I'm behind everywhere--again. I have email to answer, comments to reply to, I didn't even blog over the weekend, but while I've been around, I've been busy. Friday night I decided to redo my website. Now is the perfect time since I don't have to start the new book until Jan 2nd (although I'd like to start tomorrow).

This wasn't quite a spur of the moment decision. I've been unhappy with my site for a while. I even picked out a web designer--finally--to do my site for me, but the waiting list is into 2009. I tried to be patient, but I couldn't do it, and I've been working on it all weekend. In between bouts of cleaning. I didn't get to start it until Saturday evening and then it was heavy graphics work. I'm not very good at graphics, so everything needs to be simple. And it was--except that I forgot how to do gradients, and when I found instructions, I wanted to groan at how easy it was. How did that slip through my memory?

I want to shoot for a January 1st unveiling, but I have a lot of pages left unfinished. As of last night, I still had most of my books to do. Because I'm using a style sheet, it's going faster than it would if I had to create each page, but all the text has to be redone. Not rewritten, but since I'm trying not to use any tables, it all has to be situated in a different way.

It's been time consuming and I'm supposed to be cleaning! I have company coming next weekend. I did get a fair amount done, but let's face it, a new website is much more interesting than household chores. :-) Although I'm pretty darn impressed when I walk into the office and see all that open desk space. It won't last.

Anyway, I'll make an announcement when the new site is up and running. ::fingers crossed:: Hopefully, on New Year's Day, but that means a lot of intensive work tonight.

My mom finished two read throughs of the galleys for In Twilight's Shadow and she only found one error. Now I'm really worried that there's stuff we're missing. I've never had a set of galleys come back this clean before. Ever. The only things I've found have been things that I did that I want to change--like the point of view debacle.

I still have a 120 pages left to read and I need to have it ready to go in the mail on Saturday. Or I should. I might send it back on Monday and take the chance the envelope arrives a day late because I want to finish my second reading.

Believe it or not, there was a writing topic I planned to talk about this morning. The thought came to me yesterday as I drove into the Evil Day Job (EDJ), but I didn't write it down and I can't remember what it is now. Clearly, I need more sleep. :-) Maybe this weekend....

The only Christmas gift I asked for--well, aside from socks--was a cordless phone with two handsets, so I could have one in the spare bedroom and one in the great room. I got what I asked for and Wednesday's task was to try to hook them up. I attempted it on Christmas night, but it seemed like an awful darn lot to do beyond charging the batteries and plugging them in. So my dad came over and helped. The man can't operate a computer, but he's Rain Man with the telephone. ;-)

I'd left the phones to charge overnight, so the batteries were all ready to go. We plugged things in and set them up and all looked right--except the caller ID wasn't working on one of the handsets. It would work when it was resting in its own cradle, but not when it was out, which pretty much defeated why I wanted it to begin with. After much testing, however, we were able to get it running. Yea! And it has a few choices for customizable rings, so I've got the theme from the movie The Sting on my new phones.

I tried valiantly to order more bulbs on Wednesday, too, but the website wouldn't accept my coupon--I don't know why--and I was not leaving my coupon unused, darn it. I guess I saved myself some money and some labor since I don't have those bulbs coming in the spring.

And in writing news, I'm still going through the galley for In Twilight's Shadow. I'm really nervous because I'm not finding much to correct and that has to mean I'm missing things. I hate any kind of mistakes in my books, but I'm not going to have time to run through it a third time. Eek!

Finally, Logan and I have been talking for the last week or so. I like him. Last night he introduced me to his mother and his oldest sister. He and his twin are first borns, then came his three sisters. I knew one of them was a troubleshooter and it turns out she's the oldest of the three. His next sister wasn't at his parents' house for the barbecue. She's in college and was studying for finals. (The story opens in May, I think.) His youngest sister is about to graduate from high school.

Then, of course, there's Kel, Logan's brother. I've been getting stuff on Kel for months off and on, but I found his sister (who's name I don't know yet) very interesting. She's only 24, but she's got this calm, assertive energy. Logan's closest to Kel, but he's also very close with this sister--maybe because they're the most alike of the siblings as far as temperament goes (probably). Anyway, it's been interesting and I'm getting excited to start writing the new book. I just need to finish this galley.

