And what a fantastic review. I can feel my head swelling! Reviewer Morgan gives it an 8 and says, “Wolf in Shining Armor is exactly what a book should be, a pleasure to read. It is not the same old boy meets girl story, far from it. A must buy for the Syneca cover art alone—buy it and see what I mean. When you feel like something totally different, reach for Charlene Teglia’s Wolf in Shining Armor, it will satisfy your craving.”

You can read the whole thing here. Thank you, Novel Spot!

Edited to add: I forgot I’m at RTB today. I can be forgiven for forgetting, considering the month we’ve had.

Here’s a quote from the public information statement (US Severe Weather) on our November:”Rarely does a single month leave such a vast impression on the collective weather records for an entire region.”  Yeah, and it’s left a  big mess to clean up, too.  Anyway, there you have it,  a record-breaking bad month.  I figure the rest of the  year has to be clear to  balance the scales!

Power is now on again. Boy, doing without it means doing everything the hard way. Heating water for washing dishes, warming milk for the baby, feeding the fire. 14 hours without on this round, and we lost our phone line for a while, too. Temperatures dropped very low last night and will be very low again tonight so I’m grateful beyond words that we are able to leave a trickle of water running to save the pipes tonight. Without power we’d be powerless, heh, to do that. Pray it holds.

We’re all feeling worn out by this weather. Storm after storm, power loss after power loss. And there’s another winter storm watch in effect until Thursday morning with a severe weather statement for record low temperatures. It’d be really nice to check the weather and not see a watch, warning or advisory in effect…

I want to go back to rain. Normal, nice, temperate rain forest weather. And go back to not having to do manual labor for every little household task. But for now I need to go refill the water containers we emptied on the last outage just in case. I didn’t even bother to drain the bathtubs this time so I don’t have to refill those. (1 tub, 10 flushes!) Posting this tonight instead of tomorrow morning because the future is uncertain and I have power and connectivity now!

I have to say the crews for PUD are astounding. To fix this last outage they had to take a cat out and make a road to do the repair. The storms may be dramatic but PUD keeps winning. They are mostly unsung heroes who went out into freezing cold and horrible conditions to make sure thousands of people had heat and water. They deserve to have their praises sung.

Just got the notification that print galleys are incoming for Catalyst! One last shot to find and fix mistakes and it’s off to the printers. The paperback should be available mid-January to February, depending on holiday schedules and shipping and so on. I’m so excited, I can’t wait to see it and hold it in my hands. Catalyst was my first book and it took a lot of effort to revise it into shape but I’m glad I did. Holding the actual print book will be a real landmark.

Patrice Michelle asked today, what book are you most proud of and why? For me, in many ways it’s Catalyst. In the act of sitting down, day in and day out, I proved to myself that I could do it. I could actually write and finish a whole book. When I printed it out and saw the stack of paper it was the most astonishing realization; a whole book that didn’t exist before was sitting there! And it came from my head, a page at a time! Really, there is nothing like that. The sense of achievement and wonder and pride.

Unfortunately like most first books Catalyst had a fairly serious flaw and it took some time and some growth as a writer before I understood what was wrong, and then how to fix it, and then I had to sit down and do the work (urgh). I was willing to do the work, though, because no matter how much time passed I still got sucked in every time I sat down to re-read it. I still enjoyed the story, the characters, laughed at all the wisecracks. If I liked it that much, it was worth fixing, and so fix it I did.

And soon it’ll be in my hands, printed and bound, the final end product of all those manuscript pages when I sat down to write a book for the first time. Really looking forward to that moment.

You’d think we could make it through the holiday weekend without getting taken out by another storm, wouldn’t you? I’m glad we didn’t lose our phone line, that’s something! This has been one record month for weather. We had already decided to stay in storm prep mode, so we were ready for an outage.

Hopefully power will get restored tomorrow, but in case it doesn’t…happy Monday, everybody. I’ll be here loving my laptop and asking Santa for more batteries for Christmas.

