At some point yesterday, I hit writer's nirvana. That place where you don't want to stop writing--you just want to keep going and going and going. I'd been hoping to find it much earlier this week since I was off from the EDJ, but it remained elusive. I'm not sure when I reached it yesterday--late afternoon? Early evening--but I recognized it.

At 6:30 last night, I was sleepy, but I couldn't quit writing now! I had a second cup of coffee and I kept going. It was 11:30 when I had to concede it was time for bed, and as I lie there, what should come next in the book played through my head. (I've forgotten most of it this morning, damn it!) When I woke up this morning, I'd had less than 8 hours of sleep, but I got out of bed anyway, made my morning internet rounds while drinking coffee and I can't wait to pick up where I left off.

I can't even begin to tell you how good this feels! This is the first time since I last June that I felt this way and I've missed it. Desperately.

Baseball season starts tomorrow! Yea! I like to write with a game on and the sound muted. It doesn't matter that much who's playing, although I prefer it to be one of my three teams. I can generally find someone to root for (or sometimes against if it's a lesser of two evils situation) and I'm just happy to have it on.

You see, this is how I get into trouble on QVC. I like to write with the television on, but I don't do sound. That means it has to be tuned to something that I don't have to pay attention too for very often and that limits the selection. Without baseball, my fall back is usually QVC and sometimes when I glance up, there's something cool on. Gah! Thank God baseball is back!

It's been raining and raining here. I wish it would go back to sunny and warm again. Not that I can enjoy it since I'm chained to the computer until the WIP is done, but it was so nice to open up the windows and let the air in. It was so nice to have sun shining in and to be able to wander around the house barefoot. Right now, it's like 41 with a wind chill that drops us into the 30s and that means no bare feet and no open windows. Sigh.

Now, it's back to nirvana. Later.

In the Midnight Hour is up for preorder now at Barnes & Noble.com! It's really starting to feel real now. Four months now and counting. Wow.

I've mentioned it before, but this is the book that I wanted to write forever before it sold. Ryne just came in and demanded I listen to her while she talked and talked about her people.

For those of you who haven't listened to me talk about this story half a million times already, this is a paranormal romance and the blurb I use is:

When a troubleshooter for a society of magic users rescues a private investigator from a dark spell, she finds more than an ally as she faces down her former mentor.

The official Midnight Hour pages will go up on my website April 1st, including an excerpt. I'll post a link here on that day.

I've been hard at work on the spin off book this week. It hasn't been going as fast as I'd hoped, but it is going. I finished another chapter yesterday, which is both a blessing and a curse. Blessing because I'm glad to have it done. Curse because then I have to figure out what to do next.

Let's see. I've started talking to the microwave. :-) It really irritates the hell out of me, though. It keeps beeping. So there I am hollering things like, "I heard you the first time." And "Hang on, I'll be there in a minute." Damn, I wish there was some way to turn off those reminder beeps. I don't want to hear them.

My neck and shoulders are so stiff that my right thumb goes numb, so I've been hollering at my body too. :-) I've developed a stabbing pain just under the elbow of my left arm and my left thumb is aching, probably from the rain. (I injured it in a car accident about 8 years ago.) So there you have a it, a litany of my woes.

Email is making me crazy right now. Let's totally leave Yahoo loop mail out of it because I'm ignoring that. I'm talking about plain, regular email. Over on MySpace, I finally turned on the Away feature on messages because I've got a queue of notes to answer and I have no clue when I'm going to get to them. At least I won't have any new messages to worry about over there which is one step in the right direction.

Then there's my personal email, the stuff coming in directly to me. Yesterday, I received a note from someone I was friendly with when we worked together. She left NWA, and when I tried to send her an Xmas email card, it bounced. Now I have her new email address and a really nice note from her that I'd like to answer. No time. I'm really, really slow at composing email.

Let's not even mention all the notes I have from friends in my inbox. It'll be a miracle if they're all still my friends by the time I get around to replying to them. :-(

Then there are the emails I've had to send. The ones that I get no reply to. These are all important notes--I wouldn't have sent them if they weren't--and I get nada back. This leaves me in a quandary. First, did my email even arrive? Spam filters, the note going astray in cyberspace, whatever. Second, if it did arrive, did they decide to answer it later? Did they decide it required no reply at all? (If so, they were wrong.) Are they on vacation? Is there some other reason why they're not answering? Do I follow up at the risk of sounding like a complete pest? Did they reply and I didn't receive their note? Gah!

I already took time to write the emails once, the last thing I want to do is have to keep following up, but I really, really need answers on a couple of them. I'm starting to obsess and I don't have the energy for this.

I love email. Usually.

