Fending off the Germ Attack

I actually managed to achieve writing yesterday! I rewrote the first two scenes to fit with what I now know is the real plot of the book. I don't know if I'll get much done today because I have a lot of work on the house planned and it's choir day and I have to do some lesson planning. I also found out that not only will my co-teacher be out sick, but both of the preschool class teachers will be out, and so far we haven't found any substitutes because everyone else is sick or has sick kids. Fortunately, we already had planned for tonight to be the time the harp group comes to demonstrate, so that gives us an activity that takes up most of the evening, plus some bonus adults, but not all the kids can do that at once, so we need at least one other adult. I may kidnap the first parent who shows up.

My main plan for the evening is to do a late Mardi Gras parade (we're doing our pancake supper tonight, then having the Ash Wednesday service, so I figure Mardi Gras lasts until the service starts) and let the kids march around to "When the Saints Go Marching In." I have the CD from the band I once sang with in the French Quarter. I may even get wacky and let them play rhythm band instruments along with it while we march. We're working on matching the rhythm in a song. Some of them can find the beat, but most of them don't yet seem to realize that there is a rhythm in a song. When I get the younger kids, I have a book/CD story song thing about riding on a train to visit Grandma, so there are lots of motions and "whoo whoo" things to do along with the song.

And then as many sick people as seem to be around, I plan to cover myself in hand sanitizer and take extra vitamin C. I'm still expecting to come down with something at any minute, after all the coughing and hacking that were around at last weekend's convention.

Tomorrow is going to be another (and I hope my last for a while) big painting day, so today's fun around the house is doing some prep work for that. I found actual floor space in my office yesterday, which was very exciting. Even in just half an hour of work, I can see a real difference, so I need to make a point of doing those half hours. I just have two and a half weeks to get the house ready to show.

Deadlines

I have given myself a deadline to get my house ready. I'd like to have it on the market by spring break, so that's three weeks from yesterday. This week I need to finish the painting (the kitchen, the trim around the house) and get the office clean and clear enough that there's access that doesn't require dance skills to get to the upstairs bathroom. Next week, I plan to have the plumbing issues taken care of, and once that is done, fix the kitchen floor (self-stick vinyl tiles seem to be the best solution for a quick and relatively easy spiff-up that doesn't require removing the old floor). Otherwise, there's a lot of cleaning, sorting and purging. Having a deadline should help me focus and get stuff done, and having an endpoint makes it easier to deal with. When it's all over, I'll just have to maintain the clean (and be prepared to make myself scarce for showings). And then I'll get the fun of moving. Yay. The trick may be finding something to buy. Houses like mine seem to be selling within a couple of weeks, and there's not much else coming up for sale. But it's likely more will start showing up around spring break, and it's possible that any new buyers might not want to move in until near the end of the school year.

In the meantime, there will be another book out. Book 2 in the Fairy Tale series, To Catch a Queen, will be coming out March 3, in e-book, paperback and audio. Here's the cover:


It's available for pre-order at iBooks and at Amazon.

I will eventually get my web page updated, but in the meantime, description and samples are available at these sites with previews.

Midwinter Break

I'm feeling very virtuous because I got up this morning to go to yoga, even though it was cold and drizzly and I was in "recovering from a convention" mode. But there is a strong possibility of a nap this afternoon.

My bathroom looks rather nice. There are a couple of spots I'll need to touch up with a tiny brush, and I need to do some cleaning and put everything back in place. I still need to do the kitchen and a couple of the living room walls, but that will have to wait until the weather warms up a bit and it's not so damp.

I would say I had moderate amounts of fun at the convention. I went to some panels I wasn't on and got some good info and ideas, but the social scene was kind of quiet. There were some people I hoped to talk to and never really got a chance. The room parties got shut down early. So mostly this amounted to a midwinter break for me -- a whole weekend to recover from home improvement projects.

I want to get some writing done today because talking about books does inspire me, and I did get the opening of the book re-planned last week. It's a good day for it. After a nap (because I really need a nap), I can snuggle under a blanket and get down to work.

Sign from Above?

The bathroom is now painted. I'm going to have to do a second coat in the areas where the roller wouldn't reach because the brush doesn't seem to do as heavy a coverage. I've decided to do the trim and any touch-up work later. It turns out that this paint has almost no odor, so sleeping next to a room that's just been painted won't be an issue. The main reason it's good to be out for a couple of days is not having to worry about drying and having my bathroom not really that useable (draping all over everything, the shower curtain down).

I'm already mostly packed for the convention, so after doing that second coat in the tricky spots I'll be able to just put on decent clothes, hop in the car, and hope I can check into the hotel in time to take a shower before my 4 p.m. reading. I'm actually ahead of my planned schedule, mostly because I also decided to do the kitchen later.

I woke up this morning from a dream in which I'd decided I needed to move to Nashville. I'd figured this out because it had the kind of scenery/terrain I like (true), closer to the kind of weather I like (also true), and a lot of the kind of people I like (also true), and I already know someone there because a friend from here moved there. But I don't think it was a Sign From Above dream because the next part of the dream involved me searching for real estate listings there to see what kind of house I could get with my current budget, and I couldn't get the search to work. When I put in my search parameters, I just got random pictures that weren't of houses. Then after that I couldn't seem to find a computer to search on, no matter where I went. From there it transitioned into one of those "returning to an office job" nightmares. So while I think I could live in Nashville and enjoy it, I'm not sure why I'd want to move there at this point in my life. I am still tempted to do the real estate search and see what comes up.

And now the first coat of paint should be dry enough for me to do a second coat.

Painting Week Continues

My fun yesterday was applying spray-on texture to the walls that previously had wallpaper on them. The result isn't perfect (I don't think the stuff works as advertised), but it'll do once it's painted. The original paint job for this house was so sloppy that anything I do, however amateur, will be an improvement. They did a terrible job of mudding over the drywall tape (the tape is visible in places), and I think they pretty much painted by standing in the middle of the house and waving a paint sprayer around.

Today is taping, prepping and priming day, but I also have to get some stuff done to prepare for ConDFW this weekend. I'm so looking forward to having this phase of the project over with so I can get my kitchen and bathroom back to normal. Right now, my laundry room contents are in my dining room and there's plastic all over the bathroom. After the weekend, I really need to get my act together on the cleaning and other work because I've noticed that all the houses like mine are selling almost immediately. I was worried that there were too many on the market, but they're going fast. My problem may not be selling the old house, but rather finding a new house. There are currently three on the market that aren't my ideal but that I could probably live with.

I'm really looking forward to this weekend's convention, but mostly as a mid-winter vacation and recovery period from the Week of Painting. I don't have a lot of panels, so I may be spending my off time just hanging out in my hotel room with the knowledge that I'm not having to do any housework or home improvement projects. I may catch up on reading and sleep and occasionally emerge to socialize.

But first, there is sanding to be done.

Writing Amid Chaos

The crazy busyness of my life right now has inspired this week's writing post: How do you write when you have a lot of distractions? When life is going according to plan and you don't have a lot going on, it's a lot easier to fit in writing time. But what about when life is a little crazier? There are times when you're sick, when you have sick family members, when your day job is requiring long hours or travel, when you have a book being released and have to do promo work, when you're moving, or, like I am now, you're getting a house ready to sell and doing a lot of cleaning, organizing, and repairing. Can you still fit in some writing time? Maybe, but it takes some strategy.

One thing to try is scheduling your other obligations and your writing -- you'll paint the bedroom from this time to this time, and then at this time you'll do an hour of writing. You need to be realistic here about what you can really accomplish and which projects are do-or-die. If you're on deadline with a book, then that might have to be the priority, and you schedule other stuff around that. If you absolutely have to finish the work project, then you may have to reschedule the writing accordingly. I do find that setting a writing appointment makes it easier to make myself fit a bit of writing into the day because otherwise all those little tasks will expand to fill the available time.

Once you've set aside time to write, you may need to do something that helps you change gears. Otherwise, even though you're sitting down with your pen or your computer, your brain will be off mentally comparing paint colors. It may help to find a sensory trigger -- a visual, scent, or sound that takes you immediately into the world of your book. It may be a picture that reminds you of your setting or characters, a scented candle that evokes the mood of the story, or a piece of music that brings the story to life in your head. You may have to work to establish these triggers. It will take a few times of looking at, smelling, or listening to these things as you get down to work before you start associating them with your writing. It can also help to establish habits or rituals that separate your writing from the other things going on in your life. You may want to change clothes, move to a new location, make a pot of tea, meditate for a moment, light a candle, play some music, etc., to signal to yourself that you're in writing mode.

Of course, during some really trying times, switching gears entirely isn't an option. That's when you need to give yourself permission to lighten up -- unless you're on a deadline, and even then if you have something really serious happening, you should talk to your editor and see if you can work something out. It's better to do that as soon as you know there might be a problem than on your deadline date when your book is only halfway done. I've heard that over and over again from editors, that they'd rather you let them know that you've had some life crisis and may need more time well ahead of your deadline. If you don't have a deadline, then you can lower your expectations while you're in crisis mode. You may only manage to write a page or a paragraph, or you may just get some ideas jotted down. I'm repainting my house this week and going to a convention this weekend, and I realized that trying to write wasn't working, so I outlined some ideas and I'm listening to music that reminds me of the book while I work. I'm hoping that means next week I can sit down and write with some pent-up ideas and end up being more productive than if I forced myself to squeeze in work this week.

