Queue the Happy Dance GIF

This weekend, I finished the final edits on Wicked Obsession, my release scheduled for January 2019! I actually would have been done earlier, but I picked up a bug and couldn't think clearly enough to go through the manuscript until Sunday.

I used to post my dancing Hobbes GIF whenever I finished a book, but sadly, I no longer have it. :-( Instead I'll share the cover of the book.

The quick little blurb I'm using is:

It was supposed to be a wedding: a little fun, some wine, the chance for Langley Canfield to forget a devastating breakup. Until the wedding turns into a kidnapping, and her brand new ex—Sergeant Ryder Pienkowski—races to the rescue.

This is my first finished book since my mom died and I'm hugely excited! My mom always read my stories and encouraged me to write. She would have been disappointed that it took me this long to finish something after she passed away, but we all have to heal in our own time.

I'll post more once I have cover copy, but for right now, join me in a happy dance, won't you please?

One Shot At a First Impression

On Monday, I saw the cover for a book being offered free on Kindle. The cover looked good. Maybe not as good as some, but it was professionally done. The title was awesome. Actually, I was ready to buy the book on the title alone, that's how cool it was. As as side whine, why can't I ever come up with perfect titles like that? But at this point, the author all but has me. I click through to Amazon to read a blurb and learn what this book with the awesome title is all about.

And there, in the first sentence of the book description, is a blatant grammar goof. Your instead of you're.

I went from I'm 99% sure I'm going to download this book to I'm 99% sure I'm not going to download this book. All I could think was that if the blurb had this error, the story was probably just as sloppy. I paged down to look at reviews, and sure enough, there's one that talked about the book being riddled with grammar and formatting errors.

The author lost me.

I'm not asking for perfect grammar. Storytelling sometimes bends the rules for the sake of the tale, but your/you're, there/they're/their, its/it's, and other such things? These are basic. A typo on Twitter or in a blog post is one thing, but not in your book description. My first thought wasn't oh, the author made a typo. My immediate reaction was OMG if she can't use your/you're correctly, the book will be a disaster. And since a reviewer commented on all the mistakes in the story, I'm guessing this wasn't only a typo.

The book page is your introduction to the reader. What's your first impression going to be? She got it partly right. She paid to have a good cover made and she'd come up with a title that was intriguing enough for me to want to buy her book, but she failed by not having someone proofread her paragraph of description.

I might be a unique case because I'm a writer myself, but I've heard a lot of readers say mistakes turn them off books and this includes books--both electronic and print--put out by NYC publishers. But as a self-publisher, the author has control over a lot of things and that includes hiring a good copy editor to go through line by line. Maybe it doesn't matter to some authors, but it should. If you're a professional, if you look at your writing as a career, as your passion, then you should want your work to be as good as you can make.

If you don't care, well, I've got authors to read who do.

The Lego Dude

Another video today. Sorry, but I have been pounding paper (a small joke or joke attempt if it fell flat) trying to get my edits done in time to mail back tomorrow. Despite spending massive time and working into the wee hours on Saturday night, I'm not going to make it. It might be a blessing since it rained here today before the temperatures plummeted below freezing. The roads here are ice covered with snow and the high temp tomorrow is supposed to be 1 degree. That's the optimistic forecast.

Anyway, all the markups are made. What I need to do now is one final read through before I package the manuscript up and send it back to NYC. Since I'm only about halfway, I don't think I'll finish tonight.

While I was marking up, though, I had the national news on the TV Friday night and in the Assignment America segment, they interviewed this guy who makes works of art out of Legos! It was incredibly cool and I was amazed. His work is showing in museums and it's incredible. As someone who could barely make the most unimaginative things with the toy, I was impressed. I hoped some of you might be interested, too.

Culture Talk

I found out yesterday that the Pompeii exhibit at the Science Museum of Minnesota is open. I'd heard this was coming, but I was on deadline for In Twilight's Shadow and I completely forgot about it until I saw the article in the paper yesterday.

There was some other Pompeii exhibit that went through Chicago like a year or two ago. I heard about it after the fact, though, and hadn't gotten the chance to drive down to see it. I was disappointed by that because it sounded really interesting, but driving to St. Paul is much better than going to Chicago. :-) So it's all working out just fine. I'll be waiting to go until after the kids are back in school. :-) I'm thinking after Labor Day sometime.

I also discovered yesterday that the Guthrie Theater is doing a production of 1776. That's one of my favorite musicals ever! I even own the movie on DVD as well as having a couple of copies on VHS tape.

