So, not as much done today as I'd have liked. I got my chapters turned in and, of course, tonight I made significant changes. There I was writing along in chapter 3 and I realized it was boring. I was HORRORS! writing a transition scene to get me to the exciting part. What to do? Well, obviously, stop the transition. But if I were to go right to the exciting part, the chapter would have gaping holes in the logic. So I changed the ending of chapter 2 (this was remarkably easy to do) to have the Big Event happen there with everyone aware that it had happened. And as zey say in ze lovely Parees: "Wa-lah." I no longer needed the transition scene. Now, mind you, I have many words to whack but I'm so happy that --
dang that Alt-S! Why on earth would Blogger set Alt-S to publish?
-- I saw the problem, knew it was bigger than I liked, but I fixed it anyway!

Then I talked to my sister for a long while because the company she works for just got bought by a bigger company and tonight was the meeting to explain all the talk in the papers. Stressful for her. But the new company has better benefits.

So that's it for now. I'm tired. Oh, nice email today about Crimson City. That was really nice.

So, I'm freaking about my approaching oral exam. I should have read tonight but I didn't. I worked on the new proposal. I have to turn in chapters to my prof tomorrow and right now, they totally suck. My original opening was BORING. I think I fixed it while at son's soccer practice, so hopefully it's less boring than it was, but that's not saying much. Still, now that I know my heroine is 6 ft tall with short black hair, she came together much better on the pages. Repeat after me a bazillion times, Carolyn has to work hard at writing stronger heroines. OK, anyone reading that last sentence, you don't have to do that I do. But I'll be turning in a chapter 3 that right in the middle of it says "[some other stuff here]"

So, here I am, it's almost ten, I have to get up at five, I have to at minimum print out the chapters to get to school tomorrow and then I have to save my laundry and then, well, all this time I should have been reading for school. But I wasn't. Bad Carolyn. And that you can repeat out loud. Argh!

Sigh.

So, I did do some actual writing work tonight. For the new proposal, which is titled "Possession" at my thought and Chris K's apparent mind-reading (Ok, so not really, it's pretty obvious, considering) I stuck chap 2 onto the end of chapter 1, moved chap 3 to chapter 2 and started a new chapter 3. At which point I discovered that my heroine has short black hair. Go figure. She ran her fingers through her hair and what do you know, it was short and black. She's also six feet tall, but I knew that from the time I wrote the former chapter 2.

Argh! I have to go back to work tomorrow. Where did all the hours go? Why didn't I have more fun? Get more done? Sleep more, write more, do more? Stop and smell the roses? Eat less, exercise more? Sigh.

Darn.

Ok. Well. I didn't write much today. But I'll do some later tonight.

P.S. my email has been boring. Somebody email me!

But first some hints: I don't have a penis, aren't going to buy any stocks, I have a million IPod shuffles on order, I'm full up on gift cards and I haven't ordered anything from you.

My folks came back from Santa Barbara and the chihuahua dumped me. After all those hours of holding him, letting him sleep on my bed and even lick my face in the morning, he takes one look at my mother and he's dancing like he just won the super lotto. He leapt into her arms, leapt I tell you. I feel so used!

I wrote a lot today. On some other project. Haven't been to the gym and feel not only elfless but sort of potato-y. Ick. Sigh.

So, I've discovered that being responsible for constantly holding a 5 pound dog is actually quite tiring. Last night, the cats were not happy to find they had to share the bed with a **gasp** dog. My mother has emailed instructions for preventing doggie disaster. I emailed her pictures of the dog on my lap looking quite happy. They'll be back Saturday.

Wrote some today. Not terrifically productive. I'm tired (said very small dog is an early riser and likes to lick one's face to announce he's awake.) Mostly I worked on other stuff, some of which went quite well. I have this strange feeling that I do not like my chapter 1, but I also think it's because I have this also strange feeling that it should be action, only this one will not be paranormal action, in which case maybe it's not enough something else which I don't know yet. I've also been thinking a lot about dark elf and I have some cool thoughts about the world and what it's like. I'm beginning to think that the bigger the backstory to a story the better. Put your characters smack in the middle of a situation that challenges all their baggage. So, maybe the issue with the new project is that I haven't yet decided how to adjust my backstory to what happened in the chapters I wrote. So, need to think about that.

