Water bill which I found out about via zeFrank. If you visit ze, spend some time watching the videos. Oh my gosh! I almost died laughing. The links on the first site are to jpgs so you might have to resize them. Worth the trouble.

Then there's this one on How to choose an archnemesis from Cosmic Variance, one of my favorite blogs.

Now I'm back to writing.

Labels: humor

I'm at the library at Sonoma State right now. I'm meeting with my prof in 17 minutes. I was just looking at the theses/creative projects other students have done. I have a handle on that and know what I want to do. But now I wonder if I have a problem. The MA project counts as published. I think I have to clear this with my Warner/Grand Central Publishing editor. Uh-oh. I hope it's not a problem. Later I have some hellaciously funny links to post. When I get home, I promise. And last night I printed off my outline on index cards and they fit neatly into my purse. Useful I hope. Met my minimum and notebooked at the gym, made good progress for what I intend to write tonight.
OK, I'm off.

Labels: Graduate School, Magellan's Witch, panic

When I put my mind to it, I am a good cook. Honest. I can follow a recipe and seem to have good instincts for deviations. Sometimes I read a few recipes and then cook something I just make up. And the result is usually really good. But I must now admit defeat at the hands of dumplings. I have made them twice, different recipes both times and they were both times a complete and utter failure. Worse, tonight, I misread the instructions and put the dumplings in at the wrong time and had to take them all out, throw the big squashy mess in the compost and start over. Sigh. And Rats. So, people, I need dumpling tips. Not recipes (although maybe that would help) but the tips that no one puts in recipes. Arcana, people. Dumpling lore. I need dumpling lore.

In writing news, yesterday I put my outline in order since I've massively changed things since the last time. I had to drop it off at my prof's this afternoon because tomorrow we meet. I bought some 4x6 index cards and tonight I'm going to print the outline off 1 chapter per card so I can do some layout and mix and match. But mostly I need to get words written. Time is short now and I have to write the darn precis that's supposed to go with the final project. Sigh.

Labels: dumplings, Magellan's Witch

Uh huh. But I slightly exceeded my minimum words for the day and got my new chapter to a spot where the next one isn't totally out of the blue. I'm at 52K and typically when I hit 60K or so the story doesn't get any bigger. That's the tipping point where I have enough plot. There rest is fixing crap, adding needed detail and depth and then writing the ending. Which I always do very very last. It's the only chapter, usually, that doesn't get multiple versions.

Next week my son class is at a camp thing where they do restoration work on a creek and hike and stuff. All week. Monday though Friday. Let me repeat that just so I can feel the tingle again. He's at camp Monday through Friday. He's so excited, but he's never been away from home that long and I know he isn't going to miss me at all. I'll miss him, but I'm going to be writing like a fiend from the time I get home from work to whenever. I have a soccer meeting Monday evening (rats!) but other than that, I have some extra hours for writing coming up. I meet with my prof this week. Last session's brain storming was really helpful.

Labels: Magellan's Witch, story tipping points

Once again, I'm up too late. And I'm making it worse by blogging about it. Rats.

Here's the quick info: Lovers of JR Ward's Black Dagger Brotherhood series Alert! JR Ward will be a guest blogger at By the Blog on Monday March 26, 2007 so be sure to check it out. I know I will. Chances to win stuff!

Yesterday I got a lot done on Magellan's Witch. Awesome. Today I was all set to do the same. Then my brother dropped off my adorable niece. I do mean that. I love her to death. She's so girly! But that means I do primary babysitting duties. She had a report on rocks to work on, and low and behold, my son mentions his report on France is due Tuesday. News to me even though I've been asking him every day for the last week. So I ended up homework sitting a 6yo and 11yo. They had remarkably similar strategies involved mainly avoidance behavior and the inability to remember how to spell anything. So after my nerves were about to snap I took them out and got them totally and massively sugared up and texted my brother a picture of her holding a very very large bar of white chocolate taken while were were sitting in the Smoothie shop, moi having just purchased them a blended It's It. (main ingredient: sugar). Then we went home, they homeworked until the sugar crash and then gosh, my other brother came to pick her up just as she was complaining she didn't feel good.