A couple of weeks ago, my dad was over at my house and working on a project. This is when he commented that it would be nice if I had a sink in my basement--and since I'd have a plumber coming over anyway, I might as well put in a toilet and a shower down there, too. (He's really good about spending my money. :-)

But the more I thought about it, the more I liked the idea. And I'd want to sheet rock the room off so that it was an enclosed space, which means I'd need a light in there and a door. So I hopped online last night and checked out sinks. Because it'll be a small room, I wanted a pedestal sink and I found one I really liked--for $650. There are sinks that are much cheaper than that, so I might end up with one I don't like as well if I do this. That's still very much up in the air. It's nice to dream about, though.

It ended up being a topic of discussion at Christmas. The holiday was mostly nice for my family--I hope it was for yours as well.

The thing that kept it from being completely nice was the digital camera I gave my parents. I bought them the same brand I have (although theirs is a new, more advanced model) and I thought it would be set up the same way with a nice cradle for the camera. That way they could just grab it and take pictures whenever they wanted. Instead, the new version of the camera requires that the battery be yanked out and put into a recharger, which isn't nearly as convenient or as simple as mine.

The camera also arrived without a memory card. I was irritated by that until I read the instructions and found out it has some built in memory, so that some pictures could be taken. Now I'll have to go out and find a 2GB card for my parents. Then they won't have to worry about running out of space before I can upload the pictures onto the computer for them.
Other than that (and the snow that still hasn't stopped) it was a good day. The only thing I wanted was a cordless phone and I got that. Setting it up is today's project--when I get home from the Evil Day Job (EDJ).

Hope your holiday was as nice!

Wishing everyone a safe and happy holiday! Stay warm!

Yes, that's fresh snow on my deck in the background. Sigh.



Two shots of my red holiday amaryllis. They are now gnat free--hurrah!--and while one side is still only buds, the other two sides are either blooming wildly or about to open their flowers. It's amazing how fast these things grow, but I'm absolutely loving having a splash of color in my house this winter. And to think, I was determined not to have indoor plants. I'm scared I'm going to end up with a jungle in the house now that I've decided I like it. :-)

In that vein, I have two poinsettias added to my holiday plants. I was too lazy to take a picture of them, sorry. One's a beautiful cream color and the other is a deep, vibrant red. I've been reading up on this flower and they should last until February. My plan was to keep them alive all year and force them to bloom again next holiday, but apparently it's very difficult to do. I must be a masochist because I think I'm going to try anyway.

I did watch a movie this weekend, Charlie's Angels 2: Full Throttle, but I'm not going to blog about it. I don't have much to say other than I liked it well enough, but not as much as the first one. The first movie was totally over the top, but in a fun way that I enjoyed. This second film was further over the top than the first one and it was just a little too far for me. I'd give it about 3 stars and I'd watch a third installment if it comes out, but I didn't love it.

I'm still on my second read through on the galleys, which means I won't have time to make a third pass. I'm really worried about how much I missed and I hope my mom and the proofreader my publisher has going through it spot everything I miss. I'm a perfectionist and it makes me crazy when I find mistakes.

I was making some online rounds this week and discovered that The Power of Two is listed as Out of Stock on Dorchester's website. What that means is the publisher has no more copies, and once places like Amazon and BN.com sell out of what they have, this book will be out of print. I've been through this once before and it took two years for that title to be reprinted. So if you want a copy of TPOT, you might want to pick it up soon.

Two other books in the 2176 series are out of stock, too, and after the holidays I'll check into whether or not the series is scheduled to be printed again or if it's going to sit like this for a while. When my first book became unavailable in 2004, I fielded a ton of emails from people asking where they could find a copy. I didn't even have extra copies because I had no warning it was going out of print. This time, I actually do have copies of TPOT, so if prices get as high as they did on Ravyn's Flight, I might have to hold a contest or two to give some copies away.

It's snowing here and it's not supposed to stop until Monday. I think you can fill in the part where I whine for yourself, so I'll skip that.

Yesterday, I began my quest to hunt down the Hawaiian Christmas song I'd heard on the radio over the weekend. I went to the station's website, and while they did list the songs they played, it was only for the day, not for last Saturday. Uh-oh, I thought.

Fearing the worst, I did an online search for Hawaiian Christmas song and in a miracle of the season, I hit it on the first try. The title is Mele Kalikimaka. Half the battle was won. All that was left was figuring out who sang the version I heard and where to buy an MP3 of the song. It would turn out that my answer to both would be in the same place--Amazon.

In the back of my mind, I figured it would be Don Ho or some other Hawaiian musical artist, but I discovered the song was widely recorded by a lot of singers--a surprise to me since I'd never heard it before--and that none of them were Don Ho. :-) My top three candidates ended up being Bing Crosby (that was a surprise!), Jimmy Buffett and Chris Isaak. I decided Isaak was a long shot because I have his Heart-Shaped World CD and this didn't sound like him.

