Charlene Teglia

The CBC group is having one amazing year! Joanne Pence is up for a Romantic Times Career Achievement Award for her Angie Amalfi mystery series, and Robin Lee Hatcher's Catching Katie is in The Library Journal's Best of 2004 list. This doesn't surprise me because I have never seen a more talented, hardworking group of writers and I'm proud to be among them. The group has several distance members (obviously!) so geography is no barrier if anybody out there wants to join in the fun.

Love and Rockets went off yesterday as a complete package, the cover blurb done, a series title added, the excerpt ready to go for the E.C. website, all my revisions approved (yes!). My editor says she can't wait to see the reviews on this one. I'm looking forward to seeing the cover and to having the release date set. It's very exciting to see this book becoming a reality. It's been such a long time coming!

I will be spending the next month doing the revisions on Dangerous Games. Although hopefully it won't take me that long. I'm not fighting nausea or constantly falling asleep anymore, and it's not the holidays.

The Open eBook Forum <a href="http://www.openebook.com/bestseller/december04.htm" target="blank">best-seller list for December</a> has Yule Be Mine at #30. This is just awesome. The list is dominated by ebook releases from traditional print publishers, so for a small independent ebook publisher to be on this list is beyond great. It's amazingly good news! Yule Be Mine has once again exceeded my expectations.

Other than that, it's Monday and I'm enjoying my newly organized desk as I dive into the week's work.

Thank you, Elizabeth! I am now the happy recipient of excellent recipes for brownies, cookies, and best of all (drumroll) donuts that taste just like Krispy Kreme. Hooray!

Aside from salivating over recipes, I've had a busy day. Worked on my blurb and series title, went for a walk with my husband and our daughter (we usually walk every day but just recently we've had several days of too-cold weather) and did errands. I also cleaned off my desk; I had a pile of papers that needed to be sorted. Some of them needed to be filed but an astonishing percentage just needed to be thrown away.

I now have a full wastebasket and a clean desk. I feel very prepared for Monday.

If you want organic produce, this is your heaven. If you are a pregnant woman craving junk food, you must face the cruel fact that you are 1.5 hours from the nearest Krispy Kreme.

I told Pat I wanted brownies the other day. He said, "Well, I could probably find some at The Co-Op, but they'd be "live" brownies with bean curd." And he wasn't joking. If you want live, organic, whole grain, or any other crunchy granola Birkenstock wearing kind of cuisine, Port Townsend is for you.

The rest of us dream of Taco Bell, chocolate shakes, Krispy Kreme donuts, chocolate chunk cookies that have never breathed the same air as tofu and no horrified onlookers who think a pregnant woman eating junk food needs an intervention, not a glass of milk to wash it down.

Oh, well. I can always get a good certified Angus beef cheeseburger on a sprouted-grain bun, or a free-range chicken sandwich with bleach-free recycled paper napkins to mop up my tears.

Along with the other stuff I'm doing for the final push on Love and Rockets, I'm told I need to come up with a series name, because I'd told my editor that there was a sequel. Evidently they've seen enough from me to trust the quality of my work, because the series name is going on Love and Rockets. This is a lovely vote of confidence and means that the sequel goes to the top of my To Do list after my edits, proofing, etc. are all done. Huzzah!

And yesterday our little girl officially graduated from toddler bed to a real twin bed. She was delighted with it, climbed all over it during the day after we set it up, and didn't protest being put into it at bedtime, so we figured it was safe to let her sleep in it right off. She slept through the night, then got up and started playing like she usually does in the morning, perfectly happy with the change. She was really ready for it.

Hard to believe how much she's grown, how tall she is now. She really is going to be the BIG sister by the time the new Teglia makes an appearance!

If you haven't already cast your vote for <a href="http://www.anotherealm.com/prededitors/perpoll.htm" target="blank">best ebook of 2004</a>, click on over and be counted before the polls close midnight of Jan. 14. Yule Be Mine is listed in the nominations and so is the cover artwork.

You must give a valid email address and click the validation link in the auto email you're sent after voting for your vote to count.

Love and Rockets is coming my way for a final look-see. Dangerous Games is coming my way for edits. And I'm filling out the cover art request for Dangerous to send in today. I know exactly how I'd like it to look, the trick is to describe it so the art department can envision the same thing. E.C.'s art department is terrific and it's great to actually get input into the cover. This is often not the case in the world of publishing.

Filling out the cover request means I need to pull up the ms. and check my details, so it's actually a task that takes a little time to do right. That, the final Rockets look-see and the edits on Dangerous should do a good job of keeping me out of trouble for the near future!

This might be my favorite Shakespeare adaptation ever. It was incredibly well-done, bringing The Taming of The Shrew into present-day Seattle. And it's worth seeing just for Ms. Perky, the guidance counselor, who wrote romance novels on her laptop in between student appointments with quivering, heaving purple prose.

Julia Stiles made a great Kate. The dialog was wonderful, the physical comedy was beautiful, and the entire thing just worked seamlessly. Bianca ends up with a dash of shrew in her at the end, making her a much more well-rounded individual. And the music was great. As soon as I heard Joan Jett and the Blackhearts blasting out of Kate's radio, I knew I was going to love the sound-track.

This is a don't miss comic masterpiece for any fan of The Bard, and for any reader or writer of romance. It was so good I want to buy my own copy immediately.

So much for my BIAM plans; got a heads-up that the edits for Dangerous Games will land on my desk soon. Which is good, the sooner the editing and so on is done, the sooner I'll have a set release date. And it will sort of clear the decks to have all my edits finished. I'll just see what I can accomplish for the rest of this week and be ready to switch gears.

Finally rented Troy. I won't go into how it departed from Homer's Iliad because I think that's been covered elsewhere. You just have to take it for what it is, a beautifully done movie with lots of Brad Pitt's buff body. I think Achilles is Pitt's second best role; first place is still held by the title role in Meet Joe Black. Very entertaining, although your classic Greek tragedy. There's a reason why I prefer the Odyssey; it has a happy ending, Odysseus/Ulysses gets home to his wife.

And a big cheer is in order for fellow CBC member Cathy Mulvany, whose Run No More was nominated for Best Contemporary Paranormal of 2004 by the editors of the Romantic Times Bookclub Magazine. Yay, Cathy! (CBC is my writer's group, you'll see a link to the website under the Resources tab.)