So, I’ve had my head buried in edits for Unbalanced. Because the woman who wrote Unbalanced is not the same woman that I am now, I wanted to rip it apart and re-write, but one of my friends gave me a reality check, and, in a virtual world sense ripped the manuscript from my panicked hands and forced me to send it to my longsuffering editor, Elizabeth Burton of Zumaya. So, I’m waiting to see what she thinks of the edits I did do, and then we’ll work on polishing the novel. May 15th is not very far away.

The following bit is for Joel the tall and terrible, because he did not throw this at me the second time we were discussing me sending in my book (I would make an objection, and he would saying, “Just let it go.” – there was a great deal of laughing during this conversation, too, to keep you from thinking that we were seriously fighting…) and he darned well could have:

Robert Heinlein’s Rules of Writing

1. You must write.
2. You must finish what you write.
3. You must refrain from rewriting, except to editorial order.
4. You must put the work on the market.
5. You must keep the work on the market until it is sold.

Never forget these rules. I certainly used to live by them…I should not have allowed myself to forget them.

But, the neat thing is, here’s what’s going on in my head:

Me: I should be working on Unbalanced. But I can’t work on Unbalanced. I don’t know what Liz thinks of it yet.

Me: OK. Then you need to work on something else.

Me: Wait! I know what happens in “The Blue Girl” short story I never finished!

Me: OMG, YAY! That is totally cool! And what a neat little twist!

So, I’m back to working on “The Blue Girl”, which was a story that I was trying to write for an anthology, but ran out of time on. I am full of fail in the writing for a specific anthology department. But then, I realized that I also have a short story that needs second drafted, called “I am the Grey Lady”, and so I think that I should write a few short stories with colors in the title. I have one in progress that I love…it’s a nice story with great imagery but I don’t know the end yet, the working title being the first line of the story “She was called Aziza” – not exactly the title of the year. Maybe it should be called “The Golden Bells.” The flaw is, through, that if I’m going to do a color anthology, I need to use the word indigo. I *love* the word indigo. It’s not my favorite color (though I like it fine), but the word is a delight. Maybe I shall call the story “The Indigo Girl”…but the story has peacocks, and I don’t think peacocks are very indigo…

Speaking of color, I got my hands on Victoria Finlay’s Jewels: A Secret History and Color: A Secret History. I’ve been enjoying the book on jewels so much. It’s an easy (as in tasty, not in sense that it’s written for children or some such) read, but one of those books that’s filled with oddments of trivia and folk lore and fact. Also found that there is a Jennifer Roberson book that I did not yet have, a sad and terrible thing that I rectified immediately.

The chat is going on now: http://drolleriepress.com/drollerie/lets-chat/

Come say hey!

I’ve been wanting to show off this pretty thing:

I need to ask if I can start making LJ icons out of the cover art, because it’s really amazing

Here’s what I found out about it from the Drollerie Website. It might be worth mentioning that I intend to attend the chat this Sunday 9:00 pm Eastern. Everyone who attends who’s not a DP author will get a chance to win free copies of DP’s new releases.

In this collection, Cindy Lynn Speer, author of The Chocolatier’s Wife and editor of StereoOpticon, a collection of re-told fairy tales, gives us several new stories and an interesting look at the classic ‘Cinderella’ as well. Cindy’s stories examine the roles of women, our expectations, and the aftermath of the classic happily ever after in interesting, sometimes disturbing, ways.

Every Word I Speak: Most of us know the fairy tale of the girl who, because of her kindness, was given the gift of gems and flowers that fell from her mouth with every word she spoke, but what happens afterward? Who can she trust and what will they want from her? This version of the story is a dark and troubling tale, and absolutely delicious for those of us who like our fairy tales unmarred by a Disney ending.

One Hundred Eight Degrees: Once upon a time, a fairy tale princess discovered the truth of her kindom and led a revolt to overthrow the evil tyrant. And then she died on a pyre, her allies dead or scattered. That’s only the beginning. This fairy tale princess gets a new start in a new world, one with computers, and canned soft drinks, and cars, but what will she do with it, and can she start over with a clear conscience, knowing that she’s left her people behind?

Remember: In “Remember,” the fairy tale princess is just a dancer who falls in love with an artist, but the artist isn’t free to fall in love. It’s not safe. So what happens to the princess who finds her happily ever after and then loses it in the blood of her lover?

What Will I Do When This Dream is Over?: Matilda is a unicorn, calmly cropping the grass in Emmy’s front yard. Hank is her ex-boyfriend, who can’t see her anymore because, she’s afraid, he’s angry with her for not putting out. Emmy’s been preparing for the day Matilda would show up all her life. It’s been like a dream, always there. She’s been called upon to do a job, to save the world, and now it’s time. Emmy’s off on an adventure. She hopes she’ll win, beat the bad guys, save the day, but if she does, what happens after?

