I've spent the last 9 days writing 10-12 hours all day, every day, so I don't want to talk about writing at all. :-/ Instead, I'm going to hit some of the non-writing stuff that happened this week.

First of all, having a hiatus was weird. I've been blogging every day (with the exception of conferences when I don't take my laptop) for like 2 years or something. I can't even tell you how many times I thought about something being a good blog topic.

Let's see, I've been waiting and waiting for these rug runners to go on sale. One to match the area rugs and runner I already have, and an indoor/outdoor one for the laundry room. Right now, I have a carpet remnant where I want the one runner and cardboard and multiple carpet remnants where I want the indoor/outdoor one.

Last Monday, I received an email from Home Depot saying they had free shipping, and I almost caved in and ordered them even though they weren't on sale. I've just been waiting and waiting! Patience isn't my strongest personality trait. But on Friday, not only was the free shipping thing still going on, but my two rug runners were 20% off! I immediately ordered, so I made another stride forward in home decor.

I received an email to tell me that the three types of lilies I ordered are shipping. I've been waiting and waiting for these flowers, but of course, I don't have time to plant them or do anything with them. Sigh.

Wasp wars have resumed. The weather finally warmed up, and both the grass-carrying wasps who like to build nests in my windows and the regular wasps have returned. I'm shooting wasp spray through my screens again. Largely missing since the 20 feet distance is less than you'd think.

My dad installed my screen door on my sliding patio door. Um, it's not great since I really can't open and close it. He's going to ask someone to help him get it so I can actually go in and out, but it was nice to sit here this weekend with all the windows open and the patio door open as well and let summer inside.

I have a $100 gift card from Circuit City I need to use soon. I'm debating buying an iPod. I have an MP3 player that I like, but now the battery is starting to not hold the charge, and plus none of the accessories work since they're all for the iPod and not for mine. I like the idea of popping it into a cradle and having music in the house. The other thing that would be cool is that the Apple iPod can carry TV shows and movies, all downloadable for a fee from iTunes. I don't know, though. I read the reviews and some people love their iPods and some people don't. Then I wonder will a new, cooler iPod be coming soon? After all, the current version has been out for a while now. Does anyone have thoughts on the iPod thing? Maybe I'd be better off buying a new ergonomic keyboard with my gift card.

I had bookmarks designed for In the Midnight Hour and ordered them from the printer. I got a proof on Friday and it turned out really nicely. I hope the finished product looks as good. I have no clue when I'm going to receive them, but luckily my mom will work on bundling them up for me while she watches her soaps.

I think that's it. At least it's all I can remember. Today, it's back to the EDJ (Evil Day Job), and since I've used pretty much every day of vacation I had, I won't be getting any time off for a while. Real time off, like to relax and do fun stuff. 10-12 hour days are not fun. :-/

Believe it or not, I have nothing to say. Since anyone who's read me knows I write a lot of words, I'm guessing it's stress and/or insomnia. So unless something comes up that I really want to talk about, the blog will be on hiatus for a week or so.

I was up at 6am yesterday and went to bed after 11:30. I researched the ancient Egyptian god Set, I did a load of laundry, vacuumed the house, and finished the chapter I was working on. I think. I tack on the "I think" because I refused to go to bed until I finished it and I'm concerned I just ended it because I wanted to sleep so badly. I'll read through it this morning and see what I have.

I took some pictures. This is what my great room looks like when I push on deadline:


Here's a close-up of my table:




I seriously want a sign for my front door that says:

Do not disturb
Author at work

Once again, one of my neighbors from down the street came a ringing the bell. Fortunately, I wasn't right in the middle of writing--I was emptying the dryer--but the last thing I need are these interruptions. I wasn't going to answer the door, but since I was actually showered and dressed, and because if I didn't answer, she'd just come back again, I did open the door. And she wanted to chit chat. Gah! Luckily, my dad showed up and he ran interference for me.

