Ruts Suck

Photo of early 1990s car stuck in a rut. I think my parents messed up when I was born. My middle name should have been ‘procrastination’ instead of what they wrote down on the form at the hospital.

Unfortunately, even knowing that the longer something is put off the harder it becomes to start doesn’t seem to prevent me from falling into those same ruts of routine. Thanks to Toni Sue for prompting me to look at this blog and question why I haven’t been giving it any attention for so long.

Have I run out of things to say? Nope. I just haven’t had the energy to pry them out of my head and plop them down on the page. Having my son out of school this year for 5 months really took its toll on me. It’s not a good excuse, and I wasn’t really looking for an excuse, but I can pinpoint when he started the independent study program as the point where my free time vanished.

Why I say I wasn’t looking for an excuse and that’s not a good one is that he went back to the traditional campus at the end of March. *flips through her calendar* Uh.. yeah… So… what have I been doing the past two months? A heckuva lot of nothing. Nothing meaningful anyway.

I’ve been stuck in a very passive rut. Barely reactive, forget proactive. What really sucks is that it’s not just writing that’s suffered, but pretty much everything. I’ve tried to keep up with a bare minimum of requirements, but honestly, there’s not much spark in anything right now.

Back at the beginning of May, I started working through The Weekend Novelist by Robert J. Ray and Bret Norris. This has been helpful in sneaking back up on writing, but it’s still feeling a bit more like a chore than fun. I suspect I may need to cut out all my passive entertainment during the day and just play around with my characters again for a while. Anything to get the wheels back on track and find a routine that works for me.

Am I insane for thinking this can work just as I switch gears from school year to summer vacation mode? We’ll see. Something’s gotta give.

DS & Surgery

Tomorrow’s the big day! Our son is going in to have his sinuses drained. Specifically his sphenoid sinuses. He’s advanced to chronic sinus disease (triggered by allergies) and this is the first surgery he’s going to remember having. He’s worried, but resigned. It’s a day surgery, so we hope to have him home again tomorrow night.

Hopefully this will help with his migraine issues as well, since the pressure build up seems to trigger them on a near-constant basis. Thank goodness his neurologist gave us a new prescription before Christmas break that finally gave him some relief and returned his personality and energy levels.

We’ll be contacting people and updating information once we get home tomorrow.

Excerpt Monday: Take 9

Once a month, Bria Quinlan and Alexia Reed host a bunch of authors who get together and post excerpts from published books, contracted work or works in progress, and link to each other. You don’t have to be published to participate–just be a writer with an excerpt you’d like to share. For more info on how to participate, head over to the Excerpt Monday site or click on the banner above!

This month’s excerpt is drawn from Revealed. I decided to continue where we left off last month’s excerpt where Barrington and Marcia were paired up at dinner and he has no clue why she’s so standoffish with him. She can’t believe even he has forgotten the incident which solidified her introverted tendencies, when after all he was to blame, too bad if he didn’t know her identity at the time.

As always, any comments or criticisms are welcome.
Continue reading “Excerpt Monday: Take 9”

Workshop Tomorrow

Bob MayerI’m taking a huge step outside my comfort zone tomorrow. Bob Mayer is coming to town and giving two days of workshops: one focused on writing and the other focused on the writer. Originally the one today was supposed to be for non-fiction writers, so I wasn’t interested. Turns out it was changed to a fiction workshop after I’d signed up for Sunday’s author-centric one and didn’t feel I could afford to do both.

I think I made the right decision in any case. I need to focus on my habits and goals in order to produce the writing in the first place. The workshop is called Warrior Writer and is based on his experiences as a Green Beret and his book Who Dares Wins: The Green Beret Way to Conquer Fear and Succeed.

Continue reading “Workshop Tomorrow”

Reading Spree

A stack of books.It looks like I forgot to update my 2009 Reading List for the last month or so. I’ve kept up to date on Goodreads.com, so it was easy enough to do. I was surprised to see I’d easily sailed past the number of books I recalled reading in 2008(79) and have read 87 books so far this year. Not bad considering there are another 16-17 weeks left in 2009.

So you know I like Regency-set Historical Romances, but that’s far from the only genre I read. This month, I’ve also read more craft of writing books (big surprise, right?), Young Adult (gotta stay ahead of the girl), paranormal, Victorian and contemporary. I also read fantasy and science fiction, but I’ve had too many regencies at hand lately.

The stand outs were Tessa Dare’s Goddess of the Hunt and Surrender of a Siren. I should probably just go pre-orderA Lady of Persuasion now. I’m also curious about her Legend of the Werestag which is an ebook put out by Samhain Publishing earlier this year.

Anyway, that’s what I’ve been reading. How about you, got any good recommendations?

