Dreaming in Daylight

Life with Alzheimery parents

2011-11-12T19:42:00.001-06:00

Alzheimer's is a disease that continues to progress. And you just have to continue to cope.

It's been almost a year since Daddy had to go to the nursing home, closer to a year and a half since he was told he needed to stop driving. Mama's now failed her driving test. And she's just as stubborn about refusing to stop. She completely missed a stop sign and a yield sign, couldn't remember passing a school-zone sign...but she doesn't remember any of it now, though she acknowledged missing them at the time. So, we will have to take away her car and keys. Sigh.

And, at the nursing home, Daddy has taken it upon himself to become the lunchroom police. One of the little old men there will shout out occasionally. And when he shouted the other day, Daddy got up from his table, went over and bapped him on the head with his spoon. (sigh)

When the staff remonstrated with him, he said "Well, he shouldn't have yelled like that." Totally justified in his own mind for smacking the poor old guy. So, we're going to have to speak to Daddy--not that it will make much difference, because he won't remember us saying anything, and he will still think he was in the right. The doctor will be spoken to--maybe up some of his medicine, and we're probably going to have to start looking into dedicated Alzheimer's facilities. He doesn't wander, but he's bapping the other residents. At least it was with a spoon...

A good week

2011-11-10T14:39:00.001-06:00

Harvest Moon Regatta off Galveston Island

So far, anyway, and I don't have any reason to think it won't go on being good. :)

I got my first review for Knight in Black Leather. It's lovely, (5 stars!) and Christine Klocek-Lim is my new best friend. :) Go read it. :) (Yes, I am over-using the smiley face emoticon.) But it is a really nice review. See?

"I laughed out loud during the first chapter. I sighed in happiness by the seventh and bit my lip in dismay by the twenty-third (I also might have cried a little, but I refuse to get into that)."

I've been writing, but since I fell down on the job while I was out of town, and let myself continue to fall for a few more days, I'm only on Day 2 again. (Sigh)

Took Dolly the princess dog out for a walk yesterday, and she was a little pickle-dog this time. There were two doggies down playing on the beach, off-leash with their people, and it was all I could do to keep her from jumping off the seawall to go play with them. And that made her want to play with everybody else she saw. She's five years old. Aren't doggies supposed to slow down a little when they get that old? She dragged me across the street to wiggle at the neighbor. Pit bulls are strong doggies. And today, she's been a real whiny-baby, wanting me to come out and sit with her or play with her, or something.

I've been trying out some new recipes--a Mexican skillet chicken that's made like fried rice, only with enchilada sauce rather than soy sauce. Good stuff. And I made some marsala pork chops that were to die for.

I only made a couple of alterations in the recipe--you're supposed to bread them in bread crumbs, but since the fella's gluten-free, and I didn't feel like crushing any Crispix or corn flakes, I just didn't bread them. And I had a LOT of pork chops (or fork chops, as they're generally known in our house, because that's what one of the boys called them when he was little). Recipe called for 4 chops. I had 8 or 10. Hey, it worked. And I had some fresh mushrooms, so I sliced them up and threw them in the sauce. And I was probably a tad generous with the marsala wine. (The recipe called for one measly little tablespoon of marsala. A half cup of white wine (I used chardonnay), but only a tablespoon of marsala!) But when I got done--oh, it was SO good. My knees were all swoony.

Basically, you just fry up the fork chops, take them out, then saute a big mess of thin-sliced onion (with mushrooms if you want), add in a bunch of pressed/minced garlic, and when the onions are soft, throw in the wines and cook it down to almost nothing, then add in half a stick of butter. (No wonder it's so good!) But you don't need much with each pork chop.

Yes, I have been writing. This is the pantsiest thing I've written in a long time (meaning I didn't really have my world-building done when I started it, and didn't really know where I was going with it), but I'm discovering a lot of stuff now, near the end. Meaning I'll have some things to fix when I start putting it in the computer. But that's for later.

My book's gone live!

2011-11-02T14:16:00.000-06:00

I have been busy, and I'm getting things done. I feel so accomplished today, and all because I baked a cake last night. (Well, sort of) But we'll come back to the cake.

The big news is that I have taken the plunge into the e-pub business. My first Gail Dayton book has gone live both at Kindle and Smashwords, and as soon as I get a move on, I'll have it up at Barnes & Noble.

Knight in Black Leather is the book that got me an agent. She and I both loved it, a bunch of New York editors said they loved it--but didn't know how to sell it. This is a contemporary romance. I wrote it before I took the plunge into fantasy and steampunk. I love my fantasy stories, but I also love me some contemporary romance. It's an older-woman-younger-man story, there's some suspense, some family conflict, secrets, angst, old wounds--all sorts of good stuff. And it's set in Pittsburgh. (The one in Pennsylvania, not the one in East Texas... That one doesn't have an H after the G.) Here's the cover copy:

A chancemeeting on the dark winter streets of Pittsburgh brings widow Marilyn Ballardface to face with streetwise young biker Eli Court when he scares off a trio ofwannabe gangsters. Later, she returns the favor, rescuing him from a beating,and their encounter becomes a chance to grow and heal from the pain scarringboth their lives.

Marilyn'sfamily disapproves of the relationship because of Eli's disreputable past, aswell as their age difference. That past life--years spent in the deepestcesspools of the city--reaches out to pull Eli back into its depths, and hefears dragging Marilyn down with him. But she refuses to let him face his pastenemies alone, even when his vow to protect a young boy exposes the still-openwounds of her heart, and puts them all in danger. Can they build a new lifetogether, or will those long-denied secrets pull them under?

I hope y'all will give it a look-see. The first 2 chapters or so are up for y'all to sample.

Now I can talk about the cake. It's been forever since I actually baked a cake that didn't come out of a box. The Mexican Chocolate Pound Cake from one of this year's issues of Southern Living has been tempting me for a while, but I don't usually bake, because I'm pretty much the only one who eats the stuff I bake (the fella can't eat it, if it has flour in it, and the boy isn't big on sweets), and I can't afford it. But I really wanted to try this cake, because, hey--it's Mexican Chocolate. And since I'm going up to check on the parents this week, I can take a big hunk of cake with me to share with them and not eat most (all) of it myself--I baked the cake. (The picture is not MY cake, but it's the same recipe...)

The batter was like tasting chocolate clouds. The cake cooked in exactly the time the recipe said it would (this oven runs a little cool), AND it came out of the Bundt pan! I have been fighting with that pan since it was new, 30-mumble years ago when it was a wedding present. (35? Yeah, I think that's right.) It does not often let go of cakes. It likes to keep back a good half of the cake, most of the time, and force you to scrape it out in pieces. But this one came out! Score!!

You're supposed to serve it with sauce. Chocolate sauce--Mexican chocolate sauce, in fact. But the sauce requires heavy cream, which I did not have. So I had to run to the store to buy some. And since I also had to run to the store to buy ink for the printer to print out pictures of the grandkids for the parents, I didn't mind so much, especially since Office Depot is just down the strip mall from the grocery story. I came out with lots of other stuff, too--fancy file folders, a file storage box, etc. And I just have to share a picture of one of the grandboys dressed up for Halloween. He looks like such a cowpoke... (That's a lollipop stick!)

How to keep your head above water

2011-10-31T15:11:00.001-06:00

That title sounds like a financial blog. Which this isn't. It's not even really an "organizational" blog, unless maybe it fits in the "Organization for the Terminally Disorganized" category. Because I am. Terminally disorganized, I mean. And I'm a Virgo. Go figure.

I guess that means I want to be organized. But if it happens, it doesn't happen for very long.

I have a computer file where I can write down the menus I've planned for the upcoming week--and I'll plan for two or three weeks running, then I don't touch that computer file for months--so long that I have trouble remembering where it is on the computer. (It's in the "recipes" folder.) (In case I forget again.)

I have a spreadsheet I've prepared for the e-publishing I'm planning to do. Here's hoping I remember to put things into it for more than a month or so. I figure I'll be obsessive about keeping track of my sales for a week or two, and after that... Phhhtttt. I figure I'll be filling it frantically in when the fella informs me that I need to give him some info for the taxes.

That's usually how I go. In spurts. I seem to do pretty much everything in spurts.

Which, I suppose is my point. I can work with spurts. As long as I keep coming back to these things I want/need to do, and do them, I can get the things done that I want to get done. I like that "15-minutes at a time" thing that the FlyLady recommends. I can do anything for 15 minutes. Problem is--I usually forget to set the dang timer.

But I keep coming back. I've been "spurting"-- okay, sprinting in the writing. It's how I've made it to DAY 13 (!!!) of my 100 day challenge. I haven't made it much past Day 20, ever, yet. (You see what I mean about spurts?) But I keep coming back to it and starting again. The book is getting written.

I didn't go out and walk yesterday, even though it would have been my walking day. I meant to go, but I didn't. (I meant to do a lot of things yesterday, and didn't. Sigh.) So I went today, and I'll go again tomorrow. I got back to it.

That's the secret. Just keep going back. If you slip up, get back into it. Keep showing up.

That said, I walked all the way to 45th Street today--a mile, one way, from my house. That may not sound impressive, but I'm closer to 60 than 50, and I'm fat. I'm impressed with myself, so there.

I passed the new Fort Crockett park, where the dolphin sculpture is. I did look at the painted dolphins, and that's completely new cement. They couldn't really do anything with the old cement. The dolphins are painted in the exact same colors, same design. They look great.

This picture is of the guys planting the palm trees in the planter boxes. There are 12 trees in each box, and salt-resistant plants below them, and in the street-side boxes. They imbedded iron stars in the top of the planters--you can see them as dark spots--to keep the skateboarders from skating up there. And there are benches on the Gulf side of the big boxes, so weary walkers like me can rest up and look at the waves. Pretty cool, IMO. :)

Progress

2011-10-26T18:36:00.000-05:00

Today, I wrote a bio for the e-pub books I have planned. Why does it take so much longer to write this kind of stuff than it does to write story?

I also wrote cover copy/descriptions for the first one of the books. I'm getting friends to help me with it. But it's progress.

AND, it is DAY 8 (right?) on my writing challenge. I didn't get as much written as I'd hoped, because the boy was awake this a.m. and kept wanting to show me stuff. He did finally get the hint.

I also got started late with my writing projects, because I went out for a walk this a.m. and walked all the way down to the dolphin statue. It looks MUCH better now than it used to.

Frito-Lay donated a bunch of money to fix up the little seawall park there where the dolphin statue is. They've rebuilt the plaza, put in a bunch of planters and benches and solar-power lights and stuff, and will build a big shade pavilion once all the palm trees and plants are in the planter.

The summer after Hurricane Ike (remember that one? No? Yeah, well, Lehman Brothers went bankrupt the Monday after Ike hit on Saturday...) it looked really beat up. The storm surge washed all the sand and stuff out from under the concrete and beat it all to heck. I don't know if they poured and painted new concrete for the dolphin mural, or put back and repaired and touched up the old stuff. I looked today, while I was out, and really couldn't tell.

It's gorgeous out these days. Not too hot to get out and walk, a nice breeze off the water--and around here, not too hot does mean up to 90F/32C and a little above. Too hot is 95F/35C and above, here on the island, because it's usually accompanied by considerable humidity. It was around 85F/29C this a.m. when I was walking. We've had a cold front. But it's still in the 80s by 9 a.m. Our fall. My hibiscus are blooming like crazy, because it's not so hot and dry...

Yeah, sorry. Didn't mean to make y'all jealous...

The Rat in the Dark

2011-10-25T15:50:00.000-05:00

While we were off in the wilds of Valley Mills, Texas, (and if you know where Valley Mills is, you're doing good) (It's out toward Cranfills Gap...) we had a bit of an adventure in the night. We were out in the middle of nowhere, after all, with varmints and all kinds of critters in the fields surrounding us. And, being women of a certain age, we tended to have to get up in the middle of the night to visit the facilities. (There was indoor plumbing.)

Well, one of those nights, one of our number rose in the darkness and ventured to the facilities, using her cell phone as a flashlight to light her way so she wouldn't trip over something and kill herself, and when she got into the restroom, she saw something black and scary on the floor. She didn't have her glasses on (as mentioned, we are of a certain age, and all near-sighted), the phone light was mostly dim, and she couldn't reach the light switch to turn on the real light and see what in blazes it was. Especially since she was pretty sure it was a rat. She crept forward, holding the phone out toward the rat, while reaching with the other hand for the light--which was on the other side of the room near the other door--until finally the other one of us (who wasn't me, because I was asleep) informed her that it was my sock.

I thought I had retrieved all of my clothes when I got into my nightgown, but apparently, one of my socks got away and stayed behind to play Halloween games. My friend picked it up and tossed it out of the bathroom. I think she was trying to put it with my stuff, but the next morning, it was next to one of the support posts. Maybe it crawled over there. I picked it up and put it in my suitcase...and an hour or so later, I saw it on the floor again. That sock was determined to escape! It didn't stay put until I stuffed it down in a pocket and zipped it closed. I hope I got home with it. But we had a good laugh about how scared D was about that wayward sock.

I am making progress in my self-publishing venture. Yes, I will put up Heart's Magic when I get the rights to it--unless Tor actually decides to publish it. I am also doing a contemporary romance with no fantasy whatsoever in it--Knight in Black Leather--and a contemporary-set fantasy romance with a hero who comes from an alternate world--Heart of Stone. After that, I'm not sure what I'm going to do. It all depends on what I have, what I write, what I want to write... We will see.

I am on DAY 7 of my challenge. Got 4 pages written, and the fella came home to pack an ice chest for his trip to Austin, and wanted to converse, of all things. So I stopped sprinting.

The guys moved my bookcase out of the closet in my office while I was away, and moved a gun safe in. The fella doesn't like my bookcase where they put it. All my books are now in boxes, stacked in the floor in here. I am not happy. I'm not mad, or even upset about it. I knew they were going to do it. But neither am I exactly happy about it. I'd really like to have the books more accessible, and my office less stacked up.

Also, I'm trying to clean my desk off, along with all the other stuff I'm trying to do, and found two pieces of plastic that I have no idea what they are, nor what they are for. Just strangely shaped pieces of plastic.

In the steps toward publishing, I have fixed my Paypal account, I think. I have my e-mails straightened out. I have about 6 e-mail accounts just now--and I upgraded my web hosting plan today. It will take a day or two to get the upgrade through, and another while for me to figure out how to make it do what I want it to do, but hopefully by next week, I'll have my website updated and I'll be ready to move on to the next step.

Sprinting while sitting down

2011-10-24T17:15:00.000-05:00

Two HOT writers, getting ready to "sprint"

So. I went to the annual HOT (Heart of Texas) Romance Writers fall retreat last week. My writer friends and I took several days ahead of the official retreat and went out to the ranch to retreat early and get some writing done.

It was great! Great to be out there with friends, great to have the chance to write, great to just think, talk and breathe writing. Not so great--the up-close-and-personal encounters with bugs, and the temperature, which wavered from too cold to too hot and couldn't really be fixed right. But bugs and heat can be endured.

The pond behind the "cabin" was way down, due to the drought, and a lot of the trees had died. It was sad to see them. Hopefully, there will be some rain--before next year, please--and the creeks will come back and new trees will grow.

One of the best things we did during the long weekend was "sprint" writing. We would set a timer for 20 minutes and Just Write. For 20 minutes. When the timer went off, we would see how many words we'd written, take a little break to walk around, go potty, grab more coffee, whatever, and five or so minutes later, we'd start the timer up again.

I was pretty consistent. Most times, I got about 250 words. One of the ladies sometimes got 1,000 words or so--but she was at the end of her story and knew exactly what was happening, who had the POV, where she was going--she was in race mode. Sometimes, one of us would get only 57 words, or 84. Not very many at all. But, the important thing was that for that 20 minutes, we didn't do anything but write. We could focus, because we knew that when the bell went off, then we could check the e-mail, or look at the texts, or go to the restroom. It's not hard to put something off for 20 minutes. And it's surprising how much you can write in that length of time.

So, that's what I brought home with me. I have a kitchen timer I carry around with me, to help me focus on what I'm doing. You know--the "I'm going to do this for the next 15 minutes" thing. Anyway, it works real well for helping me do the sprint writing. I got 15 pages written while I was in Valley Mills. Today, I got four done, in the hour and a half I wrote this morning. Oh, and since I wrote every day I was gone, that makes today Day 6 in the 100 words for 100 days challenge, which I haven't gotten to 30 days yet. Maybe my challenge should be 100 words for 30 days...

I have to share the birds that have been poking around our neighborhood for the last couple of weeks. I've lived here four years now, and have never seen American white ibis (I looked them up) anywhere but out on the beach or in the marshes. But most afternoons, there they are, strolling around in the neighbors' yards, hunting for food. I assume they've left their usual haunts because of the drought, like most everything else.

Pretty cool, huh?

Well, I thought so, anyway.

I am working on pulling some books together to get up on Amazon and Smashwords and B&N. Once I get the rights back to Heart's Magic (Harry and Elinor's story), I'll probably e-pub it, too, but it's a long slow process. Figuring out how to do the self-publishing is also a long, slow process, but I will get it licked!

Yeah, yeah, yeah

2011-10-15T12:51:00.000-05:00

I know. I've been AWOL.

First, I had company. I think. It was a long time ago. Then there was the Bastrop County fire. My parents and youngest sister and her family live in Bastrop County. The fire was mostly closer to Bastrop, but it got pretty close. That's the view from Baby Sister's back yard during the fire.

And since the fire was between them and our brother's house up north of Austin (it's closer), and the kids were out of school (well, the nephew who's a freshman at Texas State was sent back to San Marcos), it seemed like a good time for a road trip to the beach. So they checked Daddy out of the nursing home and everybody came to Galveston, including Lucy the cranky old lady terrier mix and Flash the fish. (He's a Siamese fighting fish, and came in a canning jar.)

We had a really nice time, believe it or not, even though we spent a lot of time watching TV and online looking for news about the fires. Since there was a fire north of Houston at the same time, most of the local news was about that fire, but we did get the Austin stations on the internet.

We worked Daddy about half to death. Tuesday, we walked him and Mama around the block. Then in the afternoon, we made him walk down to the beach with us. It's not but about 2-1/2 blocks, but this is a man who gets up in the morning, eats breakfast, takes a nap, eats lunch, takes another nap, eats dinner, and goes to bed after watching a little TV. He's still skinny as a rail. And he took a nap on the beach. (We had some big beach towels spread out, so he didn't get too sandy.) I went out in the water with the kids. Laura and her 21-year-old daughter Molly hung on to Mama so she could stand in the surf without getting knocked over--that surf just washes the sand right out from under your feet, besides being surfy and shoving at you.

We went out to good ol' Shrimp 'N Stuff for supper and Daddy missed the step as we were leaving, and fell and skint his elbow all up. (Ack!) (also, sigh). He got blood on his shirt--just a scrape, but sometimes they will really bleed. The fella got him all bandaged up, and he went to bed fine, but the next morning, I had to make him go change his bloody shirt, because he put it on again. You kind of have to take away his dirty clothes to keep him from wearing them again. (sigh again) Anyway, they all left to go back home Wednesday afternoon, except for Molly, who gets migraines from smoke. It was really smoky back in the fire area. She stayed with her boyfriend, who lives somewhere in the area--but there are a lot of south-of-Houston suburbs...

That's pretty much all the excitement we've had. I'm trying to get some writing done. Trying to get my "independent publishing" stuff set up. (Argghh!) Every time I think I'm ready to upload a story, I realize there's something else I need to get ready first. I keep backing up, and backing up... It's just craziness.

Now that the heat has finally sort of moderated (It's still reaching the high 80s to low 90s pretty much every day), I'm walking more. I even have gotten myself back into decent enough shape that I took the Dolly-dog out for a walk yesterday. She's put on a little weight, gotten herself out of shape, so that her tongue was dragging by the time we reached the halfway point, so she wasn't dragging me so much. I also found a whole angel-wing shell, about 5 inches long (okay, maybe only 4-1/2), out on the beach, and I've seen some new birds out fishing. At first I thought it was a snowy egret that was just silhouetted in the sun. But when I got a better angle on it, it was pretty much the same color as the sand. And it was jumping around and raising its wings and--well, dancing in the surf as it fished. I think it was a reddish egret, going by the color and behavior mostly. Its neck wasn't that red, and I don't remember the pink on the beak--but I think the young birds aren't as red as the older ones, so maybe it was a teenager reddish egret.

So, anyway, that's all the news that's not too boring. I'd swear I'll keep up better here on the blog, but I hate to swear to things I'm pretty sure I will eventually do, or not do, as the case may be. I do think about posting. I'll see something pretty, and think--"Ooh, that would be cool to share." And then I don't. Sigh, yet again.

Day 1, yet again

2011-08-15T17:50:00.000-05:00

And I was doing so well! I'd made it all the way up to Day 25! And then I went to visit the parents. It's really hard to make time to write when I'm up there. But I'm back at work again on the writing. It's moving right along, but it's going to be longer than a novella, I think. Maybe not too long--I just don't know... However, I am about to have my main characters meet the scientists. We'll see how it goes.

Don't know what else to tell you... I need to start typing in the story. I am meeting a client tomorrow to pick up her manuscript to copyedit. My first non-Carina freelance job. Our visitor is still visiting. Not getting so creative with the vegetarian diet any more. My brain hurts. That's probably why I'm not writing much of a blog today. I can't think of anything to write about. Y'all have any suggestions?

Lazy day

2011-08-04T14:43:00.000-05:00

It's been a lazy day, and will continue to be, I imagine. I'm going to get up in a little bit and go wash the knives in the kitchen. I've written the day's pages (DAY 18!!) and I am now posting a blog stating that I have written my day's pages.

I do still have a little laundry to fold for the week, and probably have a couple more housekeeping things to do, but yeah, it's a lazy day. I don't have anywhere I have to go. Nothing I have to do. I'm actually thinking about heading out to the big mall to do a little shopping, because the end of season sales have started. Or maybe I'll sit around the house and read. I did go get all those library books after all.

The books on my list of "read" books are starting to back up. I'm getting them slowly into my GoodReads list, but I'm slow. They keep getting backed up because I try to write something about them, and that takes a bit of time, which makes me slower. And then I do things like read 3 books in a day. (I read Amazon Queen by Lori Devoti, A Matter of Class by Mary Balogh, and Almost Perfect by Susan Mallery all yesterday.)

So yeah, things are pretty much the same as always. I'm writing, but the rest of life is slow.

Following the story

2011-08-03T15:12:00.000-05:00

Six years ago, less a week, I wrote a blog post titled "Protect the Work." It's all about how, once you decide what story you want to write, you need to protect it from outside influences.

It's an important concept. One new writers tend to have trouble with. It's more "You don't like that? Fine, I can change it!" Of course, there are some new writers for whom their every word is golden and should never be touched by human hands (or pens). Both attitudes create problems.

I firmly believe a writer should protect his/her work. Know the story you're writing--what kind of story it is and what you want to say with it. What it's about. And protect it. Write that story.

But be prepared to follow the story where it goes. Down whatever path it might wander.

Stories do that, you know. They're flighty creatures. They tend to take it into their heads to go see what it might look like over here. Or, what about that? What if that happens instead? Plotters do all of this wandering about during their plotting phase, before they really get started with the writing. Pantsers do it while they're writing, in the midst of the writing. Those of us who fall somewhere in between--the story can make us crazy. But we do have room to follow the story where it leads. 'Cause it's going to lead you.

In the Rose books, I really had no intention of Torchay being a major character. The two main characters were going to be Kallista and Stone. And Stone IS a major character. But Torchay...just sorta -- happened. The plot's still the same as the outline I came up with. But the story went entirely astray from my original ideas. And it's the better for it.

Writers need to be able to hold two contradictory ideas in their heads at the same time. Because we DO two opposing things at the same time. We know what the story is. But we have to be open to changing it as we go along, as the story unfolds.

I am currently writing a steampunk novella. I'm trying to make it erotic, but don't know how successful I am at that, because it's not going exactly like I thought it would. It's still a steampunk novella--though the steam and the punkness hasn't quite kicked in yet--but it's veering. Or maybe it's taking side trips. I'm not driving straight ahead like I thought I would.

Maybe it's the novella bit I'm having trouble with. I have always had trouble writing short. I'm always coming up with this cool bit, and that great character, and this other neat story angle. This is why I need a road map, and a ruthless red pen. So I can keep myself on the proper path, and then cut out all the extraneous foliage--er, verbiage--when I get to wherever it is I'm going.

That said, I came up with a fabulous detail for the ending of this story yesterday. The story still ends with the sacrifice ending, with the hopeful twist--but there's a twist to the twist that I really like. And I can't tell you what it is, because that would be a spoiler.

So I'm on DAY 17, and I went to the dentist and got the chip on the inside of my lower incisor filled in and smoothed out in just 30 minutes! And I need to go beat the boy about the head and shoulders. He's still asleep, and it's 3 p.m. Shame on him! I am reading too many books today. :)

Local wanderings

2011-08-02T16:36:00.000-05:00

Okay, it's not much like wandering if you're just driving around town, but it feels wander-y. And I did drive up to League City. Of course, it's only 20 miles away--when we lived in the Panhandle, I drove to Amarillo once a week--60 miles one way. It's nice when you only have to drive 20 minutes to get where you're going. And sometimes less.

This is another week of appointments. Yesterday, I went back to the dermatologist, because they didn't get all the spot on my forehead the first time. And I decided I wanted the wart or whatever on my nose gone. But the open appointment was in League City, not Galveston. So I drove up there, they froze my forehead again and shaved the whatsit off my nose, and then I went to lunch and went shopping. The scab is tiny, and if it makes a scar, that will be tiny too. Less noticeable than the thingamajig that they took off. But I am wearing a bandaid for the next week. I may wind up with a round un-tanned place on my nose. (I plan to stay out of the sun, though.)

Today, I went to the library this afternoon, and on the way, I drove by the eyeglasses place and decided to stop and order some prescription sunglasses. I've needed a new pair since December or so, but put it off for a while. They will be cute. They are aviator-style but with turquoise/navy earpieces with hearts on them. Very cool.

We have a visitor for a few days--friend of the son's who needs a place to stay while she does interviews. I'm having to figure out meals adaptable to a vegetarian diet. It's been kind of fun, but really different. We've had black beans & rice, stuffed baked potatoes and maybe taco salad, or tacos, tonight. Taco salad is probably more adaptable. But I'm still writing.

Today is DAY 16. I've slowed down a bit--yesterday, because I had to leave the house early to go to my appointment, and today, because the boy got a phone call, and while he doesn't talk quite as loud as his father, he's plenty loud. But I'm still getting well over 100 words. :)

TBR Challenge: Kraken

2011-07-30T23:47:00.001-05:00

The Book: Kraken by China Mieville

The Particulars: Del Rey books, 2010, hardback, in print and available as an e-book.

Why was it in my TBR pile? I used to belong to the Science Fiction Book Club. Last June or July or August or so, the book turned up in my mailbox, and when I opened it, thinking it was something else, it looked intriguing enough that I kept it (and paid for it). It only took me a year to get around to reading it. ;)

The Review: This was an interesting, but weird, book. It's about the end of the world, how it comes about because a preserved giant squid is stolen from a museum. Or does it? It's about belief, and magic, and things like that--how they feed off each other. About noticing things, and about trust and evil and--oh, all sorts of things. It's funny, and scary, and it took me a long while to read, because I could put it down--but I always had to pick it back up again. Very interesting book. A good read.

Yes, my TBR book for July was about a giant squid. A dead giant squid, causing the end of the world. A truly strange read--but oddly fitting for what apparently was July's theme: Fairy tales. Okay, I can't think of any fairy tales about giant squid, right offhand, but it sounds fairy-tale-ish.

So. There is my review. Yes, it's short, but Kraken is almost impossible to boil down to anything longer than a paragraph. You either have to re-tell the whole frickin' story, or you have to just... boil.

And now: DAY 13!!!! I wrote enough I can take tomorrow off if I need to--which I probably will, but might not, since the story is really starting to percolate in my head. We will see how it goes.

And I have counted up--so far, I have read 31 books this month. Have not put them all into GoodReads yet, but I'm working on it. Just so I can whittle the 600+ books on my TBR list down a bit.

Today was a lazy, reading day. I finished Clockwork Angel by Cassandra Clare, and also read A Lady's Lesson in Scandal by Meredith Duran and Red's Hot Honky Tonk Bar by Pamela Morsi. I liked them all, but really liked the last two a lot.

Come this way, Tropical Storm Don!