There was just a commercial on The Weather Channel (Yes, I watch TWC) where it showed a couple looking at their white walls, then they go to Home Depot to pick out paint. It made me remember all the episodes of Designed to Sell and House Hunters that I've watched on HGTV and how many of the homes shown have these white or nearly white walls--and usually throughout the entire house! And nine times out of ten, if their walls are blank, their furniture is every bit as neutral, so it looks as if they're living in a bowl of oatmeal.

I always shake my head when I see this and think, "why are people so afraid of color?" Of course, if y'all have seen the pictures of the house I built (link is on the right to go to the house galleries), you know that I love color. Take my great room for example. The walls are largely a neutral creamy off-white color, but then I have the focal wall. That's a brilliant blue. There's a bright pink, tall vase on the floor with big orange flowers and my area rugs are very colorful and fun.

But I digress. As usual. Anyway, I don't understand why people are so afraid of color. You paint, you don't like it, you repaint. No, it's not a huge amount of fun, but it's not difficult either. Or if they really hate painting with a passion, get some color in the room through accessories, like my brilliant pink vase with the orange silk flowers or accent pillows. Something. I just can't imagine living in a house without color.

Last year sometime, I found a quiz online that told you what your decorating style is. I blogged about it at the time and included the link, but I don't have time to try to search it out. Anyway, I took it and my style was determined to be Contemporary, Modern and Asian, and after reading the definitions of those styles on the website, I have to agree, those are totally my styles.

I was able to turn the heat off yesterday, for the second time this spring, and open up the windows. It was windy and it'll be windy again today, but also 80 degrees. Yea!

I received a call last night; Eternal Nights is a finalist for Best Paranormal in the Write Touch Readers' Choice Awards! That certainly improved my mood last night--by like a 100 fold. :-)

I needed the boost. It's been hectic all week at the EDJ (Evil Day Job) and yesterday was about the worst. I felt like I was running from the minute I arrived until the minute I left and I was frazzled. Then I came home, read through the scene I mentioned yesterday. I decided it was mostly okay, although I did tweak a little and I'll probably do more tweaking of the language later. The problem was everything in the scene that followed. It was boring and didn't work. I trashed the entire thing and then struggled to figure out how the hell to write the scene in order to get to the big revelation. It was a big day for wheel spinning. Sigh.

I'm off from the EDJ next week. Hoping for a lot of progress and no more trashing of scenes.

The scene I needed to write yesterday was short and I could see it clearly. I figured I'd have it written in no time, only it wasn't quite that easy. The big problem was the crudity of the scene. It's in my bad guy's point of view (this is a rarity since I haven't published a book yet with this in it.) and he's thinking very crudely about sex. I rarely censor the characters, but this was just too much and I figured I'd be cleaning it up at one point or another. It's still crude, there's no doubt about that. It's just not as crude as what I saw and heard.

The language was a huge problem, so I was looking for a slang thesaurus. All the links I have to slang dictionaries didn't really help. I knew the definition of the words, I needed slightly cleaner, but still rough, alternatives. I turned up one on a site for writers, but to see the slang thesaurus I had to subscribe and it was $20 a year. :-( I finally bit the bullet and did it, but I didn't find what I needed in there. It was okay, don't get me wrong, and it might come in handy at a later point in time, but for this scene? Nope.

I finally got the thing done when I realized that I didn't have to describe every action in detail and that what I already had gave quite a clear picture of what the villain was doing. I hope. I'll have to reread it today and see what I have.

Boy, the laptop is really slowing down. I'm not talking internet connection speed, which is still at dial up since I'm not networked, but the actual computer speed itself. I'll have to run a spyware scan when I get home from work today, but I'm thinking it's probably the fact that the laptop is over two years old and there is a lot of crap on it now. I really should wipe the drive and reload the stuff I want, but I did that with my desktop a few years ago and I still don't have everything back on it. And it is a lot of work to save everything off the hard drive, wipe the drive, reload all the programs, and then reload all the files. It's probably easier to just buy a new laptop. :-/ Maybe I'll get lucky and it'll just be spyware.

I tried to get to bed a little earlier last night so I'd be rested today. It started out so well, but I woke up around 1:30. I think it was my dream. Over and over, these little creatures with huge teeth kept leaping at me and sinking their teeth into my left arm. I even think I know what inspired that--my left wrist, arm, hand and thumb have been painful the last couple of days. Bad enough that I started babying it yesterday. Anyway, I didn't fall back asleep till nearly 4am and then the alarm went off. I'm a hurting unit right now.