This only works, though, if you have a good sense of the stop date for your crisis. It can be dangerous to your productivity to let it extend indefinitely. If you know that your project will end two weeks from now and then you'll get your life back, it's okay to just put your writing aside until you can breathe. If you do that for an ongoing difficulty, it's too easy to get into the habit of not writing. There's always going to be something going on in your life to get in the way of writing and it will become an excuse.

Painting Week

The Week of Painting has begun. Yesterday I obtained paint and painting supplies, so I guess I'm really going to do this. The main thing that needs doing is the bathroom, in part because it's a non-neutral color and in part because of some sheetrock repair that was done when the new heater/air conditioner was installed. When I bought the house, there was a pinkish and teal "Southwestern" pattern wallpaper in there. When I was using the downstairs bedroom as an office, that didn't bother me much. When I switched rooms, moving the bedroom downstairs and the office up, that wallpaper didn't work adjacent to my rather Victorian blue-and-white bedroom. I ripped out the wallpaper and painted the walls a bright blue (if you use the plain blue wallpaper screen on a Mac, it's about that color) with a soft beige color wash over it. I was planning to use the sheetrock repair as an excuse to repaint with a slightly different shade of blue because the original paint came out a bit darker and brighter than I really wanted. I just couldn't decide on a paint color. I've had cards of paint samples sitting in that room for years and was never sure about any of them. Since I'm planning to sell soon, I figured I might as well just do a basic white, especially since I also have to repaint the laundry room because there's a bit of sheetrock repair in there from a plumbing repair.

I was then trying to decide which white was closest to what I needed, but then I got the clever idea of taking the piece of sheetrock that was cut out of the laundry room to Home Depot and telling the guy in the paint department that I needed that kind of paint in that color. He ran it through the scanner, and now I have paint to match, and it's enough to take care of most of the normal-height walls in the house -- the ones that are problem areas, like in the kitchen. The original painters didn't do a very good job because there are spots where the tape is clearly visible, so I'm doing some mudding over it before I paint. Today's fun is finishing the sheetrock repair in the laundry room. I've already touched up the spots around the new thermostat. Tomorrow I get to apply new texture to the walls that used to be wallpapered and to the patched areas. Thursday will be primer day for the spots that need it. Then Friday morning I'll paint before heading to ConDFW, and that way the paint can dry thoroughly while I'm out of the house.

This is where all the work I've done with Habitat for Humanity is paying off. I learned all kinds of skills for painting and preparing for painting, as well as observing how to deal with sheetrock.

Meanwhile, I guess I also need to get ready for the convention. I need to find something to read and maybe get together some promo stuff. And I got the new book re-outlined yesterday, so I hope to do a little writing. I'm finding it hard to fit all the home repair work and the writing in because it's hard to shift mental gears. I need to find a piece of music that tells me it's time to write this book so I can shut off the part of my brain that's figuring out the best way to paint that particular wall.

Not Getting Stuff Done

That whole Weekend of Getting Stuff Done plan didn't end up happening. There was a ballet production I decided I wanted to see, and tickets were plentiful, so I drove to Fort Worth to see The Merry Widow, a ballet based on the operetta. The dancing was wonderful and the costumes were utterly gorgeous, more evening attire than traditional ballet costumes. I figure it counts as research since I'm writing about a dancer, but I also found it interesting watching the non-verbal communication. Unlike a lot of ballets, this was very plot-intensive. I'm not sure I could have followed it entirely without the summary in the program (and a lot of the people around me were confused even with the summary), but it was still interesting seeing just how much could be conveyed about emotions and relationships just from body language. I caught myself mentally supplying narration from the various characters' point of view, just to see how I'd write it based on what I was seeing.

The plot was about a wealthy widow who was much in demand. If she married a foreigner and moved out of her small (fictional) European country with all her money, it might bankrupt her country, so her country's delegation in Paris was trying to make sure she married one of them. The suitor they picked to go after her turned out to actually have been a former lover of hers from when she was a young peasant girl. He rejected her on the urgings of his family because of her class (I guess she later married a really wealthy man who didn't care about her origins). When they're reunited, all the old feelings return, but can she be sure he really loves her and doesn't just want her for her money? I thought it was interesting how the dancers conveyed that sense of affection combined with distance. There was clearly a strong attraction but also a strong sense of pain and pride on her part -- she wasn't going to let him hurt her again. Anyway, I think it was time well-spent.

I didn't get much done on Sunday, either, since I had to do preschool Sunday school and direct the preschool/kindergarten choir to sing in church. Then there was a reception after church and grocery shopping, and lunch and reading the newspaper, and next thing I knew, it was time to cook dinner. So that means the Getting Stuff Done has been moved to today. I need to get paint and some supplies and start some of the prep work -- a few drywall patches, doing some texture on the walls that previously held wallpaper. I think I need to make a detailed list of all the work that needs to be done so I can tick off the boxes. The big things for me, other than general decluttering and cleaning, are the sheetrock repair and painting and doing something about the kitchen floor. Otherwise, I need to get a plumber in for a bunch of little things, replace a window and then decide if two of the ceiling fans need to be replaced or if I can get by (they work but are noisy).

In the meantime, there's writing work to be done. Today I need to finish the cover copy for book 2 and outline and write preliminary cover copy for book 3 (just to get my head straight).

It's going to be a busy month.

Age and Time

The plan for today/the weekend is Get Stuff Done. There will be an epic Home Depot trip this afternoon to prepare for a lot of little repair projects and get some painting supplies. Since I'm going to be at a convention this weekend, I figure Friday morning will be a good time to paint the bathroom since I won't have to sleep in the room next to it for a couple of nights. That means finding the right paint color. I've spent years with paint color cards stuck on the wall, trying to decide on the right shade of blue, but since I'm planning to sell soon, I now need to try to match the same white used in the rest of the house. And then I need to do a lot of cleaning/organizing. I've been invited to a party/house concert Saturday night and am still on the fence about going. On the one hand, it's something I'm interested in and might even be good for me professionally because the attendees are well within the target market for my writing. On the other hand, it's a bit out of my comfort zone (performing may be required), I'll only know a few of the people there, and getting home could be interesting, as the freeway between there and here will be shut down that night (I know the back roads, though). We'll see what condition I'm in after a day of Getting Stuff Done. I'll either be energized or collapse on the sofa.

Meanwhile, I've noticed a trend in my entertainment interests lately, and when I notice a trend I have to analyze it to figure out what it is I like about it. Then I have to see how I can use this in my work.

So lately I've found myself really interested in stories about people who are much older than they appear -- not like me still being asked for ID when I buy wine at the grocery store, but people who are centuries old but who look 30-something. And not vampires. Mostly, humans who've had their aging arrested somehow or who have been made immortal, but who don't have any other superpowers.

I think it started with Doctor Who and Matt Smith's version of the Doctor (though he doesn't really count as an ordinary human made immortal), where he looked very young but played the role like he was an old man. It really kicked into gear, though, when Rory spent 2,000 years as a kind of robot, then the universe was rebooted so he was never killed in the first place, but somehow he still had the 2,000 years of memories. They didn't come near making use of the potential of that, but there were moments when you got the weight of those 2,000 years in this young man.

There was the short-lived series New Amsterdam, with the immortal cop -- a Dutch soldier from the early days of settlement on Manhattan cursed with immortality. Now there's Forever, with the doctor made immortal a couple of centuries ago and now working as a medical examiner. Both of these series include one of the elements that I think fascinates me about this trope -- the role-reversed parent/child relationship. In New Amsterdam, there was the elderly man who was friends with the hero and who turned out to be his son. In Forever, the hero's close friend and father figure is actually his adopted son, a baby he rescued from a concentration camp at the end of WWII. This relationship is at the core of Forever, with the son sometimes looking after the "young" father as though he's a son (and that's the way the world sees them), but then when they're alone, they sometimes have those parent/child squabbles, with the seemingly younger man griping about the older son's fondness for that modern jazz music and the seemingly older man whining "Daaaaaad" when his father warns him not to do something. Doctor Who had a similar age-reversed family situation, with Rory and Amy's daughter being a couple of decades older than they were (due to time travel, though, not weird aging).

Then there have been a couple of versions of the Captain Hook story that have played with this, to varying degrees. It was most effective in the novel Alias Hook, in which Hook was immortal in Neverland, and over the centuries he did eventually grow up after watching generations of Lost Boys come and go. They sort of touch on this (but not as effectively as they should) in the version on TV's Once Upon a Time, where Hook spent a couple of centuries in Neverland not aging, so he's one of the oldest characters on the series, but played by one of the younger cast members. This mostly comes down to a few age jokes, as they barely remember that he's in a strange world, let alone a man out of time, so it's frustrating to me as a writer. They completely wasted the potential in another age-reversed relationship, where one of the Lost Boys he looked after and connected to ended up outside a curse that froze time for 28 years, so when they were reunited, the boy he knew was older than he was. Sometimes I really want to stage an armed takeover of the writers room for that show. The characters should sue them for malpractice.

So, why do I find this fascinating? I think as I get older, I find myself thinking of age and what it really means. I don't feel any different mentally or emotionally than I did as a teenager, even as I see gray hair. I took one of those "what's your real age?" online quizzes about your interests, and it gave me an age ten years older than I am. And yet I still get asked for ID to buy wine. Making a character's age extremely out of whack with his/her appearance is a way of exploring the concept of what age really means, if it means anything. I'm not sure why I'm fascinated with the out-of-order family relationships -- maybe a metaphor for aging parents? -- but I think it's mostly that it requires some creativity in writing. It takes characters out of neat little boxes and forces them to adjust.

