Carolyn's Blog

Sunday, July 31, 2005

Running on Fumes

I'm home from Reno. The RWA conference was great, some really good stuff happened, nothing official to report yet, but hopefully soon. I went to bed at 1:20am this morning and got up at 3:43am to catch my flight. That is not a typo. That's not quite 2.5 hours of sleep. I got home about 9:30am and got reacquainted with the cats, the dog and, when he got out of bed, my son. I crashed later this afternoon (not on purpose) but my son kept saying "Get up, you said you'd finish playing cards with me..." I know why he wants my attention, and he deserves it, but things got to a point where I was just too tired. Finally told him to go away in a stern enough voice that he left me alone. More bad mommy, but he has this neverending version of War he wanted to finish playing. Literally, there's no way to make the game stop, and I was too tired to think I could cheat convincingly enough to lose quickly.

Shoot. I thought I had some interesting things to say, but I guess not. I may go to bed now. More bad mom. Oh, I remember one thing. I made all the CC authors look at pictures of my son (only two pics, but still, I admit I was rude and they very sweetly humored me) and when I told him they said he was handsome (which he is) he was horrified. I laughed. He was not amused.

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Friday, July 29, 2005

Guerillla marketing etc

Liz Maverick's idea about doing guerilla marketing for Crimson City was brilliant, as are all her ideas. We met, we gave away books and stuff and it all went really fast and people were interested. Cool. I am so terrible at being social that by the end of the day, when most people are looking forward to socializing, I am just about ready to jump out of my skin. I end up sitting wherever I am (which is supposed to involve being social) sinking deeper and deeper into a somebody please make me be charming and interesting kind of hopelessness, but my sister got those genes, not me. So, then, eventually I just have to escape in order not to just have everyone want to hit me upside the head for being such a freak. OK, maybe not a freak, but sitting there like a lump. Everyone has funny stories to tell and oh well. Interesting lives and, of course, actual careers ... yes, I realize this is totally neruotic so I will just stop now. Sigh. But it's better to be here in my hotel room, thinking I should be socializing instead of being somewhere turning into a big old lump.

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Thursday, July 28, 2005

Busy busy busy in a good way

It's been a busy day. I went to a swordfighting workshop. Alas, the audience did not get to wield any swords, but it was really cool anyway. Men in tall leather boots. . . This is a fashion that must come back. Now watch, the Renaissance fashion that comes back will end up being the codpiece. Just say no! Tall leather boots!! I got to meet the rest of the Crimson City authors. They're all really nice. It was fun. Met with my editor. He's nice too. I am sorry to report that with the exception of one pretty good cappucino (must have been an accident) the espresso here is -- shudder -- Everything else about the Reno Hilton is fab - except the smoke and slot machines. I have about an hour before I'm off to my agency's party. There'll be some nice people there, too. Have to be up early tomorrow so with luck I can make an early night of it.

OK, I have one complaint. In my room. the cable for internet access comes out of a piece of furniture constructed in such a way that if the laptop is near the cable, it is not possible to open said laptop. Uh, hello, facilities? What were they thinking? It is also not possible to reach the power outlet from there either. So I have to stretch the cord across the room to an outlet and -- well, my shoulders hurt now, so I'll just stop typing.

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Tuesday, July 26, 2005

News from Reno

No news really, other than I am here in Reno at RWA Nationals. OK, there is some news. CK said really nice things about the revisions for ADC. Really nice. I feel like I dodged a bullet there. Well, I guess I should go see if I can find anybody. I need to find out where the gym is.