Oh, and Shards of Crimson is up for two NOR Awards. This award is in conjunction with Night Owl Romance. You can go over and vote here.

There's an interesting discussion going on at Romance By the Blog with a class from Princeton University about romance novels. I've just started reading the comments--there are a lot of them--but I thought I'd mention it here in case anyone was interested in reading what this literature class wanted to discuss with romance readers.

It was a busy day at work yesterday. I didn't even finish getting through email, let alone the projects on my desk and I have revisions there, too, to get done before I'm off again next week. The coworker from hell, though, is off through Thursday so it should be a tremendous week at the EDJ.

I'm not going to blog about the news--it's too sad and depressing. I'll just say that my thoughts and prayers go out to the people at Virginia Tech and their families.

Mornings have a rhythm, a routine--okay, a rut--and I realized a minute or two ago that I've totally gotten out of mine. I was running through my usual stops online and I didn't seem to be out of rhythm, but I looked at the clock and it was 4:47. Normally, I'm blogging by around 4:30 and I went, Yikes! I have to move. That's when I realized that I had somehow lost my Evil Day Job morning timing.

Anyway, yes, it's back to the EDJ again. In a way, I'm almost glad (note the almost) because my brain is exhausted from the nonstop writing I've been doing this past week. Progress was good, but I was hoping for more.

I know I have two projects waiting for my return to the EDJ. One I was working on before I left, the other was brought over about 2 minutes before I was out the door on the Friday before my vacation. I'm also going to have all the stuff to catch up on that accumulated in my absence. I'm getting more tired just thinking about it.

So basically, deadline hell continues for the book and I'm going to be running at work this week, too. Sigh.

I'm not going to blog long today. I have to go back to the Evil Day Job tomorrow and I want to get as much done as possible.

It was warmer (notice I did not say warm) and sunny yesterday, so I took my notepad and sat on my deck to work on chapter goals. I needed my jacket and it was really cool in the shade, but it was nice to get outdoors.

Last night, I dreamt I met Sting after a concert. You'd think in my dreams that I could manage to be smooth socially, but nope, I was as big a geek in my sleep as I am in real life social situations. Sigh. It doesn't seem fair.

Oh, yeah, I ordered more flowers to plant--someday.

My dad was out of town all day and we didn't want my mom alone for the more than 12 hours he'd be away. She came over yesterday afternoon. She knew I had to keep working on the book, but she didn't bring anything to do with her. I offered books for her to read, but she didn't feel like reading. She said I should put her to work and I'm looking at her, thinking there's no way in hell you're moving boxes around. I offered a few other things, and she finally decided she'd play Mah Jong on my desktop computer while I worked on the laptop.

I had to explain how to play Mah Jong, but it worked semi-well for a while--even if she never did quite get which tiles were free. Sigh. But after two games she was bored and wanted to go out on the internet. I'm like, what do you want to see? She, of course, has no clue. Finally, she decided to look at my website.

Um, not to make fun of my mom and her lack of computer knowledge, but she didn't know how to scroll down and she didn't realize the words across the top were links to other pages. Once I explained that, she started exploring--and somehow, ended up on my blog. Sigh. She read every entry on the main page. I have no memory of what I've written, but yikes, it made me uncomfortable to have her reading this and I have no clue why. I mean if I'm willing for the world to read this, certainly I shouldn't have problems with my mom seeing it. Right?

Anyway, she kept saying she wanted me to keep working, didn't want to interrupt, but she kept talking, so I had to continually get up and see what she needed. I got a few pages written after she came over, but not many. Double sigh.

Yesterday ended up being a very frustrating writing day. I didn't get as many pages done as I wanted and I'm not sure they're tightly focused enough. I'll be looking at them as soon as I finish this note and see if I'm right.