Evil laugh.

I did exceed my minimum, somehow.

Also, as I was waking up this morning, the little voice said to me Hey! You should put Santiago (an atagonist) in that troublesome scene and have him totally confront the heroine with badness and danger. Which I did. Plus some. Thank you little voice!

Labels: Black Dagger Brotherhood, Magellan's Witch

I've been writing like a maniac lately because although, as I may have mentioned, Magellan's Witch is due to Warner in August, it's also my final project for grad school, which I found out is due May 4, not end of May. Urk. So, yeah, panic is setting in.

Last night I went to see Shooter with Marc Walberg.** Excellent. Really, really good. Witty dialogue and heaps of tension. Lots of stuff exploding, but high tension and impressive seat-of-the-pantsing by a trained professional. Pity the fools who underestimate a man with an awesome naked torso.

I'm reading a book called Futureproof by N. Frank Daniels. This is a self-published book, but PODdy mouth (now retired from her blogging alas) recommended this as one of the two outstanding POD books she read. So I bought it. And wow. I only started it last night, but it's really really good. He has acknowledgments to several pretty big deal authors, so I'm wondering now if it's possible that none of those writers passed the MS along to their agents, and if they did, whether all those agents could have passed on it. I find that strange. I'm not very far along, but hmmm. This seems odd to me.

OK, off to work. I have to make up my word count from going to the movies last night (during which, I might add, I had a brilliant idea for the book.) On that subject, it's been interesting that several of my left turn or good complexifications for Magellan's Witch have come to me while I was at the movies. I mean there I was, admiring Mark Walberg's torso and suddenly this little voice in the back of my head says Hey, Carolyn, someone should be betraying your non-humans, and giving the bad guys those thingees you don't quite have a name for yet. And I said to myself, well, yeah! Thanks for the tip! And then I went back to admiring Mark Walberg's naked torso. Why on earth would any idiot reviewer say this is a guy flick?*** Sheesh.

** Clarification: Mark Walberg did not attend the movie with me, although he would have been more than welcome to come along. I went with my son.

*** Because he was a guy and doesn't get that women like men with awesome torsos? I mean come on, the movie is based on a book, and I get more women than men read that book.

Labels: Magellan's Witch, movies, writing

I'm blogging early because my evenings have been getting away from me. By the time I'm done writing, it's too late and I'm too tired to blog. I'm reasonably happy with my progress on Magellan's Witch. I have about 47,400 words. Mostly, I've been bringing things in line with all my left turns. So. Good, basically.

My agent has sent Scandal out, so I should have some news soon, as there is a time limit involved for various reasons. No fooling! I know people have been anxious to see another historical from me and now at least something is out there. Yay!

Got to get to work.

Labels: Magellan's Witch, Scandal

Today I worked on the two chapters of Magellan's Witch that I labored over yesterday. It was not as painful today, thank goodness. I cleaned them up even more and, joy of joys, when I came to a part yesterday which I knew no longer worked where it was (but decided to leave for the moment since I was tired and it was late) I knew where it belonged. And so it did. Sooner in the chapter and replacing a sort of lame-o bit that was much shorter and much less effective.

Then I went to see Zodiac. Well, odd, you know. It was a good movie for sure, but the Zodiac Killer was operating right in my backyard. Seriously. Petaluma is 45 miles north of San Francisco. I work in Sonoma, have driven many times through Vallejo and have been to Napa lots of times. And, when the killings were taking place, my school had us practice ducking on the bus. The primary suspect moved to Santa Rosa, back then 20 minutes north on the freeway (nowadays an hour or more). I used to live in San Francisco. And they seem to have shot at least parts of the movie on location. I certainly recognized many of the shots in San Francisco, as well as some of the more rural areas. So, I kept being bounced out of the movie as I said to myself, hey! that's the Transbay Terminal! Or what have you. Something that wasn't in the movie is that after the primary suspect moved to Santa Rosa, several young women attending the local junior college were murdered. Unsolved to this day. Creepy. Really creepy.