2011-07-29T16:51:00.000-05:00

Well, looks like Tropical Storm Don will be heading to Texas south of Corpus Christi--or thereabouts. However, we have benefited a little. It rained really hard for about 20 minutes this afternoon. And sorta hard for about 5 minutes this morning. Yeah, I know Corpus needs the rain as bad as we do. Pretty much ALL of Texas needs the rain as bad as we do. (I think there are about 5 counties north of DFW that are only in a mild drought, instead of extreme drought, like the rest of us.) But we really want more rain here, and 60 mph winds? Pfft! We used to get 70 mph straight-line winds on a regular basis up in the Panhandle. Tropical storm-strength winds aren't going to raise many roofs.

Yeah, you know the drought's bad when you're hoping for a hurricane. (But only a level 1.)

I did get my pages written this a.m. I'm still on track. If I'd started earlier, I might've gone more than 3 pages. But I did get 3, so I am on DAY 12.

I will take Sunday off from writing this week, I think. A friend of the boy's will be here Sunday night to stay for a bit, so I need to clean up the office, etc. Find a place where she can put her suitcase... That sort of thing.

Oh, I remember what else I was going to say. I missed my TBR review this month, because that was the week the grandboys were here. I did read a book for the TBR: KRAKEN by China Mieville. I shall do a post for it tomorrow.

This past week, I've read several books. I am currently reading CLOCKWORK ANGEL by Cassandra Clare. It's interesting. I'm enjoying it so far. Otherwise, I've caught up on Eileen Wilks's series by reading both Blood Magic and Blood Challenge, so I'm ready for the new one this fall. I've read both THE HEIR and THE SOLDIER by Grace Burrowes. Liked all of them. I'm just trying to make it to the library before my books are due. Sometime next week, I think. Tuesday? The Clare book is from the library...

Need to go catch up on GoodReads. I keep getting ahead of myself.

Double Digits

2011-07-28T18:27:00.000-05:00

Okay, so yesterday was Day 10, when I got myself back into double-digit writing days again. But DAY 11 is still double digits. My goal is 100 words for 100 days, but my new interim goal is Day 20. I aim to make it there, because I haven't yet done 20 days in a row without missing one. (You know the deal about taking a day off--I can count ONE day off a week as a writing day if I designate it ahead of time, and I write 200 words the day before.)

I am also writing more than 100 words. I've made it to 3 pages for 3 days in a row, and I'm actually breaking the rules, because I'm not supposed to brag about how much over the 100 words I've gone--but I'm going to do it here, because I'm just bragging to y'all. And there was a time I could write 6 pages a day. I am trying to get back up to that point--and hopefully build beyond it.

I am also trying to get two to three additional things done per day from my list of "things to do." Like going by the optometrist to order a new pair of prescription sunglasses, or get stinkin' Comcast to fix my e-mail. I had trouble getting it set up on the last computer, called and worked with them for about an hour when I got this new computer, and it still doesn't work. It's an alternate address, but it's an important alternate address, and I really need access to it. Sigh. I just know it's going to take HOURS on the phone with them. I haven't done those things yet, though. (sigh again)

Today, I took care of my Target list and ran by Marshall's (It's so cool that there's one on the island!) to see if I could pick up a few things without having to drive all the way to mainland stores. I needed a new purse. I'm one of those who carries the same purse until it falls apart--and the purse I bought sometime around Christmas was reaching that point. Usually they last me a year or so, but that one closed with a magnetic snap that was attached to fabric, which meant that eventually the fabric would tear from the stress of being yanked open all the time--which it did. I also needed new houseshoes and another round tablecloth for the breakfast room for similar reasons. (Things falling apart.)

I found houseshoes for $4--they're white and will probably be instantly filthy, but hey--they cost $4! (And they fit and are comfy. Sometimes it's nice having big feet.) Found a tablecloth for $10, a pair of cute and comfortable sandals for $20 (Cute and comfortable shoes are always on the "to buy" list, right?) (And these were actual leather!), and a turquoise purse for $14.

I had admired another woman's aqua purse while I was at the junior college conference in Horseshoe Bay, and thought I could carry one that color, because it would go (more or less) with everything I own. I do not change purses, except when one dies and I get a new one, because inevitably I would forget to put something important (like glasses or wallet) in one, and get myself into trouble. Tonight is the Purse Transfer moment, as it is still empty--even of the paper stuffing. I will put that on my list, so I can cross it off. I get all excited when I can find what I need for cheap prices. Don't you? Found any bargains lately?

I have an editing job to do by next week. My first official copyedit from Carina Press. I'm all excited.

Have to go up to the mainland to the dermatologist on Monday (I'll drive up there so I don't have to wait till September), so I can shop up there without having to make a special trip. That will be fun too. I no longer shop till I drop (or maybe it's just that my drop point hits sooner), but I do on occasion enjoy it. :)

"How to Write"

2011-07-27T18:09:00.001-05:00

So. It's Wednesday, and I was going to post a blog on a writing topic. I have a draft saved in my draft folder titled "POV, etc." Problem is, I don't remember what I was going to say about POV, and I didn't leave myself any hints in the draft file.

When I was out walking this morning, I was thinking about POV and what I might have wanted to say about it. Like: "POV is a very useful thing." And: "Here's a slick way to change from one POV to another without the reader noticing--I figured it out on my own, but I learned later that it's the same method Suzanne Brockmann uses."

And I will share that with you eventually, but not today. Because that got me to thinking about all the articles and workshops and books and software that are all intended to teach people how to write. There's a buttload of it out there. And most of it is good stuff. There are little tricks and techniques that can be learned. I've learned a lot of them, but when you're in the flow--when the story is really coming and you're getting it down easily and your characters are talking to you and doing their own thing--a lot of times those techniques fall by the way, unless you've internalized them. Unless they just come automatically while you're "blowing and going." And that usually doesn't happen until you've had a lot of practice in writing stuff.

The thing is--there's a million ways to write. Some people plan everything out ahead, some plan nothing, some fall in between the two extremes. Some write a single draft (or nearly) and others write multiple drafts, adding in layers every time. And they're all right. And it's hard for the people who write one way to explain how they write to someone who writes another way.

I have a dear friend who is also a writer, who is often telling me "You have such great characters. How do you come up with characters like that?" And I have no idea how to explain it to her. Because I don't actually "come up" with them. I get to know them, like I get to know people in real life.

I use the Enneagram with my characters, because it's such an in-depth system. But I don't select the type and then construct my character to fit. I get to know the character, and then decide what type best fits them. Many times, I've thought a particular character was one type, and discovered later they weren't any such thing. I can't push a character into a mold I'd like them to fit. They just won't go. But when I tried to explain this to my friend, she couldn't quite get it. This is because--in the Meyers-Briggs system--she is a sensor (senser?) and I am an intuitive. (We're opposites, except that we're both introverts.) I do a fair number of things without quite knowing how I do them.

So, I guess what I'm saying here is that you never know what kind of writing advice / technique / knowledge will or will not work for you. Just because someone is a fabulous writer who's sold a bazillion books and made bestseller lists, it doesn't mean that they can tell you how to write. Nor does it mean they can't.

Stephen King's writing book is holy writ for some people. Didn't do a thing for me. I don't write that way, and I absolutely do not buy it when Stevio says that people who write differently are somehow hacks or lesser beings. (And if that's not how you interpreted what he said, fine.) What works for you is what works for you.

And how are you going to know what works for you if you don't try it?

Maybe King's method does work for you. Give it a whirl. Try it all. Just remember that trying it means WRITING. You can't know what works if you're not writing, and writing and writing.

I know that I hate multiple drafts. I'd rather write it all in one big swoopy slog. Once. Other people can't do it that way, but I hate doing it their way, and the One Time works for me.

I also know that it's not technically one draft, because I write my first draft in longhand. So my second draft is when I type it in. I don't make a whole lot of changes when I type it in--mostly I cut out chit-chat and make a lot of notes for later of things I need to add or cut out or clean up, and then when I print it all out, I make those cuts and corrections. I like hard copy because then I can look at multiple pages all at one time, without going blind. (Every time you add a page to your screen, the type gets littler--and I'm kinda blind to start with.)

I know that I have to have a minimal outline--a one-page Hero's Journey or Beat Sheet with the main plot points on it. But it makes me crazy to go into more detail than that. Which makes me fall somewhere in the middle on the plotter-pantser scale.

I know that notecards and storyboards usually don't work very well for me. I'm apparently not that visual. (I don't do those really cool collage boards either, though I'd like to.)

I'm a linear writer--I start at the beginning and work my way through, so having notecards with story scenes that I'm moving around makes no sense to me. The scene happens in that spot because of what's come before, and it can't happen anywhere else. I can't even outline out of order.

This is how I work (and I'm not even talking about characters, here, which is a whole other thing)--and if that helps you in any way--if it allows you to say--"Oh, I get that!" or "So it's okay that I don't get storyboards?"--then I have accomplished my purpose. Which has been to say--look at all the writing helps out there, AS LONG AS YOU KEEP WRITING. That's the main thing. Keep Writing!!!

That said, I did get my writing done today. THREE pages!! (which is ... hmm, 100 words is about half a page, so that makes 600 words?) Go me! DAY 10!

I'm late for getting downtown to sing with the band, so I'd better run.

Oh--the picture is from Stone House Vineyard in central Texas. I think the address is Marble Falls, but it might be Spicewood. Not sure. Anyway--I was there on a royally hot day, so I thought I'd share the picture with you.

Falling down on the blogging job

2011-07-26T14:58:00.000-05:00

The grandkids were here. I just did not make it to the computer to type in a blog. I also did not take many pictures. (sigh) (That picture is of the view from our hotel room in Horseshoe Bay, which is where we went the day after my last day at work.) (I know. I am a bad blogger.)

I did write--most of the days. I forgot Saturday, last week. The day the boys arrived. I actually did write on Thursday--Schlitterbahn day--and on Tuesday, when we went up to Houston to the Children's Museum (TOTALLY worth going to, but from here, you have to plan at least a whole afternoon, because it takes an hour to get there) (and an hour to get home again). Tuesday was also my RWA chapter meeting day. I left from the museum to drive there. It went really well. (Whew!) Meetings can be a little stressful when one is the program person. :)

The boys went home Sunday noon. I am now officially self-employed, and I need to get busy on that employment. The writing is a large part of it, and I'm doing pretty well on the writing. I am on DAY 9! (Go me!!)

I also need to do things like build a new website for my editing, and learn how to format books and make covers and stuff like that. It's going to be a busy few weeks, I think.

Tomorrow, I'm going to write a blog post about writing. I am going to try to do writing posts on Wednesdays, because the Ws match. :) The rest of the time--it's going to be about stuff.

Like the drought. It's bad. I know it's been up in the 100s over most of the country, which is horrible. It's been that way here in Texas since--oh, May or so. Everything is drying up.

On the way to Horseshoe Bay, we crossed the Pedernales River (which is pronounced Perdnales, for some reason--probably that we're ornery Texans). Those are not houses down in that "pretty valley." Those are boat docks. On the bottom of the river. I imagine it's as green as it is, because that's the river bottom, and there are a few puddles down there... Now, Texans have a persistent habit of looking to see whether there's any water in the river any time we cross a bridge (I sometimes even catch myself looking even when crossing the causeway over Galveston Bay). But usually--unless it's the Red River--they don't look like that. This is a really bad drought, y'all. We're thinking it's going to take a serious tropical storm to break it. Pray for rain, y'all--but not too much of it.

Quick Post - Day 6

2011-07-12T18:18:00.000-05:00

Got my pages done. Enough that I can take tomorrow off if I need to. But if I can write tomorrow, I probably will, because there may be an activity planned for Thursday. We'll see. The story is going well. :)

Last day

2011-07-12T07:39:00.000-05:00

Last one at the dayjob, anyway. I have enjoyed working at The Daily News. Of course, I'm such an introvert, I haven't really got to know everyone as much as I might have. And I've really missed the Brit since he got laid off in January. Since he left, it's just been easier to wrap myself up in the job and the Internet and not mingle so much. Of course, these days most of the reporters, etc. are 30 years or more younger than me, so... And yeah, most of the stuff I do doesn't show up online, since "Applause" is so photo-heavy. I've spend half my days putting pictures of people donating stuff and/or getting awards into the computer system, and most of the other half cleaning up letters to the editor and thinking up snarky headlines (most of which get used, to my amusement) as part of putting things into the computer.

It won't be a whole lot different, copyediting for Carina--except the grammar and punctuation should be a whole lot better. I don't expect that Carina Press accepts much that's been written in all caps. Or without any caps. Or punctuation. Or things with two periods here, and none on the next sentence--because, hey--there was an extra on the last one! Or anything that has "leopolds" that "don't change their strips."

Tomorrow, the fella and I are going to Marble Falls (that's in Texas) for a conference of his--which is why today's my last day--so I think I'm going to try to get extra words, in case I don't get any written tomorrow. But tomorrow might not be my day off. I might need to take Thursday. I'm making contingency plans to take one day or the other off. I'll have to work really hard this next week to get my 100 words done every day--because the grandboys are coming the day we get home, and Pirate Week at SeaCamp starts Monday. However, there IS the time they'll be at SeaCamp. :) That said, I did get up to

DAY 5

Yes, I wrote my 100 words yesterday. I probably could have written more, but there was a lot of other stuff I needed to do in my office (which did not include cleaning it up... sigh), so I did that.

Okay, gotta run.

Day 4 - Again

2011-07-10T20:20:00.000-05:00

This morning, someone said that it takes about six weeks to thoroughly establish a new habit, which is why most people don't manage it...because they don't make six weeks. I made about two, so I've got a ways to go. Still, I wrote today. I made it to DAY 4.

And today, I wrote actual words on my story. I wrote the opening scene. My Post-It Note scene board is kinda thin--but that's okay with me. I'm writing a novella. If I filled it up, I'd have a novel. I'm really good at expanding on what I have. I am a "taker-outer"--amongst all the other divisions in the writing world, like plotter and pantser and puzzler, someone has divided writers into "putter-inners" and "taker-outers." A taker-outer writes long, then cuts to size. Anyway, I wrote actual words. So I'm good.

Now, on to more interesting stuff... or other stuff that's interesting to me, anyway...

I went out walking yesterday morning. Shoulda probably gone out this evening, but haven't yet, and the sun's going down. Anyway, I was impressed by all the umbrellas they were putting out. The past couple of years, they only put umbrellas to the left of where I reach the seawall. Saturday morning, they put a double row to the left, but they had a whole row off to the right. Not sure you can see them in this picture, but there's a row of little blue dots just past the lifeguard stand. More folks have been coming to Galveston this year.

So have the pelicans. I know I've talked about how many pelicans there are...but this time, I've got proof! And I forgot to share it back when I got it.

While we were sitting out on the seawall on July 4, waiting for the sun to go down, the pelicans were flying out to the Gulf from --I think Deer Island is where they nest. I can point to it from the causeway, but am never sure of the name. They really come out in force at dusk and dawn. So they were flying over in big numbers.

Pelicans like to fly in lines. Usually, they're in straight lines, not the Vs like geese, but if enough of them line up, sometimes, they'll make a V. And most of the time, they're in lines of three or four up to about 15 pelicans. Being such big birds, and flying in straight lines like that, they're fairly easy to count, so when I saw a Big V of pelicans flying by Monday night, I counted them. And wow! That line had 24 pelicans--a full two dozen! I counted several other lines of 10 and 12 birds, and several of one or two. Then came the big momma V... 45 pelicans. Forty. Five. All in one bunch. I'm pretty sure these were all different pelicans, not the same ones circling round, because they were all--every single one--flying west to east, heading up the island and gradually out over the water. Like they came out one way, and went home another. It was soooooooo cool!

Now this picture, I took yesterday in hopes that y'all (and me) could see the color change in the water. It goes from greenish to blue a ways out there... but it doesn't really show that well, does it? Oh well. Still, it's pretty cool that this is just a block or so from my house...

Oh! And one more bit of news. I mentioned, didn't I, that I had received "signs from the universe" and that I'll be leaving the day job? (Two more days, and I'm heading to Marble Falls with the fella for him to go to a conference, and me to go...write.) I applied to do some freelance copyediting with a publisher but hadn't heard if I had it for sure, when I resigned. Well, I got the job. I will be doing copyediting for Carina Press, which is the e-first publisher for Harlequin Ltd. Contract's signed, "preference" list is turned in (I turned down horror and thriller and things like that, because I am a wimp), and I'm all ready to go. I'm excited.

Also, I've been on a bit of a reading binge. (I did go to the library.) I finished NATIVE STAR by Hobson. I have read DREAMS OF A DARK WARRIOR by Kresley Cole (good), and THE BIKINI CAR WASH by Pamela Morsi (good), and HARD FALL by James Buchanan. I may have read something else in there, but I don't remember, if I did. I'm started on both SILK IS FOR SEDUCTION by Loretta Chase and JUST LIKE HEAVEN by Julia Quinn. I think I'm more in a Quinn mood, so I'll probably finish it first. And with the trip to Marble Falls later this week, I ought to be able to read more.

I'm going to have to plan out my "no writing day"--see which day I'll have more busyness...

Tarot cards as plot developer

2011-07-09T11:50:00.000-05:00

Holy crap, y'all-- I have used Tarot cards in my writing before. A lot. I use them to do character readings, so I can look deeper into my characters. I use them for GMC (goal, motivation and conflict--but y'all know that, right?). But I do not think they have EVER done such an amazing job for me.

See, after I wrote on Thursday, I took a hard look at my story thus far, and realized it sucked. I have a great premise, but I really didn't have an actual story. No plot.

So I pulled out my Blake Snyder Beat Sheet--which first I had to find in one of my backup hard drives, then had to adjust so I could get it to fit all on one page again--and realized I hadn't plotted anything in so long, I couldn't remember what all the beats meant. So I had to hunt up the book, which I had loaned to the son who is doing some writing, and he had to hunt it up from the depths of his desk. I re-read the Beat Sheet chapter, then I re-read the rest of the book, kind of in reverse order. Then I looked at the sheet I'd printed out again, and realized that I really and truly did not have any plot at all whatsoever, because I had NOTHING to put on the sheet. I had my premise, and my characters, and beyond that? Nada.

I mean, I knew where I thought the thing should start, and I kinda had an idea of a couple of things that might happen, but where exactly on the beat sheet should they go? Were they the 'break into two' or maybe the B-Story, or what? No clue.

I stared at that sheet for a while longer, before it occurred to me that maybe the Tarot cards could help. They certainly couldn't hurt. My main deck is in my red bag in the living room and I didn't want to go get it, but I have a duplicate deck (I use the Shakespearean Tarot--those cards in the image above are some of them) on a shelf in my office, so I grabbed that one. And wham!

Opening image was the 8 of Sceptres/Wands. Things are changing quickly, good things coming. Okay. That will work. Then the theme--which I did not have a clue about-- And up comes Strength. Which totally suits the story as well--strength of character is more important than strength of body... Then for the set-up, I got The Empress, Reversed. The Empress is all about being a woman. A woman of authority. (It has other meanings too, but...) And since my main character is a woman whose very womanliness has been taken away from her at the beginning of the story... You see where I'm going here?

Okay, as I got further into the Beat Sheet, some of the cards weirded me out. For instance, the Final Scene card came up as the 5 of Orbs/Cups, which is all about loss and grief. I'm writing a romance--we don't do sad endings. But, on the other hand, I'm plotting a novella, which I plan to be one of a series which will make up a larger story. If I make the ending about loss, but make it optimistic--a "this is bad now, but it's not the way it will stay"...maybe it will work.

And the happy thing for me is, if the market I'm writing it for doesn't work, there's plenty of other places it can go. And I can always draw another card, if I don't like the one I got. Or just change the ending. But I kind of like it now ... the ending I have in mind.

So, I am up to Day 3, since I've actually written a lot of words today. They may not be part of the actual manuscript, but I wrote them, and they progress the story, so I'm gonna count them!

Connecting with your characters - redux

2011-07-07T18:32:00.002-05:00

Or "trying again." 'Cause I'm not real sure what "redux" means. (Wait--let me go look it up...)

Redux means "brought back" so it fits. I've brought the topic back. Because I didn't get around to coming back and writing about it yesterday. See, I had the dayjob till almost 4 p.m., then I had to drive to the medical school health clinic for a dermatologist appointment, then I had to get my head examined (literally) and my brain frozen (sorta--it was a spot on my forehead they froze), and then it was time to change to go downtown to sing. I sang till 8:30 p.m., got home at close to 9, went out with the fella and the boy to Salsa's for supper--it was mariachi night--the mariachi band was playing, and they were good! (I had Pollo del Mar--chicken with a seafood sauce that had crab meat, shrimp and crawfish in it--YUM!) Anyway, by the time we got home, I was exhausted, and I just didn't make it. I didn't get any writing done, so I have to start over on my day-counting, and I sure didn't get back here to write anything on what I wanted to write about.

I'm going to try to make Wednesdays about Writing. But if you've been following my blog for very long, you probably know that I'm not very good about being organized. I do pretty good for a while, then something happens (like getting my head frozen) (The spot's not cancerous or anything, it's just big and brown and scaly and itchy, and I want it gone.), and my good intentions fall completely apart. I will do my VERY best, but... It's me.

So. Have you ever gotten one of those rejections? The ones that say "I just couldn't connect with your characters"? If you're a writer, I'm sure you've received rejections, but if you're lucky, yours said something besides "Thanks, but no thanks." Because then you can do something about it--for the next submission, because unless the rejection says "I'd be happy to look at this again, after revisions," you don't send this same thing back to the editor. You're better off writing something new anyway. But you're also better off writing characters your reader can connect to. How do you do this, you ask? Well...

I'm sure you've heard "Your characters can do anything they want, as long as you motivate it." Right? The problem is, sometimes that motivation doesn't come through on the page. Writing classes usually say "Less is more," and "Show, don't tell." And yes, that is important. But sometimes, less is just less. And you're showing all you can, and the reader just can't see. Because there's nothing really there to see but words. Little chicken scratches on paper.

This is where what I call "The Novelist's Secret Weapon" comes in. See, today's writer of fiction is ... yeah, I think the word I want is handicapped. So much of the entertainment we consume is visual. It's movies and video games and television. Yes, it's all stories, but the stories are acted out. We're seeing the story, and yes, hearing it too. And writers tend to write their novels almost as if they were screenplays. Oh, they're in a prose format--but all you get is action and dialogue. Or maybe the action stops for some backstory or other exposition. Problem is--movies and television have actors, and we've been reading body language and facial expressions for thousands of years longer than we've been reading words. So you need more.

The Novelist's Secret Weapon is that you can give your reader more. We can crawl inside the character's head and share what they're thinking and what they're feeling and how they react to the events in the story. If you're not giving us something from inside your character's head every few paragraphs, you're not giving us anything to connect with. We need that thought and reaction and emotion in order to connect.

Here's how I did it in my first book with Tor, New Blood:

“I want to do it today,” Amanusa said. “I want you to take the blood and put it in the porridge pot, and in the tea kettle. Those who don't eat porridge drink tea, and those who don't drink tea--”

“Yes, Miss Whitcomb.” Jax waited, bent over in the doorway.

“Can you do it without anyone noticing?”

“Of course. Yvaine often had me deliver the blood to the vessel.”

“Don't stand there blocking the light,” she snapped, irritated for no reason and annoyed because of it. “Come in or go out, but don't stand in the doorway.”

“Of course, Miss Whitcomb.” He left the tent.

“No, come back.”

Obedient as always, he returned and waited for her command. Amanusa wished she knew what to ask of him.

“You think I'm wrong, don't you?” She didn't know she was going to say it until the words were out. “You don't think I should do it.”

I highlighted the internal things, so you wouldn't miss them. You don't have to put the thoughts/reactions in every paragraph. It's better if you don't, in fact. But whenever something happens your character would have a reaction to--show their reaction.

Here's a short excerpt from China Mieville's Kraken:

"The boy peeped. He looked at the bone apatosaurus that Billy had seemed to greet. Or maybe, Billy thought, he was looking at the glyptodon beyond it. All the children had a favorite inhabitant of the Natural History Museum's first hall, and the glyptodon, that half-globe armadillo giant, had been Billy's."

The blue is direct thought. The green is narrative that conveys something only the character would know. But you need to keep it up, connecting the reader with the characters through their thoughts, knowledge and emotions, the way they react to things. Here, Mieville shows Billy connecting with the little boy at the museum, and that makes us connect with him, at least a bit, by showing Billy as a little boy himself. One who liked dinosaurs.

Do you see? One way to help the reader connect with the character is by showing what is going on inside the character--who they are deep down inside. We can't see, literally, what the character is doing, but we have that Secret Weapon. We can show what's inside their brains. And if we don't use it, we're going to lose--not the weapon, but the reader.

Now--it may be that you have plenty of thought, emotion and reaction, but the reader still can't connect because, well, your character just isn't coming off as likable. *raises hand* Been there, done that, wore out the T-shirt. And I know how to fix that too. But that's a topic for another day.

I'll have to write something in a little bit, so I can start over on Day 1. I wrote enough on Tuesday that if I had decided beforehand to take Wednesday off, and it wasn't too close to the last day I took off, I could have... but I didn't decide beforehand, and it's less than a week, so I have to start over. Ugh. Yeah, I'm all whiney. I'll come back and add to this after I write.

DAY 1

Good thing I don't really care for a lot of the television shows the fella likes to watch. I got my words written. Let's see if I can make it to 20 this time...

Connecting with your characters

2011-07-06T11:58:00.001-05:00

What it means when a rejection letter says "I just couldn't connect with your character" and how to fix it. I'm going to write about this, but later today. 'kay? I'll be back. I didn't mean to publish this yet. Oops!

Holiday Fireworks

2011-07-05T21:34:00.001-05:00

Yesterday was the Fourth of July--America's Independence Day. I had a holiday, and I was extremely lazy.

Well, I felt lazy, anyway. The fella went downtown to ride in the parade--too hot for me--and I put some pork on to barbecue, and mixed up the potato salad we'd boiled potatoes and eggs for the previous night. I did some other stuff too, but can't remember what it is now, because by the time the fella got back from the parade, I was goofing off. And I did that most of the day. I'm very good at goofing off.

The boy and a couple of his friends came down about 2 p.m. and we all had lunch, then they went out to the beach--taking the doggies. (The friends brought a friend for Dolly the princess pitbull to play with.) They all exhausted themselves--humans and doggies alike. Somewhere in there, I took a break from goofing off to take a nap.

Then we had supper (the barbecued pork and potato salad), and went down to the seawall for the fireworks. You can see the edge of the boy, and the jetty from which the fireworks were shot off beyond him, out in the Gulf. There were a lot more people on the beach by the time the fireworks started. Also, it was dark. You could see the lights from all the boats out on the horizon, waiting to head into port, not to mention the sport fishing boats that had come way inshore to watch the show. But I didn't take any pictures after dark. Because it was dark!

It was a good show. Not as fabulous as the one for the Hotel Galvez's 100th birthday, but a good show. I was just glad they actually had a fireworks show. All home fireworks got banned, because of our extreme drought. However, I figured they wouldn't stop Galveston's fireworks, because they set them off over water. It's the cotton-pickin' Gulf of Mexico. Then there's sand, then the concrete of the seawall and street. A long way before any sparks reach anything that might burn.

There were more people at this year's fireworks show than in all the previous years since Hurricane Ike. It was a really big crowd. And the kids saw "The Little Couple." The one from the TLC TV show, who apparently live in Houston, and came down to Galveston for the fireworks. Or maybe for the whole weekend. :) I didn't see them, so you won't see me on TV, but hey--I was there!

And today is DAY 15. (Yesterday was Day 14. I wrote double on Sunday, remember?) I didn't want to watch whatever it is the fella has on television, so I came back and downloaded pictures from my camera, and I wrote. I had to stop, though, because I need to figure out the rules for my society. There is magic--but does everybody know about it? Do they all believe in it? I think it's fading, but just how open is it? Yeah, I know. I should have decided this stuff earlier. But I didn't, so...

I am still reading THE NATIVE STAR by M.K. Hobson. I also went to the library this afternoon (took all the books back on Sunday) because hey, it's only about 3 blocks from the post office, and I had to go get the mail. So I also started DREAMS OF A DARK PRINCE, or DARK DREAMS OF A PRINCE, or ... what is the name of that Kresley Cole book? DREAMS OF A DARK WARRIOR! Yeah. I started it and I'm still reading the other book. I got two books off the "new" shelves, so I'll need to read them next. But maybe I can finish the Hobson book first.

Five more days at the newspaper. I need to write an item for the newspaper's newsletter... Hmm.

