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Friday, August 18, 2006

Praying Rain

It rained here yesterday morning, but not enough to let me out of watering the new sod around the house. :-( Let me tell you, getting the sprinklers in the right position wasn't easy. I had to make sure I got as much sod as possible wet without soaking the street. It took nearly three hours to get most of the yard and I still missed a couple of patches on the north side. Sigh.

BTW, my dad wrote out instructions on how to do the watering and at the bottom, in all capital letters, he writes: I hope it rains! I'm thinking he doesn't have much confidence in my yard care skills. He might be right. ;-)

So while I'm running around, watering the yard, my dad calls from Chicago. NINE TIMES! I had nine voice mail messages. Not because he talked all those times, but because he didn't hang up the phone until after the beep. Arghhhh!!! He knew I was going to be outside because I told him when I dropped him and my mom off at the airport. I'd also told him if he didn't get me, not to leave a message, to just keep trying. Nine voice mail messages. I hate the phone.

Despite my dad's attempts to drive me insane, I got a lot of work done yesterday on my proposal. The synopsis is revised and basically good to go. All I want to do now is print it out and look for more typos and missing/extra words. I'll still miss some, I always do, but it'll be as clean as I can make it. I also have the arc overview document almost ready to go--barring one of my writing buddies taking it apart.

My editor asked for a 7-10 page synopsis for the book. What's she getting? A 9 page arc overview document explaining what's been happening on Earth and on J Nine, introducing the characters from the three books and a short summary--complete with book goal--for each of the three stories. The synopsis came in at 11 pages. It was 12 after I revised, but I cut it back to 11 again. So this totals up to 20 pages, double what she asked for. Um, is there any question now why the print in my books is so small? ;-)

I also managed to write 5 or 6 pages of actual story last night, but that was the last thing I did and I kind of petered out toward the end. But considering how tired I was, how much mental energy I'd expended on the synopsis and arc and how much time I was wasting running around the yard, dragging hoses and sprinklers, I think I did pretty good.

Yesterday, as I was driving home from work, a song came on the radio that I haven't heard in a good long while--"Carry On My Wayward Son." I don't even remember who sings it, but that sparked some ideas for my next book--the one I need to start writing very soon. :-) If I could finish the arc proposal, I could spend more time thinking about Creed and Maia, but this idea shows a great deal of promise, and if it's as strong as I hope, it could spark more books in this world.

To wrap up, I'm praying rain for this afternoon (and there is a story behind why I say praying rain instead of pray for rain, but it's from something I read and it's long so I'll skip it). There's a big storm off to our west, so fingers crossed.