National Novel Writing Month 2019

I'm not really sure why, really, I'm doing NaNoWriMo this year. I don't have the time to do it, practically speaking, but here I am, on Day 5, with a respectable word count of 9214. I was hoping for 10k, but was easily distracted today by laundry, and an absurd desire to maintain some kind of timeline consistency.

I doubt that any of what I'm writing will be usable in a new novel; maybe some, maybe not any of it. What I do know is that since I started writing again, nightmares have stopped completely. A month of no bad dreams is worth the time eaten up by writing. It's like having a vacation.

The lizard above is one of the MANY we have on the property now. I'm thrilled that the sagebrush lizard population has boomed. They eat ants, says the Internet. Indeed, I am not seeing the swarms of megacolonies of ants that I did a few years ago.

With the time passing into November coolness, the lizards have to sleep most of the time. I get to see them if I head outside around noon, but before that, and after two-thirty or so, it's just too cold for them. Kind of like me, and writing out in the studio.

Liz is saying, "Hey, why does it get so cold when you write?"

NaNoWriMo 2018

How many times have I said I'm not going to do this to myself again?

Oh, well, here I am, Day 2, with 2515 words in my count already. Not done for the day, either. I can't say how many words I will type tonight, but my goodness, NaNoWriMo is already doing what I wanted it to do.

I got a late start yesterday, what with it being a holy day of obligation, and then having some outdoors work to do, as well as a landslide of laundry that miraculously appeared in the laundry room, and roasting two chickens and prepping another two for the freezer (I buy cheap whole chickens and then cut them into wings, breasts, and leg quarters). By the time dinner was done, I was ready to write.

Until the football game came on, which I was sure would be a lame-ass ridiculous display of ineptitude that I could ignore. Wait, what? The Lame 49'ers quarterback, CJ Beathard was out with an injury? Garappolo is out for the season, so that left ... whaaat? The former practice squad kid, Nick Mullens to take over as QB? Preposterous!

Then the kid marched his team down the field for a touchdown.

Okay, put the computer away, got to watch the new kid on the block. So much for 2000 words the first day.

When I sat down with my computer this morning, all set to write, I had a strange reaction: my hands began to shake like I was hyper-caffeinated. I couldn't type fast enough. Sure they were rough, un-thought-out words, but they were WORDS, and they were MINE, and no one can ever take them away from me, except me, if I decide to delete them.

I stopped trying to make up shit to write, and just listened to what the characters were saying and doing, and transcribed as fast as I could.

My, that sure does feel fine.

At least today.

And the kid did good.

Conclusion of "Out with the Trash."

Back in 2003, I had an idea for NaNoWriMo 2004. I had completed Character Assassin (easiest NaNo ever) and was thinking about the next year.

It was a spite novel, to include as a character a person that I had known who was unpleasant. But what to build upon? 50 thousand words is a lot of words to indicate that someone I once knew more than twenty years before was an ass. And keep him anonymous, of course. I'm not above vengeance, but not prone to libel.

It was to be about him being a hog, but not to be "about him" per se, because I didn't have any clue as to why he was actually a hog. Instead I wanted to write about his household, because it had to be as unpleasant as he was.

By the time 2004 rolled around, I had a good idea of what I wanted to happen. The summer of 2004 I remember fondly because so many mornings, I spent chatting with my friend Wendy Robards about what the hog's spouse had to be to have put up with him for so many years. That foundational exploration lent the character Emily Storm Fatzer a strong emotional and reactive bent. I knew who she was, and how she would deal with Hog Mark Fatzer before I ever began the story.

At the end of November, 2004, I had a novel in my hands, Out with the Trash, and it wasn't bad. There were some minor edits to be made, and one big one, a chapter that just didn't seem complete.

Thirteen years ago, I knew I had to edit that incomplete chapter, maybe add another 200 - 500 words. Couldn't bring myself to do it.

It wasn't that I didn't love the story and the characters, it wasn't that I didn't know what to say, it was ... what?

I don't know, even now, when the chapter is complete and published in the Piker Press weeks ago, what it was that hung me up for so many years. But as of next Monday, Emily's story will be complete, and Out with the Trash will be a published novel online.

The illustrations for the story are from my photos of koi at a water garden store in Oakdale, California, and from our own pond out in front of our porch.

