Any ideas? I was checking my spam folder for mistakenly trapped emails (there were none) and this spammy subject caught my eye.

10 Things to Say to a Naked Woman

I was afraid to open it -- no need to go blind or anything, but it got me to wondering. What 10 things should you say to a naked woman? No, I don't think your butt looks big I mean really, what else besides the blindingly obvious, of course.


Although, actually, I think I care more about 10 things to say to a naked man. 1) Wow, that's big! 2) Bring that six pack over here

What else?

All right. That's it for now. I have to go work.

Labels: procrastination

Today for Xia's story I fixed almost all the Kynan stuff AND I hit 58,747 words. So, even though it's likely tomorrow I'll delete a bunch since I stopped right before the place where's he's sitting with the folks in Oslo, I'm happy to say that he's developing a character! It was interesting to look only at the chapters that are in his POV.

Today was another beautiful day. 75. Blue skies. Really, really lovely.

Aside: don't you suppose that if you'd decided to write a novel set in, say, Elizabethan England, that it would go without saying that you actually like the period enough to be on more than a know-the-name only basis with the major figures of the time? I mean, wouldn't you expect such a person to know more than there was this Shakespeare guy wrote some plays and some of them were funny? Wouldn't you think such a person would, in fact, be such a dork for the period that they might have at least thought about reading some Shakespeare? Just wondering.

Labels: historical figures, Kynan Aijan, weather, Xia

Today was another gorgeous day. It was almost cruel having to go outside at lunchtime because going back inside was torture. If this keeps up, I'll be putting away the sweaters much too soon.

Worked on Xia tonight. I think I'm just about at the last chapter before the end. But I have some earlier chapters to rewrite. I had a pretty cool idea about what to do with a major secondary character. Originally, I sent him off to Olso so that he would be far away and unable to interfere, which at that particular point in time he was doing. Take that you interfering character you! I'm sending you to Oslo! Then in the following chapters, while he was in flight apparently, I inserted another character because of some stuff I needed to happen. I used Iskander, the same poor guy I wrote out of earlier chapters (chances are you-all see where this is going... well, I didn't. Not until recently) and then suddenly realized a day or two ago that I needed to write him out again and substitute Kynan again. Only Kynan, for crying out loud, was in Oslo which is, as you may know, pretty far from San Francisco, Berkeley and Tiburon, where the story is set.

And yes, for a while I was trying to figure out how on earth Kynan would get from Oslo to Tiburon in time. Some times I am a complete idiot. It's a story. I make it up. If I mistakenly send someone to Oslo, even if it is First Class, I am at complete liberty to unsend him. No flue powder necessary.

At last, that brilliant idea occurred to me and voila. Kynan was never in Oslo. Instead he's somewhere else not so far away, misbehaving as it turns out. But now I have a chapter where he's sitting in Oslo, with some folks who are there, and I confess I was momentarily panicking because-- well, I won't bore you with the details. Suffice it to say I will be completely rewriting this chapter with heavy use of the Un-do Previous Plot button. The icon, in case you're interested, looks like the back of my head. I think that's where all my brains leak out.

I'm told my ARCs are ready for My Wicked Enemy which means people are going to be reading it. Holy crap!

Labels: ARCs, My Wicked Enemy, plotting or the lack thereof, Xia

OK, so I won't bore you with the usual litany about Mondays. Insert our own if you want to.

It was a beautiful day, though. Perfect weather, which was nice after that recent storms. Daffodils! And by the way, I had out go outside in the rain this weekend to get pictures where the light didn't wash out the yellow. I'm still having trouble getting them just right, but, still. They're daffodils!





I'm up to 54.3K on Xia's story. I want to be at 60K by the end of the month. And I want to have a complete draft by end of March so I have April to get it read and massively fixed.

Off to bed.

Labels: flowers, writing freaking writing, Xia

Today I noodled about all day, pretty much, working on chapter 23 of Xia's story. So I was worried that I'd missed my minimum, despite working A LOT on the chapter. But I didn't. In fact, I was only a couple hundred words away from doubling my minimum plus exceeding 50,000 words. So I took a look at chapter 1 and noodled around there long enough to more than double my minimum PLUS discover the chapter rocks. I rewrote the chapter for the new Alexandrine and I have say, it works massively.

