Here’s mine.
Shane has a few more than I do, but I don’t hold it against her. 
Anyone else have a wall they’re willing to show?
Had to post because I’m so excited! I just hung the cover flat for my next book on the wall. No one else is here to get excited with me, so you get the first peek at my Wall O’ Covers.
Here’s my cat Suki’s response.
See why I had to post?
When I was in Jr. High I had it bad for a boy in my school. I mean bad. I just thought he was the cutest thing I’d ever seen. The crush actually lasted for a long while, but eventually I grew out of it. And then a few years ago, I got another crush. Before I met The Professor, and I hate to admit it, but the crush is still alive and well.
Never fret, my marriage is safe. The Professor knows all about this crush. He just smiles and shakes his head, or feigns jealousy, but he knows it’s a harmless crush. So who is my mystery crush?
That’s right. It’s Clay Aiken. And I know some of you are rolling your eyes and thinking I’m nuts, but it’s okay. I can handle the ridicule. I don’t know what it is about him. Well, that’s not true, I know it’s his voice. When he sings….oh man, it’s like the heavens open up and my knees go all weak and I get this goofy grin on my face. I just can’t help it. The man does things to me.
The season he was on American Idol, I was embarrassingly obsessed. When he’d step on stage, I was filled with butterflies and nerves. Like you do when you know you’re gonna see that cute boy in your Biology class. I downloaded all the clips of his performances and was the first in line to buy his CD. Okay, so maybe I wasn’t the first, but I was there that first day.
Yesterday he was on Good Morning, America, promoting his new CD. And let me just say it before someone else does, yes, his new hair looks ridiculous. But he’s still Clay and he’s still got it. While I’m sure he’ll get slammed for doing his second album of mostly cover songs, I know he’ll do them all better than the original versions. Friday he’ll be on The View, and I can’t wait to see him again.
Okay so just for me, here’s some more pics.
So who are your crushes?
Avast, ye matey! Do you know what today is? Can you give us your best impression?
First person to post what today is and give us an impression, wins a signed copy of NO MAN’S BRIDE!
Arrr!
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Who’s looking forward to the new TV season?
Ummm… Not me.
I can never commit. And it seems like in most of the series that have started in the past few years, you need to have watched it from the beginning. So I miss Show #1 and then I never know the set-up or the characters’ inner conflicts. What I really need is to rent the First Season DVD of some of these shows (Lost, Gray’s Anatomy, Desperate Housewives, etc) because I’ll never catch up otherwise.
Wait. I don’t really want to catch up. I don’t enjoy TV that much, unless I’m watching ice hockey or basketball. If there’s absolutely nothing better to do, no great books on my TBR pile (oh, right) then I might sit down for a Law & Order interlude, because I don’t really need any backstory. Each episode is pretty much independent. But I can’t think of any other show that I’ve watched on a semi-regular basis.
So, what’s brewing for the new season, anyway? Besides political ads, I haven’t really seen commercials for any of the new shows …
Fun for Monday morning…I’m sure some of you have seen these, but they are good for a chuckle or two. These videos are from YouTube. Just click on the play buttons.
If you have a slow connection, click on the pause button until the buffer line changes all the way to red. Then click it back to play.
Original links:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BHJ9eUkjWgY
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CWej4ZbrbbM
My mom and her husband are on a three-week road trip, so we’re cat-sitting for them. I couldn’t bear the thought of Maybelline, their three-year-old female, being home alone all that time, even if we did stop by daily. My husband was certain bringing her to our place was a mistake and would be a horrible ordeal for everyone. (She’s very timid; she was abused and abandoned before Mom adopted her from a shelter a couple years ago.) I assured my hubby all three cats would be playing together within a week. Kittens can get along with anyone. And Maybelline is declawed.
During Maybelline’s first visit to our place, cowering on the sofa beside Mom, Derby crept up to this strange cat that outweighs him by, oh, 20 lbs., and poked her, trying to get her to play. Maybelline looked like she’d prefer the sofa swallow her up, or failing that, the sofa swallow the kitten.
She spent the first few days occupying a nearly-impossible-to-get-to corner of the closet in my office. The only way we knew she came out at all was the litter box evidence and kibble consumption. But by the end of the first week she’d let me pet her. It took nine days before we saw them playing together. So I was off by two days…
Yesterday Derby walked up to her as she sat in the hall and tried to entice her to play by biting her neck. She pulled back and gave him that “Go away kid, you bother me,” stare. Far from insulted, Derby made sure his long tail trailed under her chin as he sauntered past on his way to the kibble dish. A few minutes later he was back, headed for his favorite nap spot (my chair). She swatted him and chased him around the furniture until they knocked down the sofa throw pillows and startled Dakarai, who’d been innocently napping on the coffee table. He of course immediately jumped into the wrestling match.
I wonder if she’ll miss them when she goes home?
Here’s Derby trying to wrestle Maybelline.
