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Write On

Friday, January 30th, 2009

The vampire short story is finished–more or less–and I think it turned out okay. I had fun with the story, liked the characters, and have been assured by my writing buddy that it’s “totally bitchin’.” :-) That was a huge relief since this is a new length for me and I felt at sea sometimes. The thing that kind of amazes me is that I somehow managed to tell a whole story in 7800 words. I was planning to just do a peek in to their lives sort of thing, which is what others seem to do with this length, but I just wrote without any real plan and had a beginning, middle, and end. I really didn’t expect that, but I’ll take it. And if I can ever come up with a title that isn’t a lame play on words, it’ll all be good.

Now I need to make the transition back into my full-length book and I’m not finding that easy to do. I reread the last chapter I’d written, but I need to sit down and come up with chapter and/or scene goals. I’m hoping that will get my head back into Kel’s story and help me focus.

The test print of Edge of Dawn (which comes out June 30th) has been proofread and the pages that need correction will be mailed back today. I only had time to read through it once and that makes me uneasy–I usually read through them three times–but my mom read through it twice for me and found a few things that I never saw.

It’s pretty nice to have my writing To Do List whittled down to 1 thing. Granted, it’s the biggest item of them all, but having other projects like proofreading and the short story added to my stress because they were kind of hanging there like blades from guillotines. :-) I still have too much to do and not enough time to do it in and I’ve been scarce online lately, but I’ll manage. Somehow.

Galley Time

Wednesday, January 21st, 2009

My galleys arrived yesterday for Edge of Dawn. This is a test copy of the book to make sure there weren’t any mistakes as the story was setup to be printed. It’s the last step I’m involved with before Edge of Dawn becomes a real bound book and it’s my final chance to make any changes before the book goes to press.

I both like and dislike galleys. I like them because I want to catch any errors–either mine or the printer’s–before it goes to press. I’m a perfectionist and nothing makes me crazier than mistakes.

I dislike them because I’m a perfectionist and I want to keep fixing and fixing and that’s not possible at the galley stage. Every change that isn’t a printer error costs money and so I can’t change everything I might want to change. I have to pick which ones are most important to me and live with the rest.

The other problem with galleys is reading them. I get caught up in the story and forget that I’m supposed to be proofreading, not visiting with my hero and heroine. And because I’m so familiar with the story, I’ll mentally see words that are missing or eliminate words that shouldn’t be there. That’s why I enlisted my mom a few books ago to read the page proofs, too. This is the first time she’s seen the story so she’ll notice if things are missing and/or added.

Today, I began reading through the galleys and I’ve already gotten lost a few times in Logan and Shona’s story. I really like these two and they’re both so much easier than the characters in the book I’m writing now. It’s Kel’s book (Logan’s brother–you’ll meet him in Edge of Dawn if you read it) and he’s had a rough stretch in his life and his heroine has as well. Logan and Shona? Well, you know I always torture my characters, but neither one of them has any really heavy baggage and their story was such a nice break for me between Creed’s book (In Twilight’s Shadow) and Kel’s book (still officially untitled) that I’m enjoying rereading it.

Anyway, must get back to galleys. I am hugely busy with a short story and a book both due on March 1st. I need to finish this latest job and get it out the door.

Didn’t Make It

Tuesday, January 1st, 2008

I fell short of having the new website ready to load. I have two more books to do pages for and some links to set up yet; I was this close. If only I didn’t have to go to the Evil Day Job (EDJ) today and I could stay home and finish this morning, but I do, so that means needing to wrap up this website tonight. Tomorrow begins the onslaught of the New Book.

So speaking of books, how did the galleys go? I’m sure you’re all wondering, right? I made 12 corrections. That’s an incredibly small amount. The part that’s scary is that 11 of those changes are to fix my stuff, only 1 change is for an extra word.

My mistakes include the point of view debacle where in the middle of my hero’s POV, I have a paragraph from the heroine’s POV. Why? Because during copy edits I needed to add the paragraph for explanation, thought I was in the heroine’s head and didn’t double check.

My other lulu of an error was having two full moons in approximately a two week period. I almost missed that, but as I made my last read through on Friday at the EDJ, I thought, “hmm, didn’t I mention the full moon once before?” A quick little search of my WordPerfect document when I arrived home showed that sure enough, this was the second full moon in the book. I changed the first reference to starlight because I needed the moon more in the second scene later in the book.

Everything else was mostly nitpicky stuff.