Beach Band performance

2011-07-03T23:48:00.000-05:00

They changed the Tuesday night band concert to Sunday this week, in honor of the Fourth. Galveston Beach Band performs every Tuesday in summer--except this week, they had their band concert on Sunday, and invited our church choir to come sing a "Salute to Armed Forces." (Yes, this is the band, at it's previous performance.) Fortunately, we sang the medley in church this a.m., otherwise I'd never have known how the Coast Guard Marching Song goes. But I know now. They lined us all up in front of the band shell, put those of us who usually sing in the church band in front--and then put the mike in front of us. Made me nervous. Anyway, it went pretty well, though my voice decided to be a little wobbly. Oh well. It was fun.

We waved at the duck tour when they went by, and watched the kids play maracas and ring the bell they'd salvaged. The trombones and tuba came forward and played "Them Basses," which is a very cool march. (If you can play a scale, you can pretty much play that march--if you can play it fast enough.) The beach band uniform is Hawaiian shirts--tonight's trombonists didn't have the guy on the left, but the tuba player came up front with them. He's good.

Today was a very lazy day. I took a nap. I also wrote. Enough that I can take tomorrow off. Tomorrow is the holiday, and we have company coming, so I thought I might not have as much time to write then.

DAY 13 is done. I had a good time singing, had a good time at the concert. I enjoyed my nap, too.

I've read UNLOCKED by Courtney Milan, & enjoyed it. I read MAGIC SLAYS by Ilona Andrews (didn't know IA was a writing team...), and I'm now reading THE NATIVE STAR by ... I forgot. I'll have to look it up. by M.K. Hobson. I was remembering the initials right, but not the last name. So, there's the list.

Holiday weekend

2011-07-02T11:54:00.001-05:00

And I've made it to Day 11 and Day 12.

I'm through the "opening" and to the explaining part. Exposition is always boring, but maybe I can figure out some action to go with it.

Yesterday, I barely squeaked in under the line, but still got my words written and a little more. Today, I woke very early with a headache, and went ahead and got up. Then I went out for a walk on the seawall--Folks were already filling the beach up. I'm wondering if there's a beach volleyball tournament this weekend, because I saw a women's team of some kind working out on the beach, except the balls didn't look like volleyballs. Water's still green all the way inshore, and the wind is minimal, which means it's perfect for swimming. I'll have to see if I can drag the boy out to swim with me.

Anyway, after I got home and cleaned up, I sat down to write, and I've got enough I can take tomorrow off again.

The fella has started cleaning house. He's already brought two stacks of things into the office...which is a huge mess, but who knows when that will be amended. I think I'm going to catch up on the sleep I missed this morning so we can go see a movie this afternoon. I'm still wanting to see Super 8. And yeah, I'll have to kick in on the cleaning too. Sigh. It's kinda like "When Mama ain't happy, ain't nobody happy," except it's "When Dad's cleaning, everybody's cleaning."

I guess I ought to pitch in and clean...I need to find my camera. I did figure out how to turn on the phone's camera... But in celebration of actually writing a blog post on my home computer, where I have pictures. here's the picture the older son made me take in Pittsburgh of him with Heinz Field in the background. It's the yellowish bit above the yellow arch of the bridge. This is the son who wants to be a coach. He's into sports, just a little... ;)

And yes, we're planning a very lazy holiday weekend... About all we really have planned is going to the fireworks show Monday night. They shoot them from one of the rock piers out over the Gulf of Mexico, so there's not much worry about fires in our drought. All other fireworks have been banned.

Oh, I'm keeping track of books here too. This morning, I finally finished REBEL by Zoe Archer. I bought a couple-three or so e-books last night. Need to put them on the reader so I can read them. And maybe go to the library... I've read all my library books.

Day 10

2011-07-01T13:01:00.001-05:00

Can you believe it? I've actually made it 10 days, writing every day. In longhand, the way I write fiction.

Yesterday, it was iffy. I went to the grocery store after work. (And actually topped $200 in my grocery bill!) (I don't go very often, because I don't like to.) By the time I got home and unloaded the car (mostly--left the cokes for the fella to bring in), and cooled off (Boy! it was hot yesterday!!) and put the food away, and decided what I wanted to think about maybe cooking for supper, the afternoon was gone. Then it was time to actually cook supper.

I did a Thai-style beef stirfry with snow peas & red pepper & a peanut sauce that could have used more hot sauce, with noodles. I'd bought the snow peas after I made this the first time, and needed to use them and the fresh cilantro before they got old. Cilantro really has to be used fresh. A lot of herbs still have flavor when they're dried, but not cilantro. Parsley is probably the same way--except I've never really been able to taste much besides "green" when I taste parsley.

Anyway, after supper, I was sitting around reading about the Best & Worst Legislators in the Texas Monthly (where politics is a spectator sport), and it got later, and later--and finally, it was to the point of: "If you do not go in there Right Now and write SOMETHING, you will have to start over again, counting your days."

So I went. I wrote. At least 100 words. In my rather small and crabbed longhand, 100 words is about half a page, if there's not too much dialogue. I had dialogue, so I wrote more than half a page.Yes, I'm still in the middle--well, more the beginning--of the love scene. But people talk then, too, you know.

I also read a book yesterday: finished A GREAT AND TERRIBLE BEAUTY by Libba Bray. I've pretty much been trying to decide what I think about it since.

I work at keeping up with the books at GoodReads, but I'm usually 4 to 6 (or more) books behind, there, because I try to write a little something about the book so I can hopefully remember it when I look it up, and remember that I've read it. Maybe I'll just list them here... Some of my books are on the little widget in the sidebar, but they're more random, not necessarily the most recently read. I don't know how to tell it to show the recent reads. Sigh.

Plans of mice and me

2011-06-30T11:11:00.000-05:00

Actually, I do not know what the mice are planning. But you might want to be afraid. They're kind of scary-looking, right?

As for me? Nah. No need for fear, or worry or any of that stuff--from you anyway. Me? Yeah, I'm a little nervous.

See, I quit the dayjob. I may have mentioned that in an earlier blog--snuck it in at the end. I'm still AT the dayjob. I'm not officially leaving until July 12. (That's my last day. So does that mean I'm leaving on the 13th?) Why, do you ask? So I can write more, and get into that self-publishing stuff.

I mentioned back in May that I wanted to do this, and since then, I have done very little toward that goal. Yes, I know other people work many more hours than I do, and get lots more done than I do. What can I say? Everyone is different.

I don't make that much at the dayjob, it's just part time, and I take off quite a bit to go see about the parents and help with grandkids or have them visit. And it's not as part time as it used to be. I'm working about 30 hours a week now, which cuts even more into my writing time. But still, I was chicken about taking the plunge.

So, I was walking up the steps into the newspaper office (that's where the dayjob is) one day a week or so ago, thinking "Gee, this job really gets in the way of the writing and publishing stuff I want to do. I could get a lot more done if I quit, but... What I really need is a sign." And when I got inside and signed into my e-mail, I found not just one, but TWO opportunities in writing and editing--one each.

I can take a hint. The "universe" does not need to smack me upside the head.

I still don't know for sure if the freelance copyediting opportunity will pan out like I want it to, but after copyediting here at the newspaper for around four years, plus my writing experience, I know I'm a good copyeditor, and a good editor besides. I imagine it will take a while to get that side of the work going like I want it, especially since I'm not a great salesman. However, I've already had someone approach me about doing a copyedit/proofing of a novel they'll be self-publishing. It may take off faster than I thought.

But even if it doesn't, that will just give me more time to write and publish, and self-publish. I'm not shutting down any avenues. They're all open right now. But I may start with a different story than the one I thought I would. We'll see. I'm not in a huge, huge hurry.

That said, we are at DAY 9.

I went out to get a shrimp po'boy for lunch yesterday and took the story to write with me, instead of a book to read. I am up to an actual love scene, and those always write slow. But it's moving forward!!

I do not take pictures

2011-06-29T10:09:00.000-05:00

Well, sometimes I take them. But then I don't get around to putting them up for anyone else to see. However, this time, I have not taken any pictures.

I can't find my camera. And while I finally have a phone that will take pictures--I traded up when the fella got a new one--I've forgotten where the camera button is. And I think I have to plug the phone into the computer to upload the pictures, because I don't have a data plan. (Too cheap.) Otherwise, you see, I would have taken a picture of the new car--a smaller SUV than the Silver Beast--and posted it for you. But I can't find my camera, and I forgot how to turn on the phone camera. (I've only had it a week or so! Come on... Gimme a break...)

But it's a lovely vehicle, and we're still negotiating who will be the primary driver. I have been the primary SUV driver over the past 20 years, starting with a big conversion van we got when the kids were 10, 8 and 2--we could put them in it, and they could almost not touch each other. Then I had a Suburban, then the Beast. The fella has mostly been driving sedans. I am ambivalent. I would like to drive the new vehicle, because it's new. Then again, I'd like to drive the Avalon, because it's a car and I've been driving a truck ForEVER. Though I do like to drive trucks--and I can park them. Mostly. (Okay, I still kinda suck at parallel parking.) And yeah, we just picked it up yesterday afternoon.

It's white, and loaded with all kinds of bells and whistles, and we got a good deal on it. (That is a picture of A car like we got. They have lots of pics online... This is not Our car. We do not have any trees that look like that. They cut them all down after the hurricane, 'cause they were dead. Though the grass--looks green & brown in patches, mostly.)

We didn't trade the Beast, but once the grandkids go home after Pirate Week, we'll sell it. What? You think we're taking them to the beach and water park in the new car??? (Okay, we'll WALK to the beach, but I think fishing is in the plans somewhere... Fish gear in the new car? Ewww.)

I did get some writing done yesterday. Got my words and a bit more while the fella went down to church to help with something. So we're at Day 8. Go me!! It feels slow, though. I'm trying to write a novella! However, I am a "taker-outer." I write too much, then cut stuff.

Um--and tomorrow, I will try to remember to write a post about what I'm going to be doing now that I've quit my dayjob. I'm going to get organized here on this blog. Seriously! I am. Really!!!

Well, as much as a Virgo who is also an Enneagram 9 (fatal flaw: laziness) and an INFP hybrid pantser/plotter taker-outer can get...

I get pictures

2011-06-28T10:29:00.001-05:00

See? I get pictures. The grandson needs things to keep him occupied, so they went to the zoo. He says the elephant is nice.

He thinks his baby sister is nice too. So much, he keeps moving her while she's taking a nap. He puts her on Mom's bed, and she falls off. He may have figured out this is not a good thing, by now. We are hoping she gets too big for him to pick up soon. She's growing fast...

Yesterday, I wrote. I'm counting Sunday as Day 6, because I wrote extra on Saturday. (I can take one day off a week, if I write extra the day before, but only one day per week.) And I wrote yesterday, so that's Day 7. Today, I don't have to head out to the mainland after the dayjob, like I thought I would, so I ought to be able to write more than just 100 words today.

I took the registration paperwork out to the Texas A&M-Galveston campus yesterday for the other two grandboys' Sea Camp daycamp later in July. We love having them down, and I think they enjoy the Sea Camp. There's an overnight camp they can do as they get older, but for now, the daycamp is great. They'll do Pirate Week in the mornings and hang out with Gigi and Granddaddy in the afternoons. :)

The Gulf was green all the way into shore yesterday as I drove home. The Gulf is shallow, and a lot of the Mississippi's outflow comes our way, so we do have brown water a lot, but right now, it's green. Perfect time to swim, if I can get somebody to go with me. The rip currents have died back some... Maybe, if I'm persuasive...

Later Tuesday: I'm driving to the mainland after work after all. We're heading up to pick up our new car. I also gave notice at the dayjob today. I'll be working through July 12.

Tuna--not your canned stuff

2011-06-25T11:39:00.001-05:00

Hoo-eee, that Ryan Reynolds is one hot cookie. Enjoyed the movie. A lot. Then we came home and the fella grilled some fresh tuna, caught out in the Gulf today--well, yesterday. The day we ate it. (Yellowfin tuna does live in the Gulf.) Oh my sweet heavenly days--that was some GREAT tuna. So fresh, grilled just right. SO good. And yeah, tuna is expensive, even (especially?) at the fish market. It was $13 a pound, and between the three of us (the boy is still here), we ate $25 worth of tuna--but you'd pay that for one restaurant meal, or more, for that much tuna steak. Anyway--YUM.

And now it is Saturday, and I have washed all the knives in the house (yeah, I'm bad. I let them stack up until every knife is dirty, then I wash them all at once. Knives do not go into the dishwasher.) and I have done my writing.

DAY 5. I have written. Enough that I can take Sunday off if I want to.

And the fella and I are going out to do some car shopping.

So, what's the local specialty meal where you're at? Being on a Gulf-Coast barrier island and all, we do eat a lot of seafood. Good thing I love it, huh?

Day 4

2011-06-24T18:02:00.000-05:00

Today, I wrote.

And we're heading out to go see Green Lantern in about 15 minutes. Then we'll grill fresh tuna outside when we get home. (Does tuna live in the Gulf of Mexico? Wondering just how fresh it is...)

Got yelled at at the paper today by somebody on the phone. She called, wanting to know how to get in touch with the people conducting a recall of the city mayor. When I didn't know, because I didn't write the article, she called me stupid. Made me mad. The newspaper isn't recalling the mayor. I personally don't think he ought to be recalled, and when I said that, she said I didn't have a right to have an opinion. Not while I was at the newspaper. Which made me even angrier. Because I'm neither a reporter nor an editor. I'm an editorial assistant.

I put other people's pictures into the computer and correct their crappy grammar. I put letters to the editor in the system, and correct their even worse grammar. I do not change what they're saying, other than fixing the grammar, and I make them sound better and more intelligent than they did to start with. I do not report stories and I certainly do not keep track of all the information that the newspaper prints. Can y'all tell I'm a little incensed, still, at being called stupid? Oh, and then she threatened to report me to the publisher, and I should expect to be called on the carpet. I seriously doubt that will happen, but if it does, I don't much care. Don't get paid enough to put up with abuse.

Okay. End of that rant. I shall calm my ranty self down and get ready to go watch Ryan Reynolds and his six-pack.

Still writing (Day 3)

2011-06-23T14:27:00.000-05:00

I did write last night, over 100 words. And I have written already today (at lunch).

See, the way the "100 words" thing works, is--you write at least that much every day, no matter what. And if you write, you get to post. You get to count the day, and add the days together. If you write more, great! But you don't get to brag about how many words you wrote, just that you wrote 100 words.

But if you miss a day, you have to start over on Day 1.

I am on Day 3. I posted to my 100 words loop that I was almost afraid to post, for fear that I would jinx myself. I'm hoping it will work the other way, though--which is why I'm posting here. If I post my writing days on my blog, I will be embarrassed to post that I didn't write anything. Or to ignore it and not post at all. I'm hoping that y'all will keep me honest. Even just the Idea of y'all.

And yeah, mostly, I will probably do just a little post. Or tag something at the end of a larger post about something else. And it's possible (maybe even probable) that I will not get around to actually making a blog every day. If I'm writing late at night, I may be just too tired to come to the blog and post. Or whatever. But I am going to try. Every. Single. Day.

Even weekends.

See me gritting my teeth in determination? Yeah. That.

So...

2011-06-22T13:47:00.002-05:00

It's summertime. Summers can go fast, and they can go really, really slow. Sometimes both at the same time. It's like your brain slows down in the heat (and believe me, it can get REALLY hot here), and the world slows down too. And yet, there's more stuff to cram in those slow, leisurely hours. People coming to visit. Going to visit people elsewhere. Etc., etc., etc. It's exhausting. (The picture is my Twitter icon picture--it's from a while back, but the beach is pretty much the beach...)

We have deliberately not filled up our summer. I'm not even going to the RWA national conference this year, though I went every year for a while there. It's so exhausting. This year, we have the Dallas grandboys coming for a week of Seacamp (Texas A&M-Galveston has a fabulous program). This year, we signed them up early enough to get into Pirate week. (Arrrr.) But if their father doesn't get their paperwork back pretty darn quick--I may have to spank him. Or something. Anyway--that's pretty much all we have scheduled.

And I still haven't made it into the water yet. Beach-type water, I mean. The wind's been kicking up pretty strong, which makes the water rough, and dirty. I keep waiting for it to glass out for me.

Oh hey! It RAINED today. This is big news, because it hasn't rained here pretty much since, oh, October. (That one little thunderstorm doesn't count. One rainfall in 8 months? Nope. Doesn't count.) Of course, I left the dog outside, and can't get the boy up to go let her in, and she panics like the princess pitbull she is. So who knows where she is right now. Hopefully, she hasn't eaten another hole in the fence...

Yeah. Boring blogpost today, but I'm trying really hard to get better at this blog posting thing. Not succeeding a whole lot, but I'm trying.

Oh! I started writing something new yesterday. It's been a while since I've actually worked at writing anything, so it's kind of exciting to be interested in doing something new. I'm going to give this 100 words a day thing a try again. I did get 100 words yesterday. I'll have to report back today.

Y'all take care, and I hope you're having exactly the kind of summer you want.

TBR Challenge: Hellbent & Heartfirst

2011-06-15T10:48:00.000-05:00

The Book: Hellbent & Heartfirst by Kassandra Sims

The Particulars: Tor Paranormal Romance, mm paperback, 2008, Out of print, I think; not available digitally.

Why was it in my TBR pile? I picked it up at some RWA conference or other...where was the conference in '08? I don't remember. Nor do I really know why I haven't read it yet...

The Review: Okay, so when Wendy the SuperLibrarian (Really. She's RWA's Librarian of the Year.) mentioned on her blog earlier that this Wednesday (today) was the TBR Challenge day, and I realized that, not only have I not read anything from my TBR mountain, I hadn't read much of anything at all this month, I wandered over to my bookcase with its two shelves of TBRs (I have others stashed elsewhere.) and perused the contents. And that's a long-ass sentence. Anyway, this was the book I plucked therefrom, because I've already read pretty much all the short, easy, series contemporary romance novels on it, and I hadn't actually looked to see what the suggested read was for this month.

And I pretty much read it yesterday. I started about 3:30 p.m. when I went home to wait for the plumbers, and finished it this morning. I enjoyed it, a lot. And I think there will be spoilers in this review.

So--the heroine is a college professor who's gone home to the Biloxi area after Katrina to recover from her divorce and aimlessness by helping others, or something of the sort. She meets a guy at a bar--he's younger, drop-dead gorgeous and out of her league, but he seems somehow attracted to her. She's trying to help reunite people with their missing children, and there's a woman in hysterics because her little boy was staying with her aunt, and now the aunt says he was never there. Turns out that the guy's in town chasing boogey-men--a lamia, actually--snake woman that eats children and messes with people's minds--and the missing child is probably a victim. He tells the heroine what he does, and there's some scenes with her trying to wrap her mind around the fact that things that go bump really do. She goes with him to a voodoo witch and takes part in the magic that lets them track the lamia, and they kill it and run. I think the "hooking up" scenes take place before they visit the voodoo people.

She's astonished that he's interested in her, 'cause he's younger and so good-looking. And she has this luck--it swings from astonishingly good to horrifically bad, to balance out overall--and she's sure that the luck of having a guy like him will end in a horrible breakup. Then the book jumps ahead eight months.

Jimmy Wayne's been on the road for five of those months, and Jacyn (which I never really knew how to pronounce, and kept pulling an 'L' in it, and thinking Jaclyn) has moved to Nashville to room with an old friend and get over JW being gone. He called frequently, but never made it back to town. But she's still longing. He's longing too, and sure he's really screwed things up with her, and it breaks his heart, and he doesn't know why he hasn't gone back to her, but he hasn't, and can't seem to, and he's somewhere in Tennessee to meet a witch. Not a human who messes with magic, but a different species. And she breaks a compulsion that was put on him. One that was intended for Jacyn, but hit him instead (because of her luck, they assume), and has driven him away from her. And she tells him the murderer he's after is in Nashville. Where of course the murderer is hanging out with Jacyn, and they stumble across each other again. Of course. (Her luck acting again.) They defeat the bad guys--but I'm not sure exactly how, or exactly who does what. This part was really vague and confusing.

I liked the book. Sims writes some really beautiful, evocative stuff. But the paranormal elements... weren't real paranormal. The descriptions tended to be vague, which was strange, because Sims was so vivid about most everything else. She did describe the imp pretty well, but what Jacyn thought about the magic wasn't clear. And in the grand finale climax, the magic seems to be done by somebody who's been present (I'm not absolutely sure he's the one doing the magic), but his magical ability pops out of nowhere, hasn't even been foreshadowed. And Jacyn does some big magic, but what happens, or what she thinks/feels about it is really vague. Honestly, her feelings for Jimmy Wayne and his feelings for her are the only things that feel real at the end of the book--which may be what Sims was going for. I'm not sure about that either.

All of which sounds like I didn't like the book, but I did. Really. It wasn't until after I finished it and started to think about it and about what I would write here that it occurred to me that the magic stuff was kind of vague and unreal and confusing. And that this may have been Sims's intent. Either way, it was an enjoyable ride, and it would be interesting to read more books in this universe, more about Jacyn and J.W., but who knows if that's going to happen.

I just realized I've read another Kassandra Sims book, "Falling Upward." It also confused the heck out of me, and despite that, I enjoyed it. I'd be willing to read more Kassandra Sims--but hope that she'll quit rushing her endings.

Visitors in town

2011-06-10T11:55:00.000-05:00

So, writers go to conferences and stuff. And they get to know each other, and sometimes they don't live very close to each other, so they don't actually see each other very often. And on the rare occasions when they're in the same place, they tend to like to get together. At least, I do.

So, when I tell you that a writer friend of mine was in Houston last night--which isn't exactly in town, but is a heck of a lot closer than Auckland, New Zealand, where she lives--I drove up to spend a little time visiting.

Nalini Singh is a NYT bestselling author, who's just had her first book published in hardcover. Kiss of Snow is a great book, and I'm delighted that she's doing so well. Still, the idea of driving into Houston--not through it, but onto the streets and trying to find a particular address and then a parking place, gave me the heebie-jeebies. I handle freeway traffic much better than I do streets with traffic lights, especially when I'm not real sure where I'm going. I almost backed out. More than once.

But I really wanted to go. I'm not going to the RWA conference this year--mostly because I just didn't get around to signing up--and the thing I miss most is seeing all the friends I only see once a year. So I gutted it up, and took the Beast (my vehicle is a very large SUV. Very. Large.) into the big city--and I actually found the store! And a place to park!! And I didn't get lost!!!

I got there quite a bit early, because if you don't get off the road by 5 p.m. or so, you have to deal with a LOT more traffic. But there were other paranormal romance fans at the store, and it was fun to chat with them about books and authors. I was even able to recommend my books to a couple of people. I didn't want to do too much of that, because it was Nalini's night and I wasn't going to steal any spotlight (not that I could...).

The plane was a little late--she had to come straight to the bookstore, but it was great to listen to her talk about her books and writing process. Then we went out to dinner and got to chat some, which was great. Then I had to go home. It was getting late, and it's close to an hour to get back to the island--without traffic. It was a great evening. I wish she'd had a little more time in town--she flew out this morning--but it was fun.

A little bit of news

2011-05-20T11:41:00.000-05:00

And it's news about my writing.

First, I have run out of patience. I'm hoping to have some news about a publishing date for Heart's Magic before too long. The publisher is going to have to either publish the book, or give me the rights back. They can't sit on it any more. I am going to find a way to publish this book, one way or another.

Second, I'm looking seriously into getting into the self-publishing arena myself, not with backlist books--I don't have that many, and don't have my rights back on most of them. But I do have a fair number of books that I have actually never submitted for one reason or another--some because the "big boys" don't really like books about hockey players unless you're Diedre Martin or Rachel Gibson, others because--well, I did submit, but never, ever, ever heard back.

There's one I submitted that went all the way to the wire--they almost bought it...and then bought someone else's book. At the time, I was depressed, but given how things turned out later (the someone else, I consider a friend--or at least friendly acquaintance), I think maybe it was for the best. Anyway, I want to get that book up too, sometime. But later.

There's a different book I want to start with. It's a contemporary romance. No paranormal/fantasy elements whatsoever. (I started out in contemporary romance, if y'all didn't know. My first two books were series romance for Silhouette Desire. I still like to read it.)

I started writing this book without having done ANY research into one of the areas the book was about. I did do the research as I was writing, but that means I need to revise the first part of it. Actually, there are some revisions needed through the whole thing, because I wrote it long enough ago that cell phones weren't as ubiquitous as they are now. (How's that for a $5 word? Look it up. I had to when I read a Phillip K. Dick novel years ago, (which I still don't quite get) and now I can use it. :) )

I may need to do some tweaking here and there on the whole story--shade the emotions a little more carefully, that sort of thing--but when I read it, I laughed at the funny parts, sighed at the tender parts, and just enjoyed the heck out of it. And I wrote it. So hopefully other people will enjoy it too.

So, I am not taking the plunge into self-publishing, but I am sticking my toe in it. I'm a real wuss when it comes to swimming at the beach or a lake. I've been spoiled by Texas--the water needs to be about 80F or so, and if the air is over 90F, all the better. I want it warm, baby, WARM. If not hot. Here's hoping the self-publishing water is just right.

More as the adventure continues.

TBR Challenge: The Pride of Jared MacKade

2011-05-18T10:42:00.000-05:00

The Book: The Pride of Jared MacKade by Nora Roberts

The Particulars: Contemporary Romance, Silhouette Special Edition, Dec. 1995. It was apparently SSE #1000 (Series romances are numbered, ya know.)

I chose this book as my TBR challenge book, because yesterday, I realized (when SuperWendy tweeted about it) that today was the day to post my TBR challenge, and I hadn't read anything in the past week or so that might constitute a TBR book. (I've been working really hard on my "reading all the RITA nominees, plus a few Hugo/Nebula nominees, plus some of the Edgar finalists" challenge thing.)

BUT there was this book. It's been under the futon in my office a while--who knows how long? I'm pretty sure I bought it at my RWA chapter meeting. And I read it in the past few weeks. It's not a marriage of convenience story (which is one of my favorite hooks), or pretend engagement or arranged marriage story, but I don't care. It's been hanging around the house, and I read it.

So. The Review: (Short, as usual) This is a pretty early Nora. The MacKade brothers live on/near what was once a Civil War battleground, so that history--stories about what happened back then, and maybe even ghosts--play a part in the stories. The hero is a divorced lawyer who's come home to build his practice there. Heroine is a single mom who's finally found a place to call home and raise her son. She's prickly and determined not to depend on anyone. He's got issues with pride (duh), though he does seem to work through them pretty quick. I liked the heroine's characterization as a tough woman who's willing to try again, and I liked the hero who takes being smacked upside the head (Not so much literally, but sorta) pretty well and is willing to admit that he's being a dumba$$ once he gets it. And the more I've thought about it, the better I like it. And I liked it a lot. I gave it 4 stars at GoodReads.

And there you have it. I have some other things I want to say--both here and on my website. (Geez, I haven't updated in Soooooo long.) But I will see if I can figure out how to schedule a post--Blogspot's supposed to let you do that these days--and have it post tomorrow or Friday or something. Whenever I get it written. I shall leave this review more-or-less pure.

Romance and Academia

2011-05-06T14:11:00.000-05:00

So, I mentioned in my last blogpost that I was getting ready to go to the Popular Culture Association/American Culture Association meeting in San Antonio...

I was sitting here thinking, "Gee, no wonder I'm not posting much on my blog. I can't ever think of anything to blog about." And then I remembered that I had not ever blogged about the trip to San Antonio.

Oh, and hey--I did a workshop last night for "BAWL" (also known as the Bay Area Writer's League--as in "Houston Bay Area"--except it isn't Houston Bay, it's Galveston Bay, but the Bay goes way up to Houston, and a long way from Galveston, which is where it starts, so it's usually called the Houston Bay Area, because it's the area of Houston around the Bay...). Anyway--

So I was hanging around on Twitter one day, and made the comment that "Oh, the PCA is meeting in San Antonio. I like San Antonio. It's a cool city." And up pops Sarah Franz, one of the academics behind Teach Me Tonight and the International Association for the Study of Popular Romance, who says "Want to come to PCA?" And I said--"Ooooh cool! I've always wanted to listen to smart people talk about romance like it was Important Litrachur." So I did.

I went to the meeting, dear readers, and I even took the spouse. We got a room in a "boutique hotel," or a B&B--however you want to define it--a couple of blocks from the conference hotel, and across the street from the River Walk, called the Riverwalk Vista. A seriously cool place to stay. It's an old, converted warehouse. I will put up pictures when I get home to the computer that has the pictures on it.

We ate Mexican food. We went by the Alamo. (We've been inside many times before--my grandparents lived in San Antonio.) We hung out with smart romance people. I went to several of the panels where graduate students and professors and others presented papers. It was very cool. I enjoyed hearing people talk about the link between romance novels and poetry, or how romance is used in advertising (romance, as opposed to sex).

