Vixenwriter

Two new releases coming tomorrow, chocolate in the mail and…..

Selling Stripped to Harlequin Spice for publication in an anthology called What Happens in Vegas to be published in spring of 2008 with Anya Bast, Jodi Lynn Copeland and Kit Tunstall! More of the details as we go along. I’m ridiculously thrilled and proud to be in an anthology with three of my fellow Ellora’s Cave authors and writing for a house like Harlequin too.

Yep, here at last. I feel better today although the sore throat remains. Still, my brain is unfogged and I’m almost done with the last touches on my Stripped revisions for my agent. What I love is how just a few sentences here and there can change the feel of an entire book. I love that careful, small manipulation.

I’ve been listening to She Wants Revenge as I’ve been working. One of my favorite songs on the CD is Tear You Apart and the chorus goes:

I love that! I love the entire CD. I love that they sound like Interpol and are so very 80’s but have that very sexy edge and a whole lot of D/s lyrical references too.

I’m off to do some book shopping in a bit. I want this book very much!

There are days and then there are DAYS. Yesterday was a DAY. The wee monster is going through a stage right now where she’s whiny and not sleeping well. She’s also clingy which makes it hard to get any work done. She didn’t even take her 90 minute nap yesterday so I didn’t get much done. I think it’s a growth spurt and a new tooth coming in, combined with her brothers going to school and a big change in her schedule. But I took them all to the library yesterday afternoon and the 5 year old is running in the parking lot and the 9 year old is whiny and can’t choose a book and wee monster is like a great dane on a leash and I’m trying to juggle them all, keep them alive and get my books that were on hold. The car is a nightmare of whining and yelling and crying.

All I want to do is have them all asleep so I can get some work done! I’d figured out yesterday the perfect spot to add a bit of backstory to explain my character’s behavior and I wanted to add it. I also had a shitload of work to do to get it turned in by Wednesday to my agent as promised.

So I settle in and start to work my ass off editing - at this stage, I work from paper to the computer and I’m going back and forth, I correct and add for about thirty pages or until I hit a spot I need to add a scene to. I look at the paper and my screen and the sentence I want to add to a certain paragraph is not on my screen. I look again, and once more and it’s not there.

Well I have a touchpad mouse and sometimes the heel of my hand touches it and selects a paragraph and even cuts it so I’m like, “hm, did I do that?” and add the paragraph into the text and then I get a sinking feeling.

Moving to the end of the manuscript I see the old ending. Shit. I have been editing the older version of the fecking manuscript for two days. I panic for a moment, run downstairs and look and thank god I’ve got the documents where I sent half and half to beta.

After really being upset and mad at myself for such a stupid, rookie mistake, I did realize that most of my real changes between the manuscript I’d been editing and the final were at the very end anyway and I hadn’t gotten there yet. And all my edits since I got crit back were on the older document (I expanded the opening and changed some scenes for POV). But it doesn’t look as dire, or even as difficult to deal with as it did at first glance, thank god. So I’ll have to cut and paste the end onto the doc I’m working on and just do a quick run through and compare of the old one to be sure I didn’t miss anything. But still, GAH!

I was so upset I just put it down and read for a few hours before going to sleep. I do feel better about it today though and hope to get some work done during the wee monster’s naptime (should she actually decide to take one, sigh)

I’m finished with the first five chapters of edits on Stripped and am now moving into the second half of the novella. Thank you so much Megan for your most excellent crit (and my beta readers who always give me great feedback) I’ve added a bit of backstory to my heroine to explain why she’s the way she is and woven other chunks of backstory into the novella as a whole. I’ll have it to my agent by Wednesday as promised, yay!

It set off this whole introspective thing in me last night as I was thinking on the nature of crit and how I deal with it as an author.

It takes a lot for me to send out work to crit at this stage of my writing because I normally don’t send to beta and crit until the third draft but I didn’t have the time and so it’s rougher than it would be normally. Showing my stuff, warts and all, at early stages makes me neurotic and freaks me out. But it has to be done and it makes the final product better.

And so for me anyway, I take crit in the spirit it’s offered. It helps to know what other people I trust think. I don’t want fluffy crit. I don’t want harsh for the sake of harsh either but I want straightforward crit so I can just get to the point without having to salve my ego. I can’t fix it if I don’t know what’s wrong. And I’m not perfect and neither is my writing, I’m a work in progress.