So, I'm basking in the glow, insecure in the knowledge that I will be ripping things to shreds shortly and will need to look back at this moment so as not to totally despair.

Also, note to Patti O'Shea: Do NOT stop blogging. I love your blog. I need to hear about your day and your characters talking to you.

Off to bed.

Labels: Word count, words on the page, writing freaking writing, Xia

It's been raining off and on today with the result that my lap has been in high demand. My cat Jasper is small and he fits very nicely on my lap. Jake, however, is big and fluffy and he does not fit so nicely. Plus, he's a pig (not a real one of course, he is a cat.) and when he's curled up behind me, he's always trying to push me off the chair. And then there's the Fudgester who, on nights like this, wants me to hold him. I can only type one-handed for so long. And yet, I managed to double my minimum today.

Xia has been successfully kidnapped and rescued along with another character. I have 23 chapters and and 48,656 thousand words. I think I might actually be at critical mass, except I haven't deleted very many chapters, which is worrying me. I have a lot of cleaning up to do. I have to move one of my hot scenes or maybe write one, to a different spot and then conform my heroine to the character she's becoming. Which means substantially changing another hot scent because, as it turns out, she's more of an adventuress than I originally thought. There's certain things that don't bother her! Anyway, I think the basic story is in place now. The other 10 or so chapters will magically appear (I wish!) when I split off chapters that get too long as I rewrite the heck out of this young puppy. The last scene I save for, well, last. I've learned that for me, it's pointless to write it until after I know everything else. Which comes dead last.

Labels: on laps, writing freaking writing, Xia

We've had rainy weather this week so I didn't think we'd be able to see the eclipse of the moon tonight but things cleared up, like magic! It was spectacular. Not reddish like the last two but still quite lovely. It was sad, though, to see so many city lights where there never used to be any. Rats. And the neighbors, who don't really know how to live in the country, keep on too many lights, and too many bright ones at that. You don't need 100 watt flood lights outside. It's disruptive to wildlife for one thing. It's wasteful and just plain light pollution.


At least on the other sides of the house if we get all our interior and exterior lights off it's possible to see how incredibly starry the night sky is. Amazing.

I have my minimum done for Xia and I'm heading off to bed early. I need to finish my RITA reading.

I'm pleased to report that Xia has at last been kidnapped and Alexandrine is on her way to rescue him. Yay!

Update: Went outside so the Fudgester could do his business, and I could hear the frogs and toads plus the owls. It was lovely. Not just a frog or two, but hundreds, quite possibly thousands, which is good because the last two years there were hardly any. And that's just wrong. I love listening to them. Not to mention the owls.

Labels: lunar eclipse, writing, Xia

I've got a bad case of Writer's Itch. Otherwise known as Inspiration. I think. Sometimes Inspiration feels more like a dump truck full of work.

Right. So dinner's all done. Speed Brick is asleep behind me on the chair (thus I am forced to sit on the edge of the seat with my back very very straight -- do not fail to compliment my wonderful posture should you see me!) I get back to my room at last and fire up Parallels and the incomparable Word Perfect. I make a new chapter and type this: Please, this is worse than first draft, OK? When this is done, chances are NONE of these words will remain.

Alexandrine woke up with her face flat on the mattress. Not even a pillow. The room was dark, and beside her the place where Xia's body should have been was still warm. Something was wrong. What exactly that was, she didn't know, but the air felt wrong. The center of her bones jangled with a sense of being off-kilter.
Without moving, she opened her eyes. It turned out she was facing the side of the room with the door, which meant she could make out Xia standing in front of the closed door with his head cocked.

All ready for the kidnapper! I should be so lucky. Instead this stupid little voice says Hey, what if Alexandrine knows all along that she's a witch and she's got some information about how things used to be in the long ago past and is willing to try the old ways with Xia?

Carolyn stares into space while she lets this major temblor of an idea ripple through the book as it exists in her head...

I'm leaving out all kinds of stuff about the story here. Suffice it to say that this would be a total rewrite of just about everything so far. But it would be good I think. It solves some nagging little things that have been bugging me about Alexandrine and her fate yet leaves me with many questions and issues to fill in later. Not impossible. I'm pretty sure I'm going to do it because it makes Alexandrine WAY more interesting...

I know exactly what Jack London meant when he said that you have to go after Inspiration with a club. Whack. Inspiration is a lot of work and sometimes I just want to club it.

