Hello World, I’m Still Alive

Posted on February 23, 2012 by

:peeks out at world:

Oh look at that.  You’re still here.  The worst stretch of this week is over, and I’ve totally retreated to my office cave.  My brain is slowing down from the hyperactive zombie hamster invasion (if that sounds inefficient, it totally was and is what leads to such things as hands being crushed by falling window sashes).

Via Mictlantectli @ deviantart

I’ve gotten back all mobility in my fingers, and about 50% mobility in my thumb on the crushed by window hand.  My left thumb–well it’s just going to suck until the skin grows back on that knuckle.  PSA: Cheese graters are DANGEROUS PEOPLE!  I have done every conceivable organizing thing on assorted projects that must be done this week, so I should manage to wrangle it that I don’t have to actually interact with anyone more than 5 or 10 minutes the rest of the week at work.

:sigh of relief:

I managed to get through all of Wednesday without further maiming myself.  Given the way the rest of the week was going, I consider this a major accomplishment. Just to be safe, I skipped my workout yesterday morning.  Didn’t think it prudent to touch weights or heavy equipment.

It was actually quite a nice birthday considering I had to work.  One of the trainees brought in donuts for my birthday.  Susan gave me Gerard Butler.  I had an inbox, FB wall, and Twitter stream full of lovely well wishers.  Hubby got me a CREME BRULEE TORCH!  Obviously I am not touching it until current klutzy streak is over.  My sweet in laws got me this GORGEOUS cover for my Nook Tablet. :pets the pretty:

From Oberon Design

We went out for Mexican for dinner and I got to wear the birthday sombrero.  Nothing makes up for a shitty week like a giant sombrero and a strawberry margarita.  I’m just sayin’.  I did my first tequila shot too.  First shot of anything ever actually.  It came with the hat.  I’m still trying to sort out whether Pepto will stop the burning…  Yeah, that’s me.  Wild and crazy chick.

I also read through all of Act 1 of DOTH (I’m working on the FPP now), and but for one scene that I hated (and have since, I think, figured out how to fix–maybe), I loved it.  There are clunky passages and things to clean up, but I’m really pleased.  I actually wrote last night for the first time since Sunday.  It’s a tricky scene and I need to think about the imagery I want to use to portray what’s going on.  But…yeah.  I was really really pleased with the first 25k.  So the week is looking up!

Posted in Personal | Tagged , | 2 Comments

Kait and the Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Day

Posted on February 22, 2012 by

Tuesday

6:03 AM: Message on Zune that there was an error and it has to delete all content.  Years of collected audiobooks lost.

6:07 AM: Computer refuses to recognize Zune to reload running playlist.

6:10 AM: Attempts to find playlist file in order to load it onto iPhone total fail.  Ran anyway.

7:01 AM: Deodorant falls into toilet.

7:15 AM: Accidentally bump left thumb (which I had grated nearly to the bone the night before) against the doorframe.  Scream.

7:17 AM: Apply liquid bandage (because of course you can’t keep a bandaid on a thumb knuckle).  Scream again.

8:03 AM: Walk out the door to get to work by 8:15, realize I’m on fumes.  Go get gas.  Late to work.

8:30 AM-12:30 PM: Trapped in conference room for second day running.  Make use of time by updating the tags on my 560 hours of mp3s.

12:35 PM: Shockingly freed from conference room to take care of other duties.  Get back to editing the 45 page report dumped on me last week.  Discover grad student doesn’t understand Endnote and has effed up 90% of the citations.

2:00 PM: Slip out to library to pick up book they had on hold for me.  No parking due to random class on how to use a Kindle or something.

2:30 PM: Return to office and find out I’ve got to go out of town next week.  Twice.  On project from hell.

4:30 PM: Leave office early, try to weedeat the yard.  Run out of battery.

4:45 PM: Vacuum house.  Mop.  Run out of floor cleaner.

5:15 PM: Realize I’ve left the paperwork I printed for the meeting photog hubby and I had with bride that night.  Go back to the office to get it.

6:15 PM: Sun’s down, temps dropped, go around to close all the windows I opened, had window sash crash on my uninjured hand.  Screamed again, burst into tears.  More blood and bruising.  Nothing broken (lone bright spot).

7:15 PM: Leave house for meeting with bride.  Forget to put the casserole in the oven before we walked out.

9:30 PM: Finish DVRed episode of NCIS: LA.  Naturally, it’s a 1 of 2 cliffhanger.

9:45 PM: Day is blessedly over.

Can I have a do over?

Posted in Personal | Tagged , | 12 Comments

I Want A Ganzfeld Chamber

Posted on February 21, 2012 by

I am an introvert.

I’m not shy.  I’m not bad with people (usually).  I’m not any of the things that the general public thinks of when they think of introversion.