Many thanks again to Wendy Robards and my husband Bernie, for reading and suggesting improvements to the finished work.

...And a Reprieve

After I figured out that my Amazon links were messed up, and knowing the scope of the problem was pretty wide, I sent off an email to the Tech Editor, asking if he'd help me fix the links, figuring that four hands would get the links repaired in half the time. I was wrong.

With his mighty wizardry and knowledge of how computer shit works, he did some kind of magic "find and replace" with the Press guts, and then sent me a reply email the following morning that said that all 800-and-some links were fixed.

I cannot convey what a sense of relief I felt, except that I was so energized by the prospect of not developing terminal eyestrain that I spent the afternoon writing. Thank you, Tech Editor Josh. You made my week.

On a side note, Josh did not tell me how he fixed it. He never tells me how he fixes things in the Press guts. Maybe it's a power trip -- or maybe he just knows that I don't know what I'm doing really, and that in my hands a little bit of knowledge could be a very dangerous thing. If I were him, I wouldn't want someone to risk messing up 13 years of website either.

Time for Creativity

 Last Friday I knew I needed to spend time with Lillian and art work. We had plotted to do that since school started last year, because we both felt we hadn't done enough over the summer. So while it was still cool in the morning, we opened the garage door for lovely natural lighting, and perusing my shelves, looked for inspiration.

I dragged out a sketch pad, one of many that I hoard but rarely use because of my phobia about "using up good materials on practice pieces." She immediately began to sketch, exclaiming about how much better the tooth of the paper took the pencil lines than the copy paper she usually uses; I stood at my worktable wondering what on earth I ought to do.

Shrugging, I used my pencil to make random dots on my sheet of paper. Then I connected dots with thin lines, also randomly, making sure no dot was left unconnected. The result was actually pretty cool-looking, and Lil was impressed by the idea. I myself was once again impressed with Lil's ability to bring out a creative side to my work that usually is hidden.

Taking a break from our sketches, we talked about graphic editing programs -- I use Photoshop, she uses Manga Studio, she longs for SAI. At one point, I showed her how to use the Paint Daubs filter in Photoshop (see the pic at top) to better "see" the actual colors in a picture without the brain suggesting names for the colors. Thus some of the "green" in the photo is, in reality, gray; part of the "white" of the blossoms is also gray, but a different gray.

My coloration of my sketch isn't done, but I am looking forward to playing with it some more, and using the random dots idea in a couple other ways.

And then there's writing, which needed a jump start of creativity, too...

I haven't been writing. I don't like that, it hurts me to not write, I have nightmares when I don't write, my hands want to be typing out words, and I haven't had any words coming to mind. Troubling. Am I no longer a writer? How awful!

At the beginning of May, the Piker Press vampire writer, Lydia Manx, went on hiatus from her serial fiction. Needing something to fill in the spot, I thought of my long-abandoned foodie soap opera Going Hungry -- I knew there was about 80,000 words of unedited story there, so why not brush the dander and dust off it and use it to pass the time until Lydia was ready to hammer on her stories again?

We're about nine episodes in now, and I have probably another five edited that just need illustrations; there are some flaky chapters that need some brushing up ... and then the document ends with the end of the story. Most of the middle part is in another document.

It took me several days to figure out how to find the other document, as I'd forgotten what it was named in the five years since I worked on it.

Another few days passed as I re-read it, not remembering most of it, making notes of continuity boo-boos and rambly pointless bits.

Today I reached the end of the document, the last sentence of which reads, "I've died and gone to heaven, Gloria thought, and ended the damn boring stupid story for the time being." When I read that, I laughed out loud. That was a plot twist I definitely didn't remember!

Looks like I've just put some oompf into a creative writing prompt: Finish the damn novel or look like an ass.

Yep. Time for creativity.

Ah, Winter Weather

The time change happens, your sense of daybreak gets messed up, and what looks like six in the morning turns out to be nine ... whoops, heavy Tule fog has really thrown off your day.

By the time you read the news and the comics, and drink your tea, feed the dogs, stoke the fire, put the jammies in the hamper and get dressed, it's nearly eleven o' clock and time to be thinking about what you're having for lunch and cooking for the midday meal.