Occasionally, I had trouble following what a presenter was trying to say--more because some of the academic language was unfamiliar, and some of these people talked Really Fast, than because I really didn't understand what they were saying. I didn't know what the words meant. And sometimes, I didn't know what the word WAS, because holy crap! some of those people talked fast. Yes, I realize I'm a Southerner, but not all of us talk slow. Still...

But it was FUN. It was totally cool listening to these guys talk about stuff. And I got to hang with my friend Theresa, and I got to meet Sarah face to face, and Eric Selinger and some of the other academics whose blogs and papers and things I've been reading online. I was just kinda blown away.

I also got to meet Sherry Thomas, and Louisa Edwards, and Skyler White, and Tracy Wolff--I did not know they were all from AUSTIN. Just up the road. (Or, well, as up the road as anything is in Texas...) I need to get them down here to talk to our RWA chapter.

And then, on Saturday, the fella and I strolled the River Walk, and rode on the boat tour, and had lunch next to the water, and then drove home again. It was lots of fun.

Then I came home and finally got all the revisions done on the ms and shipped it out. And I did the workshop for BAWL. It was on "Worldbuilding 101." I talked a little bit about building the worlds for a contemporary or a historical, but mostly I talked about how to do it for spec fic. (It gets tiring, saying fantasy/science fiction/paranormal/steampunk....) I think it went pretty well. I enjoyed it, anyway. :)

I probably ought to get my brain into the writing of a new book sometime soon. Maybe I'll clean my office first...

TBR Challenge: Good Grief

2011-04-26T09:54:00.000-05:00

I was on track to keep up with the blog posts, and then the wind changed.

It's not like in Mary Poppins, where the wind only changes when she leaves town. The wind changes a lot in Texas, especially this time of year. And every time it changes, it blows in something else that somebody in our house is allergic to. This time, it's me, and it's got me trying to cough up a lung. I don't know if I'm light-headed from the coughing and dripping (yeah, the nose is going too), or from the meds I'm taking to stop it, but I can't turn or stand up quickly without having to grab onto something.

And I'm leaving town tomorrow for the Popular Culture Association meeting in San Antonio! I get to play author for one of the romance track panels, and hang out with smart people who love romance. What could be more cool?

Anyway, it's been hard to motivate myself to write blogs or anything else while I'm coughing so hard. But I did read a book I decided would qualify as a TBR challenge book.

I'm pretty sure it hasn't been on my TBR shelf more than a couple of years. We've only been in this house for three, and I'm pretty sure I didn't move it here, but it's been waiting for me to read it long enough to get moved several times and eventually wind up under the futon where the grandboys sleep when they come to visit. So, here goes.

The Book: GOOD GRIEF by Lolly Winston

The Particulars: Paperback reprint of a hardcover released by Warner Books in 2004. It's a "Women's fiction" story.

Why do I have it? Who the heck knows? I saw it, thought it looked interesting, and brought it home. I'm pretty sure I bought it used--maybe from a writer's group exchange, maybe at a Friends of the Library sale...

What did I think? The book is about a woman's recovery from the death of her husband. It begins several months after the funeral, and continues past the first anniversary of his death. It is sad and funny and poignant and at times I wanted to give the woman a hard shake. Not so much for "get over it already," but for--well, idiocy. Yes, she was grieving, and maybe not entirely sane (she wears her bunny slippers and robe to work at one point--hence the cover), but there are several points where she's so totally clueless about the people around her that I thought she needed a little shaking. But then, I guess that's what those people are doing--shaking her up. It was a pretty good book, but wasn't exactly what I was looking for when I read it. There was a bit of a mismatch between my mood and the book. Still, it was a good read, especially if you're in the proper mood for it.

And I'm not finishing this review the same day I started it. I had to catch up with the dayjob, then I had to get ready to leave town. I will make a BIG effort to get a post about the PCA/ACA conference and about the trip to San Antonio up this week. I don't have anything else to do this week...well, except finish my revisions and get the ms off, and start work on a world-building workshop for next week...

That book I couldn't put down--

2011-04-07T13:40:00.000-05:00

I finished it. So, I figure I ought to tell y'all what I thought about the whole thing. I never could put it down.

And the little things that bothered me so much at the beginning of the book? Not so much as I got into it. I got used to "the blonde" popping up to do things, I guess. The near-caricature-ness of the characters began to change. The dumb one wasn't so dumb as she seemed--though she's still got a LOT of room for growth, this is apparently only the first book of a series--and the "too-good-to-be-true" one wasn't. The evilly-evil one stayed over-the-top evil, but--well, I'll try not to be spoiler-y.

In the end, I liked the book. There were things I wish had been done differently--some people died that I wish hadn't, things like that--but this is an epic fantasy. People die in epic fantasies, and sometimes it takes a REALLY long time for character growth to occur. Sometimes I don't have the patience to wait for that growth--but we'll see.

The Night Holds the Moon was a pretty good read. The central character--though this follows epic fantasy pattern by having more than one POV character--is something of a wanton, who is the "chosen" of a goddess, by being the one who can play the magic flute, and when she plays it, things happen. Weird things. She's kind of a go-with-the-flow girl, who tends to be somewhat gullible, and perhaps trusts unwisely. She's not really into politics, so when politics get all stirred up around her, she lets other people take care of things. There's a cross-country trip, magic, betrayal, politics, death--you name it, it's in here. Lots of twists, more than one of which surprised me. Pretty good stuff. Give it a try.

Contest finalists and me

2011-03-30T14:06:00.001-06:00

‘Tis the season for literary awards, or the genre awards, anyway. The Edgar Awards, presented by the Mystery Writers of America, will be announced April 28. The Nebula Awards of the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America, will be announced May 21. The Hugo Awards, presented by the World Science Fiction Convention, just passed its deadline for nominations March 26.

And on March 25, the phone calls went out to the finalists in the RITA Awards, presented by the Romance Writers of America. So of course, I had to zip on over to the website and see how many of the books in the finals I’d read.

There are 12 categories for the RITA awards. There are only six Nebula categories, including one for short story, novelette, novella and screenplay, but then the science fiction/fantasy market is about half that of romance.There are 15 categories in the Hugo, but three are for people, and a bunch of others are for screenplays and stuff. Anyway, I was pleasantly surprised to see that I had read quite a few of the RITA finalists.

I've read five books in each of the historical romance categories In Best Historical Romance, they are: The Forbidden Rose by Joanne Bourne; His at Night by Sherry Thomas; A Kiss at Midnight by Eloisa James; Last Night's Scandal by Loretta Chase, and A Little Bit Wild by Victoria Dahl. And in Best Regency Historical Romance, I've read: Nine Rules to Break When Romancing a Rake by Sarah MacLean; Provocative in Pearls by Madeline Hunter; Twice Tempted by a Rogue by Tessa Dare; When Harry Met Molly by Kieran Kramer, and The Wicked Wyckerly by Patricia Rice. That leaves three books unread in either category.

In the Best First Book category, I've read When Harry Met Molly.

In the Contemporary Series Romance category, I've read Christmas with Her Boss by Marion Lennox and Dare She Date the Dreamy Doc? by Sarah Morgan.

In the Contemporary Single-Title Romance category, I've read Happy Ever After by Nora Roberts and Nothing But Trouble by Rachel Gibson.

In the Inspirational Romance category, I've read Maid to Match by Deeanne Gist.

In the Novel with Strong Romantic Elements, I've read The Dead Travel Fast by Deanna Raybourn and Welcome to Harmony by Jodi Thomas.

In the Paranormal Romance category, I've read Immortal Sea by Virginia Kantra. (I know! I can't believe I haven't read more of them, or else that more of the ones I read didn't make the finals!)

In the Romantic Suspense category, I've read Two Lethal Lies by Annie Solomon.

I haven't read any of the books in the Young Adult, Novella, or Contemporary Series Romance: Suspense/Adventure. I just haven't got around to the YA books. I don't care for novellas, because they're too short, given how fast I read. And I'm a real wimp when it comes to suspense books. The only reason I read the Annie Solomon book is because I got it free--from GoodReads, I think. It's a very good book--but I am such a wimp, it scared me really bad and I had a hard time reading it. I'm just too much of a scaredy cat. Probably because of those years working for a prosecutor. When you've looked real sociopaths in the eye, it's really not much fun to read about them.

Anyway, I have now put most of the RITA finalists on my TBR list--and have already picked up and read Lead Me On by Victoria Dahl, which is a Contemporary Single-Title nominee. I'm not going to make myself read the RomSus books, because I wallow in my wimpitude. And if the books cost more than a paperback, I may see if I can get them at the library. But I'm going to give it the old college try. Maybe even try to read them before the RITA ceremonies in New York in early July.

And since I put all these RITA books on my list, I bebopped on over to the other lists to see what they had. I already have some of the Nebula Books on my list, and I own The Native Star, by M.K. Hobson, but I haven't read any of them yet. (Sigh.) And since they're announcing soon, I'm not even going to try to read them before then. But I'm going to put a couple more on my list, or at least try to figure out where I can read the shorter stories, even though I really don't much like short form fiction. I also added a few books from the Edgars list, though I’m wary of those, given my wimpitude, but I did add a Young Adult mystery, Dust City, by Robert Paul Weston, about a young werewolf at the Home for Wayward Wolves. I think I added a book from a series about Freud & friends as detectives. And when the Hugos finish tabulating their votes, I'll probably snag a few to-reads from that list.

You’ll find the Nebula nominees at sfwa.org, the Edgar nominees at www.theedgars.com and the RITA nominees at www.rwa.org. The Hugo site is www.thehugoawards.org. Surely they’ll have their finalists up fairly soon. Most of the sites have a prominent link for their latest awards nominees (You kind of have to hunt for the Nebulas, which is why I linked directly). Go forth and find yourself some good books to read.

Tell me which ones you've read--or which you really liked, and which ones you're tempted to try...

It just grabbed hold!

2011-03-24T10:13:00.001-06:00

I'm reading a book, one co-authored by a friend of mine in a genre new to her. Co-authoring is also new to her, I think.

I'll be honest--the book isn't the best written thing I've ever read. (And I feel bad saying that, because this co-author IS a friend, and I've read other things by her that are very well written.) But it grabbed hold of me, and I'm having a really hard time putting it down, even to go to work.

Overall, the writing isn't horrible. Though--once the main character is named, she needs to be referred to by name, pronoun, or title--like if she's 'the queen' or 'the priestess.' Something more generic, like 'the blonde,' just jerks me right out of the story, because I wonder if it's the barmaid or something, who just happens to be blond. It's just too generic to be used to name the main character, once the main character is named and described.

I'm also finding the characters almost caricatures--this one is supposed to be carefree and fun-loving and maybe a bit ditzy--and she's SO ditzy, she's on the verge of stupidity. That one is not only evil, she's fat and disgusting. This other one is a total snob with no redeeming characteristics. This one is too good to be true. That one is so focused on scholarship there's no connecting with people. Caricatures. And yet--and yet...

I cannot put the book down.

I HAVE to see what happens next. It's an epic fantasy published on Smashwords (and other self-publishing e-book platforms) about a girl who's chosen by the magic flute to be its player. There's an evil queen and her suckups, and a noble count who wants to help the girl, but also maybe use her to save his country--and maybe the whole land--from the queen, and things happen, but we don't know why they happen or what they mean, and the magic-flute-player is supposed to be a virgin, but this girl SO isn't, and...

Well, the book just sucked me in. I'm rolling my eyes at the extreme extremeness of the characters, and occasionally stopping to figure out just who, exactly, is doing or saying whatever (I mean, surely, there's more than one blonde in this universe), and gulping it down fast as I can. I sure hope the end answers all the questions raised and all the nasty bad guys get theirs and-- Well, I'll let you know.

Yeah. So, if you want to take the chance of this book grabbing you by the throat (or the eyeballs--whatever), it's called THE NIGHT HOLDS THE MOON, by Colleen Thompson and Parke Roberts.

Oh, I am still working on the revising of the book. Making notes about large changes--haven't really reached the parts where I think it may need them, just reading through, marking small changes, and making notes...

TBR Challenge: Candy Apple Red

2011-03-16T11:10:00.000-06:00

Wow. Looks like my last several blogposts have all been about the TBR challenge. Between the new grandbaby, and getting my dad settled in the nursing home, and finding all their paperwork to get sent off to the accountants for taxes, and then fighting off the bronchitis from !*@&#!, I haven't posted anything here, have I?

But I've been good. I realized the challenge was coming up, and went to my TBR shelves to see what I was in the mood to read. See, I didn't list any books as "intending to read" for the challenge. What I want to read depends on my mood, and if I'm not in the right mood, I can't get through things I might have had on my list. So, I just perused my shelves (and moved a lot of stuff around), and picked out CANDY APPLE RED by Nancy Bush.

So. The book is a September 2006 release from Kensington, book #1 in the Jane Kelly series.

Why was it on my TBR shelf? Because I got it free from an RWA conference, I think. 2006 was several years ago, and my mind does well to remember what I was doing last week. I'm pretty sure I brought it home because I thought I'd probably enjoy reading it, stuck it on the shelf, and never got much farther. Sigh.

It IS by a new-to-me author, which was the suggestion for March, so I succeeded there. It's not really a romance.

The Review: There's a blurb on the front cover from Lisa Jackson that says "Move over Stephanie Plum, Jane Kelly has arrived." This to me would intimate that the book is slapstick funny, with lots of quirky characters and things blowing up. It's not. It's a pretty good read, but it's not slapstick. It's your basic cozy mystery with relationship issues and a single-gal protagonist.

Jane Kelly is what her married accountant friend Billy calls a "hatchery fish." Someone who takes the easy route, rather than struggling upstream. She moved to Portland, OR, following a man, and just sort of stayed when he moved on. She works as a process server, and does a bit of research for a private investigator. (She does get "treed" by a mean dog on top of her car and has to call her friend for a rescue, but her friend is not a Lula-type. She has more sense than Jane.) She's slightly attracted to the PI, but doesn't want to be. She's still hung up on the guy who moved on, Murphy.

There's an old mystery at the heart of all this. Murphy's best friend Bobby was accused of murdering his entire family--wife and 3 kids--and vanishing, several years ago. It's why Murphy left town--he didn't want to believe it. The cops think Bobby's parents--rich and divorced--have been supporting him. But now Bobby's Mom wants Jane to use her connection with Murphy to talk to Bobby's Dad and find out where he--Bobby--is. Jane doesn't want to. She wants to be over Murphy. Then Bobby turns up drowned in the lake.

This story has a lot of threads and a lot of subtext. It's complicated--and it's not. The thing about mystery stories--most of the story is about the character's everyday life, with, admittedly, lots of going here to talk to this person and there to sneak around that person's house. In this story, there was a lot of riding in boats to go drink at a restaurant on a lake, or going to eat at this other restaurant. There were a lot of clothes. Jane claimed not to care much about what she wore, but Nancy Bush spent a lot of time describing what she wore. There was a fair bit of mayhem. Bush did a good job hiding the identity of the murderer. It was a fairly interesting mystery.

I'm trying to come up with my main impression of the book, and maybe what I see as the main difference between this one and others of a similar type that I've enjoyed more. And I'm not saying I didn't enjoy it, but...it felt like something was missing. It didn't have the brash voice of an Evanovich book, but I like a lot of series that don't. It felt... Dry. (For all the tootling around on--and in--the lake Jane did.) I know it's not a romance, or even romantic suspense, but the heart didn't seem to be in it. Her lingering obsession with Murphy seemed a tad academic, and her attraction to Dwayne (her boss PI) seemed to appear only when Bush needed it to. The emotion was played so far down, it felt dry.

So over all, it was an interesting read, it kept my attention all the way through to the end, without me yelling at the book for info dumping or researchitis or anything. But I don't know if I'm going to go out of my way to read any more by this author. This one's going to fall somewhere between "I liked it" and "It was okay."

I have drugs for the bronchitis. I sure hope they kick this stuff on its butt soon! I'm tired of feeling like crap.

IT'S A GIRL!

2011-02-17T07:30:00.000-06:00

Okay, I've been busy lately. I've been reading. I've even been working on the book. But at the moment, I don't recall exactly what I've read, though I could, I guess, if I worked at it. However, I certainly couldn't recall whether the stuff I've read is old or not.

You see, my very first granddaughter arrived the day after Valentine's Day. We have three grandboys who are loved dearly, but balance is important. And now, Rocket Girl has come into the family. I haven't thought about writing a review or anything like that. So... I guess this is about all you get for my TBR review for Feb.

TBR Challenge: Cowboy Boss

2011-01-19T10:54:00.000-06:00

I am once again attempting to take part in the TBR Challenge, this year MCed by Wendy the SuperLibrarian.

This year, I am not going to choose my books ahead of time. Who knows from January what books they're going to be in the mood to read come June? I am just going to go to my massive TBR pile, which now includes books 2 years old on my Reader, and see what I feel like reading. Therefore, so as to not fail this challenge in the first month, I have pulled the underbed storage box out from under the bed (the one that doesn't hold Christmas wrapping paper), and discovered that there are not as many books in it as I thought there were. But I found one to read. I am going to copy SuperWendy's format for the actual review--at least partly.

The Book: COWBOY BOSS by Kathy Denosky

The Particulars: Contemporary romance, Silhouette Desire #1457, August 2002, Out of Print, but available in e-book format. :)

Why was it in my TBR? I know Kathy. She's a friend of a friend and a nice person. When I see books by people I know, I tend to buy them.

The Review: Back of the book:

Gentle-hearted Faith Broderick had come to the Triple Bar Ranch to start a new life, not to get involved in a matchmaking scheme intended to get Cooper Adams to cast off his bachelor coat-of-arms. But suddenly stranded with the seductive cowboy, Faith yearned for the domestic dreams she'd put aside. Soon neither could hide the passion that raged between them.

Cooper wasn't planning on heading to the hitchin' post. Yet, with her warmth, lovely Faith filled his home and the lonely corners of his heart. Cooper knew he'd better watch his step—because promoting Faith from employee to wife would be far too easy to do....

This is a nice book. Faith is nice, Cooper is nice. Even the stereotypical crusty old ranch hand who sets up the stranding plot is nice, if crusty. The story was a series of romance novel cliches to give the leads a chance to lust after each other--the "catch her naked in the tub" scene, and the "watch him do manly stuff without a shirt on" scene, and even the "falling on top of each other cute and sexy" scene. But that was about it. Everybody was so nice, there wasn't much conflict, and what angst there was seemed easily brushed over and set aside. I really wanted to like this book more than I did, because I like Kathy. But it was just too...nice.

So. Here is where I depart from SuperWendy. I don't give grades to books. (Okay, yeah, I do put stars on them over at GoodReads, but my stars are more shiny than most people's. The like is higher.)

And that's it. My first TBR Challenge review of 2011. I will try my darnedest to keep it up this year. We will have to see how that works...

In other news, all is quiet on the parental front--though that isn't necessarily a good thing. It's just a thing. And as I am going back over the Big Book I finished last year, I am discovering a lot of drivel, and also a fair bit of "Wow, that's really good. I wrote that?" So now the trick is getting rid of the drivel and making the good stuff still work.

Lazy week

2011-01-14T10:53:00.000-06:00

It has been a lazy week. I am ashamed for being so lazy--and yet...

It felt so good! I sat goofing off with the laptop in the living room where I could at least be in the same room with the family, if not actually speaking to them. (I did not actually use my feet on the laptop...) I think sometimes it's fill-the-well refreshing to just be a lazy lump. And sometimes, it's just being lazy. The trick is figuring our which state you're in when.

I did have appointments three afternoons after the dayjob this week--two doctor and one to get my hair shortened. (I look lovely now, have no new skin cancers and will see what's wrong with the sore toe when the x-rays are examined.) That took up much of the after work time this week.

Next week, I am doing a workshop on writing action, so need to pull it out and spruce it up.

Oh-- We have an official due date for the new grandbaby. She (or maybe he) will arrive via C-section, because big brother did, on Feb. 16. I need to make my plane reservations so I can go up and help. Mostly chauffeuring big brother around, I think.

So I guess I'd better get all my work done between now and then, huh? Yeah, I'm just being lazy.

What's next?

2011-01-07T11:57:00.000-06:00

So. The new year is actually here, and it's time I decided what I was going to do with it.

First thing I have to do is catch up with the parents' insurance and healthcare issues. That's ongoing, and complicated. And messes with everything else. But it has to be first. I'm their oldest child and that puts me in the organizational seat. And anybody who knows me knows that organization is Not my strong suit. (sigh) But they're my parents, and they took care of me, and now it's their turn for me to take care of them. That's just the way it is.

Next, I have to get my book typed up and revised and off to the agent. HAVE to. I'm almost a year behind when I thought I could get it to her. It's written. Just needs to get polished. And in readable format. That sort of thing. There are other book things I need to bring up with her, also.

After that--well, I want to get through the TBR challenge for a whole year. I always start out with grand ambitions, then things fall apart partway through.

I want to clean up my office. And I want to rediscover the joy of writing. Of plunging into a story that appeals to me, just for the fun of it. When I actually find time and energy to write, I do have it--fun--it's just that time and energy have been a little short to come by lately.

Oh. And I need to find time to get my Comcast e-mail straightened out. It doesn't work, hasn't for months, and it makes it a pain to do e-mail. Better put it on my list. If I don't, it will NEVER get done. I live by my lists. :)

There are the other, more usual first-of-year goals: Lose weight, eat healthier, enjoy the moment, etc., etc. And those are all in there too...but these others are the ones I want to give the weight of words. They are the things I need to do, for me.

How 'bout y'all? What's on your list?

A New Year!

2010-12-28T09:50:00.000-06:00

I'm looking forward to it. Not that things are magically going to be better, but because--well, just because. It's new. And shiny. And that makes things more hopeful.

We had a good Christmas. The Texas grandsons came to visit--with their dad. ;) The boys are still here, but their dad had to go back to work. We have toys, shoes, candy, clothes and other little-boy paraphernalia strewn from one end of the house to the other. Ain't it grand!

I got a new laptop computer for Christmas. (So did the fella and the youngest son.) This is the first laptop I've ever had--and I need to find that wireless mouse I have somewhere, because using the touchpad is giving me mouse elbow... Don't know how moving my thumb and fingers makes my elbow hurt, but there it is. Still, I love it. It will go with me on the next trip to the parents'. Not that they have a wifi set up, but I can get a router to go on Daddy's cable. :)

I made pecan and buttermilk pies for Christmas, and yesterday, we went on a cookie-making binge. Well, actually, I started by making snickerdoodles (again), and then the boy's girlfriend, who's spending a few days with us, made chocolate chip cookies, and then broke out the gluten-free chocolate chip cookie mix. The gf mixes from Betty Crocker & co. are pretty good stuff.

There's even gf Bisquick! The fella got all excited, because he could finally, after nearly 30 years, have
chicken and dumplings again. We always made the dumplings out of biscuit dough or actual canned biscuits--totally wheat flour, which he can't eat. So he got busy last night, mixed up two boxes of gf Bisquick dough and made himself (and us) chicken and dumplings. Pretty good, if I say so myself.

In parental news, Daddy seems to be responding well to his new medication. Even he says he's not having so many "crazy ideas" or wild dreams. I did have to make the trip up twice last week, because Mother's next older sister was very ill, and passed away Tuesday evening. They had a quick graveside service on Thursday for family and close friends, and will have a memorial service in another few weeks. The fella and I drove up to get Mama & Daddy and take them to Waco for the burial. About every 30 minutes, Daddy asked where we were going, and where exactly we were again, but overall he did pretty good. He did have lunch twice. We got there early enough to eat at a Chinese buffet before the service, but my brother and his wife didn't, so we went with them to a Denny's afterward, and Daddy had a big hamburger. Mama and I shared dessert.

It was good seeing all the family we haven't seen in a few years--cousins and aunts and uncles. Daddy remembered some of them--didn't remember my brother's name, but remembered several of my cousins. Now of the four sisters, only the oldest and youngest (Mama) are left. Aunt Joyce is just as sharp as she ever was, which aggravates Mama half to death, because she has so much trouble remembering things. But we've been blessed to have them as long as we have.

Love your family as hard as you can while you can, because you don't know how long you'll have them. That's my motto for the new year.

Still scrambling

2010-12-10T15:11:00.001-06:00

Well. Another busy, busy week. While on the road from south central Texas (SE of Austin) to the Texas Panhandle (about an 11-hour drive) for her father-in-law's funeral, my sister got a call from the home health nurse about our dad. Seems the nurse was present for one of Daddy's melt-downs and it worried her. She thinks it's time to see about moving Daddy out, possibly into an Alzheimer's facility. So Baby Sister called me, once she reached Borger and got out of the no-cell-phone access areas, and I got up Saturday morning and headed up to the parents'.

In just the two weeks since I was last there, the Alzheimer's has gotten worse. Mama hadn't taken her Aricept every day, but she was so thin it alarmed me. (Loss of appetite is one of the side effects of the medicine.) And I could scarcely leave the room without Daddy losing his temper about something. I wound up staying four days instead of the three I'd planned, because there was a doctor's appointment on Tuesday I needed to stay for. Plus, the nurse had referred the parents to their social worker who came by Tuesday and helped us get the claim started on their long-term care insurance policy, which will cover home care as well as a nursing home. (Best thing they ever did! Besides signing power of attorney forms several years ago.) So, we've got things started. We'll just have to see how it goes from there.

We haven't finished our Christmas shopping, and we need to get gifts mailed to Pennsylvania soon. We haven't even drawn names for my siblings' families. We've been too busy putting out fires. And yet--it's still Christmas. I'm trying hard not to get too stressed--and it's working somewhat. I'm just going to focus on family and the absolute necessities, and forget about everything else. (Of course, when the fella's volunteered our house for the Lion's Club Christmas party next Thursday... But I'm making him do the cleanup!!) Keep praying, y'all. We sure need it.

Wild and woolly

2010-12-03T10:40:00.000-06:00

It was a wild weekend in Dallas/Fort Worth with all the in-laws, kids, grandkids--the whole horde. We were celebrating the fella's parents' 60th anniversary. The nephews were back from Australia--the one in grad school down there has finished his Master's degree in oenology biochemistry, and brought back wines he'd made. (Very tasty.) His brother just went down to visit. The daughter also came with her family from the "frozen Northland" (aka Pennsylvania), including the escape artist (aka her son).

That kid is really fast! The in-laws' house, where we were staying, backs up to a big park, with baseball fields visible from the house and a playground beyond them. Several times during the visit, Mowgli (he has autism, and occasionally behaves as if he were raised by wolves) would take it into his head that it was time to go to the park, and zip! He'd be out the door and dashing for the gap in the fence. And he was often faster than the adult chasing him, so his Mom would have to go out and yell at him and make him come back. I foresee a track star. If the coach can convince him to actually run on the track, and wait for the starting gun/bell to start running. Honestly, he was very good during the whole visit, except for one or two escape attempts. That's not bad for a week's visit not even at his own Gigi & Granddaddy's house.

We celebrated Thanksgiving, then we celebrated the anniversary. The daughter got everyone to tell a family story. ("Dad--we need a broom, and a bandaid." and "New constitutional amendment about green beans.") We took all the grandboys to the zoo where everyone had a great time. We took the little boys to see "Tangled." It went over well, once the action started. (The opening was a little talky.) We raked up a century-old pecan tree's-worth of leaves (plus I saw a few oak tree leaves in there) and let the boys jump in them. One tree made a ginormous pile of leaves. We even did a little Christmas shopping.

Now the older son has come to the island for a conference. We're going to Dickens on The Strand tomorrow. It's basically a street festival to celebrate Galveston's historic Victorian-era downtown, where people dress up in Victorian era costumes, pirate costumes, and even costumes from Dickens stories (like Jacob Marley from "A Christmas Carol") and hang out downtown. They're having steampunk stuff this year, along with the usual parades, street urchins, bed races, mummers, etc. I don't have a costume, but hey--it's fun. (I have stuff to make a costume, but... Good intentions and all that.)

Can't get into my office right now, with guests in town. I'll start revisions on... Sunday? Sounds good to me.

Banking Emergency

2010-11-22T10:45:00.001-06:00

Emergency and banks don't really seem like things that go in the same sentence--unless your accounts have been pillaged. Or unless your parents both have Alzheimer's. My mom's is progressing relatively slowly, but Daddy's seems to be going downhill more quickly these days.

