GISHWHES, That's All, Nothing Else

The time is almost upon us. It's the most wonderful time of the year. It's GISHWHES week!

This photograph is a highly accurate, scientific representation of GISHWHES, the Greatest International Scavenger Hunt the World Has Ever Seen. If you don't know what it is, if you've never heard of this gleeful insanity, go check out the website. (It's too late to register for this year, but maybe you'll want to consider it for next year, hmmm?)

While the hunt itself is a lot of fun, it's also a lot of hard work and creative dedication. I am participating this year, with my most excellent team, Team AngrySandwich.

Thanks to @mixeduppainter for the glorious (and highly accurate, scientific representation of our team).

The fifteen of us will be doing insane things for the next week.While you will get to mostly sit back and enjoy (or regret) our lapse into frantic madness, there may come a time when I or my fellow Sandwiches ask for a little help. Maybe you live near something we need a photograph of. Maybe you know how to build a seagull out of sanitary napkins and this is how you enjoy spending Tuesday evenings. Perhaps you have some other arcane skill that we might be able to put to good use, and the good humor enough to share your time and energy. Who knows, you might just have some fun.

I'll update our progress through the tweeties. There might be a LOT of tweeties, or not very many at all. GISHWHES isn't exactly something you can plan for in advance.

Feel free to ignore us. Feel free to ask for updates. Feel free to jump in and rebel against normalcy with us.

Just be warned, for the next week or so, for me, there really is nothing else. Hang on tight.

Long Vacations and GISHWHES

Wow, howdy! It's been a while, hasn't it?

Between finishing and editing the manuscript that's currently out with my CP's, and the craziness of summer, dividing my time between Tumblr (where I've been posting my "untweetworthy" snippets and other little observations, as well as exploring my current obsession with Supernatural) and Twitter (where I get quite silly sometimes).

Summer camp was sort of a bust this year. I lasted three days before The Plague made its way around camp. Of course my daughter was among the victims. And of course I'd spend the second half of the week dying of it, too.

Now that summer is drawing to a close, the next big deal for me is GISHWHES, or The Greatest International Scavenger Hunt the World Has Ever Seen. (at time of writing, you have 9 hours left to register if you want to join in!).

What is GISHWHES? Well, go check that link for details. It's a week-long festival of insanity created by Misha Collins to have some fun and do some good. The main goal (other than the fun) is to show people how easy it is to change someone else's life with a small act of kindness. It doesn't need to take a mountain of money or time to do something good for someone. It can be as simple as holding the door for someone who has their arms full. Basically, it's a reminder that what seems like a small thing to you might mean the world to someone else. KINDNESS RULES. Check out the charity, Random Acts, for more info there.

This year, I'm proud to be on Team AngrySandwich. From August 11-17, I might pop in here, twitter, tumblr, or even into your crawlspace. Wait, scratch that last one. I haven't mastered teleportation yet. Drat. Where was I? OH! Right. I might ask for a few favors.

DO NOT BE ALARMED. THESE FAVORS WILL BE EASY TO PERFORM! AND THEY MIGHT CAUSE YOUR HEART TO GROW A FEW SIZES TOO! Well, metaphorical heart growth. No physical hearts will be harmed in the making of this GISHWHES. I hope.

So the next update you see from me might be a strange request, or an odd picture, or a little slice of the crazy. Please to be enjoying.

Untweetworthy, Part the Third

Once again, it's time for another installment of my semi-regular feature, Untweetworthy. Here I get to share some random thoughts that are either too long or too weird for Twitter (where I spend an inordinate amount of time as it is).

But first, I had a post up here on Friday night with my feelings about the atrocity of the Sandy Hook School shooting. All I'm going to say on that is something needs to be done. Mentally ill people are mostly non-violent, and I have enough trouble without having the label "Possible Mass Murderer" attached to me because I have a DSM code pinned to my shirt. Crazy didn't kill those children, a violent man with an assault rifle did.

Now that's out of the way, on to a little more pleasant stuffnfluff. Images courtesy of rage comics.

*Lulu was reading Tumblr over my shoulder the other day and suddenly spouted, "Hey, is that a rage comic? I love rage comics!" I replied, "You do?" "Oh yeah, they're funny." I see. (How can I make this event into a rage comic?)



*I took my laptop to a Girl Scout holiday event and hunkered down as far from the merriment as possible. Wrote 1500 words in an hour and a half. Sitting quietly alone at home, wrote 200 words in four hours

 

*I have now spent more time tracking holiday gift shipments than I spent purchasing those gifts in the first place.



*Morgan the cat seems to have figured out which present I labeled "To Lulu, From Morgan" and has taken it upon himself to sit only upon that gift under the tree. He might be trying to hatch it like an egg. He also removed the bow for more convenient cat butt placement. Also, he now knows that some of the ornaments on the tree are indeed breakable, and that breaking one causes terror when I come screaming and stomping into the room.



*I have been to the grocery store three times in the last five days. Once for the BIG SHOP. Once more for items forgotten on the big shop. And again for items forgotten during the first two shops. I still have a list with four items that I forgot to buy on ALL THESE TRIPS COMBINED. I should have made a list the first time around...or at least the second time. Definitely by the third.



*So MANY friends got new agents this week! All the joy, cheers, and happiness to Tamara Mataya and Marisa Cleveland, as well as Kelsey Macke and Jessica Sinsheimer on all the agenty collaboration! You know what this means, right? MOAR GOOD BOOKS IN OUR FUTURE, LOVELIES!!!