Introversion means that I don’t get energy from being around people.  It means they drain me.  I like people, I really do, but they EXHAUST ME.  It’s why I prefer parties with small groups to big ones.  Why I like hanging out with a couple of people instead of a bunch.

So the fact that last week I spent two days trapped in a conference room and most of the rest of it putting out fires on assorted other projects that necessitated I work with a bunch of other folks to prepare for THIS week, and then that I’m trapped three days running in a conference room all day this week has left me just wiped.

One night last week, I went to bed at 8:30.

Friday night I slept TWELVE HOURS.

When I got home from work yesterday, I should have worked out, should have written.  Instead, I turned out the lights, cocooned in my snuggie, and passed out on the sofa for an hour and a half.

OMG, y’all I want my own Ganzfeld chamber.  Quiet, dark, cut off sensory stimuli.  Away from people.

I’m twitchy and irritable and I really want my cave with quiet, where nobody WANTS anything from me, so I can curl up with my snuggie and sleep and read for a week, possibly without saying a word.

 

Posted in Personal | Tagged , | 5 Comments

Flatline: Grimm

Posted on February 20, 2012 by

Okay, before I get going this morning, I want to direct you attention to my guest post on Standalones vs. Series over at Ex Libris for Stella’s 2 years Blog-o-versary!

Moving on.

Okay, that’s it.  I’m calling it.

NBC’s Grimm is just flatlining.  No matter how interesting the premise (and it had such potential–a fairy tales meet Supernatural meet pick-your-favorite-cop-drama), you cannot carry a show more than a handful of episodes without an engaging cast.  And while we all agree that Munroe the Blutbad is a lot of fun, and we even like the partner (whose name escapes me at the moment), but our central hero, the guy everything is supposed to revolve round, the last Grimm is just flat BORING.

Now I have never seen David Giuntoli in any other role, so I have no idea whether the fault is with the actor or the script, though I am inclined to think there’s some of both.  There’s nothing in the lines he’s been given to make him remotely memorable.  Nick is not funny like Dean.  He does not have Sam’s shoulders.  He’s not delightfully, heart-wrenchingly tortured.  I don’t feel anything for him other than impatience for him to get off the screen so somebody else with more personality can have a turn.

There have been so many opportunities to fix this.  They could’ve paid attention and adapted his personality.  Deepened him.  Given him quirks.  Interesting hobbies, even.  Complicate his life.  Run the fiance off.  SOMETHING.  But no, they’ve just let it float along, doling out less than a handful of breadcrumbs of metaplot per episode, and relying on…hell, I don’t even know what, to carry the show.  It’s just NOT WORKING.

So I am sad to say, I am deleting the timer off my DVR.

At least with Once Upon A Time, I still care about the characters, I want to know what happens, and how they’re going to work everything out.  It may have its issues, but I’m still watching, and I like it.

Posted in Musings | Tagged , , | 8 Comments

Sunday Summary and #ROW80 Update

Posted on February 19, 2012 by
  1. It was raining this morning.  I was pathetically glad of this fact as I just DID NOT feel like running.  I didn’t run Thursday either for the same reason so if it’s clear on Tuesday, I fully expect it to SUCK.  But I’ve been subbing HIIT on the recumbent bike, so it’s not like I’ve been lazy.
  2. Last night was the opening season bout for the local roller derby.  It was my first experience shooting wholly on manual with a flash and the excitement of the night was that I nearly got creamed 6 times in the corner I was shooting from.  Hubs almost never had anything happen last season when he shot from that corner.  Made for a few great shots though.  Today we’re shooting a baby shower.
  3. The writing has been going well this week.  My word counts are up.  Wednesday: 856, Thursday: 1064, Friday: 947, Saturday: 814, and this morning 982.  Three of those days were scenes in one of the contemporary romances I started a series bible for earlier in the week.  It wasn’t the plan, but it was such a stressful week, and I’m up to some really important stuff in DOTH, so I didn’t mind working on something else.  It’s words.  I’m good with that.  It’s part of my goal for this year–to keep writing on SOMETHING on the days that I’m not working on my primary WIP.  That means more writing days total for the year, which is absolutely my end game.  The hope is, of course, that I’ll have more stuff finished this year than in the past.  There are 10 days left to go this month and I’ve already outstripped last month’s word count by about 3k, so that’s a big yay.
  4. DOTH is going to require more editing than my last projects.  Some of these early scenes are fine.  Nailed it in one.  But there’s a lot of fumbling and floundering trying to find my voice for the heroine in Act 1, so I suspect there will be a lot of revision to clean that up.  And that’s fine.  Not every book will come out clean at the end of the first draft.  Most don’t.  Red was a fluke.
  5. I want to get back to some plotting and detail work on Longest Night, the Mirus novella I started a few weeks ago.  It’s plotted out in broad strokes, with story structure and a full scene list, but there are some world building details I need to sort out and figure out what I want to show before I can move forward and write more on it.  Which requires, you know, actual THINKING TIME.  I haven’t had a lot of that the last week or two, and I don’t expect to have much this week either.  Hopefully this is the last of my hell weeks at the EDJ for a while.
  6. I had some seriously whacked out dreams Friday night, of a variety that made me think Claire Legrand had invaded my brain.  And I totally started a blueprint based off them.  It was a YA dystopian retelling of a story that nobody would ever dream up being dystopian.  Well, except for Claire, which is why I think I was channeling her somehow.  Dystopian is so not my normal bag, and I may never write it, but it was worth throwing in the idea file in case I want to clear the palette.
  7. At the end of this week, I am meeting up with Susan Bischoff and Lauralynn Elliott over in Birmingham for a writer’s weekend.  I can’t freaking wait!  It’s a rare thing I really get to hang out much with other writers, so this is the highlight of the next few months.  It’s my Holy Grail at the end of this stressful work week.  And I’m stopping in Tuscaloosa on my way home to grab some coffee with Bobby Matthews and talk shop, as I just introduced him to Story Engineering.  Fair warning, I will probably be REALLY FREAKING HYPER NEXT WEEK.
Posted in Sunday Summary | Tagged , , , , , , | 10 Comments