The Guthrie used to send me a mailing every year to let me know what shows are playing for the season, but I didn't get one this time around. :-( And when I went to check ticket availability on the theater website, all that dates I wanted to attend were marked "limited." :-( Guess I won't get to see 1776 live. That's a huge disappointment.

I found out about 1776 because the Guthrie Theater is on MySpace and sent out a bulletin. Now that's modern theater!

Revisions continue and I think they're going well enough. I'm actually thinking I might, just might, end up with enough time to do a straight read through for nitpicky smoothing stuff. I'm keeping my fingers crossed. I have one more big, time consuming issue to tackle, and if that ends up being more difficult than I anticipate, that extra time might disappear.

Edits Are Done!

Edits are done! Hurrah! And all bundled up and ready to go to Fed Ex on lunch today. I was right, I ran out of time to do a spreadsheet, darn it. You know, it's funny. One of my engineers (or I guess I should say one of my former engineers since she's in a different department now) is getting married in the fall and she's using spreadsheets. I've been giving her crap about that, but I suddenly went, Oops! Guess I like my spreadsheets too. Of course, I'm not going to tell her that, and I'll keep teasing her, because that's what I do with engineers. :-)

Since I didn't have time to type up everything the way I wanted, I settled for hitting the highlights. I marked some of them with post-it notes, and if it was something that I disagreed with the copy editor about, I did a quick table in my word processing program and answered the query, explaining why I didn't make any changes. Like when the query for page 88 or something like that said, "tell us earlier how long he's been trapped." I replied, it says on page 53 and quoted it. There wasn't too much. I mostly just went okay and fixed it. :-)

Unfortunately, I didn't finish until after 9pm, and as I was making a last email check, I hear this really loud bang out on my deck. Of course, I immediately became wide awake and try to decide which phone to make a run for if someone is trying to break in. And I remind myself, make sure to unplug the phone cord from the laptop to disconnect before you run. There was no other noise and I finally worked up enough courage to flip on the outside light and actually check it out. Nothing.

I wasn't quite brave enough, though, to check out the basement, and when I went to bed, I was pretty tense, thinking a criminal was lying in wait for me to sleep, then he'd spring. Yes, writers have overactive imaginations. It helps when we're telling our stories, but it absolutely makes real life an adventure at times--even if it's only in our own minds. :-) Anyway, I'm darn tired today after 3 nights without enough sleep and no matter what, I'm going to bed early tonight.

I had some horrible news in email this morning--my Waldenbooks store is closing! NO!!!! This store has always been fabulous, not only to me as an author, but as a book buyer too. I can't believe they're closing this store again. They closed them once before back in the mid-90s and then reopened them again. Which means the only two bookstores I have in my area now are a huge Borders and a huge Barnes & Noble. I like my smaller Waldenbooks so much more. If you have a favorite bookstore, a place where people know your name when you come in, imagine them closing it. I'm heartbroken.

Monday Night's Chat

Last night was a Writerspace chat for January books from Leisure/Love Spell. The entire Crimson City team showed up. Yea! And so did many other authors. It was fun, but I have dial up and I think that's why I'd have no messages for a while and then I'd get like almost a full screen full. So then I'd be scrolling madly, trying to read the comments before another batch of messages came in and pushed the other ones off the screen and trying to answer notes. :-) I think I probably missed some stuff I wanted to answer.

Anyway, I was wound up by the time I left chat and I couldn't fall asleep, even though I had like almost no sleep on Sunday night. Right now, I'm working with my eyes slitted open and feeling gritty. I thought about taking a vacation day. I could sleep in and then get up again and work on packaging my edits, but no, I can't do that. The builder--or a representative of the builder--is coming out to fix the closet door my dad yanked off the pivots. Sigh. I should tell the story of us trying to fix the thing yesterday afternoon, but I'm too tired to do it justice. Suffice to say that we were both getting frustrated and were unable to successfully complete our mission.

Edits are done and marked up and now all I need to do is put the changes into my document and do my spreadsheet. The only thing is that I don't know if I'm going to have time to do the kind of spreadsheet I want to do with everything marked. (I know, I know, compulsive. I've learned to live with it.) Not if I want to get to bed early. And I really, really do. I guess I'll see how it goes and maybe only hit the highlights or something.

Oops! I gotta end here. It's nearly 5am and that means time to get ready for the EDJ.

