Query Me

August 14, 2009 by

I’ve decided to take the plunge. I’m querying!

I’ve sent out a total of 5 and receive 2 rejections so far. Tis okay. I fully expect to receive rejections. I figure I can just add them to the collection and keep on keeping on.

I’ve also been doing some agent research and I’m disappointed to see the ones I really want are closed to submissions. So that means I’ll just keep my eyes peeled on their submission guidelines and hope they open… or just keep looking for another agent. This is the part I’m not so fond of. The querying, the rejections, the research. But it comes with the territory.

Have I mentioned I hate waiting, too? I’m not very patient. ;)

I’ve been in sort of a stale-mate with the revisions for the last two days. It’s like I got to this certain point and then STOPPED. It’s because I need to rework the end of the book a little and it’s taken me two days to figure it out. I finally did yesterday. It was like a breakthrough.

I took the last four chapters of the book and write a very crude outline of what happens in each scene in each chapter. That way I could see it on paper. Then I took that outline and copied and pasted it. I rearrange the scenes and tweaked and changed. As I worked on that, I finally figured out the end of the book that not only makes sense, but it keeps me from having to do a major rewrite on the last two chapters. I love that.

So in the next few days, I will begin the process of revising three of the chapters. Plus I have to add a scene or two. No sweat, right?

Right.

I’m very glad it’s Friday. Busy weekend ahead. I really need to tackle the closet this weekend. I’m wondering if the local women’s shelter will take my old clothes. I’d feel better doing that than giving them to Goodwill.

Happy weekend!

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Playing It Safe

August 12, 2009 by

So I think I’ve mentioned once or twice I’m still in revision mode, working on the gladiator book. It’s coming along nicely and currently, I only have 80 pages to go. That’s right – 80! The end of the book with the big climactic scene.

Recently, I read through my CPs comments regarding these last few pages. When I sent it to her, I warned her I thought the ending was a bit weak and asked her to give me suggestions on making it stronger. I really felt like the bare structure of the story was there but I was having trouble pulling it off the way I wanted.

Finally I get to the final five chapters, read through her comments and when I read her suggestions it was like a light bulb went on. Of course! I thought. Why didn’t I see it that way before?

I know why. I was playing it safe. I was too afraid to push my characters to the very limit of their emotional brink. Too afraid to put them in complete and utter hell. Which in turn meant I was too afraid to push myself as a writer, drop my guard, and write the book the way it should have been written all along.

Isn’t that funny? How sometimes you need an outsider to see the storyline that way? To give you that vision of making the story a thousand times stronger?

So I’ve printed off the last 80 pages and I’m getting my hot pink pen out (because red is so obscene). I’ve started the arduous task of rewriting the climax, making it stronger, making the characters take control of their situation (instead of being a victim) and giving the reader that feeling of, “YEAH!” and making them want to stand up and cheer when the hero and heroine finally defeat evil and win the day.

Yeah. That is so totally going to rock.

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Making Progress

August 11, 2009 by

Man worked late last night so I sat and worked on the revision. I got 37 pages done! I have 80 pages to go! WOO! I love making progress.

Once I finish the revision, I want to start concentrating on working on the new book. I really want to get my hands into the futuristic and start plotting that story and writing up a good bare-boned synopsis. Besides, I miss working on new stuff. I miss the creative process and I really want to get back to that.

Still no word from the agent. But it hasn’t even been a month yet. LOL! Impatient? You bet.

Man has to work late again tonight. Guess where I’ll be? Yes. Chained to my computer working on the remaining 80 pages. It’s a great opportunity since the kiddo is at his dad’s this week. No distractions! (Don’t get me wrong – I love my child dearly but he’s very demanding of attention.)

And that’s about it for me. Not much going on in Michelle-World. It’s Tuesdsay – you know what that means? It’s taco night! Sweet.

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Just Keep Swimming

May 12, 2009 by

Remember in Finding Nemo when Dory tells Marlin, “You know what you gotta do when life gets you down? Just keep swimming…just keep swimming…”

I’m swimming! I’m swimming!

I tinkered a little yesterday with the book and some of the exercises in the Deep Edits class. I can’t say it’s any easier but I think the rusty gears might be starting to click some. ;)

On the brighter side, I got an agent appointment at Nationals with… NEPHELE TEMPEST. Dream agent, baby! Very thrilled about that. Now cross your fingers they don’t schedule me on Saturday morning when I’m supposed to be on a plane back home. If that happens, I will be severely put out.