Book Vacations

Posted on February 17, 2012 by

Yesterday on Twitter, while I was in the midst of an eye-twitch inducing day at work, one of my pals and I got into a mutual discussion of La Nora love and how there are particular books/series of hers we like to reread because we want to go back to the setting.  Sort of a book vacation.  Which is the mark of a good book, isn’t it?  One that totally pulls you into its reality?

The Irish Jewels and Born In trilogies, for example, are the only way I can afford to go to Ireland every year.  I’ve lost count of how many times I’ve reread these and gone back to Ardmore or County Clare.

I’ve made several trips back to Chesapeake Bay country visiting the Quinn family.  Damn, now I want some blue crab…

And who could forget Three Sisters Island?  You know you wanna hang out in Mia’s bookstore and have some of Nell’s awesome baked goods.

Ok, really Martha's Vinyard, but this is how I picture it

Where are some of your favorite book vacations and what do you read to go there?

Posted in Books | Tagged , , | 8 Comments

Readers Matter

Posted on February 16, 2012 by

So yesterday my pal Kristen Lamb made a fantastic post about the new publishing paradigm offering suggestions to the Big 6 to keep them from sharing the fate of the Titanic.  It’s brilliant and spot on.

Something that stood out for me was a quote she pulled from The Author’s Guild post, Publishing’s Ecosystem on the Brink: The Backstory:

For book publishers, the relevant market isn’t readers (direct sales are few), but booksellers.

Say what?

I’d wager you never thought about the fact that as a reader, as a buyer of books, your opinions don’t actually matter to big publishers.  They don’t really care what people are really reading.  They’re busy making projections about what will sell in two years and that’s what they are buying.  Which comes back to that futures analogy I used a while back. Because at the end of the day, while they are making educated guesses about what will sell, they’re just that.  Guesses.  They’re passing left and right on indie stuff with proven sales potential (and I don’t mean mine).  Hey, their loss.  The readers still get their shot courtesy of self publishing.

The whole idea of the reader’s irrelevancy simply because they are a step removed from the publisher (at least in traditional publishing) via the bookseller seems totally…well, whacked.  If all the bookstores go belly up, what does NY plan to do then?  Not considering that issue is just like all the newspapers that are playing ostrich and pretending that this online, web-delivered FREE NEWS is not going to change their business (they’re going out of business, in case you didn’t know).

Readers matter.  In the long run, readers are the only thing that matter because whether you are traditionally published and have the intermediary of the bookseller or if you’re self published and sell directly to the reader online, if you have no readers, you have no sales, period. Nobody wakes up and says “I want to write so that I can sell to BOOKSTORES!” (apart from that whole yearning to see our physical book IN a bookstore which is a whole other thing).

Readers are the whole reason we do what we do.  Sure, we hope we’ll get paid for it, that we’ll eventually make enough money to quit whatever asinine evil day job is trying to destroy our creativity like a cancer (or maybe that’s just me).  But the reason we write is that we want to share our stories with other people.  We want to entertain them, make them laugh, make them cry, touch something deep so that they’re thinking about our characters and whatever message they shared long after the last page is read.

Never forget that.  Never lose your respect for the reader or forget the end game.  It might behoove traditional publishers to think about changing their business model to reflect that rather than the business of selling paper.

Posted in Me on Indie Publishing | Tagged , , , | 8 Comments