So I had one of those uh-oh moments last night. I had all the lights off and was getting ready for bed when I realized I hadn't checked to make sure the front door was locked. I thought, well, why bother? I never forget to lock it. But on the heels of that came the thought that it would only take a minute, so I might as well just do it and I'll sleep better.

Guess what? Yep, the door was unlocked. When I'd come back from my parents' house, my hands had been full, and between that and kicking off my shoes, it must have just slipped my mind. Yikes!

I live in a safe neighborhood, but a few months ago, one neighbor had their car broken into and the thieves used the garage door opener to help themselves to stuff there. And the neighbor two houses down had their SUV stolen by the same thieves. The car was recovered the next day, but with damage. So if I'd slept with the door open, I would have been totally freaked out this morning. Luckily, I found it in time and I was only partially freaked out. :-)

I've also been watching QVC this morning while I had coffee. I know, it's dangerous, but they had the exotic plant people on and I love that stuff. Anyway, they happened to show two different types of lilies that are hardy to -30, so I could leave them in the ground over winter even in MN! Hurrah! I ordered both of them and they'll ship in May. I tell you, my need to garden and plant flowers is like the most bizarre thing ever. Trust me on this one. I'm a certified plant assassin and yet I'm buying them like crazy.

Right now, I'm watching an eye makeup kit and trying to convince myself that I really don't need to spend the money on it. Okay, I really don't need it, but boy, it should would be nice. Help me before I shop again!

I don't have much interesting to say. It was 81 degrees here yesterday, a record high temperature, and I had my windows open till 10:30 at night. How great was that?

I'm trying for deep immersion on the writing. I haven't read any of my Yahoo Group digests since Friday. I've read personal email, but I'm way behind on answering it. I hit a few late last night, but I've got more to get to. I also have some other stuff I need to get going on for ITMH promo, so I'm going to try to read through the agreement before I start writing this morning. I need to get that rolling.

My mom's out of the hospital. Still weak, but feeling better than she has in months. I've been spending some extra time over at my parents' house even with all the writing I need to do. The last five days have given a little perspective on what's really important.

And pretty much that's all that's been going on. Writing, writing and more writing.

Needless to say, I didn't watch a movie last night. :-/ I did see one on television, though, on Friday night, and while I missed parts of it, I think I can review it.

Legally Blond stars Reese Witherspoon as a sorority girl in love with Warner. He chooses another girl and both he and his new fiancee are off to Harvard Law School. Reese decides that she's going to attend too. Everyone discounts her ambition, but she gets the score she needs on her LSAT and Harvard admits her.

She ends up getting a plum assignment with 3 other first year law students (Two of them are Warner and the new financee) and ends up helping with a murder trial. Along the way, Reese learns that she's smarter than she's been given credit for and she gains confidence.

I didn't expect to like this movie. It sounded silly and lame, but I surprised myself and really enjoyed it. In fact, I added it to my NetFlix queue so I can see the whole thing without commercials. I had a few interruptions that night and missed big chunks of the movie. Reese Witherspoon did a fabulous job making her character someone likable, someone I could root for and cheer on. And how she exonerates her client at the end of the movie was cute.

It's not Oscar material, but it's certainly an entertaining way to spend a few hours.

My rating: 4 stars

Since I first came up with the idea for In the Midnight Hour, I'd tried and tried to think of a name for the series. Okay, it's only two books right now, but hey, that's a series! And it has the potential to go on indefinitely depending on how it's received.

I'd thought about calling it The Gineal Series after the name of Ryne's people, but that was pretty boring and certainly not catchy. Besides, it says nothing really about the books. Then I thought The Troubleshooters because Ryne is a magical one of those. Except I think Suzanne Brockmann calls her series Troubleshooters, doesn't she? If not her, then there's someone. It was so frustrating. Today, though, it came to me.

The Light Warriors.

I did a search online, both on a search engine and at Amazon and the only thing I turned up was a role-playing game and a book from a vanity publisher. Hurray! The Light Warriors can be used!

I can't believe I didn't think of it before. Ryne's official title is laoch solas which means warrior of light in either Gaelic or the Gineal language--whichever works. :-) I'm all excited about this now. I actually have a cool series name!

And in other news, I have all the windows open in my house--the first time since the cold weather set in last fall--and it's heavenly. I love getting some fresh air in here.

Guess what I have over on my MySpace page? A movie trailer for the third Pirates of the Caribbean movie! Pretty darn cool what you can do now, isn't it? If you want to see a preview of POC3, and if you have a high-speed connection, head on over and watch; it's under the section marked "Movies." The movie looks like it's going to be fun, but how can it miss with Johnny Depp and Orlando Bloom?