In happier news, I am still reading Philip Pullman's series to my son. We're on number 3, The Amber Spyglass and I continue to be awed. Wow. In tonight's reading a particular thing happened and my son and I both went "What!!??!!" and he said, "But now how is Will going to help Lord Asriel?" And you know, I have no idea. Things seem pretty hopeless right now.

As a writer, all I can do is say, man, oh man. That's what it's about.

In other news, my agent has not told me I need to further revise the synopsis for Scandal, so I think that, indeed, it goes out to editors tomorrow. All I can say is that my chapters rock since I took a scalpel to the parts everyone in my Fiction Writing seminar really liked. Kind of interesting, no? I remember sitting there listening to the input on the chapters I submitted to the class and feeling more and more anxious as people agreed this section of chapter 2 was their favorite. I was anxious because I secretly felt myself that it was the most problematic, the least focused and the most off point. And when Sandy Schwab read the chapters and said things didn't get really interesting until chapter three, I knew I had some serious work yet to do. I rewrote Chapter 1 to give it the intensity of chapter 3 and deleted the entire scene my Grad School class liked best. And that fixed everything.

I guess now I have to explain my post title. Which is that in Magellan's Witch, the chapter I was working on was the previously blogged about Pharmacy scene. I ended up naming my non-human Pharmacist Larry (of course that's not his real name!) and whenever I read that today (which was several times) I smirked because it's just so ridiculous. Larry the Pharmacist non-human soon to be stud. And then when he is a stud, well, geez. Larry? So I guess I'll have to change that, but right now it's amusing me and that counts for something as we head into Monday.

Labels: Magellan's Witch, Scandal, School, writing, Zodiac Killer

44,230 words for Magellan's Witch. I conformed the sneak into the house scene to fall in line with other changes, which took me most of the day and, sigh barely to my secret minimum, which must now be my actual minimum. But after dinner I finished that and moved on to working on the exciting Pharmacy fight scene which actually turned out to be fairly close to how I set it out in yesterday's post. So I am pleased with my progress today. Tomorrow we'll see how I do. Off to bed.

Labels: Magllan's Witch, Word count

As previously mentioned, here, here and here, I've been working on the synopsis for Scandal. I sent the chapters and synopsis off to my wonderful agent who had me revise the synopsis. I did that. She sent it back again with some astoundingly spectacular edits and two questions for me to address. I have done that, and sent it back. Monday, unless -- no, it's too horrible to contemplate-- Monday Scandal goes to editors.

People, her edits were amazing. I think she read the thing and just shook her head and said, ok lookit, the girl can write a novel but she's effen hopeless with the synop. She didn't make huge changes at all, I fixed the really bad bits, but she tweaked little stuff that totally made it awesome. Short writing is way different from long writing. But, gosh, I wish I weren't so darn synopsis impaired.

What else? I'm tired. I had a fabu idea for a scene in Magellan's Witch at the gym this morning. I had this scene that was only doing one thing and even worse, it was doing only one thing that did little, if anything, to complicate the story. A classic warning sign that the scene is boring and thin. Uh oh. Without help, that's a scene that will need to be deleted or sent to the prose-surgeon later. And then your writer's insurance premiums go way up. So I applied a little preventative medicine and as I pedaled away, asked myself what else this scene could do for me that would introduce both conflict and complication.

My hero is in an all night pharmacy trying to get a refill of a prescription for my heroine who is outside in the car very very ill. Goal of the scene: get the refill.

Let's analyze. The hero and heroine are apart. He's in a pharmacy getting a prescription filled. She's in the car. He gets the refill, then he leaves, gets in the car and drives away. Ohmygawd. Yes. really. That's how I wrote it. And I had like three or maybe five pages about that. Oddly enough, putting a wall of condoms in the store did nothing to sex up the scene. Rats.

But I knew this was not right. Here's the notebooked changes:

The guy filling the prescription isn't human. Ooohhh. And he works for the bad guys. Ohh. He knows my hero isn't supposed to have the refill. And my non-human pharmacist is compelled to tell his bad-guy boss what's going down.