It's raining. At this time of year, rain is a good thing, unless you happen to be outside in the dark without a coat waiting for a very small dog do its business. I could hear the owls, though. It's too bad there's no portable digital sound recorder, because I would love to record the owls. That sound and feeling has to end up in dark elf.

Lastly, I'm bored with my website. I ate too much. My son skunked me in poker, go fish, Crazy Eights, Crazy Kings and modified Crazy Eights. We have a variation on just about every card game we play. This one is fun. But there's no such thing as playing a game with him and not changing the rules in some fashion. His teacher says she's really curious to know what he does with his life. She put this oddly: He has a gifted mind. She also said he thinks outside the box. Oh, my. The kid is quite often no where near the box. But she's taking it well.

Happy Thanksgiving!

Today I got drafts done of all three proposal chapters. I'm not completely happy with them, but I like the direction well enough. It felt good to have a day with so many hours all to myself. Nice. I think I'll have some OK chapters for my prof to look at.

There's a good review of A Darker Crimson posted at by Michele Patrykus of Paranormal Romance Reviews: "Ms. Jewel has lived up to her name and given us a crimson jewel - the fourth book in Crimson City series. This is a big success for her as she changes from writing Historical to Dark romance."

Here's hoping she'll go post it at Amazon. And now, off to cuddle with the little dog.

Edited to add: I forgot, today was my turn to post on the Crimson City blog and JonnyWolf, the necro dog made an appearance. But I decided to update his profile and I managed to find a suitable photo under GPL and an audio file of a wolf howl. I got the chills just listening to it. So, check out the blog or go directly to his blogger profile: JonnyWolf. Scary fun.

So, I've started writing the chapters for the new one. Chapter 1. And already it doesn't match the outline or the synopsis. But that's fine. I've just further refined my heroine and the backstory she brings with her. I thought my villian wouldn't appear until chapter 2 or 3 but, in fact, he answered the door in the second paragraph. Something terrible is about to happen. But I'm tired and I'm going to bed because I need to be rested for chihuahua sitting. It's an important job.

My future is bright: food, writing and reading. Not necessarily in that order.

The practice oral went fine. The homestretch is in sight. I've read Alice Munro's hateship, friendship, courtship, loveship, marriage. Apparently I am an idiot because I was expecting personal essays and got sublime short stories. Oh my. What a wonderful book. I'm about halfway through Italo Calvino's Six Memos for the New millennium and these are essays. About writing. They are a tour de force of explication-- about Italo Calvino's world of the writer. The man's a genius etc. Yes, I know. But I have the same problem with these essays as with most essays about writing. The minute a writer, good, great or genius, devises the words that explain the end result, I end up admiring the words and yet have no idea what to do with them. So, sure, read the essay on lightness, think about the examples he gives. Now go do that. Right. See how easy it is? Sigh.

I suppose if you read Calvino's essays really, really really closely and then sat down with your WIP and thought about what words you need to make a reader fall into your world then you'd have made good use of the essays. Or, you could skip Calvino entirely and just sit down with your WIP and think about what words you need to make a reader fall into your world. You can send me the $12.00 I just saved you. Heck, it's a sale. Just send $6.00. I can save you money but not time. Spend the time and then you might sell a book of essays on writing for $10.00 (because, let's be realistic, chances are you're not Italo Calvino.)

What else? I have tomorrow off so it's a nice long weekend. At 9:30 am tomorrow I am responsible for my mother's chihauhua because my brother is taking my folks to Santa Barbara to have Thanksgiving with my little brother and his wife (yay!!). So, Thanksgiving here will be me, my sister, my other brother and my son. Plus the chihauhau. Smudge. He must be carried at all times. I shouldn't like such a little dog, but I do. Apparently, I carry him exceptionally well and for this he loves me, and so I love him back.