I listened to a clip from Bing Crosby and I was pretty sure it wasn't him, but these darn snippets are so short, it was hard to be 100% certain. I listened to Jimmy Buffett next. Hmm. Maybe. I tried Chris Isaak and I was right--it wasn't him. I listened to a few other versions, but it was definitely between Bing and Jimmy. After listening to each clip one more time, I decided it must have been Jimmy Buffett and bought the song. If I was wrong, it was only 89 cents. :-) After listening to the entire thing, I know I picked the right song.

So Mele Kalikimaka! It's the thing to say on a bright Hawaiian Christmas Day. :-)

It's been really foggy here, although I guess technically it's smog because we have some inversion thing going on. I don't know if that's what did it or if we had a light frost or something, but the tree branches here are coated white. It actually looks pretty, and considering how much I loathe winter, that's saying something. Even my wind spinner had a coat and looked cool. I took a picture of it, but I was far too lazy to download them off the camera. :-) They might not have turned out anyway because there was no way I was actually going outside if I didn't have to. :-) See the sentence about loathing winter.

I finally finished my first run through the galley for In Twilight's Shadow and today I'll begin another. I know I must have missed all kinds of stuff, so I'm hoping repetition will help. I don't know how much help my mom is going to be because she said she kept getting caught up in the story. That's both a good thing and a bad thing, I guess.

We have radio stations here doing nothing except Christmas music right now and I'm enjoying this. One of them played some Hawaiian Christmas song that I totally loved. It's the first time I ever heard it and they didn't give the title. When I have some time, I'm going to have to begin the online search for it. I see a new addition to my holiday MP3 collection.

I guess it's official enough to announce now. I sold two more books to Tor for their paranormal romance line!!!

The plan right now is to release the first book July 2009, which seems like forever away, but the time I have to write it will fly by, I'm sure of that. I wanted to give a little blurb about book one, but I realized it might be a bit of a spoiler for people who want to read In Twilight's Shadow. That's where the heroine is introduced. Geez, I hope I didn't give anything away while I was working on the proposal. I try to be careful about that, but sometimes I don't think things through. With that said, y'all obviously know that at least the first story will be part of the series that started with In the Midnight Hour.

Okay, I'm going to try this:

Shona is a glass artist whose world is shaken when she loses her ability--and her desire--to create her art. The upheaval only gets worse when she meets a sexy stranger. He knows secrets that she doesn't and her ignorance just might get her killed.

Not the best blurb ever, I know, but the best I can do on the amount of sleep I had last night. :-)

Discovery Channel did an all day marathon of episodes of Planet Earth on Sunday and I totally became addicted. In case you're unfamiliar with it, this is a series that looks at different aspects of our planet, one hour per aspect. Some of the programs covered the deep ocean, the deserts, the antarctic/arctic, the forests, the plains, etc. The photography was stunning and the entire thing was fascinating. They also were able to film things that no one had filmed before and were allowed in places where few are ever permitted to go in order to film. If you haven't seen this before, definitely watch for this to be rerun. It's worth it.

And just so you don't think I was totally worthless this weekend, I was working on galleys while I watched. Fortunately, it's a left-brained activity, and when I did need to focus more intently, I just muted the television. I've got another 65 pages to go to finish my first read through.

I worked my tail off on Saturday. I spent the day unpacking all the boxes in my spare bedroom. Okay, so it's been a year and a half since I moved in--I just hadn't gotten around to it. :-) I'm such a geek that I keep standing in the doorway and staring at my nice, clean room. The only thing left to do in there is to organize all my scrapbook supplies, but that's a job for another day. That leaves the office as the last room that needs to be set up. That's just going to be ugly. No doubt about it.

At the Evil Day Job (EDJ) yesterday we were talking about these guys who leap from building to building. There's a name for it, which I've forgotten, and it's apparently a sport with training facilities and everything. Um, this is definitely one of those things that has me scratching my head because no matter how much athleticism is involved, some things just aren't sports. They're past times. There's a difference. :-)

We also talked about those squirrel jumper people who leap off like mountains and try to "fly" down as far as they can without opening their parachute. Again, this is considered a sport, and again, I don't think so. But that's not the point of this blog.

