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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.

Two Dozen FREE eBooks!

Wednesday, July 23rd, 2008

Free eBooks!

Tor.com is giving away about two dozen free ebooks! There are two paranormal romances and the rest are SF/F, but it’s a good opportunity to try new authors or to get copies of books you’ve already read in another format. I’m trying to figure out how to load them on my iPod because I don’t want to carry my laptop with me to read them. :-) They’re only available for a limited time, so if you’re interested, I wouldn’t wait too long to click over.

The Rest of the Blog

Now on to my usual stuff. I looked out of the window this afternoon and thought I saw flowers around my daffodils. I couldn’t be sure, though, from the distance I was at and I decided to take my camera down just in case. And wonder of all wonders, my new daffodils, the ones I planted back in like April or May, have little, tiny flowers on them! Pictures another day. I ran out of time to download them off the camera and crop one up.

I spent this afternoon trying to get all my snail mail items ready to go in the mail. I think I succeeded, too! That means I can cross one item off my lengthy To Do List. It took forever to get it all together and I think I have like half a dozen separate things that need to go, but it’s a huge relief to accomplish something. I haven’t done much of that since I turned my book in. :-) I was so excited, I even started to tackle my email backup, but I only answered one note before my laziness kicked in again and decided to do my blog instead.

My next goal for the day after I finish here is to get to bed early. You’d think that would be an easy one, but the Cubs are playing in Arizona and the games don’t start until 8:30 my time. Even staying up for just a few innings is too long when the alarm goes off at 4am for the Evil Day Job.

Author In Search of a Title. Still.

Wednesday, July 9th, 2008

No title yet for the just finished book. I sent my editor about a dozen suggestions, but none of them grabbed her. Me either for that matter. I wanted to fall in love with a title, but I haven’t found the one that’s done that yet. There is one I kind of like, but it uses the word “night” and I was hoping to save that one for the next book since it’ll be a pretty dark, intense story. I think.

There are still half a million things on the To Do List and I’m not tackling any of them. Maybe I need to actually write them down to make myself do them. I have email backed up, I have things to go snail mail, I have vacuuming left to do, and assorted other things and I don’t feel like doing any of them. That’s so bad. I need to accomplish things. Seriously.

In other news, I walked out to my garden yesterday afternoon to take a look at it. It’s kind of bare on flowers right now (just one type has a bloom on it. I need to find flowers that bloom right now for next year), but I usually take a look around every day. My tree ring and garden have chicken wire around them to protect them from the killer rabbits, but I have tiger lilies next to the evergreens that are unprotected and tree lilies behind the big garden because they’ll end up being too tall to be part of the garden itself.

Anyway, I’d noticed while I’d been writing that something was eating the tops off my tiger lilies. Annoying, but they were free flowers from my parents, so I wasn’t too heartbroken. Then the other day, I noticed that something had eaten the bottom leaves on my tree lilies. That did not make me happy. I was even less happy when something ate the top off one of my tree lilies. It was a small lily, though, and my bigger ones had been ignored and had a lot of flower buds on them. I’d survive.

Then came yesterday. I walked down to my garden and saw the one tree lily had been eaten bare. Then I noticed the top had been eaten off the next one in line. And the next. And the next. All the way down the row to my biggest tree lily–the one that had had 6 buds on there waiting to bloom. Gone. All gone! The rabbits got the bottom leaves, the deer had taken off the tops.

Steam came out of my ears. And then I began to worry. My elodie lilies are getting ready to bloom–it shouldn’t be more than a week or so now–and they’re against the back side of the garden. What if the deer, now that they’re used to coming up to my garden, decide to stick their heads over my fence and eat my other lilies? OMG! My dad bought liquid fence for me today and he’s going to spray tomorrow. Hopefully that stinky stuff will protect my garden from evil, killer deer.

Pretend It’s Monday Morning

Monday, March 31st, 2008

I’m blogging tonight for Monday. They’re predicting 4 t0 6 inches of snow here starting tonight and I might be in no frame of mind to post tomorrow. :-/

Honestly, talk about going from the sublime to the ridiculous. It was 51 degrees here this afternoon and I turned the heat off and opened up a couple of windows to get some fresh air. Talk about glorious. And I had Sunday night baseball and the official start of the regular season to look forward to. I’d say easy come, easy go except that there was nothing easy about earning our one day of spring.

I’m feeling better about my To Do List right now. I spent Saturday working on the most arduous of the items on it–mailing out bookmarks. I’m down now to just a couple of hundred for In Twilight’s Shadow and I managed to get rid of a few hundred more of In the Midnight Hour as well. Yea! I still have one more request that came to my PO box to mail out and then I’ll be caught up with that as well.

I also mailed out pretty much all my Advanced Reading Copies (ARCs) so that’s another item off the list. I think that covers all the reviewers now, but I did keep a few extra copies just in case something crops up.

Anyway, I think I’m off to bed. I’ll need to get up early to give myself extra time on my morning commute.


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