I've done a very geeky thing, but it's totally cool. I have a link to an audio clip of me reading an excerpt from Chapter 9 of A Darker Crimson. It was easy and it worked when I went to my site and clicked on the link, so hey, success! I'll be working on further geekifying the experience.

Last night I did work on chapter 1 for the new project. Haven't yet today, but I spent the morning reading poetry.

Hmm. True, I had to get up early to go to work. But I came home and did ... stuff. Really important stuff, I'm quite sure. I remember I played cards with my son. Did more . . . stuff. Reading. I did reading for school. Took a nap. Shopping. I had errands so we went into town to do that. A Darker Crimson was in the Long's drugstore I go to and the grocery store. That was exciting. Had to check the PO box to make sure there wasn't anyone who'd mailed in a contest entry. Ran into a friend and her son on our way home from errands and we ate sandwiches together. Home. Did more . . . stuff. Played dungeons and dragons with my son. More .... stuff.

Then my little brother emailed to say he got married. My phone paged me first and since he attached photos, it took a while for the email to show up in my actual email box. So, at first I only had the first 150 characters on my cell phone and I was thinking, why on earth would Patti O'Shea be emailing me about her characters getting married? (We'd been talking about that for the Crimson City blog so I have an excuse.) But no email from Patti. Then I looked at the message again and saw it was from my youngest brother! Some excitement all around with that. In his defense (he emailed??) she's Danish and they decided it would be easier to get married and not have half the family complaining they couldn't come. But they got married Tuesday and this is Saturday! But his wife (!!) is fantastic so it's really happy happy news. Yay!

I picked my contest winner. I ended up pulling everything into a database and generating a random record. I'll post the winner tomorrow.

Among the stuff I didn't do today was write a blessed word. I'm going to put my jammies on and get at least something done.

Still stressing about reviews. But I will hopefully resist tonight. I'm still among the Bookscan top 100 romances, total sales about doubled, but I did drop some, as I predicted. Will I get killed by returns? Arghh! Something else to stress about! I better call the Ingram's hotline... Just needed to get that in. Moving right along...

Just came back from seeing Harry Potter. Go see this movie. It's fabulous. I could hear people around me gasping or saying "Oh, no!" I was on the edge of my seat. If I had time for an actual life, I'd go see it again.

Still reading Piazza Tales. It's still really, really good. I have to go to work for a bit tomorrow morning. I guess I'll read. I have to be there to do this incredibly important job that includes mostly waiting around for someone else to do a lot of work, and then I move an xml file from one SQL server to another. That's it. If I wasn't in dial-up heck, I'd be able to do it from home, but dial up just won't maintain a reliable server connection over the VPN. Oh crud, that's work talk. Ick. But my excuse is it explains why I'll be going to work and reading for school. I have a bunch of Dickensen to read this weekend, the Bradtstreet poems and then that's it before the practice oral on Monday. Then I have about 10 books to read before Dec 12, for the real oral.

This is my long day. Didn't make it to the gym because it's also parent-teacher conference week. Had to go back to work today. That was hard. Have set aside Whitman for Melville's Piazza Tales. I think I read this years ago. I'm enjoying it quite a lot. Still stressing over the love/hate it for A Darker Crimson. Really really strong reactions. Oh, well. Tired. I want to start writing chapters for the next project. Still no word from my agent on the proposal for the Rake. Right now I'm just feeling really pissy about me and writing.

Back from George R. R. Martin. I'm thrilled to pieces. Yippee! Can't read the book until after school is over. I was sitting there at the bookstore with many many other readers, waiting (had to get there a bit early to get a good number and a seat with a line of sight over other short people) and the book kept whispering to me Come on, open it up. It won't hurt to start reading just a little bit. He's gifted. He's an amazing writer. You've been reading Walt - I wrote a lot of BORING poems - Whitman all freaking day. How about something that will blow you away? But I was strong because I know otherwise I would be up all night. I am proud to report that like yours truly, he is a pantser. He didn't use the word and I don't really know if it gets used outside the Romance community, but he is. His Fire and Ice series is sublime and he achieved it as a pantser.