I'm not sure how I can use this in a story, since it's probably less effective in print than it is on the screen. You see characters from the inside in a book, and no matter how many times you say that someone looks 30, if they act 100, that's what readers may see. I do have one idea in mind that involves someone being frozen in time for a long time -- a kind of Groundhog Day existence -- but I'm not sure how that will manifest. I think it'll mostly be more like time travel, suddenly being dumped into a strange environment, though she'll have made a lot of use of all that time to have a decent array of skill sets.

But that's a backburner story until I finish a few other things.

Reading Reviews

The publicist at my publisher isn't too worried about Harper Lee hijacking my release date. There's not a huge crossover audience. I suspect that the teen readers are still in the "ew, a sequel to a book I was forced to read" category, and it'll be literary people who are most excited. I did love To Kill a Mockingbird when I read it, but I've never had any desire to re-read it, and I'm not sure about reading the follow-up book. Sometimes, a book stands alone as a perfect entity, and I would rather leave it that way than follow up on it. There have been other books I've loved where I've avoided sequels. If there's enough material there to get a story out of it (and it isn't a genre situation where villains can arise), then it generally means things are disrupting these people's lives. I'd rather imagine what happens next than actually see it play out. But I'm weird that way. I haven't read the new Bridget Jones book that takes place more than a decade after Bridget and Mark Darcy got together.

For now, I need to worry about my own books. I've been going back and forth with my agent on cover copy for the next Fairy Tale book. She doesn't think my take is quite right, then I agree with her but think her take on it is all wrong, so I rewrite, and she's not sure about that. Eventually we'll agree on something that accurately describes the book. Meanwhile, they're getting info together to send to subrights agents, and I haven't been collecting or even reading reviews, so I don't have review quotes. Strangely, I find myself really sensitive about this series. I can't even bear to read positive reviews of it. The longer I'm in this business, the less I can deal with reviews, in general. When I started out with the Enchanted, Inc. series, I had Google alerts set up. By the seventh book, I didn't want to know. And it's not like I get a lot of bad reviews, so I'm not sure where this came from. I think I mostly don't want to be influenced by outside voices, good or bad. I've seen how dangerous that can be in other people's work. You'll never make everyone happy, so there's no point in catering to the fanbase. You just need to write your own stories.

Anyway, this will tie in to my next step in the book I'm working on because I need to come up with a paragraph to describe it, and if I can't describe it in a paragraph, I need to work more on the plot.

All this on a day when I really just want to crawl back in bed. I had a weird nightmare last night in which I was in grad school (I've seldom considered grad school because it's not that applicable to my life, but being in grad school has become a recurring nightmare) and taking a writing seminar that somehow involved both pointe shoes and cake decorating. And we weren't allowed to eat the cake. I'm not sure what this had to do with writing. At any rate, it didn't make for restful sleep, and then I woke up at 5 a.m. with a bad foot cramp. I managed to ease the worst of it, but it's still twinging. Maybe that's where the stuff about pointe shoes came from.

My Hijacked Release Date

The big news in the publishing world yesterday was that Harper Lee is finally releasing a sequel to To Kill a Mockingbird. It's actually a book written before the one that was published and takes place 20 years later. Apparently, an editor who saw this book told Harper Lee she was more interested in the events the main character remembered from her childhood and wanted to see that story, so she went back and wrote the book about the childhood events, then never published the original book. There's a bit of controversy about whether she wanted this book published. She'd said she didn't, but there's a new attorney in charge of her estate after the death of her sister, who previously controlled it. I've seen a remark by someone familiar with the situation that this book might have been a fallback in case the income was necessary to pay for Harper Lee's care in a nursing home (my current retirement plan is to stockpile books that can continue to be released in my "retirement," so that makes sense).

And guess who shares a publication date with this highly anticipated book? Yep, me. Both the sequel and my Rebel Mechanics will be released on July 14 (unless my publisher blinks and switches it).

I suppose there is both good and bad potential here. On the bad side, this means that there is absolutely no chance I could have a #1 bestseller that week. Not that I was in much danger of that. I don't have a "lead" title, so it wouldn't get the kind of promotion and bookstore placement necessary to have a bestseller. It's also likely that I won't get much publicity, since all book news that week will be on the highly anticipated book. Not that I expected a lot of mainstream publicity.

On the good side, this means that a lot of people will probably be going into bookstores that week, which increases the chances they'll be exposed to my book. That is, if the stores don't devote all display space to the other new book that week and don't bother to shelve anything else. I don't think there's that big a crossover audience, actually. As beloved as To Kill a Mockingbird is, I suspect that the majority of its sales come because it's required reading in so many schools. I know book people are drooling in anticipation, but there are a lot of people who may not be that excited about the sequel to a book they were forced to read in junior high. It will be interesting to see what happens with this release. I'm sure a lot of people will buy it because of the hype, and people who write about books are excited, but how does this really trickle down to the general book-buying public?

Now I can see myself visiting bookstores during release week and saying, "Hi, I'm not Harper Lee. I'm the slightly less reclusive Shanna Swendson, and I also have a book out."

I'm sure I can have fun with spinning this into some publicity advantage.

Girls in Towers

Yesterday was pretty productive. I got a fair amount of research reading done, and I had a few plot idea breakthroughs. I'm starting to see bits of mental movie for this book again. I've also done some PR thinking and planning. I may be about to make the scary leap into Twitter. I have a few more ideas I need to implement, so stay tuned for news.

In the meantime, I have a book to discuss! As you may have noticed, I have a thing for fairy tales. I also love history. And magic. I found a book that combines all of them, Bitter Greens by Kate Forsyth. It's a Rapunzel story that's also about the writing of the Rapunzel story. The story of the maiden in a tower may possibly have been a folk tale, but there were two very early published versions, so it might also have been what's often called a "literary fairy tale" that was written by a particular author, like Alice in Wonderland, The Wizard of Oz, or Peter Pan. The earliest version was Italian, and then there was a later French version, but apparently it would have been unlikely for the French author to have seen, heard of, or read the Italian version. This novel attempts to explain this. I suppose in a way that this book could be considered historical magical realism because the fantasy element is that the folk magic that was actually practiced -- love charms, curses, and the like -- really is magic and really works. But the book is based somewhat on real people and real events.

The author of the French version of the Rapunzel story was a scandalous noblewoman and novelist. She was banished to a convent by Louis XIV after one scandal too many. That much is true. In this novel, while she's in the convent, the elderly nun who tends the garden befriends her, and while they work in the garden together, the older nun tells her the story of a young girl who's taken away from her parents by a witch and locked in a tower.

The narrative involves stories within the story. There's the framing story of the woman being sent to the convent and trying to adapt to the abrupt change in lifestyle. There's the story the older nun tells about the girl in the tower. There are flashbacks to the main character's life, from childhood on up, explaining what led to her being sent to the convent. And then we also get the story of the witch's life and why she locked the girl in the tower.

If you're into history, there's a fun look at life in the court of Louis XIV and at life in Renaissance Venice. I found myself digging up Baroque music and wanting to read more about both time periods. The Rapunzel part of the story is one of the more interesting fairy tale fleshing-outs I've read. It makes the story make so much more sense by getting into the motives of everyone involved (and even explains the salad craving and why the witch is so uptight about her garden being invaded). I admit that the book was a bit slow-going at first, but it picked up once I got into it.

Now I think I need to re-watch Tangled.

Memory Lane

I had a yoga class this morning, so I'm feeling all stretchy and relaxed, and since it's a cold day, the temptation is to snuggle under a blanket and just read.

Fortunately, that's exactly what today's work requires! I have a few e-mails to send or respond to, and then I have some reference books to go through because I have an idea about the book I'm working on that needs some development, and I stopped by the library on the way home from yoga to pick up the books I need. I've got a theme in the works and I can feel the story coming together. This will be the perfect day to burrow under a blanket with a book and a notebook and do some planning and plotting.

Meanwhile, I got the office closets mostly cleared out over the weekend and have started putting other stuff in them. I'm discovering floor space. Soon I may achieve enough floor space for a plumber to easily access the upstairs bathroom.

The boxes I was sorting through were keepsake boxes from high school, college and my first job. There was a lot of stuff from the first job that I was able to trash, though I did keep all the work samples. I seriously doubt that work I did more than twenty years ago would be considered relevant for any job hunting I did now, in case the writing thing doesn't work out, but I like the idea of having them, just in case. I can always use this kind of stuff for career day-type talks. The high school memento box is pretty small, so I may make decisions on that later. I don't have kids to show these to, but again, since I'm now writing some YA I may be able to use that to show kids what I was doing at their age.