One evening last week, Mama was paying a bill when she realized she didn't know what the bill was for. Or rather, it was for a line-of-credit loan she didn't know had been taken out. Because Daddy was asleep, she took it next door to my sister, who called me, and we got online to see what was going on. And nobody knew, except that nearly $10 grand had been used from their line of credit, and who knew what the money was used for. When I called the parents to tell them I was coming down the next day, I asked Daddy if he knew anything about it, and he thought somebody must have got into his banking and messed with it. Mama had a morning doctor appointment, so I got up in the way-too-early hours of the morning and made the trek through Houston and beyond to their little town, only to learn that Mama had gone to the emergency room with chest pains only that Monday, and yet again had failed to tell the sister--who lives Next Door--and yet again had allowed Daddy to drive her there, when he's not supposed to be driving at all. (This is now the perennial fight when I go visit. He has to bring it up at least once while I'm there.) Sigh.

So. Baby Sister got a substitute for her high school English classes and we all trekked to the county seat, where the bank is, and we discovered that the money had just been transferred into their savings account. Of course, this was still a problem, since the loan was at 10% interest, and savings is at--what? 0.25%? Terrible interest. So we paid back the loan--at a cost of $150 or so--got Baby Sister and me added to the accounts, and changed the password on the online banking to keep it from happening again.

That day, Daddy accepted that he had probably done it. Next morning? He had decided that I had gone into his bank accounts and messed them up, because he certainly hadn't done it. We'd convinced him to take the bills next door to Baby Sis so she could make sure everything got paid, but the next day, he was all gritchy again, because he'd paid the bills all his life and didn't see why he couldn't keep on doing it. So I just took care of it without telling him.

By the time I headed home, he'd accepted again that he'd done it himself, and had decided that he would be in the "nuthouse" before I came back, because when I said I'd see him when I came back again, he said "Probably not."

It's time to get a guardianship set up, though. We need to protect them from themselves, but that's going to take a little while. Pray for us. We need all we can get.

At last!

2010-11-10T15:27:00.000-06:00

Yes, at long last, I have finished this book I've been working on.

Well, mostly. Except for a necessary epilogue. But that will be easy, once I decide what, exactly, happens. All the emotional turmoil is done, the angst is de-angsted, the decisions are made. (The characters' decisions, I mean. Mine aren't quite finished.) The last little bit is just the happy ending part. And yes, it has a happy ending. I'm a romance reader, and a romance writer. I insist upon the happy ending. Happy. Not perfection. 'Cause, you know, you don't get perfection this side of glory. But you do get happy.

I also still have to type the rest of the book into the computer in the first edit. And then I have to print the sucker out and go through for revisions. I already know some stuff I'm going to cut out. And there's more I probably need to punch up. But I like it. And it's done. Mostly.

Go Me.

Niagara & beyond

2010-11-01T15:08:00.000-06:00

Yes, for the very first time ever in my whole life, I got to go to Niagara Falls. You will notice that there are no pictures of the falls, or of the beautifal fall leaves in Canada (we stayed on the Canadian side of the river, because after 3 days in Niagara Falls, we went to Toronto for 4 more days). This is because I left the camera in the rental car when we got back to Buffalo to fly back home. We took lots and lots of pictures, but... I am sick about it, but what can you do?

Anyway, we had a wonderful experience. You can see Niagara Falls in movies and on TV, and it looks really amazing and impressive, but honey, believe me when I say that it still doesn't prepare you for how much MORE impressive and amazing and everything it looks when you see it in person. We went on the Maid of the Mist boat ride. We went in the tunnels behind the falls (not much to see, really, but white water & mist). We drove up the river to Fort Erie, Ont. to look at the fort, but it was closed. Still, it was a really nice drive down the river. When we left Niagara Falls, we drove north, down the river (it really felt weird to be going downriver, and north at the same time), to Niagara-on-the-Lake and stopped at one of the ice wine wineries, then on around Lake Ontario to Toronto.

At Toronto, I wrote a little bit, but it's a very interesting city, and we were right in the middle of it--across the street from city hall. I did not realize that Hudson's Bay Company was still in existence. It is now the largest department store in Canada. I went. Didn't buy anything, except breakfast one morning. I went to the Bata Shoe Museum, and while it did have some gorgeous and glamorous designer shoes, I found the "history of shoes" exhibit and the rotating exhibit on native American moccasins the most fascinating. Flip-flops have a Loooooooong history. ;) (Egyptians wore flipflops)

We did Chinatown, and rode across to Toronto Island, which creates the harborfront in Toronto. Their seawall, along the island, was a LOT chillier than our seawall... We just had a good time, and ate at a lot of good places. I had rabbit pasta--first time I ever ate rabbit... I just hate that I lost the dadgum camera. Sigh. (I also lost an earring. One of my new black ones. Grr.)

Okay, I can't do it. I have to put at least one picture in. Yes, the water really is that green. And there's a lot more city around the falls than I thought. I had this mental image of the falls being isolated way out in the country, somewhere you had to drive to for hours and hours, but it's not. You fly into the Buffalo, NY, airport, and 20 minutes later, you're there. Niagara Falls. With city on both sides of the river. Though the US side has a state park. We stayed in a hotel next to a casino with a fabulous view of the falls. I just loved it.

And now I am back home in sunny Galveston, where the cold front takes the temperatures down to a balmy 72F/22C instead of the 50F/10C it was while we were in Toronto (which was the coldest it got--really, it was lovely most of the time. They still had roses blooming at the botanical gardens!). I admit it--I have lost all my antifreeze. I am a wimp when it comes to cold weather. But really--we had a great time in Canada.

Life's a beach, sometimes

2010-10-08T17:00:00.000-05:00

Those are the flip-flops I wear when I go to walk on the beach. I only wear them while I'm walking on the seawall before I climb down the stairs to the sand, or sometimes when I cross the rock groins built out from the seawall for wave control during storms. I carry them most of the time. But when I come back from my walks, they're all sandy, and I don't want to wear them in the house, so they tend to live on the front porch, waiting for me to come back and put them on again for another walk.

I usually walk in the morning, after breakfast, before I start working on whatever I'm working on that day. It's a nice way to clear the head/commune with nature before having to focus and use the brain.

The seagulls have been sitting actually IN the water the past several days, I assume because the water is still warm. If you look, you can see the seagulls, and someone who's taken the challenge of walking out on the rocks. People like to walk to the end to fish, but it's not easy to get all the way out there, because there can be big gaps between the rocks, and they aren't always level.

I've been dealing with parents earlier this week, and really needed a beach walk or two.

My parents both have Alzheimer's, but it manifests differently in each of them, and is progressing at different rates. Because of some worrisome things that happened recently--Daddy losing his temper abruptly in inappropriate places, and having trouble remembering people--I made him a doctor appointment so I could go with them and talk to the doctor about these worries. I couldn't figure out how to talk to the doctor without Mama and Daddy present, until I realized I could write a letter, which I did. The doctor had the nurse call me out, and we discussed the things I'd written, then I went back into the exam room first, and he came in after a minute. It's nice that people with Alzheimer's are as easy to distract as toddlers, because when Daddy started to get upset that I'd "snitched on him," I was able to shift the conversation to how skinny they were, and whether Mama really weighed 112 lbs. (She didn't--weighed in at abt. 126, but Mama is 5'9" or 10" even after "shrinking" so she really needs to weigh around 145.)

Anyway, the doctor really hammered in that Daddy needed to stop driving, No Matter What. We'll have to take his keys, and maybe even disable the car to get him to stop, though. He's got it in his head that he HAS to drive, and that he's just fine doing it. He can't remember who his granddaughter is, and gets ideas that people are beating on him, but he can drive. (ARGGHH) And, the doc wrote an order for a home health nurse to come by and check that they're taking their meds.

The nurse came yesterday, and although Daddy was pretty crotchety the whole time she was there, it sounds like she's going to get them all organized. Transportation when they need it, meals once a week at the rec center, check-ins about their meds, blood pressure checks--all kinds of things. I'm just tickled.

It's still likely they'll have to go to some kind of assisted living sometime in the new year, so we're starting to talk that up, but we can keep them at home a little longer now.

Program break for political rant

2010-10-01T16:05:00.000-05:00

I'm in a bit of a pother. Actually, I'm pretty outraged.

Money for hurricane relief was allocated to the Texas Gulf Coast--this is for relief of Hurricane Ike from TWO YEARS AGO. But the Feds fooled around and didn't send the money for months and months, and when it finally arrived, the agencies helping the people who got Iked only had about 6 months to spend the money, while following all the red tape and guidelines of the Feds. The deadline could have been extended--and routinely has been for Hurricane Katrina victims and other disaster relief.

But ONE representative--a Republican from Kansas--somehow blocked the bill that would have extended it. With no comment as to why.

Once again, Ike is the Hurricane America Forgot. Just because Lehman Bros. went bankrupt two days later... Yes, Galveston is a smaller city than New Orleans. No, the flooding did not stay for week. BUT, 80 percent of the houses on the island flooded. (Mine was not one of them.) A lot of people are STILL out of their homes.

Don't Americans deserve as much consideration as Haitians? Don't Texans deserve as much help as Louisianans? Galveston's pretty purple, as much Democrat as Republican. It's about as bi-partisan as a city can get. Is that why this Republican cut off the grants? That's $40 million my neighbors aren't getting. Money they deserve and ought to have.

I don't have a dog in this hunt. My house wasn't damaged. We're doing fine. But so many are not. Still. Cutting off the grant isn't the way to fix bureaucratic problems...

Epicurean adventures

2010-09-28T16:46:00.000-05:00

The fella and I went to the Epicurean Evening event at Moody Gardens in Galveston last night. We've gone to it the past three years and always enjoy it a lot. Last night was no exception.

See that picture? That's only a quarter of the room. Or less. Now imagine that stretching in all those directions. With food and drink booths all the way around. And in the middle. There were only a few booths in the middle, but there was still plenty of room for silent auction tables, and tables for people to sit down for a minute or two to catch their breath, talk a little with friends or digest for a minute.

All the hotels had beautiful presentations. Moody Gardens has some wonderful watermelon carvers, who also make parrots out of squash and sweet potatoes. They also had fish carved out of sweet potatoes and some other things I couldn't figure out what they'd used. But I didn't post the picture of the carved vegetable fish. (The coral was carved out of potatoes. Just regular old potatoes that turned brown creatively to make them look more like coral and sponges.) When I took the picture of the fish, the waiters who were standing there ducked out of the way and made my picture look all blurry. Oh well. (I can't figure out how to get rid of the big gap here, so you're just going to have to live with it.)

Then there was the display of fish and shrimp and crabs (with bell pepper flowers) that Fisherman's Wharf had. I thought it was gorgeous. But then anything with seafood is gorgeous, IMO.

The food was fabulous. The booths had little tiny servings, and I ate till I was filled to my eyeballs. I tried to keep up with the fella, who eats shockingly fast, which wasn't smart. We had crab cakes and shrimp with watermelon gazpacho and salad (Fisherman's Wharf had a salad with fresh lump crab, shrimp and...something else) and in all kinds of sauces.

We had shortribs with polenta and prime rib with a tiny scoop of garlic mashed potatoes. I ate a raspberry chipotle olive pizza, and a smoked chicken salad sandwich (out of this world) with a slice of pork tenderloin with a spicy apple barbecue sauce from Capital Q Barbecue.

I had an Asian chicken salad from the Mosquito Cafe, and a fruit skewer from Southern Produce. That was really good, and I should have gone back for another... The fella ate sushi from the Sky Bar, and I got gumbo from the Gumbo Bar (I think they're owned by the same people). I also got some crawfish etouffee from... Hmm. Don't remember. But it was good. And they also had red beans and rice.

There was a chicken-crawfish-shrimp in wine sauce thing from one of the Mexican restaurants, and a broccoli-rice casserole that had barbecued sausage in it from one of the barbecue places. That was really good too. We tried pretty much everything, unless the line was too long. Except all the wine. There were a LOT of wine and spirits booths, and two with beer/hard lemonade type things. I like the Smirnoff Cranberry Lime malt beverage. I also tried a taste of cherry rum. Yes, I was a two-fisted drinker (as you can see). This was before I dropped the barbecued sausage down my shirt and got barbecue sauce on it.

They also had bibs, because it was really hard to hold a cup and a little plate, and try to eat off it. But I couldn't get the bib to stay up, so I got barbecue sauce on me. Ah well. Oh--and desserts! There were biscotti and cupcakes and pumpkin bars and cookies and this mini-volcano thing from the Rainforest Cafe that was ice cream in the middle, brownies around it (as rocks) and caramel and chocolate sauce dribbled down the sides. DEElicious.

I tried to keep up with the fella, who eats lickety-split, and I hurt myself eating too fast. I did slow down after the first or second booth. There was plenty of food, and it was all good.

I AM writing. Or revising. That's all good too. Also, I don't have to run my genre-review column by the editor before putting it in the paper any more. It's all good.

Presenting the Plotting Workshop

2010-09-23T16:00:00.000-05:00

So, my friend Belinda came to town this week, and we did a workshop at the Houston Bay Area RWA chapter on storyboard plotting with Post-It Notes.

We do our plot brainstorming this way. It's very visual, and some of the HBA members had heard about it, but couldn't figure out how to do it. So we did a joint workshop and showed how we do it.

We probably don't do it like anyone else. B is a little on the anal side (she has a whole Justin cowboy boot box full of different colors of Post-It Notes), and I'm a whole lot loosey-goosey about things, so when we're doing our brainstorming, we get a lot of "You need some more internal conflict in there," from B, and a lot of "I'll just figure it out when I get there," from me.

Don't get me wrong. I DO plot before I write. I just don't plot very deeply. I want a one-page skeleton/roadmap to hang my story on. B, on the other hand, would plot right down to the individual scenes if she could do it. (Not that she can't, but she usually doesn't, because I'm fussing at her to "Write the dang story already!")

Anyway, we had a good time doing the workshop. We plotted a paranormal story, so we could have more plot threads to keep straight, and use more colors. But as one person said, it probably would have worked better if we'd done a plot from a movie--something well known.

It rained most of the time Belinda was here, but we did get to eat some nice shrimp, and went downtown to The Witchery on Postoffice Street so she could buy a crystal for meditating. The fellas--because B always comes down with hers (he doesn't trust her driving in Houston traffic)--went fishing while we did our workshop. They caught fish too, but gave them all away. I'm glad they had fun too.

And yeah, the visit with my folks went fine. The Alzheimer's is getting worse, so I'll be talking with their doctor in the near future to see what needs to be done. But this weekend, I'm being sorta lazy.

Out and about

2010-09-15T15:55:00.003-05:00

I took this picture last week, but I'm posting it today, because I haven't uploaded the pictures I took this a.m. when I went out to walk on the beach. It was pretty windy this day. Today, it was still, not much wind at all. But still fabulous.

There was a snowy egret out fishing on the beach. I gave it a wide berth so it wouldn't fly off, but I wasn't the only one out walking...still, it seemed pretty calm with 3 or 4 people out and about.

So, the fella and I have had our birthdays. We went to Saltgrass Steakhouse for his birthday and ate steaks, and to Landry's for mine, where I had shrimp fresca (because I love that stuff) and he had fish. Tilapia, I think. The oil spill hasn't seemed to interfere with the local shrimping, but I'm wondering if it's messing with the fishing. Haven't seen as much snapper or redfish lately... We are still discussing our birthday present. (We usually get One present, because there's all of 8 days between the two events, and we might as well.) I think we're going to get a refrigerator. As in, not getting rid of the old refrigerator, but adding one. We have a 30 year old freezer we're going to retire. (It runs all the time and uses a lot of 'lectricity.)

The fella has bought himself a pistol. He is taking the class to get himself a license to carry a concealed weapon (it's legal in Texas to carry concealed, not openly) (If you take the class and get the license), and you have to have a handgun in order to take the class. He's not taking it because he intends to carry the thing. But at the state capitol, folks with a license can get into the building without having to go through all the metal detectors and searching. (There is a logic to it...) And since the lege is meeting starting in January, and he has to be there frequently during the session, he wants a license. And while he is taking his class, I'm going to visit the parents.

I was talking to them today, telling them I was coming up to visit. I mentioned my daughter by name--and Daddy couldn't quite remember who she was. He knew she was family, but couldn't place how she fit in...and was totally embarrassed when I told him. He hasn't seen her for a year--they live in Pennsylvania and don't get back to Texas often--but, well, it's breaking my heart, and I hope we do get them to the end of the year in their own house.

Shrimp salad

2010-09-10T14:22:00.007-05:00

I mentioned before that my mother-in-law loved this shrimp salad from a now closed restaurant. Occasionally, we get a salad that's sorta similar, but usually, no. So we worked to try to recreate it, and I believe we've gotten close. It's mighty tasty, at any rate. And I've promised to share. So here it is.

I started with my leftover shrimp. I had lots. I bought 4 pounds, and we might have eaten half of them. Maybe. This was less than I had for the first salad I made, but still probably more than we really needed. Amounts may be adjusted according to your taste, and to how much shrimp you have/how big a salad you want to make. This makes a great main dish--but the fella likes to have it "on the side" as an actual salad. (I think he's silly.)

So. Shrimp. At least a pound, boiled (or steamed in the microwave--whatever).

Then, you'll want: celery (this is the majority of the salad), cucumber, green onion and green bell peppers. I peeled, seeded, chopped and salted the cucumber, (I used a whole one) then put it in this colander to drain. When I made this before, I didn't do the salt-and-drain thing, and the salad got a little watery. Draining it helped. It takes a while to do all the peeling and chopping, so if you do the cuke first, it'll have plenty of time to drain.

I used 5 celery stalks for this salad. I used more for the first one I made. The tender heart of the celery is the best in this, but I didn't use it in this salad. It was still good, and I don't even like celery, which I may have mentioned before. I like it in this, though.

I used 5 green onions--all of them, end to end. The green parts are really good. And I used about half the bell pepper. I used less in the first salad, and could taste it more in this one. I like bell pepper, so I liked the "more."

I may go for an "English" cucumber next time. Those are the really long cucumbers sold wrapped in plastic wrap. I think more would have been good, and the English ones are supposed to have fewer seeds and maybe be a little drier. But I just used one whole regular cucumber.

I chopped everything to a fairly small dice, maybe 1/4 to 3/8 of an inch. I peeled and chopped the shrimp after I did all the vegetables. It was really pretty, I thought, when I piled it on top like this.

But we are not done. This is not a layered salad. This is a scoop-it-onto-your-plate-in-a-mound salad. It needs the dressing, and then to be all stirred up.

The dressing is like for a tuna or chicken salad. Mostly mayo. (We use real mayo, because of gluten issues.) You have to judge the amount according to how big your salad is. Everything is adjustable in this salad.

I used two big spoonfuls of mayo, and then added another couple of little spoons of sour cream. (This is a big salad, people.) I seasoned it with a little salt and pepper and a good dusting of Cajun seasoning.

I could have used a ton more, and probably still have barely tasted it. I could scarcely taste any spice at all. All those vegetables, I guess. The shrimp are naturally salty, and I did cook them in the Old Bay. But this is a very mild-tasting salad.

You could probably experiment with seasoning--but the vegetables and shrimp are all so cool tasting, I don't know that you could change that very much.

At this point, I'm sure you know the rest: Stir it all up, and eat it. You might want to stick it in the refrigerator a while to let the flavors blend, but they blend pretty good from the very beginning.

I also imagine that you could do this in a food processor, if you're careful not to puree things. I think the restaurant had smaller chunks of food, and it did take me a while to chop all this stuff up. (The first time, I had the fella peel and chop the shrimp for me.)

It took us three days to eat all this salad, and there were four of us eating it. Of course, until Monday (Labor Day) lunch, we didn't eat it as a main dish for the meal.

Yeah, it looks a lot paler, not so pretty and colorful, with the white dressing stirred all into it, but take my word. This is really good stuff.

My foot is almost well. I've been out walking the dog twice this week, but I let her walk around the neighborhood with me off leash. She's been very good about staying with me and not trying to leave the street. I let her out of the backyard the other day to run while I brought the trashcan in, and she was so cute. When I had the can in the back, but the gate still open, she came and peeked around the corner of the house at me, just to double-check I was there, and maybe to see if I was going to make her come back. She saw me look at her, and dashed back to the front yard, in case I might call her. She came back to check on me again, before I got back out front to watch her. She stayed in our yard, except for running across the street to see if Tony (the owner) or Sheba (the dog) were home. Tony loves Dolly the princess pitbull. Sheba tolerates her. So she's allowed to go in Tony's yard. As long as she's a good doggie, I'll take her walking with me. We both could use the exercise. :)

Shrimp feast tonight!

2010-09-03T14:34:00.011-05:00

So. I've been wanting to make that yummy shrimp salad again. I almost bought frozen shrimp at Kroger, but the fresh ones are so much better--and I've been in there mornings to see them opening the Exact Same bags of frozen shrimp they have in the freezers and pouring them onto the ice in the "meat market" area. Therefore, this morning, I got in my bus and drove down to the fish market.

Yes, the two markets at Galveston harbor are right next door to each other. And just to the right of Katie's (where I bought my shrimps) are the shrimp boats. Some of them anyway. More of them are farther east.

We are in Texas. The oil spill has not come this direction. We have had no oil, no dispersants, none of that mess. The seafood here is Just Fine. Excellent, in fact. Just FYI.

Today, I forgot my ice chest. It's better to take an ice chest with you to buy fish and shrimp, because then you don't have ice melting on your floorboard while you drive home. Anyway, the first job in fixing shrimp anything is to select your shrimp. In the front, you have your medium sized "head on" shrimp. They're usually a tad cheaper, but you have to pinch the heads off. (This kind of "pinch" is pronounced "peench" which is the correct Southern pronunciation for something vicious enough to take the head off a shrimp, or make your little brother squeal in church. A pinch of salt is just a "pinch.")

I hate pinching the heads off shrimp, because they have these poky spine things that stick out in front, and they stab me. Also, I don't like shrimp hairs. You get a few hairs in de-headed shrimp, but not enough to comb. So, I bought the medium-sized shrimp in the middle--30-35 shrimp per pound. The ones in the back are the extra large (11-15 per pound), but they're not as good for a shrimp boil, and would require a Lot of chopping for salad. (Also, they're about $5 more per pound.) The large shrimp didn't make the picture. They're about $1 more, and today, they were the pink Gulf shrimp, instead of the "brown" Bay shrimp. They didn't look enough bigger to make me want them. I bought four pounds, because when I mentioned making shrimp salad, the fella wanted cold boiled shrimp for supper. I mean, if I was going to the fish market anyway, I might as well buy enough for supper too, right?

The first thing you do, whether you're going to eat them plain, boiled, or make them into a salad (or into enchiladas or sundry other things), is to boil the shrimp.

For this, you need a big pot, with lots of water, some "shrimp boil" (we like Old Bay seasoning), and shrimp.

I like to rinse the shrimp before I put them in the pot to cook. You don't necessarily have to do this, but I did. You can maybe get a better idea of their size and color in the "rinse" picture. It's something to do while you wait for the water to boil, and gives you a chance to pick out any stray shrimp hairs that might have got into the bag.

Shrimp don't take very long to cook. I add the Old Bay (or other) seasoning to the water when I put it on to boil, about a tablespoon for every couple of pounds. The fella likes more, but I think that's plenty.

You'll want to get the water to a really big rolling boil, then dump the shrimp in all at once. It will stop boiling, and the shrimp will all sink to the bottom of the pot. You can sort of see them in this picture, despite all the steam. They're done when they float, and turn pink. Generally, that's about when the water comes back to a rolling boil, and boils over.

So you have boiling water, and floating shrimp, and they're pink. It's time to take them off the heat. Pour them carefully into a colander in the sink--I haven't burned myself yet in this process, but give me time. This is me. Run some cool water over them--this is problematic here, since our cold water is mostly lukewarm this time of year. Then put them in a bowl--our big one is glass, but plastic works just fine, and metal probably would too.

See how pink they are? Since these shrimp were brownish-gray to start with, they turn a more delicate pink. The Gulf shrimp start out about this pink, and get a really bright pink when they're cooked. Almost neon.

So then, you pile ice on top of the shrimps and stick them in the refrigerator until you're ready to eat them. We love to have people down to visit, because it gives us an excuse to have a shrimp boil. We do "peel-your-own" shrimp dinners. The first time the youngest boy's girlfriend came to eat with us in Galveston, she had never peeled her own shrimp. We had to teach her how.

The easiest method is to grab their legs and peel one way around the back of the shrimp, taking off as much of the shell as you can. Usually, it breaks off at that tail joint--the one restaurants leave on. Then you take hold of the tail, squeeze that tail joint shell just a bit, and gently pull, to pull all the good meat out of the shell. If that method doesn't work, just wrestle that sucker off the best way you can. Set out bowls at every place to hold the shells, and have lots of napkins handy. (You can buy bottled cocktail sauce, which I like just fine, or you can mix your own with ketchup, horseradish sauce and mayo.) Corn on the cob goes real well with a boiled shrimp meal, also cantaloupe and sliced tomatoes.

Our youngest grandboy is six. He's loved shrimp since he got his first ones at his first birthday. He is just now learning how to peel his own, but can't peel fast enough to suit him. Dad still has to help. His big brother doesn't like shrimp. (He's the picky eater in the family.) Won't touch them. We don't mind. Just means more for the rest of us.

I'll take pictures of the salad making when I get there, but this is obviously step 1. :)

I has an Owie...

2010-08-31T13:59:00.003-05:00

So, I went walking with the dog last Wednesday, because I walk faster when I take her. Except sometimes I walk too fast, and I don't see all the hazards of the road. And Wednesday, I wasn't paying attention to a place where the asphalt didn't cover the whole street, and made a little 2-inch curb. My foot rolled over, sprained itself, and I hit the ground. Rough asphalt made holes in my knees, etc., etc., etc. (There was bleeding.)

So I let the dog off the leash--she got a little running in, but she was very good about coming back home with me. (We hadn't gone very far before I fell.) I walked back home--I knew the foot was just sprained, not broken, because I could walk on it. The picture--that's the foot I didn't sprain. The other foot. It swelled up too, but not as bad as my right foot.

Anyway, I was amazed by the purpleness. The bad foot hasn't turned purple, but it swelled up pretty good. And hurt a lot. I have been hobbling the last several days, but today it's better enough I climbed all the stairs to get into the library.

Yes, I know. I need to give up this falling business. It's no fun. Back to exercising with the Wii.

Not much else to write about. I need to get back to writing this week. I'm kind of in a reading slump, so I need to write.

I've been Manga-ized!

2010-08-25T13:56:00.007-05:00

We've had a package at the post office (we use a P.O. Box for most of our mail) waiting to be picked up for better than a week, because nobody could manage to get by there during "window hours." Finally, the fella went by to get it. It was a box from Harlequin, and I figured one of my old books had been translated into a new language. (Though seemed to me they've already hit most of them--Czech, German, Italian, Korean, Japanese (twice for one book), Greek, Spanish, Portuguese, etc. Maybe not Polish yet, or Hungarian--though I'm not sure.)

Anyway, when I opened up the box, there was one book inside. A manga edition of my 2003 book, Her Convenient Millionaire! (Yeah, I didn't crop the image very well. Oh well.)

They had the beach scene and everything! There were people I don't remember clearly--I wrote this book well before 2003, in case you didn't know how slow publishing worked. And they turned it into Manga!

I have another picture to show, but I'm afraid I'll wind up overlapping them. I haven't tried to show this many pictures with this new "widescreen" format.

The other picture is from later in the book, after the "romance part" begins. Since this is Japanese manga, the love scenes are R-rated. ("Soft-focus" with upper body nudity. Does it count, since it's just pen and ink?)

I also have a picture of a couple of the grandboys taken while they were visiting. I'm not sure who took the picture, because I did not pick my camera up Once the whole time they were here. (I know. I'm going to lose all my "good Gigi" credentials.) The boy in the picture took more pictures with my camera than I did. Pictures of his stuffed cow, and the electronic photo frame, and a fuzzy blanket. He did take a picture of his cousin. Pretty good one, except the kid had his hand in front of his face. Silly boys.

I want to do some recipes in a blog soon, but I want to take pictures of the process, which means I need to fix them again. For years and years, there was a restaurant the in-laws just loved up in Fort Worth, which served a chopped shrimp salad-- Not salad greens with a few shrimp tossed on top, but tons of shrimp and celery and other chopped-up things so thick they served it in a mound, like it had been shaped in a bowl and turned upside down. Shrimp in every bite. We loved that salad. And when the restaurant closed, spent ages trying to figure out how to make it.

