookstores, but I’m sure Tor mails to both as well.

It was like Christmas last night with this box of pretty ARCs and they had my back cover copy on them, which I thought was really good and doesn’t give away one of the secrets. Although I’m sure more than one reviewer will give that away since it’s revealed in chapter 2 and my understanding is if it happens in the first three chapters, it’s fair game. Ah, well, I console myself with the fact that most people don’t read reviews and will be surprised.

One of my favorite memories about this proposal is one of my writing buddies shrieking over email when she read the scene with the secret. I want my readers to (hopefully) have that same kind of experience and if reviewers give it away, it’ll ruin that. Ah, well, there’s really nothing I can do about that, but hope for the best. BTW, this is the one element that most editors couldn’t wrap their mind around, so there you go.

Tags: arcs, midnight_hour, surprise
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Time Change Woes

Tuesday, March 13th, 2007

I still feel as if it’s the middle of the night, and because I wasn’t tired when the clock said I should be, I stayed up later. You’d think that would be a good thing, except that I figured out what’s wrong with the scene I’m working on and I have to cut everything I wrote yesterday. I might have to cut more stuff that I wrote this weekend too. I’d cry, but I’m too tired.

A look at the calendar is panic inducing. I need to finish my read through of the galleys for Midnight Hour by tomorrow. That will give me time to type up my spreadsheet and mail them back. The only way, though, that I’m going to finish a second read-through of the galleys is to not write today and probably tomorrow. Then there’s all the stuff that needs to be done now for promoing Midnight Hour and that all takes time, too. It’s all little nibbles.

Oh, before this whole post becomes a whine-fest, one of my friends told me I had a mention in the RWR. For the non-romance writers, that’s the monthly magazine from the Romance Writers of America for its members. I immediately dug out my issue and started scanning it. My agent was interviewed for the article on paranormal romance and mentioned me! That was pretty darn cool.

It was 60 degrees here yesterday and all the snow melted off my deck. Finally! It was a little sloppy, but I can live with that.

Tags: midnight_hour, time, weather, WIP
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CRW Award of Excellence

Monday, March 12th, 2007

I received a call yesterday; Eternal Nights is a Colorado Romance Writers Award of Excellence finalist for Best Paranormal! This is the book where Kendall and Wyatt are trapped in an ancient temple and pursued by smugglers. If you haven’t had a chance to check out my book video yet, head over to the EN page on my website and scroll down toward the bottom. It’s really cool and worth watching.

Yesterday, I made some progress on the WIP, but as I was getting ready for bed last night, I decided I went off in a direction that I didn’t want to go–at least not yet. So I need to cut that section and restart. The good news is that it only involves a handful of paragraphs.

My mom has been reading through the galleys for In the Midnight Hour for me and she knows that Ryne’s sister is the heroine in the WIP. She actually asked me last night what kind of story I could have with Maia. Gee, thanks Mom. The vote of confidence is awe-inspiring. Especially since this book continually makes me want to bang my head against the wall in the hopes of shaking some words loose. :-/

Both my XP computers made the switch to Daylight Savings Time without a hitch, I set all the clocks that require the personal touch, and one of the two DVD players with automatic time-set have made it to the new time. I can’t figure out why one didn’t since they’re both hooked into the same cable system, but whatever. I figure it’ll eventually be right again–even if it is this fall.

I’m not a big fan of these time changes. I wish we’d just pick one time and stick with it year round. I don’t care which one–real time or DST–but this switching around messes me up for weeks! Oh, heck, I just remembered I have to change the clock in my car. Sigh. I never remember how to fix that one.

Tags: awards, time, WIP
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A Movie-less Saturday

Sunday, March 11th, 2007

There’s no movie review today. Sorry for those of you who were looking for one. I was going to watch my weekly movie last night, but when I picked it up and saw the run time was 133 minutes, I thought, I just can’t spend that long watching tonight. Honestly, whatever happened to 90 minute movies?

I was invited to a new site designed especially for readers and authors to talk about books. It’s called The Yack and it’s free to join. It looks like it’s going to be fun once we get some more romance people over there. The site looks relatively new and there are less than 1000 people on there right now–at least as far as I can see. And of course, I’m still on MySpace. Feel free to visit me there and friend me as well.

Speaking of MySpace, it’s been a weird weekend for that. Yesterday, I had someone put in a request to friend me, and when I went to look at his profile, it was private. That isn’t the weird part, I’ve had private profile people friend me before. The strange thing was this kid was 15 years old per the information available. I try not to friend people under 18, but I do have a few teenage girls who love to read paranormal romance. A boy, though? Maybe I’m being sexist, but I just couldn’t quite see him as a fan.

Then this morning, I get up and check in at MySpace and I have a friend request from another guy. His profile is private too, but it says he’s 21. I hesitated, but he’s an adult, so I approved his request, then looked at his profile again now that I could read it. It says on his page that he’s 14! It gets better, I page down to the book section and it says that he hates to read books, but he’ll look at magazines. Then why the hell is he friending me? I can’t figure this one out. Anyway, I was hugely uneasy about the age and I deleted him as a friend. I think I was successful, but MySpace isn’t the easiest thing to figure out sometimes.

My question now is why the sudden interest from teenage boys? Is there something I don’t know? Eek!

I had a window open yesterday. It was so fabulous to be able to do that after a long winter. It was a little cold yet, but I’d burned a bag of popcorn (ick!) and I wanted that smell out of my house. It was one of those mini-bags and I set the timer for 1 min 30 seconds and walked away. By the time I realized it had stopped popping, but the microwave was still running, I was too late to save it. Yes, it’s pretty sad when a person can’t successfully cook microwave popcorn.

The book from hell continues to be the book from hell and I don’t want to talk about my frustrating day working on it, so I won’t. I’ll just say I can’t wait to finish this thing. Gah!

Tags: life, myspace, theYack, WIP
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