I did have one fun discovery in the first job box. I had the materials from a conference I went to in 1993 on my first trip to Washington, D.C. It was a conference for university PR and communications professionals, and I'm pretty sure I was the youngest person there. During the opening session, I looked around the room at the other attendees and noticed that there was one youngish guy who was kind of cute. I found myself daydreaming about how cool it would be if I could talk to him. And then during the first coffee break between sessions, I was totally surprised when he came up to me to talk. We ended up hanging around together for most of the rest of the conference, went to lunch on our own together that day and to dinner with a group that night. We made enough of a connection that we might have stayed in touch if e-mail had been more of a thing (I didn't get e-mail at work until the following year), but not enough of a connection to bother with long-distance phone calls or snail mail. I'd thought about him off and on over the years, mostly because that was one of the few instances where reality actually lived up to fantasy and came close to the novel that was playing out in my head, but he had a tricky last name, so all I remembered about him was his first name and where he worked. So when I found that conference folder, it turned out to have a roster of conference attendees, so I saw his last name. On a whim, I Googled him, and it turns out that he's become rather well-known. He contributes to a major newspaper and has written a couple of non-fiction books. I'd actually heard of him, but hadn't made the connection with the guy from the conference, probably because what I'd read didn't include photos and the subject he ended up specializing in wasn't something that came up in conversation. With the photos, I'm sure it's the same guy. It was kind of nice getting that trip back down memory lane to a really good time and to find out that he's done so well (and is still cute, but married now). I guess neither of us stayed in university PR. Some of my friends have been saying I should contact him, but I suspect that conference was far more meaningful to me than it was to him and I don't expect him to remember it at all, and I don't want to come across as a creepy stalker.

Now off to crawl under a blanket with my reference books.

Swirling Ideas

I managed to figure out the plot of the book I'm working on yesterday. Now I have to figure out how this affects the opening scenes I've already written. It's going to require moving some things around and adding some new things, but I'm not entirely sure if some of the scenes will be able to stay at all. It's going to be "drill into details" day. I need to start seeing the movie of this book in my head.

One problem is that another story has decided to pop up and do a little development right now. My head is generally a swirling mass of story ideas, story fragments, characters, and other things that could be stories. When one has built up enough to be written, it comes to the surface. Or sometimes I can focus on one enough to make it come to the surface so I can work on it. But every so often, one of the bits and pieces swirling around in there will randomly pop up and let me know some new detail about it.

In this case, it's one that's been backburnered for a few years. It's what I'm planning to write to follow up on my YA steampunk planned trilogy. I have two more books in that series to write before I can get to this one. I have one main character really well developed in my head. The other has been a cipher, but he suddenly came to life for me, and he's not at all what I expected him to be. It'll be a whole new character type for me to write. And then I realized that this book might actually involve a caper story -- one of those "assemble a team of experts to carry out a seemingly impossible job" things. That made the whole plot fall into place. It will require a lot of research to build the world I want for this book, so it still has to be backburnered. Unfortunately, until I can force that story back into the idea soup, it's currently a little more vivid and exciting than what I need to be working on.

I suppose this means I need to write faster so I can get to everything I want to write. I need to finish the third book in the Fairy Tale series. I suspect there will be more, but there will be a brief break while I work on the second steampunk book. Then there's an entirely different adult series I want to start that bridges the steampunk and contemporary fantasy, but that one will require lots of research and some travel, so it probably won't happen until next year. I guess I'll see how things go with the steampunk launch before I'll know how quickly I need to write the third book -- will the publisher want more books or will I independently publish the last two books?

And in the meantime, I need to get this house ready to sell, sell it, find a new house, and move. This is going to be a fun year.

Neighborhood Excitement

I got a cold call from a Realtor this morning asking if I'm thinking of selling my house because she has clients looking for this kind of thing all the time, so that means I need to get my act together. I have cleaning, decluttering and organizing to do, then I need to pretty much put a plumber on retainer for a day to fix a bunch of little things (ah, the joy of really hard water that corrodes everything). I have a few little carpentry repairs to do, and I need to repaint the downstairs bathroom and do some touchups elsewhere. I probably also need to get the garage door inspected and the opener possibly replaced, as I think the current code requires a sensor. So, yeah, I need to get busy.

We had a little excitement around here on Tuesday that helped reinforce my decision to move away from the townhouse and into a standalone house. I was on the conference call with Apple when I started hearing sirens. That's not odd, as my office overlooks a major road leading to the highway, so any wreck anywhere near means the fire trucks will be screaming past my office window. Then there were more sirens. And then something that sounded like someone shouting through a bullhorn. Then something that sounded like a helicopter circling. Something had to be up. So I checked the breaking news pages of the various local TV stations, in case it was a news helicopter. And it was. And the image on the breaking news page was of my complex. Two-alarm fire. Later, I went out to take out the trash and found the entire fire department lined up down the driveway. The fire trucks were a little farther along and it was the battalion commander trucks in front of my house. It turns out that the fire was in a building just around the corner and across the driveway. The only damage visible from outside is busted skylights -- possibly what the firefighters did to access the interior -- and the fire/water restoration service trucks were there about an hour later, with pumps running all night, and they were loading things into a Ryder truck, so it doesn't look like it was a total loss, and the structure seems to be fine. But still, when you share walls with other people, you can be affected by things they do. And it's a little weird to learn about something happening across the street by looking on the Internet.

In other news, I have a release date for the second book in the Fairy Tale series, To Catch a Queen -- March 3. That will be e-book, print and audio. I'll have a cover and a sneak peek soonish.

I don't have any obligations for the rest of the day and have already taken care of my morning errands, so I'm hoping that I can get some serious work done on redeveloping this book (and maybe a little housework). That is, if we don't have more neighborhood excitement.

Professional Jealousy

I finally have a new dishwasher! And to celebrate, how about a writing post? For those who are new here, I generally do a post about some aspect of writing -- the craft, the mechanics, the business, marketing, the writing life, etc. -- every other Wednesday. If you want to get these by e-mail, you can subscribe at http://groups.yahoo.com/group/writewithshanna/. I don't send anything else via that list, so you won't get spammed by book promo, or anything like that. Feel free to share with other writers, but just let people know who it came from.

Today's topic falls into the writing life category: professional jealousy. In a business this public, it's nearly impossible not to compare yourself to others. You generally hear when someone sells a book because that gets announced. You know when someone finals in or wins a contest. You definitely know when a book gets published. You know whether a book makes a bestseller list. You can see if the publisher is doing a lot of promotional activity. You can check out reviews and Amazon rankings. You know who's being invited as guest of honor to conventions. That all makes it easy to tell how other people are doing in comparison to you and your own goals.

How this affects you can be either positive or negative, depending on how you deal with it. You can let jealousy consume you in a negative way so that it becomes a distraction. You can derail your own career by chasing after the career someone else has if that leads you to write something that isn't really what you need to be writing or miss opportunities that lead in a different direction. You can poison professional relationships if you let your jealousy make you resent other authors or if you start demanding things of your agent or editor based on what you think someone else is getting. If you go public with your jealousy or let your jealousy affect the way you behave in public, it can affect your image or the way fans see you (passive-aggressive digs at another author on convention or conference panels, for instance, may turn people off of trying your work).

The truth is, although there's a lot of stuff that's public about a writing career, the public elements don't tell the whole story, and they only tell a snapshot at a moment in time. A book that never makes a bestseller list can actually end up selling more copies over time than a "bestseller." You may not have made a list, but you might be making more money than the bestseller. Some careers move in fits and starts instead of a steady upward trajectory, and some burst out of the gate in a big way. The person who is successful now may have had a few false starts along the way. Someone who got a huge start may crash and burn. When I sold the first book in my series with only one publisher making an offer and a modest advance, I was jealous of someone I knew whose book sold in a big auction not long afterward. It turned out that she was terrified of what she had to live up to because her publisher had huge expectations for that book, something I didn't have to worry about. There are authors who have the things I think I want in a career -- a dedicated and vocal fan base, guest of honor invitations to conventions, name recognition -- who mention on Facebook that they're worried about being able to pay bills or the mortgage, a problem I haven't faced in spite of my relative obscurity. So the things you're comparing yourself to may not be what you think they are.

How can you keep professional jealousy from becoming toxic? First, remind yourself that it may not be what it looks like. Second, take stock of what you want for your career -- what you really want and what would make you happy, not what someone else has. Then figure out what it will take for you to get what you want out of your career and focus on that. Use any jealousy as a motivation for going after what you want. Emulate what the people who have what you want are doing rather than envying them. What are they doing to achieve their success? While there are cases where lightning strikes and there's no rational explanation for why one book explodes, usually there's something behind that success -- most often, a lot of hard work.

If you find yourself really being sidetracked by comparing yourself to others, cut yourself off from getting your fix. Resist the temptation to look at bestseller lists, read your rivals' reviews or compare Amazon rankings. Focus on what you need to do. Most of this career is entirely out of your control. The only thing you control entirely is how much you write, the kinds of stories you write, and how well you write them.

I think I need to embroider that on a throw pillow.

A New Appreciation for Mornings

Either all this fresh air, sunshine and exercise is nudging me into earlier mornings, the days are getting longer, or I've reset my body clock after a lot of events lately that required early rising because I've been getting up on my own earlier than I normally do at this time of year. Morning people would point and laugh at me and people with regular 8-5 jobs would pat me on the head and call me adorable, but it's still early for me. I'm going to have to reset the "wake" time on my thermostat so I don't have to get up to a cold house. And it's amazing how much more I get done in the day with that half-hour (or more) head start. I've already done a groceries and gas run today and may have time for a little housework before lunch.

