Elizabeth Hoyt is having a contest. You could win three of my books. (Indiscreet, Scandal and My Forbidden Desire) Enter here.

In other news, I made pumpkin pie for Thanksgiving and have since been baking lots of pumpkin stuff because I bought a big pumpkin and had LOTS of pumpkin left over. The pumpkin muffins have been consumed. Yummy. I made pumpkin soup last night that was amazing. That disappeared before it had time to cool. Today I made a pumpkin bread with cranberries and boy, it's really, really good. I'll probably make 1-2 more pumpkin-y things.

I've now been twice to see the movie The Blind Side. What a great movie! Go see it.

I'm in the middle of reading Diana Holquist's Hungry For More. It's really cute and I'm in awe of how accurate the chef details seem to be. From what I've read (I went on a Ruth Reichel binge a while back plus read a long New Yorker article about chefs) she seems to have nailed the details. And even if she didn't, she's making me believe she did.

This afternoon, I met some friends and had European Sipping Chocolate and talked about books. What a lovely day.

Currently, I am in denial about Monday and how much I've eaten. Please support me in this effort.

Thank you.

Labels: baking, contest, movies, reading

Today was not a fun day, pretty much on any level. The writing was hard. Nothing was easy. Yuck. But I made my minimum and today have 29K words.

Saw 27 Dresses today. Although I loved the actress who starred in the film (sorry no idea of her name) Ok I looked it up, it's Katherine Heigl. I thought the male lead was unworthy of her. And there's a point where she strikes back at her sister by publicly humiliating her in front of friends and family. Not good. The movie died for me right there. Not even Heigl could save the movie for me at that point. And then sometime later she's at least expressing some remorse, the male lead actually tells her at least you stood up for yourself Oh come on. Whoever wrote this movie should be ashamed. Ok, I looked that up, too. It was Aline Brosh McKenna and she should just be ashamed. Somebody give that writer lessons in what it means to be despicable. That scene was despicable. Don't see this movie. Ever.

Labels: movies, writing, Xia

Yikes. Didn't get much done today, word-wise. Soccer in the morning in a city about 45 minutes away, then back to town where I did the grocery shopping before heading home. Kidlet not happy about that, but pretty much, tough tootles for him. No way was I going to go back into town to shop later. Too much stuff is out or picked over. I gave him $5.00 and send him over to the yogurt place to wait for me while I shopped.

Came home from shopping and fell exhausted into bed and slept hard again. When I woke up, I fuzted around and thought about Scandal but didn't actually do anything about it. Then I took the DC to the movies. We saw The Brave One which was better than I expected. I like moral ambiguity and that was present for sure. And, I'm embarrassed to admit that I totally missed a subtle yet key point of a pivotal scene that my son totally picked up on. He liked the movie, which I actually didn't expect. I thought it might be too cerebral for his tastes, but no.

Came home, took down the garbage and recycling and I swear by the time I walked back up the hill, I was ready to fall down in a heap. I'm exhausted now, and this, obviously by now, isn't normal. I wasn't anemic when I gave blood, so that's not the problem. So, we'll see how things are tomorrow. I must be getting something. I did work on Scandal though, and ended up rearranging the chapters. But I need an unexhausted brain to think about where things are going.

To bed for me.

Labels: movies, Scandal, Writting. freaking writing

Oh no. It's off to work I go. I'm not in the least bit tired because I spent the last week on my normal sleep routine which is up late morning and evening. So I'll be quick about this. Magellan's Witch went well today. I rewrote all of yesterday's new chapter because when I woke up this morning I had a much better idea for it. I'm getting in the fixes for this in the subsequent chapter right now. Almost done. Took a bunch of new garden photos today. Here's a couple of my favs:





Saw Spiderman 3. Somebody on that movie has never read a Romance novel. If they had, they would have fixed the broken boring romance. The actor who played Harry is a total hottie, so it was worth it for that. Three great trailers: Silversurfer, Pirates of the Caribbean 3 and Transformers. Movies I really want to see. Off to bed.

Tomorrow's going to be no fun.

Labels: Magellan's Witch, movies

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

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

Today was Fix the Scandal Synopsis Day, if by fix I mean start completely over. Which is exactly what I mean. I'm about three quarters of the way through and I think it's way better so far. I just haven't worked out the scope thing, the extra scandal to add. I have some ideas, but I need to notebook at the gym tomorrow morning to get clear on it.

I went to see Music and Lyrics this afternoon. Totally cute movie. Lots of great lines for Hugh Grant, really funny ones. Very enjoyable movie. Drew Barrymore was good, too. I'm not sure yet because I'm still in that post-movie 24 hour period during which I love every movie I see (except the remake of Planet of the Apes which is the worst movie ever made). I think there was perhaps a lack of chemistry between Hugh and Drew. But I went to the movie fresh off of wrangling with my hero and heroine in Scandal, and those two are angsty-edgy-hot which this movie was not, so maybe I was projecting. But I think it's true. I feel compelled to note, however, that Hugh Grant has an awesome naked torso and I would like to extend my heartfelt thanks to whoever thought of leaving the camera on a medium-close shot of Hugh Grant's naked torso for a quite significant time. Thank you, also for his jeans during that scene, which were low riders. There was some female skin on view as well, but not Drew's, so gentlemen so inclined would also have reason to thank designers who feel compelled to save the environment by using very small amounts of sparkly cloth.

Anyway, I am happy with my progress on the Scandal synopsis and hope to have it finished by tomorrow.

Labels: movies, Scandal, Synopsis

Sigh. Writing has been like pulling teeth today. I wrote a lot of words but deleted a lot, too. I saw Pan's Labyrinth today. I really expected to like this movie a lot. But I didn't. It's a really good movie, interesting enough to recommend, particularly as a rental. But the trailers and reviews all suggested that the young protagonist falls in love with the faun. Um, no. They must have been thinking of some other movie. Because there is no love in this movie, I mean that in a very stark way. I was disappointed because the movie was not what I expected. But still, positively not a waste of time or money and the actors were all wonderful. I'd like to see more movies like this. The good news is that my son has agreed to see Music and Lies with me. Yay! I like Hugh Grant and Drew Barrymore.

Word Count for Magellan's Witch: 36,019

Anyway. Back to get a few more words squeezed out. Tonight's goal is to get to 36,500 since that will give me over my minimum for the day. Depending on how things go I may have to put off the Scandal synopsis fix until Monday. Also, I'm tired and will be going to bed shortly.

Labels: Magellan's Witch, movies, writing