Throw Me Somethin', Mister!

You just can't keep a party city down.

I've been to Mardi Gras a few times, mostly in Mobile, Alabama, home to the oldest Mardi Gras celebration in the U.S. Mardi Gras in Mobile is more laid-back and somewhat more family-friendly than the bacchanal in New Orleans. My favorite of the Mobile parades is the raucous and crazy Joe Cain Day parade, which is sort of the equivalent to a GDI in collegiate Greek society. It lacks the focus and discipline of the Krewe parades, but makes up for it in sheer creativity and enthusiasm.

I have been to New Orleans during Mardi Gras, once. Since I don't drink, smoke, toke, or bare my breasts for beads, it wasn't exactly a fun experience. However, I've visited New Orleans at other times of the year and loved it. I'm glad to see the old city slowly coming back to life. May she live to throw down for centuries to come.

Oooo, Looky!

I'm one of the Intrigue Authors!

My next big milestone is coming up quickly---I should get my June bookcover in the next couple of week. I've heard cover horror stories, but I'm really liking the current Intrigue covers. I like the new emphasis on the author name (well, duh, of course I do) and the more stylistic art appeals to me in a big way.

Here are some of my recent favorite Intrigue covers:

SECURITY MEASURES by Joanna Wayne

HOUSE OF SECRETS by Tracy Montoya

PRIMARY SUSPECT by Susan Peterson

PERSON OF INTEREST by Debra Webb

BENEATH THE TEXAS MOON by Elle James

As you can tell, I like the "evocative scene" covers better than the "lone hot guy" or "clinch in the midst of danger" covers. Although I must admit to some fondness for the "lone hot guy" covers, too. :)

I'll probably be happy with any cover I get--just getting a cover the first time will probably eclipse any more esoteric considerations. But I'm hoping for an "evocative scene" cover that really captures the eerie undertones of my story.

Bronze, Baby!

Congratulations to the U.S. Men's Olympic Curling Team (aka Team Fenson) for winning the first ever U.S. Olympic medal in curling!

As I noted in a previous post, I've become addicted to this little known and little understood sport (at least down here in Dixieland), thanks to the Olympics. Curling ran early morning on MSNBC, for the most part, and I was able to watch a good bit of it (especially the days I was out sick from work with the crud). Once I got the gist of how the game works, and what the strategies are, I found it utterly fascinating. It's a finesse game, full of thinking and strategy, easy to learn and difficult to master.

I'm not sure I'll ever go curling myself---the whole ice-o-phobia I have would make it problematic---but I'm definitely a fan of the sport now.

(And look! An online curling game!)

Blogging Blues

I'm in some sort of blogging funk. I haven't been able to think of anything to blog about that's not political, and I don't do politics on this blog, so I've just been silent. Part of it's due to the nasty upper respiratory infection I'm battling. Part of my funk is also dealing with my prima donna of a writing muse, who apparently took one look at the cold, rainy February weather, grabbed her hot pink bikini and hopped the first plane to Tahiti.

And part of it is my strange new obsession with the game of curling (I blame Paul Gross and the U.S. Men's Olympic Team). It's a very weird new obsession for an Alabama girl who thinks traversing ice by foot, ski, snowboard, skate or curling shoe is insane. (You could slip, fall and break something!)

Also did Sasha Cohen really have to skate such an amazing short program just when I'd talked myself out of getting sucked into the women's singles competition?

Maybe I have ADHD.

Die, UM, Die!

Some things are just sacred.

;)

Know Jack?

Jack Bauer's Friendster Profile.

We Wuz Robbed

And no, I'm not talking about the Super Bowl. I didn't really care which team won.

I'm talking about the rain falling outside that was supposed to have been at least mixed with a little snow. The local weather guys were practically salivating last night at the prospect of a little of the white stuff, but noooooo. Just rain.

I know, I'm silly to wish for snow in Alabama. It only mucks everything up. But it's so rare down here that just the prospect of it is enough to make me giddy, and having the rug pulled out from under me, as usual, still stinks.

Can You Tell I'm a Frustrated Artist?

I can't ever get happy with the look of my website or my blog. I'm more limited on the blog due to using Blogger software and templates, but I wanted at least a little coordination between my blog and my website, so I decided to go for a blue-toned blog theme.

I'm a little obsessive about blue. It's been my favorite color from childhood, and I love to be surrounded by it. It makes me happy.

Is that weird?

Wow, That Was Fast!