ANYHOO… crappy day yesterday but it got better. Went to Kid’s last soccer game of the season and it turned cold. Now, when I say cold that’s becuase we got used to 85 and 90 degrees with lots of humidity and then all of a sudden it’s 70 with a brisk little breeze. I was freezing out there! More rain on the way this week. It’s that rainy season. The cottonwood is blooming and absolutely trashing my allergies. And the grass. There’s nothing like freshly mowed grass but man it kills me. Hate this time of year for that. And I detest having medicine head all day. Oh well.

Just keep swimming!

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What’s New

April 30, 2009 by

Tomorrow is the day! The day that TAKE ME I’M YOURS comes out with Cobblestone-Press. Hopefully tomorrow, I will be doing the Great Release Fest and everyone can join in for the fun and games.

The end of April already? Excuse me, Father Time? Could you please slow down a little? I’m not really ready to age another year in 27 days. K THX BAI! :)

The last few days have been pretty busy for me. When I got home on Tuesday night, I had to run to the post office to mail out the chapter dues renewals for one of the chapters I’m in. Then when I got back home (after a visit to Taco Bell), I sat down and worked on the WIP.

I was very close to finishing, so I pushed through and worked until midnight and got it all done. After letting it sit overnight, though, I think the ending could be a lot stronger. I think it even might be a little anti-climatic.  

So since I finished the revision, I decided to “relax” on Wednesday. Which I quickly discovered is a foreign concept to me. I think I’ve forgotten how to do that. I paced the house. I read and responded to email. I paced some more. The kid was quite entertaining with his jokes and drawing pictures and writing me spy letters. And then itw as time to get him settled down into bed. I was suddenly wiped out from staying up too late.

I have a second book planned to go along with Phoenix but haven’t done any sort of plotting on that yet. I have a general idea of where I want to go. Plus there was an open call for submissions from Samhain that I’m thinking of doing. The deadline is August 10, so I better get busy on that if I’m going to make that happen.

And… I’m already thinking about another project, which is something I hope to talk more about in-depth later.

See why I can’t relax? There are too many things up there in the head and I need to get them out on paper. Sometimes there aren’t enough hours in the day. Well, there are… I just have to spend them doing things that, you know, pay the bills. :D

So…that’s about all I know.  What’s new with you?

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Writing While Cooking Fish

April 27, 2009 by

So the weekend is already gone. It amazes me how fast it goes.

Saturday morning was an early start for a 9 am soccer game. It was cloudy and windy and kinda cool but we made it through the game without rain – and won! That afternoon, we headed to the movies and saw Monsters vs. Aliens and I was highly entertained. Great flick! Of course, it cost $25 for me and the kid to go to the movies… urgh.

We pretty much just hung out the rest of the day and most of Sunday. The kiddo went with his grandparents for dinner since his cousin turned 18 yesterday. Now you KNOW time flies when you look at the kids growing up so fast.

While he was out, I stuck some tilapia in the oven and broke out the AlphaSmart. As the fish was baking, I stood in the kitchen and clicked away on the Neo. I finished out another great section on the book – the chariot race! I used Ben Hur as inspiration. I had started it the night before but was too tired to get it finished. I even did my “research” by watching that 30 minutes of the movie. After I got the scene all written, I found a great resource online for chariot races and went back and tweaked. I’m very pleased with it and I think it came out really well.

That was another 1200 words or so. The story is up to just over 78K and I’m shooting for 85. I’m pretty sure I”ll make it but I only have four days to finish it before my self-imposed deadline.

I have some other things in the works – in fact a really cool something – which I’ll be talking about soon. And even more good news! My book with Cobblestone-Press, Take Me I’m Yours, finally comes out THIS friday, May 1. WOO! Stay tuned because you know there will be free books involved.

And… if you’re a frequenter of the blog, you’ll notice I bumped up the font size. Finally figured that out and my apologizes for the eye-straining size I had before. Hopefully this size will keep you from squinting. :)

Okay that’s it for me today. It’s off to work because I owe! I owe! And time to get the kiddo to school, too.

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Adventures in Motherhood and Writing

April 24, 2009 by

This is been a … weird week. On Tuesday, the kiddo was complaining of an ear ache. Plus he had bad sinuses and a slight fever. So he stayed home from school and it was off to the doctor we went. He has another ear infection and we got ear drops, antiobiotic, nose spray. Yeah. Um…$45 later… I got him home and pumped him full of Motrin, then fed him and made him take his ear drops. That was NOT fun. He refused and I was Mean Mommy and sat on him to make it happen. Yes, I did. Then I made him take the antibiotic and shoot his nose with the nasal spray and THEN I gave him Claritin. I pumped him full.

