well...

today is just like any other day, even though there's a book out today with one of my stories in it.

Same old slacking off, same old chocolate guzzling, same old aches and pains... but something must have sparked me up a bit, as I finally got back into writing IllMet and did a mighty 2K words in the end! I managed to complete what's turned out to be a helluva long marathon sex scene, and then felt compelled to kick on, and write a bit of a scene that illuminates Robin the hero's emotions. He's not human, but he's beginning to feel that he wants to be, and my job is to try and convey that yearning effectively. I hope I can do it. I think I can do it. But only the writing will tell... Writing paranormal isn't something I've done a lot of, although I'm very much enjoying it, and I don't want to muck up my mythos... It's all got to make sense within the bounds of the story's internal logic. Don't want to leave any glaring plot holes to spoil the reader's enjoyment, do I?

I've got something 'out' tomorrow... apparently...

Kristina Lloyd reminded me that Sex and Shopping is out tomorrow! I'd completely forgotten... which shows how direly crap I am at promo. Once a story's done and subbed and accepted and proofed, well, I've forgotten it because I'm on to the next thing and the next thing and the next...

Any road up, S&S contains one of my stories, This Very Boutique... which, obviously, is about shopping, but in a slightly off beat styley. I think it's a right laugh, a jolly sort of story, not to be taken in the least bit seriously, but sweet, I think, in its own particular way. At least I think it is...

You can buy the collection from Amazon.com and Amazon.co.uk although American readers will have to wait until 26th December to order it. Not sure how many folks will be browsing Amazon on Boxing Day though, but there you are!

Anway, I may post a teaser bit of it later today at Portia's Prose, if I can find it on this laptop...

UPDATE... found it! Go to EXCERPT FROM THIS VERY BOUTIQUE!

Oh, and while I'm here, sorry for the sparseness of entries in the last couple of days... a doctor's visit and a migraine have sort of knocked me for six, but hopefully, I'm on the mend now...

Five Interesting Things About Me...

Naughty Jax tagged me... Now, I don't normally participate in things like this, but decided to do a quickie.

1. I have six toes on my left foot
2. I am distantly related to the Romanovs
3. I speak the language of cats
4. I had a paper on String Theory published under an assumed name
5. I was temporarily swapped at birth with another baby and lived with a different family for three months

Please remember that I'm a pathological liar with a vivid imagination and I earn my living by making things up... LOL

ps. I won't tag anyone specifically, but if you feel like doing this for a laff, please consider yourself tagged.

It's Guy Fawkes weekend!

Went to a bonfire last night, with himself, and while I didn't take any photos, because basically I'm crap at photography, I found this lovely image on Flickr which looked very much like the display we saw. It was taken by a talented photographer called berriehol, who v. kindly allowed me to post it here.

Haven't achieved a whole great deal of anything today, apart from one or two tiny web bits for a client, some emails finally dealt with, and one or two other things sorted. I've mainly spent the day wrangling with the synopsis I mentioned, and boy, has it been a bit of a wrassle! I hate writing synopses... The book itself is hard enough to write, without this having to 'sell' it in the form of a potted summary... Eck!

urgh....

It's been tough going these last couple of days... I've felt v. tired and things have been a struggle, but at least I've managed to keep my wordcount up, and am now over half way through Ill Met By Moonlight! I feel I've done quite well with this, considering it was only a pretty vague idea, and I started writing it more or less because I felt I should be writing something, even though it's uncommissioned and might never even find a home...

I feel very bad though, because I have a long list of emails I need to reply to. I don't know why I sometimes feel this strange resistance to answering emails, even those from people I like and cherish. It's v. weird. It's like I want to reply and communicate, but there's this invisible barrier that stops me doing it. It's very similar to the resistance I feel towards writing my fiction sometimes. It's so stupid... because when I manage to punch through that barrier, I'm all right and the words flow... And it's not that I don't want to commicate at all, because I'm managing to write this, aren't I? And I've been posting at my very favourite writers' gathering place in all the world, the Romance Divas Message Board, but emails have been building up and building up... and I must deal with them!

Anyway, today I have a busy schedule... Top of the list is write some emails! I've also some web bits to do, and I've to write a synopsis for another novella that I wrote quite a while ago, because a friend who I'm collaborating with on a proposed two person anthology is hoping to pitch it to an editor within the next week. God, this is a tough one though... like many authors, I hate and loathe and dread writing synopses. I've read all the howtos on the topic, and I have written plenty in my time, but to be honest, if writing novels is tough, writing synopses is a hundred times harder!!!

Any tips on synopsis writing, anyone?

omigod, another VDO dream!

Yikes, I had another dream about being with Vincent D'Onofrio/Bobby Goren last night! It seemed to be the latter, as he had the Goren 'look' but it's all a bit vague so it's hard to tell. I can't remember the details, but we seemed to have been at some kind of club, and had stayed out all night and had dossed down together somewhere. In the same bed, I think, but alas I can't remember anything more intense than a bit of kissing and cuddling... I think we might have been at my parents house, and I was younger than I am now, because I remember getting a ticking off for having a man round! There were more confusing bits that are hard to dredge up... Bobby might have been involved with someone else, but was trying to break up with them, and also there was one fleeting bit where he might have been naked... and possibly wrestling with someone, like in the film Women In Love... but as I say, it's all pretty vague. Unfortunately, in respect of the naked bit!!!

what I've been doing this morning....

Have been having my roots done! The excellent Anne has been round to do away with the inch of mud brown [and grey]...

new excerpt!

Go here!!!

still feeling...