 This brings us to the end of another edition of Untweetworthy. I hope you found it edifying, somehow.

Voodoo as a Legitimate Response to Querying

I haven't written here in a while. At least it feels that way. I've been sucked under by my glamorous whirlwind of a life. At least I've been making time for writing.

So today I spent the morning helping the Girl Scouts unload and deliver a mega-crapton of  mums and pansies. When you're the lady who owns a monster truck, you get picked to help out with delivery-ish things.

A small portion (very small) of the mega-crapton of flowers.

At least all the flowers made me feel all autumny. I love this time of year. In fact, the only thing Lulu wants to do this weekend is go out for a pumpkin spice latte. I can't argue with that.

On the way home from flower duty, I saw something odd in the road. It was a black rat snake sunning itself on the pavement, coiled up and taking bites at cars as they carefully drove around it. I slammed on my brakes, parked, and fetched a stick out of the roadside ditch. I went over, Steve Irwin style, and moved the little (hah, like 6' long) snakey from the road. A lady pulled up behind me and put her hazard lights on, blocking the road so I wouldn't get squished by speeding rednecks. Hopefully the snake had the common sense to stay out of traffic. I'm now all nervous about driving that way again and seeing him smeared all over the street.

For those who don't know, I live in a rural area. Most of the roads are narrow country lanes between fields dotted with cows and corn, soybeans and goats. My entire neighborhood is one lane roads on steep hills and sharp curves. This still doesn't stop some people from driving forty miles an hour, or a lot faster out on the wide and spacious country lanes where I found snakey.

Anyway, I've also been battling technology for the last few days. I've dropped my phone twice today, once the second I got out of bed, and again at the post office. I've suffered two power outages that lasted just long enough to reset everything in the house and reboot my computer. Let this stand as your BACK UP YOUR WRITING reminder for the day.

And finally, the reason I was at the post office. After a conversation with my CP, the fabulous @FeakySnucker, I decided I needed to make an Agent Love Voodoo Doll.  I mailed the prototype to her. The idea is that when you're waiting for a response on a full manuscript submission, you pin the novel's title to the doll in a heart, causing the agent in question to fall deeply in love with it and take you on as a client. The logic might be shaky, but it's based on centuries of Voodoo tradition. And if you're rejected, you can just stick pins through the doll's naughty bits. If I actually gave the doll any naughty bits.

Keep in mind that this is a rudimentary prototype. Next time I make one, I promise to use pins, and draw a better pattern. This one took all of five minutes to make, which is why his arms and legs are so wonky:

Mutant Agent Love Voodoo Doll

Have y'all ever resorted to anything this drastic? Would anyone else be interested in an Agent Love Voodoo Doll? Would it help if I swore to make sure its head turned out round instead of pointy? Do you think I need to spend less time on social media dreaming up this sort of lunacy?

Oh, and the Progress-o-Meter

Words: 55,373
Pages:172
Edit Page: 98

Food, Kitchens, and Cooking

Okay, I understand that I talk about food all too often. I can't help it. Helper Monkey works at a grocery store, and we talk about groceries at least three times a day. I assume most people do. For some reason, today was particularly food-centric for me. Here I attempt to rehash the most relevant moments of foodiness from today.


Saturday, Sunday, and Monday I worked baseball games, and the guilt of not being home for dinner three nights in a row was starting to get to me. My poor family had to get by on pizza, breakfast-for-dinner, and the like. Last night I cooked. It was nice for me, too. I'd been living on french fries and chicken fingers at the park.

Today Helper Monkey and I watched Hell's Kitchen, thus starting the food fuss. It all went downhill from there.

Before dinner, I exchanged an increasingly dyspeptic series of emails with Fabulous Crit Partner, Feaky Snucker, about disgusting foods. This chat centered around beets, in particular, and why we both think they are The Devil's Food. Now that I'm settled in with a therapeutic bowl of ice cream, I can discuss beets without feeling the need to hurl. It was not the best topic for pre-meal conversation, though.

Also, while making dinner, and yet again being blinded by steam fogging up my glasses, I wondered if there were any professional chefs who wear glasses. I wonder how they manage. I mean, I really only cook one meal a day, and it drives me bonkers to be periodically blinded while handling boiling hot things. It leads to a fair degree of physical injury.

While I cooked, we discussed the fact that one of the chefs on Hell's Kitchen professed a dislike of cilantro. Helper Monkey hates the stuff. I tried to convince him that it had a respectable place in cooking. Let's just say the conversation devolved comically to the point where Lulu chimed in that we were acting in a fashion unbecoming parents. I think it was my "OH NO YOU DIDN'T" comment that pushed her over the edge.

I asked the Monkey what Pad Thai (a dish he loves) would be without a little cilantro. He answered, "Better." "OH NO YOU DIDN'T!", to which he replied, "UH UH GIRLFRIEND!" etc. etc.

The conversation went downhill from there, to the point we were quoting Geoff Peterson and doing the Secretariat dance. Lulu observed like we were an exhibit at the zoo. She's our own personal Jane Goodall. Someday I'm sure we'll be the subject of an academic paper. Or therapy.

Luckily, I can go back to editing now. I think part of my problem is lack of sleep. I was up until 1:30 last night revising, and then up at 6 am today. Food (and caffeine) is about the only thing keeping me from slipping into a coma right now. And on that happy note, back to editing.

This little snippet of my fascinating life has been brought to you by the versatile herb, cilantro. Suck it up, Helper Monkey!