By the time Wednesday came around and I picked him up from his grandparents, he was feeling about a thousand times better. And it showed. He spilled his Coke all over the dinner table, leaving a sticky mess and then announcing that, “Uh, MOM! We have a problem.” So I cleaned that up. By that time, it was his bath time. I ran the bath and he got in with the explicit instructions NOT to splash.

Well, about 30 seconds later, I hear all this slashing and open the door to find the floor underwater. sigh Three bath towels later (and I had kicked him out of the tub), I’d reached my limit. It was time for him to be in BED. I think he was out in 2.3 seconds.

When I got up Thursday morning, the cat had decided to puke in three differernt places in the living room.Yeah. I so wanted to clean THAT up first thing in the morning. And it was DES-GUST-ING, too. I was :shock:  

That afternoon was soccer practice and since I’m trying to finish my revision in ONE WEEK, I thought I’d dust off the AlphaSmart and take it with me. I felt SO smart. I even printed off my pages for the latest chapter I was working on. I get to soccer practice and sit in the car, breaking out Alphie, punching the ON button and… nothing. Nada. Zilch. The batteries are dead. Crap. So I open up the back and find… the batteries are corroded! Double crap!

So I get out my trust ink pen and start to scribble the newest scene I want to write on the back of one of the pages. I’ll just write in longhand, I think. That won’t be so bad! It’ll be novel and… CRAP! The pen ran out of ink!

ARGH!

I threw it in the backseat and look longingly at my paper with the scribble along the back. I see the scene in my head so vividly and it’s driving me crazy I can’t write it down. I pick up the Alphie and use an old pair of sunglasses to pry out the disgusting batteries and – luckily – have an empty sandwich bag in the car to put them in. I have a package of On The Go Wipes and use that to clean out the battery acid (very carefully). I put that in the baggie. I sit and wait until soccer practice is over.

We get home and Man is already there mowing the yard (YAY!). I cook breakfast for dinner – eggs, bacon, sausage. I make the kid do his homework then put him in the tub and finally it’s time for him to go to bed. I put in new batteries in the Alphie and sat down on the couch while Man read his book and wrote and wrote and wrote. I wrote 1250. And you know why? Because I wasn’t distracted by the Internet, Twitter, Facebook or email. It felt SO good to write those words and get them out on paper. Tonight I’m going to work on the scene some more.

That is, of course, if no one spills or pukes on the carpet.

Happy Friday!

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Hopeful Fear

April 21, 2009 by

So I’ve gone and entered the Book In A Nutshell contest hosted by The Knight Agency. The deadline was yesterday, by the way, and they’ll announce the 20 winners on May 1.

Hence the reason why I’m trying so damned hard to finish the revision by then. I’m on page 147 of 275, by the way, in case you’re keeping score at home. And I’m still a ways from finishing. With less than two weeks to go, I’m starting to feel the pinch.

So the gist of the contest was to write three compelling sentences, 150 words max, to describe your book. Get it? In a nutshell? Do you know how hard it is to write THREE sentences only about the story? Okay, it was for me. I struggled with it. Until, one day, the three sentences literally popped into my head.

Here is what I submitted:

Elena is a slave, forced to participate in The Games as a hardened gladiator. Cassius is an assassin hired by an underground secret order to kill the Emperor. When their love affair is discovered, they are pitted against each other in the Grand Arena in a fight to the death.

Compelling enough, you think? Will it garner me a much coveted position in the 20? I don’t know. That, of course, is not ALL the book is about. There’s murder, revenge, conspiracy, deceit, hot sex. It’s a lot of fun to write.

With less than two weeks left until the Big Announcement, I’m feeling a bit… queasy. Okay, I felt that way the second I hit send on that email. I guess you could say I have Hopeful Fear. I want to make it into the 20, I really do. But a little part of me is terrified. I have a lot of confidence in this book, but it’s the fear of the unknown I think.

So I tell myself this: To get something you never had, you have to do something you never did.

It’s my new mantra. And if I don’t make the cut, it won’t be the end of the world. I will get my query polished up and start submitting it to the world. Because by then, I’ll have a full manuscript ready and waiting. And that’s just grand!

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Another Week Gone

April 17, 2009 by

It amazes me how fast the time goes! Here it is Friday again.

Last night was all about the paperwork. I had to get some stuff done and since Man wasn’t here, I sat at the computer after I got the kiddo in bed and got caught up. I still have paperwork to do but at least there’s not as much of it now. I also worked on my Pop Culture Diva blog entry for next week so that’s all done. Or almost. I had a weird thing happen with a website when I was hunting for pictures. The same window kept popping up over and over and over again. I couldn’t get it to stop, so I had to shut down. Of course, then I was afraid I’d gotten a virus and then it was off to scan the entire computer. What a pain. I try to be careful, but sometimes I caught unaware.

