Strawberry Moon Interludes

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I was so het up to discuss my fashion emergency yesterday, that I forgot to mention that I skipped over to Karen Katchur’s blog, to talk about fitness and writing.

No, I haven’t gotten one of those treadmill desks. Mostly because I think it would look ugly in my office. Priorities, people!

The other thing I’ve been forgetting to mention is that I’ll be in Memphis this weekend. The River City Romance Writers are hosting me on Saturday and we’ll be talking about novellas and “writing tight.” Should be very fun. The rest of the time you’ll likely find me wandering Beale Street with a frozen daiquiri in my hand.

If all goes as planned, that is.

Today I find myself between projects. I remember this feeling, from when I was only a reader. I’d finish a novel and, still swimming in the lovely world the author had created, try to decide what to do next. More often than not, I’d turn back to the first page and start over again. Or go through and re-read my favorite bits – which usually morphed into a full second read anyway.

Then I’d choose the next book. Sometimes this would be dictated by school, or by what was due at the library soon. But every once in a while I enjoyed the luxury of spreading out all the waiting books and selecting whatever seemed most exciting.

I’m kind of there right now.

I’ve sent off all my “supposed to’s.” All my deadlines, internal and external, have been met. I’m holding off until after the RWA conf on one novel. The other is out. I’m all caught up.

Work is quiet, too. I’d really pushed to finish things, both in work and writing, because I anticipated this month would get crazy. But the projects haven’t come in yet. They’re still hovering on the horizon, like storm clouds that will eventually gain enough momentum to swoop down on us.

But for now the sun is shining and I feel like I should be making hay. Instead I’m kind of lying in the grass, lazily eating strawberries.

The Strawberry moon is a gentle moon, isn’t she? Full and sweet, serene in the twilight sky.

I might sit here and enjoy it, just a little longer.

Village Fashion Assistance

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Why, yes, that is Katy Perry dressed in Gautier from the June 2011 issue of Vanity Fair. And there’s a very good reason she’s there for you to admire.

Let me tell you the story.

See, I’m going to the RWA National Conference the last week of June. This will be my fourth time. This year I knew I’d be invited to the Carina party, as one of their authors. Author cocktail party? Pretty much a slam dunk in fashion-planning department.

Now I had a bit of an additional complication, in that I discovered the Carina cocktail party would be right before the FFP Gathering. Not a big deal, right? One party to the next, stick to the same drink, all is fine, tra-la tra-lay.

Only there’s one little hitch: the FFP party is a Superhero theme and I have my heart set on being Cat Woman. I don’t think I’m ruining any surprises here by leaking that, especially since I fully expect to be far from the only Cat Woman at a Superhero party attended primarily by women. In fact, I figured I’d just go to the Carina party in my Cat Woman outfit. It’s pretty demure, since I’ll be more of a Michelle Pfeiffer version than the Halle Berry iteration since, hello, I do not have Halle Berry’s vicious body. Dress myself only in black leather straps? I don’t think so. My costume looks like this (sorry it’s so small) and I figured I could be brassy and just wear it to the cocktail party, too.

But, and this is a big “but,” then I was happily invited to the Harlequin party, too. I wasn’t expecting to, but since Carina is a Harlequin imprint, they included us questionable digital types. It’s after the FFP party, so that’s fine. And, hey, everyone says it’s THE party to go to, so woo hoo! Except, I get the invite and it’s a rooftop Black and White ball, formal dress.

I’ve got nothing.

Clearly I’m not wearing the Cat Woman outfit there. Even if it wasn’t an outfit that can’t be worn outside of air conditioning (lemme tell you, that thing does NOT breathe), it just ain’t formal, by any stretch. I look in my closet – nothing. You know what that means, right?

~FASHION EMERGENCY~

I’m going in a couple of weeks, have practically no time to shop, and no inspiration.

So, I’m getting my hair done – my carefully planned pre-conference beautifying appointment – flipping through Vanity Fair and whining about my fashion emergency to a sympathetic Larry. I get to the above Katy Perry pic and say, this! This is what I should wear. Larry peers over my shoulder. “That’s perfect,” he says, “that’s exactly what you should wear.”

I say, “Um, Larry, that outfit is Gautier and out of my league on so many levels it’s not funny.”

“Oh no,” he waves the scissors in the air, “you could totally fake this outfit.”