So I'm lying in bed this morning and thinking about how much book I have left to write. As I'm thinking OMG, how am I possibly going to do this? another thought occurs to me. How many chapters do I have left to go? I worked that out and went GAH! I have a lot of story to tell and not much room left. And because Creed and Maia are both so damaged at the beginning of the story, they've just started to deepen their relationship. Gah! The second thing I'm going to do after rereading yesterday's work is to figure out the scenes I have to have and where I'm going to put them.

Panic on two fronts. Length of time till this book is due and number of remaining pages in this book. Gulp.

On the plus side, I did sleep last night. About eight hours. Yea!

I finished a chapter yesterday. Amazing how much I could get done when I knew what I wanted to do and I didn't have to search the internet for pictures. :-/ I was in bed by 10pm, also good, but woke up an hour later. Not good. Especially when the insomnia kicked in. I hate it when I get insomnia and it happens when I'm stressed about a book.

Yep, I'm stressed.

If I had time, I'd take a picture of the snow for y'all. We had a couple of inches and it's still on the ground unfortunately.

I think ESPN should change their name to the Red Sox Baseball Network. Nearly every game they've televised this spring has had Boston playing. I don't mind seeing them now and then, but not every game. Sigh.

So from my window it looks more like the beginning of December than the beginning of April. I am totally not happy and it's supposed to snow all day. At least I don't have to leave the house.

And part two of my frustration is the WIP. Sigh. My characters decided to go to the Minneapolis Institute of Arts, and since I haven't been there in years, I hopped online to research. How long could it take to find out some basic information about the museum and some pictures of the interior of the building?

It turned out it took many, many hours. The MIA website was quite helpful about laying out their hours and there were pictures of their art including the Egypt collection which is what I needed. There weren't many pictures of the interior of the building.

I used Flickr, I used Google Images, I used some other picture site that I can't even remember the name of and I was getting more and more short-tempered. I can't imagine trying to do this on dial up--it took forever with high speed. At one point yesterday afternoon, I growled, "It would be faster to grab my damn camera and drive down to the museum myself." Which is probably what I should have done.

Then I go to bed last night and the scene I get has my h/h in a park. Sigh. I have no clue if there's a park near the museum. I get up and get back online. I know, but if I had to waste hours today researching this, I'd be crabby as heck. As luck would have it, there happens to be a park right across the street from the MIA. Now I need a good look at it so I know for sure there are benches. I go to Google, but Google Earth is now a download. I swear I remember looking at it online at work without downloading anything.

I ended up on Flickr again searching for the name of the park. I didn't find many pictures, but the few I did locate showed the place was perfect. I went to bed and now I'm ready to tackle the WIP again.

Sometimes the world scares me. Last night while I was taking a break, I flipped through the stations and saw that Nancy Grace was still devoting an entire show to Anna Nicole Smith. In a headline across the bottom, it said "DNA Tests Due Back Tomorrow!" And yes, they used an exclamation mark.

I do admit to some curiosity as to who fathered the baby because men were coming out of the woodwork to claim her, but I don't need a whole eve-of-the-results show. Just a one or two minute update after the results are in is good enough. Are there people who really are sitting down and watching hour after hour of coverage after all this time? I guess they must be. I'll confess, I'm totally not a fan of CNN Headline News's evening programming. I'd rather have the news every half hour than these people like Glenn Beck (whose logo looks so much like Garth Brooks' logo that I was like, wow, Garth is getting a show?) and Nancy Grace. Of course, I'm still lamenting the fact that neither MTV nor VH1 play videos any longer.

Then there was QVC this morning. I know, I shouldn't be watching, but I had to have something on while I had coffee. There's no baseball at 9am (I want 24 hour coverage!) and The Weather Channel is way too depressing. (3-6 inches of snow possible starting tonight and going into Wednesday.) I look up from email and they've got a wall mounted fish tank that looked maybe an inch wide and the guy is showing a baby's picture behind it. Look, see what you can do? You can have fish on your wall with your grandbaby's picture. Gah! Who's buying this stuff?

Um, no offense if you're one of the people who think nothing could be cooler than a fish tank/picture frame.