We had soccer practice last night. Another windy evening. Afterward, we went to McDonald’s as per the kiddo’s request. Blech. It was like a hard rock in my stomach. There was not a darn thing on the TV last night, so as I was flipping channels, I came across Turner Classic Movies and they were showing Seven Brides For Seven Brothers. I hadn’t seen that in a really long time, so I watched that.

Earlier this week, I had to get to the doctor because I was having some really bad hand pain. I couldn’t close my left hand into a fist, it was so painful. Turns out I have a bruised tendon, so the doctor prescribed me an anti-inflammatory and told me to rest it. Rest, eh? Like that’s gonna happen. I spend 90 percent of my life at a computer. I don’t have time to rest. ;) At least the hand is feeling better now. It’s still a little sore, but it’s not nearly as swollen as it was the other day which is good. He told me if it didn’t get better in a few days, I’d have to see a specialist. Well, so far so good.

I have been working on Phoenix. I made it past a major hump in the story this week, so it’s all downhill from now. I’m so looking forward to seeing this turns out with the deeper POVs. I’m up to nearly 75,000 words.

I’m also working on a cross-promotional idea with a friend. So far, we’ve hatched some really cool ideas. I’m excited about the collaborative effort!

We have soccer Saturday and Sunday, so I guess I know what I’m doing this weekend. I’m also getting my hair cut tomorrow. YAY! The ends are looking scraggly and it needs it.

Thought I’d live you this week with a little snippet from Phoenix Rising. Just click on the more link below and enjoy!

[Read more...]

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Recap

April 16, 2009 by

I’ve been a busy bee. Lots to do and accomplish this week. I’ve been ignoring not only my blog but my usual blog reads. I hope to get caught up this week.

Saturday was our chapter meeting and we had a really good speaker. The North Texas Paranormal Investigations came to speak to us. Their presentation was very interesting and one of the ladies (Steph) is a medium. Hearing their stories was really cool. You can check out their website by clicking here.

That afternoon, Man and I ran some errands all over town. We didn’t get back to the house until nearly 7 and then it was time for The Ten Commandments, which we watched for three and a half hours. That was as far as we made it. :)

On Sunday, it rained. I ended up staying home from church. I took the kiddo his Easter basket that afternoon. It was nice to have a soccer-free weekend. Man and I went to dinner at Outback. And it was yummy. :)

Also finalizing our Winter Rose Luncheon. I had to order some things for the finalists. And then the Treasurer and I worked on the budget to make sure we’re going to have enough money. Becuase, you know, I’m a worrier. haha From what we talked about, we should be okay.

Since the finalists were announced, I need to get together the non-finalists stuff and get that sent out. I’d like to get those done and out next week.

In between all of this, I’ve been working away on Phoenix. I’m almost to 75k  and just over 100 pages into the revision. It’s going well and I’m finding that I really look forward to stepping into this world. I’ll post a snippet soon.

More rain on the way this weekend. I have a feeling our Saturday soccer game will be rained out. We have another game on Sunday afternoon, which is a make-up game for one that was rained out earlier in the season.

And not much else to report. Just working, writing, reading.

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Writing Epiphany

April 9, 2009 by

I’m blogging today at RomErotica. If you get a chance, stop on by.

Thanks to everyone who stopped by yesterday. I will do the drawing today and announce the winner tomorrow. :)

I’ve been working on Revision #2 of my WIP and I had this really great epiphany about the story the other night. It felt great. I love when it comes together like that. Of course, that means more intense revisions than I had anticipated, but that’s okay. I can dig it.

Thanks to some great feedback, Elena and Cassius have become more three-dimensional characters. I love who they’re turning out to be now. It’s fabulous. Plus, I’m taking this really awesome online workshop for writing action scenes (i.e., fight scenes!). And I’m still watching lots of action movies and the Rome DVDs to get my research in. I love this book. It’s so much fun to write. I’m still on target for a May 1 finish date.

Lots to do this weekend. And it’s going to be 87 today! It’s officially sandal and open-toe shoe weather. Yay! Time for that pedicure.

It’s supposed to rain this weekend. We may have some strong storms on Easter morning. And I had planned to go to church that day, but if it’s horrible weather, I will be holed up in the house. I don’t drive in thunderstorms unless I can’t help it. It’s just not safe with all the crazies on the road who think that they can still drive 90 when it’s pouring down rain. No, thanks. I’m sure God will forgive me. :D

And that’s about it for me. I’m off to work/school. And then tonight is our usual soccer practice which means I get to dive into the book I’m currently reading. WOO!

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