Today I made back most of the words I cut after I realized I needed to rewrite chapters 1 and 2. Things are complexifying. But this is the part where I am besieged by deadline panic. Ack!

I turned off Twitter and my email and put some tunes on. I only wasted time once when I went off to listen to Paolo Nutini on YouTube for a while.

Off to bed!

Bonus picture for the heck of it. Roses are red. Blogger squishes the pictures down quite a bit so they don't look as crisp as the original which you can see here.

Labels: deadline, editiing, roses, writing

Reminder 1: Tomorrow Sept 30 2008 is the last day to enter the LOL cat contest

Reminder 2: I am still working on The Next Historical. Currently rewriting Chapters 1 and 2.


Feel like you need to put things in perspective? Check it out. (Scroll for heaven's sake!)

Labels: Comics, contests, Perspective, writing

Today has been a strange day. My son is ill so I kept him home from his soccer game. I haven't had a free, quiet Saturday in forever. I felt like it was a weekday and I was home from work. I came out into the kitchen this morning to see this:




There's a LOL cat in there somewhere. So what the heck. Let's have a contest. I have this awesome glass ring and a glass pendant thingee that I bought at Art in the Park. Best LOL title entry gets them, k? Put yours in the comments to this post. I'll select a winner, say, September 30. Your odds of winning are good, there are only 6 of you regularly reading this blog. What is this cat thinking?

Speaking of contests, I have to wait on the Wicked Cool contest entries from Fresh Fiction before I can announce the winner and I think it takes them a month. Sorry for the delay. I will be announcing a winner as soon as I have those and have them processed, I promise.

Labels: contest, Helping Cat, writing

U.C. Berkeley courses in iTunes. Free.

Massive swooning here.

Labels: Cool Stuff

Just a quick post to warn you posting here may be infrequent for a bit. I'll post when I can since I don't want to cause the six of you Carolyn withdrawals or anything.

My Forbidden Desire needed some smoothing out of the edits and I've been doing those since Monday. I finished up today and sent it off for Megan F to read before I send it back. That means two and a half days without working on The Next Historical and a few more coming since I want to do a complete read-through of MFD just to make sure I didn't miss anything. So now I have to pick up the pace on TNH once this interlude is over.

Meanwhile, I have preliminary back cover copy for MFD which I will share when it's final. And I saw the cover today. My agent said, It's smoking hot! and when I showed it to my sister she said, ooh! in that kind of surprised and awed voice women get when they see a hot cover or, say, some hunky construction guy using a shovel right in front of you at Trader Joe's. (If you were following me on Twitter you would know all about the awesomely gorgeous Construction Guy. I think I need more Greek yogurt....)


Anyway, it's deadline heck around here. Wish me luck.

Labels: Book Covers, My Forbidden Desire, Reivsions, The Next Historical

I got the final cover for Scandal yesterday: feast your eyes, peeps!

Cover Blurb

The earl of Banallt is no stranger to scandal. But when he meets Sophie Evans, the young wife of a fellow libertine, even he is shocked by his reaction. This unconventional and intelligent woman proves to be far more than an amusing distraction-- she threatens to drive him to distraction. Unlike the women who usually fall at Banallt's feet, and into his bed, Sophie refuses to be seduced. And soon Banallt desires her more than ever-- and for more than an illicit affair.

Years later, the widowed Sophie is free, and Banallt is determined to win the woman he still loves. Unfortunately, she doesn't believe his declaration of love and chivalrous offer of marriage-- her heart has already been broken by her scoundrel of a husband. And yet, Sophie is tempted to indulge in the torrid affair she's always fantasized about. Caught between her logical mind and her long-denied desire, Sophie must thwart Banallt's seduction-- or risk being consumed by the one man she should avoid at all costs...

Berkley Books, February 2009
ISBN: 978-0-425-22551-6

Labels: Book Covers, Scandal

Visit my blog post over at Grand Central Cafe and find out how you could win a signed copy of My Wicked Enemy.

Labels: Blogging, contest, shamless promotion

Today when I finished working on The Next Historical my total word count for the MS was 55,552. So I actually spent 10 minutes finding the right 3 words to add to bring the total MS word count to 55,555.

It was fun. And now I'm feeling unaccountably happy even though I'm still 1000+ words away from recovering the 3000 and some words I deleted over the weekend.