The Fortunate Ones: Once upon a time, there lived a people who were always fortunate. And then they discovered that their fortune resided in their women, so they turned them into a commodity to be bought and sold. Annabelle is living the dream with her very successful husband, except he beats her sometimes, when he’s angry, when things don’t go right. She doesn’t like knowing she’s a commodity. She doesn’t like thinking like that. But she has to, and it’s up to her to save herself. If she can. If she can take her fortune back into her own hands.

But Can You Let Him Go?: The fairy godmother who provides Cinderella with her pretty clothes and shoes and the ride to the ball is paying penance for her mistakes. When she’s not passing judgement on foolish and avaricious humans, she’s hunting for Cinderella, the Cinderella in this tale, at this time, and the handsome prince who will give Cinderella her happily ever after. She needs to get it right. She needs to save them both. If she doesn’t, she’ll never see her people again. Her sister, however, is determined to see her fail, and she’ll do all in her power to make that come to pass.

And With This Slipper…: In this essay, Cindy Lynn Speer discusses the many Cinderella stories there are in the world, in almost every culture, and what it is that makes us love it so.

You are the hurricane,
The screaming banshee’s song,
He is the depths of the ocean,
Silent and unhearing.

He is the mountain,
Unyielding and steep.
You are the rain,
Forgotten in a day.

You are the violet
Hiding in the shadows,
He is the oak tree
Higher than the sun.

He is everything that is quiet,
Everything that is strong,
and unattainable, and beautiful, and wise.

And you, you are the mist…
You touch his face but briefly,
And then you are quickly burned away.

(Sometimes I feel like poetry is emotion…it should be raw and honest…though I think this one will need to be revisited, its flaws sanded off.)

I’m being very productive at work today. You know what that means, don’t you?

Exactly. I’m avoiding working on my editing project.

I got a good start on it…I think it’s funny that, several years ago an editor rejected the manuscript for The Book Formerly Known as Balancing Act because there was a scene where the main (male) character sounded like a sixteen year old girl. I was annoyed…not that she didn’t like the book, that comes with the territory, but that she’d not been a little more tactful.

I’m kind of laughing now because I read the passage and thought, “By Jove, she was right!” Yes, I did say by Jove, darn it, I’m trying to cut down the cussing.

It’s kind of fun to do, though. This book has been the longest journey for me…the first book I ever finished, it was a book that when I needed a creative writing project in University I pulled it out and worked on it. Back then the main character was a vampire, herself (hence the name Andromeda) and Alistair was a cop. Now Andromeda’s the cop, and Alistair is an out of work English department adjunct who runs a herb shop.

I wrote the newest incarnation when I was 25, 26. I’m 35, and I see that I am a different person, just as I did when I was 21 looking back on what I’d written when I was 16.

And it’s not just a story of what I’ve been as a writer, but of my attitudes. I re-wrote a scene because my reaction was, “That’s not romantic. I know that there, that scene, is supposed to be romantic but it really isn’t.”

Also, in the random fact category:

New tires are love.

I sincerely believe that if I survive driving up the narrow, twisty, steep, icky road to the main connecting road, that the main connecting road ought to be better than the icky twisty road as an award. But it’s not. I further believe that I should not be tailgated by some idjit who apparently perceives the road as much nicer and safer than I did.

Fabric-store.com has the 7.1 weight linen on sale. I love 7.1 weight linen. It drop tests so nicely. I am, however, avoiding the site studiously because I have enough linen, really I do. (In fact, I have storage issues…more related to the fact that I’ve stopped throwing my fabric in garbage bags and stuffed them under the train table. My fabric is now organized…by use, rather than kind. There’s the “Box of doublet fabric” and the “This is for armor” and “dress fabric for out of period dress I may never make.”

I need to sew faster, but I didn’t really feel like sewing over break. Which sucks because my best intentions promised me that I’d have the doublet for Rodrigo done by now…I have been more like, “It’s cold. I want to drink tea and read, not bend over a cutting table.

So, I realized that not only is The Chocolatier’s Wife coming out on paper soon, so is a book that I used to call Balancing Act…so we’ll try and get that out this year.

I am seriously reconsidering naming my book  Balancing Act, my working title, or Unbalanced, my editor’s working title…one of my friends pointed out that the first one is over used, my editor can’t be sold on it, and I really, really can’t shake the idea that Unbalanced is a book that should take place in an abandoned institution.  It would be set in the 70’s, and star someone like Sondra Locke, who I never really cared much for anyway.

