Write On

The vampire short story is finished--more or less--and I think it turned out okay. I had fun with the story, liked the characters, and have been assured by my writing buddy that it's "totally bitchin'." :-) That was a huge relief since this is a new length for me and I felt at sea sometimes. The thing that kind of amazes me is that I somehow managed to tell a whole story in 7800 words. I was planning to just do a peek in to their lives sort of thing, which is what others seem to do with this length, but I just wrote without any real plan and had a beginning, middle, and end. I really didn't expect that, but I'll take it. And if I can ever come up with a title that isn't a lame play on words, it'll all be good.

Now I need to make the transition back into my full-length book and I'm not finding that easy to do. I reread the last chapter I'd written, but I need to sit down and come up with chapter and/or scene goals. I'm hoping that will get my head back into Kel's story and help me focus.

The test print of Edge of Dawn (which comes out June 30th) has been proofread and the pages that need correction will be mailed back today. I only had time to read through it once and that makes me uneasy--I usually read through them three times--but my mom read through it twice for me and found a few things that I never saw.

It's pretty nice to have my writing To Do List whittled down to 1 thing. Granted, it's the biggest item of them all, but having other projects like proofreading and the short story added to my stress because they were kind of hanging there like blades from guillotines. :-) I still have too much to do and not enough time to do it in and I've been scarce online lately, but I'll manage. Somehow.

Galley Time

My galleys arrived yesterday for Edge of Dawn. This is a test copy of the book to make sure there weren't any mistakes as the story was setup to be printed. It's the last step I'm involved with before Edge of Dawn becomes a real bound book and it's my final chance to make any changes before the book goes to press.

I both like and dislike galleys. I like them because I want to catch any errors--either mine or the printer's--before it goes to press. I'm a perfectionist and nothing makes me crazier than mistakes.

I dislike them because I'm a perfectionist and I want to keep fixing and fixing and that's not possible at the galley stage. Every change that isn't a printer error costs money and so I can't change everything I might want to change. I have to pick which ones are most important to me and live with the rest.

The other problem with galleys is reading them. I get caught up in the story and forget that I'm supposed to be proofreading, not visiting with my hero and heroine. And because I'm so familiar with the story, I'll mentally see words that are missing or eliminate words that shouldn't be there. That's why I enlisted my mom a few books ago to read the page proofs, too. This is the first time she's seen the story so she'll notice if things are missing and/or added.

Today, I began reading through the galleys and I've already gotten lost a few times in Logan and Shona's story. I really like these two and they're both so much easier than the characters in the book I'm writing now. It's Kel's book (Logan's brother--you'll meet him in Edge of Dawn if you read it) and he's had a rough stretch in his life and his heroine has as well. Logan and Shona? Well, you know I always torture my characters, but neither one of them has any really heavy baggage and their story was such a nice break for me between Creed's book (In Twilight's Shadow) and Kel's book (still officially untitled) that I'm enjoying rereading it.

Anyway, must get back to galleys. I am hugely busy with a short story and a book both due on March 1st. I need to finish this latest job and get it out the door.

Didn't Make It

I fell short of having the new website ready to load. I have two more books to do pages for and some links to set up yet; I was this close. If only I didn't have to go to the Evil Day Job (EDJ) today and I could stay home and finish this morning, but I do, so that means needing to wrap up this website tonight. Tomorrow begins the onslaught of the New Book.

So speaking of books, how did the galleys go? I'm sure you're all wondering, right? I made 12 corrections. That's an incredibly small amount. The part that's scary is that 11 of those changes are to fix my stuff, only 1 change is for an extra word.

My mistakes include the point of view debacle where in the middle of my hero's POV, I have a paragraph from the heroine's POV. Why? Because during copy edits I needed to add the paragraph for explanation, thought I was in the heroine's head and didn't double check.

My other lulu of an error was having two full moons in approximately a two week period. I almost missed that, but as I made my last read through on Friday at the EDJ, I thought, "hmm, didn't I mention the full moon once before?" A quick little search of my WordPerfect document when I arrived home showed that sure enough, this was the second full moon in the book. I changed the first reference to starlight because I needed the moon more in the second scene later in the book.

Everything else was mostly nitpicky stuff.

Last Friday night, I go to make my final changes to the galley, and I decide I need to refresh my memory, so I look for the cover letter with the instructions on how they want the markups handled. Um, I couldn't find them. Anywhere. I think in my cleaning frenzy that I mistook the galley letter for the letter that came with the copy edits and shredded it thinking I was done with it. I was left with my memory of what I did the last time I had galleys for Tor. Hopefully, they didn't change their process.