Later in the day, as I was driving home from work the second time (don't ask) I suddenly realized that my pharmacist recognizes my hero for what he is and gives him a traditional greeting of non-human respect. And proceeds to betray him, as indeed, he is compelled to do.

Then my heroine comes in the pharmacy, just as the two guys are going to do the non-human equivalent of throwing down. She's ill. She's not sure what's happening to her (something major, I promise) and she then breaks the pharmacist of his enslavement to the bad guy. Totally unexpected by all, let me assure you.

I think there's going to be some cops or something in there. Maybe. Then the ex-pharmacist drives the hero and heroine away, while the heroine reveals something to the hero that totally changes everything.

So, yeah, a non-human guy rescued from being a pharmacist for the bad guys. Now that's exciting stuff.

Tomorrow when I actually write this, who knows what the H will happen. But it'll be way more exicting than standing around in a Pharmacy.

Labels: Magellan's Witch, Scandal, Synopsis, writing craft, writing scenes

Yesterday I finished revisions to the synopsis for Scandal and emailed that plus the tweaked chapters to my agent. With luck, the synopsis is OK and Scandal will go out shortly. Tonight, I worked on bringing two chapters of Magellan's Witch into alignment with recent developments. Hit my word count and now I have to totally get cracking. Time is flying by too fast. Yikes. Plus now it's late and tomorrow I'll be exhausted.

Labels: Magllan's Witch, Scandal

40,409 for Magellan's Witch. It's a psychological barrier for me. At about 40K words I start thinking, hey, that's almost halfway done! I haven't deleted those two chapters because, as it happens, I may need them. So I'm going to let them hang out for a while. The story took a sharp turn to the left the other day when I turned a tattoo into a burn mark that then turned into a living thing. Which was awesome, I have to say. And then while I was watching 300 on Sunday, I had this other left turn and I swear, I almost got out the notebook and started writing, but it was a simple enough notion that I wasn't in danger of forgetting it.

My contract for MW came today, which means I had to read it before signing. Not much fun, but pretty straightforward to the extent these things are ever straightforward. It's scary all the stuff they put in about disasters just waiting to befall a hapless writer. Not turning your book in on time, turning in a crappy book, not being able to fix said crappy book, turning in your book but not getting the edits done in time, stealing the whole book from your cousin Ed (I DO NOT have a cousin Ed!), them not publishing your book after all, floods, fire, subrogation, audio rights, indemnity and the laws of the State of New York... It's enough to give a writer a flaming case of hives. Which I had for a while, let me tell you.

But then I got some work done on Magellan's Witch and my two left turns are kind of cool. So I'm mostly okay. But up too late.

Darn time change.

Labels: Contracts, Magellan's Witch

It's winter here in California, but today, it's summer. It's now 72, and gorgeous out. A spectacular day when it should be overcast and foggy.

Just came back from seeing 300. Oh my gosh. Can it be that at long last a woman can go to the movies and expect to see naked and nearly naked men with awesome bodies? Apparently so. I don't know if Spartan men went around so scantily clad, but I am all for historical inaccuracy. Why, I hardly blinked when a Spartan hottie said "God Speed" except to briefly look around for Kenneth Brannaugh, and I just shrugged when someone else said the Persians, or someone, were going to hell. I have blogged before about the awesome hottness of Rodrigo Santoro. He's a bit scary as Xerxes but I'm not sure I've ever seen a King so punked up and basically naked before.

In fact about the only thing I didn't enjoy in the movie were the painfully, horribly thin women. Oh my gosh. Even their knuckles stood out. I can't imagine what they look like in person if they looked that skeletal on screen. Who cares if they're scantily clad? They were skin and bones. This is just sick. Seriously sick and dangerous. It's time to speak out about this. Consider yourself motivated to start talking about this to everyone in every forum. This bears repeating: it's sick and dangerous to present skeletal women as sexually desirable.

Off to take the kid to soccer tryouts. I'll get some good work done at Starbucks while he's there.

