Pre-order Book 5!

Wow, it's been a busy morning, and my day hasn't really even started yet. First, the big news: You can now pre-order book 5 for Kindle at Amazon. Or if you're in the UK, here's the link. It will be available at most of the other major e-bookstores, but this is the one that's currently allowing pre-orders that will guarantee that the book downloads right away on release day (supposedly at midnight). It should be available at B&N on release day, but possibly not quite at the stroke of midnight because of the lack of the pre-order option.

I celebrated by going to the dentist for a teeth cleaning. Woo hoo! And then I enrolled for my fall ballet class and went grocery shopping. Now I have to actually get work done.

I think I may have a limited number of words in me per day. Yesterday I wrote 5,500, which is good and better than normal, but although I had some time left, I just fizzled out at that point. It was a rather productive day, as I did more in less time, but still, I think I could produce even more if I made good use of the time. I hear all the time from writer friends who talk about spending eight hours a day writing. I manage about three hours of actual writing time and get about 5,000 words done in that. If I wrote for eight hours at my usual pace, I could write a book in a week, though I think there's a diminishing returns issue, since I accomplish most in the first couple of hours and by the eighth I'd be getting about a word a minute. Still, if I even spent five hours a day writing at my usual pace, I could write a draft in a couple of weeks. Maybe I need to work up to it. Part of the issue right now is that I'm getting ready to have a book published while I'm doing this, so there are business decisions and publicity activities I have to take care of, and that means I can't spend a full workday writing and I can't just stay off the Internet all day because there are e-mails I need to deal with.

I did take some time for Olympics viewing last night. I'd deliberately spoiled myself on the gymnastics, so I was able to watch it without having a heart attack, and I'm very proud of our girls. Boy, that sport has changed a lot since I was a kid. I was in gymnastics during the heyday of Nadia (and funny, I was taking gymnastics classes in Oklahoma while she was competing for Romania, and now she's coaching gymnastics in Oklahoma), and the desired body type was that willowy waif who just sort of floated in the air. Today's gymnasts are about thirty pounds heavier and muscle-bound so they can do a lot more powerful stunts. My joints never would have held up to the pounding it takes today, though I do think today's gymnasts need to take more ballet. They were corkscrewing on their pirouettes instead of keeping form. They need to find more of a happy medium between power and grace.

Now to get my day started after the initial excitement and the oral health interlude.