... cheered by the supportive comments everyone left when I had my latest little confidence crisis a couple of posts ago! That's the beauty of online friends, they can always manage to knock some sense into me in the nicest possible way.

Haven't achieved a mega amount today, although I have walked up into little town to the post and made a start on IllMet for the day... before lunch, which is a miracle! Was wondering how to tackle the next bit... how to get them together... but it suddenly seems quite simple. Lois just has to take the bull by the horns, so to speak, and tell Robin she's dreamt about him, and take it from there! No biggie... [well, actually, there is a biggie, nudge, nudge, wink, wink, say no more...] After all, the guy is sitting there in the buff and one thing does tend to lead to another! LOL

I suppose when I've got a decent sized chunk of this thing done, and polished it a bit, I should think about posting a bit of it over at Portia's Prose... Anybody fancy that?

Words done so far today: 321

[Good job I'm not doing NaNoWriMo, innit? I'd soon get drummed out of the programme!]

better

Well, thanks to all the wonderful people who've commented on my previous post, I'm now feeling a tad better about myself. I've flicked through that old book, and I don't see anything that's too close to something that's in the later book... I'm sure there are similarities in terms of tone and the shapes of certain scenes... but I don't think there's anything that's exactly the same. Phew!

I haven't got much done today though... I've felt tired, and confused, and unable to focus. I've dotted around online a bit, and tried to fend off another migraine, and written a tiny bit of a thing that might become part of a friend's magazine feature. So at least that's something achieved. I've even, just now, managed to do a bit of IllMet... just a few hundred words... but at least I'm staying in touch with it. It doesn't feel too special at the moment, but it's only a first draft, and first drafts are made to be polished and improved on...

In all this kerfuffle about similar scenes in my books, I completely lost sight of other comments... ie. that Suite Seventeen is 'more of a real novel and emotionally satisfying...' So that's got to be good, hasn't it?

Words done so far today: 478

F*&%! S£$%!

Life had to come back and bite me a big one in the butt, didn't it?

Was riding high in my dream, on Anais's comment and the achievements of yesterday, and naturally that means that everything has to go wrong today. It's 10.30am, I'm not dressed and I'm in such a state of high anxiety that I could burst into tears at any second and have already had such a major yelling fit with myself that the cats are cowering. Basically...

• I foolishly misunderstood some instructions given to me, and a minor disaster nearly happened. Fortunately, I think I've been able to catch the error and someone is dealing with it...
• Worse, it seems that I am subconsciously rewriting scenes from my earlier books. My agent has just read an older book of mine, and wonders if I lifted a scene straight out of it to put in a more recent one... Now I swear on my cats' lives that I haven't done such a thing. I wouldn't dream of it... but it's very possible that I have written quite a similar scene without even realising it. Which is very, very depressing, as it just goes to show how very limited I am in the ideas department. I feel quite cast down about this now...

Writers out there... has anything like the above happened to you? Have you inadvertently written a similar scene in two different books?

Or is it just me who's a useless ageing hack who's run out of ideas and who should just pack it in? :(

a good day... and night...

Now yesterday was a better day...

First of all, I managed to do 1.2K of IllMet, and managed to get as far as a quite filmic scene that I've had in my mind for what must be years now, ever since Robin morphed from my previous fantasy hero [Spike] into my current one [Bobby Goren]... The way I've written it now is probably v. different from the way I had it planned originally, but I think it's worked, it was fun to write, and it's moving me on v. nicely with the plot. Maybe we'll finally get to some horizontal action where the heroine is actually awake now!!!

The second thing was that yesterday evening I was touched and awed to read a truly heartwarming comment left by a reader and prepublished writer called Anais, on my Myspace Profile. My ebook Lessons and Lovers really struck a chord with her, and she was kind enough to post a long comment expressing her enjoyment in the book. She also posted about it on the Romantic Times message boards too, which was totally brilliant of her. It really warms my heart when somebody likes my writing enough to take the trouble to express their feelings. Even though I've been writing since the dinosaurs roamed, because I'm crap a promo, I probably don't get as many reviews and plaudits as a lot of authors who've come to prominence recently. So the ones I do get mean the absolute world to me - because a lot of the time, I have the most terrible doubts about the quality of my writing and storytelling and what have you... I might rabbit on with enthusiasm in my blog about my characters, but just because they seem alive and wonderful in my head, that doesn't mean my feelings about them necessarily translate onto the page in a form that others can enjoy... so when I hear that I got it right for a reader, I always feel totally over the moon!

So, many thanks, Anais! You made my day!

And that's only the start of it... I had a Vincent D'Onofrio dream, didn't I?

It went like this... I was on holiday somewhere, and Vin was working in the same town/city/whatever. I was in this big building, and upstairs, he was having a row with his agent about some film role or something, and I saw him storm out into the street. Obviously, seeing my hero, I followed [eek, I'm a stalker!] and though I was able to keep him in sight for a while, I lost him eventually and was rather disappointed. Anyway, I was standing under what I think was a bus shelter, and suddenly Vin jumped down from the roof of it and said 'Hello!' [this was actually inspired by my filmic moment in IllMet, I think...] He seemed v. pleased to see me for some reason, and took me by the arm and led me back to the building, where he was now about to do a scene in a hospital drama. I think I hung around there talking to him for a while, but eventually I had to go, and he grabbed me in his arms and gave me a very thorough kiss! He was holding me v. close and I was left in no doubt that I'd made a big impression on him!!! After that, we parted, but there seemed to be some intimation that we'd meet again... and then I woke up, alas.

Now if I could dream the next installment of this little saga tonight, I'd be a very, very happy person indeed!