Congratulations to my fellow GH 2004 finalist, Tessa Rallis, who gave an online pitch to Silhouette Desire on January 9th, earned a request for a full, and got The Call today. Way to go, Tessa!

Done!

My proposal is packaged up, ready to go in the mail to my editor tomorrow. I'm going to have to get right back on writing the rest of the book soon, but working up the synopsis for the proposal helped me outline the rest of the book, so hopefully it'll go faster now.

To celebrate reaching my goal of having the proposal ready to go before the end of January, I treated myself to the Battlestar Galactica miniseries and first two episodes on DVD. My critique partner and former best friend Jenn talked me into giving the series a try, the evil wench. I can see why she likes it so much, but did I really need another television show to obsess over, I ask you? Did I? Some friend she is!

Off to watch episode 3...

I Need a Hero

From The Listkeeper in the comments section of a "24" thread on PoliPundit: (some words masked for content - see link for uncensored list)

Some random facts about Jack Bauer:

1) If you wake up in the morning, it’s because Jack Bauer spared your life.

2) If Jack Bauer was in a room with Hitler, Stalin, and Nina Meyers, and he had a gun with 2 bullets, he’d shoot Nina twice.

3) Upon hearing that he was played by Kiefer Sutherland, Jack Bauer killed Sutherland. Jack Bauer gets played by no man.

4) Jack Bauer’s favorite color is severe terror alert red. His second favorite color is violet, but just because it sounds like violent.

5) Jack Bauer once forgot where he put his keys. He then spent the next half-hour torturing himself until he gave up the location of the keys.

6) Jack Bauer got Hellen Keller to talk.

7) Jack Bauer killed 93 people in just 4 days time. Wait, that is a real fact.

8) Jack Bauer was never addicted to heroin. Heroin was addicted to Jack Bauer.

9) 1.6 billion Chinese are angry with Jack Bauer. Sounds like a fair fight.

10) Superman wears Jack Bauer pajamas.

11) Jack Bauer doesn’t miss. If he didn’t hit you it’s because he was shooting at another terrorist twelve miles away.

12) Lets get one thing straight, the only reason you are conscious right now is because Jack Bauer does not feel like carrying you.

13) When you open a can of whoop-ass, Jack Bauer jumps out.

14) If Jack says “I just want to talk to him/her” and that him/her is you… well amigo, you’re *******.

15) Killing Jack Bauer doesn’t make him dead. It just makes him angry.

16) When life gave Jack Bauer lemons, he used them to kill terrorists. Jack Bauer ******* hates lemonade.

17) In grade school, a little boy punched Kimberly Bauer, and Kimberly ran home to tell her dad. That little boy’s name? Stephen Hawking.

18) Jack Bauer does not sleep. The only rest he needs is what he gets when he’s knocked out or temporarily killed.

19) No man has ever used the phrase, “Jack Bauer is a *****” in a sentence and lived to tel-

20) In kindergarten, Jack Bauer killed a terrorist for Show and Tell.

21) Jack Bauer literally died for his country, and lived to tell about it.

22) As a child, Jack Bauer’s first words were “There’s no time!”

23) Jack Bauer’s family threw him a surprise birthday party when he was a child. Once.

24) If you get 7 stars on your wanted level on Grand Theft Auto, Jack Bauer comes after you. You don’t want to get 7 stars.

25) Guns don't kill people, Jack Bauer kills people.

26) Everytime Jack Bauer yells “NOW!” at the end of a sentence, a terrorist dies.

27) Jesus died and rose from the dead in 3 days. It took Jack Bauer less than an hour. And he’s done it twice.

28) If you send someone to kill Jack Bauer, the only thing you accomplish is supplying him a fresh set of weapons to kill you with.

29) Jack Bauer could get off the Lost island in 24 hours.

There are a few more, but I'll let you read them yourself.

This, That and the Other

I've had a breakthrough on my sucknopsis, and as soon as I track down the author of the method I used to achieve it, I'll share it with you. It's a fill in the blank questionaire that I used to brainstorm the book idea, and I've also been using it, with minor tweaks to take into consideration changes that happened during the writing process, to set up my synopsis. I've tried every "write a synopsis in six easy steps" method known to man, I've read every article titled "The Dreaded Synopsis," and I've even listened to RWA conference tapes on the subject, but this method was the first one that ever actually worked for me.

So I'm ahead of where I thought I'd be, and it looks like I'll easily make my self-imposed Monday deadline to mail the proposal to my editor. To celebrate, I'm going to allow myself a brief, stream-of-consciousness blog post.