Too Clean

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....

Holiday Blooms

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.

Winter Fog

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.

Planet Earth

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.

Texas Gold and Ten Down

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.

Six Down, Nineteen To Go

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.

Surprise "Gifts"

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. :-)

Happy St. Patrick's Day!

I'm supposed to get my hair cut this morning. I think. I remember making an appointment and getting a card with the date and time on it from my stylist. I also remember throwing it in my purse. Sometime last month, I thought, you know, I should really mark this on my calendar so I don't forget. But when I dug in my purse, I found a handful of cards from my stylist with appointments written on them. I was able to throw away the one that had a date from the fall, but I'm not sure the one for March 17th is the right one. I probably should have called and confirmed, right? Only I've been so busy this week, that I never even thought of it until this morning and it's too late now. If I'm wrong, I can just turn around and go home again, so not too big a deal.

Of course, I'm behind again. I'd hoped to be showered by now, but I just finished coffee. It's that time travel thing. I can't figure out where the last hour has gone, but then what else is new? This is like the story of my life.

I realized yesterday at work that I'd made an incorrect correction on my galleys, and of course, they were all packaged up at home, ready for my dad to pick up and bring to the post office. I didn't want to waste time opening it, correcting it, resealing it and then having to run back to the PO--all after work on a Friday afternoon, so I emailed the info. It was a quote from a review and I had the attribution wrong. So many of these sites have similar names and I got confused.

I finished the project I was working on at the EDJ--at least until my maintenance specialist comes in and looks at it on Monday. I figure I'll be tweaking stuff for him, but the big lifting is done. Metaphorically speaking.

Happy St. Patrick's Day!

Pedal to the Metal

I finished my second read-through of the galleys yesterday, did my spreadsheet and packaged it all up to go back to NYC. BTW, I was thrilled because my spreadsheet is only about a page and a half and it's setup landscape, so that means even fewer rows of corrections since the paper is on its side, not up and down. Hopefully, whatever I (or my mom) didn't catch, the publisher's proofreader did. I have this thing about perfectionism and I hate missing mistakes in the galleys.

Life has been absolutely, pedal-to-the-metal hectic for me this week. Y'all have heard about the galleys and that I had to have them ready to mail today, but the EDJ (Evil Day Job) has been totally crazy too. I usually try to catch up on a few emails while I'm there, but I haven't had time! One of my specialists has a huge project that he needs first thing Monday morning and I've been working nonstop on that all week.

Take yesterday. I thought I was winding up on the project. Everything had been proofread, the formatting fixed and all I had left to do is add a PDF to the end of the report. I transform the PDF into a TIFF file, insert it into the document and breeze through one last time. Only it turned out not to be one last time. The PDF/TIFF document didn't scan well. Of the 5 pages, only 2 were readable. And 1 of those had parts of it highlighted which had the same effect as dragging a black magic marker over the words. Clearly, I needed to replace this version with a clean version.

My challenges on this endeavor? My maintenance specialist was on vacation and won't be back until Monday, so I clearly can't ask him for the article. The magazine was dated Jan-Mar 1996. That's right. The magazine was 10 years old.

An online search turned up nothing useful, but I did figure out that "Airliner" magazine was a Boeing publication. I headed to the Boeing website, but couldn't find anything. To shorten the story considerably, I finally found a hard copy of the issue on another floor, tried to scan it in, ran into huge problems, and settled for copying it and getting the gray scale to work so everything was readable. But when I tried to scan it in again, 1 of the 5 pages remained illegible. I ended up scanning it in full color and printing it on a color printer. It took me almost the entire day to get these 5 pages in and it involved something like three trips to another floor.

So I didn't have even five minutes to answer email or even read my work email. Today, things should calm down. I hope. And with galleys done, I can get back to work on writing the WIP.

You know, I exhausted myself just reading my litany. :-) Time for another day of fun and frolic at the EDJ.

Back Cover Copy

I realized late yesterday that after talking about my back cover copy for In the Midnight Hour I didn't post it. I meant to. Blame my lapse on lack of sleep. :-)

Ryne is a magical troubleshooter, sworn to protect the innocent from being harmed by magic--and she's been chasing Anise, her former mentor, for six years.

Deke is a private investigator who knows something key to defeating Anise. But Anise cast a dark spell over him, and even though Ryne has managed to temporarily lift the curse, Deke can't remember what it is that he knows.