Parental Nerves Run Amok, or Sunday Afternoon

The house is very quiet tonight. And dark. The little person who normally runs around leaving lights and TVs on in every room is away this week. I loaded her on an airplane all by herself yesterday afternoon and sent her off to my sister's house for a week. It was a tiny airplane. She loved it.

Tiny plane.

We almost didn't make it to the airport. I'd spent the last week thinking her flight was at 2:35. Yesterday morning around 9 am, I printed out her boarding pass. I'm glad I decided to do it when I did, instead of waiting for the last possible minute to take care of it. Her flight was at 12:22.

I spent the next 15 minutes panicking. Luckily I made her pack the night before, and she only had to throw a few last minute items into her backpack. We both got dressed (I think the TSA would have frowned on us arriving in our pajamas), and bolted for the airport.

The last half a dozen or so times I've flown, I've used National Airport. This was the first time I've had to use Dulles since they installed the underground trains between terminals. First, I want to say how much I miss the old jetway busses that raised and lowered to the height of the plane. They were repurposed as shuttles between the main terminal and the newer terminals, but now they've been almost entirely replaced by the new train. Which is probably the least efficient airport transport system I've ever seen. Ever.

Don't get me wrong, there's nothing wrong with the train itself, but the security lines that bottlenecked us twice before we could join the labyrinth of escalators and hallways beyond the screening point leaves a lot to be desired. There are about a dozen different lines you're randomly assigned to, and then the lines are randomly shut down  from time to time.

Once you finally make it through the boarding pass/ID confirmation point, you're shuffled into one of half a dozen other randomly moving lines to go through screening. Luckily, the kid didn't have to go through the backscatter machine, so neither did I. Those things creep me out.

There were so many escalators beyond this point that they could speed them all up and call it an amusement park. I haven't been up and down that much since I rode the Tower of Terror at Disney last summer. I considered going back and taking a picture of each one, but I try not to act suspicious at airports.

I tried to take this picture in the least suspicious manner possible.

Just so you know I have nothing against the trains, I rode in the front car on my return journey to the main terminal. Nice view.

After the kid was safely airborne, I had to get to work at the Keys game. It was so difficult to work when the kid was sending me messages on my phone, and I'm not technically allowed to have my phone while I'm working. So sue me. I cheated yesterday.

She's having a great time at Girls Rock Camp this week. Her band formed today. They assign girls to bands based on their musical tastes and preferences, so hopefully she'll have a great experience. In case I haven't mentioned it before, she's the drummer.

They did team building activities today, including writing an advertizing jingle for Orange Aliens. She promised to write the lyrics down for me, and assured me it's hilarious. I'll keep you updated as they write their actual song this week. They get to perform in a real concert on Saturday. Fingers crossed for her.

Now that all that's out of the way, I used the unusual quietude around her today to finish the edits from the Magnificent Crit Partner of Magnificence. I can't think of anything else I want to change. Now I'm trying to convince myself that Running Down the Dragon is ready to meet the world. I'd hate to send it out in public only to find out its skirt was tucked into the back of its pantyhose or something.

I think I'll wait until the thought of showing it to agents and editors no longer causes respiratory failure. Yeah. That might happen. Or maybe I'll just wait one more day.

Camp Backlash, and catching up on the Blogfest

Howdy! First of all, I'm relieved to be home. Camp is always fun, but it has its down side. The new definition of "cankles" is "Camp Ankles", if that helps clarify. I twisted my right ankle the first night at camp. That's what I get for going out without a flashlight. Midweek, I had the crazy desire to tweet a photo of just how dark camp is, but it would be silly to tweet a black rectangle.

Just when I thought the right ankle was healing up, I whacked my left ankle with a kayak. That's what I get for trying to load kayaks onto a trailer by myself. Lesson learned.

We (the adults at camp) start out the week with high hopes and a boatload of work to do. We want the campers and PA's (Program Aides, the Girl Scouts equivalent of Camp Counselors) to have the best experience possible. We have the best of intentions, and a boatload of coffee to get us through the week. By Wednesday, we're running on fumes and in need of a break.

Wednesday is also the night that the campers in grades 3-6 get to spend the night. The week-long staff and PA's get the night off, and our replacement shift comes in to cook, run the activities for the overnight, and clean up. We get to chill. Or roast. We had a campfire and made smores.

Thursday morning is when my gasket actually blew out, and I was sent away for therapeutic reasons. I was seriously on the verge of psychosis, and had to get away. Luckily, the camp is very close to some great National Park and State Park facilities. I decided to head over to Cunningham Falls State Park. Either swimming in the lake or hiking to the falls sounded perfect. I chose hiking, since I'd still end up somewhere watery, and could swim later if I felt like it.

I drove over, looked longingly toward the Catoctin Mountain National Park on the other side of the road, and stuck to my guns. I wanted to see waterfalls, darn it. I parked, and had to make another choice. There were two routes to the falls, the cliff trail and the low trail. I chose cliff. It sounded kinda dramatic, no?

I had to stop about two minutes into my climb. Yes, climb. The Cliff Trail lived up to its name. It was steep. I kept going, and was rewarded. The other side of the mountain (read: hill to those of you who think we don't have mountains in the East) was a precipitous winding trail that mountain goats can appreciate. Even with my sprained ankle, I ran the whole way down, leaping from rock to rock. It was AWESOME!

I found the falls, splashed in the creek below, and then hiked off trail up the hill a ways to find a quiet spot to sit and read for a few hours. I was rewarded with this:

Behind my backpack there was a perfect lounge chair carved from rock, in sight of the falls. All I could hear was falling water and birdie twitterings. I sat there for about two hours, and then hiked back out.