So, in other news, I found out today that my website is mentioned in the December issue of The Writer! So I ran out and bought the issue, and it's not just a sidebar thing. There's an article about naming your characters, about which I have waxed eloquent. At first, I couldn't find the mention because I was looking at the article sidebars, but in fact, he mentions my site in the article and briefly and very well paraphrases me, and he used the phrase "fine website" during the mention. So that was pretty cool.

I met with my prof today about the new project and the discussion was very helpful. I have some interesting things to target.

In reading news, I slogged through more of Whitman today. Some of the poems are really, really good, but some are just not. Leaves of Grass is a book that needs to be read slowly, over time, with ample opportunity to reflect. Reading the things like it's a novel or something is imho bad for you. I'm halfway through and my brain turned to mush long before that. Oh. hideous poems. Words that flow together like molasses trickling into the interstices of my brain. That stuff may never come out.

I'm going to our local indy bookstore right now because George R.R. Martin is appearing there! Yay!!

Edited to add: ohmygod, you have to go read this: World's most Comprehensive Junk email

Yes, I got a lot done at my son's soccer practice. I completely recast the situation the heroine's going to be in and that makes me feel much better. I'd all but finished the synopsis when I just got the nagging voice that said "But I don't want to do it that way!!" So I listened to the voice for a bit and decided I was right. (Look, I have no illusions about where the voices are coming from.) So now my heroine is completely different and I feel happier.

Which is good.

Because...

Let's pretend for a moment that I went off the deep end again and performed such stupid web tricks as checking amazon reviews. I know, I know, you're saying, "Carolyn would never do something so stupid." Just pretend. Sigh. The thing is, 5 plus 1 = 3. People seem to either hate my writing or love it. There's rarely an in between.

So, I bopped around the big-I a bit and was looking at bookscan which still has the figures from the week-ending 11/06, and I note that of the 100 books listed in the top romances, two are Dorchester books. It looks to me like historicals are popular (so, where's this swan dive everyone's talking about?) I feel my brain slowly emerging from a fog of reading.

So, maybe this isn't really nuerotic, but I think it's about time to start on chapters for the new proposal. It's sort of pre-neurotic because when I do start writing, maybe even tonight in the car at soccer pratice, I'll start getting all-- well, neurotic about it.

Devil cat is in the hallway knocking down everying that isn't fastened or bolted down. Must go rescue precious items...

So far today I've finished Walden and On Civil Disobedience, some poems of Phillis Wheatley, 3 short stories by Nathaniel Hawthorne and am now tacking Walt Whitman Leaves of Grass. Tackling is what it feels like. I've forgiven Thoreau for Walden because of the Civil Disobedience essay. I enjoyed re-reading the Hawthorne. Wheatley was depressing because it reminded me of the horrors of human culture. (today's headlines, detainees in Baghdad tortured.) I should hope that horror is self evident. Can I stand another hour of Whitman? I am SOOOO bad with poetry and it's 400 pages. Sigh.

Maybe I'll just work on the synopsis for an hour...

Today I finished Ellison's Invisible Man. I stand enlightened. Wow. Great book. Then I read Frederick Douglass Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass. I'd already read parts of it before, but not all. As I read, every now and then I would get this flash that, holy shit, this is not made up. All these horrific things really happened. Chilling and just, saddening. I wonder what Ellison and Douglass might have talked about if they'd ever met? Now, I think I'm just depressed. Then I started Thoreau's Walden and even though I'm only about 1/4 of the way through, I keep thinking, where the hell does he get off getting all holier than thou like that? He's a free white man without a family to support. He can go live like that. If it was a young woman? Now what do you think would happen? Anyway, at the moment, he's only succeeded in irritating me.

Then I had to go pick up my son and do the soccer thing and I got heaps of writingon the synopsis done in the back of the car during practice. I'm pretty happy about that. It went really, really well. And so now I'm going to work on that a bit.