Ryne has sworn to never get involved with a human, but Deke is sexy, charming, brave and irresistible--and as Ryne and Deke are pulled further into Anise's evil schemes, it's harder and harder for Ryne to resist the attraction.

But dark magic has its own attraction, and in order to defeat Anise and lift Deke's curse permanently, Ryne will have to risk following in Anise's footsteps and succumbing to the lure of the darkness...

The font/lettering they used for the copy (and actually for my name and title, too), give the idea that the book is humorous. It's not. While Deke is a smart ass and there are some funny moments from that, this is probably the darkest book I've written. I hope people who pick it up without knowing anything about it aren't expecting a romp because they'll be disappointed.

I don't know. When I filled out my art facts sheet, I mentioned that the tone of the book was dark. That's why this font just blows me away. It just screams fun. I'm probably worrying about nothing. I'm sure the copy makes it clear this isn't a light-hearted, humorous paranormal. Right?

I have to finish the page proofs for Midnight Hour tonight and have them packaged up and ready to mail back tomorrow. I thought I had so much time to get this done, but the time disappeared before I realized it. I didn't finish my second read-through yet, although I'm not finding much, and my mom read through it twice for me.

That reminds me. On one of the author loops I'm on, another author talked about hiring someone to go through her galleys for her. At first, I thought what a great idea, but I realized that would never work for me. I find things that no one else could find because they don't know what I'm trying to say. It could be something that shades the nuance of the sentence. Like in Ravyn's Flight, I had a sentence that said "poke at her." As in baiting her. When I received my galleys, it said, "poke fun at her." Someone else reading it would think that sentence was fine, but I knew it totally changed the meaning of what I was trying to say. (BTW, it didn't get fixed and the book was published with "poke fun at her." Sigh.)

Trembling Chins and Wimpy Plants

My mom finished reading through the galleys for In the Midnight Hour and she found lots of stuff that I missed. The page proofs are still clean compared to other books that I've had, but wow, I'm glad I asked her to read through them for me. She found missing words and wrong words, like: She chin trembled. HER chin trembled. Gah! How did I miss that one? Since she did so much better than I did, I asked if she'd mind doing a second read-through.

I was worried yesterday that I was going to need to cut most of what I wrote on Tuesday, but it turned out that I only needed to lose about 5 or 6 sentences and it took care of the problem I had. Now I'm wondering whether I should have revealed some information about the bad guy in this chapter or if I should wait a little longer. I'll read through it today and try to figure that out.

These characters or the book, I'm not sure which, continues to be nocturnal. In other words, I get the most accomplished later in the evening when I should be winding down and getting ready for bed. I hate this. I lived through it with Through a Crimson Veil, but my demon children were nocturnal creatures and most of their story happened at night. Maia and Creed have no excuses. I'm just tired. Sigh.

In non-writing stuff, I'm drooling over these exotic flowers QVC has been selling. I don't like the regular, boring flowers that most people have, and I'm really attracted to these less ordinary plants. Problem? They're borderline or unable to be grown in Minnesota. Or in the case of one plant, they're hardy to zero, which means if your temperature will go below that, you need to bring the plant indoors. The thing is that I just want to plant them and forget them. I do not want to wrestle a planter into my house.

I am going to try this cute little bamboo plant, though, indoors. My sink is in the corner with two windows so I'm going to put it there. These plants are supposed to be tough. Let's see if it can withstand the plant assassin (me!).

My Magical Society

I finished my first read through of the galleys for In the Midnight Hour. I'm not sure I've ever had a set of page proofs that were this clean before. Wow! I might not even have to do a spreadsheet. =8-O Of course, maybe I will anyway because I'm compulsive that way.

I'm taking an online class about Scottish History this month. Don't worry, I have no plans to write a historical and I doubt I ever will. But my magical society from Midnight Hour and the book I'm working on now has its ties back to Scotland and I figured it might be nice to know more about the history of this country. What I find extraordinarily odd is how this all happened.

I'm talking with Ryne, the heroine in Midnight Hour, and she's giving him incredible amounts of information on her people. I've mentioned how my characters will say things like: "my name starts with an R" and then have to page through baby name books. The same thing happened to me with the society's name. It starts with a G. Sigh. At least this time, I also was told it was Gaelic. To me, Gaelic is Irish, so I do a search for a Gaelic dictionary, get a lot of hits and find an Irish Gaelic one. I go through all the G's and nothing is right. I'm not quite sure why I tried the Scots Gaelic dictionary next, but I did and there it was: Gineal: race, breed, offspring.