I also discovered a new music group that I like--Pink Martini. It was so funny how I found them too. I popped over to someone's MySpace page to leave a Happy Birthday comment and "Let's Never Stop Falling In Love" was set to play automatically when the page loaded. Normally, the automatic music annoys me and you'll notice on my MySpace page it requires the play button be clicked before anything comes on. But I digress. So this song comes on automatically and I loved it. I listened to it a couple of times, then I clicked over to the artist's MySpace page and listened to the other songs they had up on their site. My next stop was Amazon to order both of their CDs. I'd never heard of this group before, I don't even know exactly how to describe their music because it's a blend of styles, but it was fun and I haven't been this excited about new music since I discovered Loreena McKennitt years ago.

I also bought some really cool planters on QVC. At least I hope they're cool. They looked like they were on TV. These planters are made to fit over a railing, which would put them at the perfect height for tending plants on both my front porch and my deck. Every time I type something like that, I just think: Whoa! I'm so totally not into gardening--a response to being expected to weed my parents' huge gardens as a kid--but this year all I want to do is plant flowers. Nesting, maybe? It's just bizarre.

If I don't blog daily like you're used to over the next week or so or if I'm really slow on answering comments, it'll be because I either don't have time or don't have energy. My family has a medical issue going on and it's fairly serious. And I think that's all I'm going to say on that.

I needed a high res image of my cover for In the Midnight Hour and I finally received it yesterday. There were two images attached to the email, one smaller and one big one. The big one opened without any problems, but the cover only had the image and my name and title. I was hoping for a version with my quote and with the paranormal romance graphic my publisher uses. I decided it must be on the smaller image and worked on trying to get it open. This was a jpg file, but I kept getting an unsupported file type message.

I think this might be one of those situations where being pretty good with computers isn't a good thing. Most people would have tried a couple of things and given up, but not me. I knew I could get that damn thing open--somehow--but even my graphics program wouldn't show the thing. After much mucking around, I did get it open, but it was just a smaller version of the same picture in the big file. So all that for nothing. Sigh. Anyway, I sent the big image off for the postcard and resized it for the website.

That's been the other project I've been trying to do this week--get the Midnight Hour pages ready to go up on the website. It isn't horribly time consuming as far as creating the design/layout goes. That's already done for other book pages and it's just a matter of replicating it. The place where I am running into an issue is with the excerpt. First, I had to choose a scene. With the help of a friend, I did. Then I had to find my contract and refresh my memory on how many words I'm allowed to post. 1500. Seemed like a lot when I read it, but it boils down to about 6 pages and the scene is something like 8-9 pages. I started trimming. I'm close to 1500 words now, but I'm wondering if I cut too much out. :-(

This started me thinking: Why 1500 words? Why not 2500 words? I could have gotten the entire scene up with 2500 words. Why the limit at all? Were there writers posting too much of their books?

Anyway, I'm finding this very restrictive and it's taking up too much time. I wanted these pages up by April 1, too. :-( And I don't think I have a 6 page scene early enough in the book to have it make any sense to someone reading it. Actually, I'm not sure I have a 6 page scene in the book. ;-) I write a little long. In fact, in Crimson Veil, I had scenes that were 26 pages long!

I love the vernal equinox. From here on out, the days keep getting longer and I love that. When I was younger, one of my friends told me that at the moment of equinox--7:07 last night to be exact--you can make an egg stand up and stay up. I tried it and it worked. Of course, I did it on berber (sp?) carpeting so maybe the ridges helped it stand, but it was still really cool. I didn't do this last night, but I thought about it.

This morning I woke up thinking about starting a book with action. I've read a lot of contest entries over the years that have begun that way and I can't think of one that worked. Quite frankly, I didn't care what happened to the characters because I didn't know them. This morning, though, I thought about how In the Midnight Hour starts with action. I don't know if this was something that was working it's way through my subconscious or what the deal was because it wasn't anything I was actively worrying over, but I had an answer when I woke up: I don't start immediately with action.

Yeah, the first chapter has a fight scene, but I think I begin it early enough that the reader gets to know a little bit about my heroine and there's some interaction with another character before Ryne confronts her assignment. The first chapter contains a lot of world building and a lot of characterization, but it's done through action and not an info dump, so that's why I think it works.