A quick snack to break your nightly fast, a finger-numbing rummage through the freezer for some chicken filets that have mysteriously migrated to the bottom of the storage. You look at your watch and realize that you have almost five hours of daylight left to weed the winter garden, rake leaves into the street, go to the store for bread, stop at the Post Office, pick up the grand-daughter at school, get out to the yard to clean up dog poop, and take the recyclables down to the City Recycle Center.

Bam! It's dark, midday meal is done, the fog has come back up again, and the comfy pajamas seem like an oasis in a chilly desert night.

A warm laptop computer. A story you got to thinking about when you were supposed to be praying at church last Sunday. Thick, cushiony socks.

The glass of wine, and a tiny plate of summer sausage and walnuts.

Another winter tale begins.

An Autumn Evening

My studio in the garage is already starting to get chilly in the evenings, already too chilly to want to work out here in the mornings. In another week, I'll be swearing about having not laid out the cash to insulate the ceiling over the summer as I promised myself last January that I would.

There are so many things I keep saying I'll do: finish those novels, put my finished novels up on Amazon Kindle Direct; finish the six oil paintings hanging around the studio, continue with some colored-pencil sketches I was really having fun with months ago; make a comforter from an old polyester blanket and a deliciously-textured cotton duvet cover someone gave me, sew a couple baby outfits, hem the veils that cover my mouth, cheeks, and ears while I'm riding during fly season and hot sunny days.

Everything takes time.

I did manage to get a winter garden planted, with seed onions, spinach, beets for beet greens (I already ate a few of the tiny leaves and they are wonderful), chard, lots of snow peas, and yesterday I finally saw some of my lettuces sprouting -- it's red-leaf lettuce and the tiny dark leaves were nearly invisible against the soil. Planting the garden took a couple days, working the soil, sowing seeds, weaving a twine lattice across the south planters so that cats would stop digging in it (had to replant the beets after that), weeding out the rogue nasturtiums that insist on popping up to strangle all the other plants.

Today I caught up on the last of the laundry to be folded, went out to the ranch and exercised the horse in the arena, then dunged out his paddock. After a shower, I began making braised lamb shanks (time-consuming but well worth the time spent) and gorditas (fat little tortillas) for dinner. John made tzatziki (cucumbers and stuff in Greek yogurt) to accompany the lamb.

Good work, a feast, and a long autumn evening to watch NFL football and ponder the paths life takes and to question the decisions of coaches.

Projects can wait for a day or two, I think.

Re-Capturing A Glow

Having the old laptop come back to life on my desk made me think of the files that were on it. I had a look around them, and with a stomach-clenching start, realized that my six novels were NOT there. The next four were, in various states of unedited/unfinished-ness, but I have them backed up on the work laptop and a thumb drive already. With horror I went to the desktop machine, that perverse Windows 7 HP lemon ... oh, no, that's where the completed novels were? What had I been thinking?

When I transferred those files from my first (and now dead and gone to recycle bin) laptop, I hadn't known that the desktop was a lemon, that's what I had been thinking. Well, what the hell, I thought, I could work with those files on the Big Screen -- maybe that would help me catch typos!

I knew that Character Assassin needed "justified" print (CA was actually my first novel in print) so I thought I'd just do that and see if I still remembered how ...

And thus began the next few hours of sweat and twitchiness: the Word program I had installed on the desktop would not allow me to use "Thai Distributed Justify," which had worked so nicely with the other books. Again and again I typed those three words into Word's "Help" program, Google Search, back to Word, calling up Dreamer and seeing "Thai Distributed Justify" in its formatting, unable to find it for CA ... OMG, don't tell me that Windows 7 won't work with my old 2002 Word program!

I turned off the Big Screen and turned on my Windows Vista laptop. Yes, you can access Thai Distributed there. I turned Vista off and turned on Windows 7 laptop. Sweating bullets of relief, I found Thai Distributed there, too. Why the hell wasn't it on Big Screen -- all my machines had the same Word 2002 disk uploaded -- and what the hell might have happened to my files while they were being mauled by Lemon Big Screen?

There were two thumb drives in the desk drawer, and neither one of them had my novels on them.  With a steadily droning "Eeeeeeeeee" of horror running through my head, I carefully loaded the novels from Big Screen onto the thumb drive with palsied hands, checking each one to make sure that Page One and The End were on each. Lamaze breathing exercises and glugged ice water helped me keep from falling into a panic attack.