Derby on the receiving end, with an opponent more his size…
Oh, yeah, he’s real stressed at having a strange cat in the house:
There was quite a bit of hissing at the start, but the only growling is when Derby is playing with a binder clip or ring from the milk jug. Or a plastic bottle cap. He goes nuts for those. A box full of official cat toys (if they ever got put back in the toy box) and their favorites are office supplies and kitchen castoffs. Nothing like climbing into bed at the end of a long, hard day, and finding half a dozen clips, rings, and caps “buried” under the covers.
Lately I’ve seen a lot of posts on some of the loops I’m on where authors talk about “how” they write. Most allude to doing two or three drafts before sending in the completed manuscript.
I rarely post because, with working full time, I don’t have a lot of time…but I can tell you my reaction—2 or 3 drafts????? Are they kidding?!!!! I must do 100 drafts. No lie. I’ve been known to spend 6 or 8 hours on four pages (getting them to be just as I think they should be)
The way I write is: I write all new pages on the weekend. Have two critique partners that review the new pages during the week. On Friday I put in the changes, ready to write new pages again the next weekend. During the week I carry my pages with me at all times. Go through, make changes, key in changes, print off, go through, make changes… I think you’re getting the picture.
If I have a long plane ride or a longer block of time, I print out all the pages on my current WIP (work in progress) and edit it again up to that point.
Do you think I’m just not understanding what the word “draft” really means or could it be that I’m some sort of self editing freak??
I hate:
1. Cleaning
2. Standing in line
3. That commercial for Citi bank where the two old women have had their identities stolen by some motorcycle-riding men (though they don’t sound like men on the commercial*)
4. Animal abuse
5. Mosquito bites
6. Writing chapters 4-6
7. Revision letters
8. Cooking
9. Spam
10. Being alone on Friday night (for some reason Saturday is okay, but I always feel like a loser if I have nothing to do on Friday)
I love:
1. My husband
2. My family, my friends, and my kitties
3. Beginning a book
4. Ending a book
5. Reading a good book
6. Libraries
7. Flowers
8. Godiva chocolate
9. Bubble baths
10. Fall weather
11. Hugs
12. Kindness
13. Christmas
14. Dancing
15. Sad movies
16. Bookstores
17. Shopping
18. Opening a box with the first copies of my new book
19. Good surprises
20. Holding hands
What about you? What’s on your list?
Most of us are probably aware of the current popularity of the continuity series in the world of romance. It’s everywhere you look, pervading almost every genre, from historical, paranormal, and contemporary, to even some of the category lines. Connecting books use to be a rarity, but now they are the norm. Just think about it. When was the last time you read a recently published book that didn’t have a sequel or a prequel? That didn’t contain characters that had made appearances in an author’s past works or promised to make appearances in their future works? Any time I pick up a romance novel anymore, I’m almost assured to find within its pages a brother/sister or a best friend or a best friend’s second cousin who just screams “Future Hero or Heroine.”
Strangely enough, before I was published I had never even seriously considered attempting to write a series. All of my completed manuscripts had been stand-alones. In fact, when I first began working on the book that eventually sold to Avon, A Kiss in the Dark, I had no plans to write a sequel. But the secondary characters of Peter and Emily had so grabbed my attention that I couldn’t forget about them after I typed The End. I felt like they deserved their own book, and my editor–Thank goodness!–agreed. So I wrote A Kiss Before Dawn.
By the time I was ready to go to work on the proposal for my third book with Avon, I decided I needed to approach it a bit differently. I knew that series books were in demand, and I wanted to try writing a series of my own. Eventually I came up with the idea for a trilogy of connecting books about three sisters trying to solve the murder of their mother. Thus, Sins of Midnight was written and the Daventry Sisters series was born. And the rest is history…
Umm….Well, maybe not quite. I have had people comment to me on how much of a weight off my mind it must be to write a series. How much easier it must be to write connected books than stand-alone titles. After all, I already have all of my characters and the concept in place. I just have to fit the pieces together, right? Right??
Again, not quite. Though some writers may find that writing series romance is a bit less demanding, I have had a rather different experience. In fact, in many ways I find them harder to write than stand-alones. They simply present a whole different set of problems. Though I have my charts and graphs to keep track of character descriptions and major and minor plot developments that occur in each book, it can be tricky to stay on the ball and to make sure that all of the pieces fit together correctly. And just how much of what happened in Book One do you include in Book Two, Book Three, Book Four? You don’t want to bog down the people who have already read that first book, but you don’t want to lose the readers who haven’t. And the list goes on.
As a reader, I can completely understand the appeal of a continuity series. It is wonderful to catch up with characters that you might have grown to love in a previous book, to find out what has happened since the happily-ever-after or to see a former secondary character get a happily- ever-after of their own. But as a writer, my feelings are much more mixed. I wonder, when is it enough? Should everyone from the heroine’s dog to the hero’s valet have their own story? (Okay, maybe that’s overstating the case, but sometimes it really seems that way! 
)
So what are your feelings about continuity series? Love ‘em or hate ‘em? Do you want more or has it been taken too far? What about you writers and aspiring writers? Is it easier or more difficult for you to write a book that is part of a series? In today’s romance publishing market, where series are so much in demand, do you think it makes it more likely that a book will get published if it is part of an intended series?