Sometimes it amazes me what's going on in my head--especially the stuff I don't know about. ;-)

Is anyone else really tired still? I don't know if I'm still adjusting to the time change or what, but I'm still exhausted. I couldn't get out of bed this morning and now I'm typing this entry as fast as I can because I have to get ready for work in a minute. I just couldn't move. I hit the snooze as many times as I could and still laid there, not wanting to move. It's been this way all week and I'm getting tired of being tired. :-)

I think I mentioned that I finished a chapter on Sunday and I wasn't sure where I wanted to go next. What I started to write wasn't going to work--too boring--but no other possibilities were coming to me. I spent yesterday with a notepad, writing down possibilities and studying my other notes on what I still needed to do. Late yesterday evening, I finally got an inkling. It will up the stakes for Maia considerably, forcing her to choose between her safe (and boring) existence and the sister she's always protected. Of course, there's no real doubt which one she's going to choose--she won't hesitate more than a split second--but it's not going to be a comfortable position for her to be in.

Then I thought, well, this is going to be one very short scene and I still need to get some reaction in to what Creed said in the chapter I'd finished. I think I solved that too. I'm going to back this scene up and have Maia working on her plan of attack. Then hit her with her semi-dilemma.

Right before I left work yesterday, I requested vacation from the EDJ (Evil Day Job). My plan is to take next week off and hit this story hard. The thing is that I can't waste a day like I did Monday trying to figure out where I'm going next, so I'm going to need to have a plan for the book. Much easier said than done because I'm just not a natural plotter. To this end, though, I've printed up everything I have so far and I'm going to read through it and make notes. I know some of it has to be cut and I'm going to lose pages, but is it information that I'm going to need later? If so, where am I going to stick it?

But the big reason for reading through is to get a sense of the story, the big picture. It's easy to lose that when you're focusing scene to scene or even chapter to chapter.

I was making all kinds of notes yesterday about the WIP. (I'm not calling it the book from hell any longer because that has negative connotations and I'm trying to think positively.) I like the legal pads, but with 8.5x11 paper. I used pink and lilac and I had a set that was supposed to be lilac, but it's grayer than my other lilac and I realized that I need more colors. :-) I have a list of things I need to go back and fix, a list of things I need to do yet in the story, and my list of chapter goals. I was also writing down a few other things that escape my mind right now, but I was thinking, wow, I wish I had more colors of paper. Do you realize how limited colored lined paper is? If I wanted paper without lines, the sky's the limit. With lines? Not so much.

I like the idea of color coding this way, but let's be honest here: I probably wouldn't remember what the color signified anyway and I'd have to glance over what I'd written. I really miss my memory. I think it was my second book that killed the most memory cells in my brain. :-/

Last night, after my brain had turned off for the day, I began working on my website. I want to load some of the pages for In the Midnight Hour on April 1. I need to find my contract and look up the word limit on excerpts. I can't remember what it is, but I think I'm over it at about 2000 words. That'll mean some surgical editing to bring the scene in within my contract's specifications. I also need my cover. Not just for my website either. I have other promo things that need it and are coming due. And I also worked on my trivia page for the book. TBH, with my thoughts centered on the WIP, I'm having a hard time remembering things to list on the page. I might end up with a really abbreviated version.

No movie review again this week. It was after 8pm before I was ready to sit down and watch and because the movie was so long, I opted not to start it that late.

Once, not all that long ago, I used to be so organized. I'd have my Christmas shopping done before Halloween, I was 10 minutes early for everything, and everything was put away where it was supposed to be.

Now, well, that's mostly gone by the wayside. I live my life perpetually running late and racing to arrive on time. I'm lucky now to have my Christmas shopping done by Christmas (and sometimes I don't!), and my office and spare bedroom are still only partially unpacked from my move. This last one is absolutely driving me insane. I can't find anything when I need it and I hate wasting time doing a search.

The reason I wax nostalgic is because I was running late for my hair appointment yesterday morning. (And I did have one.) And I was remembering the old days, when I used to have to sit in the waiting area and read a magazine because I was so early. That rarely happens any longer.

I had some highlights put in yesterday. My hair has been so blah from months of winter that I said okay when my stylist suggested it. I almost choked, though, when the total for a haircut and some blond streaks was $100. Gah! Guess I won't be getting streaks just for the heck of it again. From now on, there'll have to be an event for me to shell out that kind of money. I thought maybe $80, which is still a lot of money, but yikes!

The POS laptop has been home instead of locked in a filing cabinet at the office because it needs some major TLC. I pretty much need to wipe the drive and reload everything, but I can't find all my disks. (see previous paragraph about office only being partially unpacked) I did stumble over the rescue disk for that computer, but it won't boot itself automatically, and when I opened the drive in Windows Explorer, I couldn't find a run command. I'd like to get this done before I go to work tomorrow because I can't really use the POS laptop as it is right now. I don't know how I'm going to manage this.

And I saw some preseason baseball this weekend! Yea! Unfortunately, my beloved Chicago Cubs lost both games despite all the money they spent in the off season. :-( I hope that they do better once the season actually starts or it'll be a long year.