I was just thinking about how far I’ve come after doing this a few years. Some of the comments I received, if I’d gotten them a year ago, I wouldn’t have known how to fix it or it would have been this long, arduous process. Now I know how to add even a paragraph here or there to make a huge difference overall. So each time I do this I learn and as I want to do this for the rest of my life, I have to keep making things better. You can’t do that if you don’t try and put yourself out there.

Half the importance of crit is finding people who you click with and who you can trust. The other half is taking what you need and ignoring what you don’t but still benefitting from everything that’s said.

Woot! Finished Stripped and it came in at just over 32K, right where I wanted it to be. So now it’s with beta and crit and I’ll put it aside until Sunday when I start revisions.

The weather is lovely and I’m hoping it stays sunny and cool until the end of the weekend but you know how that goes. I love fall! Autumn in the Northwest is my favorite time of year. The air is crisp and clean and I can start making soup again too. Crock pots are the best thing ever. Ok, not as cool as magic erasers, now that’s an invention! But right up there with the wonder bra and 100 calorie granola bars.

I’ll now go back to Celtic Triangle and finish up that partial before getting back to Wolf Unbound for EC. Hee!

I hit 30K last night on Stripped! I’m nearly done now. I’m writing the last major scene now and there’s just a small bit after that and the first draft is finished. Yay! Then off to beta and crit and then rewrites and then to my agent.

And then I wait.

I suppose it’s supreme irony that me, one of the least patient people on the planet is now involved in an industry that is all about hurry up and wait.

Goddess is off now on the way to the editors who requested the partial. Now I wait impatiently to hear if they want it or not. But it’s not gonna be fast and I know that. So I now have to pretend like I’m not even thinking about it.

And I’ll send my novella to my agent and she’ll pitch the anth in October and I’ll wait over that too. Just like I’m waiting to hear back on some stuff I sent my editor at Samhain and I wait to hear back from EC too.

Blarg. But I suppose it’s balanced in large part by the very real fact that I’m living my dream. So there.

So I’m at 25K on Stripped and I’ll be done with the first draft tomorrow, Friday at the latest. Novella writing is a much faster process than a novel. Still, I prefer novel length probably because I have dialog tendencies I need to feed, LOL. I’m just happy I’ll be able to get it to my agent before my self imposed deadline.

And then back to Wolf Unbound, the next Cascadia Wolves book. I’d really gotten into it when this marvelous opportunity for the anthology came to me so I hope I can get back into the characters’ heads again. I think it’ll be okay, I like to go back and forth between contemps and paranormals to keep my brain engaged.

I was reading through my voter guide and man, there are some seriously wackadoo people running for office, scarily enough for supreme court. One of the candidates (non wackadoo) is a guy I went to law school with. He was very nice. I don’t know if I’m voting for him but I do know I’m not voting for the woman who was put on the bench with no prior experience who chided female attorneys for not wearing skirts to court like a freak. As if a suit with slacks makes your argument worse? Oh, the air on the calves is more suitable for justice? Jeebus, I’m glad get to hang out at home in a pony tail and in bare feet most of the day.

Over at the message boards it’s Titilating Tuesday and I’ve posted some sneaky peeks of Reluctant and even a small glimpse of Stripped.

Speaking of Stripped, I hit 20K last night! Woot - over 60% done now.

Oh! And Giving Chase is available for pre-order at Amazon! I happened upon it by accident earlier today. That’s so cool!

I saw a review for Triad that complained the story would never happen in real life. Hello? It’s about a vampire, a witch and a wizard and a compact created by a goddess who was aided in a battle with a demon - what part of that led anyone to think it would be “realistic”? It also complains of too much story and not enough sex, which makes me laugh because there’s another older review that complains of too much sex and not enough story. And I do beg to differ about the menage, I take a lot of care in my menage books to deal with the very real problems of sharing someone you love with someone else - even if they are vampires. It’s fine, it just shows the very real subjective quality of reviews, LOL. Some of the books I loved the most have been ones other people have hated (Narcissus in Chains and Outlander for instance)