My agent hasn't read my proposal for The Rake yet. Impatient frown. But she has it.

dumb.

Will I ever learn: NEVER look at reviews? Just wait for your friends to tell you about the ones that are good. Someone was disturbed by Claudia's dark demon sex. Oh. Well, sorry about that. That's a strong scene, and I don't mean craft-wise (although I'm sure it is :P ) It's a scene that is probably politically incorrect. Oh, well. I guess I don't care about that too much. The whole damn book is un-PC. I admit it.

Could there be some gender bias here?

The guy's a demon and they have this bond thing going on both sides, and now that I think about it, although the review refers to claudia's rape, the reviewer did not see that Lath (the demon) also falls into that category. He doesn't want anything to do with a human yet he's compelled by his demon nature to do what is anathema to him. Why isn't it disturbing when a male is having sex against his will? Claudia feels much the same as Lath, her body says she must while her mind is saying - how can I want this? Why is that horrible for her but not horrible for him? Why didn't the review note the preceding scene containing issues of sexual compulsion? (Technically, I suppose, it did in a broad sense, by warning the book was dark. Yup. I do dark.) The hero is possessed by a (different) demon who, among other things, wants to have sex with the heroine. One of those other things is to make her a vampire without her consent. Which is worse? Possession sex or being made a vampire when you don't want it? Well, that's a whole 'nother can of worms because that scene used to be a whole lot stronger than it is in the published version. You can read about the possession sex controversy if you want to.

There are some rather obvious answers. Men do not suffer from the same history of sexual repression (which is not to say they haven't suffered any from their own sexual histories). Once upon a time, men got away with saying, she said no, but she meant yes. Or, that a woman needed to be forced in order to reach enjoyment. But the tides turn. 500 years ago, women were thought to be lascivious by nature and thus incited men to lustful acts that imperiled their male souls. Damn women! making men want them and think sinful thoughts and perhaps even commit sinful deeds. To have the issue of desire - mind - body raised in such a way must make some people profoundly uncomfortable. Was Claudia raped? Was Lath? Or was it something else entirely? I guess my book isn't for everyone. But, more particularly, I guess the way my mind works isn't for everyone.



Why does the mind so thoroughly trump the body? I have no immediate answer to that. But does it? Is that even a true statement?

Now remember, this whole story is totally made up. There is no demon world and there are no demons. Is it really a rape scene? I'm not so sure. It's a scene of moral ambiguity, I'll grant you that, and I think the reviewer failed to appreciate the depth of the ambiguity. Some people are going to fall on the "that's wrong (it's rape)" side and others not. Also, to digress a bit, I suspect that some (many?) of these site reviewers do their review and then go to Amazon and post their personal review which, naturally, reflects many of the same opinions. Just a stupid suspicion and, really, who cares.

On to the Good News!

I went to my local RWA chapter meeting today and the bookseller there had 4 copies of A Darker Crimson. They told me they ordered 12 (that's a lot!!) sold out in a week and ordered 8 more. Those four were the ones left. Three of those sold at the meeting. They're going to order more.

Also, This just in! Writing News

I have already gotten some major work done on my new proposal. It think it's going to be fab.

Writing stuff

Today I guest blogged on Marjorie Liu's Blog. I hope it's not too lame.

Family stuff and Writing stuff

Did stuff with my son today, will ignore all my responsibilities and write tonight. I'm getting some good work done on my other proposal. Yay!!

Web stuff with Writing business stuff

I was going through my weblogs and here's some interesting statistics: total hits for October 2005 were 44,638. The trend has been basically upward since I got my site up. This is typical of the spike I see when I have a release, but it's still nearly double my traffic from a year ago. 85% of the hits come from within my site - what that means is the people who people come tend to stay and click around. My craft section continues to be popular. The blog is increasingly popular, including the archives. I get some referrer spam, ick. Hate that. But not as bad as it used to be. Lots of traffic from search engines, google and msn are tops, with google far and away the top. So, I'm doing OK with search engine optimization (SEO) I think. My relatively good adherence to web standards helps out there I think.