I had a big breakthrough on figuring out this book yesterday by going back and figuring out what the heroine wants and what might stop her from getting it. That suddenly gave me a structure to hang everything else on. I've realized that I tend to handle the plot in my books like a mystery novel, where finding the identity of the villain and figuring out the villain's scheme is a big part of the story, so the only direct confrontation with anyone other than henchmen comes in the climax of the book. I'm going to force myself to break that pattern and introduce the villain up front, so that the identity of the villain isn't a mystery, nor is what the villain wants to do, and there's a lot of direct conflict through the whole story. I suppose I've had more direct conflict in this series than in the Enchanted, Inc. series, and in the first book we knew who the villain was all along, if not what her plan was. But I figure that with a steel magnolia southern belle kind of heroine, I need to do at least one book where she's up against the villain from the start and has to at least pretend to play nice because it's not a situation that allows for open opposition until later in the story. I'm already cackling with glee at the thought of getting to write that much thinly veiled "bless your heart" passive aggression.

Now I just have to figure out how what I've written already fits into this concept. I'm not really changing the actual plot that drastically, just the way I'm telling the story.

However, this afternoon's primary event will be a conference call with Apple about how to sell more books through the iBookstore. I'm totally in favor of that.

Meanwhile, there was a runthrough of the first act of Mary Poppins last night. The kids had more or less learned the songs but were still using scripts for the dialogue (except for a few high achievers) and they hadn't done all the blocking and choreography. I sat and watched and knitted until they reached a song where the chorus sings. It was all very cute because these are mostly junior high kids. Mary is being played by a recent college graduate who teaches one of the choirs at the high school (it's a tough enough role to require a ringer), and the other main roles other than Jane and Michael are high school kids, and then they're filling in the chorus and smaller roles with the younger kids (which is why the adult choir is helping out with the chorus parts). Jane and Michael are actual children (and Jane was one of the ones who was already off-book). At this point, there's a lot more enthusiasm than polish, but they have nearly two more months to work on this. A lot of the cast were part of the bunch when I chaperoned the choir tour a few years ago. I figure that hanging out with teens counts as work, since I have a YA novel coming out.

And tomorrow we'll see if I finally get that dishwasher or if they find something else to screw up.

Feeling Fit

I'm feeling all fit and healthy right now, after starting the morning with a yoga class. I've done yoga with exercise videos or books before, but hadn't taken a real class. Unfortunately, it can be hard to make myself get around to doing the videos or workouts in a book, so since my church has a class on Monday mornings, I thought I'd give that a shot. And I really liked it. One thing the class forces me to do is slow down and remember to keep breathing. I have a bad habit of holding my breath, when yoga is supposed to be all about the breathing. I think this will be a good way to start my weeks.

And I kind of needed the stretch after my Saturday fun. I did a hike with the church's women's hiking group, and boy, this bunch was hardcore. When I go walking or hiking with friends, I'm usually the one out ahead who has to think to slow down for others. About half of this group left me in the dust. I started out keeping up with the leaders, but when I paused for a drink of water, I fell to about the middle of the group. They don't bother to pause to rest or drink water. They have those long tubes on their water bottles coming around to their backpack straps so they just lean over for a sip rather than having to get a bottle out of the side pocket of their packs. Once I fell back, I remembered that the main reason I hike is to just enjoy being outdoors, and you can't see the scenery when you're zipping past at supersonic speeds. I ended up with what was essentially a solo hike with backup. I was walking on my own so I could look around and think, but there were people nearby who'd notice if I didn't show up at the end. We ended up doing a little more than nine miles in less than four hours of walking (with a stop for lunch before we turned back).

I was very glad I decided to get new hiking boots because my old ones would have been killing me. They have rather stiff soles, and I found boots with the more flexible soles like on my walking shoes. That meant I didn't get blisters. I was really stiff, sore and tired at the end of the hike and spent the rest of the day on the sofa watching figure skating, but I was more mobile than I expected yesterday, just a little stiff. I liked the trail and will have to go back there some other time. I mentioned my experience to a couple of the women in choir, and they'd either expected or experienced the same thing, so we may start a rival hiking group for people who aren't trying to set a land speed record. The core of this group are the kind of people who consider "fitness" a hobby and who came to this hike after a bootcamp workout. They set timers and were trying to beat their last time. When I hike, I may walk briskly, but when I reach an interesting spot, I may stop for a drink or snack or to look around. If I keep track of time, it's more about "I hiked four hours" instead of "I  managed to do that trail faster than the last time."

Now I have a day ahead of me without anything major on the to-do list, which means I need to get back into writing, if I can figure out what's going on in this book. It's being very elusive.

Then tonight I have a Mary Poppins rehearsal so the invisible backup chorus can practice with the actual cast. I'm bringing my knitting because I imagine there will be a lot of down time.

The Lost Art of Customer Service

Perhaps I praised Home Depot too soon. I was supposed to get a call yesterday to give me my delivery window for today. When I didn't get a call, I got up early this morning to make sure I was up and dressed before anyone could show up, and then I called the delivery service number to check. They had no record of a delivery for me today anywhere in their system and said I need to call the store. Since the store is just down the street and I need to run some errands anyway, I think I may just go to the store in person with my paperwork and see what the deal is because calling a retail store seldom does much good -- you frequently end up on hold or transferred around. I'll be nice, but they may get to see the part of me that Sophie (the heroine of the Fairy Tale series) comes from. It's a little too chilly for the feminine floral dress, though.

I doubt they'll be able to reschedule the delivery for today, and they don't let you pick a window, so that means I can't do it Monday because I have a yoga class starting Monday morning. Unless maybe they let me pick a window after they messed up. There will need to be some groveling, I think.

And … I just got a call. They lost the order in their system. But now they can't deliver until Wednesday. They could have done it Saturday, but I already have Saturday plans and I refuse to rearrange my life according to their incompetence (and probably spend the whole day waiting -- I'd have to cancel my hiking trip, then they'd show up well after the trip would have been over). It's not like I haven't been hand washing dishes for years. I'm still going to give some really low marks on the inevitable "how did we do" customer service survey. See, this is part of why I procrastinated so long. Getting things delivered and installed is such a hassle. That plan I had to put the dishwasher on wheels and ride it down the hill to my house from the Home Depot is starting to sound not quite so crazy.

And here I was, all excited last night about washing my last sinkful of dishes.

Oh well. Now I guess I can go get groceries and maybe get crazy and buy some new hiking boots, since I'm not sure how well my repairs will hold, and I don't want to be four miles from the car when the sole falls off. And then I might actually get some work done.

Putting the Subconscious to Work

I ended up spending most of yesterday going through yet another round of proofreading on the steampunk book, going over the latest proofreader's questions. We've reached the point where the editors are editing each other, where the latest editor is suggesting inserting a word that the previous editor deleted. That means today I need to catch up on yesterday's to-do list, including cleaning the kitchen and living room so the new dishwasher can be easily brought into the kitchen and installed (yay!).

Tonight I'm supposed to find out what my delivery window is, so I'll then be able to plan my Friday. I'll need to make a grocery run because the church women's hiking group is doing a hike on Saturday, and that means I'll need something for lunch. I'm not a big sandwich fan, so I seldom have sandwich ingredients on hand. Thanks to my vacation preparation and a Christmas gift, I have a new backpack and two insulated bottles, one with a straw lid for cool water and one with a flip-top lid for hot tea. This is going to be a four-hour hike of about ten miles, so I'll definitely need lunch and snacks. I imagine I'll sleep well that night. And maybe not walk too easily the next day.

I really need to get back into that book I've been working on, but I don't think the subconscious is ready yet. It's stewing on something, and little things keep popping up, but they aren't quite right. I feel like I'm getting closer. I'm normally so linear and plot-driven that this is weird for me, but it just seems to be the way this particular series works. It may be a relief to go back to the steampunk series once this is done. That one's so straightforward (relatively speaking).

So maybe my brain can be doing behind-the-scenes work while I clean house and hike.

Rearranging Routines

I now have a dishwasher, or I will on Friday. Theoretically. I think that the configuration is set up so that they will install it, but there's little in my house that would be considered "standard," and the installation info sheet and the way the guy at the Home Depot talked made it sound like the installation guys will get the vapors and run screaming if they have to do anything that looks suspiciously like "thinking" or "work." At least this time I not only got help in the appliance department but got a full lecture on household plumbing, what to look for and what to do about it, and the guy treated me like he thought I was intelligent and competent enough to check things out for myself. And once I explained my situation about just needing a functional dishwasher so I could sell the house, he didn't try to upsell me and skipped past the extended warranty sales pitch. If I were staying in the house, I might have bought something a little nicer, but what I got should do the trick. As I told the sales guy, the kind of person who wants a dishwasher with Internet access that can control space probes probably isn't going to be buying this kind of house. Now I need to clean up my kitchen and living room (to create an easy pathway) and empty a couple of cabinets where the various connections go.

This is going to be a huge change in routine for me. For one thing, the dishwasher hasn't been entirely empty in years, since I've been using it as a large dish drain and I mostly just use the dishes straight from it instead of putting them away in the cabinet. I had to rearrange the cabinets to put things away so I could pull the dishwasher out and check the connections. Then this morning when I was making breakfast, it was weird to have to get dishes out of the cabinet instead of just grabbing them from the dishwasher. But it will be lovely to have the dishes washed with the push of a button, particularly on days when I'm busy (or sick) several days in a row and don't have time for hand washing.