When I expressed my opinion, which was basically who in their right mind would do stuff like this, one of the engineers said something that I haven't been able to stop thinking about since then. I don't remember exactly how he phrased it, but the gist of it was that when he does adrenaline-laden things that at least he's alive and not just living.

I wish I'd caught what he was saying a few seconds sooner because the conversation veered before I processed his words enough to get what he was saying. I'd love to question him on this for a couple of reasons. The first is that he was implying that people (like me) who don't do things like this aren't living. The second is that I'd love to know why he equates an adrenaline rush with being alive.

Cause you see, I totally disagree with him. You see, I can sit out on my deck and watch the birds fly around my backyard and I feel totally at peace and totally alive. No adrenaline involved, just enjoying what life has to offer.

I feel alive when I'm working on my stories, knowing in some corner of my mind that I'm offering my life's passion to the world. That people will read my stories and be entertained (hopefully) and transported into the world of my book and the lives of my characters.

Hell, I feel alive standing in my backyard and watering my flowers. :-) Last summer, I even had a hummingbird hovering next to me. And I feel alive when I see joy spread across someone else's face.

So his feeling that they only way to feel alive is to do something that causes an adrenaline rush is so opposite of everything I've experienced, that I totally don't understand it. That's why I'd like to question him and understand.

I've never, ever had any desire to jump out of airplanes, hang glide, para-sail or leap across rooftops in an urban environment. I've never wanted to jump off mountains or cliffs or scale mountains, then repel down them again. None of these things seem like fun to me in any way, shape or form. But more than that, I don't understand why he thinks doing something that gives him an adrenaline charge is the only way to feel alive. And I do want to understand. Maybe it's because I'm a writer and like to dissect people, but I'm hugely curious.

Part of the problem is that I'm polar opposites with this engineer. Everything he likes to do sounds like my idea of hell on Earth--or darn close to it, anyway. :-) And I'm sure he'd hate the things that I like to do. So since we're so different maybe I won't be able to ever understand why he feels the way he does. And I admit it, my own bias makes me believe that he's totally wrong about what feeling alive means. :-) That'll make it even tougher for me to get it. But I think it would be really interesting to write a character who thinks like this, so I'd like to try.

I found out yesterday that Eternal Nights is a finalist for Best Paranormal in the Texas Gold Awards. This is the first time for me in this one because to be eligible, the author needs to be from Texas or have the book set primarily in Texas, or a main character who's Texan. Wyatt is from Fort Worth. :-)

I'm still going through the galleys and I found a huge oops--and it was mine. :-( During copy edits I needed to clarify who someone was, and when I did it, I thought I was in the heroine's Point of View (POV) and wrote it that way. Yesterday I found out I was wrong.

The scary thing is that I read right past the paragraph as if everything was fine and it wasn't until I was halfway through the next page that I noticed something was off. I stopped and went back to reread. It still took me a minute to figure it out. Thank goodness I spotted it. I'm a POV purist, and when I break that, I want it to be for a specific reason, not by accident. It won't take much to fix it, but this was one close call. :-)

Otherwise, I'm not finding a lot that needs to be fixed. That's worrying me since I don't want to miss stuff.

I've made it through the first 6 chapters of the galley so far. It's still reading really clean to me and I wasn't totally exhausted yesterday. Now that I'm thinking about, In the Midnight Hour had really clean galleys, too. Of course, I found more mistakes later, after it was published, so it wasn't quite as clean as I'd believed. :-( Then there was the proofreader who didn't know what keyless entry was and changed it to keys entry. I still cringe every time I think about that in my book.

Anyway, I'll try to get three read-throughs in for In Twilight's Shadow and hope my mom gets a couple of readings in as well. She spots things I don't all the time.

I've been watching National Geographic Channel and HGTV lately, and there are two commercials I see all the time that are really getting on my nerves. The first shows this red chair in the middle of a suburban street and this guy is talking about the American dream being that each person gets his own dream. I'm sooooo sick of hearing it. Talk about overbuying media time. I have no clue what the ad is for, but I'll hate that product forever because of how tired I am of seeing their commercial. :-) The second ad I'm sick of is for Direct TV and has Beyonce singing about upgrading and HD TV. This is another commercial I've seen like six million times. Give it a rest already.

And on a final note, I really stuck my foot in my mouth at work yesterday. Sigh. This is why I usually don't talk too much when I meet people because I am totally socially inept. My problem is that I'm comfortable enough at work that I don't think about what I say--at least not enough. My social faux pas was mentioning I thought of one of my engineers when I saw some idiot riding his bike on a two-lane road with no shoulder because of the snow. And that I thought the bike rider was a moron. My engineer rides his bike in winter, too, which is why I thought of him, but I didn't mean to imply I thought he was a moron. Why don't I think before I open my mouth? Gah!