Lastly, I bought an 1882 book History of Fashion that still had very high quality color plates in it. Very nice. I'll try to add some pics later. And I was privileged enough to hold in my hand a 1640 (I think) geography book that contained fold out maps. It was $5,000 and belongs in a museum, imho. If I had that kind of money, it would be mine. Wow.

Labels: books, movies, writing

Long day today. I went to my local RWA chapter meeting which is always enjoyable. After that I went to a book signing at a nearby Borders with several other authors. They didn't have Shards of Crimson, which was a bummer and kind of worrisome, but A Darker Crimson was there. I sold some books, so that was good. Then we started compiling stacks of everyone's bookmarks and giving them to people in the store. That brought people to the table, and even generated some sales. And, several of us ended up giving out all our bookmarks, so accosting total strangers is actually a good strategy it seems.

I haven't gotten any writing done today, but I did manage to reorder my chapters last night after the brainstorming re-org with my prof. I'm trying to decide if I should print out another paper version or do a read through. I'm leaning toward a read through.

And, I'm enjoying MySpace in really unexpected ways. I've been able contact some neat people. I'm an art lover and I found an artist, Rachel Tribble whose art I really, really like. I figured there's no way I could afford anything by her, but when I checked her website, au contraire. I love Cattails and when my tax refund comes in, I may well indulge.

OK. Off to work.

Labels: art, marketing, writing

Well, gee! Blogger ate my post. Now I'm really tired. I'll have to make it fast.

I'm tired. I worked a lot on Magellan's Witch today. I fixed some plotting issues. I have a book signing Saturday and haven't done anything to advertise it. I'm now even tireder.

Labels: Magellan's Witch, plotting

Lover Revealed has been consumed. Now, here's the odd thing. Up until yesterday, I just knew I wanted to marry Zsadist. But no, in fact, it's Vishous. Go figure. I had no idea I was so fickle.

In writing news . . . Uhm. uh-oh. I've been reading. Sorry. No writing news. And tonight I have to go to bed early to make up for my sins. Fortunately, I think Vishous will be okay with that.

Since I'm anthropomorphizing here, I'll mention that I got an email the other day asking who fathered Claudia's baby (from A Darker Crimson) Tiber or Lath? Good question. But, they may not know for sure until their child is much older. And besides, Tiber doesn't care. He loves the baby. And Claudia. No matter what. The way I love Vishous.

!

Labels: books, reading

I'm tired. I'm going to bed soon. I can't even remember why I was up so late last night. Oh, yeah, I was notebooking Megallan's Witch, closing in on what I think is the final Big Tweak before the story really takes off. But here's the news that matters to me!

The following items have been shipped to you by Amazon.com:

---------------------------------------------------------------------
Qty Item Price Shipped Subtotal
---------------------------------------------------------------------
Amazon.com items (Sold by Amazon.com, LLC):
1 Lover Revealed: A Novel of... $7.99 1 $7.99

Shipped via UPS Next Day Saver (estimated arrival date: 06-March-2007).

This, in case you live under a rock, is Lover Revealed by JR Ward. And March 6 is tomorrow.

Sorry, JR, I don't care about your lay down date.

In other news, what a day. It went like this: Get up 4:30am blah blah workout, day job, get mangled automated voice message that implies my son has 2 overdue library books (me: WTF?) pick up my son, mention overdue books. He gets a look on his face and asks if it's okay for him to run back to his classroom to get the overdue books I knew nothing about (there was a field trip) get him home to change for Aikido, drive him to Aikido, drive to library to return books, go grocery shopping, then drive home, unload groceries quickly because I am 5 mins late to pick up son, go to bookstore to get a book on Japan because the library is closed now and he has a report. Buy book on France. Buy $50 of other books, one of which is about Japan, But the are really great books..... Get awesome take and bake Margarita with extra garlic pizza for dinner, come home cook pizza. Feed son. Check email, blog.

Now I go read to my son and fall into bed.

Labels: Magellan's Witch, stuff

Weekends just never last long enough. Sigh. But, I did get a lot done on Magellan's Witch. I'm still entering in the paper edits, but it's going well. I'm happy enough. I expect I'll need to do another read through shortly after I'm done.