I thought “Call of the Moon”, and was all excited (it’s only been used once, in 2003) but then remembered that I also wrote a book with the word Moon in the title, and that it would make people think it was a sequel.  Something that three whole people not related to me have requested.

Now I’m considering “Palace of Bone”.  Palace of skin would actually be more accurate, but it sounds suspiciously like a porn novel.  Or “Pilgrims of the Night.”  That one would also be more accurate…so I’m living with titles, trying to think of something interesting that I can live with.  Usually titles are very easy for me…but never for this book.

Currently I’m drinking a can of Coke slush.  I left the box of cans of coke I’d bought Thursday in the trunk of my car, and only remembered that it was there today.

When I went out, I noticed, since my wheels were turned steeply to keep my car from sliding down the driveway, that my right front passenger tire has large bald patches on it.  I’d gotten these tires last <I>June</I>, so I am less than excited.  I went and looked at the others…all of them are fine except the driver side rear tire…it’s almost completely bald, too.  I had the car aligned last June, too, so I don’t understand why the two catty-corner tires are bad.  I’m also less than thrilled because I was seriously contemplating, since the car now makes a bit of a clunk when I make sharp turns up or down steep hills (universal joint, maybe?) and the radiator leaks (the car overheated for the second time, on the way home from work Thursday…it overheated on the way home from Harvest Raid in September…I’m going to try the bottle of Bars Leaks I found in the cellar.)  and since the car helped clean out my savings two summers in a row (well, that and house improvements) that maybe, despite my great and enduring love for my car, it’s time to let her go.  Since my mother’s car is undrivable right now, I’m going to suck it up and buy replacement tires so I don’t end up with a blow out, and just kid the car along until I can decide what to do…or at least get my mother’s car fixed so I can drive it.  I just pray that it doesn’t break down when I’m driving students.

Also, I researched this clothes rack…I wanted a new rack, something really sturdy that I can roll back and forth a little, because right now half my work clothes are in front of a book case in the cubby hole of a room we call the back room.  So, I bought one back in May, but because the room project took so long I never got to clean out the backroom and put it up until now…all the reviews were wrong.  It’s a horrendous piece of junk, and it’s way too late to send it back.  I might right the company and see if they’ll send me some replacement pieces, but right now it’s repaired thanks to the extensive use of duct tape.

When the highlight of your day is drinking soda slush, you probably need to give up and go back to bed.  But instead, I’m going to finish going through my clothes so that I can make up a Goodwill bag, and trying to get the backroom into some semblance of order.  Then back to the re-writes of what’s its name again.

Over at Drollerie, we’ve been celebrating the 12 days of Christmas with free stories and a chance to win a free e-reader. 

If you’ve ever wanted to check out my short story “A Necklace of Rubies”, now’s your chance to do so for free.    It’s a re-telling of the Mr. Fox/Bluebeard tales.   If a handsome man offered to set you up in his huge house, filled with wonders, love you and give you everything you ever wanted…you just couldn’t enter this one small room at the end of the corridor…what would you do?

Check it out…you might even read an e-reader to read it on!

So, I’ve been going through my books. It’s slow going because I’m really a pack rat when it comes to books.

In a way, though. they are a diary of what I was, what I thought I’d be, and what I’ve become.

There are the historical romances…I started with Jude Deveraux’s Velvet Angel, which I’d found in a bag of books that were being passed around and started reading because it was in medieval times. That was the summer when I’d turned thirteen…that summer I went to the local used book store and bought every one of her books I could, expanded out, reading Joanna Lindsey (Oh, those horrid Fabio covers! I can’t look at them without thinking about fake butter.) and Katherine Sutcliffe and Laura Kinsale. At a flea market I did some lady a kindness and she told me to pick out any book I wanted, and that’s how I got into Julie Garwood. I’d do my chores, take my lawn chair out, and read until dinner. Then I’d go to my room and read more. I was devouring a book a day, sometimes getting a good start on the next. Even though, later, I’d read and review romances for Affair de Cour (the only print book reviewing gig I could get) I just…didn’t have the joy of it, most of the time. So I got rid of a bunch of those…I kept the favorites, I mean, I don’t think I’ll ever read any of them again, even Jude’s A Knight in Shining Armor, but they were a major part of…something, and I just want to keep them a little while longer.