One last final note. :-) I swear, no more after this. I'm supposed to have homework for my online class done today. Big, huge GAH! This is hard homework requiring hours of work on my part--hours, quite frankly, that I don't have.

There's nothing quite like waking up at 2:30 in the morning and not being able to fall back asleep. That's what happened to me yesterday and it wasn't pretty. I finally got up an hour later and did some work on my holiday cards. I'm nearly finished with those now. I also had time to write and made progress on a synopsis thing for one idea I want to work on. It was really frustrating, though, to have to log off to get ready for the Evil Day Job when I wanted to keep going.

It all would have been good except for one thing--I couldn't keep my eyes open after I made it to work. By afternoon, I was really dragging. You can imagine how much fun I had proofreading the galleys, right? I probably missed a ton of stuff.

Then there was the nap I took when I got home. That would be the three hour nap. Sigh. It is such a vicious circle.

I'd hoped to have a nice, deadline-free holiday this year. I've only had one Christmas where I haven't been stressed trying to meet a deadline since I sold my first book, and I'd hoped this would be number two. It was looking really good, too. Until yesterday.

I was driving up my street, and as I neared my house, I glanced over at the front door. I wasn't expecting anything, but it's a habit. That's when I saw it--the envelope! Naively, I thought it might be cover flats and I was all excited about that because Tor didn't send me many on my first book with them. I didn't waste any time getting to the front door and retrieving my envelope.

It was from Tor. So far so good. And it felt nice and soft--just like cover flats. I opened the package all excited to see the cover for In Twilight's Shadow in person, and what do I find? Galleys!

Galleys mean work. Galleys mean deadlines. I checked the cover letter. Yep, deadline. Guess the date? Due back at the publisher on Jan 2. That means right up until New Year's Eve, I'll be proofreading the test run from the printer. :-(

I still have a mountain of homework for my online class, holiday stuff which I'm so totally behind on, it's not funny, and now this. I'm putting my mom to work again. :-)

My new furniture is assembled! Yea! My dad came over on Saturday and we spent about seven hours or so putting it all together. On the plus side, the size of the coffee table is perfect and I was exactly right--anything larger would overwhelm the space and make it impossible to walk. On the minus side of things, the furniture was cheap and it looks it. :-( Considering it took me more than a year to find this stuff, I'm keeping it. I figure in a couple of years I can start looking again and this time get nicer tables. I just needed something now because it was darn near impossible to spread papers out on the couch and I was using the step ladder as an end table. And as I look, I'll at least have something usable.

Of course, the assembly did not go smoothly. In the first end table, my dad used the long screws in the drawer and cracked the wood. It was an easy mistake to make because they had pictures of all the parts and labeled them with letters. The directions said use the M screws, and in the image, the M screws looked longer than the N screws. It was a misrepresentation. Looking at the picture of the screw heads, the N screw had the Phillips head and that was what was supposed to go in the drawer.

Second piece that went together was the coffee table. The left drawer would not fit. It got stuck like half way. We decided that maybe the drawer was just bigger or something and my dad worked to sand down the piece it slides against. It still wouldn't fit. As it turns out, the two sides of the drawers were designed differently. Once he disassembled them, switched the sides out, and put them together again, it all worked.

By the time we were finished, I had bits of Styrofoam all over my house and sawdust from where my dad was sanding the inside of the coffee table.

Saturday we also dosed the amaryllis with the gnat killer stuff the nursery recommended. It doesn't kill adults, though, just the larvae, but how long can adult gnats live anyway? And without any little replacement gnats being born, their residence should come to an end, right?

Today's review is Pirates of the Caribbean 3 - At World's End starring Johnny Depp, Orlando Bloom, and Keira Knightley. I know the DVD just came out this week and I should probably be careful, but there are a few points I'd like to discuss, so there will be spoilers! Stop reading here if you want to be surprised.

I wanted to love this movie--I really did. I loved the first one (Curse of the Black Pearl) so much and everyone had been assuring me that World's End was better than Dead Man's Chest, that I expected to enjoy this one even if it wasn't quite as good as the first. I've been waiting for World's End for weeks and made sure I had my last movie in on the right day at NetFlix in order to get this one for the weekend. I did like this movie, but I didn't love it.