Read in my daily Publisher's Lunch e-mail that Frederick Forsyth will have a new book out this fall titled THE AFGHAN. I'm a sucker for a good political thriller, and I liked the only other Forsyth book I've read, so I'm looking forward to reading it. It reminds me, also, that I need to see if Tom Clancy has put out any Jack Ryan novels I haven't read yet. One of his later Ryan novels gave me the seed of the idea for one of my novels, the one I'm planning to turn into the first in a series for Intrigue (think Deb Webb's Colby Agency books or Gayle Wilson's Phoenix Brotherhood series).

Has anyone been watching AMERICAN IDOL? I didn't watch the first season, but thanks to Birmingham boy Ruben Studdard, I got sucked into Season 2. Fantasia kept me there for Season 3 and local boy Bo Bice for Season 4. I promised myself I wouldn't watch it this year, but slowly I'm being sucked back in, this time by a pretty girl with an amazing voice named Paris Bennett, granddaughter of inspirational soul singer Ann Nesby. She's terrific, gutsy (her song choices were Dixie Chicks and Billie Holliday) and charming. If she makes the top twelve—and why in the world wouldn't she?—I'm probably doomed to watch it again this year.

I'm also watching LOST again this season, and I'm still loving it, especially the slow transformation of bad boy Sawyer from surly maverick loner to surly maverick community member. They're doing a good job of softening some of his harsher edges without turning him into shapeless mush. I like it. Could do with a lot less Charlie and Jack, though.

And belated congrats to Hugh Laurie of HOUSE, MD for his Golden Globe win. Much deserved. HOUSE is a great show and Laurie is phenomenal in it.

That's it for now. Hopefully more regular blogging will resume when I get my proposal out the door.

Drive-by Posting

Crazy busy at the moment with more than just the writing thing, although the writing thing is enough. If you're bored and looking for something to spend time on, try this.

You can curse me later.

BAMM!

Books-A-Million now officially has FORBIDDEN TERRITORY listed on their website for pre-order. If you're a BAMM club member, you get a discount! So what are you waiting for?

Order now. Order often.

Also, in related news, The Writing Playground's May/June contest will feature an autographed copy of FORBIDDEN TERRITORY as one of the prizes, so if you're going to be all penny-pinchy and stingy and not order my book yourself, you can always enter that contest for a chance to win it. I'll also be one of the June author interviewees, so keep a look-out for it.

Nerves of Mush

Well, my editor is supposed to call this afternoon to discuss WILD CARD and future projects. I'm trying not to freak out. (And thank goodness it's a relatively slow day at work).

My gut instinct is that WILD CARD is a no-go. Since the word count change, it won't fit SIM as is, and I'm not sure it was that great a fit to begin with. I don't think it really works for Intrigue, either, and unless she sees it as a perfect fit for Superromance, I can't see where else it can go at H/S. That's why I'm peddling it around to agents.

As for future projects, I'm 203 pages into an Intrigue, with about 55 pages or so to go to meet my page goal for the book. I do think this idea works well as an Intrigue, and it's a sequel to FORBIDDEN TERRITORY, which I hope will please my editor. If not, I have some other ideas to pursue.

Not that any of that makes the butterflies in my stomach go away as I wait for the call.

UPDATE:

Okay, heard from the editor. She's not buying WILD CARD yet, because she thinks it needs substantial changes to fit Intrigue, just as I thought. But, she didn't reject it outright, and she's going to send me a revision letter, although she stressed that I should backburner it for now, because she wants me to have a couple of books waiting in the wings after FORBIDDEN TERRITORY hits, and she thinks that the revisions to WILD CARD will take up time I'd better spend writing new stuff specifically targeted to Intrigue.

So I'm sending her a proposal for CODE NAME: WILLOW next week, since it's finished, and I'm going to work up a proposal for my WIP, DANGEROUS PURSUIT, which isn't finished but isn't far from it, to send to her by the end of the month.

Whew. Nerves back to normal.

Jack is Back!

Twenty-four more hours of heart-pounding, breath-stealing television, and it starts in just four hours.

Can. not. wait!

Triskaidekaphobia

I'm probably about to jinx myself, but today's turning out to be a pretty good day. I got a raise at work, my revisions are off to the editor, the online contest judge seminar I was co-teaching is finished, and in an hour, I get to go home for the weekend.

