I'm at the LUST BITES blog today...

With a very naughty excerpt from GOTHIC HEAT! It's the bit where Rafe first 'meets' Paula's dark side, Isidora.

HERE'S THE LINK

Leave a comment there, and you go into a prize draw for a copy of the book itself! :)

I made a little banner...

Isn't it nifty?

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!!!!

Erm....

... according to my stats nobody followed this link the other day.

hot sexy fiddling about in a mop cupboard....

It's naughty fun, I promise you! :)

Stop Press!

I am so dumb... when I changed the format of my excerpts blog... I forgot to add the stat counter, didn't I? No wonder there seem to be no hits!!!!

I am such a doofus sometimes, aren't I? LOL

I've been feeling...

... a little bit foggy these last few days.

I think it's a viral thing, because I'm a bit sinussy too, and with a tendency towards headaches etc, as well as a cough. I think I feel a tad sharper this morning, but I'm not crystal clear. Not that I ever am...

I haven't really done much of anything since I turned IN TOO DEEP in on Monday. A lot of time has been spent grappling with stupid technology. Basically trying to get my old Psion 5MX to talk to my laptop... when my laptop doesn't have a serial port and the Psion only connected via a serial port. After trying two previous USB/serial adaptors, I was ready to chuck in the towel, then I read a blog post somewhere, recommending yet another brand... and lo and behold, it arrived this morning and it actually works. Hurrah! My idea is to take the Psion with me to RWA, so that if I have any brilliant ideas, I can type them up on it, and then load them onto the laptop when I get home. :)

Needless to say, wrangling with recalcitrant comms software and drivers isn't the best thing to do when you're fuzzy headed, but me being me ie. a complete twit, I've wrangled, and probably made myself feel worse into the bargain.

The action is...

here today!

playing with my camera

Was foofing around with my camera whilst waiting for himself to get ready to go out... and managed to get a shot of myself that's only slightly psychotic for a change. :)

This, of course, is...

... not my body!!!!

But I'm pleased to report that I've lost around half a stone in the month or so I've been trying to cut down on junk food and eat more heathily! And the beauty of it is, I've not had to deny myself completely. I'm still eating some nice things, like fish and chips and Stella Artois once a week, and our home made pasta bake etc. I'm afraid the chocolate has had to go for the time being, but once I get down to a weight I'm happy with, I may allow myself one or two choc treats a week. Possibly as consolation when I feel particularly fed up.

I think that if I can maybe lose another half stone by RWA, or maybe three quarters, I'll consider that sufficient. I've been caught in the prison of total weight/diet obsession before, and I'm not going to let that happen again!

V. busy for the rest of the week...

Things are a bit crazy here at the moment.


I was chugging along nicely with my reunion story, starting to get to grips with it, when the writing life, as it so often does, dropped an anvil on my head. Message from agent saying that editor has asked if there's any chance I can turn in IN TOO DEEP like... now!!! Major eeek agh situation! Now, the thing is finished in first draft, and has even had a polish, but there were some fairly majorish plot/research issues that I wanted to double check, and be sure of... and I was pretty sure that when I found out what I needed to know, there'd be some rewriting. I was also thinking of waiting 'til my actual delivery day, on the off chance that I'd get to see a sneak peek of the real cover... and if the hair or something was different, I could rewrite to fit!

But alas, no... I need a few more days, but I'm going to try and email the finished product in next Monday, which is a full two weeks early, which still helps the editor. Not sure why this rush has come about, but sort of have my suspicions.

I have to give a shout out to my good writing buddies, though, for hand holding me through this, and convincing me I could do it. So yay to Saskia and Madelynne, as ever, and many thanks to Merry and friends for library advice, and the Romance Divas for some medical stuff. And a huge shout out to my fabulous sister Rita, who's a nurse, who supplied me with some totally brilliant and crucial medical info too.

I'd better get stuck in then, hadn't I?

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.

I know... I know...

I'm a useless blogger at the moment!

It's not that I don't have any news or anything, or that I'm particularly depressed or more under pressure than is normal for a writer. I just can't seem to translate my news or my thoughts into any kind of meaningful blog post. I think I'm just a little bit tired, and I can't summon the pep for a worthwhile post just at the moment.

In the meantime, here are links to a couple of new excerpts.

GEMINI HEAT

IN TOO DEEP

Enjoy!