He outlines how I’ll do it. Do I have a black skirt I could slit up the front? As a matter of fact, I do. I have a black pleather pleated Jones New York skirt that would work. Put a white lace slip or skirt under it, black heels, black leggings – I love how he never once considers putting white stretch lace on my thighs – with a big white blouse on top, belted with a fabulous Santa Fe belt.

I’m sold.

Of course, this is not so easy as it sounds. (Did it even sound easy?)

Once I left the salon, clutching my pic of Katy Perry in *my* outfit, which Larry thoughtfully tore out of the magazine for me, I began to lose heart.

“Just find a little black dress,” my mother counsels. “You don’t have time for this.”

I went shopping Saturday morning and nothing, just nothing lit me up. I began to despair. Sunday I hit the consignment stores and Goodwill thinking I could cannibalize a wedding dress for the white lace underskirt. Big goose egg.

Then, in Dillards, of all places, I found a big white jacket – spunky, sheer and shimmery. It’s the last one, and I make the sales gal take it off the mannequin for me. It’s a large, turns out, but that works perfectly. I find some black leggings with black lace edging at Kohls. Already bought funky black heels for the Cat Woman look. I’m rolling now.

Back at home, I start Googling for wedding slips. KAK is helping me via IM. But even her Google-Fu, which is very strong, fails. She does, however, find me this fab black corset to wear under the white jacket.

Now we just need the lace skirt, which totally should not be this hard. But it is.

She’s combing eBay. Laura Bickle comes on IM and I catch her up on the Story So Far. Almost immediately, Laura finds this skirt on eBay. It’s perfect. It’s in Hong Kong.

BUT, they have express shipping and it’s not that much overall.

Win!

So, all the parts are acquired or on order. Yeah, we’ll see how it all works out.

I think it will be fabulous. I’ll try to post pics of the final product.

Could never have done this without my pals.

Beaked Yucca Lessons

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Update on the yucca flowering:

Not so much?

If you haven’t been following along with the Blooming of the Rescue Yucca, it started sending up a spire here and was much bigger here. I should have done an update last Monday, but I clearly had important ranting to do about appreciating the role of serendipity and chance in life.

So, you’d think there would be actual flowers by now, that there would be fragrant blooming. After all, it’s been weeks and weeks. Surely that’s enough time and effort? But no – the buds are covered with some kind of sticky stuff that the bugs seem to like. It’s all alien-looking and kind of Invasion of the Bodysnatchers.

The moral here is obvious.

Not all stages of growth are pretty. Things progress on their own schedule.

It always seems like a long time, when you’re waiting for the blossoms.

A few of my own flowers opened this weekend, though. Ellora’s Cave is making an offer on a short story tentativley called Feeding the Vampire. That’s right – it’s my Post-Apocalyptic Erotic Vampire story.

What?

Hey – I don’t tell the dream faeries what stories to send.

Also, Petals and Thorns finalled in another contest – More Than Magic – for best novella! I’m so pleased to see P&T getting some love.

I don’t even mind the little bugs.

Is Writing a Really Good Book Enough?

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I did a chat with the FFP gals last night and for the first time I was tempted to say one of the things I hear authors say that really annoy me.

One of the gals asked how to get published with Carina Press, because they’re really difficult to get in with. I wanted to say, well, they’re really picky and are pushing for a high-quality brand, so write something very good.

As regular readers know, I hate it when authors give publishing advice along the lines of “write a really good book.”

I dislike this advice for three reasons:

1. It’s self-evident. OF COURSE you have to write something good. Nobody tries to write bad stuff. Sometimes we don’t push the story or the characters as hard as we should. Sometimes we don’t revise enough, or polish enough. But everybody wants their stories to be good. This is akin to the advice to send in your best, most polished work. It implies that there’s some kind of external, quantifiable standard for that. Wouldn’t it be nice if writing was like chemistry and the document changed into a different color when you hit the correct amount of revision? Bing! Now it is GOOD.

Yeah, dream on.

2. It’s pompous. I know I’ve been on this tear lately, but it’s obnoxious when authors preen and suggest to the questioners that, to follow in the author’s footsteps, the would-be just needs to gain that level of awesomesauce. If you say “to do what I did, you need to write a really good book” implies that your talent and skill just rises above everyone else’s like it’s ensured by the laws of physics.