And yet, I am glad for the visit.

Labels: inspiration, writing process, Xia

I know it's Tuesday but it's really Monday in disguise. I had a 4 day weekend that wasn't long enough. I guess they never are. But still. The weekends fly by and the weekdays crawl. Sigh. I mailed off the page proofs for My Wicked Enemy today. I also mailed my taxes to my CPA. That's two big things crossed off the To-Do list. The next one is to finish Xia. Ha. Ha. Ha. I crack myself up. Really. The Fudgester, aka, Speed Brick, aka my dog Fudge is trying to get my attention. So I'm off to cook dinner and throw the stuffed toy for the doggie. Oh, and this morning at the gym (I made it! Yay!!) I was notebooking and not getting anywhere near the issue I wanted to have resolved for tonight... How does Xia get kidnapped without being de-alphabetized? and I was beginning to think I'd have to have some kind of writerly hissy fit with myself. In the last 15 minutes I started discussing that with myself and came up with a couple of ideas. After dinner, we'll see what I write. Something completely different no doubt.

Labels: Mondays, writing, Xia

First I'm setting the stage, as it were. I'm a Web 2.0 Beta Project slut. I admit it. I've beta'd a lot of products the vast majority of which Did Not Work For Carolyn (DNWFC); that is, I got nothing useful or fun from them. The thing is, I'm busy. A beta has to be either immediately (and I do mean immediately) usable or so obviously a value-add for me, including fun by the way, that it's worth spending time when I should be writing. So, Twitter -- so easy and fun that I twitter still. Pownce -- seemed too complicated given my deadlines. Flickr -- fun easy and now with the use of the browser Flock a dream for the MySpace time suck. Like that.

I was reading about a product in beta called Smashwords. Two links: Smashwords Press Release and More about Smashwords. For the lazy, they want to make it easy for authors to publish and sell multiple formats of their work. Hmm. On the face of it, quite interesting. Really.

The Beta sign up is stupid, however. You have to answer a bunch of questions including selecting from a list that 1) was obviously written by an insider who understands COMPANY lingo, but not the lingo of possible users and 2) requires that stupid selection BEFORE you indicate you're an author. And NONE of the selections seems to apply to their target group -- authors. So I'm not going to bother with the beta.

I did skim through the two links above and I'm bothered by a few things, even though I think the idea is kind of neat and possibly convenient for authors.

The press release is a monument to unintentional humor, misstatement, omission and common misconceptions about the publishing business.

Authors receive 85% the net sales proceeds from their works, and retain full control over sampling, pricing and marketing.

Net not gross. Can anyone say Hollywood style accounting? That's been all over Publisher's Lunch for crying out loud. Full control -- but not over rights? Who gets them? What happens to them if you use this company? If you want to attract authors, then address the issues that matter to them.

The site offers authors free viral marketing tools to build readership, such as precent-based sampling; dedicated pages for author profiles and book profiles; support for embedded YouTube book trailers, author interviews and video blogs; widgets for off-site marketing; reader reviews; and reader "favoriting."

Overlooking the spelling error, one omission here is the fact that readers have NO LOYALTY to a publisher. Their loyalty is to the author. Suppose there are readers who love my books (there's some, I'm pretty sure!) They don't care who publishes me. They care that I'm published and they can, therefore, buy my books. I care who publishes me because that decision puts money and other career goodness in my pocket. That loyalty is why if J.K. Rowling changed publishers, her old publisher would be feeling sick and nauseous and her new publisher would be hiring some long-needed staff.

So, what's here that an author can't do on her own website, much more effectively from the point of view of the reader? Possibly the favoriting. None of this is a huge selling point for me, an actual author. Gosh knows I don't need yet another place where I have to maintain a presence. The Smashwords folks are confusing reader-centric benefits (favoriting) and writer-centric benefits (money and audience).

Also Viral Marketing? The whole problem with viral-anything is that you can't make it happen. To suggest that this is a method for going viral is well, in my opinion, dishonest. That Jedi-Knight guy on YouTube doesn't get a cent for the video in which he appears. YouTube sure gets lots from it though.

Amazon and Google Books are two huge competitors for most of this stuff. Well, competitors for that group of Authors Who Can Write.