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!

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.

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.)

Wow. Yesterday I had a huge, heavy box from Tor. The only thing I could think was that it was ARCs (Advanced Reading Copies) of In the Midnight Hour, but I was sure I must be wrong because I know most houses don't send their authors many ARCs. I opened it up and it was ARCs! A boatload of them! I'm still amazed and trying to figure out what to do with so many. I started soliciting opinions, then I realized that I better email the publicity woman at my publisher and coordinate with her so that I don't mail them to the same places she does. I have a few review sites that I want to hit and I was reminded of bookstores, but I'm sure Tor mails to both as well.

It was like Christmas last night with this box of pretty ARCs and they had my back cover copy on them, which I thought was really good and doesn't give away one of the secrets. Although I'm sure more than one reviewer will give that away since it's revealed in chapter 2 and my understanding is if it happens in the first three chapters, it's fair game. Ah, well, I console myself with the fact that most people don't read reviews and will be surprised.

One of my favorite memories about this proposal is one of my writing buddies shrieking over email when she read the scene with the secret. I want my readers to (hopefully) have that same kind of experience and if reviewers give it away, it'll ruin that. Ah, well, there's really nothing I can do about that, but hope for the best. BTW, this is the one element that most editors couldn't wrap their mind around, so there you go.

I still feel as if it's the middle of the night, and because I wasn't tired when the clock said I should be, I stayed up later. You'd think that would be a good thing, except that I figured out what's wrong with the scene I'm working on and I have to cut everything I wrote yesterday. I might have to cut more stuff that I wrote this weekend too. I'd cry, but I'm too tired.

A look at the calendar is panic inducing. I need to finish my read through of the galleys for Midnight Hour by tomorrow. That will give me time to type up my spreadsheet and mail them back. The only way, though, that I'm going to finish a second read-through of the galleys is to not write today and probably tomorrow. Then there's all the stuff that needs to be done now for promoing Midnight Hour and that all takes time, too. It's all little nibbles.

Oh, before this whole post becomes a whine-fest, one of my friends told me I had a mention in the RWR. For the non-romance writers, that's the monthly magazine from the Romance Writers of America for its members. I immediately dug out my issue and started scanning it. My agent was interviewed for the article on paranormal romance and mentioned me! That was pretty darn cool. :-)

It was 60 degrees here yesterday and all the snow melted off my deck. Finally! It was a little sloppy, but I can live with that.

I received a call yesterday; Eternal Nights is a Colorado Romance Writers Award of Excellence finalist for Best Paranormal! This is the book where Kendall and Wyatt are trapped in an ancient temple and pursued by smugglers. :-) If you haven't had a chance to check out my book video yet, head over to the EN page on my website and scroll down toward the bottom. It's really cool and worth watching.

Yesterday, I made some progress on the WIP, but as I was getting ready for bed last night, I decided I went off in a direction that I didn't want to go--at least not yet. So I need to cut that section and restart. The good news is that it only involves a handful of paragraphs.

My mom has been reading through the galleys for In the Midnight Hour for me and she knows that Ryne's sister is the heroine in the WIP. She actually asked me last night what kind of story I could have with Maia. Gee, thanks Mom. The vote of confidence is awe-inspiring. Especially since this book continually makes me want to bang my head against the wall in the hopes of shaking some words loose. :-/

Both my XP computers made the switch to Daylight Savings Time without a hitch, I set all the clocks that require the personal touch, and one of the two DVD players with automatic time-set have made it to the new time. I can't figure out why one didn't since they're both hooked into the same cable system, but whatever. I figure it'll eventually be right again--even if it is this fall. :-)

I'm not a big fan of these time changes. I wish we'd just pick one time and stick with it year round. I don't care which one--real time or DST--but this switching around messes me up for weeks! Oh, heck, I just remembered I have to change the clock in my car. Sigh. I never remember how to fix that one.

There's no movie review today. Sorry for those of you who were looking for one. I was going to watch my weekly movie last night, but when I picked it up and saw the run time was 133 minutes, I thought, I just can't spend that long watching tonight. Honestly, whatever happened to 90 minute movies?

I was invited to a new site designed especially for readers and authors to talk about books. It's called The Yack and it's free to join. It looks like it's going to be fun once we get some more romance people over there. :-) The site looks relatively new and there are less than 1000 people on there right now--at least as far as I can see. And of course, I'm still on MySpace. Feel free to visit me there and friend me as well.

Speaking of MySpace, it's been a weird weekend for that. Yesterday, I had someone put in a request to friend me, and when I went to look at his profile, it was private. That isn't the weird part, I've had private profile people friend me before. The strange thing was this kid was 15 years old per the information available. I try not to friend people under 18, but I do have a few teenage girls who love to read paranormal romance. A boy, though? Maybe I'm being sexist, but I just couldn't quite see him as a fan.