And it’s not true, because:

3. It’s not enough to write a really good book. It has to be the right story, told in the right voice, that pleases the right editor, who convinces the right marketers that the right readers are out there to buy it.

So, I restrained myself from popping out the easy answer. Instead I told them what kind of stories Carina likes. I told them what my editor looks for and what my process was. I offered some leads to research their acquisitions editors, because I believe knowledge and networking always gives more power.

And I’m going to work on that answer.

Wild Kingdom

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Not the moon, but the sun, seen through the smoke haze at about 7pm.

Today we have some video treats from the wildlife camera. It’s not lions, tigers and bears, but these are some of our daily visitors.


This is a Towhee. They’re very friendly, happy birds. They love to get inside of things. If you open the garage door, they fly right in. They get inside the Jeep when we have the bikini top on it. Funny little birds.

The rock squirrel is what David really wanted to get on film. They’re difficult to photograph because they’re fast and suspicious. You can see this one watching the camera. We think they have babies because it looks like this one is filling up its jowls with water, to take back to the nest.

This looks like just a bit of Towhee, but if you wait for the 5 second mark and watch the upper right quadrant, you’ll see a lizard go by *really* fast.
Leezard!

Wild Kingdom

admin / / Blog

Not the moon, but the sun, seen through the smoke haze at about 7pm.

Today we have some video treats from the wildlife camera. It’s not lions, tigers and bears, but these are some of our daily visitors.


This is a Towhee. They’re very friendly, happy birds. They love to get inside of things. If you open the garage door, they fly right in. They get inside the Jeep when we have the bikini top on it. Funny little birds.

The rock squirrel is what David really wanted to get on film. They’re difficult to photograph because they’re fast and suspicious. You can see this one watching the camera. We think they have babies because it looks like this one is filling up its jowls with water, to take back to the nest.

This looks like just a bit of Towhee, but if you wait for the 5 second mark and watch the upper right quadrant, you’ll see a lizard go by *really* fast.
Leezard!

Why Writing Is Like a Forest Fire

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One thing about forest fires – they make for dramatic sunsets.

A lot of people here are bemoaning the fire. For those not up on Western news, the Wallow Fire is now the third largest in Arizona’s recorded history. The fire covers 486 square miles, has been burning for over a week and firefighters have zero containment. Fortunately they’ve been able to keep it away from the towns so far and let it burn away at the dry forested hillsides.

But people have been saying things like “why do there have to be forest fires?” And I hear them blaming oil companies for global warming.

They really don’t like it when you point out that forest fires are part of nature and play an essential role in the cycle of the forests and fertilization of the soil. Nature isn’t always a pretty, happy place with serene lakes and chirping birds. Sometimes it’s ugly and violent. Plants and animals are consumed and remade. Flames and smoke boil through and overcome everything.

We’ve had to seal up the house, to keep the smoke out. The other night it was so thick, it was like night fell hours early. I worried about the birds, with their tiny lungs.

But in the morning, the hummingbirds were out as usual, feeding in the clear morning air.

David pointed out something to me the other day. He says I said it to him, but I don’t remember it. We’d watched Creation, a really excellent movie about Darwin, with Paul Bettany (yum!) and Jennifer Connelly. In the movie he struggles with Parkinson’s disease, the death of his daughter and a spiritual crisis that threatens his til-then strong marriage. Writing his manuscript is a huge effort.

David used that as an example and said that, when we have an art or a pursuit we’re passionate about, it nurtures us. It’s wrong-headed to think we live our lives to nurture it. Rather, it’s when people lose their passions that they falter and waste away.

I don’t live to support my writing. My writing is what keeps me alive.

It’s all part of nature.

Digital Publishing – What a Long, Strange Year It’s Been

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Today is Carina Press’s one year anniversary. Word-Whores is hosting one of Carina’s executive staff, Aideen O’Leary-Chung, Director of Digital Commerce for Harlequin and Carina Press. If you hie over there, you stand to win some pretty fab prizes.

It’s funny that it’s been a year since Carina launched. So much has happened since then. Reading through the various posts (there are 20 in all), it’s interesting to hear the reminiscences of the Carina folks. It makes me remember how it all appeared to us, from the outside.