"We plan to do for ebook authors what YouTube did for amateur video producers," said Mark Coker, founder and CEO of Smashwords, based in Los Gatos, Calif. "We make digital publishing simple and profitable for authors and publishers."

Whoa. Talk about some slight-of-hand! What did YouTube do for amateur video? Gave them a forum. It did not put money in their pockets. There's no profit for YouTube content producers. None. Besides, YouTube created a fun and easy forum where none existed before. Before YouTube, there was no fun and easy method of sharing video. But legions of writers already post stuff on their websites and in their blogs. What Smashwords would do for them is provide a forum. But it won't have them quitting their day jobs anytime soon. Heck, writers who already get paid for their words can't quit the day job. Smashwords isn't going to change that. They will be profiting from all the people who want to write but can't really. I can do most of that stuff over at Amazon and it doesn't cost me anything but time. The Smashwords forum might be quite nice. But I' compelled to point out that for writers who CAN write, digital publishing is already cheap and profitable. More about that later.

The inspiration for Smashwords grew out of founder Mark Coker's frustrations as an aspiring novelist.

Prediction: Authors who know the business cringed inside when they read that.
Fact: 98-99 percent of all the people who think they can write a novel 1) can't and/or 2) don't work hard enough at it. The Press Release goes on to describe a Roman-a-Clef project that sounds pretty interesting on its face, but the Roman-a-Clef bit has legal issues all over it. If they were rejected for the stated reason I would like to point them to Ursula LeGuin's famous rejection letter. I'm guessing their project wasn't any Left Hand of Darkness but nevertheless, two years isn't all that long when you're trying to get published (see press release for more ifo).

Coker concluded that in today's digital age, there's no reason why authors shouldn't be able to publish anything they want - and readers should determine what's worth reading, not just publishers.

Ohmygosh. Authors already can publish anything they want. Can you say Vanity Press? Here's the reason publishers SHOULD have something to say about what gets published: POD-dy Mouth.

Readers already do determine what's worth reading. It's just that no one has a sure-fire way of figuring out what that's going to be.

From the other article:

The hope is that ebooks, which failed to gain a foothold almost a decade ago, have advanced far enough both technologically and in the eyes of readers to be an acceptable alternative to traditional books

Huh? eBooks didn't fail. The closed, proprietary eBook Reader device failed. eBooks have been profitable and flourishing for quite some time. And that profit has flowed to authors. See Ellora's Cave. eBooks thrived among the population most invisible to mainstream businesses and geek-types: women readers of romance. The money's been there for a long time.

OK, this is way too long. Smashwords sounds interesting and possibly useful, but someone needs to proofread their Press Release -- there's way more than one typo -- and maybe have them cut down on the hype.

Labels: publishing

My son is doing a history report on Genghis Kahn, and while reading about the great man, he suddenly came to me and said he wanted to make a bow and arrow. OK! So we googled How to Make a Mongolian bow and what do you know? Lots of hits and videos and the like. Unfortunately, a Mongolian bow requires the use fish glue (recipies available!) and yak horn. That last one, as you can imagine, was a show stopper for us. There are no yaks around here. So, he decided an English Long Bow would be an acceptable substitute. The preferred wood for an English Long Bow is yew.

Further research revealed that the Northern Coastal California yew is considered among the best bow-making yew in the world. Another excellent choice is cypress. As it happens, we live in Northern Coastal California. So I gave the Darling Boy a hacksaw and said go cut yourself a six foot branch off the yew tree down by the fence. And if that doesn't work then get a branch off one of the cypress trees by the sheep chute. We live in long bow heaven it seems. Who knew? Off he went with his size 9 1/2 feet and the hacksaw and he came back to the house with the perfect yew branch. One of the websites said to ask the tree's permission first. He says he did, but that it was on vacation at the time. Right now he's out sanding his yew stave.

update: I thought perhaps he'd chosen a limb that was too thick, but I was just looking at it, and now that he's shaved it some, darned if the thing isn't just springy enough to imagine Robin Hood bending it.

I've been through the first round of the page proofs for My Wicked Enemy. Now I'm off to check all the corrections. I'm hoping I'm able to get some time in with Xia.

