Sep
10

Page Count

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Even aside from all the issues I’ve had this summer, I had long expected to have this current WIP in to my agent months ago. But the editing road of the panster can be a tricky one and I appear to have added about 100 pages to it in the last few months. Which seems like an awful lot. If I hadn’t, I’d probably be done with the manuscript by now…but I’m only halfway there, as a result. However, those pages need to be there. As most of you know, pacing is pretty important when it comes to a book. Too slow and you lose your audience to snoresville. Too fast and the payoff feels cheapened. (The protag has to earn what she gets – and in my case, things were lining up a little too conveniently. Time to shake it up a little, right?) Plus, it’s written in 1st… Read more
Aug
28

Listening at Virtual Doors

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Growing up, I was taught that it wasn’t polite to listen in on other people’s conversations. Sometimes it couldn’t be helped, of course, but gossip is one of those heady things. Sometimes we end up inserting ourselves into the middle of a dialogue, even if no one asked us to be there. In the old days before the internet, creator – consumer relationships were usually limited to snail mail and in print reviews. These days an author can stumble over forums, reviews, tweets – everyone has an opinion and most aren’t afraid of throwing it out there for anyone to see. We can choose to interact..or not. Not everyone wants us in their space, after all. Through the use of tools like Google Alerts, I can be instantly notified if my books or my name is being dropped about on the internet. (Incidentally, Google Alerts doesn’t seem to be working… Read more
Aug
23

F is for Fibro, G is for Gluten

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I’ve caught a bit of a breather today at work so I’m able to get a quick post in for the first time in forever. And not that I want to continue to discuss health issues all that much, but I got a fair number of emails about the fibro thing – support from others who have it, or illnesses like it and questions on how I cope with the pain all the time and things like that. And I don’t have a huge amount of answers simply because I’m wrapping my brain around it myself right now, but figured I would maybe touch on a few things I am trying that may help. 1. Going gluten free. I’d had a few people suggest this before, but I’d sorta poo-poohed it, because I love carbs. I eat pasta all the time and how could I possibly think of cutting it… Read more
Aug
15

Diagnosis

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Most of you know by now that I’ve been dealing with chronic pain issues for a pretty long time, compounded by a back that is falling apart by the day. The sort of good news on the back front is that I’ve gotten the go ahead for the double fusion – which I will be trying to schedule for some time in September – I’ll probably be AWOL for at least several weeks during that time period, but I’ll know more about my schedule when I get closer to it. So today I went to an arthritis doc – and we talked through the other stuff I’ve been dealing with, and she ordered some more bloodwork and some x-rays, but she suspects I have Fibromyalgia. TMI warning, blah blah blah. Which is something I’ve sorta wondered about for a while, but I never looked too closely at it because a… Read more
Aug
14

Odds and Ends

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I can tell this is going to be one of those odd weeks. Things keep disappearing. Stuff keeps breaking. Money is being spent like water. And there’s not really anything I can do about it. My sunglasses will show up with they like, I suppose, though I’m a tad irritated at the DH’s wedding band. Hopefully we’ll find that tonight. And before the jokes start up, yes, he takes it off during the day job rather frequently – mostly because he doesn’t want the criminal sorts to know he’s married. It’s sort of like sitting down in a restaurant and realizing that you arrested the busboy last week and hoping there won’t be any revenge spitting going on. Have I mentioned being married to a cop isn’t quite like the romance books make it out to be? (One day, I will write an actual cop romance and no one will… Read more