Anyway, I'm downloading tropical beach scenes to use as wallpaper on my computer and whining pretty heavily. It's April and they're talking about snow. Snow! They also said that we won't see normal temperatures for another 10-12 days. That's after a week already below normal. You know, I could handle a couple of days of cold, but nearly 3 weeks? Sigh.

Progress yesterday was not what I'd hoped for. :-( I'm blaming it on the fact that I wasn't 100% and that I was trying to get through the fight scene from hell. Well, kind of through it. I had to get to the crucial moment in the fight scene to end the chapter, then I'll pick up and finish it in the next chapter and deal with the repercussions--and there are a lot of them. Poor Creed. He's going to be lying his butt off shortly.

Right now, though, I'm in Maia's POV and trying to get out of her scene with some kind of interesting point. I was hoping for divine inspiration overnight, but didn't get anything. Who's hogging all the divine inspiration and epiphanies??? (mad face) Okay. I know. Sigh.

I'm not reading groups email again and only answering personal email when it's critical. Otherwise, everything is sitting. Again.

Um, what else? This weather is making me feel homicidal. It's going to be cold through next weekend--that's mid-April--and we're supposed to have snow this week. This is just wrong. I want to open my windows, damn it! I swear, I've worn my winter scarf more in April than I did in January. I repeat--this is just wrong. Right now it's sunny and 19 degrees.

For those who celebrate, Happy Easter!

Day 1 of the writing marathon did not get off to an auspicious start. :-( I picked up some bug, I think it's a 24 hour one since I feel okay this morning, but I spent most of yesterday in bed. Sigh. When I wasn't in bed, my mind wasn't working real well. I called it a night at 7pm and slept till 7 this morning. I'm beating myself up over the lack of production, but I'm not sure I could have written anything keepable yesterday.

I did have some cool dreams, including a trip to Vegas with my cousins. LOL! And a really cool story that I'll never write because there are too many other shapeshifter to jungle cat stories already out there. At least it was an entertaining way to be miserable.

I received a phone call yesterday at work. I answered thinking it was probably my dad. Once he's on a streak, he'll call about the most mundane things. It wasn't him, though. It was the lovely coordinator of the HOLT Medallion calling to tell me that Eternal Nights finaled for Best Paranormal Romance!! Since I was at work, I couldn't snoopy dance and one of the engineers on the other side of the wall was on a conference call so I couldn't whoop either, but I was hugely excited. :-) A mental happy dog dance is just as good as the real thing and less embarrassing when others are around. ;-)

This was by far the highlight of my day and tops second place by a mile. Maybe ten miles. :-) When I got home, my spinner was there! Okay, you're going what spinner is this? I bought it for my deck. It's 3D and has some cool optical effects going on. If it ever warms up (and I'm beginning to wonder because I've worn my scarf more in APRIL than I did in January), I'm going to hang on the corner of my house so I can watch it turn from either the deck or my great room. I picked one up with hummingbirds for my mom's Mother's Day gift. She's very hard to buy for, so who knows if she'll like it or not? Certainly not me. But I thought since she likes birds, maybe she'd like it. Anyway, it's too cold to go out on my deck to hang it, darn it, but I want to see it twirling in the sun.

I'm off from the EDJ for the next week. Wish me luck on huge page production because I need it! This fight scene is just kicking my ass--which is what Creed should be doing to the monster, not to me, damn it.

I'm still working on this darn fight scene. I swear, it's like pulling teeth to get any words down and this is a perfectly miserable writing experience. It has me questioning, though, whether Creed really is angry, and if he isn't, is there some other emotion that's going to make him do what he's going to do? I don't know. This might possibly be the worst fight scene I've ever written. I know I've said that before, but this time I really mean it. :-/ Of course, at this point, I'd be happy just to have it finished so I could fix it.

I was asked by the organizer of a local readers' group to come in and talk to them. They're reading Eternal Nights for April. She offered their May meeting as an alternate and I said I could do that. April is going to be nothing except writing, writing and more writing on the WIP. Anyway, after I finish this book, I'll have to reread EN, so that my knowledge of the book is as fresh as theirs. :-)

You know, at least in my case, I think I'm never going to forget details in my books and then a reader will come up to me and say something, or will email me and ask a question, and I'll think, I didn't write that, did I? And yeah, I did. It's kind of embarrassing not to remember your own stories, but on the other hand, by the time a book is out, I've probably written at least one more and done proposals for a few others.