Then, there are the novels I felt that a woman who was going to go on to get her MLS and Masters in English and finally get her PhD (I wanted to get my doctorate in Arthurian Literature) needed to own. Books I’d read for class, things I’d picked up at book sales. I sorted those today, too. I don’t keep books for cool value, (I became very disillusioned with that idea when I realized that people didn’t think that the fact I have a whole bunch of Nataniel Hawthorne books is cool. Apparently, I’m the only person in the world who actually *likes* Nathaniel Hawthorne. I blame it on people being tortured by the symbolism in The Scarlet Letter — which, I think, is a lovely book, but really, let’s not keep people from reading The House of Seven Gables or The Marble Fawn because of it, shall we? I felt particularly pleased to get rid of Evelyn Waugh’s The Loved One. I’d never had a worse time finishing a book in my life. I also own several copies of Shakespeare’s plays…I think I kept them because they were paperbacks, and because I have Shakespeare’s plays all in this really old, beautiful, hard cover set. I looked myself in the mental eye, tole myself it was either get rid of the paperbacks or get rid of the hardbacks, and put all the paperbacks (save for “Much Ado About Nothing”, which is my favorite comedy and, being the movie tie in has pretty pictures in the middle) in the Goodwill box.

I also found my Graham Greene books…I was reading the back of them and wondering if any of them are half as good as This Gun for Hire…they all come off sounding a bit boring and even a little soapy. Any suggestions?

I am sort of on the fence over M.M. Kaye. When I was little I read The Ordinary Princess, one of my favorite stories of all time. I’ve not read it since my teens because I’m afraid that it won’t be as magical now as it was back then. So, every library sale I went to that had them, I bought whatever M.M. Kaye book I found that was fairly cheap. I know she made her name through The Far Pavilions which I have but have never read, but she also wrote a bunch of murder mysteries. I read Death in Cyprus the other night, and while I did stay up late to find out if I was right about who I thought the murderer was (she gave it away by one small line of dialogue near the end of the book, it was very much an aha! moment) but I found that the tone bothered me. There’s a certain era of story where the woman is a blithering idiot and the guy is a hard keep your chin up don’t you dare start crying after you almost fell to your death but were saved by your long hair catching in a pine tree (not joking) or go into hysterics because someone is obviously trying to kill you. type of bloke. Very forceful and controlling and “You’re a little dumb, since you’re a woman, so let me take care of all these plot points off the page so that you’re safe and you won’t ruin my plans.” And I’m sort of like, “Bleah” about it…I know it’s the era, and I certainly don’t mind powerful, proactive, protective male protagonists, but I want my women to be powerful in their own way (without going to the other extreme where they are completely bitch cakes and yell at the guy all the time.) So, I have this big pike of M.M. Kaye books that I’m not sure if I’m going to ever read now. I did love her descriptions of Cyprus…I now sort of would like to visit the place…but eh.

I’m also going over books I was given to review. Technically it’s considered bad form to do anything but keep them, but I suspect donating them to a good charity is not a bad thing. And sometimes they’d send me the hardcovers, then the paperbacks of every title. And some of these books I liked…but not that much. Or just never read because I knew I wouldn’t like it.

But it’s also been…a walk down a happy road, really. I’ve become re-introduced to old friends, I’ve found books that I forgot I’d had, books I’ve not yet gotten to read. Sometimes books remind me of a period of my life, or a story of what was going on when I got it, sometimes they remind me of story ideas that I was working on because I’d bought it for research, sometimes they just make me happy, anticipating what’s inside of them. I think that may be why I kept so many of the romances…they were good dreams.

I did, however, finally find my copy of the Eyre Affair…yes! So I can finally read the whole Jasper Fford series, front to back.

But first, more sorting of books.I don’t understand it, but somehow I managed to make more shelf space yet have less room for books. The logic of this is failing me.

Here is an example of what my life is like. Everyone’s is, so that’s what makes this wincingly funny.

Last night, the power went off right in the middle of cooking dinner, which was going to be pancakes and sausages. So, we had the sausage finished, which let us scroung up stuff to make sandwhiches. After I did all my stuff…chores that I could do by flashlight, visited with the parents, I think…wow. I can nap, guilt free. I don’t have to think, “I should be sewing or I should be decorating or putting things away, I can nap.”

So I go, change out of my clothes, fluff my pillow, slip into my freezing sheets, arrange the ye ton of blankets I feel that I need…snuggle down…shiver because darn, those sheets really *were cold*, and just as I’m all comfy, and my body’s settled down and the bed’s warming up…

CLICK. The power’s back on. Lamp, right in the eyes.

Now, I am actually happy the power came on so quickly…very grateful in fact because if the house got too cold I would have had to taken my father to a hotel, and I have friends who just got their power back…but yes. If bad timing was a country, I would rule it.

Hello!

I am trying, with the help of the lovely Deena, to start this site back up again. Sadly, I am not as good at changing things over as I thought I would be.

Keep your eyes peeled, however, as both myself and Drollerie will be running contests.