Not a bad Friday the 13th, as such things go.

Ugh

Up to my eyeballs in edits on FORBIDDEN TERRITORY. Have to get them in the mail by Thursday morning.

Drowning...

Talk to you Friday. Maybe.

Discipline in Small Doses

A while back, I discovered the joys of using Microsoft Excel spreadsheets to track my editor and agent submissions and my contest entries, finals and wins. It didn't take long for me to discover that I could also use Excel to keep up with my daily writing schedule as well.

Last year, when I wrote my 80,000 word novel WILD CARD within two months, part of what kept me going was setting up a daily page goal in Excel and doing all I could to keep to it. I was lucky that WILD CARD was one of those marvelous creatures, a novel that practically wrote itself. Keeping to my daily writing schedule wasn't hard; many days I went over my total and got to subtract pages, even days from the entire schedule.

I used the Excel trick when I was revising two other books, including the one that would become FORBIDDEN TERRITORY. I was able to revise as much as twenty to thirty pages per day using the Excel method.

But then came my current WIP. I wasn't what I'd call bogged down, exactly, but between the holidays, my work schedule and my family responsibilities, my goal of writing five or six pages per day clearly wasn't working. I'd come home from work dead tired and mentally drained, look at my Excel schedule and see I was supposed to do six pages per day. Overwhelmed by the very idea, I'd just punt and add days to my schedule.

Finally, I realized that I had to give myself small, reachable goals every day. Two pages I could do, even on a brain-dead night. The thought of it didn't overwhelm me. And I soon discovered that when I gave myself permission to do only two pages a day, I often did five or six a day once I got going on the story.

The fact is, if you don't set up a disciplined writing schedule, where you write every day or almost every day, you will not finish a book. And if you don't finish a book, you'll never sell a book. So you have to face the fact that writing a book, while it can be fun, is at its core hard work, and you have to make yourself do it. Every day.

But don't overwhelm yourself, either. Set a reasonable goal, one you can meet virtually every day, while being flexible enough to account for unexpected setbacks and obstacles.

Look at it this way: if you write two pages a day every day, by the end of four months, you'll have approximately two hundred and forty pages. That's a short contemporary romance novel, a short mystery or a young adult novel. Two pages a day on week days and five a day on weekends, and you're looking at a long contemporary or a single title romance, mystery or historical at the end of four months.

Those are doable goals, if you're willing to put in the work. And if you can do more pages a day, even better. You can finish a book in a month, or two months.

I started this version of my WIP on November 29th. I now have 192 pages, well over halfway through my novel, and I'm on track to be finished with the first draft by the end of January, all because I gave myself manageable goals that I could meet or exceed.

You can do it, too.

Saturday Morning CatBlogging

About three years ago, I was packing up stuff from a rental house to move into the house with my mom and sister. I hadn't been to that house in almost a month, since I was already living with my mom, and unknown to me, someone had broken into the back door of the rental house. They stole a few things that I wasn't that attached to, but in the process, they'd left the back door open. So when my mom and I went into the house to pack the stuff up, not only did we find the break-in but when we looked in the open cabinet under the kitchen sink, we found three tiny kittens. They were wild as hares, having never seen a human before.

Their mother was nowhere to be found, so we gathered the kittens up and put them in a box (though not before I got the stew bitten out of me by one of the kittens), and continued with our packing. When we were ready to go, we had no choice but to take the kittens with us. We couldn't leave them in the house, since we were closing it back up, and we couldn't put them out to fend for themselves with no idea where their mother was. So we took the tiny fuzzballs home.

Taming them was an ordeal. The one who tamed earliest, Oliver, turned out to have feline leukemia. probably contracted from his mother. We had to have him euthanized. However, Toby and his sister Sophie were leukemia free, and somehow, we managed to tame them (although with Sophie, I had my doubts it would ever happen).

Now, Sophie is a delightful, quirky little cat, a long-haired tortoiseshell with a sweet disposition. Her brother Toby is a large buff tabby who's a little more stand-offish but lets my niece manhandle and drag him around at will, without ever scratching or biting or even putting up a fuss. Since my sister's digital camera is new (a Christmas present), we haven't gotten a picture of Toby yet, but here's a nice shot of Sophie:

The side shot doesn't do her justice; she has gorgeous two-tone eyes—chartreuse on the outside and olive green around the pupils. And she's silky soft, her hair long enough to make her fluffy but not so long that her hair tends to matting.

Can you tell I'm sweet on her? :)