In the last two months, I've seen a significant increase in bots from blog readers. Remember my prediction not so long ago that writers need to get an RSS feed set up for their blogs? My weblogs prove it. Get your RSS set up and you will have people adding you to their feeds. I have several favorite writers whose feeds I look at and I often click to the site anyway...

Shocker!!

Here's the shocker for me: IE represents a mere 51% of browsers hitting my site. Firefox is 18%. Konquerer makes a good showing. The rest is a mix of weird browsers, robots, spiders and RSS readers.

I'm on "vayCAYshun" until next Thursday. But that's an air quotes vacation because tomorrow my son has no school and no day care and Monday-Wednesday I'll be reading madly for school and writing. I'm about 1/4 of the way through Ellison, liking it a lot.

I'll be guest blogging on Marjorie Liu's blog tomorrow. No pressure. None at all. Oh well. Speaking of pressure, A Darker Crimson is #26 on the Neilsen bookscan top 100 romances. I should be happy dancing about that and all I can think is - what happens next week when it plunges out of sight?

Today in class one student was brave enough to offer up a paragraph from her story for an editing exercise I think can be quite instructive. Take a passage of a decent size, something without dialogue, and then remove all modifiers. All of them. Every adjective, adverb etc. And then take a look at what's left. Are there sentences that make no sense without the missing words? Which ones are stronger? Weaker? Now that you're down to bare structure, does the structure hold up? Did the image you were going for rely entirely on modifiers? Now, put back the ones that are necessary for a sentence to be coherent. Ask the questions again. What's flat? What's not? Why? Have you really truly said exactly what you meant? KNOW which words are working for your image and why. Put back the words that must be there for the image to be what you want. Are you using the same words as the ones you removed? The point is not that such words are bad, plainly, they're not. Try. See what happens. It's just an exercise to make you think about what you're writing, not an anti-modifer rant.

I'm tired. Done with Roth, on to Ellison and Invisible Man. Not a lick of work done today. When my son and I got home for various reasons it was better that we not be at home, so we went to the movies (Chicken Little) and then to a deli he loves that my sister took him to once. It was good. The Deli. I have papers to read for school. Need to do that now. Tomorrow is my long day, so I won't get much work done tomorrow either. Sigh.

I should be working, but I got distracted when my phone paged me. My personal cell phone pages me for certain top secret emails so as I was going to check what exciting email I got, my work cell phone rang, which about gave me a heart attack because that's only for servers paging that something is wrong, and only work people call me on that cell which should have meant that it was something REALLY horrible that would require my physical presence at work... (Sorry to bother you, but the SQL server's on fire and about to explode... like that) So, after I told the lady, that's OK (it's so nice when they apologize for dialing a wrong number) then I checked for my exciting email and instead of proof that I need to refine my secret email-paging filters (I am NOT neurotic!) hey, it was exciting! Twice!

There's a really great review of A Darker Crimson at Internet Writing Journal which says stuff like this: a sizzling thriller by Carolyn Jewel and Carolyn Jewel is not an author that is known to paranormal romance fans, but all that is about to change with the release of this gritty, passionate adventure that crackles with danger and suspense. So, that's pretty good. (This is me enjoying the moment. No. Will not go look at Amazon or BN. No No No No No ) PLUS! The site noted above has a cool article on author blogging and my blog is on their list of best author blogs, along with Laurence Lessig! Neil Gaiman and Cory Doctorow, plus some of my favorites, Patti O'Shea, I have her in bloglines along with Marjorie Liu and Liz Maverick and the Banterist.

So, anyway, as I was thinking about all that, especially after reading about how an author's blog should be interesting, I froze up. Interesting? And Funny? But I've just been logging into blogger and writing about whatever the hell is on my mind, and to be honest, most of the time that frightens me. Edited to add: Hey, are they saying there's something funny about my mind? I think that's the implication. Funny ha-ha? Or funny, stay away from her, she looks like a nuerotic writer?