Last Friday night, I go to make my final changes to the galley, and I decide I need to refresh my memory, so I look for the cover letter with the instructions on how they want the markups handled. Um, I couldn’t find them. Anywhere. I think in my cleaning frenzy that I mistook the galley letter for the letter that came with the copy edits and shredded it thinking I was done with it. I was left with my memory of what I did the last time I had galleys for Tor. Hopefully, they didn’t change their process.

Too Clean

Friday, December 28th, 2007

My mom finished two read throughs of the galleys for In Twilight’s Shadow and she only found one error. Now I’m really worried that there’s stuff we’re missing. I’ve never had a set of galleys come back this clean before. Ever. The only things I’ve found have been things that I did that I want to change–like the point of view debacle.

I still have a 120 pages left to read and I need to have it ready to go in the mail on Saturday. Or I should. I might send it back on Monday and take the chance the envelope arrives a day late because I want to finish my second reading.

Believe it or not, there was a writing topic I planned to talk about this morning. The thought came to me yesterday as I drove into the Evil Day Job (EDJ), but I didn’t write it down and I can’t remember what it is now. Clearly, I need more sleep. :-) Maybe this weekend….

Holiday Blooms

Monday, December 24th, 2007


Yes, that’s fresh snow on my deck in the background. Sigh.

Two shots of my red holiday amaryllis. They are now gnat free–hurrah!–and while one side is still only buds, the other two sides are either blooming wildly or about to open their flowers. It’s amazing how fast these things grow, but I’m absolutely loving having a splash of color in my house this winter. And to think, I was determined not to have indoor plants. I’m scared I’m going to end up with a jungle in the house now that I’ve decided I like it. :-)

In that vein, I have two poinsettias added to my holiday plants. I was too lazy to take a picture of them, sorry. One’s a beautiful cream color and the other is a deep, vibrant red. I’ve been reading up on this flower and they should last until February. My plan was to keep them alive all year and force them to bloom again next holiday, but apparently it’s very difficult to do. I must be a masochist because I think I’m going to try anyway.

I did watch a movie this weekend, Charlie’s Angels 2: Full Throttle, but I’m not going to blog about it. I don’t have much to say other than I liked it well enough, but not as much as the first one. The first movie was totally over the top, but in a fun way that I enjoyed. This second film was further over the top than the first one and it was just a little too far for me. I’d give it about 3 stars and I’d watch a third installment if it comes out, but I didn’t love it.

I’m still on my second read through on the galleys, which means I won’t have time to make a third pass. I’m really worried about how much I missed and I hope my mom and the proofreader my publisher has going through it spot everything I miss. I’m a perfectionist and it makes me crazy when I find mistakes.

Winter Fog

Thursday, December 20th, 2007

It’s been really foggy here, although I guess technically it’s smog because we have some inversion thing going on. I don’t know if that’s what did it or if we had a light frost or something, but the tree branches here are coated white. It actually looks pretty, and considering how much I loathe winter, that’s saying something. Even my wind spinner had a coat and looked cool. I took a picture of it, but I was far too lazy to download them off the camera. :-) They might not have turned out anyway because there was no way I was actually going outside if I didn’t have to. :-) See the sentence about loathing winter.

I finally finished my first run through the galley for In Twilight’s Shadow and today I’ll begin another. I know I must have missed all kinds of stuff, so I’m hoping repetition will help. I don’t know how much help my mom is going to be because she said she kept getting caught up in the story. That’s both a good thing and a bad thing, I guess.

We have radio stations here doing nothing except Christmas music right now and I’m enjoying this. One of them played some Hawaiian Christmas song that I totally loved. It’s the first time I ever heard it and they didn’t give the title. When I have some time, I’m going to have to begin the online search for it. I see a new addition to my holiday MP3 collection.

Planet Earth

Monday, December 17th, 2007

Discovery Channel did an all day marathon of episodes of Planet Earth on Sunday and I totally became addicted. In case you’re unfamiliar with it, this is a series that looks at different aspects of our planet, one hour per aspect. Some of the programs covered the deep ocean, the deserts, the antarctic/arctic, the forests, the plains, etc. The photography was stunning and the entire thing was fascinating. They also were able to film things that no one had filmed before and were allowed in places where few are ever permitted to go in order to film. If you haven’t seen this before, definitely watch for this to be rerun. It’s worth it.

And just so you don’t think I was totally worthless this weekend, I was working on galleys while I watched. Fortunately, it’s a left-brained activity, and when I did need to focus more intently, I just muted the television. I’ve got another 65 pages to go to finish my first read through.