Labels: My Wicked Enemy, writing, Xia

Also, this morning I woke up at 10:30am. So maybe I was really tired. I don't feel like going back to sleep, which I did yesterday. We've had a warm February and it's faking out the trees and one rose bush:

Labels: flowers

Yesterday was my day off for attending my company's freezing cold off-site all-employees meeting (and yes, it was really, really cold!) Here's what I did: slept late, added MySpace friends, changed my MySpace profile, uploaded more photos to Flickr, went through my 2007 tax planner and added more itemized expenses, did crosswords, watched 6 episodes of Buffy with my son.

Here's what I did not do: read my page proofs for My Wicked Enemy, write, read RITA books.

Yes. I am a champion time fritterer. No one defeats me. Mwahahahahah!

Labels: My Wicked Enemy, MySpace, writing time

Not only that, but I have the day off. And Monday's a holiday. Yippee!

It's been an odd week though. I've been exhausted. I think it's because last weekend I didn't get to sleep in either day and couldn't catch up on the sleep deficit. I didn't make it to the gym a single day this week. I was just too tired to get up. I slept until 8:30 this morning. And I feel like I could go sleep some more.

My page proofs came for My Wicked Enemy. Not sure what to think. I've started reading and, well, what do other writers think of their stuff when they're reading it after having moved onto the next project. Is it a disaster? Better than you thought? What?

Anyway, besides reading the page proofs, this is mostly errands day. Getting my tax stuff together, etc and ready to send off to my CPA. No fun, but at least then it's done. Done. Done. Plus, the credit union seems to have rolled over a CD that I need for taxes. I put 50% of all my writing money into some account, usually a CD, so that I have the money for taxes. Got to track that one down.

Off to do -- stuff.

Labels: My Wicked Enemy, writing time

I saw a headline about Minnesota being the Ice Box of the Nation the other day. Freaking 40 below zero! I thought of Patti O'Shea who lives in Minnesota and I felt bad for her. Then I saw Marjorie M. Liu's pretty picture of ice covered plants and thought, wow. That's some cold. And then there's Kristin Nelson confessing it's colder in NY, where my friend Megan Frampton lives, than it is in Denver (where my non-writing friend Jennifer lives) with all that snow and well. You know what?


This whole week here in No. Cal., has been spectacular weather-wise. Gorgeous, glorious perfect weather. 75. Blue skies, daffodils coming up. No need for a coat when I go outside. Sandals at all times when I'm not at the day job. You go outside and you just think wow. This is just freaking perfect weather. Ah, yes. And then I had to go back inside. That was a bummer. Honest, I felt bad for my cold-weather friends, agents and what have yous. But, gee, not for very long. Sorry. Not that I'm gloating or anything. All right I am. But hey, you guys make me really appreciate the weather here!

So, I finished eliminating the extra character tonight. Next up, kidnapping.

Labels: gloating. weather, Xia

I'm still in the middle of pulling an excess character out of the Work in Progress (WIP). I've done three chapters, and had to stop at the last one because it's late and this chapter will be the most work. Some interesting stuff happened and also, quite happily, I've solved the problem of the disappearing hero. Tip: when your hero is unconscious for a chapter and a half, this is bad. Especially when those are the chapters you were thinking would be hot. ::sigh:: A couple of years ago the spectacular Mary Balogh was on a list I was on and she said she'd been told never to have her hero and heroine apart for more than 5 pages. Probably in a longer work you could get away with a few more pages, but not many. I've found I have fewer boring passages when I try to follow that advice. So, 15 pages or so of an unconscious hero is bad. Very bad indeed.

Anyway, today was a boring day except for when I was watching Buffy and doing my character-ectomy some of which I did in the car at lunch time.


My editor emailed me to let me know the page proofs for My Wicked Enemy should be arriving tomorrow. I'm kind of excited to read it. This is Carolyn ignoring the unpleasant fretting in her head, hey it'll only cost me thousands of dollars to re-write the whole book! I have a day off Friday, and Monday is a holiday so, I have a 4 day weekend coming up. Yippee!


Still obsessed with Spike, though.

Labels: Buffy, My Wicked Enemy, Spike, writing, Xia

Today as I was noodling on about something non-writing related, the writing portion of my head was obsessing about Xia. Major breakthrough involving some forward motion, as in now I have some. It's nice to know where to go from here. Also I'm deleting my first character from the story and folding him into another one. Yay! Bloody carnage, agreed, but this is going to be way better. My stories seem to start out with multiple personalities -- 2 or more characters playing the same role/function. I am ::sigh:: not one of those writers who easily handles a cast of dozens. A dozen makes my head spin. Heck, half a dozen is uncomfortable. So, obsessing was good to me today.

