It’s a bright sunny day

…and the sun woke me up this morning streaming through my bedroom window when all I really wanted to do was sleep in. Ah well. I needed to drag my ass up anyway, I suppose.

My RWA chapter has a new website! And it’s beautiful! Check it out: Yellow Rose Romance Writers.

And I’m very excited to report that my very own website will be getting a facelift soon. So stay tuned for that.

In other news… NICE GIRLS DO is on submission at Samhain. WOOO!

So I’m sitting here with my first cup of coffee and a piece of toast with grape jelly and I cannot – absolutely cannot – get this new story out of my head. And this is one I hadn’t planned on writing. I keep seeing a man shackled to a wall in a dungeon who is a prisoner of war. However, this isn’t a contemporary story; this is a story set in another world. What is up with that? My plan was after Nice Girls was finished, to work on Take Me I’m Yours so I can get on to another story I had plotted. How come it never works out that way? My muse is certainly fickle. I guess sometimes you just need to follow that muse, yes?

Tonight Best Good Friend is having a Halloween party for her daughter and her friends. I’m going to head that way and hang with them. One of the party games is a campfire story where they take a beginning, then sit in the circle and finish the spooky story. Each girl takes a turn. I wrote the beginning for them. I was SUPPOSED to write it for the invitation and everyone was supposed to finish the story and then vote on for the best one. But, naturally, I was moving and my life was chaos when she sent the invitations and she was too nice to remind me. So, I suggested she do a campfire type storytelling. Anyway, totally rambling. Here’s the beginning:

The cemetery was silent as the grave. Moonlight from the full moon flooded the grave stones in a blue-white veil and – strangely – a mist hovered over the dampened ground. Somewhere in the distance, one lone cricket chirped and then stopped abruptly. As if the spookiness of the graveyard had gotten to it too.

I stood under a willow tree, looking through the branches and waiting, my heart throbbing painfully in my chest and my pulse racing at top speed. The grave markers cast long wavering shadows and every now and then I’d swear I could heard the rustle of some unknown creature in the dark.

The pirate costume I wore didn’t exactly protect me from the cold north breeze and I shivered and wondered why in the world I had decided to take the dare…

So I’m throwing out the challenge to all my writer friends. Finish the story! Go ahead – scare me. I dare you. 😉 No deadline. And I’ll post them on my blog when you send them. This isn’t a contest; it’s just an exercise to flex your writing muscles. Oh yeah, and try to scare me.

And don’t forget about Paperback Writer’s e-book challange! Deadline is this Tuesday!