I ended up buying two Scots Gaelic dictionaries and there is a smattering of words in Midnight Hour. Luckily, I'm writing paranormal romance, and even more fortunate than that, my characters speak Canan, not Gaelic. And their language just borrowed from Gaelic so it's "bastardized." :-) My world. My rules.

Anyway, I'm reaching a point where I'm going to have to start putting up information on Midnight Hour. I'm shooting for April 1 for an excerpt, but I might hold off till May. We'll see how it all goes. I have a lot of work left to do on the book from hell and I'm trying not to get too distracted with other stuff. Bad enough that I have to gear up promotion for Midnight Hour now and that's always time consuming.

The Lion's Roar

What is that old saying? Something like: If March comes in like a lion, it'll go out like a lamb? What's fiercer than a lion? Because according to all the weather reports, that's what I'll be dealing with here today. It started snowing about 6pm last night and it's not supposed to stop until tomorrow. Depending on how much rain is mixed in with the snow, we could have anywhere from 10-20 inches. Gah! This is a really long way of saying that I have to be brief this morning and not spend a lot of time thinking about what I want to say because I need to leave early. (I heard, though, that the commute home will be the worst we've had in years. Oh, joy.)

I've been reading through the galley for In the Midnight Hour the last couple of days and it's been amazingly clean so far. That's both a blessing and a curse. A blessing because it's nice that it's so clean. A curse because when I don't find anything I find myself falling into the story and forget that I'm supposed to be watching carefully for mistakes. I hope my mom does a better job at focusing. Of course, I forgot to warn her that I used some Gaelic words and she was trying to check the spelling in an English dictionary. Oops!

I made a list of promo things I'd like to do for Midnight Hour and starting doing some pricing. When I added up the items I had dollar figures on, I was 10% over my budget and I hadn't even checked on the cost of doing teaser booklets yet or advertising on this website I like for fiction. So, I have to make some choices and they're not necessarily easy ones. I also need to get off the stick and email some people to find out what's going on and to let them know what I plan to do. I don't know where I'm going to find the time to do this since these are notes that will take me a while to compose. I'm a slow writer--even when it comes to things like emails and blog posts. And the more businesslike I need to be, the longer it takes me to write. I'm the queen of casual, including with the written word.

Falling Into the Story

My galleys for In the Midnight Hour arrived yesterday. The galleys are test printing of the book that need to be proofed for accuracy. I swore to myself that I wasn't going to read them last night. I put them in my bag to take to the EDJ (Evil Day Job) and did other stuff last night. But at 9pm, when I should have been on my way to bed, I caved. I couldn't help myself.

Part of it is that this is probably my favorite stage in the process. All the hard work is done, and while proofing takes a lot of concentration, it's all left-brained stuff. Besides, this is when it really feels like a book and not just one of my stories. I wonder if other published authors feel this way or if it's just me? I'm the one who walked around with my first book for two weeks after it came out because I couldn't believe it was real.

The other part of it is that I really like this book and these characters. I love all my stories and all my heroes and heroines, of course, but Ryne and Deke just a tad more than usual right now. Maybe it's because it took me so long to sell this story and I wrote two others in the meantime. I'd look out the window at the EDJ, see the cemetery where the opening chapter takes place, and long to write this book. Of course, I've been asked which book is my favorite and my answer always is the last one that I've finished. It's fresh in my mind, and like I said earlier, the hard work is done.

Whatever the reason, though, I caved in and picked up the galleys last night. I just wanted to check out one of the quotes the publisher used on the opening page, since I'd just checked out the source and I wanted to make sure it was right. And since I had the galley out, I thought I'd check out a couple of my favorite spots. Just real quickly.

I ended up reading pretty much the entire thing. At least all the character stuff. I did skip the action scenes. My weakness is the h/h and how they interact with each other. That's my absolute favorite part of writing. And I love how Ryne and Deke do it. They're just so, well, cute together. (And I say that about all my h/h, but then they always seem to fit each other perfectly. I figure I can say that since they come in as fully formed people and I have nothing to do with it.)

So it was after midnight when I put the galley back in my tote bag and I had to get up this morning at 4am. I'm dying here and it isn't helping any to remind myself it was self-inflicted.

It also doesn't help to think that if I was going to stay up that late, there were a million other more pressing things I should have been doing. Starting with writing the WIP and ending with the billion and a half emails and MySpace messages I need to reply to and/or write. Gah! I've reached the point where I whimper when I see I have new notes because it's just overwhelming right now.