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It’s a Book!

Friday, February 8th, 2008

My ARCs (Advanced Reading Copies) arrived today for In Twilight’s Shadow. They look beautiful. :-) It’s almost as good as getting actual copies of the official book. This is my first chance to see the spine and back of the cover. Actually, it’s my first time I’ve seen the cover in anything except electronic format and that’s always darn cool. I think it looks striking and (hopefully) it will stand out among the other books.

I also discovered that the back cover copy I have up on my website is missing a few words, so when I have some time, I’ll have to update that and upload the new version. I can also see the font they used for the copy and it’s clean and legible, and most importantly, easily readable. Yea!

Sorry, I didn’t mean to run on about every facet of the ARC. My plan was to talk about how exciting it is to actually hold something like this in my hand and think, “wow, I wrote this.” It doesn’t matter that this is my sixth full-length book, it’s still a huge thrill. And it’s still surreal in a way, you know?

When I received copies of my first book, it didn’t feel real. I kept thinking, this can’t be my story. I kept reaching for Ravyn’s Flight reading parts of it, trying to get it to sink in that hey, I wrote this. I finally just started carrying it with me everywhere I went because I constantly had to assure myself it was reality. :-) It took two weeks before it finally penetrated that it really, truly was my work. There are times I still wonder if this is real, but I think I like the wonder of it all, you know? It’s just magical to hold a book I wrote in my hands and I’m glad I haven’t lost that.

So now I have to figure out when to send copies out for review. Too early and the reviews get posted too far in advance of the book. Too late and the reviewer doesn’t have enough time to read the book and write her review. I’m still not certain I have the timing exactly right, but eventually I’ll learn. I hope.

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Continuity

Wednesday, January 16th, 2008

The WIP (Work in Progress) is the third in the Light Warriors series and that means continuity is on my mind. In fact, it’s a major issue at the start of the book. The first instance where this comes up is that the creature Logan’s fighting is mentioned in Twilight’s Shadow. It was a one line throwaway on who/what it is, so I’m clear there and can do pretty much whatever I need to do.

However, the second flare up isn’t that simple. There is the council chambers and anteroom. They were not only mentioned in Twilight’s Shadow, they were described in some detail. Normally, I like to find a picture of a room and use it as guide. That way I don’t get details wrong and it doesn’t require that I reread previous books. This time, though, I had a clear image of what these rooms looked like and I didn’t bother searching for any visual representation. I’m paying the price now. I think I’ve had my finished book file open as many times as the WIP files and I’m still not finished with the scene.

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Sin

Friday, January 4th, 2008

I’ve had notes from readers asking for Creed and Sin’s stories–both made brief appearances in In the Midnight Hour. I was able to tell them that Creed’s story was next, but Sin? Well, I knew I wanted to write him at some point, but I didn’t have a story for him. That all changed this week.

The first revelation was who his heroine was. I’ve started working on my next book and the hero has three younger sisters. Boom. Suddenly I knew that one of Logan’s sisters belongs with Sin. That happened back on Monday or Tuesday, I think, but there still was no story, just a pairing. I should be used to this by now since I almost always get the characters first, but I wanted the story, too.

That came yesterday. I can’t tell you what I was doing because I don’t remember. I was at the Evil Day Job (EDJ), and either during lunch while I was writing Logan and Shona, or after lunch when my mind was still on them, I got it. Another boom.

It’s just a general idea and not a full-blown story, but it’s something I can mull over while I’m writing the WIP (Work In Progress). The best part is that there’s built in conflict–I’m thinking the council divided Sin’s territory in half because there’s so much activity that one troubleshooter can’t keep up with it, and that Tris is the one they assign to work in Los Angeles alongside him. Sin would hate that. Tris would hate that, too. But when something that’s related to In Twilight’s Shadow comes to their neck of the woods, they’d have to work together. (And no, because it might be a spoiler for Twilight, I’m not going to say what that is.)

Of course, who knows if I’ll have the chance to write it. The story I’d like to do after Logan and Shona is Logan’s brother, Kel, so this is at least two books out, but it’s nice to have the idea of what to do anyway.

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In Twilight’s Shadow Cover Copy

Thursday, January 3rd, 2008

Yesterday I received the cover copy for In Twilight’s Shadow and I couldn’t stop reading it. Hey, it really is a book. :-) What do y’all think of this?

Something Wicked…

Maia Frasier thought she’d escaped the world of troubleshooters and demons when she’d ceded her magical powers years earlier. Now a wounded enforcer has turned up in her home, claiming Maia’s sister is in danger.

Creed Blackwood needs Maia’s help to hunt the demon he’s after, especially since he’s hiding the fact that his powers are becoming erratic. And then there are the blackouts…

Maia soon begins to fear Creed has fallen to the dark forces himself, and with his strong magic, that makes him as dangerous to her and her sister as any demon could be.

I’m not going to load it on my website yet, so this is the sneak peek of what will be on the back cover.

Now if only my ARCs would come….

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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.

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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….

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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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