I worked my tail off on Saturday. I spent the day unpacking all the boxes in my spare bedroom. Okay, so it’s been a year and a half since I moved in–I just hadn’t gotten around to it. :-) I’m such a geek that I keep standing in the doorway and staring at my nice, clean room. The only thing left to do in there is to organize all my scrapbook supplies, but that’s a job for another day. That leaves the office as the last room that needs to be set up. That’s just going to be ugly. No doubt about it.

Texas Gold and Ten Down

Friday, December 14th, 2007

I found out yesterday that Eternal Nights is a finalist for Best Paranormal in the Texas Gold Awards. This is the first time for me in this one because to be eligible, the author needs to be from Texas or have the book set primarily in Texas, or a main character who’s Texan. Wyatt is from Fort Worth. :-)

I’m still going through the galleys and I found a huge oops–and it was mine. :-( During copy edits I needed to clarify who someone was, and when I did it, I thought I was in the heroine’s Point of View (POV) and wrote it that way. Yesterday I found out I was wrong.

The scary thing is that I read right past the paragraph as if everything was fine and it wasn’t until I was halfway through the next page that I noticed something was off. I stopped and went back to reread. It still took me a minute to figure it out. Thank goodness I spotted it. I’m a POV purist, and when I break that, I want it to be for a specific reason, not by accident. It won’t take much to fix it, but this was one close call. :-)

Otherwise, I’m not finding a lot that needs to be fixed. That’s worrying me since I don’t want to miss stuff.

Six Down, Nineteen To Go

Thursday, December 13th, 2007

I’ve made it through the first 6 chapters of the galley so far. It’s still reading really clean to me and I wasn’t totally exhausted yesterday. Now that I’m thinking about, In the Midnight Hour had really clean galleys, too. Of course, I found more mistakes later, after it was published, so it wasn’t quite as clean as I’d believed. :-( Then there was the proofreader who didn’t know what keyless entry was and changed it to keys entry. I still cringe every time I think about that in my book.

Anyway, I’ll try to get three read-throughs in for In Twilight’s Shadow and hope my mom gets a couple of readings in as well. She spots things I don’t all the time.

I’ve been watching National Geographic Channel and HGTV lately, and there are two commercials I see all the time that are really getting on my nerves. The first shows this red chair in the middle of a suburban street and this guy is talking about the American dream being that each person gets his own dream. I’m sooooo sick of hearing it. Talk about overbuying media time. I have no clue what the ad is for, but I’ll hate that product forever because of how tired I am of seeing their commercial. :-) The second ad I’m sick of is for Direct TV and has Beyonce singing about upgrading and HD TV. This is another commercial I’ve seen like six million times. Give it a rest already.

And on a final note, I really stuck my foot in my mouth at work yesterday. Sigh. This is why I usually don’t talk too much when I meet people because I am totally socially inept. My problem is that I’m comfortable enough at work that I don’t think about what I say–at least not enough. My social faux pas was mentioning I thought of one of my engineers when I saw some idiot riding his bike on a two-lane road with no shoulder because of the snow. And that I thought the bike rider was a moron. My engineer rides his bike in winter, too, which is why I thought of him, but I didn’t mean to imply I thought he was a moron. Why don’t I think before I open my mouth? Gah!

One last final note. :-) I swear, no more after this. I’m supposed to have homework for my online class done today. Big, huge GAH! This is hard homework requiring hours of work on my part–hours, quite frankly, that I don’t have.

Surprise "Gifts"

Tuesday, December 11th, 2007

I’d hoped to have a nice, deadline-free holiday this year. I’ve only had one Christmas where I haven’t been stressed trying to meet a deadline since I sold my first book, and I’d hoped this would be number two. It was looking really good, too. Until yesterday.

I was driving up my street, and as I neared my house, I glanced over at the front door. I wasn’t expecting anything, but it’s a habit. That’s when I saw it–the envelope! Naively, I thought it might be cover flats and I was all excited about that because Tor didn’t send me many on my first book with them. I didn’t waste any time getting to the front door and retrieving my envelope.

It was from Tor. So far so good. And it felt nice and soft–just like cover flats. I opened the package all excited to see the cover for In Twilight’s Shadow in person, and what do I find? Galleys!

Galleys mean work. Galleys mean deadlines. I checked the cover letter. Yep, deadline. Guess the date? Due back at the publisher on Jan 2. That means right up until New Year’s Eve, I’ll be proofreading the test run from the printer. :-(

I still have a mountain of homework for my online class, holiday stuff which I’m so totally behind on, it’s not funny, and now this. I’m putting my mom to work again. :-)


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