A strange and wonderful day!

First of all, here are my newly dyed eyelashes, ready for RWA. They might not look anything special, but believe me, they look twice as long as they did before, due to the pale tips now being a beautiful shade of blue-black. :) Note also the tidy brows as opposed to the previous Neanderthal Babe look...

Today's big news broke, however, just as I was setting off for the La Femme Beauty Rooms. Got a phone call from my agent, with various bits of news... and the big kicker of me having sold four short stories/mini novellas to Spice Briefs!!!

I can barely believe this. In fact I keep waiting to wake up. I was very, very cautiously hopeful about these stories, but the reality of selling them still seems amazing. I've actually only written two of them. One is A Gentlewoman's Predicament, my naughty Victorian thingie, and the other is Twice the Pleasure, a menage a trois story, which is the first in a trio of shorts entitled Risque Reunions, all based around a ten year school reunion. I just have outlines for stories #2 and #3, but they're pretty clear in my mind, and shortish, of course, so I can't wait to get my teeth into them and polish them off too.

The timing of this news is fantastic too, and will help no end with my confidence levels at RWA! At the moment I feel as if I could almost float across to San Francisco, no jet required!

More news as and when it breaks...

It couldn't last...

... my writing spurt, that is.

I finished my first school reunion story on Saturday evening, in first draft, but I haven't really done any new writing since. Correction, I haven't done any writing since, why avoid the issue!

I'm sort of in a bit of a multiple holding pattern at the moment, waiting to hear about various things, and I'm not sure what to do next. Editing the reunion story would be obvious, but I like to leave things to set for a little while before I tackle editing. In the meantime, I've not been totally idle on the writing front. Instead of actually laying down words, I've been researching and reading topics up online, for a book idea that's 'out there'...

Now I've no clue as to whether this idea/proposal will come to anything, or any special hint or sign that there's any hope... but it's a story line that needs more background development than my usual boy meets girl, boy shags girl, boy and girl skip off into the sunset tales. So, I thought I would look up a few things in sheer blind hope that I'll need them...

Other than that, I'm having a pleasant but very lazy Easter Holiday... and I hope you all are too.

ps. I indulged myself this morning at Amazon, with a Black Books Complete Box Set. Oh, so funny... And in honour of that, here's another look at a YouTube I've posted before, but which is one of the most hilarious and ironically true to life writing vids I've ever had the pleasure to view.

Finally... some decent progress...

Finally, some decent daily word counts for the Seventy Day Challenge! The last couple of days have been much more productive, with a very handy 1.8K on Thursday and a useful 1.5K on Friday. I was beginning to think that I was flunking the current challenge completely, but it seems I might be starting to do a bit better at last.

My current WIP is a bit of an experiment, the first in a trio of three long short stories/short novellas about people who meet up again, after several years, at a school reunion. The one I'm working on now is a bit rough and ready, a bit scrappy at the moment, to be honest. But it's words in a file that can be edited, so maybe I can make something worthwhile out of it in the editing. It's the story of Caitlyn, who fancied both Drew and Steve in sixth form college, and ten years later, gets the chance to pick up where she would have liked to have left off... with both of them!!!!

I am not...

... quite such a deadbeat today!

Much to my relief, I'm back on the challenge horse and have racked up a tidy 1.6K words today, on a newish project. It's a novella, based on a school reunion, which might turn into three novellas if the ideas gel properly. It started out not going so smoothly, but now I'm more in the zone with it, and I'm liking my new characters more. It's a story about a woman who discovers that the boy she used to fancy madly at school actually fancies his male best friend... and that the two of them also fancy *her* too... ooh la la!

I've also had a pretty productive day generally, doing chores like sorting out promo, ordering author copies of my forthcoming titles, Gothic Heat and Gemini Heat, and ordering my new bookmarks and postcards, designed for me by the fabulous Frauke of Croco Designs.