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Monday, July 25, 2005

How to Look Busy Without Actually Being Busy Part 2

Today I putzed around getting ready for RWA Nationals in Reno. I wanted to have a red dress in case wearing a dress turned out to be imperative. Why red? Because everyone wears black at these things, that's why. Also there were a couple of unmentionables I needed to buy, so I bought those and went in search of a red dress. And here is what I discovered - clothing stores only carry hideous dresses. A few nice black ones, but no nice ones in any other color. Once I understood the extent of the retail problem, I expanded my search to some color that wasn't black and also didn't have flowers disguised as fried eggs or flying saucers. Oddly enough, this did not appreciably expand the acceptable selections. I went to many stores. I found one lovely, glorious red dress on a sale rack. There were at least 10 of them. One size 4 and 9 in size 6. I am a size 8. I haven't been a size 4 since I had time to run 60 miles a week, and I will have to be off sugar for a wee bit longer before I am a size 6. If ever. Sigh. But then I found a light purple dress that looked cute. They had size 8. So, I tried it on. For a sissy color, it looked pretty good. Only the zipper pooched out at my butt like an extra tail or something. Sigh. So, no sissy but pretty light purple dress. I came home defeated. I packed a dark purple dress that was hiding in the back of my closet. I don't think I have shoes that will work, but if I have to wear it (and if it fits) maybe no one will look at my shoes.

So after the dress fiasco, I had to iron two shirts. Normally, I would just buy new ones, but that would be fiscally irresponsible, so I ironed them. Packed. Mostly. Then I cleaned my room because well- sometimes cleaning is just unavoidable and I don't want to come home to the mess that my room became during revisions for ADC. That was a lot of work. In between I fed my son, played cards with him, convinced him to eat graham crackers (If I had his eating habits I would be a size 2) for lunch, took him to Aikido, checked email, prepared my presentation on The Minerva Press, checked email, watched My Cousin Vinny (not appropriate for my son to watch, can't wait til he goes to bed...) - which requried a download of some software that apparently got munched during the recent computer disaster, and since I am stuck with dial-up that took an hour and a half, during I did some stuff which I can't remember what it was (not writing, though) and then watched the movie. Hours awake: 13. Actual hours of work done: 0

You, too, can look busy without actually being busy. Reno tomorrow.

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Sunday, July 24, 2005

fear and loathing in northern california - mostly fear

So Liz's Crimson City got great reviews. Marjorie's A Taste of Crimson has great reviews, early indications are that Patti's Through A Crimson Veil is going to get great reviews, too (she's heard from a reviewer already.) Which is great except it's going to be humilating for me. People either like my writing or hate it passionately. So far, I've yet to see evidence that there's any in-between with me. So just great. I'm going to be the weak link. It's going to be "Crimson City? Yeah, fabulous series, except Jewel's. Hers sucked." It's too late to tell Chris to forget it, even if I gave the money back. Liz will never speak to me again, and I won't even want to be around the other authors because they all wrote great books. Sigh.

I made the mistake of googling around a bit while I was pretending to be busy and I came across a bit of conversation about Crimson City and me. They like my historicals (and don't even get me started about historicals) but don't think they'll like ADC. See? People haven't even read the book and they're prepared to not like it. Too violent, based on chapter one, which I admit starts out with two bodies, but they're just lying there dead. What's violent about that? Gross, maybe, but not violent. There's an inter-species war going on and my heroine's a cop. It's not like the bodies get up and walk around - that doesn't happen until chapter 6 or 7 at least and it's not those two. They're just dead. Like my career.

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Saturday, July 23, 2005

How to Look Busy Without Actually Being Busy

Today I did stuff. A whole bunch of stuff. My two neices had a combined birthday party in Napa CA today. There was a pool and the kids and many adults were having a blast. It was 105 degrees Farhenheit. 105!! People, I live in Coastal California plus I think 80 is too hot. I live for fog. Also, I do not own a pair of shorts or a bathing suit. Why should I? I have no life. I never go anywhere or do anything, and I will only hint at the troubles I have getting away for an evening. Start with babysitting and end with family members who say things like, "You mean that's tonight?" or "You know I haven't been feeling well today" or "No." Let's just say I got tired of cancelling because it turned out I had no babysitting. Plus, school keeps me busy. And when there's no school, there's writing and if there's neither (when does that happen?) I'm tired.

Anyway, I was going to talk about how to look busy without actually being busy. Oh, wait, is that my email chime? Uh-huh. Better check. Right. So about being busy. Maybe I'll check my word processor settings to see if there's anything cool I can do. Nope. Not really. Oh, hey, that's my phone paging me. Someone sent me an important email. Note to self - check email phone paging settings. I wonder if anything interesting is trapped in my spam filters. Uh, no. I don't even have one of those. Hmm. I bet other writers have written something interesting in their blogs. Why, yes, they have. Open chapter 1 of WIP. Right. I didn't finish getting rid of the sentence fragments. Better get right on that, but wait, I should update all my anti-virus and spyware programs.