Regency Resources Updated

I just spent far too long updating my Regency Resources page. I mostly cleaned up AOL and Geocities links. I LOVE the wayback machine (http://www.archive.org) for things like this. I also added a bunch of new links I had sitting waiting to be put in.

I’m still thinking about how to make it more readable and usable. I put the current links, titles, and descriptions into an excel file so I can sort, add and rearrange stuff easily, but need to figure out what I want it to look like in the end. I figure since I use it as my personal regency bookmark system, it needs to be functional as well, especially since it gets a good number of visits as well.

Enjoy! And if you have any suggestions or additions, don’t hesitate to leave a comment.

I Stand Corrected…

today's forecastSo, remember when I said summer was over just last week? Mother Nature apparently took exception to that and has sent us a heat wave here in Sunny SoCal. The electronic sign at the high school has been unable to properly show the temp, claiming it was 1C3˚F the other day. Now, the question is, was that 103 or 108? Yesterday it clearly said 107˚. Except for the low humidity, I almost feel like I’m back in Austin, TX.

I think there’s a reason that school usually started after Labor Day. I felt so bad for the high school boys who were out running around the “block” on Friday afternoon. The block just happens to be about 3.5 miles.

Add to this fun, that DS developed a sore throat and fever Wednesday night after coming home from school at lunch with a migraine. Took him to the doctor on Friday because he was still hovering around 101˚ according to our old-school glass thermometer. Get to the pediatrician’s — they use their fancy wave-it-across-the-forehead kind and get no fever. Guess which one I trust since I knew his fever hadn’t broken in the last hour. It never fails in there. The strep culture came back negative. But his cough concerned the doctor enough that she sent us to the radiology clinic downstairs to get a chest x-ray.

So what does DD do on Saturday? She comes down with it too. It’s always something.

What a way to start the school year. I guess I should be happy he didn’t get his annual back-to-school-after-being-exposed-to-new-germs fever until the first Thursday instead of Monday. I think he’ll be back tomorrow but I’ll have her home for at least another day of miserableness. It’s a good thing the middle school here puts all the homework assignments up on a website so we can keep up to date. It’s just a matter of getting the work done now.

C’mon Fall!

Gone to the Beach

Pedestrian bridge from our hotel to the beach across the PCH.
Pedestrian bridge from our hotel to the beach across the PCH.
DH came home from a business trip this morning and we snuck out of town a little after 6pm. Traffic wasn’t too bad except for the border patrol check point in San Onofre which began moving promptly again at precisely 7:30 pm. Illegal immigrants must abide by the holiday schedule as well, you see.

So we’re all settled in and looking forward to a couple of carefree days. Have a great weekend!

What A Day!

wedding1Seventeen years ago today, my husband and I tied the knot on an overcast morning beside the Chester River in Chestertown, Maryland where we went to college. This was one week before he graduated, four months before his 21st birthday. We had a surprisingly large turnout of all our friends and family considering it wasn’t just Mother’s Day Weekend, but Mother’s Day itself.

We’ve joked through the years that we gave our mom’s gifts that would keep on giving. For better or for worse, they each got the son or daughter they’d never had. Over the years, they’ve also received a matched set of grandchildren: one girl, one boy. I hope they both recognize the love we have for them even if we’re not always the best at showing or telling them. We’ve only shared the day one other time in 1998 before today. (Calendar dates and weekdays coincide every 5, 6 or 11 years depending on leap years or not.)

momsI was looking through the photo albums of our wedding pictures this morning. I hadn’t remembered the edges of the pages had melted and fused together in many places ten years ago in a house fire. I should do something about that. However, what annoyed me was the realization that the photographer sucked. We have several pictures of this one guy I don’t recognize any more now than when we got the pictures back. We have numerous pictures with the wedding party, pictures of the reception, pictures of us with my parents, pictures of us with his dad’s family and then his mom’s family.

So, what’s the problem? It was FREAKING Mother’s Day. We don’t have any pictures of us with JUST our mothers (or even with just all four of our parents for that matter). I had to crop a picture from the receiving line to get THIS one of both of our mothers together. Sheesh. (Oh, and that’s my youngest brother-in-law there in front of his mom. He’s taller than I am now!)

Happy Mother’s Day to Lynnda and Yvonne and Happy Anniversary, dear!

What’s the best gift you ever received or gave on Mother’s Day?

Happy B-day to Me!

No big plans today, no big post like last year. I haven’t even decided where we’re going out for dinner tonight. In the last year, I haven’t noticed “life began at 40”, but hey, it’s still early, right?

Two best gifts so far? An actual plan to make DS feel better and DD comes home from camp today!

Another of the Romance Divas (or is that two people?) shares my birthday as well. Two of my friends from Cub Scouts do as well. Definitely a good day in many ways. And hey, Sebastian Bach and Jamie Hewlett were born the exact same day, that’s still kinda cool.