The view from my seat in the woods. The falls are around that little hill to the left.

 The best part of this trip, my water shoes no longer smelled like the stinky lake where we kayak at camp. Their stink-free state lasted for about an hour, until I ran the afternoon kayaking sessions. I have to hose them out again. Ick.

Other random weirdness from camp:

1. The theme at camp was "Best of the West." We were supposed to be learning about frontier life and what it was like to be a cowboy. Somehow, a character was invented who took over the camp. The girls created "Bad Bart" or "Black Bart" or "Bad Black Bart" depending on who you asked. He and his gang tried to sneak into camp and steal our gold. Boy, would they be surprised to learn all our "gold" was actually fish tank gravel coated with metallic spray paint. We should have let him have it and been done with it.

We built a wagon, and the camp director painted it. After it rained, she painted it again! And we had horsies!

It was fun chasing Bad Bart all over camp, but we've never had so many skinned knees and twisted ankles .

2. We get silly when we're sleep deprived. One other adult enlightened us as to the definition of "weenus," which is the stretchy skin on your elbow. We spent a good hour thinking of ways to work it into conversation with our husbands when we got home. "Dear, we can see your weenus." "It looks like your weenus is sunburned." "I saw Bad Bart run through camp, his weenus swinging in the breeze." This was all highly entertaining Thursday evening.

3. Thursday night is PA movie night. We took the girls up to the theaters in Gettysburg, and they had their choice of three films. Lulu and I went to see Brave. I was really glad I brought my scarf to use as a blanket. The theater was really cold. I didn't need it to wipe my eyes. Much. Oh, ok. I wept. Sue me.

4. A man who lived nearby brought a kitten to camp. He caught some strays and was trying to find good homes for them. I still have his phone number. The kitten was cute. Should I call him back? Do I need another kitty?

5. I found a tree that had mitten-shaped leaves:

I think that's about it. The highlights of a very long, but immensely fun week. I intended to post this last night, and to interview the next person on the Blogfest list (Gwen Gardner), but I crashed and burned. I slept for 14 hours straight. I'm here again. I'll post new interviews by tomorrow.

I certainly got some reading done at camp, but I didn't do one lick of writing. I even brought the laptop along, but I never even opened it. Not once. I've been rewarded with an idea for a new YA novel. I'm abandoning book 3 of my current series to tackle the wilds of YA. Book 3 isn't as urgent in my brain at the moment, so I'm itching to start something new. And the New Thing has a lot of promise. And it makes me tingly to think about! :)

Thanks, and Ahoy!

Serious Character Research. Ahem.

I've been inspired to do some serious research into my characters today. Well, yes. It is serious. I know, I know. It's so hard to keep looking at all these beautiful people, but somehow I've managed to muddle through... And I thought I should share some of the success stories I found.

I found some good visual references for some of my main characters. Some of them improved with suggestions from the peanut gallery. If you have anyone you'd like to nominate for consideration, please let me know. I'm open to more of this sort of research! :)

Thalia Drake, the dragon masquerading as a werewolf. Born in Ancient Greece, I originally pictured her more like statues of Artemis than like a modern-day human being. But then I saw this:


Tonia Sotiropoulou

Just give her grass-green dragon eyes, and you've got it.

Now on to Mal. Oh, how did I ever survive this research! Mario Lekkas, who is now Mal in my head... and yes, he merits at least two pictures. Shut up.

And how about Henry, the mild-mannered guy with the eyes of a predator:

And Ellen, sweet and innocent on first meeting, but she's persuasive and powerful.

I could do this kind of research all day, but for some reason, my family expects to be served dinner. I guess they don't understand how difficult this has been for me today. *Sigh*

Characters I still intend to find faces in the real world for: Donna, Allen, Wil, Kerry, Hannah...and probably a few more, too. :)

Right now, I have to go make food. Enjoy! :)


***DISCLAIMER: I removed most the photos from this blog entry because I don't want to get sued. It's sad that fair use doesn't include properly attributed photos used in a positive way. But it doesn't. The only photo I left is from Wikipedia Commons, which I am pretty sure is public domain. Crossing my fingers.

Sunburned Feet and the Insidious Blisters (my next band name)

I've had a full day to recover from Girl Scouts Rock the Mall, and all I have left are blisters. The sunburn on the tops of my feet (I changed into flip flops when my shoes started hurting, but forgot to sunscreen my feet) is fading. The bruises on my right hand from repeatedly putting on and taking off a heavy backpack are fading. Just the blisters remain. Unfortunately they are on the BOTTOMS of my feet, right up by my toes. How does this even happen? My feet are so callused I can use them as a pin cushion, but I still manage to get blisters?

Firemen hosing us off to keep us cool. They kept this up for hours. Note: Lincoln Memorial and WWII memorial in background. I love this city.

A closer-in shot:

And me, post-drenching:

And a small (incredibly tiny) part of the crowd:

Frankly, the best part of the whole event was running under the fire hoses. There were two guys at the top of the bucket truck all afternoon, and they delighted in soaking us with a misting hose, and then surprising us with a blast from the cold fire hose set to full blast. Well, probably not full blast, but you know, really strong compared to the misting. I tried to get a shot of their faces, but I couldn't get close enough without soaking my camera, so I wanted to make sure everyone knew I don't think they stopped grinning all afternoon. Thanks, DCFD!

We're also officially part of a Guinness World Record, for largest sing-along. We had over 250,000 people all singing at once. It's probably the only thing I could have managed to do to get into the Guinness Book, since I can't fit a berjillion straws in my mouth, or shoot milk out my eye for distance, or anything else cool like that. Which is probably a good thing.