Then this morning, I get up and check in at MySpace and I have a friend request from another guy. His profile is private too, but it says he's 21. I hesitated, but he's an adult, so I approved his request, then looked at his profile again now that I could read it. It says on his page that he's 14! It gets better, I page down to the book section and it says that he hates to read books, but he'll look at magazines. Then why the hell is he friending me? I can't figure this one out. Anyway, I was hugely uneasy about the age and I deleted him as a friend. I think I was successful, but MySpace isn't the easiest thing to figure out sometimes.

My question now is why the sudden interest from teenage boys? Is there something I don't know? Eek!

I had a window open yesterday. It was so fabulous to be able to do that after a long winter. It was a little cold yet, but I'd burned a bag of popcorn (ick!) and I wanted that smell out of my house. :-) It was one of those mini-bags and I set the timer for 1 min 30 seconds and walked away. By the time I realized it had stopped popping, but the microwave was still running, I was too late to save it. Yes, it's pretty sad when a person can't successfully cook microwave popcorn.

The book from hell continues to be the book from hell and I don't want to talk about my frustrating day working on it, so I won't. I'll just say I can't wait to finish this thing. Gah!

Hello, World!

Today, the sun is shining brightly--in fact, it woke me up--the snow has been steadily melting, we're supposed to hit the mid-40s, and I saw deer tracks in my front yard. I wish I'd seen the deer themselves, but it's still cool. This morning anything seems possible. :-)

My local writing chapter meets today, and while I'd like to go, I'm staying home to write. I will write lots, I have to, because I realized yesterday that I need to cut somewhere between 20-25 pages from the beginning of the book. It's boring and it has to go, but it's going to hurt.

I'm also hugely thankful that I've never had a precognitive dream. Yep, I had an icky one. I dreamed I was staying in a hotel, lying in bed and watching planes take off from a nearby airport. In my dream, one of the planes seemed a little low and a little too close to the hotel. Sure enough, a wingtip hit the building. I immediately started getting ready to get out of the hotel because I knew we were going to be evacuating. In the dream, I heard twice "100 people died." :-( Like I said, I am hugely grateful that I can't predict or see the future.

Once, years ago, I did work with a woman who had dreams about plane crashes and she was eerily accurate, right down to the colors on the plane's fuselage and the exact circumstances of how it looked to bystanders as it went down. I used to say to her, "let me know if you have one of those dreams, because I'm not flying if you do." She never had enough information to tell anyone and it could be a lot of months before what she saw happened, but there was only one instance where she "saw" a crash that didn't occur. How freaky would that be? Like I said, I am hugely grateful I can't see the future.

I do wish I was good at dream interpretation, though. I'd love to figure out the meaning of what I saw--especially the part where I heard the number of the dead. Twice. Numerology would be 1+0+0=1. According to NumberQuest, the number 1 means:

Unity, Beginning, Focussed concentration, Goal-striving, Action, Independence, Originality, Courage, Invention, Leader, Self-reliant, Ambition, Pioneer , Will, Conscious Mind, Positive.

Okay, this is pretty good even if the dream wasn't. I'd like to think this means that the WIP (AKA The Book From Hell) has turned a corner. I also think it has something to do with realizing what I can't control (the plane hitting the hotel) and what I can control (my reactions after the crash). I feel better about the dream now.

At the EDJ (Evil Day Job), I've been helping another department out by filing manual revisions for them. It's not the most exciting job in the world, but it's made even more frustrating by the condition of the pages that need to be put in the binders. Yesterday alone, I had pages with the holes on the wrong side, pages with no holes at all, 11x17 pages that were folded so the holes were covered up, folded so they were all in one big lump, and folded like one, big letter so that the information on the page couldn't be seen. When I finally had the revisions in order, I grab the manual and find that it's been filed incorrectly for years and years. I don't know how anyone used it, and what should have been a quick little job, has now become a major undertaking since I have to fix everything.

The big excitement, though, for yesterday was that my glass nail files arrived! Now, I officially have a back up file, a file for my purse and a third, big file. You know that it's vital to have back-ups for things you love. I can't tell you how many times I found something that worked for me, and when I needed to replace it, that item was no longer sold. Anywhere. The problem comes in when it takes a while to realize how necessary something has become to your life. :-) This happens to me all the time with shoes, but I never know how much I like a pair of shoes until it's too late to buy a back-up pair.

There's not much else going on. Yesterday I posted that I didn't have to cut much of what I wrote on Tuesday, but last night, I did cut a lot of what I wrote on Wednesday and started over. Frustrating, but I think the changes work better than what I had.

