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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!



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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.

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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.)

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Trembling Chins and Wimpy Plants

Thursday, March 8th, 2007

My mom finished reading through the galleys for In the Midnight Hour and she found lots of stuff that I missed. The page proofs are still clean compared to other books that I’ve had, but wow, I’m glad I asked her to read through them for me. She found missing words and wrong words, like: She chin trembled. HER chin trembled. Gah! How did I miss that one? Since she did so much better than I did, I asked if she’d mind doing a second read-through.

I was worried yesterday that I was going to need to cut most of what I wrote on Tuesday, but it turned out that I only needed to lose about 5 or 6 sentences and it took care of the problem I had. Now I’m wondering whether I should have revealed some information about the bad guy in this chapter or if I should wait a little longer. I’ll read through it today and try to figure that out.

These characters or the book, I’m not sure which, continues to be nocturnal. In other words, I get the most accomplished later in the evening when I should be winding down and getting ready for bed. I hate this. I lived through it with Through a Crimson Veil, but my demon children were nocturnal creatures and most of their story happened at night. Maia and Creed have no excuses. I’m just tired. Sigh.

In non-writing stuff, I’m drooling over these exotic flowers QVC has been selling. I don’t like the regular, boring flowers that most people have, and I’m really attracted to these less ordinary plants. Problem? They’re borderline or unable to be grown in Minnesota. Or in the case of one plant, they’re hardy to zero, which means if your temperature will go below that, you need to bring the plant indoors. The thing is that I just want to plant them and forget them. I do not want to wrestle a planter into my house.

I am going to try this cute little bamboo plant, though, indoors. My sink is in the corner with two windows so I’m going to put it there. These plants are supposed to be tough. Let’s see if it can withstand the plant assassin (me!).

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My Magical Society

Monday, March 5th, 2007

I finished my first read through of the galleys for In the Midnight Hour. I’m not sure I’ve ever had a set of page proofs that were this clean before. Wow! I might not even have to do a spreadsheet. =8-O Of course, maybe I will anyway because I’m compulsive that way.

I’m taking an online class about Scottish History this month. Don’t worry, I have no plans to write a historical and I doubt I ever will. But my magical society from Midnight Hour and the book I’m working on now has its ties back to Scotland and I figured it might be nice to know more about the history of this country. What I find extraordinarily odd is how this all happened.

I’m talking with Ryne, the heroine in Midnight Hour, and she’s giving him incredible amounts of information on her people. I’ve mentioned how my characters will say things like: “my name starts with an R” and then have to page through baby name books. The same thing happened to me with the society’s name. It starts with a G. Sigh. At least this time, I also was told it was Gaelic. To me, Gaelic is Irish, so I do a search for a Gaelic dictionary, get a lot of hits and find an Irish Gaelic one. I go through all the G’s and nothing is right. I’m not quite sure why I tried the Scots Gaelic dictionary next, but I did and there it was: Gineal: race, breed, offspring.

I ended up buying two Scots Gaelic dictionaries and there is a smattering of words in Midnight Hour. Luckily, I’m writing paranormal romance, and even more fortunate than that, my characters speak Canan, not Gaelic. And their language just borrowed from Gaelic so it’s “bastardized.” :-) My world. My rules.

Anyway, I’m reaching a point where I’m going to have to start putting up information on Midnight Hour. I’m shooting for April 1 for an excerpt, but I might hold off till May. We’ll see how it all goes. I have a lot of work left to do on the book from hell and I’m trying not to get too distracted with other stuff. Bad enough that I have to gear up promotion for Midnight Hour now and that’s always time consuming.

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The Lion’s Roar

Thursday, March 1st, 2007

What is that old saying? Something like: If March comes in like a lion, it’ll go out like a lamb? What’s fiercer than a lion? Because according to all the weather reports, that’s what I’ll be dealing with here today. It started snowing about 6pm last night and it’s not supposed to stop until tomorrow. Depending on how much rain is mixed in with the snow, we could have anywhere from 10-20 inches. Gah! This is a really long way of saying that I have to be brief this morning and not spend a lot of time thinking about what I want to say because I need to leave early. (I heard, though, that the commute home will be the worst we’ve had in years. Oh, joy.)

I’ve been reading through the galley for In the Midnight Hour the last couple of days and it’s been amazingly clean so far. That’s both a blessing and a curse. A blessing because it’s nice that it’s so clean. A curse because when I don’t find anything I find myself falling into the story and forget that I’m supposed to be watching carefully for mistakes. I hope my mom does a better job at focusing. Of course, I forgot to warn her that I used some Gaelic words and she was trying to check the spelling in an English dictionary. Oops!

I made a list of promo things I’d like to do for Midnight Hour and starting doing some pricing. When I added up the items I had dollar figures on, I was 10% over my budget and I hadn’t even checked on the cost of doing teaser booklets yet or advertising on this website I like for fiction. So, I have to make some choices and they’re not necessarily easy ones. I also need to get off the stick and email some people to find out what’s going on and to let them know what I plan to do. I don’t know where I’m going to find the time to do this since these are notes that will take me a while to compose. I’m a slow writer–even when it comes to things like emails and blog posts. And the more businesslike I need to be, the longer it takes me to write. I’m the queen of casual, including with the written word.

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Falling Into the Story

Tuesday, February 27th, 2007

My galleys for In the Midnight Hour arrived yesterday. The galleys are test printing of the book that need to be proofed for accuracy. I swore to myself that I wasn’t going to read them last night. I put them in my bag to take to the EDJ (Evil Day Job) and did other stuff last night. But at 9pm, when I should have been on my way to bed, I caved. I couldn’t help myself.

Part of it is that this is probably my favorite stage in the process. All the hard work is done, and while proofing takes a lot of concentration, it’s all left-brained stuff. Besides, this is when it really feels like a book and not just one of my stories. I wonder if other published authors feel this way or if it’s just me? I’m the one who walked around with my first book for two weeks after it came out because I couldn’t believe it was real.

The other part of it is that I really like this book and these characters. I love all my stories and all my heroes and heroines, of course, but Ryne and Deke just a tad more than usual right now. Maybe it’s because it took me so long to sell this story and I wrote two others in the meantime. I’d look out the window at the EDJ, see the cemetery where the opening chapter takes place, and long to write this book. Of course, I’ve been asked which book is my favorite and my answer always is the last one that I’ve finished. It’s fresh in my mind, and like I said earlier, the hard work is done.

Whatever the reason, though, I caved in and picked up the galleys last night. I just wanted to check out one of the quotes the publisher used on the opening page, since I’d just checked out the source and I wanted to make sure it was right. And since I had the galley out, I thought I’d check out a couple of my favorite spots. Just real quickly.

I ended up reading pretty much the entire thing. At least all the character stuff. I did skip the action scenes. My weakness is the h/h and how they interact with each other. That’s my absolute favorite part of writing. And I love how Ryne and Deke do it. They’re just so, well, cute together. (And I say that about all my h/h, but then they always seem to fit each other perfectly. I figure I can say that since they come in as fully formed people and I have nothing to do with it.)

So it was after midnight when I put the galley back in my tote bag and I had to get up this morning at 4am. I’m dying here and it isn’t helping any to remind myself it was self-inflicted.

It also doesn’t help to think that if I was going to stay up that late, there were a million other more pressing things I should have been doing. Starting with writing the WIP and ending with the billion and a half emails and MySpace messages I need to reply to and/or write. Gah! I’ve reached the point where I whimper when I see I have new notes because it’s just overwhelming right now.

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