One of the most interesting questions that I received--and I got it at least half a dozen times, maybe more--had to do with Elliot's computer in The Power of Two. Everyone wanted to know what really happened to it. One of my readers was even another writer and she's like, I know you offered three ideas of what might have happened to it, but what choice did you make? And I'm like, I don't know. I write by listening to the characters and they weren't there when it happened. It took me totally off guard that so many people were interested in this computer. Not only that they were interested, but that they were interested to the point of asking me what had happened.

So yeah, I need to reread EN before I meet with this group in May because I'll have a hard enough time answering questions as it is. :-)

When I was writing The Power of Two, I used to take these twenty minute power naps. They were enough to refresh my brain, but not so long that I ended up feeling groggy when I got up. This seemed like a good solution for me yesterday. I'd do a power nap, wake up refreshed, get a lot of work done, and then be able to sleep that night. Sounded like a good plan.

I left my blinds open so it wouldn't be dark. I didn't turn my air cleaner on because I'm used to sleeping with that running. Twenty minutes, I told my subconscious/higher self/unconscious.

An hour and fifteen minutes later....

I finally woke up. I was groggy and had a hard time focusing my thoughts. I was also pretty awake at 10pm, but I had to try to go to bed because I get up at 4am. I'm not sure how long I tossed and turned last night, but it was a while, and this time, I didn't get any brilliant ideas for the WIP. :-(

So I'm tired. Again. I overslept. Again. I'll have to answer comments later because I'm pushing right now and I'm moving at about quarter speed--both mentally and physically.

On a slightly more interesting note, I found a blog where my books and writing are liked! I swear I didn't search my name. I don't do that anymore. I was hesitant about checking it out because if people don't like my books, I'm much happier not knowing. Anyway, the reason I bring this up is because she reviewed Shards of Crimson and had some interesting observations. The one that caught me had to do with Kimi's age.

My original plan was to write Kimi when she was older, like done with college and out in the world for a couple of years, but I couldn't because it's part of the series and we had to stick closer to that time frame. Because I was stuck with Kimi being 19 in Through a Crimson Veil, the most I could age her was to 20. I think she grew up a lot during the course of the book, but she was young enough that she was still learning who she was. That made things dicey for me because Nic was much older (he's a demon and long lived) and I didn't want her molded by him. Does that make sense? I was hoping that by the end of the story, that the reader had a sense that she'd grown up enough and had developed enough confidence in herself, to hold her own with Nic.

But I do wonder what she would have been like and what the story would have been like if I'd written her when she was older. I write by listening to the characters, so her age would have changed everything.

Last night around 5:30, I decided to have a second cup of coffee. Normally, I only drink it in the mornings, but I'd been struggling to stay awake and write this fight scene and coffee seemed like a totally brilliant idea. I still fought for each word in this scene--part of my balancing choreography with emotion issues--but now I was wide awake as I ground it out word by word. (Part of the problem is that I need emotion to drive action, so that even while I was telling myself just get the action down and layer in the emotion later, I had to have some emotion in there.)

So at 10pm when I'm tired, my brain is still wired from the caffeine. I don't know how long I laid in bed, tossing and turning. A long while. As frustrating as it was, though, it was also a good thing because I figured out some stuff. Like how my characters kill the creature that seems unkillable. (I know, not a word, but I'm going on very little sleep here.) I also came up with something cool about the hero's scars. I knew part of it from earlier in the evening when I had the original idea, but I didn't figure out this last part until I went to bed. It's going to work really well because it will be a plausible excuse for some action he takes in the scene that his co-workers (and do you really call fellow magical troubleshooters coworkers?) are angry about. And the best part is that I actually remembered these things when I woke up this morning and wrote them down.

Anyway, once I didn't have a restful night and getting up this morning was painful. Painful enough that I overslept for about twenty minutes and now I'm exhausted and rushed. Oh, yeah, while we didn't get any snow yesterday during the day, we did get some last night. Less than half an inch, I think, but enough to mess up traffic.