Did you know that it's okay to mention "Stress Sweat" nowadays? Yes, it is, I heard it on a television commercial just the other night. The ad noted that "Stress Sweat" is really smelly, different than "Exercise Sweat" -- duh! After I made sure that every sentence of my novels had successfully loaded onto Windows 7 Laptop, I re-formatted Out With the Trash to Thai Distributed justification. It looks sharp.

And then I took a shower because I stunk.

But you know what? Making sure that my novel files had lifeboats gave me some time to spend with them, and I liked what I saw. I think I'm ready now to start working with them again, and get Out With the Trash into circulation.

Fan that little spark, and make Sand a writer again, not simply an editor.

A Challenge!

Not one for letting me alone, Lydia Manx gave me a poke and suggested that we write 10,000 words over Memorial Day Weekend.

She didn't wait for my answer, because she knew what it would be and how I would phrase it -- so she quickly amended it to a picture being worth a thousand words, thus a 10-picture challenge.

I could do that.

The pomegranate tree got a photoshoot, with  guest appearances by a nasturtium and an artichoke.

The result of the challenge can be seen at Palmprint Gallery.

WTF Blogger?

I have been working with the 15-minute blocs of writing -- indeed, I have written a movie review, an additional batch of words for the Aser Murder Mystery, and I'm going to count this blog entry, too, when it's done. I didn't try to write yesterday, it being Super Bowl Day, and me being required to advise both Harbaugh brothers on how to coach their teams. A Harbaugh coach's team won the Super Bowl, and I can't say whether or not it was due to my advice. I did what I could.

Nevertheless, I was going to post what I had written for "Murder Mystery" but Blogger, when I copied and pasted the paragraphs from Word, made the text appear in two different types -- annoyingly different types. And today, when I opened Blogger to post a new bit, I'm finding a really, REALLY basic version. WTF?

Is it me, or is it Memorex?

Aside from the blog wreck, I had a great day today. A trail ride through Central Valley orchards with a chatty companion was delightful, although a bit longer than I'd planned for. The chatty companion held forth on orchard irrigation options (flood vs drip) and grower-end problems of farming, and owl-box management. Coolness!

And Dink is improving, gaining some weight back, and has LOTS of energy back.

There, 15 minutes, I'm done.

ZZZZzzzzzzzz.

The Day Before the Day Before Rain

There was fog today. Not the can't-see-across-the-street fog, but it was pretty substantial. The morning temps were in the mid-30s.

My studio has no heat, except for a small radiant heater that warms up the heater-side of me and not a lot else. But I did re-discover my winter riding boots, and let me tell you, those things are so insulated you can't tell if you're standing in snow or on cement in a studio. I dusted them off (how many years had they been on a shelf, unused?) and have been wearing them on chilly mornings in the studio. Perfection. Add my NaNoWriMo extra-large hoodie and fingerless gloves, and I'm good to go.

I've been trying to learn how to manage the Piker Press Forums ... I want to clean them up so that they better suit the tastes of the people that actually use them. Not a lot of people -- as one Piker recently put it, "Forums are so 80s." Still, it's nice to have them to leave a message for others: "Can't be there online tonight, my dog's on fire" or such. Or a silly writing game. Anyway, it's been yet another learning experience. I thought I was done with learning experiences for a while, but maybe it's part of adulthood, realizing that the learning experiences just don't ever really stop heading your way.

Tomorrow is supposed to be the last clement day for a week; I myself am looking forward to a bunch of rainy gray days, during which I can catch up on Press work and maybe even get some prime writing time.

Surfing Time's Curl

In the evening sunlight, this year's red dragonfly perches on a bamboo stick over my Goliath tomato.

He doesn't worry about how many days he has left -- by the time winter gets here, he'll be toes up in some shrub, his life drifted away in some shallow respirations at the end of his mating season. He doesn't care. He lives, eats, flies, mates, eats, flies, lands on his stick to survey his kingdom. That's good enough for him.

I know that I don't have all that many years left (or days, truth be told) and I want to get to that dragonfly's mentality.

I don't want to worry about the future; that leads to broken sleep and miserable nights.

And in the time that remains, while the wave is still sweet and strong and carries me and my board to exhilarating speeds, I want to live, write, eat, write some more, play with the Press, and hold my newest grand-daughter. Then write some more.

Yet I see the ceiling of water hovering over me, and fret.

Lord, make for me a dragonfly heart.

