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Whew, made it through to vacation.  Actually, I’m a few days into it, as it technically started when I went home Friday.

So far, I’ve:

• Spent a day tending to a sick person…well…a day and a half.
• Spent some time trying to fend off a low-level yuckiness myself.
• Ran back and forth to home depot to get paint, tile, flooring material.
• Played starcraft 2
• Read the first few chapters of Darkness Calls, by Margorie M. Liu
• Had someone come by to fix the fridge, which is having defrost problems, hence problems keeping the fridge side cool
• Fixed the faucet of the downstairs bathtub to no longer leak.  Unfortunately, water collects in the corner by the wall and is leaking.
• Did just a touch of revision on Chapter 2 of my little writing project.

What come

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So, after years of ruminating about this, I’ve decided it’s time. In the next two weeks, we’ll be packing up to prepare to move to New York, where I can further pursue my writing career. All of the big publishers are there, and the opportunities are much higher. It’ll be hard, but I expect all of you to help.

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So I was going to donate some money to the Red Cross for their Japanese relief efforts. Then, I came across something really cool. The League of Reluctant Adults, a group of paranormal romance and urban fantasy authors, had placed an auction on ebay with the proceeds going to the Red Cross efforts for Japanese relief. They agreed to critique the writing of the winner. Up to 6000 words at that. Needless to say, I bid. Hey, giving money to the Red Cross and actually having my work critiqued by professional authors…cool stuff. And, I won. So, I’m looking forward to presenting my work to Sonya Bateman, Michele Bardsley, Carolyn Crane, Kevin Hearne, Jackie Kessler, Diana Rowland and Jeanne Stein.
6000 words is enough for a synopsis and the first chapter of my project. Now, I just need to clean it up a bit more and send it off. Shudder…
In other news, plumbing sucks. I’m not suffering from two burns and a sore back from an evening of sweat soldering copper pipe in

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We watched an anime called Summer Wars last night.
I rather liked it. No spoilers, but it involved a large online virtual world, lots of avatars, a bit of cryptography, computer hacking, and an artificial intelligence/robotics professor from Carnegie Mellon.
Interesting, as I went to Carnegie Mellon, studied engineering with a focus on robotics, work in the robotics institute there, went on to work in the security and cryptography group at Microsoft, and currently work as an engineering manager for a rather large online virtual world with lots of avatars.

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So in my “ample” spare time, I’m trudging through revising my book. It’s turning out to be a long, slow, somewhat painful process, as this is my first revision of this project, and frankly, I’m rewriting a lot.
The characters have changed and grown. I’m getting rid of plot ideas that are frankly “silly.” I’m adding in new plot directions. And I’m planning on fleshing out more as far as subplots and romance.
So much to do, I feel like I”m starting over again.
However, I’ve also been polishing as I go along. The product of this revision is much more reader-friendly, and I’ve been chopping and cutting so the pacing is more appropriate.
Want to know what I’m writing?
Well, at RADCON, I took a workshop on pitching your project to publishers, editors, agents, whoever. A number of great authors and one publisher sat on the panel, and took sample pitches from the audience, critiquing them.
What’s a pitch? A

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After nearly 2 years of neglecting my blog, I think it’s time to dig it up, sew the parts together, zap it and bring it back to life.

So, what’s going on with me now.
Last weekend, I took part in Vaginomicon, a mash-up of “The Vagina Monologues” by Eve Ensler and Scary stuff. We did it for Women in Horror Month.

How’d this happen? Well, Tori planted the seed, and Jenna took it from there, collecting a rag-tag group of women and men to write and perform scary monologues about scary women doing scary things. How cool is that.

And, the amazing thing. We put this together in under a month. Writing, practicing, planning, acquiring space, advertising, and actually doing the deed. Truly amazing. Everyone was amazingly supportive, we all had a great time, and we’re looking forward

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So, we spent the entire weekend (well, part of it at least) weeding the garden. Weeding is generally not a big deal. Pull out a few small plants here and there. Well, the garden was a prehistoric jungle. Huge flesh-eating plants. I think we’ve won though. Had to remove all of the plants, as well as the top few inches of dirt, the dirt with the weed seed.

I did have a chance to pick up a few sword dancing pointers from Brooke, belly dancer par-excellence. I’m looking forward to performing with my new copper dance sword. I’ve a performance coming up after the parade on the 20th of June, and might try to make it to the harem show before then.

Oh, and hey. I’ve been consistently keeping up with 1000 words or more per day in my writing project. I’m 25k in.

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Saw the new Star Trek movie last night. While I’m no trekkie, I did spend my childhood watching the reruns of the first series, as and I’ve watched pretty much all of the other ones. As well as the movies. This one definitely kept to the tradition of ‘even movies are the good ones.’
I thought it was great. The actors they found for Spock, Kirk, Uhura, Scottie, Sulu, Bones, Chekov, well they were all right on. I loved the old-school Kirk, getting into fights, chasing women, and so on. And Spock, well, we’ve always known he’s the most emo of the entire crew.
Kirk on earth, living in Iowa, well that was cool. Especially the bar fight and corvette.
The plot, well, it was a bit close to star trek nemesis, the previous movie. Romulans coming to attack earth.
There were plenty of winks to the original series, making it quite fun for long-time fans.

And Vulcan getting destroyed. wow.

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I know you’re not supposed to do this, but I’ve started a new story, and my other one isn’t done yet.

I just sorta lost steam on the other story. It didn’t have ‘fun,’ and it was a bit too dark. So, I’ve started off in another direction, writing a fun urban fantasy type o thing. I love the genre, it’s fun, it’s exciting, and it allows for a bit more ‘creativity’ than other more down to earth genres.

I’ve been outlining my story, and that is going well. It’s just pouring from me. If I can get a decent outline done in a few days, I’ll start turning into something more, which should be pretty easy once I have a good idea where I want to go.

Now, if only I can avoid lifes other distractions.

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Managed to turn out a whole 800 words today (well, I only wrote for 45 minutes).

Let’s see if I can do it again tomorrow…perhaps 1000 words.

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