Tonight, The Darling Boy and I watched the last three episodes of Buffy, Season Six. Which brings me to my obsession du jour.



The episode ends with Spike having endured horrific trials in an attempt to return to his original bad and evil vampire self. Make me what I was originally so Buffy gets whats she deserves, he says, all mean and vampire-nasty. Uh-huh. And that's exactly what happens, because, who doesn't deserve a hottie like Spike?

Thank goodness I have it all on DVD, because I don't think I'd make it waiting for TV time to get me to season 7.

Off to remove a character and then have my hero demon-napped. Or is it mage-napped?

Labels: Buffy, Spike, writing, Xia

Had to do some day job stuff this morning. Yuck. Took longer than it should have due to an issue that was out of my control. But all's well and I'm home now. Xia has been going very slowly lately. I need to make up some words today. But I also have a lot of RITA books to read. Sigh. On the good side, despite the slow going, the ideas have been good. I have 41K words now and things are starting to gel. I'm trying to think of something amusing or interesting to say here, but no go. So! instead of that I'll talk about a growing obsession of mine.

Spike

Oh, my gosh. As perhaps you know, if you read here from time to time, my xmas present to myself was Buffy the Vampire Slayer on DVD. So, the character Spike is a bad boy vamp who's pretty dang hunky. Plus, there are scenes in which he has very little clothing on and it's quite clear he keeps up a regular workout without overdoing it. And yes, I should be hanging my head in sexist shame for this, but I'm not. It's finally our turn!

Labels: Buffy, Scandal writing, Spike, Xia

Today was a gorgeous, spectacular Spring day, right smack in the middle of winter. I was going to work in the car at lunch time but then I decided I'd go for a walk with a buddy from work. Oh, it was beautiful out!

There's a park near where I work that has a smallish forest-y area with several paths and a quite respectable creek. The oak trees are so big you'd need three or more people to get your arms all the way around the trunks. It's a pretty walk and doesn't take any more than 20 minutes or so. The creek was full of rushing water, and we were walking in the huge shady oaks, where, I am quite sure, Robin Hood lurks. And we ran into an older gentleman and his dog Cookie. He walks there just about every day, and after a few times seeing each other we got to be talking, and petting his dog. I suspect he has early stage Parkinson's, and he and his dog are always quite sedate. I started picking up crunchy little sticks for Cookie to chew on when we met. One day we saw her and I called out "It's Cookie!" and she came running down the path to get the stick from me, all happy and goofy the way dogs do sometimes. Who knew she had so much perkiness in her? She's a bit of an elderly dog herself. Now we bring her dog biscuits and she REALLY loves us. So I had a lovely walk on a lovely day and I got to give Cookie some biscuits and scratch her ears and chat a bit. Not too bad for a lunch hour!

Now I'm working on Xia and pushing 40K words and getting a bit nervous about how much I'll need to be ripping out later. I don't have them nailed yet, so there will be massive editing to come I expect. And yet I don't feel too bad about things right now. I imagine that will come. Cue the ominous music: Dun dun DUNNN!

Also, here's a look at the cover for My Wicked Enemy. I need to find a graphics tool for the Mac so I can update my website! They touched up the flames quite a lot since they sent this, and the woman's shirt has been fixed up so the almost-final is even more hot than this. But pretty awesome, huh?



Here's the cover copy:

Carson Philips is a witch on the run. For years the notorious mage Alvaro Magellan has held her as his psychological prisoner. But once Carson gets a glimpse of the true extent of his evil, she flees Magellan's mansion--- stealing a stone talisman of unimaginable power on the way. Her only hope for survival is a demon who ignites a voracious hunger in her she can't deny, a longing she can't resist. . .

Nikodemus is a warlord with a mission. Kill Magellan and his green-eyed witch at any cost. But when he meets the desperate Carson, the pull of her magic takes his breath away. He's not sure he can trust this tantalizing woman--- she is his enemy --- and less sure he can keep his hands off her. But Magellan will stop at nothing to reclaim what belongs to him. Can Nikodemus save Carson before his desire for her destroys them both?