Tonight, I'll continue to pay the price for coffee last night. I'll be dead tired by the time I sit down to write. The question then becomes do I have coffee again or not?

Snow in April. That's just wrong.

Eight days ago, it was 81 degrees. Today, we're supposed to get 1-3 inches of snow and we're under a snow advisory from now until midnight. Doesn't mother nature know I have planters in my foyer just waiting for plants?

I've been struggling with this action scene I'm writing. These scenes are tough for me anyway, but this one seems particularly difficult. Part of it is that this creature (from another dimension) can't be killed by a direct magical attack and I'm not really good at dreaming up subversive magical fighting techniques. :-( The other problem is that there's a lot of stuff going on in this scene. My hero has all these emotions bubbling and he's used to being pretty emotionally cut off, so I have to deal with all that too.

I go through this all the time with these types of scenes. What I need to do is just write and then go in and layer through what I left out the first time around. Why is this so hard for me to do? Does it go back to wanting it all perfect the first time? Which is a major problem for me when it comes to writing. Anyway, the fight--both my hero's and mine--continues today.

Twins won. I love baseball.

I can't believe my week is up and I have to return to the EDJ (Evil Day Job). I could really get used to being a full time writer. Waking up in the morning (I was up early every day!), having coffee, blogging, and then getting down to writing. It really made me envy those writers who don't have an EDJ. A lot. Especially this morning when the alarm went off at 4am. Sigh.

Last night, I assessed my progress for my time off, and while I didn't get as many pages done as I'd hoped, I did make good headway. And I consider it a victory because this story, and its characters, finally clicked. Creed hadn't been talking to me before this week at all. Now I can hear him. Yea! Everything feels better. Too bad this didn't happen a month ago. :-(

I watched QVC again yesterday. I thought I was safe, after all, the gardening show was on opposite the first baseball game of the season and I was definitely going to watch that. Only somehow, I found myself flipping between stations. I ordered a tree peony. Yes, I shopped again. It was a really cool plant, though. And where is this gardening bug coming from? I don't garden. I'm the plant assassin!

And finally, baseball season has begun! Ahhhhhh!!!! Finally, finally, finally!!!! Happy dog dancing around the room. I write better with baseball on. Or at least I spend less money. Usually.

Back into hell.

The pages for In the Midnight Hour are up on my website now. The main Midnight page has the back cover copy and links to an excerpt and book trivia--including where the idea came from, how to pronounce Ryne's name, why Deke got his nickname, etc. If you want to see a bigger image of the cover, click on the small cover on that page and it'll take you to the larger one.

I don't know how many more times y'all can stand hearing me say how excited I am about this book, but I really am. This story and the characters just wouldn't leave me alone until I had it written. I guess it didn't really help anything that the opening scene of the book takes place in the cemetery that I can see from the bathroom window at the EDJ (Evil Day Job). Ah, well, the story is written and all my work on it is finished and in just a few months, it's going to be a book. ;-)

So yesterday morning I was in nirvana, the writing was flowing fast and furious and I could hardly wait to get back to it. I finished the chapter I was working on and...SPLAT! Did you know there's a wall in nirvana? I didn't either until I hit it.

I couldn't figure out what I wanted to do with the next chapter. I needed an action scene since it had been too long since the last one, but beyond that? Shrug. The idea I came up with seemed rather convoluted and I wasn't sure it was the answer. After talking with a friend who basically said: write it and if it doesn't work cut it. Which gave me heart palpitations since the deadline is looming and I'm going to have my back against the wall to make it. But she also pointed out that sitting there, not writing, wasn't producing any more pages than if I wrote them and then cut them.

So that's the plan today, to get this scene down. I've done some mulling and managed to streamline my idea, but I guess we'll see how successful that was when I actually start to write.

It finally stopped raining here long enough for the deck to mostly dry out. It won't last, there's more rain coming, but for now, it's nice. Plus, I can see all the buds on the trees around here and it's fab to know they'll be getting leafs soon.