Monday Moanings

Well, I ended up not making it to any of the festivals, mostly because my sinuses decided to go on a rampage (it's that time of year), and I spent much of the weekend on the sofa, zonked on allergy medicine, while doing some revision brainstorming.

The allergy drugs tend to give me weird nightmares, but the only one I vividly remember, the one that had me waking up in a panic, involved me suddenly having 80s hair and not being able to fix it. I could scan one of my high school pictures and post as an illustration of that nightmare image, but I think that might be too painful for everyone involved. I'm not sure if that particular hairstyle was widespread, but I do know almost everyone in my school, male and female, had it (probably because we all had the same hairstylist). And it was truly awful.

Some little newsy bits that I keep forgetting to post:
I've put a deleted scene from Don't Hex With Texas up on my web site (linked from that book's page).
The Chinese version of Enchanted, Inc. is out now, in places like Taiwan and anywhere other than mainland China where Chinese is spoken/read (though I imagine there will be bootleg copies in mainland China). It should be a good translation because the translator contacted me to clarify a lot of stuff, and we did a lot of e-mailing to make sure she was getting the gist of some of my Texanisms. I don't know what the cover looks like, as I don't yet have my copies, but I did get a blog comment from someone who's read the Chinese book. I've also started getting a lot of messages in what looks to be Chinese in my spam filter, but I don't know if there's a connection or if they're fan mail that gets sent to the wrong place because there's absolutely nothing in the messages I can read.
I've also been getting another wave of fan e-mail. It's odd how it does seem to come in waves, which makes me want to try to track down the source of how these people came to find the books and see if there's something that set off the wave. I'm getting the usual question about when the next book is coming. Believe me, I want to write it more than you want to read it. But as I keep saying, the way to get that book is to tell other people about these books and get them to buy them. Money talks. So far, Don't Hex seems to be on a pace to outsell the previous book, or at least sell faster (more copies in the first year of release) and upward trends are good.

It's nice to be getting fan mail when I'm at this stage in the revision process of another book. That would be the "I suck, what was I thinking?" stage. I went through the whole book, putting the gist of each scene on a notecard, and I realized that I could lose half the cards from the middle without losing anything. Then I realized that there were maybe two scenes in the middle that I wanted to keep. The beginning and end are great, but wow, that middle just kind of lies there. It all seemed so exciting when I wrote it. Now it just seems repetitive.

On the TV front, I'm going to have to get on the library waiting list for the book True Blood is based on, since they seem to be doing the first season more or less based on that one book. The TV series pace is making glaciers look fast, as we're three episodes into what's supposedly a mystery, and nobody's started investigating anything yet. They're all too busy having sex and thinking about having sex. It's like Torchwood, but in Louisiana and with vampires (though the Torchwood people might have done more about looking into the mysterious deaths by now). I just want to know what happens with the plot, so I want to read the book instead of waiting for it to unfold. Meanwhile, I'm not sure if I'm going to bother with the return of Heroes tonight. I more or less gave up on it last season, and this is supposed to be the "villains" season, and I'm really not all that excited about the villains. However, I really liked the Supernatural season premiere last week, so I'm not just in a crotchety mood. Since I gave up Fringe last week, maybe I'll give The Mentalist a shot tomorrow night in that time slot, since there's a reasonably attractive man in it who might actually have more than 30 seconds of screen time per episode.