Net effect: busy on computer all evening. Amount of work done - oh, hey, I better go see how many words I did today.

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Friday, July 22, 2005

Vacation! Yippee-zzzzzzzzz

So, I'm officially on vacation. Put air quotes around vacation because I'm heading off to RWA next week. Lots of stuff to do. Am working on Shift, but I'm already fell asleep once. Woke up in time to make dinner. I'm exhausted and maybe I'll just go to bed early. I'm working on Chpt 1 right now and it's not what I hoped. So, it needs work.

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Thursday, July 21, 2005

Settling down - A day in Real Life - give me anything but!

So, ADC is in NY to face whatever its fate will be. Tired. But have been catching up on my sleep. Today I started working on Shift again. Oh. Sentence fragments all over the place, so now I'm just cleaning that up. RWA Nationals are next week. It's been a flurry of setting up meetings and what not. I almost think I'd rather just go there and sleep a lot.

Anyway, what's new in my glamorous life? Well, today at work one of the SQL Servers rebooted itself in the wee hours and I was getting in the car at 5:30am when the GA office called me to report no one could get into the application that runs on that server. Get to work. Check things out. According to the nice replacement for the BSOD I'm told that the server has recovered from a serious error. After a reboot, and starting and stopping all services on the application server that talks to the SQL server the application works fine. Then I spend an hour reviewing the server, system and application logs to see what made it decide to reboot in the middle of all the backups. Clues, but no firm evidence although there's indications of some AD (active directory) and SNMP misconfigurations - that's the LAN admins, not the DBA so what do I know? But looks like a new process installed to compress the 50 GB data files may have hosed things up. I document. We have no good backups, however because the server rebooted in the middle of the SQL backups and right when the tape back up was kicking off. Erk. Then I have to finish trying to document the BCP (business continuity plan - that's consultant-ese for "What the eff are we going to do if the CA building blows up and the GA one doesn't?") for the application I'm in charge of documenting. I only have that one because it's really complicated - not complex, that might actually be interesting. No, this proprietary app is just complicated. Straight port from an AS400 into SQL Server, so naturally, the tables are denormalized and all the datatypes are CHAR instead of varChar. For crying out loud no wonder the freaking database is 50GB, and the client interface - think way back to Windows 3.1, that's how elegant the interface is. So, trying to document a BCP test plan is really a joy. Attend meetings. That's my day job day. See, there's a reason I don't talk about it in my writing blog. Never again.

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Monday, July 18, 2005

Here's Toast

OK, for better or worse, the edits for ADC are done and on their way to NY. It is now a completely and utterly different book. I went to bed at 1:00am last night and got up at 5:00am, and I just now came back from Fed Ex. Is the book any good? I have no idea. Chris Keeslar has probably saved my you-know-what from total shame and humiliation. The whole first week I was revising, I was on painkillers and it's kind of scary, but that week is a vicodin-blur, although I admit I was holding off on the pills every night until after I was done writing so that was, just, not really fun at all, but I don't see how I could have done an even marginally OK job fixing my big fat mess with my brain mushier than usual. When 4 vicodins didn't do the job, I think that means it hurts. I can just see it now:


Anyway, then I started worrying I was turning into a dope-fiend so I flushed all the vicodin down the toilet and then the next night I was really sorry. But, that's exactly what a dope-fiend would think, right? And then the pain got worse. . . And I had to go back to the doctor.

And I've been a bad mommy for two weeks. Plus, my room looks like a paper bomb exploded in it.

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Saturday, July 16, 2005

The end is near -- er I mean In Sight

I have been through the revision letter and addressed every last comment. So, now I start transferring to the edited MS CK sent. Sigh. We're going over to a friend's house tonight for dinner and then a video and I have kindly been offered a room of my own (don't know about the view) where I can work instead of socialize. Oh, well. I have no life any way. I have no idea if I've made things worse or solved any problems or created new ones or anything. I'm tired, over-caffeinated and need more caffeine.