Basic plot synopsis is that Jack (Depp) is in Davy Jones' locker and a rescue is launched to bring him back. Each of the major participants has his or her own reason for going, part of a larger agenda that plays out in the film. Rescuing Jack, though, is just the beginning because there's still the evil Lord Beckett to deal with. Because Beckett has the chest containing Davy Jones' heart, he controls Jones and his ship and he's ruthless about using them.

I thought the start of the movie was very slow. It begins with a scene of people marching to the gallows, hanged without trial because the evil Lord Beckett has suspended all rights and basically taken over. There are two things I didn't get about the scene. The first was the part where the prisoners start singing, led by a little boy on the gallows who's holding a piece of eight. When the British soldier reports this to Beckett, he says, "At last." Or words similar to that. Um, why did he want them to sing? It made no sense to me since it had absolutely no bearing on anything in the movie as far as I could see.

My second question about the opening scene is why have it at all? It served no real purpose in the movie at all except to show that Lord Beckett is evil, something that we could have figured out on our own from other scenes if we needed to know it at all. After all, we already love Jack, Will and Elizabeth and we're going to be rooting for them no matter what anyway. This opening scene just seemed completely unnecessary on every level.

You know, I just had a flash of insight come in. I'm looking at this movie as a writer, picking apart scenes, goals, motivations, etc. I don't think I can help myself because when I write or critique for my writing buddies, I'm always analyzing things like this. When it comes to scenes, each one should serve multiple purposes and the opening of POTC3 didn't IMO.

The movie continues to drag as Elizabeth and Barbossa go to Singapore. Things briefly pick up during the fight scene, and I totally loved the monkey and the parrot and their actions, but overall, was finding my attention wandering. I thought it was because I was waiting for Johnny Depp to come on screen.

When Jack finally does appear, it's in the midst of a hallucination where there are many Captain Jack Sparrows aboard the Pearl. This was another scene that dragged on far too long and something much shorter would have sufficed. Again, I found myself asking what's the point of this?

Other problems I had involve characterization. Will Turner was the biggest issue for me. In the first movie, Will possesses honor to an extreme degree. As he works with Jack to rescue Elizabeth, he learns that the real world, particularly the pirate world, doesn't have that same kind of code. At the end of Curse of the Black Pearl, he frees Jack to his own detriment because it's the honorable thing to do. That's a far cry from the Will we see in World's End. This Will is as conniving and duplicitous as any pirate. What happened to his sense of honor? I don't remember anything from Dead Man's Chest that would make me believe such a drastic change in this character's core.

The other character that seemed off to me was Jack. Not as far off as Will, and I can't express why I felt this as clearly as I could with Will, but Jack just didn't feel like Jack to me in some of the scenes. Not all, but some.

On the other hand, I think Elizabeth made a natural (albeit hurried) transition from governor's sheltered daughter to pirate queen. She always had a fascination with pirates and she was always a strong woman. Over the course of the films, she had to adapt and deal with pirates largely on her own. She was able to handle it and succeed.

The other thing that left me scratching my head was that later in POTC3, Jack again is hallucinating multiple versions of himself. Why? I didn't get that, and again, there didn't seem to be any purpose in it. I also didn't understand why he was hallucinating when he wasn't in Davy Jones' locker any longer.

Anyway, I found this movie to be overly convoluted. Maybe if I'd recently seen POTC2 before watching POTC3, things might have made more sense, but I didn't. Some day after I buy a copy of World's End and I have time, I'll have to watch all three movies in a row and see if three makes more sense then.

One of the reviews I read of the movie on IMDB said that two and three had lost touch with what made the first movie such a delight and I have to agree with that. Curse of the Black Pearl told a wonderful story from start to finish with good characterization and no unnecessary scenes. POTC2 and POTC3 seem to have wandered far from the first. Both movies seemed overly enamored with the special effects to the detriment of the storytelling.

And one last ding against the movie. Lord Beckett is portrayed as evil throughout, yet when push came to shove, he went down with barely a whimper. There was great satisfaction in seeing him destroyed, but it also felt anti-climatic. When a villain is portrayed as hugely evil throughout, he needs to remain a formidable opponent during the dramatic conclusion. The argument could be made that Beckett's power came from Davy Jones and once Jones was defeated, Beckett didn't know what to do, but I think that's a bit of a cop out. Bottom line, I thought he should have been a stronger bad guy to make the victory by the heroes and heroine seem more satisfying.