Edited to add: We have power again! Hurrah! And it looks like about 3 inches of new snow.

We had snow yesterday, over an inch. We knew it was coming so we were indoors enjoying it and not stuck on a road somewhere. Driving in snow can be stressful, but being inside with a fire going and fat flakes falling outside the window, frosting the evergreens, turning everything white, very peaceful.

More snow is expected today and tomorrow as the bigger storm moves in, up to six inches today. That could be interesting though I doubt we’ll actually get that much.

PBW is asking about what gets a writer through crunch time and I realized I don’t know the answer. Unless it’s, “writing is writing”. In a way it’s all crunch time so there’s no real difference. I just keep at a story and I push it up the hill until it starts to avalanche down the other side and then I run to keep up. What keeps you doing it, well, the story wants to be finished for starters. I think that even thinking about it in terms of “crunch time” is a bad idea for me because it makes me freeze up. The minute you start thinking about your performance you become self-conscious and get in your own way. You have to get out of the way and focus on the story.

What helps you get out of your own way, now that’s an interesting topic. Dorothea Brande is big on wordless recreation for writers. Knitting, playing solitaire, walking. I do a lot of hiking. Lately I’ve also been baking, which seems to serve the same purpose. Do something that keeps you a little busy but mostly allows the mind to be quiet and then you can get out of your own way.

I’ve had some visitors searching for Yule Be Mine and comments over on Dear Author (where you can win a copy in the Thanksgiving giveaway) and I thought I’d post a quick “about Yule” for those who want to know.

Yule Be Mine was originally published as an ebook by Scheherazade Tales, now defunct. While it was there, I had a lot of requests for it as a print book. Since ST had no intention of ever going into print, we created a trade paperback via Lulu which was available through bookstores. So there are print copies out there circulating from that original edition. One at least is circulating via Bookcrossing.

I resold Yule to Cerridwen Press, and it will re-release Dec. 7 as an ebook.There *should* be a future print edition but there’s no date or anything set yet. I pulled the original trade paperback edition when I resold it because that’s part of EC/CP’s contract terms (that the work not be for sale elsewhere).

So. Yule has been out of print for about a year, re-releases shortly as an ebook, and should re-release in the future in print. It has a fabulous new cover which I really love, but the story is essentially unchanged. (Very minor editorial changes were made for house style, mostly punctuation.) Hope that answers questions! If I forgot something, ask away. : )

I have no amazing insights this morning because it started too early. *yawn* Unless it’s, “Inspiration comes in a mug”. Caffeine, don’t try parenthood without it.

Actually I do find a lot of inspiration outside of a mug. I find a lot of it in books. I went on a book download binge last night and today I have that “new books to read” glow. My buys: From Samhain, With Nine You Get Vanyr which I have been waiting for and then didn’t buy the week of release because I was busy or something, and Project: Man because Alexis Fleming is so freaking funny. From Ellora’s Cave, Interstellar Sparks from the so-entertaining Shannon Stacey and Faer Fetched, a Quickie in Christine Warren’s Fixed series.

Reading is like training wheels for writing in so many ways. It puts the brain in the right place. Sometimes I deliberately study a book to see how X thing was done, sometimes I study it to see why it didn’t work for me, sometimes I just enjoy it. The pure enjoyment factor is just as good for the brain as study because it puts the brain into that relaxed state that’s so condusive to writing. Play and relaxation are vital to work. I’ve done some mental playing around and playing on paper this week and it’s good to do that stuff.

I hear so often the refrain, “I don’t have time to read” or “I don’t enjoy reading anymore” or “I don’t read while I’m writing a book” from writers. I realized some time ago that if I don’t read while I’m writing a book I’ll never read again because I’m ALWAYS writing a book. There is a point in a project when I tend not to read anything new, though I’ll re-read. But sometimes I think picking up a story somebody else wrote is the only thing that gets me through the current project. Reading, it’s good for writers. Especially when it’s just to relax.