New Year’s Eve day

Found this last night, just when I needed a shot in the arm:
“Social workers, mechanics, soldiers, authors, artists, aliens and vampires, this wonderful collection of stories represents people from across social strata, not to mention time and space. Fiery passion, tender lovemaking, and characters that will worm their way into your hearts prove once again that Ellora’s Cave has quite a few extremely talented people writing for them. The authors that contributed the stories to SEASONS OF SEDUCTION VOLUME III have outdone themselves. Don’t miss one of the best anthologies of 2007, get your copy today!” – Romance Reviews Today Erotic

Edits are gone. Now to send the proposal after ’em. Unfortunately, when I opened it yesterday it looked like drivel, which meant my brain was tired. So I closed it and read Manhunt by Janet Evanovich and laughed myself silly. Then I read about 20 pages of Shadow Music by Julie Garwood. Oh. My. I’m not very far in, but it’s so good. (The 20 pages I read were towards the end, because I had a sudden fear that it was Not A Romance. This is because of the cover and the tag “a novel” by the title. My fears were relieved. Shadow Music is a romance, and it has the flavor of Garwood’s other Scottish historicals.)

Now that I’ve read, laughed, and had a good night’s sleep, I will tackle the proposal again and if anything really does read like drivel I will edit the crap out of it and fix it.

Lots of changes ahead for 2008. This is my year of better life balance. I have lots of goals to achieve and part of my plan for getting there is taking better care of me. Eating right, getting enough sleep, making changes so that daily exercise can happen. Reading more. Time away from the computer to do things with kids. Refilling the well, so that I can keep on happily writing!

I produced a lot of work in 2007. Good work. I also grew a lot as a writer and learned a lot, very valuable lessons. I’m really looking forward to the coming year and to writing this next book. It has a phoenix in it. How freaking cool is that for starting the new year?

this is my brain on edits and happy news

Still not quite done. I have two tweaks left and then I need to double-check that I didn’t miss anything and the changes I’ve already made are as brilliant and perfect as I thought they were when I did them. Snort.

Edits are hands-down the hardest part of writing a book for me. Changes that sound simple often aren’t, and there’s always a ripple effect. Change one thing over there, and now everything else has to be changed for consistency. So there’s always the tricky “did I remember to get all references to Blah” business.

But the really hard part is that you have to think analytically and creatively together, which pretty much sprains my brain. You have to see the analytical “this has to change to accomplish X” and then you need the creative, “Okay, we can get there by doing this”, and what tends to happen is the analytical squelches all the creative insight you need. It’s very hard to think both ways at once. Usually I do edits to the soundtrack for the story to get the creative juices flowing and I forgot to do that on this round because the holiday music is on. Must remember that trick next time.

Anyway. Almost there. In happy news, Love Romances nominated Ellora’s Cavemen Seasons of Seduction III in the Best of 2007: Best Erotic Anthology! So we’re nominated for best in two places. Yay.

Best of 2007 nominee