Well, I think we finally figured it out. When the family was down, we had a shrimp boil. (That's one reason we have company. So we have an excuse to go buy shrimp from the fish market and eat cold boiled shrimp.) And we had leftover shrimp. And the dairy allergic boys can't eat shrimp enchiladas. (We have three gluten-free eaters, two of whom are also allergic to dairy (one only mildly so, and one extremely so), and one additional non-dairy person in the family. It's kinda nice that there are enough people to have double menus...) Anyway, with all the dairy allergies, we decided to make shrimp salad instead. So, one day soon, I will cook some more shrimps and make the salad, and post pictures with the recipe. And that's just one I want to share...

Fun in the Sun

2010-08-23T14:49:00.004-05:00

It's August in Texas. That means it's hot. Very hot. Extremely hot. As in-- folks would pay a visit to hell because it's bound to be cooler there hot. And the daughter, s-i-l and grandson came down for a week from Pennsylvania last week.

We did some beach going. The Dallas grandboys came down so the cousins could have a little time to play together. We went to "Slitherbahn." It was no harder keeping up with the autistic kid than the other two--they all wanted to run off and do their own thing.

The second time we went to the beach, there were itchy things in the water. We thought at first it was seaweed--but there was less seaweed (sargasso) than the first time, so maybe not. Then we fished some of the itchy things out of our swimsuits. It looked a little like tiny speargrass--maybe the size of a mustardseed. Round, with spiny things sticking out, and kind of clear, but not. Then, I got to wondering if it might be alive in a different way--like maybe tiny baby jellyfish or something... About this time, the daughter pulled out another one of the itchy things and looked at it--and yelps because it has pinchers moving around. Pinchers! Like maybe crab claws. Like the itchy things were tiny, transparent, baby crabs.

I have since looked up crabs and such, and apparently blue crabs (and possibly others) have a tiny, mustard-seed-sized, transparent phase. There are many blue crabs in the Gulf of Mexico, as well as stone crabs and others. So we all had (probably) tiny little crabs up our swimsuits. Needless to say, we did not stay in the water long for our second trip. (The water wasn't as warm either... Not like bathwater trip earlier.)

We also went for a ride on the Galveston-to-Bolivar Peninsula ferry. It's free, and if you walk on, you don't have to wait in line. There's a high observation deck where you can go inside and stay cool in the a/c, or you can go outside and stand in the wind (strong enough to knock me down that day) which helps with the heat, and watch for dolphins.

And we saw them. On the Bolivar side, there must have been a big school of fish, because the birds were swarming the spot. And so were the dolphins.

Too many to count--we guessed we saw somewhere around 20-plus. They were moving too fast to count all of them--and yes, it was obvious that it was that many different dolphins. They don't move that fast. And they were all sizes, including some obvious babies. I saw them jumping out of the water--I saw a trio horsing around, with their noses up out of the water--head up type jumping, and some of the others with bigger-than-usual curving jumps, so their entire bodies came up out of the water, not just their breathing holes and fins. It was SO COOL. I have never ever seen that many dolphins at once.

Most of them surfaced in pairs or trios. I actually have never seen a dolphin swimming alone. I guess they follow the "buddy system." (You know, like Boy and Girl Scouts--you never swim alone, always have a buddy, and always know where your buddy is.) It did make us wonder whether we had more dolphins because of the oil spill, because we haven't had any oil "upstream" of the Gulf current. The picture is not one we took. I forgot my camera. In fact, I did not take A Single Picture the whole time the grandkids were here. (I know. I may lose my "good granny" status. But I was busy playing with them!) The daughter may have gotten some pictures. I hope so, but they were kind of far away, so maybe not.

I have a new computer, but since I'm on jury duty this week, I'm having trouble getting everything loaded and set up. Sigh. But I'm working on it.

I spent all morning today in a county courtroom for the jury questioning (voir dire), knowing I wouldn't get picked, because I was sitting on the last row. I'm still apparently "on call." I have to call a phone number when I get home to see if they need me tomorrow. If I make it through till Friday, I'm off duty. Wish me luck.

Thoughts on gothic vampires

2010-08-12T15:41:00.003-05:00

I read a book yesterday. It was by an author who was not new to me. I've read Deanna Raybourne's "Silent" books and enjoyed them. This book, The Dead Travel Fast, is her newest release, and not in the same series as Raybourne's earlier books.

I have no idea of Raybourne's motives for writing this book, so I really don't want to guess. To me, it feels like it wants to be a vampire book like vampire books used to be before vampires got all sparkly and sexy. Like the original Bram Stoker Dracula.

The heroine is a small Englishwoman--she grew up in Edinburgh, but does not self-identify as Scottish--who travels to Transylvania in the mid-Victorian era to stay with a friend in anticipation of her marriage. The friend lives at the top of an isolated mountain as part of the Dragulescu family, but when the heroine gets there, she finds things are not what she expected. The friend is not marrying her count Dragulescu after all. And the heroine is quite attracted to the man.

About halfway through this book, I really had to drive myself to finish it. I just wasn't having any fun.

I read a review fairly early on, and decided it didn't really sound like the sort of book I enjoy, so I didn't hunt it up. However, I was at the local library earlier this week, looking for Angus, Thongs and Full-frontal Snogging, ran across it and decided--what the heck--it's at the library. I might as well read it.

Except I was right. It wasn't really my type of book. It was the kind of vampire book that reminded my why, for the most part, I really don't like vampire books much. And why I really don't like gothic novels much. It was all mood and atmosphere and language--and I'll be honest here--I really prefer clear, straightforward, workmanlike language with only flashes of artisticness. I am not much of a lover of lush prose. I don't hate it, but sometimes, I think it gets in the way. Or when used, you wind up with a book that's mostly atmosphere and not much substance. Which I really can't say about this--there is substance. But there's an awful lot of atmosphere and brooding and such.

There's a lot of "are there vampires, or is it only criminals trying to make you think there are?" and "Is the hero an evil vampire SOB, or a victim of his childhood?" That sort of thing. The sort of thing gothic romances are full of.

Gothic romances are famous for having a hero whom the heroine suspects of dastardly deeds. This one follows along those lines, although here it's mostly wondering whether vampires exist. I've always thought gothic heroines a little dim, because they were attracted to men they thought might be killers (or vampires?). Never have been able to get into that mindset.

There are a lot of people out there who like moody, atmospheric, gothic romance-type books. If you do--if you liked The Historian, by Elizabeth Kostova--you'll probably like this book.

I am not a fan. (Did not like the Kostova book at all--this one is Much better than that one.) I know I'm not a fan, and yet I picked this book up anyway. It was wrong of me, and about halfway through, I knew it.

So, I am writing this I suppose to remind myself that I honestly do not enjoy gothic romances, or old-style vampire novels (I really don't like any horror books at all), and I prefer prose that's more straightforward than lush. So it's okay if I don't read them.

Really, there's nothing wrong at all with Raybourne's book. It's quite well done. But it's still a gothic, old-style vampire novel full of lushly lovely prose. Not my cup of tea.

Now, notice I'm not calling it crap, or trash, or anything of the sort. Nor am I bashing the taste and/or intellect of those who read it and loved it, unlike many of those who criticize the readers of romance and/or science fiction and fantasy. I'm just saying--it didn't work for me, and this is why. Everything is subjective. We just have to recognize our own areas of subjectivity, acknowledge them, and especially, admit that we ourselves are not the arbiters of all taste and good books and allow others their own preferences.

I guess you can tell I'm getting sick of romance bashers again. Anyway--The Dead Travel Fast--gothic vampire novel. You might like it, if you like that sort of thing. (Hey, it's better than The Historian, though it has much the same feel.)

Writer's Weekend

2010-08-10T14:40:00.003-05:00

I said I was going to go, I went--didn't even have any cell phone access for texting, unless I walked out of the cabin and waved my phone around near the cars--and now I'm back to tell you all about it.

The picture is of a central Texas river, not where we stayed--although the Bosque River flows through Valley Mills. But there was a cattle-watering pond, known as a tank pretty much throughout Texas, just outside the back door with overhanging trees and banks that looked a lot like this. The water had a lot of duckweed in it, and the water level was about 2 feet down from when we were there in the spring, but it was just as clear as this, when you could see around the weeds. Lots and lots of dragonflies.

Which we didn't see much of. It was hot as blue blazes--around 100F (38C) when I was driving out there. The cabin had air conditioners, and this was supposed to be a working weekend. We stayed in the cool as much as possible. Took three or four walkabouts around the cabin or along the drives in when we just couldn't sit any more. And yes, we ate LOTS of fruit salad. Friday night, B went over her notes for the novella she was working on and did some tweaking, while I went through my research book which I dug out and brought with me so I could be sure what I wanted to do corresponded with what was really happening.

Saturday, we got up, had breakfast, and started writing. That's pretty much the whole weekend, actually. Every so often, I would get stuck, and we would talk out what I'd got stuck on. Mostly, it was me interrupting B, but once or twice she wanted to talk something out. Saturday night, we had a big salad at the cabin, then did some plotting for two ideas I had, then talked some more about B's story. Then we got out the Tarot cards and did a little reading on her characters and suchlike. Sunday, we got and wrote, had lunch and wrote, and then went home. We got to stay a little later, since the new people weren't coming out to the C-Bar till Monday, and we took advantage by writing.

I came home with 20 pages, which is the most I've ever done in two days. Also a bad case of butt fatigue. The book still isn't finished, but I'm a lot closer. There may be only one big scene left. I think this book is going to need an epilogue. Deal with it. I have my fingers crossed. I have also written some both days so far this week. I think I can keep that up, until all the relatives come. Which is Saturday.

We will have ALL the grandboys here. For a few days, anyway. :) Also, their parents. =8^O

Coping mechanisms

2010-08-05T13:51:00.003-05:00

We all have them. Sometimes they are coping mechanisms for dealing with difficult people, or for doing things we don't want to do, like housework. There are all kinds of coping mechanisms. The little spiral notebook I carry around with me is a coping mechanism for getting the stuff done that I keep forgetting to do, like remind the fella to refill my windshield wiper fluid. (Living on the coast requires gallons and gallons of the stuff--I don't know if it's the salt in the air or what, but I have to wash my windshield off nearly every morning.)

So--I blogged a couple of weeks ago about keeping on, and being a slug and how I ought to cut myself a little slack. Well, I have been. I have been slacking up, down and sideways. I am ALL about the slack.

Which is where the coping mechanism comes in. I am so good at slacking, that my friend B asked if I needed a writer's weekend to make myself finish this stinkin' book. (I am Soooo close to the end.) (Well, maybe not quite that much...) (but almost)

With the daughter coming, and jury duty lurking not far beyond that, I wasn't sure I could get away--then I realized that I had THIS weekend free. B and I have not yet discovered a cheap place between our two cities, so we are going back to Valley Mills and the dude ranch with its plywood-walled cabin to write all weekend. Time away from the world and its expectations so I can make myself write.

I am taking a folding chair. The chairs in this place are Hard. It's August, in Texas, and while I think this place has a window unit a/c, it's still bound to be hotter than blue Hades (which you know is hotter than regular Hades...) Maybe I will take a fan. We have fans.

I have bought chips and dip and fruit and cookies and Coke Zeros (vanilla and plain). Tonight I will cut up fruit (hence the picture above) and put the Coke Zeros in the fridge to get cold, and I will pack. (Do you know how hard it is to find a picture of fruit salad with no kiwis in it? My salad will have none. Nor will it have watermelon, though I wanted some, because all those other people on the island bought them. It will have cantaloupe and honeydew melons, grapes, strawberries and pineapple. Also maybe peaches.) Tomorrow, I will go to work in the a.m. so I can get out of town early (before bad Houston traffic). Then I will go home and load the ice chest and the car, and buy gas, and lunch to eat in the car, and I will drive to Valley Mills. And when I get there, I will write.

So. Now I have put it down in electrons on the Interwebs. I have to do it, because y'all will know if I don't. One way or the other, I will get the writing done. I have pulled out one of my coping mechanisms. But, boy, am I glad I'm not on an actual deadline...

Wallowing in slugness

2010-07-28T13:43:00.004-05:00

I have the midsummer blahs. Even though it's not midsummer, whether one calculates by the sun (which makes midsummer June 21 or so), or by dividing in half the number of days off between the end of school and the beginning of school in the fall. Either way, we're closer to the end than to the beginning of summer. I don't know whether that makes me nostalgic, desperate or just tired. Maybe all three.

Anyway, we've gone up to Dallas for a birthday party, we're home again, and I'm having a whole lot of trouble getting motivated to Do Anything. Alas.

It's not just the writing that's been left gasping by the wayside. Pretty much everything else is too. Exercise, cooking, shopping for groceries--I just want to be a slug and read, or maybe sleep. Sigh. Gradually, I am forcing myself to get things done. I went to the grocery store yesterday. I've folded most all the laundry (except for what is still in the dryer, and the fella doesn't really need his underwear that bad--he has more). I do go outside and comb the granddog. (She has short pit-bull fur, but likes to be combed, cause it scratches her itches.) But she will let me sit on the glider and read while I comb/scratch her. (When I scratch her, my fingers come away with dirt on them, she gets so dirty. And yes, she gets baths. And immediately goes to dig/roll in the dirt and replace her dirt.)

Anyway, yes, I am a tired slug who is doing as little as possible and feeling terribly guilty for it, but not enough to stop being a slug. I'm wallowing in my slugness. It IS easy being a slug, and I like it. So there. I may have to take a "writers weekend" to finish this dang book. I could definitely stand to escape to Valley Mills or some other similar place for a few days. Even though I just did... Ah well. Hopefully I'll be able to scrape the slug coat off soon. :)

Keeping on with the keeping on

2010-07-20T15:39:00.003-05:00

Those of you who check in periodically with my blog may have noticed how I've really been fighting to get the current Work in Progress finished.

This is different from the fight with the previous book. That fight began because I was trying to put two books' worth of plot into one, and because I had 50 bazillion relatives (okay, only 25) show up in town the month I was trying to get the book finished. I think I may have mentioned on this blog that I wondered whether it was more of a psychological struggle than an actual "work time" struggle. That I've had this book living in the background of my life for so long (years) that I'm ambivalent about actually finishing it and sending it out into the cold cruel world. That doesn't mean it's any less frustrating.

Anyway, over the weekend, I went to a workshop/writer's retreat event. I had planned to go with my best buddy Belinda, but she had to stay home and take care of grandbabies while their mama was in the hospital. I thought about canceling when she couldn't come, but decided no, I really needed to go, even though the grandboys were in town all week, and I went to Slitherbahn on Thursday and wore myself out and had to get up really early on Friday to get all the way across Houston to the event... Yes, that is a long-ass sentence. Deal. End result is, I went, and I was glad.

It was structured with workshops in the morning, and writing time in the afternoon, and yes, I did have to lie down on the sofa where I was writing and take a little naplet so I didn't fall asleep over the writing. Afternoons are not my best writing time. But I wrote. And I listened. And I took an appointment with the creativity coach person, Kathryn Lorenzen. Her reaction was that--yes, you may be resisting the end of this book. Because I'm dealing with an awful lot of transitions and things right now, including my youngest graduating from college. It may be easier to send him out into the world if I hang onto the book I've been "raising." Basically, I need to be nicer to myself, while still showing up to work as close to every weekday as I can.

And, even though I had my naplet every afternoon I was there, I got about 3 pages written every day I was there. Maybe a little more. I pushed through a lot of the "buildup" stuff, and started getting excited about reaching the ending. And in my writing this week, I think I'm there. My hero has had his plane shot down. He's been captured. The heroine is sailing her little sailboat closer. She's had a fight with her dead husband. Things are happening, and I'm hoping I can get this all wrapped up, 100-plus words at a time, before the daughter, son-in-law and grandson come to visit in August.

Wish me luck.

Texas Hill Country

2010-07-13T09:29:00.003-05:00

So I spent the last half of last week in the hill country southwest of San Antonio. We went on a wine tour Thursday. I've never been on a wine tour before. I've never tasted so many wines (3 wineries and 16 wines) and found so many I actually liked. (I'm not much of a wine drinker, and I tend to have plebeian taste...)

We went to Becker Vineyards, Torre di Pietra Vineyard, and Rancho Ponte Vineyard. If they were having a contest and whoever bought the most bottles of wine was the winner--we were definitely in contention. The fella has aspirations of being a wine connoisseur. (How in heck do you spell that word?) But mostly, we bought stuff we like. Fleur Sauvage (which just means Wildflower, even if it sounds like Savage Flower, which I like much better...) from Becker, and 5 others, including a port; Red Flirt from TdP, and Sorreline from RP. I don't think we've broken any open since we got home.

I've read all these Regency historical romances--and other Regency era books and histories--for years, where all the gentlemen linger around the dinner table after the ladies withdraw and drink port, but I never knew what it tasted like. That stuff is dang good! No wonder they sat around and drank it.

We also went out to a dude ranch-type place for barbecue and hangin' out. They had a big tournament of Washers--where you try to throw washers into cans in the ground. BIG washers. My teammate and I lost first round, with a big fat goose-egg. I am not athletically inclined, even when it comes to tossing washers into cans. But then, I knew that.

In other news, the Dallas grandboys are visiting this week, going to sea camp. It's really hectic in the mornings getting them up and dressed and ready to go, AND getting myself ready to go, because I go in to the dayjob while they're at camp. Yesterday, while driving from Pelican Island, where sea camp is, to the paper, first I had to wait for the drawbridge, while a barge passed through, and then got stuck behind the biggest oversized load I've ever seen. I've seen really long ones, when they transport those huge power windmill blades. A single blade is as wide as a truck trailer (plus a little) and almost as long as two trailers. But this thing was two trailers side-by-side. Took up the whole road, loaded with a big tank of some kind (painted baby blue), and drove 20 mph. all the way down Harborside to the freeway. I have no idea how they got it ON the freeway. They let us pass before they tried turning.

And yesterday, I got in the water at the beach for the 1st time this year. Mid-July...not too bad. It was lots of fun, and I was exhausted when I got home. No oil where we were, though there has been a little on the beach down from our house. All cleaned up for now. Hope it stays that way.

Black Moments and Grand Finales

2010-07-01T14:19:00.003-05:00

When I analyze book and movie plots, I can get very clean and structured. This is the crisis, that over there is the climax, and this other thing, it's the resolution.

But when I'm actually in the midst of the writing? I have no clue. Once I'm done, then I can look at what I've done, and see where the various pieces fall, but in the midst of the writing--I suppose it's that I've internalized it so well I don't have to consciously think about it, or something. Because I haven't ever forgotten any of the pieces, so far, anyway.

Every story has a black moment--that moment when all seems lost, the bad guys are going to win, and nothing will ever be right again. I don't care what kind of story it is, there will be a black moment. Little Red Riding Hood has a black moment ("All the better to EAT you with!"). The Wizard of Oz has a black moment (the wizard's hot air balloon leaves without Dorothy). Sweet romances and women's fiction and urban fantasies and every story has a black moment that sets up the climax--the point where the story begins rolling downhill to the resolution of all the conflict.

Each black moment, with its attendant climax, resolution and denouement, suits its own story. All together, these things create the conclusion of the story. The ending. Each thing has its own part to play. I have written endings that were 3 pages long, and I have written endings that were several chapters. Because I write adventure stories--romance or not--I tend to write big "grand finale" type endings. (I have a picture of an airplane on this post, because there are airplanes like that one in the current story.) There's usually a big final confrontation with the bad guy that coincides with the black moment and all the rest. I often stick in my characters' "dark night of the soul" and their "moment of realization" into the middle of this big battle/what-have-you. (Sometimes it's a battle, sometimes it's sneaking around, sometimes it's hand-to-hand combat or a rescue.)

I am in the midst of the "grand finale" of the current book. I'm not sure I've quite reached the blackest of the black moments yet--just the kickoff one. Things will get blacker yet. This particular story is a big, sprawling adventure and needs a big sprawling ending. I really don't want to rush it, and yet, I can't drag things out either. But, it's partly why I need this 100 words a day to get through it. There's a lot to it. Lots of action. Lots of emotion. Lots of character turmoil.

So, there you have it. Adventure stories need adventurous endings. Romantic stories need romantic endings (you can have the romance in the adventure--or at least the "thinking about romance"). Emotional stories need emotional endings. Quiet stories need quiet endings. If they're quiet and romantic, then both those things need to be there. In this book, I have to have adventure, and romance, and emotion, and...

Huh. Didn't realize I was doing all that. I'd rather not think about it. It will scare me into not writing again.

Yeah, I'm on Day 9 of the writing. Go me!

Hurricane Season

2010-06-29T13:38:00.004-05:00

Hurricane season officially begins in the Gulf of Mexico on June 1, which (the Gulf, not June 1) as I type is either about 3 miles away, or 400 yards (you can do the conversions to metric, my brain is too tired to look up a website to do it for me). It depends on if Offuts Bayou counts as the Gulf--which I guess it doesn't, since it's really off Galveston Bay. So--3 miles from the dayjob. Two blocks from my house. (The picture is from "our" hurricane, Ike, at Fort Crockett Park, about 6 blocks from my house...)

However, I don't pay a whole lot of attention to it until a tropical depression forms somewhere and the Weather Channel starts to get excited about it. On June 1, our hurricane supplies are only beginning to dwindle from last year (I think we still have pinto beans from 2 years ago), and we're probably not riding anything out anyway, so... yeah. No need to get really excited about it until there's something to get excited about.

Which means that last week, when "The tropical depression that will be named Alex if it ever gets winds above 50 mph" was fooling around in the western Caribbean, the fella went out and replenished our hurricane supplies. We now have TWO 40 lb. bags of pinto beans. One of them is half used. We just don't eat that many pinto beans... Plus a humongous bag of rice, which will probably have to be replaced before the season is over in November, many cans of tuna, chicken, green beans, etc. and 4 or 5 cases of water bottles. We may have to replace those too. We drink the water.

Unless weather patterns change drastically, tropical storm Alex won't mean anything to us here except rain and maybe some waves for the local surfers to get excited about. The rain is pretty exciting too. It's been dry. And the oil spill cleanup shouldn't have to stop working either.

Anyway, now that there actually IS a hurricane in the Gulf, it feels like hurricane season has arrived.

We used to live in Tornado Alley. All my adult life, actually, I've lived in Tornado Alley. I don't get too worked up about tornados, because most of the time, they go somewhere else, and if they hit--well, there's not a whole lot you can do about it, except get in the bathtub or closet in the middle of your house, because usually there's not much warning, and they'll probably go somewhere else anyway. Hurricanes give you a lot of advance warning, and it's easy to leave town to get away from them. (For us, anyway. We have lots of inland relatives to stay with, too.) But when they hit, they really hit.

So. Yeah. It's Hurricane Season. There's an actual storm in the Gulf. It's going somewhere else. Life goes on.

Still writing, little bits at a time. Those little bits will add up.

Eating the elephant one bite at a time

2010-06-24T14:05:00.004-05:00

You write a book the same way you eat an elephant. One bite--one bit--at a time. It's a long hard slog. (Okay, an elephant reading a book doesn't have anything to do with eating or writing, but it is an elephant, and a book...)

I was going to say it's probably a good thing that stories aren't exactly like elephants, because a whole elephant would go bad before one person could eat the whole thing. (Not that I can imagine one person actually trying... A whole tribe of people, maybe...) Except, it's entirely possible that stories might rot a little before one finishes writing it. Or go stale, anyway. Still, that's not my point here. We don't want to stretch that metaphor right out of shape.

The point is that when you take on a task that is going to take a while, you just have to keep doing the next thing. Keep writing the next words. And the next ones, and the next ones.

I have fallen out of practice of doing the writing First, and I need to get back into it. If not First, then Whenever I Can.

And in pursuit of that, I have joined a "100 words" loop. The goal of this loop, generally, is to write 100 words every day for 100 days, no excuses, no exceptions.

There are some members who have slightly different goals--one is writing 300 words a day, with weekends off. (This will put her ahead of the 700 words a week pace...) One of the main rules is that, if you get More than 100 words, you can't say so. Just say that you got your words for that day. That way it doesn't turn into a competition, or something for someone to beat themselves up over. Oh, and if you miss a day--you have to start over with Day 1.

One of the members, Kay Hudson, has made it up to Day 300-something. Or maybe 400-something. She's now burning up the contest circuit with finals and agent/editor requests. And she's on Day 52 of the new cycle.

I'm on Day 3. I had to squeeze my words in yesterday between the dayjob in the a.m., and the dentist in the afternoon. (I now have my permanent, gold crown on my back tooth, and the sharp, hurty temporary crown is no longer hurting my tongue, and the tooth has calmed down and is no longer crazy sensitive to cold. I am happy.) But the words are squozed. I have made it through the scene I was unsure about, and I think it works. I am on the verge of the black moment, crisis, climax, etc. etc. and the end. I do tend to write extended black moment/crisis scenes, so we will see whether I can soldier through this before the grandboys come for sea camp.

I did get all their paperwork done and turned in and fees paid, so we are all set for them to come and stay and dissect fish and such in two more weeks (or three). It will be fun. And until then--the writing.

One bite, 100 words, at a time...

Seaweed Season

2010-06-22T14:32:00.003-05:00

So, while we really haven't had any oil on the beach so far--none at all, from what I can tell--it is seaweed season. Every year, huge blankets of sargasso seaweed drift into shore. The picture is of Padre Island National Seashore, but our little sandbar island looks much the same during seaweed season. Except a lot of mornings, the blanket of seaweed is thicker, and wider.

It's perfectly natural. The seaweed is actually GOOD for the beach and part of the Gulf coast ecology, and it's interesting to walk on (though you don't want to much, because you can't see what's under it). It can be kind of stinky. Here, they tend to rake it up and pile it against the seawall to help anchor new sand dunes. Other places, I'm not sure they do that much.

Thing is, it's kind of a red-brown color, once it washes ashore and dries out. Very similar in color to the red-brown oil they're showing in the pictures on TV. Consequently, a number of folks in hotels along the beach would see the sargasso clumping up on the beach, and call downstairs in a panic to ask "What's that stuff on the beach?!?!!" It's seaweed. It belongs there. Just step over it, if you don't like the crunchy, textury way it feels. It'll be gone soon, and then it will be jellyfish season, and you'll be missing the seaweed. (Yeah, the jellyfish come ashore after the seaweed mostly stops. It doesn't really ever completely stop.) Still, when there's a choice of oil on the beach, and seaweed--give me the seaweed!

I did get some pages written today. Not many. I'm going to join a 100-words-a-day group and try to get this dang book finishes.

Sum-Sum-Summertime

2010-06-17T15:03:00.005-05:00

Summer just seems to be made for fun, bouncy songs. "Hot Fun in the Summertime" and "Under the Boardwalk" and "Up On the Roof"--they're all about summertime. They're all really old songs, (Not as old as "In the Good Ol' Summertime") but I don't know if any of the newer songs (I listen to Breaking Benjamin and Avenged Sevenfold, thank you, and even Lady Gaga, among others.) specifically mention Summer. The 60s beach party songs just seem to be suited to "summer songs."

Anyway--I'm not sure why I'm riffing on summer songs, except that it seems to have suddenly become summer. It was a cool spring, then all of a sudden--Wham! Ninety degrees and 900% humidity. (Yes, I know that's not technically possible, but...) And the oleanders have been blooming like crazy for better than 6 weeks now. I am very impressed. I mean COVERED with blooms. Plants almost solid pink, or white, or red. I'm amazed every time I drive down any street in town. (We have lots of oleanders because they are salt-resistant.)

And so far, I really haven't had time to enjoy the summer, so far. I've had to make a couple of trips to check on the Alzheimer-y parents. Then I caught a case of The Flu That Would Not Die. And it's just been really busy. I haven't even had time to go out for a swim in the Gulf.

Yes, I know the Gulf of Mexico is full of oil. But the oil is east of us, and so far, it hasn't come west. Haven't seen a single tarball, much less that oily gunky stuff, along the shoreline. I want to swim before we get any--if we do. The current runs east, not west. It's going to Florida, not Texas. I have a lot of sympathy for Louisiana and Mississippi and Alabama, and Florida, too. But I can't be sorry it's not coming this way.

So, yeah, it's summer. Lots of stuff to do, lots of places to go. So I'd better get my writing done, huh?

Art & Music

2010-06-08T16:54:00.004-05:00

I've always loved both art and music. I took oil painting classes when I was in junior high and early high school, and piano lessons for years, as well as participating in band in high school and college. In fact, the fella and I met in the Baylor University Golden Wave Marching Band, following family traditions. (I played flute (not very well) and he played trumpet and B-flat baritone.) (One does not play instruments very well if one never practices.) I got back into the painting while I was in the Panhandle--haven't managed to pull it out again since I've been on the island, though. Sigh. Anyway...