Labels: Book Covers, romance novel covers, Spring day, Xia

My cold is better, but I'm not really feeling all that hot, to be honest. Went back to work today anyway. I have a cool idea for Xia that I'm anxious to get started on, so I'm going to do that. Here's a random garden picture.


These are Paper Whites, but the daffodils are starting to come up. Yippie! I love daffodils. They make me smile.

Labels: flowers, garden, Xia

I can't help myself -- does this sound cool or what? From Publisher's Lunch:

NON-FICTION: BUSINESS/INVESTING/FINANCE
Reclusive CEO of Blackwater Worldwide Erik Prince's WE ARE BLACKWATER, an insider's account of the controversial company that has supplied bodyguards and support-and-rescue personnel to hot spots around the world, including the battlefields of Afghanistan and Iraq, promising to "refute criticisms of the company, and take the reader on thrilling missions into hostile territory," to Regnery.

Check out the Danger Room Blog for interesting background and links. I'm not so sure Erik Prince is reclusive, since he's certainly been in the news a lot lately. And can you say, Damage Control? Search the Danger Room Blog for the Blonde Rescue story. It's hilarious.

Also, here is the tea I drink every morning. I love it. I used my cell phone to take a picture of the Welsh side of the container as I am convinced that improves the taste.

Speaking of Fun Tricks With Cell Phones, my Grand Central editor emailed me about either faxing or sending her a scanned copy of my signature to stick in a teaser thingee for My Wicked Enemy. So, I'm thinking, Fax? Scan? What the?? Way too much work people. So I signed my name on a sheet of paper, took a picture of it with my cell phone and emailed it to her from the phone. Took about 2 minutes. A while back when my work laptop was blue-screening, I'd take a photo of the BSOD (Blue Screen of Death) and send them to tech support so they could read the error messages. Because as any Windows user eventually learns, once you get a BSOD, your computer is frozen and there is no way except by writing it down to save the error message*. Until the cell phone camera... Same thing here, I thought. The lighting for my signature pic was not ideal, but so far I haven't heard that the jpeg wasn't usable.

* OK, I'm sure the Windows event log has the message logged, or if not there, then in the stack dump, but have you ever tried to read a stack dump? And besides, some of those BSOD's are fatal errors. You'll never get to that hard drive again. Sending a photo is a lot faster.

Labels: Fun With Cell Phones, publishing, Tea

sniff. I don't feel good. I hab a code ib my nobe. I came home from work early and fell asleep. Now I feel groggy and yucky. But so far, I'm not as sick as my son was. I'll sleep in tomorrow and hopefully that will take care of everything.

For once the Darling Boy and I were rooting for the same team in the Superbowl. Yay Giants!! So, yeah. Joe Montana never lost a Superbowl, so I think those comparisons are over for Mr. Brady. As a season ticket holder for the 49ers, I was at Candlestick park for the run up to all but their first Superbowl. Wow, is all I can say. I have never ever seen another QB affect the very air people breathe the way Montana did. He was an amazing QB. And Niner fans love him to the point where if he shows up at a halftime event, people literally cry. Seen it happen, folks. Not that Brady isn't a good QB, obviously he is. But when it came to getting it done, it was Eli Manning yesterday who had the magic. The Giant's defense was awesome.

I didn't get much writing done yesterday. I wasn't feeling so hot, plus I was futzing around, I admit it. Then the Superbowl. But now I'm going to try to get something done now. Hopefully my fuzzy brain will manage not to poop out on me.

Labels: Football, Joe Montana, Xia

Sigh. Went to a meeting for the Evil Day Job this morning. Got home about 1:00pm and then had to go find my sister's extra car keys and take them to her at her job, since she'd locked herself out of her car. Then I came home and fell asleep for a while. I think I'm getting whatever put my son down with a temp of nearly 103. Great. My brother came over and hung out with my son while I logged my writing income and expenses. No fun, but at least that's done. Now I have a raging headache. We'll see about getting any writing done today.

However, I have some cool ideas for Xia.

Labels: Regular life, Xia

It's late. It's been a long, tough week here at Jewel central. Tomorrow I have to go to a function for the day job. Sigh. I've been mulling over Xia and think I've made plotting progress.

Also, even though the MacBook Air is waaayy overpriced, and I can't afford it, I want one. Rats.

Labels: miscellaneous, procrastination