After all this, you're probably thinking I hated the movie. I didn't. There were some wonderful moments as well as the things that I found problematic. As I mentioned previously, I loved the first fight scene with the monkey and the parrot. I also really liked the competition between Jack and Barbossa as both tried to be captain aboard the Pearl.

Jack was also escaping by swinging from masts again, and that was fun as well. My favorite line in the entire movie is when one of the British officers asks his companion(I think it was the evil Lord Beckett (and yes, I'm using the evil Lord Beckett appellation repeatedly on purpose)), "Do you think he plans it all out or just makes it up as he goes along?"

Now to pick apart the romance between Will and Elizabeth. :-) I found it completely believable in the original POTC and the ending was satisfying. However, in POTC2, the writers introduced the question of a triangle with Jack. In POTC3, there are clearly huge trust issues at play with Will and Elizabeth and both of them are keeping huge secrets from each other. This undermined the romance for me and I found it nearly unbelievable that without working through any of their issues, they decide to get married in the midst of a battle.

As a writer, I believe if you're going to raise issues, you darn well better resolve them before getting to the happy ending. Nothing seemed to be resolved in POTC3, and because of this, I found it difficult to believe that Elizabeth would sedately wait ten years for Will. I also found it difficult to believe that she would give up her command of her pirate vessel to wait quietly for ten years. (This is shown at the very end after all the credits have rolled.) I could see her pirating for ten years and then going to wait for Will and having a baby after that, but I had problems with how the writers did choose to portray it in POTC3.

My other problem as a writer is that if an issue is raised (such as a possible triangle among Jack, Elizabeth and Will), something needs to be done with it otherwise don't raise it at all. This one shouldn't have been raised at all because almost nothing was done with it. To my mind, it was a convenient excuse in POTC2 for Elizabeth to get close enough to Jack to betray him. It garnered one mention in POTC3 because it caused Will to question Elizabeth's motives in World's End, but it was quickly resolved and nothing else was done with it.

And my own personal bias--okay, Orlando Bloom is cute, but if I had a choice between him and Johnny Depp, there's absolutely no contest. Give me Johnny! Especially with Elizabeth fitting so well into the world of pirates, it could have been a good match. Of course, with the way the romance was set up in the first movie, it wouldn't have satisfied a lot of movie goers, but I would have loved it. :-)

A couple of final thoughts--as if I haven't said more than enough already. :-) I loved what they did with Will toward the end, when Jack helps him stab Davy Jones' heart so that Will didn't die. Will would actually make the perfect person to cross souls who died at sea to the other side because of his honor (which unfortunately was largely missing from his character throughout much of the movie, but fits with the overall characterization). I also loved that Jack was willing to do this because he'd planned to do it himself and sail the seas for all eternity, but he was willing to sacrifice this for a friend. Also fits his overall character arc very well.

I also totally loved it that Barbossa's stealing of the Pearl didn't work out for him exactly the way he'd planned. And Jack setting out in the dinghy with Barbossa's map was priceless considering the way he'd double crossed Jack before Curse of the Black Pearl.

So after all this, what's my final rating on the movie? I'm not sure. I did like it, but I didn't love it, and overall, I was largely disappointed. Still, there were a lot of wonderful moments, and I obviously feel passionately about the series of films from the way I've gone on and on. So, maybe 4 stars?

Did you ever have one of those days where you didn't feel exactly right? Not sick, just not able to really click all day. I had one of those days yesterday. I had a bunch of stuff to do, but I couldn't work up enough steam to accomplish anything. I even nearly fell asleep in at the dentist, and since I have a huge phobia, that's saying a lot!

So nothing was accomplished yesterday. Not my worksheet for the online class I'm taking, not answering email, not holiday cards. Nada. I'm hoping for a higher productivity day today.

Did I mention the dream I had after I added all my winter blankets to my bed? The one about someone sitting on me? Last night, I added a fifth blanket to my bed--a goose down comforter that my mom gave me--because I've been cold at night. I woke up about an hour after I went to bed and I felt like I was suffocating! :-)

I was warm, but I'm not certain it was worth it since it took more than an hour to fall back asleep, and even then, I had to fold back the new comforter so that it wasn't over my chest. Isn't the human mind strange? Or maybe it's just mine.

Right now I have two projects burning to get written and I can only focus on one at a time. I've kind of switched, though, to the second idea because I'm having difficulty writing the first. I'm not sure why. The only thing I can think of is the structure is wrong. I knew going in that this one was going to be a pain to try to set up right because of how the h/h meet and know each other. The prologue went well, but chapter one? I struggled with it, and while it's done, I'm not sure I'm happy with what I have.