So we encouraged our children to be involved in art and music--or at least music. The daughter has taken up watercolor. That's one of her paintings from her trip to Sardinia. Yes, the Sardinia that is the island off the coast of Italy where Italians (and apparently many Germans) go to vacation. (Statisticians must have really good conferences. She got to go to Dublin too. I am totally jellus--except for the statistics conference part. Don't particularly want to go to one of those, just to Dublin, or Sardinia.)

All three of our children were in band (trombone, trumpet and baritone). They have variously taken up guitar and singing. The oldest & youngest have played with learning keyboard. They are able to sing because they have not been handicapped with the allergies their father has had. They can hear and match pitches.

And now, the next generation is coming along. The middle grandchild loves to play with his parents' trombones. (We moved seven of them the last time they moved.) He loves music, especially the songs in Disney's Fantasia, both volumes. He is so enamored of Gershwin's Rhapsody in Blue that one of his favorite birthday gifts was a book about the Gershwin brothers and how that music came to be written. And he's Seven years old.

He also wants to know why there isn't a Rhapsody in Purple. (This may be why he colored himself purple with markers the other day...)

He wants to jam. Not in those exact words, but he does. This is his picture of the instruments in a jazz band. Okay, so the trombones look a little like pregnant, one-legged camels, and the trumpets look like they could play from both ends, but I think they're recognizable. I guess there are so many trombones because his parents have so many. (They met in the Texas Tech Marching Band, in the trombone section, just FYI.)

I just like the look of the picture. I think it could make a cool all-over fabric print, or something. Not bad for a 7-year-old, is it?

In other news, I had the Flu that Would Not Die last week, and am only now finally getting myself vaguely back into the swing of trying to get my book finished. I am so glad I don't have a deadline. :)

How I use Tarot in writing

2010-05-28T08:54:00.004-05:00

So, yeah. I've kinda taken the past month off. I didn't mean to do it, but--well, it happens.

I think I'm finally getting myself off dead center, though. I let the story ferment in the swamp a while, deliberately not thinking about it. Then I talked about it, a little bit. Mostly about how I really didn't know which scene needed to come next.

This week, I threw down some Tarot cards. I thought I was doing a reading for my heroine, who is the confused one right now in the story, but the first spread--yeah, I went ahead and laid them out in a Celtic cross--seemed to fit my hero better. I didn't write any of them down, but the "You, where you are" card was one of the ones involving heartache--not the 5 of Cups, but maybe the 2 of Swords. Or maybe the 8 of Cups. I don't remember. What I do remember was the "As others see you" card was the 9 of Cups. In that others saw that he had everything he could possibly want--but really, inside, there was heartache. But heartache moving away. And the outcome card was -- dang it, I don't really remember. Either Justice or Resurrection. Justice, I think. Getting everything he deserved.

Then I did another spread, a triangle for my heroine. I wrote these down, and so I remember them better. I don't have the notebook I wrote it in with me, alas. Anyway, in her present, there was the Fool. But for my heroine, it was more like deliberate ignorance and fooling herself than innocence and faith. She's ignoring things she really does know. Then in the near future, there was the Magician, but he was reversed. I know a lot of people don't read reversed cards. I used to turn them right side up, but I usually don't any more. And it fit--though the meaning I got from it doesn't match what I usually read this one as, because in the heroine's story, her attempts to fix things and "make the magic happen," blow up in her face. And then she lets her fears and the lies she's told herself run her right off the cliff (Knight of Cups and Knight of Swords in her later future). There were 2 cards in each side of the triangle, but I mostly remember the Fool and the reversed Magician. (The others fit with these cards. I do remember that.) And the central card, that centers the whole reading was Strength. IOW, the heroine is stronger than she thinks and stronger than she realizes, but she needs to get control of her fears and guilt and grief--and she can.

So, between the two readings, I have decided that I'm going to write the scene I had in mind, rather than skip it. Or at least have the event happen. I may skim over a lot of it, but I think it's going to be a triggering event to kick off the Big Black Moment. Which I will then have to write, but it will get me to the end of the book, and I'm hoping I can have it done by the end of June. There just isn't that much left to write. An emotional blow up. Probably a literal battle scene of one sort or another. And it's done.

What did those readings have to do with my writing? A couple of days ago, I wrote about being stuck. I couldn't decide whether to have this event actually happen, or jump straight into the Black Moment. Either way could work, but I just didn't know. I couldn't make up my mind, even after letting the alligators in the swamp that is my subconscious chew on things.

This is where Tarot comes in, for me. It's a good tool to get the chewed-up bits in the subconscious out where I can get a look at them. The pictures can be symbols, or they can be literal. They don't have to mean what the book, or some class or site on the Internet says they mean. (And that internet link is a good one; it's where I learned Tarot.) It's about what they make me think of when I see them. And the "everyone thinks you have everything you want" card hit me. The scene I wasn't sure about is one where that would happen. People would see the hero and heroine together, and think they have it all. But they don't. The "magic" blows up in her face. That's how the cards helped me see what I sort of knew, but couldn't pull up out of the swamp. The cards themselves are nothing more than tools to help me see what I already really know.

In the meantime, since my writing process includes what you see in the picture above, I am typing in what I already have written, so as to get my head fully back into the story.

We're off to visit the fella's parents this weekend. I haven't been up there since his mom broke her arm back in January, though he has. We also have to get the paperwork filled out so the grandboys can come down and go to Sea Camp this summer. It will be fun. :)

Storage buildings

2010-05-26T14:21:00.003-05:00

We don't have a storage building, unless you want to count our garage. It's big enough for 3 cars, but we can't get a car in it. It's too full of bicycles, furniture, boxes (mostly of books) and other... stuff.

We also have a storage unit in the little town where my parents live, about 174 miles inland from our sand bar of an island. It's drier there. None of my books have become moldy yet, but the furniture is, and some of the plastic binders the fella had in boxes.

So, when I drove up to check on the parental units and go to the doctor with Daddy, I took ten boxes to put in the storage unit.

Both the fella and the son told me, "Some of them don't weigh anything at all, and the rest are only sort of heavy."

They lied.

NONE of the boxes weighed nothing. One was fairly light, but the rest were all at least "sort of heavy." And a couple were so heavy, I staggered the few paces from the back end of my Ginormous SUV to the opening of the storage space, dropped the box on the concrete, and kicked it into place. Sort of.

Two of the boxes were of my books. One was a box full of the books I've written--mostly the Rose books, I think. But I didn't open it to look inside. The other box, I made up from two boxes of books. I opened them up and merged them, taking out books I thought the boy would like to read (Linnea Sinclair books from before 2007, Patricia Briggs, etc.), and writing books and some books I couldn't remember why I kept them. Those, I've been re-reading and enjoying.

The parental visit was rather climactic. The doctor decided it was time Daddy needed to stop driving, and did us the favor of telling him so. He seemed disappointed but accepting in the doctor's office. Sort of "Hmm. Well, I've quit driving on the long trips."

"Yes, but you need to stop driving altogether. Your reaction time just isn't good any more."

"Hmm, well, all driving? Hmm. I guess."

But he got cranky about it later. Sigh. So, that step has been taken. He's gone off his patch medicine, because of side effects--he's lost 10 pounds since he's been on it, and 138 lbs for a man 6 feet tall is just too skinny. I'm really hoping we can keep them at home for the rest of the year... Oh well.

I'll try to post something writing related later this week. It's been really busy since I got home. And we're going to visit the fella's parental units this weekend.

A post about writing

2010-05-21T13:56:00.002-05:00

I'm trying to write two blogposts a week now. One about my life, such as it is, and one about something to do with either writing or reading. About books. The last several weeks, that post has mostly been about reading books, rather than writing them.

This one is going to be about writing, mostly because of that. Because I haven't been. Writing, I mean. I've been reading. A lot. And doing a lot of other stuff. But mostly, I've been reading and not writing.

Sometimes, when I get stuck in a story, I do better when I stop and think, give myself a little time off to decide what I want to have happen next, or figure out what the characters want / need to do next. That's why I originally slowed down on this one. I wasn't sure if I wanted to write a particular scene.

But that was weeks ago. (Maybe only two.) And I still don't know if this scene needs to be written, or if the story will be better off without it. I don't think I've ever been this paralyzed about my writing.

So, in between thinking "I really need to get busy writing," and making giant bowls of potato salad, and calling parents, and deciding what book to read next, I have thought about why I'm not writing. Part of it is, yes, that I don't know what to write next. But I'm wondering now, after all this paralysis, if that's all of it.

Right now, I'm between books, out of contract. There isn't a book I have to write. There's no real deadline pressure on me. That's undoubtedly a factor.

I'm wondering if I'm having a teensy bit of "fear of finishing." This is a book I've wanted to write for a long time. It's hung around, waiting for me to learn how to write for decades. And once I picked it back up and went to work in earnest on it, it's taken me a couple of years. Not because I'm actually writing it that slowly, but because there's a lot of stopping and starting. I've written two whole books in between the big hiatus. (This one is actually a small hiatus, but it's a break because I'm not writing anything, not because I'm writing something else.) The book means a lot to me. But when I finish it, I have to send it out into the big mean world.

Yes, my agent has seen a big part of it, and loved it. But will she love the rest of it? Will anyone else? Will the economy wreck its chances? Have I built up the earlier parts of the story to wonderful heights only to smash the ending on a jagged reef of pathetic boredom? Does my ending make any sense? Can I do what I think I want to do, and have people continue to suspend their disbelief? Or can I just run off into the night screaming ARRRGGGGHHHH!! and pulling at my hair?

Yeah, okay. There definitely is some of that.

So. Now that I have defined it, what am I going to do about it?

That, my dears, is what defines the difference between the published (or even multi-published) author and the one who is still dreaming of making that first sale. (Or second, or tenth.) When things stall out, when the writing stops happening, you do something about it.

Fortunately, I don't have a deadline. I like deadlines. They help me get the work done, keep me at it when I'd really rather be reading the new Duran release. But right now, I need that time, so I can spend a day taking my dad to the doctor and not sweat it.

BUT, I really do need to get back to work. So I have a plan.

I'm going to think about the story. Try out the scene in my head. I'm going to use my Tarot cards. Draw one, or two, or five, and see if my intuition can break out of the straitjacket my worries have put it in. And then, when I get back from the parents', I'm just going to have to plant my fanny in that desk chair and get to work. Because when it comes right down to it, I just flat have to get words on the page.

And maybe I'll clean off my desk between now and then...

Annnd--He's Done!

2010-05-18T13:23:00.004-05:00

Yes, the moment has arrived. The youngest son has graduated. He's done. Through. Finished. Complete--or his degree is anyway.

The grandboys were thoroughly bored sitting through the graduation. They got up to go to the bathroom at least three times, each. And had to stop to talk to their Dad, who was waiting to take pictures on the sidelines, on the way to and from. But they were good, except for whining about being bored.

The son is taking a week off to sleep, and play a little bit. Then he's going to hit the job hunt. There are thousands and thousands of just-graduated students all hitting the job hunt at the same time, but I don't imagine too many of them have degrees in marine engineering technology. Hopefully, that will give him an advantage...in something.

Our two boys look a lot alike, don't they? (It's the hairline, and the chin.) Some of Rob's friends were asking if they were twins, but no. Rhys is 6 years older. We were glad he got to come down. It would have been great to have their sister down for graduation too, but she was in Italy. Sardinia, to be precise.

We ate all our food--had lots left over. I had strawberries on my waffles for breakfast, and made shrimp enchilada casserole (I didn't have enough actual corn tortillas to make enchiladas, so I used tortilla chips and layered things.) with leftover grilled shrimps. Yum. We did away with the 10 pounds of potato salad pretty quickly... (Ten pounds of potatoes makes 10 pounds of potato salad, right? You may take off the peelings, but you add eggs and pickles and mayo and mustard and pickle juice, right?) (Yeah, I made that much potato salad. And I ate the last little bit for my Sunday night supper.)

We went to the girlfriend's graduation party on Sunday, and left the boy there to visit for his week of sleeping. He might come home during the week. Don't know. They came to go to Schlitterbahn (the water park, which the littlest grandboy calls "Slitherbonn") today, but it was closed. So we had lunch, Rob got the oil changed in his car, and they're going back to the Big H to play putt-putt.

I am trying to get back into a rhythm, but so far, it ain't happening. Maybe tomorrow. Today is my RWA meeting for Houston Bay Area Chapter. We're having a workshop on Tarot for Writers by Arwen Lynch. I'm looking forward to it. I dug out my five extra Tarot decks to pass around for people to look at.

Tomorrow is soon enough to get myself together, right? Right.

Graduation Blow-out!

2010-05-14T12:13:00.003-05:00

So, the boy is graduating. His degree will be a Bachelor of Science in marine engineering technology. It seems to be the sort of degree one ought to be able to find a job with, even in a slow economy. We are justifiably proud of him, and have invited everyone we can think of who might come to attend graduation, and then come to the house for a party afterward.

Okay, so it won't be exactly a blowout. We're not exactly the "blowout" types. There won't be a kazillion people there--maybe as many as 15, depending on how many of the boy's friends come. Our older son and his boys will be here by supper time tonight. The fella's parents can't come--his mom's broken arm and injured hip is much better, but still not good enough to sit in a car for 5 hours. His brother has a son graduating college in Colorado at the exact same time (even accounting for the time zone difference). My parents--well, when I called them this morning, they had forgotten that we made arrangements for my sister to bring them down today. (sigh) But I think they'll get it together and be here. Along with whoever else decides to come with the party. One or more of the nieces might come. The little one likes to travel...

The graduation ceremony will be in the morning (which is how the sister gets to come, since Saturday night is her son's senior prom), and then we will repair to the house and barbecue shrimps and chicken, and eat potato salad, beans, and strawberries and angel food cake. I have boiled the eggs. I will make the potato salad tonight. As well as peel the shrimp and skewer them to be ready for grilling, and cut up the strawberries, and maybe cook the beans. We will be ready. :)

I figured I'll probably be doing family stuff for a while--I might be taking the parents back myself, if they want to stay another day-- and we're going to a graduation party for the girlfriend on Sunday, so I thought I'd do the graduation post before it happens. Who knows when I'll have time to do a post-graduation post. And I still can't find the camera cord to download my pictures from a month ago. Sigh. Craziness.

Reading Glom

2010-05-12T15:56:00.003-05:00

I really shouldn't be doing this. I have lots of other things to do. The son is graduating college. (YAY! Last one out!! We will get a Raise!) (That is, once he gets a job and moves out.) Anyway, his graduation is Saturday morning, and we have lots of company coming in Friday night. We have cleaning to do, shrimps to buy (because we're going to throw them on the barbie), potato salad to make, beans to cook--all the things one does when one has a party.

And I'm still in a reading frenzy. See, I picked up a book I had in my closet, in a stack of "re-read in case you still want to keep it" books, and re-read it. Valor's Choice by Tanya Huff. And I liked it. So I bought another book in Huff's Valor series, and also picked up the first book in Elizabeth Moon's Vatta's War series, Trading in Danger. I read the Huff book, and liked it, but wanted a bit more of a time gap before I read another in that series. So I read the Moon book.

Then I got books 2 and 3 in the series. And read them. I am now reading book 4, and have book 5 on the Reader waiting for me to finish #4. I do not want to clean. I don't want to cook. I don't want to go to work. All I want to do is read. I really hate getting stuck like this. Especially when I have so much else to do.

Yeah, I'm enjoying these books. They start off a tiny bit like Bujold's Miles Vorkosigan story when he gets kicked out of the space force academy and goes off and creates his own mercenaries--but not. The heroine, Kylara Vatta, gets kicked out of the academy, and is shipped off on a family trading ship, but the characters aren't really similar--Miles is much more romantic than Kylara, and much more hyperactive. Ky gets into fixes more because of events around her, than her own actions (though not always). Anyway, there's a lot of adventure and space battling and intrigue and, well, all kinds of stuff. And I need to finish the darn books and get through graduation and the flurry of things I have going on afterward--like doctor appointments, and dentist appointments--I have to have a new crown on a back tooth because a piece of it is threatening to break off--and parental unit stuff, and-- Just thinking about it makes me tired. At least the sister is bringing them TO graduation. I may have to take them back.

Cute kid stories

2010-05-05T10:11:00.003-05:00

My kids are grown. Yes, I'm old enough to have grandkids (But only because my children got started early)--I've talked about them before.

Anyway, the older son recently called to tell me some cute grandboy stories. The oldest is eight, will be nine in July. He was walking with his dad in some large mega-box store, and it was crowded, so Dad said "Hey, give me your hand. We need to hold hands."

And the boy said "Oh Dad, that's so embarrassing." At eight. Broke his Daddy's heart. They grow up so fast. Of course, Dad made him hold hands anyway.

His little brother, our youngest grandchild, just turned six. He's been dying to be a Cub Scout since he was three, when his big brother joined up, and will finally get to be a Tiger Cub in the fall when he starts first grade. (We come from a Boy Scout family--the fella is an Eagle Scout, as are our two sons.) And since Mom is a Den Leader, the little guy has been going to all his big brother's meetings, pretty much since the beginning.

So at the most recent Bear Cub den meeting (3rd grade Cub Scouts), a new boy came. After the meeting, the new kid started beating up one of the other little brothers. The littlest grandboy pulled him off and pushed him back and said, "Do you want to be a Cub Scout?"

The new kid said "Yeah."

And my Guy said "Then act like one."

Just warmed the cockles of my heart. He's such a good kid.

Oh, and the middle grandboy--the daughter's son. He's the one with autism. Anyway, Mom's taking him on one of her conference trips so he can go stay with his other grandparents in Colorado, since her conference is in Denver.

She was telling him they were going to go on an airplane to see Grammy and Grandpa. He comes back with "Go see Gigi and Granddaddy" (what the little boys call us). They go back and forth a couple of times about which grandparents they were going to go see, and she finally asks him, "WHY do you want to go see Gigi and Granddaddy?"

He comes back with "Go to the Beach."

Beach trumps mountains for a kid who lives where it snows, I guess. Apparently not because he wants to see US. ;)

Ah well. I enjoy cute kid stories. I have a number saved up from when my kids were little, to tell the grandkids and embarrass their parents one of these days. You got any to share?

I've been reading

2010-05-04T14:08:00.004-05:00

Summer has arrived on the island. It's not as hot yet as it will get in July or August--we've got at least 10 degrees to go for that, but it's consistently reaching 85 F (29.5 C) by 1 p.m. In a lot of places, it doesn't get that warm in the height of summer, but we're not out of spring yet.

I still haven't downloaded my Valley Mills pictures--the son borrowed my camera cord, I asked him to put it on my desk, but I can't find it. Wondering if I buried it, or if it's still on his desk.

Anyway, I thought I'd blog about the books I've been reading, because I've been reading a lot. I picked up several hardbacks at the library that I'd been wanting to read, but resisting because I didn't want to spend the bucks to buy them. And I've been reading through the RITA finalists--at least the categories that I read ordinarily. I don't read a whole lot of romantic suspense in my "regular" reading, so I haven't put any of those on my "TBR" list. I have read all the historicals, and I think I'm almost through the series contemporary romance. I've read a few of the Novel with Romantic Elements entries. And I've enjoyed them all. I have two now--a series romance, and a NRE, both finalists, both by Christie Ridgeway.

But I haven't got round to them, because I had to read the last book in The Lost Fleet series: Victorious, by Jack Campbell.

I've enjoyed these books from the very first one, and Victorious is a satisfying conclusion to the six book series. It hits all the notes and wraps up all the loose ends, (the big ones, anyway) and even lets the hero get the girl. Campbell's not a particularly romantic writer, but there is a hint of romance, and I like the way he handles it. It fits the characters and the story. And there is the possibility of a new series in this same universe. Yes, the loose ends are tied up, but you know how it is with life (even life in space). There's always something. Politics and human nature can always create conflict (necessary for a book), and when you throw mysterious aliens into the mix... Well, I do have hopes. :)

I've also been to the library and brought home some hardbacks I wanted to read, but wasn't sure I wanted to spring for. I've read Fantasy in Death by J.D. Robb--it's a locked-room mystery. I liked it a lot, and especially enjoyed the banter between Eve and Peabody. (The conversation about penises going on vacation cracked me up.) A very satisfying read.

I also got Patricia Briggs's Silver Borne in which Mercy deals with fae and werewolves and friends. Hmm. Yeah, okay--the same but different, and totally enjoyable. Mercy was dealing with her new relationship with the werewolf alpha, and fae who wanted things from her, and still dealing with the fallout of what happened to her a couple of books ago. Liked it a lot.

I picked up some paperback romances, but can't for the life of me remember what they were... One was a Stephanie Laurens. To Distraction. Not one of my favorites, but readable. I've gone back since I got those, and this time, I got If His Kiss is Wicked by Jo Goodman. She uses very formal, very historical sounding language. I enjoyed the book, but it was slower to get through than books by others. In this one, the heroine is kidnapped in the prologue, and in chapter 1 goes to the hero, because she thinks she was kidnapped by mistake, and her cousin is in danger. She was also brutally beaten, and suffers from PTSD because of it, and much of the book is about the hero trying to help her recover, and trying to protect her. It's a very good book, with a slow revealing of who the villain is and just what has been going on. It has a gothic feel, though (thank goodness) the hero is never suspect. Just everybody else.

Reading, reading, reading. And I can't remember half of them. Drat. I may have to go back to the library and look.

Grammar counts. Really.

2010-04-28T15:22:00.005-05:00

Here's the thing. A lot of people act like grammar doesn't matter. Punctuation is optional, and if one exclamation point is good, more are better.

You can get away with that when you're tweeting or texting, or even e-mailing. I will confess to being profligate with the exclamation points in e-mails. (Not in tweets. You don't have the space.) But when you're writing something for publication--even if it's just a Letter to the Editor of the local newspaper--you flat out have to pay attention to your language, including spelling and grammar.

I've taught junior college history and government classes. I always required two book reports in the history classes for part of the grade. I told them that I didn't grade for grammar, but...

Grammar was invented so we could understand what we're talking about. I can understand you and you can understand me. The different verb tenses tell us when something happened. The order the words come in (English, being a word-order language) tells us who does what to whom. Apostrophes clarify things--They're sounds like their or there, but it sure doesn't mean the same thing. When you leave out all the punctuation, it makes it hard to tell what you are trying to say. That old "Eats, shoots, and leaves," conundrum. Or "I'd like to thank my parents, God and Mother Theresa."

Why am I whining about grammar today?

One of my tasks at the newspaper dayjob is to put letters to the editor in the system. This means not just copying, pasting and formatting it to the AP style. I also have to clean up the grammar, and sometimes, try to figure out what it is the person is trying to say.

About half the letter writers are clear and concise in what they're trying to say, and correct in the way they are saying it. The other half...not so much.

It's not that I don't agree with what they're saying--I tend to disagree as often with the grammatically correct writers as with the ungrammatical ones. And actually, the letters that wander all over the place and don't seem to have a point--or one they actually reach--are sometimes grammatical. More often, however, I'm left struggling to figure out what they're trying to say, and just where I ought to put the periods and commas.

There are the folks who leave out every bit of punctuation altogether, and those who throw in periods and commas at random. I often have to remove excess exclamation pointage. The newspaper won't let you have more than one. And sometimes the copy editors take those out. (I don't.) As for apostrophes--those tend to be pretty random too. I had one letter recently in which every word with an "S" on the end of it got an apostrophe. (Or a "comma to the top" as some have put it.) So we had toe's and book's and kudo's and top's.

Then there are the annoyances that have slipped through from e-mail. We get the majority of our letters to the editor via e-mail these days, which really is convenient. We can copy, paste and edit, rather than having to type the whole thing in. However, those e-mail-isms remain. People leave out the articles--"the" and "an" and the like, which I then have to put back in. They use all caps for emphasis.

Sweetie, if you can't use emphatic verbs and nouns, you're sunk, because the newspaper isn't going to leave those all-caps words in. In fact, if you do excessive regular title-style capitalization, I'm gonna take it all out. And it's a pain to go through and lowercase all those words. A serious, major pain.

So, some of my whining is due to actual grammar issues. Some of it is due to newspaper style issues. I just wish people would realize that writing for publication isn't the same as writing an e-mail. Sigh.

And I really, really wish I could leave in all the misspellings (House of Represintatives!) and bad grammar (count your toe's!) to illustrate just what idiots some of these idiotic letters come from. But I can't. Sigh.

In other news, there are ruddy turnstones on the beach. I usually see them earlier in the year than this, but I've been late getting back out on the beach. I also saw a pair of laughing gulls courting. The males and females look exactly alike, except the males are slightly smaller. The male was following the aloof-looking female around, touching her beak and giving off a periodic squawk--er, plea. He looked pretty dandified and worthy to me, but what do I know from hot-looking seagulls?

Their beaks were Very orange--the others had more blackish beaks. Makes me wonder if, besides getting sleek black heads during the courtship season, the laughing gulls get bright orange-red beaks... Have to look it up.

In other news, I got my car washed, finally. YAY! It was so very, very dirty, given that I had parked it on the seawall where it picked up a sticky salt film, and then drove it down a dry caliche road where all those billows of white dust stuck to the salt. And then it got rained on. Not enough to wash off the dust, but enough to streak and spot it. I drive an SUV that's really about an SUV and a half--the guys told me $40 to clean it, and were going to stick to that price, but go up if I had it washed again--I gave them $50 anyway, because it is so big and was soooo dirty. I knew it was nasty. But now it is CLEAN. :)

And no, I haven't written anything this week, yet. Sigh. But I think I've decided which scene needs to come next, and to leave out the one I was thinking about. It was probably good that I let it ride, so I could let the swamp have the story and figure out whether or not I really needed that scene. The story will work better without it, and it will get me closer to the end sooner. So.

I may have to drag myself off by the neck tomorrow...

Tickled funny bone

2010-04-27T16:00:00.002-05:00

It's been a long time since I've laughed as hard as I laughed this afternoon.

At the dayjob, I work in a large open room that is fairly empty. The regular denizens are three reporters who are in and out, an editor/reporter, and me, the lowly peon. I sit across the desk from the editor, who only recently was promoted from the copy desk to doing his reporting/editing thing. Previously, he was in charge of the section I do, and we worked very closely together. He's still my "go-to guy" if I have a question about whether something belongs in my section.

He's English, about 5 years older than I am, and wears a coat and tie to work every day, whereas most days I dress pretty much like I am now--a nice T-shirt, good jeans, and a jacket (because it's freakin' cold in here with the a/c cranked up way too high). He also has a Wicked sense of humor and is a lot of fun. But he's English and wears a coat and tie every freakin' day.

So, today--the Brit-across-the-desk spotted one of the "back room guys" (I'm not real sure what he does, but maybe something to do with the computers) wandering across the newsroom in his direction. He said "Oh no, B--'s looking for me." And vanished.

I'm thinking "Oh no, he did not just duck down to hide underneath his desk." But obviously he did. He had to have. There's no place else in this big open room for him to have gone. And I started laughing. Meanwhile, B stopped to talk to one of the reporters.

Next thing I know, he's come around the end of the desk nearest me, and I see him crawling on his hands and knees--this fancy-talking English guy in his tie--past my trash can. And I'm laughing even harder.

The guy who'd come in to talk to him finally looked around as he walked closer to our corner of the room and decided--hmm, the Brit's not here, might as well leave. But about this time, our Brit decided he couldn't escape, so he popped up, like he hadn't just been crawling back around to his side of the desk.

He said later, when I'd recovered from my laughing fit and we were talking about it, that he probably could have said he'd always been there, B just couldn't see him. If he'd done that, though, I really would have fallen off my chair and been rolling on the floor, laughing. And then I'd have had to get up again, off the floor.

So that was the day's excitement.

That, and --I have my computer back! And I finally managed to get my e-mail set up so I don't have to go out and look at the webmail, which is nice to have, but hard to work from. I'm happy. I still have to find one of my programs--which I could swear was on top of one of my desk boxes, but I can't find it now--to reload. But I have Office, Quickbooks, the print thing and my Sony Reader Library loaded. I need to reload Calibre too.

There was something else I was going to say, but I can't remember what it was, so I'll just stop there.

What's tickled your funny bone lately??

Slow repairs in G-town

2010-04-23T14:13:00.003-05:00

It's depressing how many things are still broken in Galveston since Hurricane Ike hit more than a year and a half ago.

Don't get me wrong--a lot of stuff is fixed, the city is livable. It's even a fun place to be.

But people are just now getting FEMA money to fix their houses. The city's just now suctioning out all the sand and debris left by Ike in the storm sewers. And--well, the stop lights are still barely working. They have been working on duct tape and hope ever since the storm, and every time there's the least little bit of moisture in the air, sundry traffic lights go on the fritz, leading to long lines of traffic doing the four-way stop thing.