In other number news, yesterday I rewrote the opening of Chapter 1 12 times before it was right and ended with a net increase of about 234 words. Ouch. Today when I was driving home, all of a sudden I knew I needed a different chapter 1. So today I renumbered all the files and Chapter 1 became Chapter 2 and then I wrote the new Chapter 1.

I think it works.

I'm going through start to finish on a mission to clean up my little messes. Fast. I'm freaking a bit about my deadline. I wish panic wasn't such a motivator.

Labels: editing, numbers, writing, writing fast

That's one of my all time favorite cartoons. And I love xkcd

I'm not procrastinating by the way. Yesterday, I pulled out the chapter outline for The Next Historical and added in all the new stuff and then rearranged the new and the old so I'd know what the new chapter order should be and which ones needed to be deleted. Two of them. The others I think have enough to warrant staying for a total rewrite. Then I reordered my chapters. Then I read Travels in Turkey and Asia Minor, Syria and Egypt (1844) and got some really good background information. But I had to also do some quick side research on The Levant Company to confirm a suspicion of mine about the Consuls. Uh, yes, it's true. The British Consuls were appointed but apparently needed to be approved by the Levant Company which was kind of the Middle Eastern equivalent of the East India Company. Politics and commerce. Hand in hand.

Today, my son had a soccer game in a town about 35 minutes away after which we went to Art in the Park where he ate a lot of food and looked at art. I bought a couple of things that will go into the contest stash and a couple of things I liked for me. Then I went grocery shopping then we came home. I was at the computer for a bit and when I actually fell asleep sitting up for a minute, I figured I needed a nap which I did for 2 hours. Then dinner, then cleaning up and now blogging. And so, maybe I surfed the web a bit, maybe.

Anyhoo -- off to get SOME work done because I have two deleted chapters to make up...

Labels: art, research, stuff, The Next Historical, writing

In real life, I am only mostly right-handed. I do an awful lot of things with my left hand. I do sometimes write left-handed. Sometimes. Driving me with was nightmarish before I ponied up for a GPS. Now it's mostly amusing when I sometimes turn right even when the nice lady in the GPS says to turn left. (Recalculating is a frequently heard word...) Despite the big huge arrow on the screen.

It happens in my writing, too. I always have to be very very careful with my physical descriptions in case that left-right confusion sneaks in on me.

Today I had a bigger directional problem, related to my tendency to start out making things way too complicated. Example: The Next Historical opens in Syria. After first writing what I thought was the beginning (set in England) I realized I had to start in Syria, so I'm pretty sure the back half of the book is more or less written, subject to some massive revisions when I get back to it.

Anyway, I started everybody out in Aleppo, which is in Northern Syria near Turkey. Then, of course, it was still the Ottoman Empire and then I had my heroine and her father heading off to Iskenderun (Alexandretta) which is roughly 60 miles north-west-ish on the Mediterranean through, as it turns out, some mountains and the Syrian Gates where Alexander the Great defeated Darius and his Persian Army (hence the Alexandretta). Iskenderun is named after Alexander the Great.

So, as I was saying, my hero goes off to Maarat an Numan (spelling seems to be variable) and then goes to Iskenderun to meet up with the heroine after a fashion. Then they go back to Aleppo, and then some stuff happens and then they go back to Iskenderun because in order for my heroine to end up back in England with the rest of the book, she has to sail and Iskenderun is the only port in the province.

You see my issue. I have my characters going from Aleppo to Iskenderun to Aleppo and back to Iskenderun. Absolutely do NOT ask me why I didn't see how stupid this was before. Suffice it to say that today as I was sitting in the car at soccer practice the stupidity of all this back and forth finally smacked me.

So now I have to move everybody to Iskenderun at the start, then off to their various locations of castle ruins in Maarat An Numan and the suq in Aleppo, and THEN my hero goes to Aleppo and takes my heroine back to Iskenderun once and only once and puts her on a ship.

That should be an interesting fix not to mention a demonstration of my writerly super powers as I move entire houses 60 miles from their original locations. And then I will rename Aleppo to Fredericksburg or something, then rename Iskenderun to Aleppo and then rename Fredericksburg to Iskenderun. And move a bunch of descriptions from east to west.

Ta-dah! And the crowd goes wild!!!!

Labels: Revising, Superpowers, The Next Historical, writing