I guess I could mention that the hotel had feather duvets on the bed and a thick, feather mattress pad as well as 4 pillows. Very nice. Not as nice as the Westin, which has like the best hotel bed setup ever, but nicer than what I've had at the other RWA conferences I've been to. I still remember 2001 and the horrible, crippling beds we had at the Sheraton in New Orleans. They made up for that by being so close to the French Quarter. :-) I adored NO so much!
Okay, so what have I been doing since I got home? I did laundry, got the oil changed in my car, and tried to catch up on sleep. I checked almost all my windows and found no wasps or wasp nests, although I'm still worried about the kitchen windows because I can't reach the latches to unlock them. I'm hoping, though, that the wasp I tried to spray before I left for Atlanta caught enough poison to die and that she was the only wasp who liked my windows. :-)
I've also been working on one of my proposals. The prologue through chapter 2 were strong, but the third chapter was too long and needed to be shortened up considerably to keep it suspenseful. It was 19 pages when I started and now I have it down to 12. Today, I plan to read through the whole thing and fine tune it. I also need to rewrite the synopsis for the third book, and take a look at the synopses for the first two books. My goal is to have this project ready to mail to my agent on Monday.
Then I get to work on another proposal for a futuristic series. It was only going to be two books, but then Z showed up and this guy is hot. He's very quiet, very intense and very sexy. I was immediately fascinated by him. :-) Then, after brainstorming with a friend about possible ideas for Flare's story, it dawned on me that night that the plot is big enough to arc across three books and that I could do Z. Um, well, you know what I mean. ;-) Anyway, my plan is to write it so that each book stands alone, but so that the reading experience is enhanced if the series is read as a whole.
Of course, this is going to take a lot more pre-plotting than I usually do to figure out where the books begin and end and tie into each other. Normally, I have a loose idea in mind of a few scenes scattered in the book, then I do chapter goals as I write. This time, I'll have to have a much more solid idea of what's going on. I always seem to create learning experiences for myself. That's a good thing, of course, but this is going to be particularly challenging for me.
BTW, this three book series would be a spin off of Eternal Nights and the three heroes would be commandos from Wyatt's team--Flare (Wyatt's chief warrant officer), Digger (the team medic), and Z (team sniper). There's a couple of other guys on the team too, but they haven't spoken up. :-)
Before I start to write, I go looking for pictures of my characters. I found Nadia (Digger's heroine) right away. In fact, I wasn't even looking for her and there she was. I already knew that Digger looked a lot like Orlando Bloom, so I have his picture (And damn it, I hate usuing celebrity pictures for my characters, but I can't see searching online when I have such a strong candidate.) Found Sasha, (Flare's heroine) easily as well. I still can't believe I'm going to write a character named Sasha. I keep telling people that it wasn't my choice! :-) I even argued with her about it, but she was adament--her name is Sasha. I know when to surrender.
I managed to find a picture of Z, but the guy is grinning in the shot. Z doesn't grin; he's too controlled. His lips might curve, but that's about it. Still and all, I can't find a picture of this model without the grin so I'm using the shot. I also can't find a picture of Z's heroine and I don't even know her name yet, which is a problem.
The last difficulty I have is finding a picture of Flare. I stumbled across a small one of a guy that might look like him, but it's so tiny I can't be sure. This guy looks familiar to me so I'm guessing he must be fairly well-known. Of course, I spend so much time writing, that I'm not up on my pop culture icons and have no clue who he is. If I had a name, I could do a search for him and find a bigger image and find out for sure whether or not he fits what my Flare looks like.
And I've run on and on again. Oops. It wasn't my intention to talk so much about this. Sorry. Now you know, though, that my pre-writing process includes finding pictures of my h/h.
I went to Sam's Club yesterday and bought paper. I was almost out so this was a needed purchase. I also found a pack of 18 G2 pens in assorted colors. I love the G2, so I bought a pack even though I didn't need them. I use the different colors to mark up my manuscripts on various runs through. That way, I know what I've already fixed and what still needs to be done.
I think I'm finished now. I need to get this first proposal wrapped up so I can start thinking about the second one I need to work on. And gee, revisions for both my June projects should hit this month too.
Seriously, is anyone else unable to get Blogger spell check to work? It's been like a week now and I keep getting an error message. I'm a decent speller, but I do make typos and I like to have some assurance they're being caught and that means spell check--which I don't have access to right now.