Anyhoo, I've been hobbling around the house for the last two days, avoiding touching my feet at all for fear they'll explode like two little bombs. That's how they feel, anyway. But things are looking up. I have to put shoes on in a few minutes to drive Lulu to a friend's house for a sleepover. This is both good, and bad, and good again.

Good, because she's going to be away so I'll have a lot of time to write tonight. Bad because putting on shoes sounds like torture. And good, because I promised to take her and her friend out for ice cream. Mainly so I'd have a good enough reason to put shoes on. Ice cream is good enough today.

So, out to ice cream, and de-kid-ification, and then back home to write! Whoo hoo!

I hope it's a good writing night.

Mad Libs

Today's after dinner game was Mad Libs. We enjoy this one. Picking the most bizarre words possible to fill the slots becomes a competition in itself. We're all kind of geeky that way.

Some favorite lines from tonight's game:

From one about the three branches of the U.S. Government:

• The Executive Branch includes the office of Pig Wrangler.
• The Judicial Branch is responsible for upholding the Firefly, which was flown by our founding fathers.
• The Judicial Branch includes a Supreme Sasquatch, which rules on mottled issues.
• The Legislative Branch is divided into two puddles.

One entitled Impeachment, reproduced here in its entirety:

A cloud can be impeached for any number of reasons, including lying to the United States Fungus, arrogantly abusing his powers to jiggle sweaters, making smelly remarks regarding shoes, or otherwise behaving in a crusty manner. If the cloud is impeached by the House of Bowties, a trial in the Senate could follow, presided over by the Chief Bowling Ball of the Fluffy Court. After rapidly weighing the lotions, senators will raise their toenails and cast a vote of either "sticky!" or "not sticky!"

And finally, my personal favorite, a rewrite of Nixon's famous "Checkers" speech:

My fellow staples, I spin before you tonight as a candidate for Worm Farmer, and as a man whose cat and mouthwash have been questioned. Every scum that Pat and I have ever gargled is urgently ours. Pat doesn't have a mink squeegee, but she does have a muddy Republican cloth squeegee. I always tell her she would look cadaverous in anything. We did get one gift, however. It was a moist cocker spaniel boomslang and our little sky, Tricia, named it Checkers. And no matter what they say, we're going to smash it.

Poor Checkers! No wonder they impeached the jerk. He smashed Checkers! Not to mention calling his wife cadaverous to her face! For shame!


So there you have it. History rewritten by the Hughes family in postprandial repose.

We're still looking for some new game recommendations that aren't too complicated for an almost-12-year-old, and yet not stabbiness-inducing for the grown-ups. We all enjoy word games, card games, trivia games, etc. Pretty much anything is on the table (especially whatever game you suggest). If you've got a good recommendation, please leave a comment! Thank you!

On a more serious note, I have to thank Jessa Russo for actually getting me to write while the sun shone today. She held a 1k in 1 hour challenge on the tweeties, and I pushed my "real work" aside for a whopping 53 minutes. At the end of that, I had 1,070 new words, though, so it was an (almost) hour very well spent. I would have had more, but I actually had to stop to research something before I committed it to paper (or keyboard, or electrons, or whatever). The perils of writing about something technical and wanting to be sure my terminology didn't come off as hokey or just plain wrong. So I wasted ten minutes making sure I worded a description properly. Sigh.

I still didn't finish the project that will bring in actual cash money, so I have to kill another hour or two with that tomorrow, but then it's all about the new words again! And Lulu goes to the eye doctor in the afternoon, so another day cut short with errands and driving and spending money. But it's better than letting her suffer with headaches when a new pair of glasses will hopefully fix the problem. I'd bring the laptop along and write, but I don't think I'd have much of a chance to get anything done.

Also, thanks to Tumblr, I am now coveting a new fountain pen. And thanks to my addiction to Moleskine notebooks, I also covet a small, lined notebook the same size as my pocket planner (3.5 x 5.5 or thereabouts. And also a 2013 planner, since shockingly, things are starting to pop up that require planning more than six months out. Gah! who invented this kind of long-term advanced planning? I never got used to putting my calendar in my phone. I like having it on paper so I can just flip through and make notes, cross notes out, etc. It's so much easier for me. Plus, Moleskine addict. Need I say more?

I'll settle for this simple Pelikan model fountain pen. A bargain at $278.22 on Amazon! Yikes! And I thought my $40 Zero Gravity Space Pen was pricey!

Still, one more good day of writing to look forward to. Here's the current Progress-o-Meter:

Words: 50,721 (yay! Half way!)
Pages: 166

Random weekend update...

First of all, Happy Mother's Day to any mother reading this. And that includes other writers whose only children are their word-babies.

Notable things I've seen/done/heard this week:

I saw my first copperhead of the season. Finally it's warm enough for all the snakes to come out of hiding, and we see a lot of them in my neighborhood. I live in the woods, so we see a lot of wildlife, including reptiles, but too many of them succumb to traffic. The first copperhead I saw was sadly flattened on the road. I hate seeing that. I have no desire to get cuddly with venomous snakes, but they're great at keeping the rodent population in check. It's a real concern out here in the boonies. There's nothing worse than a family of mice taking over the inside of your walls. *shiver*

I spent my birthday jumping in glow-in-the-dark moon bounces with a bunch of 12-year-olds. Oddly, this was a FANTASTIC way to spend the evening. I had cake for breakfast, lunch, AND dinner, and got to sit in an inflatable throne.