I have a partial solution for the time suck of finding and friending My Space readers who are fans of my books or of the kind of books I write. I offered my son $5/hr with a bonus if certain conditions are met, to help me. I set him up with the laptop, explained my criteria (as noted above) then lectured him about what to do when he hit inappropriate content. Fortunately, he still thinks that stuff is gross. There's a lot of booty on My Space. When, very shortly, that stuff is not gross for him, maybe he'll pay me... Yah.

Anyway, he sat on my bed with my laptop while I sat at my computer and continued with the edits. He lasted about an hour and turned out to be remarkably good about picking good people to friend. I could glance over and see the laptop screen and help him out if there were issues. And, people are starting to find me, which is nice. I've had some nice email exchanged with friends from My Space. Best of all, today, someone left a comment about how much she LOVED A Darker Crimson, and that I totally made her day by friending her. Well, hey, she totally made my day!

My Space has opened my eyes about a few things, too. I realized after a bit that I was friending too many people just like me, meaning age and gender mostly. Hmm. That got me thinking. So I deliberately starting looking at a much broader spectrum of profiles, and you know what? Not only did I find some awesome sites, ( Troy is a great photographer. He's unbelievably talented. I felt so inadequate looking at his profile.) but I discovered that a not insignificant number of men read books that are, in fact, romance. A number of young men are fans of Crimson City. I've come across several men whose profiles say they like historical romance. And yes, there are some weirdos, but they're everywhere.

Today was a gorgeous day. Oh my gosh. Just spectacular. I went out and got probably the next to last batch of daffodils and the first of the white and pale yellow daffodils (or whatever they are). The tulips are only just coming up. Mostly just leaves, but I saw one small tulip flower. Gosh, I love tulips!

It's late. Monday morning comes early.

Labels: Magellan's Witch, My Space

You-all saw the gory picture from yesterday, right? I forgot to mention that I needed to resort to the backup red pen because the first one ran out of ink. And, last night, I was thinking, well, ok, Carolyn, you deleted some crap chapters and other stinky stuff, and yet 14 chapters held together pretty well, all things considered. But I went to bed with no freaking idea where I was going to go with the story. All I knew was that poison wasn't enough. A big fat drats.

As Chris Keeslar (Dorchester editor extraordinaire) once said to me: Where's the MacGuffin? I'm not a big enough Hitchcock fan that I didn't need to google what the f he was talking about. Oh. But now I know (it's the thing everybody's after, like the Maltese Falcon, that keeps the action going, or like the Subtle Knife.) Last night I went to bed knowing that poison had turned out not to be the MacGuffin and that therefore, Magellan's Witch was MacGuffin-less. My characters were looking out the pages at me saying, Now what do we do? This is not a happy place for a book to be.

This morning at the gym, I found my MacGuffin. I was getting all sweaty (no tattoo boy, no jaguar man, early am at the gym is all too often a visual disappointment) and with nowhere else to look but at my notebook, I figured it out. I have it and it quickly snowballed into the theme of the damn book. I feel much better.

I've now started tackling my red-penned pages and giving the story this new layer of complexity and right now I am a darn happy camper.

Labels: creative process, Magellan's Witch, writing

Today was the 2nd day of soccer tryouts. I had my purse, unlike last time, so off I went to Starbucks to continue going through the paper copy of Magellan's Witch. Here's a picture of one of the pages. The arrow means there's more on the back of the page. But, see? This is why printing my MS on 3-hole punch paper is so handy... I took the pic with my phone, so it's not the greatest quality, and yet you can see well enough what I was doing.



Am I blue about all that red ink? No way. That means good progress made. I'm thrilled I got all the way to chapter 14 before things fell apart enough that I had to stop. I'm a little freaked that I deleted two chapters, but hey, they weren't doing much for me anyway. I need a rock solid opening before it's worth my time to mess with later chapters. The only issue is, um, now what?

Tomorrow. Me. Notebook. Gym.

Labels: editing., Magellan's Witch