That Glorious Aaaah Moment

No worries this evening; the Piker Press is back up, and so quickly that there were only a few schedule tweakings that needed to be done. This morning I switched the cover stories, in line with my goals for the Anniversary Issues. On Wednesday, perhaps KK Brown's wistful story about Africa will appear on the cover.

The first few years of the Piker Press, I knew that the ezine was important because it was my venue for writing, my excuse for continuing to come up with the tongue-in-cheek Aser stories. After I took over the management of the site, I wondered if I was just wasting my time, but I loved meeting new authors, and reading some really, really good writing every week. Sometimes, however, I wondered if I was the only one in the world who loved the Press, and would anyone care if it ended, as so many online ezines do.

This past week, I found out the truth. Other people care. They cared enough to get the Piker Press through this disaster. And I found out that I care more deeply than I thought about the people behind the stories in the Press. It would have been a loss for everyone not to have those wonderful words available; it would have been a greater loss to lose track of the wonderful people I've come to know.

I try to be altruistic, and look at the bigger picture.

Still, I'm human, and I love our authors and readers deeply.

For both aspects of the Press, I thank our donors once again.

Train Wreck

The Piker Press is currently unavailable.

At 12:01 am, May 1st, the Piker Press and its attendant satellites (forums, email, archives) crashed. As in a train derailment, something unexpected was left on our track, and that was that. We didn't see it coming at all.

Well, can't we fix it? The answer is yes, but it's going to take a month or so (we hope) and then we'll be up and running again. And yes, we could fix it sooner (48 hours) but the quick fix only happens to the tune of about $300 -- a sum that I simply don't have on hand, given that neither my husband nor I have a job, and aren't old enough for Social Security. We're living on savings, with food and housing being the priorities.

And so we wait, hoping that the problem will resolve easily as the situation changes. It is my intention to keep publishing the Press for as long as I can keep my wits about me, God willing and the creek don't rise, and the Mayans weren't right about the end of time coming up.

Is irony what this is? The Piker Press goes kaflooey less than 10 hours after the Grand Finale Anniversary Issue goes up. It's kind of like a giant meteorite hitting New Orleans during Mardi Gras. What a damn shame, as it was a great issue, and the month-long Tenth Anniversary celebration was glorious, with so many brilliant contributions.

Anyway, we'll see.

The published and penciled-in schedules are going to be bumped back four to six weeks, depending on the amount of damage control we have to do. There may be some hooching around with stories and their schedules. I'm so sorry that this happened, but as my husband told me this morning, "Sometimes businesses burn down. Rebuilding them takes time." I only wish it made me feel all better, but it doesn't.

I will be sending out my working email address to all the authors and submitters that I can for correspondence. And if you want to hear the latest news, this blog is where you'll hear it first.

My final comment is that during the hub-bub of the April issues, with all its work on formatting and illustrations, I mumbled a lot about looking forward to May when I wouldn't be so busy and could get back to work on my novels.

Damn, be careful what you wish for.

I think I've learned how to add a donate button ...

I spotted the red freesias in bud just as it was getting too dark to take pictures without a flash. The result does nothing to convey the other-worldliness of the buds. The real colors were ocher instead of yellow, and deep, dark magenta instead of reddish. I'll try again in the morning, if it doesn't rain like they're saying it will.

Of course, they -- the Weather Channel -- says it is currently raining outside, but it isn't, so probably they will be wrong tomorrow as well.

April is a bunch of buds ready to bloom. I am astounded at the landslide of replies and submissions the Piker Press has received in response to my letters asking a number of previous contributors to offer something in the Press for our Tenth Anniversary Month. The five April Anniversary Issues will be fat and fine.

And what does this mean for me, personally? Why, it means that I am going to be working harder than I have for ten years (which was about the time I retired from the paying job). April is going to be nutso for me. I hope it rains a lot so that I have an excuse for not fiddling around out of doors. Not only will I have 3 - 4 times the material to edit and format, but also will have a major artistic expenditure, as I would like each of the Anniv Ish stories to have its own illustration. Alex has already turned in two, and I have a stack of manuscripts available should she desire more prompts for her art.

I'm going to start formatting stuff tomorrow, after we get back from Lowe's, where Bernie promises to get me a functional shoplight. My halogen ones, though I love their spectrum and their heat, are totally unreliable and burn through bulbs in a matter of hours.

