Hm. It’s been another 10 days since I’ve updated. Bad me.

Let’s see. I’ve been tagged no less than 4 times to do this meme. The following people are to blame for this: AJ Chase, Leigh Royals, Ally Kendall and Jodi Henley.

I’m not going to tag anyone else, but I will add my 7 Random Facts here for the curious.

1) At one time, we had 30+ gerbils in the house. This is the result of having 3 breeding pairs that kept, well, breeding. We used to trade the babies for food for the adults. After a while, you could go into any pet store in the area and you’d see ones related to ours with the cute little white bracelets against their black fur. This count does not include the hamsters we also had.

2) I’m allergic to guinea pigs, bee stings, and penicillin. My eyes water from the guinea pigs, wherever I get stung swells about 3x normal size, and I get nasty hives from penicillin.

3) I only moved once before I went to college. I was 3 at the time and my mom still lives there. After college, I moved back near campus to be closer to my now-DH. Since we were married, we’ve moved 5 times in 15 years. Two of these were only across town. We also keep moving west. Maryland->Alabama->Texas->California. I used to joke, where’re we going next, Hawaii? I stopped when DH came home with a job offer in Shanghai.

4) After 15 years, I still don’t know Spanish with any fluency. I understand more than I let on, but I’m reluctant to actually speak aloud what I do know.

5) I love Latin music. I don’t always know what the hell they’re saying, but I dig it. Gipsy Kings, Rodrigo Gabriela, Shakira, and even JLo and Ricky Martin.

6) I love Latin food. My MIL and I spent much of her visit last week trading recipes and searching for a bone-in pork leg to roast. We did find a nice hometown-style butcher shop where we can order one for her next visit.

7) In high school, I played flute and piccolo in marching and concert band. No, not “One time at Band Camp” stories! However, I really wanted to get into the jazz band, so I had to learn how to play trombone.

Phew. That’s over with. So, what besides spending time cleaning house and visiting with my MIL have I been doing?

I’ve been in study mode instead of writing mode again. I refuse to let another whole month slip by without actively working on my WIP though. Jodi suggested a couple of new craft books: Creating Unforgettable Characters by Linda Seger and Self-Editing for Fiction Writers, Second Edition: How to Edit Yourself Into Print by Renni Browne and Dave King. These have direct relevance to issues I’m having with my book: my hero, for all that he wanted to be in the limelight, has refused to shed much light or expose much of his character and I’ve never really edited any fiction with any purpose and direction before so I’m panicking over that step now.

Anyway, I just finished both books and on the surface, they really didn’t tell me anything that didn’t seem to not be common sense. And we all how how rare that is these days.

There were lines in both books that jumped out at me and I went “Aha!” or “Yeah!”, but I don’t think I’ve quite grokked (or as Jodi says, internalized) them well enough yet, but you can expect to hear a lot more on the subject in the coming days. I need to nail down my hero and squeeze another 50 pages or so out of him. To do that, I’m gonna need to know a helluva lot more about him and his motivations and goals. Sneaky bugger.

Edit: Apparently Fionn Jameson has also tagged me after the fact. 🙂