Mostly About Edits

Yesterday was a very productive day. I finished the writing part of my copy edits and began marking up the manuscript. The two scenes that I reworked ended up being a lot easier to take care of than I expected. I'd thought I was going to need to trash large portions and do massive writing, but it ended up that all I needed to do was change a few sentences here and there and it took care of things. Yea!

Markups are always time consuming, but even those were going along quite well. Of course, I'll include a spreadsheet of the changes I made. I'm a teensy bit compulsive--what can I say? And I'll probably type up a response to the copy edit query sheet even if it's just to say "okay." Besides, I want to explain why I didn't make a few of the changes.

Like toe-to-toe. That got changed to head-to-head. Well, first off, I don't like head-to-head. I don't know why, but I can't recall ever writing it and I don't know if I ever will. I never say never because the next thing you know, I'll have a character who uses that phrase, but right now, I wouldn't write it. Seeing it in my book grates on me. Again, I don't know why. It's a stupid reaction, but I also had it when one of my editors changed "butt" to "buttocks." I told him he could use any other word and I wouldn't object, but that I couldn't stand buttocks. :-)

The other reason I want to keep toe-to-toe is I meant toe-to-toe in most of the cases. Ryne, my heroine, literally gets in the hero's space when he gets her het up--and Deke riles her up a lot! In the spots where I didn't mean toe-to-toe, I reworded it to something else other than head-to-head. I think I used "squared off."

It's funny, there are some authors that will fight for every comma, that will be outraged if an editor changes a word in their story. I'm not like that. I don't think I've ever argued about punctuation (even when I'm right, although I will change it back to the way I had it. Like the comma comes before "and" in a clause, dang it. I cringe when I see that in my stories because I know better) and I rarely argue word changes unless it's changed my meaning or it's a word I don't like or wouldn't use.

And I finished The War of Art by Steven Pressfield yesterday and I can't recommend this book highly enough. I think there's something in there for everyone who wants to achieve a dream, but it's for sure good for anyone interested in something creative--especially writers. I honestly can't imagine any writer who wouldn't take away something to help them out of this book. I wish someone had told me about it the day it came out!

Anyway, I emailed the author and told him how much I loved his book. I never used to do this, BTW. Before I sold, I never even thought about it, and even if I had, I would have figured the author received so much fan mail that one more would be a burden. Or that they were so busy, a note would be a burden. I have to tell you, I found out differently. Fan mail is the best thing ever. It doesn't matter how busy I am or how swamped and overwhelmed I feel at that particular moment, answering fan mail is a joy. So I vowed that whenever I read a book I liked, I was going to let the author know about it. Of course, I haven't had time to read much in the last few years.

After I sent the note, my first thought was, OMG, I just emailed the bestselling author of The Legend of Bagger Vance; what was I thinking? He must get tons of fan mail. But you know what? Within a few hours, I had a fantastic note back from him. I read it a few times. I guess now I understand why readers are in awe when an author answers them because that's how I felt. :-)

POV Difficulties

I finished all my GH entries now and sent the scores in. Actually, the RWA (Romance Writers of America) website lets you do the scores online now which was way cool. The new design makes it difficult to find anything, but it does have it's pluses like inputting scores online and paying for Bookscan right on the site.

Of course, with that off my plate, RWA sent me an email yesterday telling me my Rita books were on the way. Gah! I was really hoping they wouldn't need to use me as a judge. No such luck, I guess. Now I just have to hope that I have a small number of entries. The last time I was used, I had to read 9 thick books. Once upon a time, back before I committed myself to writing, I used to read a book a day. Those days are long gone and I'll be pushing to get everything in on time.

Speaking of on time, I was hoping to do one of my edits yesterday and just leave the two scenes I want to change for the weekend. Unfortunately, that didn't happen. I have a semi-difficult edit (To make the hero more disoriented) and POV issues that were going to make it a problem to do this. I read through the three scenes I thought would be possible to include some of this, and sure enough, nothing jumped out at me as being an obvious spot to add any of this. That meant I needed to read through a second time, and this go-round, I looked for less noticeable places to slide stuff in. I have a list of potentials now, and I'll work on that today. I also woke up this morning with another scene that has potential to add some stuff. In fact, it might be the better option in Deke's POV.