Tonight I get to try some new tricks I learned last weekend on the little imps. I have one game that might just make their heads explode (it requires actually paying attention). There's one thing I want to try that I'm a little afraid of because I can see what will happen, but I may have a way around that consequence. The speaker suggested that a way to focus on the tune of a song and get kids to actually sing was to have them meow, bark or make some other noise to the tune instead of singing the words, then switch to the words once they know the melody. I'm afraid that once my kids get to meow a song, they will forever meow it and never bother with the words. I may experiment with a song we won't be singing in public so that it doesn't matter if they meow the song forever and think of it as the meow song.

Meanwhile, I have a few little things to clear up on the steampunk book, plus some other stuff I need to do to get Fairy Tale book 2 ready. Eventually I'll manage to get back to writing book 3.

And a Sassy Red Hat

We had another nice day yesterday, so I took another long walk. This time, I got out the hiking boots and went off the paved trails. The church women's hiking group is doing a hike Saturday morning, so I figured I needed to get in better shape and test the repair on my hiking boots. The sole came off the last time I wore them, and I think it needs more glue. Or I could do something really crazy and buy a new pair of boots. These are nearly 15 years old and were cheap to begin with.

The other wild and crazy thing I'm going to buy this week is a new dishwasher. In fact, I'm going to make myself head out this afternoon. I don't know why I've been procrastinating so much about this. I first planned to replace it when it initially broke nearly five years ago. I was going to use my tax refund to buy it, since that was a low-income year, but then I messed up my shoulder and ended up in physical therapy, and there went that money. Then a few years ago when I started making money again I actually went to the Home Depot to buy a dishwasher but couldn't get anyone to acknowledge my existence. I came home and fired off a nastygram to their customer service e-mail address, then had a nice phone chat with the manager about how weird it was that I get so much help everywhere else in the store but not in the one area where I can't buy something without help -- if I want a $1 packet of screws, I get helped even though I can take them off the rack and to the cash register myself. When I'm going to spend hundreds of dollars on an appliance and can't do so without an associate, they have one guy in the department who didn't give me so much as an "I'll be with you in a moment" while he helped another customer and then wandered off after they were done without even acknowledging me. And I think that experience has something to do with why I keep saying I'm going to do it and then dragging my feet about it. Now watch this time go so smoothly and wonderfully that I wonder why I've been hand-washing dishes for so long (or else I'll manage to talk myself out of going and procrastinate again).

Tonight is a TV break because of politics, but otherwise, why do they put absolutely everything on Tuesday nights? I'm always out of the house because of ballet, and it takes me nearly a week to watch everything OnDemand. I usually manage to watch NCIS before I head to ballet. But then there's also Person of Interest and Forever. I used to prioritize Person of Interest to watch after choir on Wednesdays, but I find myself wanting to watch Forever first because Person of Interest gets pretty stressful and Forever is just plain fun, feel-good stuff (but I shouldn't get too attached because the ratings are terrible -- please, if you're a ratings household, watch this show!). Now they've added Parks and Recreation to Tuesdays, and then there's Agent Carter. I haven't watched any of the Marvel superhero movies or Agents of Shield, but I kind of love this, and I suspect the clothes have a lot to do with it. I want to be Agent Carter when I grow up. I love the sassy 1940s dame kind of character, and then there are the suits with the nipped-at-the-waist jackets and swingy skirts, and the shoes and the hats, and swoooooon. I think this is a limited run show, though I'm hoping that it does well enough that they decide to make it a real series. And I need a red fedora. I bet I'd get service at Home Depot if I had a sassy red hat.

And so I'm barely caught up on Tuesday night before the next Tuesday comes along. This week, I guess I'll get a break. Maybe I'll do more reading.

Art Immersion

And we have yet another weekend I need a weekend to recover from. I could claim today as a holiday, since it technically is one, but I took Thursday off already and I have a lot to catch up on.

Thursday I did actually make it to the art museum. I don't know if it was just that it was a big exhibit or if it was that it was the last two weeks of the exhibit, but the museum was really crowded. I didn't spend all that much time in the big exhibit, just enough to revel in being that close to works by Degas, Monet and Renoir. Then I scooted over to the permanent collection in the museum's original building, which was a lot more peaceful, and I got to spend a lot of time up close with the works, including a small painting that may have been Michelangelo's first painting, from when he was around 12 or 13. That was rather mindblowing to contemplate. The big exhibit was on Impressionism, and while I went for the Degas dancers (they only had one of those), I ended up spending more time contemplating the clothing in the paintings with my steampunk work in mind.

Then it was two days of workshops for church music leaders. I spent Friday in sessions aimed at working with preschoolers. We had a smallish group, so there was a lot of discussion, with ideas being exchanged. When I got to our room early for one of the afternoon sessions, I chatted some with the workshop speaker, and she said I should be doing this full-time because I clearly understood children. Just the thought of spending more than 45 minutes a week with a room full of small children gave me a panic attack -- probably because I do understand them. Saturday I went to two sessions with a children's choir director -- the more serious musical kind, not the play around with small children kind. She'd worked in schools, in churches and in an auditioned city choir. I probably learned more about singing than about directing a choir from those sessions because my kids aren't quite yet at that level, but I did get some ideas. For the last session, I went to one just for my own interest on building a choir. I got some great feedback on tone, etc. (it was a small audience, I was sitting in front, and the speaker ended up mostly directing everything at me), but also got some ideas for things I could do with the kids. Then he did this really interesting exercise on arranging singers in a choir, which I had to be one of the demonstration examples for. He had a group of us line up, then sing in groups of three, and then he'd rearrange us and try with another group of three until he had us arranged in the best way. The result was almost magical. It was eerie the difference it made, both in the sound and in the way it felt. My choir director was also in this workshop, so I have a feeling I know what's coming Wednesday night. There may be a revolt because most people sit next to their friends. I'll be curious to see how this works. I tend to try to sit next to the people who feel right when we sing, regardless of social considerations, so we'll see if I've been choosing correctly.

In between those workshop sessions, they had "reading" sessions in which they passed out packets of music chosen by the various clinicians, who then led all the attendees in singing them. I think the idea was to expose choir directors to different pieces of music that they might then purchase for their choirs (I was sitting near my choir director, and he kept marking or folding down pages -- I made sure to let him know when I liked something). I found it valuable practice in sight reading and forcing myself to be more confident. I felt a bit out of my league surrounded by people who do this for a living and who have degrees in music, when I'm a volunteer with little "formal" musical training, just school band, church choir and a few community college music classes here and there. It was also weird not sitting by section, so I wasn't necessarily bolstered by other people singing the same part. I did get to sing first soprano, for a change, since I figured that parts weren't being assigned and I wasn't obligated to sing second. I got to bust out a high B-flat at the end of the last song, and some of the people sitting in front of me turned to give me thumbs up, and a few people approached me later to comment on me being the one with the B-flat. I got to act modest and say that in my choir I'm a second soprano. I was sitting next to my choir director, but I don't know if he caught the joke and the implication of what that said about our choir.

Then Sunday was a gorgeous day, so I went for a nice, long walk in the woods.

Now I have to catch up on housework (my kitchen got very messy) and regular work and get back in the swing of things.

Finding the Core

Yesterday I re-read the start I've made on book 3 in the Fairy Tale series, and while there's still a lot I like about it, I don't quite feel like I've got it nailed down. I need to do some thinking. Since I'll be spending Friday and Saturday at a choristers guild workshop, I think I may go to a museum today. Immersing myself in other arts might help the subconscious. Plus, there are Degas works at the exhibit I think I'll go to, and all that ballet plays into the book.

Of course, that's if I manage to get out of my pajamas (but I deliberately didn't get dressed yet because once I put on the sweats, I know I won't want to put on "going out" clothes, but I didn't want to drink my tea and catch up on e-mail, etc., in my "going out" clothes). No matter what, I will have to go out and do something eventually because it's quarterly tax payment day (whee) and I need milk.

I think the problem with the book is that I haven't yet found the core of it. I have events happening and a villain in mind, but the villain I have in mind isn't yet clicking with the events for me. I like the scenes I've written, but they feel like scenes rather than a story so far.

I've had this problem with every book in this series, where I have to write a lot of the book before I figure out what it's about, and then I have to rewrite it. There's a dreamlike quality to the writing process that I haven't had in anything else I've written.

Incidentally, A Fairy Tale is eligible for a Hugo Award, if you're into that kind of thing and able to nominate. It feels weird to do even that much campaigning, so I'll stop now.

And I suppose that if I'm going to go out, I should start getting ready to do so. I'll be offline tomorrow because I have to make it across town ridiculously early (for me). Wouldn't you know, they're closing the freeway between me and the conference site this weekend for construction. I will be making use of my knowledge of surface streets.

Overused Words

Having just finished a round of copyediting and proofreading, I feel like I've learned some valuable lessons that I should pass on.

One thing is that it's a really good idea to give the near-final version of your book a quick read -- reading as much as possible in as few sittings as possible. That will make overused words and phrases pop out at you. If you read a word or phrase once in a reading session, it's not so bad. If it pops up multiple times, you start to notice. If one does catch your eye, do a global search and you may be surprised how many times it comes up.

Fixing this may not just be a case of using your thesaurus. There may be another issue at work. For instance, in a recent book I was working on, the phrase "as though" and the word "seemed" jumped out at me. At first, I started changing some of the uses of "as though" to "like" or "as if," but then I noticed the "seemed" overload and realized that I was using weasel words. I was trying to avoid breaking point of view by having it "seem" to the character what was happening when the character couldn't get into the other person's head to know for sure, but I'd gone overboard. There were plenty of cases where it wasn't "as though" something was true or even that it "seemed" it was true. It was just true. Or I could find another verb. Instead of saying "It seemed as though she was tired," I could say "She looked tired." Or I could describe the way her feet were dragging, her shoulders sagging, her eyelids drooping, etc.