And I'm still overwhelmed with stuff to do. I owe emails and comments to a ton of people. I hope I still have friends by the time I finish the book from hell.

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!).

This morning, I caught a flash of one of the Geico cavemen commercials and thought, man, I'm getting so tired of them. Then, I read one of my boards and someone posts that they're going to do a TV series with them, but that she'd rather see the Capital One barbarians in a show. I have to agree with her. I like the barbarians much better than the cavemen. I always think the Geico ads are almost there, but not quite. But then I'm pretty picky on commercials and I have been since junior high when we saw reels of Clio Award winners every year. I saw what was possible and then I saw what most companies were doing.

The Minnesota Twins have a couple of cute commercials playing right now. One features Jason Bartlett and Nick Punto (our shortstop and third baseman who were called Piranha by White Sox coach Ozzie Guillen. Because they're not homerun hitters, but they just nibble you to death.) Anyway, it shows a girl and her father going through Undersea World or whatever the heck the aquarium is called at Mall of America and the girl is asking her father what everything is. Then they reach the tank with the piranha and it's the two Twins players under water in full uniform. It ends with the handler dumping a bucket of baseballs in the water and the two swimming to the surface to get them.

This might be one of those ads where if it has to be explained (and if you're not a Twins fan or don't live in Minnesota it has to be), it loses some of it's humor.

The Twins have a second commercial with Johann Santana, our Cy Young Award-winning pitcher and Joe Nathan, the pitcher who closes our games. I've only seen this one once, but Santana is driving like he pitches--constantly changing speeds--and Nathan's getting motion sickness. It was cute too, but I want to see it a few more times because I missed some stuff the first time around.

You know, it's tough in a way to have a major in advertising and then watch ads. I can sit there and label the tactics the commercial is using, and depending on the skill in which it's deployed, it might annoy me. If it's done well, I don't think about it, but if it's blatant, I definitely don't like it.

Mercury is in retrograde right now. I'd never heard this, let alone knew what it meant, until maybe five years ago or so. There was some communication misunderstanding and someone mentioned the Mercury thing. Ever since then, whenever there's misunderstandings, lost email, missed telephone calls, etc., I check to see if the planet is in a retrograde period, and you know what? Nine times out of ten, it is!

We've got another day or two, I think, till this period of retrograde ends. I'm hoping that makes it easier on my poor computers. The POS laptop that I keep at work is having all kinds of problems. I brought it home last night to do some upgrades and updates and it's just a mess. But since it's still better than hauling the laptop I use at home back and forth, I'll have to fix it up, baby it along, and hope for the best.

Speaking of the home laptop, this thing has gotten slow. I know it's because it's over 2 years old and it's time to wipe the drives, reload the software and start fresh. But not only don't I have the time to do that, I don't want to! It's a lot of work. A lot. I did it on my desktop a few years ago and I never did get everything reloaded, and at this point, I'm figuring those files can't be that important anyway. :-)

And of course, I've been waiting to replace the desktop for more than a year. I'm just waiting for Vista Service Pack 1 to be issued by MS to fix the bugs and I'll begin the hunt. This has nothing to do with Mercury and is no doubt my imagination, but I've been using this computer a lot more since it's the only one with high-speed internet and it seems painfully slow. Of course, I've loaded more software on that thing too since hooking it up to the internet autobahn. :-)

Anyway, every computer I own is having some kind of issue right now that's making me more insane than usual. I'm counting the hours until we're clear of this planetary situation and hoping that helps the electronic equipment. :-)

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.

Last night, I watched Stranger Than Fiction starring Will Farrell and Emma Thompson. The movie was released in 2006, and while I'm going to try my best not to reveal any spoilers, I can't promise that, so if you don't want to risk anything being given away before you see the film, you better click away now.

Will Farrell plays IRS Auditor Harold Crick. One day, he begins hearing a voice and it sounds as if it's narrating his life. No one else can hear it. He sees a psychiatrist and she tells him he's schizophrenic. Harold insists that he isn't. The voice isn't telling him what to do, it's just telling his life like a story. The doctor tells him that maybe he should see someone familiar with literature. Enter Dustin Hoffman as a college professor. He thinks Harold is nuts too--until he mentions that the narrator said: "Little did he know..."

Along the way, Harold falls in love and he doesn't want to die. The question is, will he be able to stop it?

I really liked this movie. Maybe it's because I'm a writer and I feel like my characters are real, but after watching this, I was so glad I write romance. I'd hate to kill one of my people. Especially since they come in as fully-formed human beings. What if they are real? You never know, especially after watching this movie. :-)

Will Farrell, who I normally don't like, played this role perfectly. I didn't think of him as an actor, but as Harold Crick. His reactions to something weird were wonderful.