The dirty, boring truth: Today I went to the gym and did not see any elves. I finished Call it sleep. Currently, I am procrastinating even though I have work to do. I should be panicking about reading for school, but I'm going to put that off a bit.

P.S. I find it highly ironic that the blogger spell check does not recognize the words blog or blogging.

Why? Because my son had homework to finish so he didn't go to Aikido, and then came an email - no soccer practice this week! So I've been home all evening, spelling hypothesis and whatnot, instead of driving all over the place and sitting in the back of the car to work or read or whatever. Probably I'll spend all day tomorrow thinking it's Monday.

I'm nearly done with Call it Sleep Enjoying it.

Getting a lot of work done tonight on the new proposal. Back to it.

First, before I get to the meat of my psycho-analysis, I have finished Absolom! Absolom! Wow. I wish I hadn't started all those years ago with The sound and the Fury, because I would probably have read more Faulkner. Wow. I'm on to Call it Sleep by Henry Roth and am about 1/3 or so of the way through. Pretty good, but I'm wondering right now if McCourt's Angela's Ashes doesn't give Roth a run for his money. Probably that's blasphemy and when I'm further along I'll have an apologia to make. But to me, there's a striking similarity in the immigrant story, despite Irish vs. Jewish, and that comparison speaks volumes for unity of experience, but then I've always believed that race/ethnicity is really not something that matters with respect to one's intrinsic worth, only with respect to one's experience.

Annyyyyway. Yesterday I ended up mostly working on the new proposal and I'm doing something a bit different that seems to be helping me. I'm working on the synopsis and chapter outline at the same time. What seems to be happening is that I write high-level in the synopsis and then jump to the outline and get some detail which helps to drive forward the story and thus the synopsis and then when I go back to the synopsis, I move things around a bit, restate and then go forward a bit and then back to the chapter outline and, so, OK. We'll see.

Then, I made the HUGE mistake of performing stupid web tricks again and found a so-so review of A Darker Crimson on Amazon and then, despite the other much longer reviews from readers who reacted positively and appreciated, so I like to think, the complexities of the story, there I was, suddenly feeling completely talentless and hopeless and why-do-I-even-bother-ish. And that got me thinking about why on earth The Spare didn't do much better than it did. It's a superior book, it's much better written than Lord Ruin. But then, Lord Ruin actually made it into stores for readers to buy and The Spare didn't and I was too stupid to know I should have been on the phone to my editor asking why every damn bookseller and reader in the world couldn't get my book for MONTHS after release. Seriously. Some booksellers told me they placed multiple orders for The Spare and it never arrived. Ever. And then I got to thinking how much better A Darker Crimson could have been if I'd had more time and things have been pretty much downhill since. Sigh.

I'm worthless tonight. I stayed up too late, too wound up, and got up too early. Reading for school. Almost done with the Faulkner. But I have the paranormal proposal to get out, so tomorrow I will read during the day (around soccer) and write at night. Sunday more of the same, only I'd like to write in the afternoon. And now, to sleep.

Argh! I'm not reading fast enough for school! I haven't finished Absolom! Absolom! (OK, Faulkner was a genius, I admit that now) I have a bazillion more books to read by the 21st.

The thing is, I really, really want to be working on a proposal for the next paranormal, which won't be shift or Dark Elf, it will be this other thing that Chris mentioned and that would be fabulous to do.

OK, I have vacation days to take, apparently I need to take more than the childcare issue days I have scheduled. Foo. I could take more days and read like a maniac on some and write on at least one of them, right?

Sigh. It's late. 5am is too early. But at least the washing machine didn't malfunction again. Too many stories in my head, too much reading, too much everything else. [day job rant deleted.

P.S. I got my first official fan email for A Darker Crimson today. It's 2nd if you count Patti O'Shea's blog.

Ok, the proposal for The Rake is in the mail. Yippee!

Ok, the cover letter and proposal for The Rake are sealed into an addressed envelope. I'll wander out in a bit and get it mailed. Now what?

In the meantime, today I guest blogged about A Darker Crimson on Patti O'Shea's blog. I wrote mostly about demons.