Today is the anniversary of Carina’s launch – when they debuted their first books to the world. But we first heard about Harlequin’s new digital imprint quite a bit before that. The news astonished everyone because, *gasp* Carina would not be offering advances.

This sent RWA into a frenzy. The Romance Writers of America non-profit corporation is one of, if not the most, powerful writers organizations in the world. The venerable standard of RWA has been, for decades, that to qualify as an approved publisher, they must give their writers advances. This has been a non-negotiable standard that, really, any legitimate publisher could meet. It was a low bar for a very long time.

And then the world turned and times changed.

With the advent of electronic publishing, paying the author up front no longer made so much sense. Instead epubs offer authors much higher royalties (~35% for most as opposed to 8-10% for print). Carina chose that business model.

Well, this turned into a BFD, because Carina was an imprint of Harlequin, which means just a subset of the overall company, and Harlequin has been the queen of romance publishing for longer than RWA has been in existence. And boom! Harlequin could no longer be an approved publisher by RWA.

At the time, no one could understand why Harlequin was doing it. They were accused of vanity publishing (where authors pay to get published). People thought they were completely nuts to potentially compromise their publishing empire for, what? some stupid ebooks??

They sorted it out. I believe (and someone correct me if I’m wrong) Harlequin satisfied RWA by legally separating themselves from the Carina digital arm. Harlequin is approved. Carina is not.

And look what the last year has wrought.

Ebooks are now the only part of the publishing market that’s growing instead of losing money. More and more people have ereaders. Everyone wants to digitally publish. I’d love to see a list of all the epubs started in the last six months.

I set my sights on Carina because they have the forward-thinking excitement and savvy of the electronic market founded on the Harlequin rock of excellent business sense. I’m so pleased that Sapphire will be published by them in October.

Happy One-Year Anniversary Carina Press!

Why Me?

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David had a classmate, Marjorie, who died of cancer this last winter.

I never got to meet her. Not for any particular reason. At first we just weren’t in the same place at the same time. Then her tumors came back and she finally withdrew from the acupuncture college. Because I wasn’t a friend, I didn’t go visit her when everyone went to say good-bye. It just didn’t seem right.

But I felt like I knew her, because David liked her so much and often related to me the things they talked about.

One thing that stuck with me – she told David that she finally had to get over the idea that she was a bad or negative person because she developed the cancer, because it ultimately defeated her. See, when you’re in the natural healing world, there are strong ideas that your mental attitude governs your health. Negativity or bad emotions promote chronic disease states is the thinking. Positive thinking creates health and healing.

All of this success stuff comes from similar philosophies. “I create my own success.” Your life becomes what you envision it to be. Anything can be yours if you simply envision it, be positive and make it happen.

The flip side, of course, is that if you don’t get what you want, it’s because you failed. Failed to envision enough, be positive enough, what have you.

Like with Marjorie. She failed to cure her own cancer. But she ultimately decided to refuse to accept that as a personal failure.

She lived ten years past her initial diagnosis of terminal cancer. She enjoyed her life and continued to follow her passions. Part of that meant coming to terms with not seeing herself as a bad person because she got sick. How she dealt with the disease truly showed her strength of character. And she died surrounded by friends and loved ones, both animal and human.

This is what I was trying to get at on Friday. I’m not sure I did a very good job.

(Either that or everyone was out enjoying their summer weekend, which is all to the good.)

I absolutely believe we have a hand in our own successes. But I think there’s danger in believing we can control fate. It would be nice, sure. Tempting to try. Ultimately, though, the universe goes where it goes and takes us with it. Sometimes beautiful summer days fill our weekends. Sometimes tornadoes hit. The weather falls equally on the good people and the bad people, the positive thinkers and the bitter, angry ones.

The differences show in how we handle it.

We love to tell stories about grace under pressure. The heroics, large and small, that shine when disaster hits. We rarely talk about how well someone handles success.

My favorite religious studies professor, David Hadas, who I quote often, pointed out to me that, when tragedies occur, we look up to whatever gods we follow and ask “why me?” Rarely, he said, does anyone look at some amazing bounty they’ve received and ask the gods, “why me?”

It’s easy to believe that, when our efforts are rewarded with success, it’s because we are so wonderful and deserving. But that’s as much of a trap as believing that we deserve cancer. Or tornadoes.

The true test is how we handle it.