by Charlene Teglia | Apr 15, 2007 | Uncategorized
It’s 10:22. Where has my morning gone?
Lots of helping potty training toddler on and off potty, which involves ritual handwashing.
Breakfast.
Getting dinner in crockpot with much help from husband. (Hurt my arm yesterday, taking it easy today)
Dressing baby, prodding toddler through dressing.
Coffee. More coffee. Lots and lots of coffee, all while doing twelve other things.
Planning/discussion with husband.
Walk, which involves getting out backpacks, getting shoes/jackets on children, inserting children into backpacks, shoes and jackets on us, backpacks on. Geez. It’s a workout getting ready for a walk.
Load of laundry.
Prodded by Google/Blogger to merge my accounts. Merged. Now able to post comments on Blogger blogs once more. Which did not save the lost comment on Beth’s blog about my Annie Lennox period followed by the brief and unlamented “blue period“, although that lost comment did prod me to jump through all the !@#$& Google/Blogger merger hoops.
Visited a few blogs.
Checked email for a. cover art b. edits c. happy news. Got lots of spam from lots of Very Concerned Citizens who are sure I need Viagra and want to help me get it.
Naptime routine, which involves snacks, potty time again, the four millionth reading of Goodnight Moon, nap blankies, hugs, kisses, etc.
Heave sigh of relief. Naptime is here! Sit down with laptop, and wonder, how did it get to be so late and where did my morning go? Then think, “hey, at least I can get a blog entry out of that.”
by Charlene Teglia | Apr 14, 2007 | Uncategorized
by Charlene Teglia | Apr 13, 2007 | Uncategorized
I can pretty clearly see my evolution as a writer when I compare, say, Catalyst to Dangerous Games. Catalyst was my first book. I was so clueless. I remember physically taking a paperback romance of equivalent length apart to figure out how to put mine together. Structure aside, there’s a point where you settle in and stop feeling self-conscious and things just sort of…smooth out. By the time I wrote Love Spell and Dangerous Games, I’d settled in.
But I continued to really learn and grow and evolve, and I can see a difference from Dangerous to Wolf In Cheap Clothing, a year later. Another shift with Wild Wild West and Satisfaction Guaranteed. Once the settling in stage happens, maybe your growth accelerates, or maybe it’s just practise. But I can see a difference.
Which makes me wonder how a reader might react to encountering different stages of my evolution out of order? From time to time I worry. Maybe I shouldn’t have published this, or that, because it isn’t the same as the way I’m writing now. Then again, somebody thought it was publishable. Somebody RWA recognized. And let’s face it, the creator is often not the best impartial judge of their own work, so it’s probably best to leave those decisions to a publisher.
And then there’s the simple fact that (hopefully) the evolution of a writer is an ongoing thing. I’ll always be learning, growing, striving to improve. The best I can do five years from now ought to be better than the best I could do two years ago. And if you wait until you reach the pinnacle before you feel worthy of publishing, what body of work will you have?
This kind of thinking also has a built-in gotcha in that you won’t reach that level of expertise and experience without all those years of writing in between…and chances are, if you’re not publishing, you’re not writing as much or as well, because editors haven’t worked with you, because you had to take a second job in lieu of writing income, because you couldn’t justify the time to write very much or very intensely when you weren’t publishing.
I know that when I look at books by favorite authors of mine, I can see the evolution. They settle in, and it shows. There’s change over time. And as a reader, it’s never bothered me unless the author started really going in a direction I wasn’t interested in in terms of genre. It’s never been style that’s put me off an author. So probably this is something I’m overly conscious of now that I’m published myself. Also because I’m trying to do the finishing touches on Miss Lonely Hearts and I feel like I’m straddling The Great Divide of how I wrote then versus how I write now.
Anybody else noticing the shift in their evolution? Any reader thoughts?
by Charlene Teglia | Apr 13, 2007 | Uncategorized
It’s Friday the 13th? That’s kind of funny. Didn’t realize yesterday was the 12th. I finished reading Strange Candy, and it was kind of like time-travel in a few ways. The early Anita stories went back in time in the series. And the high fantasy stuff took me back to a time when I read stuff like that.
I don’t read heroic/high fantasy anymore. I read fantasy, but it’s urban fantasy, or funny fantasy (ala Terry Pratchett). In other words, not the serious stuff. Ok, I re-read all the Tolkien books and saw every LOTR movie more than once when they came out, but in general, I quit reading “serious” around high school.
There was a certain appeal to Serious Reading back then, not quite sure why. Maybe it made me feel smarter, maybe it was adolescent angst. Maybe a combination of the two. Whatever, I moved on. So reading stories like the ones I used to read sort of took me back to that younger me, and considering my upcoming YA project, that’s useful.
The collection of short stories made for good reading, and it was interesting to read stories set in the world of Nightseer. So, if you want some varied short reading and a little armchair time-travel, check out Laurell K. Hamilton’s Strange Candy. My favorite stories in the collection were the early Anita Blake shorts and At The Edge of the Sea.
by Charlene Teglia | Apr 11, 2007 | Uncategorized
Regular blog readers will remember Trey, who joined us about a month ago. The first new nights he spent hiding under our bed. Gradually he grew braver and was able to withstand more and more before bolting back under the bed for safety. But every night, when the sun went down, he started to howl. This made for many sleepless and interrupted nights.
We searched for answers online. We asked ourselves what the problem might be. Eventually, we realized: he’s afraid of the dark. So. We tried leaving a light on in the laundry room where the food, water and litter are. Not good enough. It’s dark everywhere else. Then we tried leaving a light on in the living room, lighting the way to the laundry room. Better, but he likes to sleep with us…and the bedroom’s dark.
Which means that now, when it gets dark outside, we have to turn on our bedroom light. The laundry room light. And the living room light, so that he doesn’t have to venture into the dark between our bedroom and the laundry room.
Life with Fraidy Cat. But he’s not keeping us up all night howling, so I’ll take sleeping with the lights on. At least until we get the next power bill…
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