Welcome, and Big News!

Greetings, and welcome to the Blogger incarnation of my online journal. Content here will mirror what's on my LiveJournal (see link to the right), but I wanted to make it easier for people without LiveJournal accounts to comment on posts, and I wanted to broaden my horizons a little bit. I'll be responding to comments in both places, but to see the full scope of the discussion (and get advice and insights from Mom), you may want to pop over to LiveJournal every so often. That's also the place to see archives going back to September 2004. So, without further ado, here's my first real post here:

I have big news today!

(Drum roll, please)

I've now sold books three and four in my series. No titles yet, of course, since I never seem to be able to come up with titles. I also don't have exact release dates, though both will come out in 2007. One will be in the spring (which I guess narrows it down to March, April or May) and one will be in late summer (August or September). I'm really excited about these books. I already know that writing them is going to stretch me, and I'm looking forward to taking my characters to some interesting places, both emotionally and geographically.

Of course, if you were on my mailing list, you'd have learned this last night. I figured I owed at least a little perk to the mailing list, and I didn't want to upstage Megan on her interview day. If you want to make sure you get any other breaking news or perks in the future, you can join the list here.

I plan to start serious work on book three next week. In the meantime, I'm hoping to get my life into something resembling order before I fall into the book and lose track of my surroundings. I should admit, though, that I've been talking about getting my life in order for years, and I haven't managed it yet. I do have a head start on my deadline dementia dining, with a pan of lasagna made that I can freeze in individual servings for microwave meals (and isn't lasagna on the Mediterranean diet?). I also have plenty of dark chocolate M&Ms, and I'm well stocked on tea and Diet Dr Pepper. One thing I hope to do this week is re-read Enchanted, Inc.. I've never before read one of my books in its final, published form, but I haven't really delved into this book in a while, and it went through a lot of changes along the way, so I can't quite entirely remember what's in the finished version. I hate it when authors aren't consistent within their own series, so I need to remind myself. I'll also probably re-read the last few chapters of Once Upon Stilettos. I have to admit that those chapters are probably my favorite thing I've ever written (so far!), so I like just reading them, anyway.

In other news, I also learned yesterday that I've been accepted for membership into the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America (SFWA). It's a fairly exclusive organization, in that you have to have certain publishing credits that they deem worthy in order to be accepted as a member. I'd applied a while back and had received some mailings from them, though never anything that outright said, "Congratulations and welcome, you're now a member!" But I got their member news publication in the mail yesterday, and included in that was a directory update page that had my directory info on it, so I guess we can assume that I was definitely accepted as a member if they're asking people to add me to their member directories. Ever since I decided I wanted to be a writer, I've wanted to be a member of this organization. I'm such a fangirl geek about the idea of belonging to the same organization as so many of my favorite authors. I guess I already had that in Romance Writers of America, but RWA is a broader organization that lets anyone who's interested join. With SFWA, it's like being invited by the kids at the cool table in the cafeteria to come sit with them (though, considering it is an organization for people into science fiction and fantasy, I doubt many of these people were ever actually at the cool table when they were in school. They were over in the corner with the geeks like me).