A truly awful picture, red-faced and disheveled from moon bouncing, but the pizza was good.

We worked a sold-out baseball game yesterday, and by the time I left, I was so soaked in beer and soda, all the way up to my elbows, that my hands were sticking to things. For reference, the stadium is across the street from the cemetery where Francis Scott Key is buried. You can see the top of his monument from the road. I finished work before the stadium had time to empty out, and there was a bottleneck trying to leave the parking lot, and trying to get back out to the main roads from the stadium's smaller street. I turned on the car radio while I sat waiting for traffic to move along, and made myself laugh when the next cd in line to play was White Zombie. It seemed an irreverent thing to blast while staring at a spooky graveyard after dark. I hope Mr. Key didn't mind. I was so tired I had a momentary panic attack that the zombie apocalypse would start any second, and the undead were about to crawl from their graves. I just turned the volume down a bit and rolled up the windows. Thankfully the cars in front of me started moving, and I got the heck out of there.

So this is what I'm doing instead of writing my novel today. Stupid, eh? I've been complaining for the last two weeks that I don't have enough time to work on the writing, and when I finally have a whole day to write, THIS is what I end up writing about. Now I've made myself mad, which is probably a good thing. I need to write a fight scene, and I hate writing fight scenes. So feeling tooth-grinding mad should help, at least as far as the emotional content of the fight is concerned.

Oh, and I'm seriously looking forward to the 24th. The folks running the Writer's Voice competition (which I failed to submit an entry to because I'm incompetent at filling out online forms) are having a Twitter Pitch contest! Pitch your novel in 135 characters or fewer (leaving room for the #WVTP hashtag). It's terrifyingly difficult! For details, see this post from Cupid:  http://cupidslitconnection.blogspot.com/2012/05/writers-voice-twitter-pitch.html

On that cheerful note, back to work! :)

Writey McWriterson is back

Finally, a day where I accomplished a substantial block of writing, despite my many attempts to procrastinate. Since writing is essentially boring to anyone but the writer, I figured anyone reading this post might be more interested to know what I did during breaks to avoid going back to work distract myself for a few scant minutes at a time.

I needed to get in a holiday mood this morning, because my WIP takes place three days before Christmas. It was in the upper seventies here today, and sunny. Not exactly getting me in the mood to write this particular tale. I hauled out my Jack Skellington mug and made some hot tea, thinking it might help the mood along. While it brewed, I cleaned the kitchen a bit, and then found a great project to stall for a while occupy the few minutes before I had to get to work.

We keep a flower pot full of pens and pencils on the counter by the phone. It was overflowing with crayons, markers, and all manner of things, and you couldn't get half the pens into the pot anymore. I dumped it out on the counter, and tested each pen before placing it carefully back. By the time I finished that important task, I was almost done with the tea, and figured I should get to work.

I threw out about a dozen non-functional pens, and still the pot's full to bursting.

My next distraction came a few hours later. The kid has a little stretchy man made of yellow rubber, and she was throwing it up into the air in the living room. It stuck to the ceiling, about fifteen feet up.

He's the little speck in the middle of the shot. Sorry it's hard to see, but it was about ten feet above my head.

The Helper Monkey got the broom and retrieved the little guy for us.

Safe and sound...for now

Of course, this prompted a round of running around the house finding other surfaces he might stick to. You see, he's not sticky, he won't stick to the painted walls, or the fridge, or the stove, or the light fixtures, or anything else in the house. So we started throwing him up against the ceiling again.

On the ceiling of the hall

This, as you might imagine, was insanely fun. We found a ceiling we could reach ourselves, without the Helper Monkey's assistance, and spent the next ten minutes making him stick, before knocking him down with a broom again.

All this highly intellectual activity was exactly what I needed to inspire me to go back to work. Actually, it was the shame at how hard we'd been laughing at Sticky Yellow Guy's trauma that eventually drove me back to work.

Nevertheless, I still managed to get quite a bit accomplished today. I'm stunned how this project is turning out to be completely different than the last book in this series, just as that one was completely different from the first. This one is much more of a mystery, with my two main characters following a bunch of twisty-turny clues to solve the crime. I'm dashing everything down in my usual Pantser fashion, but I know this book is going to require a lot more in the editing department than the others. Continuity is a bigger issue here than it was in the others, since it's freaking hard to keep track of who knows what about the mystery. Can't have anyone reveal something too soon, and can't have people oblivious to something they should have known already. Gah! So confusing! So in addition to all the new words I've written today, I've spent an inordinate amount of time skipping back in the narrative to make sure the continuity is....continuous. Ahem.

Back to work again, while the word factory is still open for business in my brain.

Words: 28,261
Pages: 93

Afterthought: What's with the new Blogger interface? I'm lost. Please bear with me until I get used to it.

 After-Afterthought: I finally named my WIP. It's called BLACK SHEEP, for future reference. I hate naming my novels. In fact, I'm thinking of renaming DRAGON HUNTER. I was thinking RUNNING DOWN THE DRAGON sounded better. Any thoughts?

I'm suffering from Writer Brain.

More accurately, the Helper Monkey is suffering from MY Writer Brain. Since he works night shift, and gets only one night off a week, we tend to use that night to catch up on a ton of recorded TV shows. We watch a lot of mystery/police/detective type shows, and my severe case of Writer Brain is starting to infringe on his fun. We've been noticing that, since I started writing, I've gotten better and better at spotting the twist in the plot long before it's revealed.