Another way to catch this sort of thing is to read your manuscript out loud. Your eye may skim over things like this, but when you hear it said out loud, it will be a lot more obvious. As a bonus, when you read out loud, you have to read every word, so you know what's really on the page instead of your brain filling in blanks or fixing things for you. It's also a good way to check awkward phrasing and to make sure your dialogue sounds like actual human speech.

I think a lot of this becomes more important if there's a chance that your books will become audiobooks. When you listen to a book, you hear all those words that you may skim past when you're reading. I've listened to friends discussing audiobooks and how they can't listen to the work of some authors they enjoy reading because of verbal tics that get annoying when reading out loud. For instance, the use of the word "said" for every dialogue tag. One oft-repeated bit of writing advice is that you shouldn't use fancy synonyms for "said" (uttered, shouted, declaimed, etc.) with dialogue because "said" is an invisible word. It's no longer invisible in an audiobook, and the repetition gets annoying. In some cases, such as a two-person conversation, tags aren't necessary for every line. You can use action to indicate who's talking. And those synonyms sometimes actually work.

Of course, the more engrossing your story is, the less likely it will be that someone will notice minor flaws. But you don't want to give any reason to pull readers out of the story.

Pretending to be Famous

I think the January hibernation impulse is starting to kick in. I barely dragged myself out of bed, and I could easily go right back and take a nap now. I'm in trouble for Friday and Saturday (particularly Friday, when I'll have to face rush hour) when I have to be across town and in a workshop session at about the same time that I usually get out of bed. This will all be a good reminder of why I need to keep the writing thing working for me because I never again want to go back to doing the get up, drive across town, spend a day on someone else's schedule, then drive back across town thing on a daily basis. At least this one will be fun and involve lots of singing.

I'm not going to talk about a specific book with identifying details this week because I can't really recommend the book I read last week. It did bring up something interesting that made me think, though. It was a case of either the title/description being misleading or me misinterpreting the description so I thought it was something else, but it turned out to fit the "New Adult" formula -- damaged female college student/grad student with a bookish/literary bent gets all her material needs suddenly taken care of and meets a wealthy, powerful, older (but still young) guy. I guess that makes sense as a fantasy. When you're in school, I'd imagine that the heavens opening up and showering you with grants, a cute apartment you'd never be able to afford, a computer and a bonus hot guy who can afford to take you to all the fanciest restaurants in town sounds like a wonderful thing. Maybe I just have jealousy issues, but the fact that I had a more normal college existence of living in the dorm and feeling like Olive Garden was a fancy dining-out splurge makes me resent the fictional characters rather than living vicariously through them.

In this book, the way we managed to have a wealthy man who was still young enough to be hot to a grad student was that he was a successful novelist, and that really was a through the rabbit hole/looking glass experience for me to read. Granted, I'm not as mega-successful as he was supposed to be, since his books were being made into movies. That automatically ups the income and the name recognition. But it was funny to read about someone with my job being a kind of fantasy figure. To me, it's just normal life, and I'm just me, the same person I've always been. I suppose to some people I might count as a celebrity, which always feels weird. I have had a few minor freakouts from people who learned who I was after talking to me for a while. I guess you don't expect the person sitting next to you at a city-wide choir rehearsal to be an author whose books you've read. And I have had a few people who were visibly shaking when they approached me at booksignings (it's funny, I do that when I meet favorite authors, but I don't expect people to do it for me).

However, I can't get an impossible restaurant reservation on the strength of my name. I'm actually a little creeped out by people who develop crushes on me because of my books and think that means they really know me. I would be extremely cautious about getting into a relationship with someone who started as a fan (I do have fans who have become friends, but that was more from hanging out together at conventions. I'm probably not going to start dating someone I meet because he shows up at my booksigning). On the other hand, I don't think it's a wild and crazy, subversive prank to sign the copies of my books that are on the shelf in a bookstore (when I read that scene, I immediately flipped to the author bio to verify my assumption that this was the author's first book. Yep. Once you've had one published, you know that this isn't that wild and crazy but rather something you're expected to do).

I suppose much of the world has a view of writing as a rather glamorous career, and it does have its moments. I do get to meet interesting people and be in the public eye at times. I spend way more time wearing sweatpants and refusing to leave the house. I sometimes say that I have two modes in my career. When I'm being an "author," I dress up, put on makeup and go pretend to be famous. When I'm being a "writer," I'm a slob at home churning out the words. The writer part is about 90 percent or more, depending on my publication and event schedule. You have to do the hard part before you get to do the glamorous part.

Smash, Thud, Clang, Grunt

I had the kind of weekend that requires a weekend for recovery. Saturday, I got together with a group of friends to see the third Hobbit movie, then we had a gathering afterward. I then had two hours at home before I had a choir party. Sunday, I sang in both services. And meanwhile I was doing one final pass on my book over the weekend, squeezing in proofreading time among all these other activities. I got most of the work done by bringing my laptop to church, and after I sang in the first service when others in the ensemble were heading out, I hung out in the choir room during the rest of the service and between services and did my editing. It was a pretty good working environment because it was quiet, no one else was in there, and there weren't a lot of distractions because the church WiFi doesn't work well in the choir room. However, when the organ kicked in at the end of the first service while I was deeply absorbed in my work, I was somewhat startled. And then the sermon (that I heard in the second service) turned out to be about honoring the Sabbath. Oops. But I usually avoid working on Sundays unless I have a deadline, and I'd told my agent I'd have this book to her on Monday morning.

It was a good thing I did one more pass because I caught a few errors and did some general improving work. I now have a longer list of things to look for.

I have to admit to being rather disappointed in the Hobbit trilogy. The casting was perfect, the performances were wonderful, and there was a lot to like about it, but the good stuff was buried in a lot of bloat. It's a little book that didn't need to be overly expanded into an epic. I never got around to seeing the second movie in the theater and finally saw it on HBO last week. I got a lot of knitting done during it because while all I heard was "smash, thud, clang, grunt" I didn't have to look at the screen, since I wasn't missing anything. I could pause my work and look up when characters were actually interacting. For the third one, I wish I'd had my knitting with me because there was a lot of "smash, thud, clang, grunt." I kept checking my watch during the endless battle scenes (when I wasn't providing mental commentary). The parts where the characters actually talked to each other were so good, but I think we could have figured out that there were epic battles raging without having to see every little detail.

Also in the fantasy realm, I'm rather amused by Galavant, that sort of fantasy comedy musical TV series (though they haven't introduced magic yet, so I guess it's technically not fantasy). It's not the best show ever, but there's usually at least one bit that has me in hysterics. Last week, it was the super-slow joust and the "Maybe You're Not the Worst Thing Ever" romantic ballad. This week, it was the inept water-adjacent pirates who'd taken up sustainable agriculture (made even funnier by the fact that Hugh Bonneville was playing the pirate king, and it was in the time slot right before Downton Abbey came on another channel). Oh, and there was also the band put together from the executioners, since the king had executed all the musicians, and the executioners were the next best thing, since they had a drum. I end up having to rewatch OnDemand to catch all the jokes.

This week's fun: I need to write cover copy, take care of some business/promo stuff and maybe get back into writing book 3, but it's a short week because I have a Choristers Guild workshop Friday and Saturday and there are some other things I need/want to do this week, so maybe it will be a thinking/reviewing week before I dive in.

Being a Marketing Slacker

I have 96 more pages to proofread, and then I'll be done with this book, other than writing cover copy, deciding on a cover design (the art is done), reviewing the e-book and print book layout, and then marketing, etc. Then next week I can get back to working on the next book.

I've somehow fallen into a group of independent/self-published authors on Facebook, and seeing what they do for publicity/marketing is making me feel like a slacker.

Apparently, I should have a newsletter. I haven't done much of this -- I once had a Yahoo group mailing list, but I haven't used it much -- mostly because I hate these as a reader. Then again, I haven't actively signed up for any author newsletters. The ones I've received are from people who must have put their entire address book into the mailing list, so they're from people who may have e-mailed me once or twice, people I might have e-mailed once or twice, people I've been on another mailing list with or people I've been in an organization with. I might feel differently if I had actually signed up because I wanted to receive an author's news. I'm not sure how many more people I'd read with a newsletter, though, because that Yahoo list I had didn't have as many people on it as my usual blog hit count. Unless maybe they were entirely different people? So maybe there are some people who read my blog, some people who follow me on Facebook and some people who might want a newsletter? I can't imagine I'd reach new people with a newsletter because why would anyone sign up for it if they hadn't heard of me? I know some authors do contests to build their mailing lists -- like giving away an iPad or a Kindle -- but from what I've seen, these get spread around contest junkie groups, they sign up just to win, and then they unsubscribe from the newsletter immediately (or even mark it as spam, which can lead to the mailing service dropping you). I'm not even sure what I'd put in a newsletter, and some of these authors do them monthly. Romance authors do stuff like recipes and knitting patterns, but I don't know about my audience. However, I do have at least three books scheduled for this year, so I could probably sustain a quarterly newsletter. Thoughts?