Anyway, Deke is used to thinking on his feet to situations where he might not necessarily know what's going on--at least not totally. After all, he was a cop and he ran into stuff like that all the time. He's also really good at concealing any kind of weakness, and feeling confused and disoriented would definitely fall into that category for him. He'd never make himself vulnerable like that to a stranger and he just met the heroine. Since two of the three scenes where I could add this stuff are in her POV, it makes it damn hard. By the time I'm in his head, he's out to rile Ryne up and he's not really thinking about his circumstances. See where my problem is?

Anyway, I think the scene that came to me this morning as a possibility will work better than the one where he's pushing Ryne since Deke's mood/tone is all wrong for disorientation/fear or whatever.

Edits and Blogging

I only have three more items to work on for my edits. Only. The three spots are the biggest of everything. I was able to solve/handle all of the rest with no more than a paragraph or a sentence or two here and there. The three remaining things are bigger.

One is Deke being dazed and disoriented. I'm still mulling this one over because there's some POV and characterization concerns that I have. The other two scenes are ones I've decided to rewrite--with my editor's permission. :-) I'd like to finish item one tonight, if I can figure out how the heck to handle it and then tackle the two scenes over the weekend.

I also need to work on my dedication. These are harder to write than they appear. Still, if everything goes according to plan, I should be done with edits early and be able to get back to the book from hell, AKA the WIP.

Yesterday, I read another blog that again tells me that I blog wrong. What I'm supposed to do is pick a topic and never, ever stray from it. It's supposed to fit my brand and be entertaining. I should never write a word here that doesn't fit my topic, tone and brand. Oops!

After being mildly depressed because I just can't blog the way I keep hearing I should be doing it, I've decided that I'm not going to worry about it. Maybe I'll never get a thousand hits a day of people dying to see my on-topic and fascinating daily post, but whatever. If I had to do that all the time, I'd rarely blog at all--I know myself--besides, that would take a lot of work and take time I can't afford away from actually writing my books. What I do here is stream of consciousness, daily diary kind of stuff. If I wasn't published and I was keeping a blog, it would be just like this. I talk about what's on my mind or what happened the day before or sometimes about the writing or some aspect of what I have to do after a book is written and before it hits the shelves.

I caught a little bit of President Ford's funeral yesterday when I got home from work. It wasn't something I'd set out to watch, but I had the television on CNN, and when I flipped it on, there it was. I felt bad for his wife because she appeared exhausted and she had to endure a public spectacle of her grief. There were several points where the camera zoomed in on her face and I found that intrusive. Some things should be private.

Shards of Crimson Is Out!

Shards of Crimson is out today! This is an anthology set in Crimson City with four new stories by Liz Maverick, Carolyn Jewel, Jade Lee and Me.

My story is Dark Awakening and the hero and heroine are Kimi Noguchi and Nicodemus. Both were mentioned in Through a Crimson Veil although neither physically appeared. Kimi is being hunted by a dark demon, and with Mika and Conor out of town, she calls on Nic to protect her. Nic's been avoiding Kimi for her own good, but now that she's summoned him, all bets are off.

Yesterday, despite the 3:30am wakeup call, was a stellar day! Because it was a holiday for most people, the traffic was nearly non-existent which made the commute in okay. Yeah, the side streets were horrible and so was the highway, but the freeway was in decent shape. I got like the best parking spot at work since my union was the only one required to work and the office was empty. No one else was there. One of my engineers did show up around 10, but he stayed for less than an hour and he's nice and quiet, and because I was able to concentrate, I got a ton of work done.

I was able to wear weekend clothes, which means extra casual and the commute home was fabulous! I couldn't believe how light the traffic was. If only the freeway was like that every day, I wouldn't hate driving so much. :-)

Worked on my edits some more. I'm still mulling over a comment about Deke and his reaction to his circumstances. Part of my problem is the scene where he might be off-balance is in Ryne's POV and Deke isn't going to admit to her--or display in any way she'd notice--that he's rattled. It's displaying a weakness and he doesn't know her, so he wouldn't do that. The next chapter is in his POV, but by then he's reached a few conclusions and he's not shaken up any longer--if he ever was.

POV can be a bitch. On the one hand, I understand why Deke should be rattled, but he's too used to thinking on his feet to display this, and short of headhopping, his reactions are going to seem to be calm. On the other hand, yeah, you'd think he would be freaked out. :-) It's this same thinking on his feet quality that makes him a guy who takes things as they come and doesn't dwell on them or worry too much about what he can't change. He just deals with what is. And by the time I'm in his head, that's where he's at. So I'm mulling for now.