When I spot it, I swear I try to hold my tongue, but I get too much of a thrill showing off my hard-won Writer Brain. And Helper Monkey is getting used to me pausing the show, sometimes as early as fifteen minutes in, to reveal what I've figured out about all the characters. It's happening so often now, he's actually started congratulating me on it, rather than being peeved for ruining the show.

I think Writer Brain is a side effect of writing. I spend hours every day trying to craft these kinds of mysteries. When I see a simplified version of a mystery (like an hour-long cop show on TV), I can't resist applying my own writing process to the action on screen. It's become a game for me to see how early in the show I can spot the upcoming AHA! moments. It's sort of like writing in reverse.

Having said all that, it's back to actual work for me. Since I've confessed I spent most of last night and today watching TV with the Helper Monkey, I haven't written much. Here's the update, though:

Words: 24,272
Pages: 80

It's Friday, It's Friday!

This is what I sing every Friday morning while I'm driving Lulu to the bus stop. She and her friend (our neighbor who I often also drive to the bus stop), have come to expect and ignore this. But this Friday is even better. It's spring break all next week, so I only have to wake up to an alarm once in ten days! Next Thursday we're taking a little day trip to D.C. for the cherry blossom festival, even though most of the flowers are gone...it's still fun to go on a field trip. That necessitates an alarm being set, since we have to be out of the house by about 6:30 in order to catch the train. Still, it'll be fun.

I also caved in and bought a lottery ticket for the half-BILLION dollar drawing tonight. I never buy lottery tickets. I have a better chance of getting a million-dollar publishing contract by sunset tonight than I do of winning the lottery. And if you know anything about where I am in my writing "career", you know how unlikely that is. Still, when you can start referring to the jackpot in relation to a BILLION dollars, it's too tempting.

My mom lives in one of the eight states where they don't have the Mega Millions game, so we bought her some tickets, too. I still think it's odd, how someone thinks they significantly improve their odds by buying 20 tickets instead of five. (confession: we bought a total of ten, five for us and five for my mom). When the initial odds are 1:176,000,000, you don't really improve your odds by buying a few more numbers. Some guy on the radio thought his odds would improve if he bought his tickets at different stores. He's actually driven to Virginia, DC, and Maryland just to buy some tickets in each! Yikes! Can you say: No concept of random odds? And with gas prices the way they are, I'm not going multi-state for my lottery needs.

So I've bought into the 24-hour-dream, that maybe I'll win. I've got about 12 more hours to imagine all the things I'd do with the money before I have to give up on it, but I'm determined to enjoy every minute with my imaginary half a billion.

What I'd Do with half a billion dollars:

• Pay off everything I owe money on (well, duh! gotta start practical before you go nuts)
• Get the Helper Monkey a new car. He's driving a 98 Jeep Grand Cherokee with 215k miles on it
• I like my neighborhood, so I wouldn't want to move, but I'd love to remodel, starting with my kitchen and bathroom. Maybe someday I'd add on a master bedroom suite.
• I'd pay off my mom's house
• I'd get the kid a new computer.
• I'd pay for someone else to clean my house
• I'd travel. Tim wants to see Europe, Lulu wants to go to Paris, and I want to see the Far East, as well as Russia.
• I'd get some new Fluevogs
• I'd buy a bunch of fancy clothes that I'd never even considered buying before. If you're that rich, no one questions your eccentricities. If I want to play putt-putt golf wearing an 1865 evening dress, than so be it.
• I'd pay someone to do my finances for me. I hate balancing my checkbook, and with half a billion clogging up my accounts, I'd never want to handle it on my own.

I think that's enough to take care of the 12 hours of daydreaming I have left today. Now hopefully all that daydreaming won't get in the way of the actual work I need to do, because obviously I'm not going to actually win the jackpot.

The Battle Against Boredom

It's the end of the Cookie Season for Girl Scouts around here, but our troop still has about 300 boxes to sell. This is the last weekend we're allowed to sell at grocery stores and the like, so we're out there in force in the hopes we won't get stuck with cases and cases of cookies. If we do, we'll obviously have to eat them, and that would be really bad...

So Lulu and I held a sale outside a cute little store near our house, but despite the gorgeous weather, foot traffic was sporadic, at best. To keep ourselves from getting too grumpy about it, we decided to play Camera Tag. This is a fun game, where one person dances and dodges around, while the other person tries to capture them in a photograph. We had mixed results, but we actually got a few good pictures.

I caught Lulu unblurred, and actually smiling!

Blurry, but at least I'm mostly in the shot.

We were also getting a little silly with self-portraits, and I'm debating whether or not to use one of these as my new profile pic.

You can almost see down my shirt in this one...Maybe not this one then...

The other strange thing I learned from Picture Tag was that spring is definitely back. During winter, I can keep my hair from frizzing out, and almost make it look wavy with enough conditioner and attention. This is why I hate the summer months, though. The only thing I'll be able to do with my hair for the next 6 months is this:

Oh, curly hair! You just do whatever the heck you want, don't you?

At least I won't have itchy shins at the same time. Humidity= Crazy Hair - dry skin. See, it's a math problem! I guess I can deal with it.

I was supposed to be working this morning, but I slept late. Now I have to head out to learn how to run a ballpark concession stand. I'll be back for dinner, but then my MS is going DOWN! *does the little "I see you" gesture at the unruly MS*.

Always with the distractions

I'm SO CLOSE to finishing my edit, but I'm being pulled in about fifty directions this week. I'll be thrilled if I manage to finish by Wednesday (so why am I wasting time writing a blog?).