Idea two is more tempting because it's less formed, and let's face it, new ideas are always more interesting. :-) The thing about number two is that I don't know the hero of the book and I really don't have much beyond the heroine's name and that she can kick butt. This means that I can't really write this one either, but I have been fiddling with a synopsis of sorts.

Basically, I'm not sure what to do right now and it's frustrating. Then add to this that I'm taking an online class that expects a lot of homework--most of it requiring a lot of thought--and I feel like I'm getting nothing accomplished on my writing. I think what I'm going to do today is take a notepad and work out what I can on paper for both stories. With a little luck, that will help me figure out which project to work on first and what to do with them.

It snowed again yesterday. :-( That meant my usual 25 minute commute expanded to an hour and a half. Make that a white-knuckled hour and a half. Top speed was about 30 miles an hour, but most of the drive was at 1o mph. That was a good thing because the roads were horrible. It's up early today and out the door ASAP because of the conditions.

The only thing that made the day bearable was arriving home and finding my coffee table and end tables on the door step! Yea! The problem was dragging snow covered boxes into the house. I'm hugely excited to have these tables and absolutely can't wait to fold up the step ladder (my makeshift coffee table) and put it away. I just have to get my dad to come over and assemble the new furniture. :-/

On the plant front, I talked here about the bugs in my amaryllis. The nursery suggested some stuff that mixes with water, goes into the soil, and kills them. I can't wait for that to arrive. They said the bugs are harmless, just a nuisance, but I don't like them in my house. I don't care if they are harmless. I'll also have to dose my bamboo plant with this stuff, I guess. The guy said that the bugs will make their way to other plants in the house and that's all I have.

Speaking of bugged, last night just before midnight, the phone rang. Wrong number. Not only was it a wrong number, it was someone's computer trying to connect to the internet. I've had calls like that on my voice mail when I've gotten home from work, but I never had a call in the middle of the night before. You'd think the fact that they've never connected dialing my number might encourage the person to delete it. Apparently not. Grrr.

I had to make up time at the Evil Day Job (EDJ) yesterday. I'd planned to do it today instead, but we have 3-5 inches of snow (blech!) in the forecast and I didn't want to drive home any later in bad weather than my usual time. That's one big advantage to starting so darn early--I'm usually out of the office before the freeways become horrible when it snows.

The last hour at the EDJ actually went pretty fast and there were riddles involved. :-) There's an intern sitting across the aisle from me and he had a riddle he was telling everyone. So then I told the only riddle I remember from when I was a kid and it was hilarious to watch these engineers work. I thought they'd get it quickly, but they over analyzed until they had themselves hopelessly far from the answer.

There was one more great riddle that I know I knew--once upon a time--but I couldn't remember it to save my life. Not even enough of it to do an online search. I'm going to have to think about this for a while.

In other news, my amaryllis has tiny bugs flying around it and they had to have come with the flowers because I didn't have any of these things in my house before it arrived. I tried spraying them with hairspray over the weekend, but all that did was stink up my house and I was getting worried about what it was doing to the flowers. What I'd like to do is stick the whole pot outside for a few ours. With our cold temperatures, that should kill those bugs in short order. The only problem? Amaryllis are sissy flowers and I think the cold will kill them, too.

Sorry no pictures of the snow on Sunday. There didn't seem to be any point since we only ended up with about 4.5 inches (despite the hype) and the yard doesn't look that much different than it did in the picture I posted Saturday.

Now on to the movie review. Again, there might be spoilers since this movie has been out for a while, so stop here if you don't want to know what happens.

This weekend's movie was the first Charlie's Angels starring Cameron Diaz, Lucy Liu, Drew Barrymore, and Bill Murray as Bosley.

A tycoon gets kidnapped and his president or partner hires the firm to find him. They do only there's more going on than meets the eye and it turns out Charlie is the one in danger.

Um, wow, I managed to sum up the entire movie in two sentences. I've never been that succinct before. :-)

This movie was a total action-filled blast! I enjoyed the hell out of it. Okay, so it's not Hamlet and I was able to guess what the plot twist was way before it happened. I didn't care. There were chases and parachuting and women kicking butt. It was just flat out fun! There were even a few humorous moments.

My rating: 4 stars

And so my time in hell begins.


They're predicting 6-10 inches of the stuff. Notice how I censored my language?

At least I have my amaryllis.


More pictures tomorrow when my hell on earth (aka the storm) is finished.