Then they have "street teams." I've heard about this for traditionally published authors, where they cultivate groups of fans to go into bookstores and ask for their books, turn them face-out on shelves, pass out bookmarks, etc. I'm not sure what a street team would do for books mostly available online. Maybe virtual street teams? Get people to blog, Tweet, etc., about their books and post Amazon reviews? It may be the Scandinavian in me coming out (there's a cultural distaste for marketing -- something fun when you're doing PR for Ericsson), but there's something that seems a little dishonest to me about officially cultivating and even rewarding people for doing the stuff that fans do spontaneously, so that if they're doing it because of the reward but other people think it's just them being fans, then it's misrepresented. I suppose I'm fortunate that my fans seem to be good about talking about my books without being recruited and paid to do so.

Then people were posting pictures of their offices and showing their swag closets full of stuff they give away for promotional purposes. I have a box of bookmarks. Does that count? I don't even know if any of that works. I mostly use the bookmarks as a kind of business card for when I meet people who say, "Oh, you're a writer? What do you write?" and I can hand them a bookmark that lists my first four books in order. I probably need to start coming up with promo items for the new series and the steampunk book.

In my experience, one of the best ways to boost sales for all books is to put a new book out. When my publisher has done BookBub ads, that's also been effective. I may look into doing a promo like that for the first book in the Fairy Tale series when the third one comes out (the first one becomes a loss leader, so where you reap the benefit is from having more books that can also be boosted).

But I'm not doing too badly, so maybe I should keep doing what I'm doing and not worry about it so much.

Death Throes

As of last night, my holidays are truly over, since I was back to having children's choir and regular choir practice. I only had seven kids, but they were all insane. It got cold, so instead of having recess at school that day, they watched a movie inside, and that meant they were bouncing off the walls by the time I got them. There was one thing that actually got their attention, and it was the snowman counting song. I don't know what it is about this song, but every group I've had absolutely loves it. Basically, the song is about a line of snowmen, and then with each verse, one melts. I've done it with the kids melting in order or by pointing to kids at random and having them melt until they're all melted. I don't know that we've ever done that one without the kids begging "again!" We did it three times last night, and the meltings got more and more dramatic. We're talking William Shatner-quality emoting. "Light … fading. Darkness … closing … in. Goodbye … cruel … world." There was even one who called out, "I'm not done melting yet," when we went on to the next verse before he was done with his drawn-out death scene.

But hey, it kept them occupied and participating instead of running around and screaming, so I could have kept it up all night. And it was really fun watching their death throes. Not because I wanted them dead, but I liked seeing how creative they were. I suppose I'll need a real lesson plan next week.

Otherwise, I'm singing in an ensemble Sunday morning for the early service and someone wants to put together a flute ensemble for later in the year, so I have to start practicing again. I wonder if the stage fright cure from singing also applies to instruments. I used to be as bad for instruments as I was for singing.

But the priority this week is getting through my last round of proofreading. The challenge there is that I need frequent breaks so I don't zone out, but then that reduces the amount I can get done in a day. So I have to be careful about what I start to do on the breaks so the breaks don't become longer than the work sessions. I do still like the book, which is good. Since I'm mostly looking at the writing itself on this round rather than the story and characters, I'm actually noticing that there is some good writing there. I'm normally more focused on the story when I work, but I guess I do know how to string words together.

In other news, it looks like this summer's steampunk book is now available for pre-order in e-book form, at Amazon, at least, and it's already on all the teen steampunk bestseller lists, including the one that's general books, not just Kindle books. With any luck, that means that when the book is actually available it will do even better.

I Feel the Earth Move

We've had a rather earthshaking time of it lately -- literally. There have been at least 10 earthquakes in the past 24 hours in my city. All of them have been relatively minor -- people in California are sneering -- but as the Texans responded, how would they deal with that many tornadoes, even minor ones? If you've had maybe one tornado in the past 50 years, then have 15 in two months, and then 10 in one day, it's rather shocking, even if they're EF-1s.

I definitely noticed the first one, a 3.5, yesterday afternoon. My whole house shook, things rattled, and it was loud. Then there was a 3.6 just before 7, and that one felt and sounded like a truck hit my house. There were two more in the upper 2s that I didn't notice -- I was driving to ballet class at the time -- and then two more around 10 that I also didn't notice. There was apparently a 3.1 around 1 a.m. that I guess I slept through. I heard something for the small one around 8:30, but didn't peg it as an earthquake, and then we had another that felt like a ripple about an hour ago, but I haven't seen any reports on that one (but a friend in the area felt the same thing at the same time). I definitely notice them more when I'm sitting at my desk upstairs.

Today, though, it's so windy that I have to pause and wonder if any shaking is yet another earthquake or just a really good gust of wind.

And now I need to use minor earthquakes in a book. I have a sensation to describe when the earth trembles (probably from a spell, or maybe from a dragon waking).

I got through the copyedited manuscript yesterday, with all the corrections entered. Today I'll start going through the whole thing again for one final proofread. It'll be a short workday, though, because children's choir starts again this evening, and I have a few errands to run on the way there. The weather's supposed to get really rather nasty for the next few days, so I'm looking forward to holing up inside and digging into the work. And maybe bracing myself for more shaking.

Swashbuckling Romantic Fantasy

The house has now been totally de-Christmassed, aside from all those artificial pine needles that never seem to go away. Since today is Epiphany, I'll take down the Nativity scene tomorrow. So I guess I'm back to normal. I also got a good start on copyedits yesterday and will try to finish today so I can spend the rest of the week giving it one more once-over as a proofread.

I did a fair amount of reading over the holidays, but much of it was re-reading, along with more books in the Phryne Fisher series. I've started thinking of these as Nancy Drew for adults, since just about every book shows off some random skill or knowledge Phyrne has. At least with her, she's an adult who's lived a really full life, so it's more believable that she's a trick rider, pilot, race driver, cricket expert, etc., than it was for Nancy to be able to do all that stuff at 18. And then there's a touch of a gender-switched James Bond thrown in, as she tends to collect attractive men and has at least one new lover per book, most of whom are quickly forgotten.

Last Friday was cold and rainy, and I wrapped up my holidays by curling up with what turned out to be a really wonderful book, Alias Hook by Lisa Jensen, which is a fantasy/romance for adults about Captain Hook from Peter Pan. I will confess that my choice of this book had a bit to do with my slight crush on the version of Captain Hook on Once Upon a Time, and this take probably gets closer to that than to the original, as it's essentially a redemption story. It also fits the Once Upon a Time story structure, with a present-day story interspersed with backstory flashbacks.

In this take on the story, Hook was cursed into Neverland when he chose revenge and his reputation as a pirate over love (the other pirates would have thought he'd gone soft if he gave up piracy for a woman). He's made immortal, so he can't be killed. He just suffers through and heals from wounds that should have been fatal. He and Pan are the only immortals on the island, so the Lost Boys are sent home when they get too old and the pirates get killed in the ongoing fights with the Lost Boys. The pirate crew keeps getting replenished by former Lost Boys who return to Neverland when they can't handle the transition back to the real world and never actually grow up, in spite of being adults. After a couple of centuries of this, Hook is getting really, really tired of it all. And then an adult woman shows up, something that's never happened before (since Pan thinks grown women are icky). She's a war widow who longed to escape the gloom of 1950 London, and she might just be Hook's last chance to escape Neverland.

This is one of those books that manages to be a lot of things, all at once. It's an adventure story, there's a mystery, there are a lot of fantasy elements, and there's a love story. But it's also a meditation on what it is to grow up and be an adult -- about taking responsibility, about standing up for yourself and not following the crowd, about knowing what's right and not being swayed from it, about recognizing consequences. Hook may have been a man in his 40s when he was sent to Neverland, but he wasn't a grown-up. He was just as arrested as Pan himself. So this is also a belated coming-of-age story.

It was the perfect thing to read on a cold, rainy night, and I almost couldn't put it down. This is definitely one I'll be rereading eventually, and I may even end up with a keeper copy (after I move and get some bookshelf space). Now I want to write a good swashbuckling romantic fantasy. But first I have to finish copyedits on this book, then finish writing book 3 in that series, and then I want to get a start on my second steampunk book, and then I have something pretty ambitious that I want to tackle.

Kicking off the Year

I was so productive this morning in getting my to-do list dealt with that I forgot to post a blog. Oops! But I've done a programming survey for a con, responded to some other business and promo stuff, sent in my notes for my page proofs and taken down my Christmas stuff. There's still a pile of greenery in the living room floor because it's cold and I don't really want to go out to the garage right now to get the boxes and then take everything out. I'm waiting until it warms up a few degrees.

I was really good this weekend and totally purged my kitchen. I went through the pantry and got rid of everything that had passed its expiration date, then I organized everything so that all my baking supplies are on one shelf and everything else is on another, and grouped by category. Then I cleared out and organized the tea/hot beverage cabinet and emptied several drawers where I'd apparently been saving coupons, recipes and fast food condiment packets. If I didn't know the recipes were there all this time, I'm not likely to use them, and some of the coupons had expired in 1999. Oops. Now I have an extra utensil drawer. My kitchen is still too small for my needs, but it's bigger than it once was.

I really want to do a closet purge next, but I think I need to start with the closets upstairs in the office so I can get more stuff there cleared away and open some floor space. This is the danger of a military brat living too long in one place. My way of doing regular purging was just to do it before each move, but I never learned how to do it while staying in the same house, and it's not something that occurs to me as needing doing.

But housework is going to have to fit between other work sessions because I need to deal with copyedits and get a book ready for publication.