The things I didn't like? While the movie got a lot right about being an author, it got a lot wrong too, at least in my experience as an author. This was more like Hollywood's vision of what it's like to be a writer. First off, Karen Eiffel (Emma Thompson) has writer's block for like 12 years. I understand the block, but 12 years? Second, her publisher sent an assistant to help her finish the book that she was 10 years over deadline on. Ten years! Um, yeah, sure they're going to pay for an assistant to help an author that they can't be counting on at this point to deliver anything. My guess is that they're more likely to have written her off by now. And wow, her early books must still be raking in the royalties because she hasn't had to get a day job for that ten year period and she still has a pretty damn nice apartment. Speaking as an author who hasn't even been able to seriously consider quitting her day job yet, my response was, "yeah, right."

My other quibble is the romance between Harold and Ana. I wanted more here because I found it difficult to buy they'd developed feelings for each other so quickly. Still, it was sweet and I liked the two characters together.

Overall, though, the movie was a very enjoyable way to spend a couple of hours. It's not laugh out loud funny, IMO, but the characters are people I cared about and I wanted things to all work out.

My rating: 4 Stars

And head on over to 2 B Read. I blogged today about some movies I really enjoyed.

Snow fall totals for my city: 18 inches. Previous storm snow fall total: 10 inches. Amount of snow that fell in one week at my house: 28 inches. Amount of snow for November 2006-February 23rd: 12 inches.

A week ago yesterday, there were large expanses of bare grass. Every day more was melting because the sun is so high in the sky. Then the two storms rolled through. I went out last night and tried to take pictures for the blog. The snow is over my knees. Sigh. You'll notice there are no pictures with today's post. That's because I couldn't get any good shots and I wasn't willing to slog through more snow to get a good angle.

What's really funny is that I'm getting itchy to put plants in my yard. I find this amusing for two reasons: 1. The snow and cold weather. 2. Me? Garden? LOL! When I was a kid, my parents used to have several huge gardens and we had to constantly weed and water those damn plants. Ever since then, any kind of outdoor garden has been something unappealing to me. Maybe it's just spring fever and will pass by the time it's actually warm enough to do something.

Do y'all remember me talking about my glass nail file that I bought at the Woman's Expo and absolutely loved? I've wanted to buy another, but I couldn't find one I was willing to buy. If the price was good, the site was unknown to me and I was unwilling to give my credit card number to them. The sites I did know were charging $12 for one plus shipping and handling and I wasn't willing to pay that. (My file cost $10.) I finally, finally found a set of 3 for $20 plus shipping from QVC and I ordered them. I'll have one big file, one travel size and one the same size as what I have now. The best thing about these files is that they never wear out! I've had mine for over a year now and it still works as great as it did day 1. With these extras, I'll now be able to leave them in strategic locations (like my purse!) and have one handy if I break a nail.

The Fashion Police were talking about the Oscars and mentioned that Cameron Diaz wore emerald and diamond earrings worth $1 million. Gulp. Can you imagine wearing something that expensive? I'd be worried all night that I'd lose one. I had a pair of really cute earrings that cost $50 and when I lost the special back to one of them, I spent a half hour combing the office in a panic because those earrings were so expensive! LOL!

I really, really try not to talk about the weather here because I know not everyone is from Minnesota and finds it as fascinating as we do, but sometimes, the weather is the news. It started snowing here Wednesday evening. It's still snowing. I have no idea of exact totals, but there's a lot. It's probably knee deep on my deck, although I hardly consider that an accurate measure of snowfall.

The commute home yesterday was slow, visibility was lousy, and in most places, it was impossible to know where the lane was, so I just lined myself up on the car in front of me. It wasn't the worst drive home that I've ever had, but the top speed most of the way was about 25 mph. It was a long drive.

This morning, the question is how bad are the roads? Because of the early hour, there are no traffic reports available, so I won't really know until the wheels hit the asphalt--or maybe I should say till the wheels hit the snow pack. :-) If it's too horrible, I'll turn around and return home. I'm going to try to leave the house at 5am, which will give me an hour to make it in to work.

In non-weather news, I'm still reading through my galley. I still have a gazillion emails to send and haven't done even one of them. I hate to set aside a whole afternoon/evening to do email, but I might have to since I'm not sure how else I'm going to manage it and I can see the big clock ticking in my head since there's a time frame for some of this stuff.

Anyway, after this scintillating post, I need to get moving. The only huge bright spot with the weather is that I don't work with passengers. I'm sure the gate agents are just having more fun than is humanly possible dealing with all the flight cancellations.

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.