At long last I found an LCD monitor that was a bit more than decent, bigger than I thought was in my price range and - in my price range, meaning pretty cheap. So, it came yesterday and I love it so far. Only downside is the cat can't sleep on it. He keeps going behind the monitor to get up and -- oops. He can't. I'd feel sorry for him if I weren't so busy working. I was so sad when my 21" CRT bit the dust and I had to use a junky old 15 incher. Sniff. It took me nearly a year to find an LCD I wanted to spend money on.

Plus, my copy of Harry Potter came today and WAHHHH! I can't read it until ADC is in the mail.

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Survivor?

I keep fixing stuff, writing myself into a corner and then fixing that and then again and again. I'm almost done, though, with the last pass through the revisions. Sigh. A couple of things keep occurring to me. First, how to leverage all this fixing-experience into the next book. Part of it will be not having so little time, I hope. I can see that (as usual, actually) I got so focused on details that I lost the big picture. Also, I am a pantser. Pressure is good. I need it because it forces me to listen to the internal voice that says I'm making a bad decision or to take a risk. I bet when I read this tomorrow (later today) I'll realize I'm babbling.

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Thursday, July 14, 2005

No Panic Here

Still no panic. Argh!!!! No panic or despair or anything like that at all. It's not like nobody except CK noticed (or decided to point out?) a couple of huge enormous logical problems. I will fix them, of course. But still, the time for thinking the whole thing freaking sucks is NOT days before it goes into the mail to get typeset. No, the time for that is months before then. OK. Back to work. CK probably hates me.

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Wednesday, July 13, 2005

Revisions

Revising, Revising, Revising, Revising, Revising. I am not panicking in the least.

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Wednesday, July 06, 2005

Panic Attack?

I have the revisions for A Darker Crimson. There's one change that's pretty major because it involves completely changing the psychology of two chapters, but it's localized, more or less, to those two chapters. I think my solution to the problem pointed out is pretty darn good. Everything else isn't a huge deal I don't think. I'm in the middle of what I think is the messiest of the changes, lots of little stuff... Some things seem more complicated than they really are while stuff that sounds easy, isn't. Downside? This has to be back in NY by July 20. Erk! I'm hoping (probably not realistic) to be done with the first pass by the weekend. I got a lot done today. However, my son has an all day soccer tournament on Saturday. Not sure what that will do to my time frame. Depends. I'll know more, I guess, after his practice tomorrow. No complaints about any of the stuff I expected. But this will be a fabulous book when I get through adjusting to what he's pointed out.

So, in other news, my agent likes Shift a lot. She sounded enthusiastic. It's a good story. I'm kind of peeved I have to put it aside for a bit.

I was going to work on polishing my Sleath paper, I have a pretty complete draft, I think, but now that has to wait until after ADC gets into the mail.

I got my bookmarks for A Darker Crimson. If you want one, send me an email with your snail mail address.

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Sunday, July 03, 2005

So, I got to 551 odd words on the WIP and realized I was in the wrong pov. Shoot. [Stronger word intended] But it's now tomorrow and I'm tired and my mouth still hurts. I'm going to bed. Sigh.

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Saturday, July 02, 2005

I have a working title for the new paranormal: Shift. Hitting about 1,000 words per day. Haven't hit my goal yet today, but will get to it after this post. I had some icky dental work done last Thurs that has given me a whole new definition for the word uncomfortable. I admit the discomfort is distracting me a bit. I slept until 11:00 this morning. Good heavens. I woke up and most of the day was gone. I had errands to run, then I came home and played cards with my son for half an hour, then had to man a Fireworks booth from 1:30 to 3:00 in a location that's 20 minutes from home, that means 40 minutes driving. My day didn't get started until 4:30, for heaven's sake. I got my son an ice-cream maker for his birthday so we made kiwi ice cream (his choice!) but it didn't come out right. The chocolate ice cream we made was awesome. We all went into chocolate coma afterward. So after the kiwi ice cream disaster, I had to deal with some fall-out from the recent computer disaster, and I started getting a temp, so not only did I not feel very good, I spent some quality time imagining I was going to perish from infection even though they gave me penicillin, which I am taking faithfully. But the fever seems to be gone now. That's why I haven't hit target yet. But now I'm going to put on my jammies and work.

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