Usually, it's the older traffic lights on the less-traveled streets that stop working, but we usually get at least one set of lights on Seawall Blvd. doing the blinky thing. More rarely will a light on Broadway go out. Broadway is the road the causeway/freeway dumps onto. It's the starting point of I-45 from Houston to Dallas, it's six lanes across (3 each way) with a tree-planted median all the way through town, until it merges with Seawall at Stewart Beach. (I think it's the only traffic median on the national historical register...)

There where the freeway ends, Broadway also has two turning lanes to the county courthouse, so it's 8--no, 9 lanes across. (There's an extra lane added on the "outbound" side to send two lanes down the access road.) So it's a Huge Intersection, with a light.

Today, that light was out. It had sorta rained earlier. Pathetic, pitiful rain--more like mist, really. Or like really, really thick humidity. But that was enough moisture to knock out the stoplight. So, of course, the traffic backed up. It wasn't too bad--probably wouldn't have been as bad as it was, except they'd blocked off the inside lane, I think to mow the medians, or some such.

Anyway, what I'm getting at is that most of the traffic lights on the island were damaged in the hurricane. They have them working--sort of. But every traffic light in the city needs to be rewired and replaced. Galveston is supposed to be getting some federal help in doing it, but that help is very, very slow in coming. The fact that the economy collapsed the month after the hurricane hit didn't help any. We're still the city the country forgot. Sigh.

But we're hanging in. Bit by bit, the city is getting put back together.

Oh, and that house hunting thing? The banks aren't being cooperative, so we're going to wait a while before we move. Stashing more money. I also need to sell another book. Which means I'd better finish the one I'm working on. And I didn't write a blessed thing today. I did however, finally get my computer put back together. Now I have to go reload all my programs.

TBR Challenge: The Quiet Gentleman

2010-04-19T15:44:00.003-05:00

I read this month's book early in the month, unlike last month. I'm actually doing pretty well in my challenge reading for this one. Last year, I think I'd given up by this time. (Yeah, I know. It's only the 4th month. *hangs head in shame*) But I'm keeping up this year, so far.

I'm not sure how I'm doing on the topics, but I am clearing some books out of my stacks/shelves. So, this month, my book was THE QUIET GENTLEMAN by Georgette Heyer.

This was a nice quiet read--despite the fact that there was a mystery in it. The Gentleman of the title returns home from the wars. He's inherited the title after his father died-apparently his mother ran off with a footman, or some such, then quickly died, so dad could re-marry. Since the new earl (or whatever) resembles his mother a great deal, Dad never liked him, and when the oldest son went off to fight Napoleon, everyone hoped he might just, accidentally, of course, die, so the younger son, by the second wife, could inherit. But he didn't, and now big brother's come home to take up the reins. And none of the family--especially his younger brother--is happy about it.

There's a cousin, and a neighbor's bluestocking daughter who's staying for a visit while the parents are away, and the stepmother, and another very pretty neighbor who's something of a flirt. The younger brother's had his eye on the pretty neighbor, and when her head is turned by the new earl's showing up, little brother has a temper tantrum or two. Then the earl is warned away from a dangerous bridge. And he flirts some more with the neighbor, and bubba has another tantrum. And they go to a party, and have a party, and somebody shoots at the earl, and--well, it's a nice little story, and truthfully, not as exciting as it sounds here.

I enjoyed it, but there were large stretches where nothing much happened. Often I enjoy Heyer's "nothing much," but this seemed like less "much" and more "nothing" than I usually get in her books. It poked along a little too pokily, maybe, than what I prefer. Or maybe it was that we got so very, very little of the internal goings-on of the Quiet Gentleman and his family. I prefer to get a lot of what's going on inside peoples' heads--more emotion and thoughts and such, and we don't get a lot of that. I think some of it is deliberate, so that the happy ending is more of a surprise--but I don't read romance for the surprise. I read it for the journey. So, while I liked the story overall, it's not one of my favorite Heyers.

Misadventures in Research

2010-04-16T14:04:00.007-05:00

I have issues when people mess up the research for their stories. Not just in books, but in movies and television shows. Sometimes I can shake my head at the silliness (Human beings Diving From Space into Atmosphere in their BARE Skins, with no consideration of re-entry heat or turbulence, as in the Star Trek reboot) and enjoy the story anyway. But sometimes, it can really mess up my enjoyment of the story. Especially when people mess up stuff about Texas.

This has not been a recent issue. My annoyance dates back at least as far as the series premiere of the old television series Dallas. When they had the main characters cowering in WACO for fear of a hurricane, you KNOW the writers do not have a CLUE about much of anything having to do with Texas. FYI, Waco--where I was living at the time with my brand new spouse--is more than 300 miles from the coast. When evacuating for a hurricane, Waco is where people go to be safe. (My son went to Waco to visit his girlfriend when Hurricane Ike made landfall in 2008. I didn't go that far...) When we lived in Waco, we liked hurricanes, because they usually meant rain, and most of the time, we needed rain.

I'm feeling particularly grouchy today, because I have bumped into more than one instance of gross Texas ignorance in the past couple of days. This ignorance has nothing to do with the way outsiders see Texas as one giant monolithic mass of redneck Republicanism--which it most definitely is not, but that's beside my point today. I'm talking about the kind of ignorance that is easily solved by Picking up a map. Or Asking somebody. Or checking out a government website, or a high school text book. Simple research.

For instance, I have already mentioned the book in which the Texas State Football Championship (A, AA, 3A, all the way up to 5A) is played in the school's home football stadium rather than in the capital city of Austin. All that author had to do was to ask on any e-mail author loop she belonged to: "Hey--where's the state football championship played?" and there would have been an author from Texas who could tell her. There are always authors from Texas on any writing loop, because it's a big state, there are lots of people here, and lots of us write books. Ignorance has no excuse.

The book I read today--isn't actually wrong. It's just Vague. Which isn't a sin. I blame the vagueness on New Yorkers. Because I know this author personally, and I know darn well that she knows that the city of Galveston is on an island. An island that is over a mile from the coast of mainland Texas. You can't really swim your horse across, even if large parts of it are no more than 4 feet deep.

But she has her Texas Rangers riding a day south of the city to a little ranch without ever showing them crossing water. Now, in 1859, the city of Galveston was confined to a small section of the east end of the island, which stretches 30 miles to the west (southwest), and it takes about a day to ride that far, so they could have ridden to the other end of the island and confronted outlaws there. Outlaws that somehow got over to the island themselves... On the other hand, she referred to riding South out of the city. Here's another thing. If you go south from the port of Galveston, you cross the island the short way and wind up in the Gulf of Mexico.

After much confusion (since, after all, I live in Galveston), I finally decided they must have crossed over somehow, and ridden south toward Matagorda or Freeport or somewhere inland. Those places are south, but they are also west. I also got confused when her people rode past Galveston on their way to somewhere else. If you're inland, and you're going somewhere else further inland, there is no way Galveston is on the way. It's pretty much not on the way to anywhere. I blame that on the copy editors as well.

I think a large part of my confusion with this story was due to the fact that I couldn't place the heroine's home ranch or the outlaw's hideout anywhere specific, so I couldn't visualize where these people were riding around. And that was my issue. Someone who hasn't traversed that same territory every couple of weeks wouldn't have had a problem at all. And the author did once mention leaving Galveston on barges. Late in the story. Still, it was annoying when I kept wondering how these people got off the island, and the fact that it IS an island was never, ever mentioned. Is it general knowledge? That Galveston is an island???

And then there was the Criminal Minds episode this week. Besides the fact that the Texas border with Mexico is a RIVER along its whole entire length, which makes the digging of tunnels under the border a little problematic, seems to me, and the fact that Terlingua, Texas isn't actually a town, anymore--I'll let them get away with that. People make up towns all the time, and Terlingua used to be a town. That's okay. The tunnels were silly--did nobody think that there was a river in the way? But, that wasn't the big issue.

See, a large part of the motivation of the villain was that the sheriff just moved down from New York City and got hired as the sheriff. She came in as an outsider and took over, and the villain, who grew up in the town, was jellus. Problem is, that would never happen. Because every sheriff in every one of the 254 counties in the state of Texas is ELECTED. And no outsider could get elected. Now maybe, if the previous sheriff died in the saddle, so to speak, the Commissioner's Court, or the county judge (who usually isn't the judge of a court, but the administrator of the county) could appoint somebody as sheriff, but that appointment would only hold until the next election, and since just about every office in the state of Texas is elected, there are elections every five minutes--or so it seems. Which made the major conflict in the story, or one of them, well--silly. And impossible.

So, those of you who are not Texans or ex-Texans who might be considering setting a book in Texas-- just remember. If there is a public office or government position that might be elected, it probably is. We even elect the county treasurer (if there is one) and the tax assessor/collector. We elect county clerks and constables and justices of the peace. I'm really surprised we don't elect the county janitors. Oh, and it's not the sheriff's station or sheriff's department. It's the sheriff's office, for both the location and the organization.

Really, people--just do your homework. Don't assume that all states work the same. 'Cause they don't. Oh, and when you get your map of Texas to use in plotting your story (I do recommend using maps--it makes things so much easier), do pay attention to scale. It's farther than you think it is.

Retreating to write

2010-04-14T15:42:00.003-05:00

I was waiting to write/post this blog until I got my wildflower pictures downloaded from my camera. But my computer is still in the shop, and while I could climb over the boy and use the back-up in his room, it's a real pain. So I haven't downloaded my pictures. I'll borrow one from the dayjob photographer. Jennifer Reynolds is much better than I am. And yes, bluebonnets do come in pink.

Anyway, I went up to Valley Mills, TX to "camp out" and write. I actually went up to do a workshop on using Tarot to spark your writing, but that was just for several hours on Saturday. I drove up on Thursday and stayed till Sunday. We wrote, hashed out plot issues, talked, ate salads and chocolate cookies, took a walk to look for wildflowers--didn't find the big field out where we stayed, but we found some others--and wrote some more. It was wonderful.

I got a sticky point figured out. I knew, sorta, what I wanted to have happen at the end of the story. Problem was, given the date where I started the story, the actual historical events didn't cooperate to create one of the endings I wanted to write. I just couldn't drag out my hero's assignment three weeks longer than it ought to be, to make them do what I wanted. So, I had to re-read my research book and see what my timeframe was and what I could to do wrap things up. And I did. I've got a handle on things now. And I'm closer to the end than I thought I was. All through the benefits of talking things through with critique/plotting partners.

Oh, and I wrote about 12 pages while I was there. So I'm very happy. :) I haven't written so many pages since I've been back. I've been Really Tired.

I'm doing some re-reads of historical novels I liked a lot, and reading some new ones. Trying to read the Rita finalists. Need to pick up more of them. And we're out of breakfast food. Since I'm the only one in the house who eats breakfast, this means I need to go buy myself food.

Wish my computer well, if you would. I really would like to have it back again. Thanks.

Things in books that drive me bonkers

2010-04-08T09:10:00.002-05:00

Somebody else has written an essay on something to the effect of "What makes bad books bad." I haven't read it (yet), but since I was trying to come up with a topic to write a blog about, I thought I might write about that. Because there Are things that make bad books bad, generically speaking.

However, those books are bad enough that they don't usually get published. (Hopefully, anyway.) I'm talking about books with bad grammar, or "fishheads," (also known as backstory dumps at the front of the book). There are manuscripts out there that detail Every Minute of the Character's day. Taking a shower. Eating breakfast. Walking on the beach. Driving to work.

Now--walking on the beach can be fascinating in real life, obviously. I've written way too many blogs about it (probably). But in a book--if your character is going to walk on the beach, something has to happen on that beach that will change the story. He has to find a body washed up on shore--maybe tangled in the tentacles of a Portuguese man-o-war, but the jellyfish isn't what killed her. Or she needs to kiss the hero. Or fight with the hero. Or make a confession of some kind to the hero. EVERYTHING that happens in a story must be important to the story in some way.

But what drives one person crazy (me) might be what another person loves about the book. So I'm just going to talk about the things that make it hard for me to finish a book, or have me arguing with the author/characters.

One of the things I've already mentioned: Nothing happens. I remember reading a historical romance--a traditional Regency, if I recall correctly--that opened with the heroine wandering over the hillside pondering the recent events in her life. I stuck with it, but it didn't improve much. The pace remained abysmally slow. Which is kind of the same thing. Slow pace = nothing happens. Some slow paced books can work, but mostly, they just aggravate me.

Ponderous, purple prose. That annoys me. Sometimes it's not even purple, just ponderous. Stilted. Like they think authors are supposed to write in lofty language. That works for Georgette Heyer. Barbara Metzger can do some very interesting things, playing with Heyer-ish language. Others--not so much. There are some authors who write mostly in that lofty tone, and then the characters will suddenly use slang. Or think in slangy, contemporary language--when they haven't been for 2-1/2 chapters.

That's another thing that can drive me bonkers. Inconsistency. If you're going to use a historical-feeling tone, then use it. Don't jump back and forth. Characters need to be consistent too. Obviously, emotions can change, but I'd like to be able to follow the change. You can let your characters do whatever they must--if it's motivated. Too many unpublished authors (I've judged a lot of contests) don't get enough internal thought, emotion and reaction into their stories, so their characters seem flighty. Unfortunately, there are a few characters in published books who don't make a lot of sense. I want to be able to follow the character's thought process as they make a decision. Not a bunch of wishy-washiness, or hand-wringing, but what they think, and why, and how they move to this decision, whether it's a major change of heart or simply an important decision.

There are other things that make me crazy--poor historical, or even contemporary research. (IE. A state football championship in Texas that is played in the school's home stadium. Excuse me? Even the 6-man football championships are played in AUSTIN. (The state capital) ALL championships-whether sports, music, academic--all of them are Always in Austin. Period. And it ain't that hard to find that out. Geez.) (Okay, the UIL Solo & Ensemble State competition for band and choir musicians is in San Marcos for 1A schools--but San Marcos is only a little ways south of Austin.) Bad research can throw me so far out of the story, I'm arguing with the author in absentia for hours.

And then there's the language that isn't bad, but has no spark to it. It's just--well, dull.

Are these things that annoy most readers? Are they things that make the books objectively bad? A case could be made, I suppose.

On the other hand, it could be argued that some of these things are just my subjective taste, like my mild distaste for vampires and pirates. (A vampire story has to be really good, and probably different, for me to like it. Same with pirates.) On the other other hand, I'm always willing to give a good Western, or werewolf/shapeshifter, or marriage of convenience story a try. I'm willing to recognize my prejudices and subjectivity in those areas. My disposition against slow-paced stories falls in this category, I think.

Which is why I gave this post the title I did. These are things that drive ME bonkers. They might make you nuts too. But then--you might not care. :)

What does annoy you when you're reading? What kinds of things will make you set a book down and not pick it back up? I'm not necessarily talking throwing-it-against-the-wall, though you can share those too, if you want.

I'm leaving town this afternoon and won't have Internet access way out in the wilds outside Valley Mills, so y'all play nice. :) I'll try to check in before I go.

First beach walk in 2010

2010-04-06T14:24:00.005-05:00

That's right, folks. Today, I went out to walk on the beach for the first time in 2010. It's been really cold, and then it's been wet, and I've been lazy (and enamored of my new Wii & its Wii Fit game), and it's taken all the way to APRIL to make it out to walk barefoot on the beach. Okay, I haven't walked barefoot much before April in any of the years since I've been here, but I've been out with shoes on. It's just been a cold winter.

Spring has arrived in a rush, and while the water is still quite cold, it is definitely spring. So it was time to hit the beach.

The place where I like to walk when I drive over (as opposed to when I walk up with the dog) has been very low in all the years since we moved here. It's just east of the park where this dolphin statue is. (The picture of the statue was taken before Ike--the wall behind the dolphins is broken, & the soil where the flowers are was washed away.)

By that, I mean that the sand hasn't reached high on the seawall, the giant pink granite boulders in front of the seawall were exposed, and often awash in water when the tide was in, which meant you had to pick your way through the rocks to get to the next jetty and cross over to a wide, high beach with the boulders all covered up. But today when I arrived and climbed down the stairs, I scarcely recognized it.

The parks people (and maybe the Corps of Engineers too) had brought sand in and raised the beach level, covered up all the boulders and moved the waterline out where it didn't lap on the bottom of the stairs. So I had to cross about 30 yards of very soft sand to get to the hard, easy-to-walk on part.

Not many seagulls or other birds out this a.m. I don't know whether I was too early for them, or too late. I did, however, see lots of critters that got washed up on the sand. The saddest were the four dead willets I saw spaced along the length of the beach where I walked, like some sandpiper mama had lost so many children just as they were learning to run and forage along the water. Poor birdies.

I also saw 10 (yes, ten!) clear/white jellyfish washed up on the shore. I've been rummaging through the Internet trying to figure out what kind of jellyfish they were--they're the big (cantaloupe sized) clearish ones that look like abandoned plastic bags from a distance, and don't have long dangly tentacles. Either that, or all their tentacles had been broken off, but since I also saw a bunch of Portuguese man-o-wars (men-o-war? Is that proper for jellyfish (even though the man-o-war is apparently technically not a jellyfish-something I learned in my rummaging) terminology?), and they all still had their purple/blue tentacles trailing across the sand, I think the big clear jellyfish must not have long tentacles.

I did not know till my research today that the oblong purple/blue/teal jellyfish (see picture) are actually the man-o-wars, and the big clear ones aren't. I've been stung by the clear ones, and it hurt like crazy--but the man-o-war is supposed to be worse. Maybe. I've been stung by jellyfish I didn't see, and it sure hurt, so it might have been a MoW... I think the clear ones might be Sea Nettles--they're not Cannonball Jellyfish, because they are colorless. I am still researching. Maybe I will ask our neighbor. He's a marine biologist, I think.

Anyway, while I was walking along the water's edge, carrying my shoes and counting birds and jellyfish, and noting the long tentacles & such, I also picked up any nice-looking oyster shells I happened upon. My friend @KristenEthridge (as she is known on Twitter) makes jewelry out of oyster shells. I rather like the white and purple shells. The little ones looked a little nicer, because they hadn't had time to get seacrud on the outsides, so you could still see the purple on their outsides, as well as their insides. (Seacrud is a technical term.)

And because I put the shells in my pocket, I had to rinse the sand off them, which meant I got my feet in the water. It felt really cold when I first walked in, but by the time I left--I think my feet were so cold they didn't know what was cold and what wasn't. But it was nice to get my feet in the water, to be out on the water, and find shells and things. It was so incredibly windy--my hair blew all one direction, then all the other when I turned to walk back. There was lots of choppy surf (the surf in the Gulf is never Big here), and lots of irridescent seafoam, and my glasses got all salty. My wet feet got Very Sandy because I had to walk across that soft, fluffy sand (with lots of bitty shells in it, because it's dredge sand) back to the stairs, and I had to go in the back yard and wash them off before I could go in. The dog kept her distance, in case I decided to wash her. But it was a nice walk. And I've had fun looking up jellyfish. And sooner or later, I'll get together with @KristenEthridge and give her the shells, if she wants them. (I have no idea whether they're the kind she uses, but I picked them up, so...)

I'll try to get another blog in here before I leave town, but I'm heading up to Valley Mills, TX to a writing retreat, just me and my friend B, on Thursday. We are going to stay at the usual dude ranch (it is mostly ranch, very little dude), and talk and write. I can't wait! Hopefully I can solidify how my book needs to end.

Friday follies

2010-04-02T13:12:00.004-06:00

It's Friday, and what day is more foolish (isn't that the adjective that goes with folly?) than Friday? At least it's alliterative.

Although I'm not going to write about folly today. This is going to be a Random Stuff blog.

Like: I am a graduate of Baylor University, and as such, I am hugely enjoying the NCAA tournament playoffs of both the men's and women's basketball teams. The men's Sweet Sixteen and Elite Eight games were in Houston which, as you may know, is just across the causeway (and the rest of Galveston County) from the island. So we mounted an expedition to venture into the Enormous City to go to the regional playoff game and see Baylor play against Duke. The Fella, the Boy and myself met up with The Older Boy, had lunch at Luby's near the stadium, and went to the game. We enjoyed the game tremendously, right up to the very end, when the Beloved Bears couldn't quite pull it out, and bid a fond farewell to the Older Boy who had to drive back to Dallas, after driving down just to go to the game. (He's in school to become a coach--he'd probably drive even farther for almost any sporting event.)

We are not going to San Antonio to go see the Baylor women's team in the Final Four of the tournament. Even if it was the men's team in the finals, we wouldn't go see it. If they're in the finals next year, in Houston, we might go. But we are excited, and will watch them play. Go BEARS!!

Then, on the way home, the Fella decided he wanted some oysters, and since the Boy had told us of an excellent oyster bar he'd gone to only Friday, we desired him to take us to said bar so we could partake of fire-roasted oysters. (Not me. I'm not a big oyster fan.) (Can you tell that I've been reading Georgette Heyer today? Sorry. I'll try to control myself.)

Anyway, the Boy couldn't remember exactly how to get to Gilhooley's. A large part of the problem was that there are a lot of Farm to Market roads on the Galveston County mainland with similar numbers--1765 and 1764, as well as 517, and 519. And the Boy couldn't remember whether they'd gone down 517 or 519 to get to the place. We finally had to call and ask. (It's on 517, just FYI, in San Leon.) But they did have some excellent oysters, and while I didn't order a whole dinner-full of oysters, I did allow myself to be persuaded to eat one. (The menfolks ordered a dozen each--and received 14 and 15 oysters each, in all.) And it was the first oyster I've ever eaten that I actually rather enjoyed. It was extremely soft and fluffy-but I don't really mind that texture. It tasted mostly of woodsmoke, but darned if it wasn't pretty good. I'm not sure I can be persuaded to eat a whole dozen of the suckers, but one at a time, it was definitely edible.

In other matters--I have written Eleven pages for this week. That's the most I've done in a while, so I'm happy.

I only looked at one house this past weekend, and it was so much more suitable as a duplex than anything, it really wasn't worth posting about. Still haven't heard from the bank, so we're not looking hard yet. And since the government let the flood insurance program expire and haven't got round to re-upping it yet, it may be a while.

The Girlfriend has come down for the weekend. We are hoping Dolly will got more walks.

We have a new fence, on one side of the yard. The fence in the back was already replaced, shortly after Ike. The fence on the north side is still in good shape. The fence on the south side was rotting and had to have boards screwed over it to keep the granddog from biting holes in the rot and escaping. So now we have a new fence. The fence guys came at 7:30 a.m.! It wouldn't have been a problem, except I was bad the night before and stayed up reading till 4:30 or so, and was Very tired at 7:30. I let them move my vehicular beast from the driveway, and stayed awake long enough to eat and take meds, and walk the dog. But the fence is done.

Following the Characters' Lead

2010-03-30T13:11:00.003-06:00

I've been trying to write a love scene for about a week now. (At least.) I know that a love scene is the next thing that happens. I know that it will happen eventually. But my characters are being amazingly difficult about the whole thing. It's kind of like trying to lead a critter that doesn't want to be led. Which has me thinking about my process, and wondering whether non-writer people would understand. (Probably not.)

See, I'm not one of those writers who sits down and just starts writing, flying by the seat of my pants into the mist to see where the story takes me.

Conversely, I'm not one of those writers who plans out the story scene by scene, chapter by chapter. I don't know where my chapter breaks will fall until the second draft, at least.

I'm something of a hybrid between the two. I have to have some structure--a plot skeleton to hang the story's flesh on, and often, a list of scenes I think I want to write. (Though that list is often not developed until I reach the roadmap's turning points, to mix my metaphors.) But I can't have too much.

Basically, what happens when I write: I have my roadmap, or skeleton, or beat sheet--whatever term you want to use. I have turning points and Major Scenes written down. I might also have a list of things that need to happen after This turning point, in order to reach That turning point. Beyond that, I really don't know much.

I line my characters up--put them on their marks, to use acting jargon. She is here, doing this, wearing these clothes (or not, as the case may be). He is over there, doing this other thing. There are people outside, or in the room around them, or maybe the characters are alone. Then I tell them--this is the situation, this is what has just happened, and this is what is going to happen in this scene.

The one I'm trying to write is a love scene, but it could be anything. I could tell them: "This is the scene where He tells Her about his dead child," or "In this scene, She gets His shirt off to look at an injury and is mortified by her attraction to him." Or whatever the scene might be. I tell them what the scene is, and then I say, "Okay, Ready? Go!"

And I write down what they do. (It's kind of like improv, that way.) I write down what they think and what they feel, how they react to what the other person says. And quite often, they surprise me.

This particular love scene comes fairly late in this book. I know my characters well by this time. I know how they'll react to things. Which is where the stubborn comes in. I know good and well these two people are going to do it. But I am having the dickens of a time getting them to the point, because of who they are. I can't say it's because of who I've made them, because I'm not sure I can claim that. I tend to get acquainted with my characters more than I invent them. My hero is a good guy and he's damn proud of that. He's a little rigid on the point, which is what will make his fracture so delicious. And my heroine is crazy. But she's not as crazy as she'd like to be. I'm hoping that tomorrow I may be able to move beyond the talk into some action. I hope. (Please, people!)

I know already that I'm going to have to go back and thin out some of the repetition, and probably shorten it, because it feels long. (Though it may not be as long as it feels, because I haven't written that many pages over the week of trying to get them started.) But I had to write all that to know what actually happens. To turn my characters loose and let them lead. Because for me, that's when I know the story is going to be what I want it to be. If the characters have taken over, that's when it's working.

So while I'm frustrated that they're taking their own sweet time about this, I'm also content to let them do it the way they want.

And how are things going for You?

TBR Challenge: I Capture The Castle

2010-03-25T12:45:00.002-06:00

Well darn. I didn't make the Blog Post Day for the TBR challenge--but I have done it! The Official day for the TBR blog post was March 17, but I hadn't finished reading the book by then. Sigh. So I'm posting my mini-review today.

This month was supposed to be Historical Fiction/Romance/Mystery. I read a YA book set in the 1930s, so it was technically historical, but I'm going to count this as June's YA book, and read a historical (or something else) then. I am going ALL out of order on this thing.

So. I read I CAPTURE THE CASTLE by Dodie Smith.

I think I'm just not in the target market for this book. I liked it okay, but it wasn't "the bestest thing ever." Probably because I'm so much older than the age group it's really written for. I appreciated the message that "You shouldn't settle for less than what you really want." But I've known a lot of 17/18-year-olds who were/are a lot more mature than this girl. Maybe it's the difference in era, too. Kids today are a lot more sophisticated, in a lot of ways.

The story is about a self-aware 17-year-old who lives in a rundown castle in rural England with her family-older sister, younger brother, stepmother and father who was a "one-book wonder," making lots of money with a highly acclaimed experimental novel, and hasn't written anything since. They're desperately poor, and the sister hates it. The heroine, who tells us the story in her journal, isn't wild about being hungry or having ratty outgrown clothes, but she's not so desperate. She wants to be a writer, wants to "experience life." Oh, there's also another boy--very handsome, but "lower class" (his mother was their housekeeper, till she died)--who lives with the family and works for them. He gets room & board, but doesn't get actual wages, and he's got a crush on the heroine.

I spent a lot of time wanting to smack the heroine upside the head and say "grow up!" She talks about how it's immature to kiss someone and think one's in love--but she does it anyway. And I never did understand why she was so snobbish to the "servant" boy - I could see how she might not "love" love him--he was essentially like another brother--but it wasn't explained like that. Maybe the narrator wasn't conscious of it--but she was conscious of so much else. That may have been part of the reason for my impatience with her. She was so self-aware about so much--and so dim about so much else.

But then the adults in the book needed smacking even more than the heroine, so... I have even less patience with people who "wait for the muse" when they want to create. The muse shows up when you give it a place to appear. You create the opportunity, by sitting down and starting the work, and the muse has space to work.

In the end, I'm not sure what the point of the whole story was. It felt very much like a slice of life story without a real ending to the story arc. Either that, or I missed what the arc actually was. And yes, there was the "Don't settle," theme, but... I guess the end left me feeling as if the story just fizzled out.

I did like the book, but it wasn't anything to swoon over, IMO.

I had all sorts of inspiring ideas for a blog--but didn't write them down, and when I get to the "New Post" page on the computer, I have forgotten them all. Alas.

I have written pages this week, despite having doctor appointments and such. Need to go get mail from the post office today. Should have a new Netflix movie in.

I will try in future to write down blog ideas so I will not forget what they are. :)

Oh! The middle grandson is learning to ride a bike! He does pretty good, except--when he sees a car coming their way, 2 blocks away, he yelps, jumps off the bike and hides behind the nearest tree. (He's autistic. He's doing good, considering.)

Y'all have a good weekend.