I worked a cookie booth last night when the scheduled volunteer canceled at the last second, and I have to deliver and pick one up today. I work a four hour booth tomorrow. Then Tuesday AND Thursday I have training sessions for the two groups I volunteer with to learn how to man the concession stand at the local minor-league baseball team's stadium. We're running the concessions ALL SEASON, so I'm going to be attending an awful lot of baseball games. Go Frederick Keys!

And then next weekend? MORE COOKIE BOOTHS! GAH! Does someone want to buy 800 boxes of Girl Scout Cookies so we can cancel the rest of the booths? I'd be much obliged.

And all this running around means I'm gassing up Little Red far too often. What possessed me to buy a vehicle that gets 14 mpg? Oh, right. I needed to haul a lot of crap around, like Girl Scout cookies.

Anyway, back to work. I'm getting so close to the end, I can smell it. It smells like victory.

And still, for the first time ever, I'm reading a draft of something I wrote and thinking, "Hey, this is pretty good." I swear, I've never thought that before, so hopefully I'm not suffering from brain damage from having edited and revised it too many times now. I hope it really is good this time! :)

The potentially endless loop of editing and revisions.

I've discovered a strange anomaly in the writing process: It's possible to spend the rest of my life revising and editing a single novel.

I already went about twelve rounds with Dragon Hunter, and I thought it was done. Since then, I wrote the sequel, Devil May Care, and went a dozen rounds with it, as well. I even started on the third novel in the series, and have about 60 pages done on that. And then my submissions for Dragon Hunter started coming back. I've had three agents read the manuscript so far, and I finally had one who rejected it with something more than "This isn't for me," or "I like it, but I just don't love it."

Let me tell you, it's great to get some actual feedback I can work with. I went through the five stages of grief over the fact that my story wasn't perfect the way it was, and then I sat down and actually read it again. Yikes!

Either I've really grown as a writer in the last few months since I started querying it, or I went through a period of serious self-delusion when I started sending it out. The agent's comments were spot on. There were a few whackadoodle plot missteps, a serious lack of explanations for some of the things that I thought were obvious (since I made up the world, and can see everything in my head, and know all the characters' history, flaws, etc., sometimes I forget that I neglected to explain this stuff to the reader!), and some rather stuffy dialog in places.

Even though I already edited for all this kind of stuff, having an INDEPENDENT AND UNBIASED third party read it and give feedback was priceless, especially since she's in the publishing industry and has a clue as to the kind of advice an author really needs. My friends and family I've recruited just aren't critical enough with me. My husband's great at pointing out spelling and grammar errors, but he's not a trained editor. The best he's been able to do is tell me whether he likes it or not (he likes it, but he sort of has to, right?).

My mom is an English teacher, but even she lacks objectivity when "grading" my work. She picks up on misplaced commas, but she has a hard time saying anything negative about plot, pacing, character development, world building, etc. She is my mother, after all. What did I expect?

Another friend is reading it right now, but I think she's reading it for enjoyment rather than as an editorial review.

What I really need is an army of beta readers who all have a stinking clue what the publishing industry demands from a novel. Does my dialog need to be tightened up? Does the pacing lag in a certain place, or is it too fast to keep up with somewhere else? Do I need to describe some aspect of the world better so you don't feel lost? Or maybe a joke one of the characters tells is so bad it makes you want to throw the book in a lake and pretend you never saw it in the first place? That's the kind of advice I really need. Are there any people out in the universe who are good at that kind of thing? Any who would like to read a contemporary/urban fantasy novel and then get to tell me why it sucked, and what you think it needs in order to not suck?

I'd be grateful for a few new victims volunteers.

Otherwise, I might be stuck in the circular land of revisions for the rest of my life. It's like Groundhog Day. Round and round, the same story, slightly different each time, and never a chance at a new day, or a different story.

Also, I tried to sleep last night, like I usually do, but my cat was apparently hosting a parade in the living room (which is directly over my bed). It sounded like he had cat rugby scrimmage with a jingly ball. This went on for nearly an hour before he felt tired enough to come to bed. At that point, he happily curled up ON MY LEGS. This was not good, either. Cats are very warm. Not to mention, if you move and upset them, they have a multitude of pointy weapons at their disposal, and they're more than willing to use them.

Point of fact: The other night after dinner, Tim lingered at the table while I cleared away the dishes. He was finishing his food, when the cat decided something must be wrong. Tim's coat was hanging on the back of his chair, and the cat slipped under the coat and prepared his attack. I was in the kitchen, and heard Tim scream, and saw the cat bolt down the stairs like a chipmunk on crack. I ran out to the table to see what was wrong. I asked what the problem was, and Tim looked murderous. "The cat just clawed me in the ass," he snarled.

I tried to look sympathetic. I swear I did. So did Lulu. I bit my lip. We even left the room. After thirty seconds of snorting and chortling,  he grumbled. "You can laugh." So we did. For like ten minutes. I wish stuff like that happened more often.

In happier news, It is GORGEOUS here today. *waves hello at spring robins outside* It's 61 right now, sunny, with wispy white clouds smeared across the blue, blue sky. I think I'll take the laptop outside to work. I've given myself one final read-through before I query again, and then dive in to revise the second novel to match up with the changes I made to the first. And then I can jump on the Devil May Care carousel and ride in circles for a few weeks with that story. Dragon Hunter takes place in early spring (technically, it's the first week of April, but it FEELS like the first week of April outside today). I think it's the perfect day to move back out to the deck.

Toodles and La-Di-Da!