The work is going to be stimulating, I know; and after reading and editing so much of other people's work, I'm going to have a thrilling May, getting back to my own.

Bernie tells me that my laptop's days are numbered.

I don't want to believe that, because I've really liked this machine, and the keyboard feels so very familiar, and it has all my favorite programs on it to my satisfaction. However, it has begun running with a hot spot in the upper left corner, the power cord connection is wobbly, the DVD reader doesn't read any more, and there is the new problem with the screen going dead for no particular reason.

"It's not that old!" I sputtered at my husband, who then pointed out that this machine gets powered up in the morning even before I totter from bed to bathroom, and though I let it rest periodically during the day, it's also only turned off in the late evening when I've decided I can't keep my eyes open any longer. Is it possible that I've used my machine up?

We started with a noisy e-Machine, on which I wrote my first emails and my first novel; then I had my sweet little Micron that Tedi and JT sent me so that I could have my very own computer. After that came the first laptop, and then a desktop that could handle all the graphics I was doing in Photoshop; and then this laptop, and the absolute lemon desktop that can barely count its own toes and which I despise so much it will probably never work correctly.

So many ghosts of computers past, and present, and what will fill the future? I looked at laptops in Best Buy today, and hated every single one of them.

Nevertheless, I am reluctant to entrust any more writing to this laptop ...

A Decade of Filthy Pikers

Last Fall, I had this idea of contacting authors who had previously published their stuff with the Piker Press.

Seriously, LAST FALL. Here it is, less than a month before Spring, and I just today was able to climb over the monsters and nightmares and phobias and panics and JUST DO IT, DAMMIT.

All I had to do was construct a nice form letter that could be personalized, pull out the files of contracts, and go through them, one by one, get the email addresses, and plug in the emails and the stories' titles, and hit "Send."

I've become such a hermit that to do so was paralyzing... but today I did it. And oddly enough, it didn't hurt as badly as I thought it would. I was weary by the end of the day, but not freaked out and shattered. The first step wasn't even such a doozy that I fell down. The next steps were more like an escalator, and seeing the list of names get marked off with my highlighter sent endorphins all through my brain.

Goal!
Activity!
Completion!

The Piker Press is coming up on being a decade old. When the Press was conceived, Lillian was still a month or so from being born, and she's going to be ten in May. I'd love for former contributors to submit something for April issues, and instead of one Anniversary Issue, have an Anniversary Month. We'll see how that pans out.

You Filthy Pikers who didn't get an email yet, expect one. I won't do form letters with them who should be submitting regularly, because I love you, and know you will do what you can.

That wall candle sconce? It amplifies the light of the candle in olden times.

The Piker Press does that, too. Not just on your own computer screen do your words appear, but on screens all over the world.

Light it up, write it up -- we're not famous, as how many people go to the web for literature -- but we're out there, and have been for almost ten years.

Editorial

In the last week or so, I -- in my capacity as Managing Editor of the Piker Press -- received two very long excerpts of novels.

One submission was double-spaced lines, which I hate reading on the computer. If I'm editing a manuscript for pay, it's fine, it gives me space to write notes or make corrections. But just to read? Ugh. The other was some kind of locked format with a small and fussy-looking font. I had to go to 150% zoom just to read the thing.

Both submissions were over 20,000 words.

I read them both, and then foolishly after the fact Googled the authors. Both stories are already available in ebook formats for Kindle. They're both already published.

Now what did the authors expect from the Piker Press?

I asked both authors that very question, and I must have tapped my inner Swahili, because neither one had a coherent answer for me.

One thought that having me do a review of the book would be wonderful, which seemed odd to me because I told the author up front that although it was a good story idea, the writing was stilted. If I did a review of the book, I'd have to trash it, because I would NOT want to read that kind of dull writing, or put up with all the spelling and typographical errors and grammatical mistakes.

The other author was readable, but answered that the work wasn't available to the Press in its entirety -- just the excerpt, so as to drive sales of the book on Amazon. Hmm. A 20k excerpt would be ... ten weeks of story to get to the end and find ... no ending? And in the publishing of the excerpt, I would edit and correct all the spelling errors and grammar, whereupon an interested reader would buy the book and be annoyed at all the mistakes?

I don't know that I care to correct 20k words for free, if the story itself is too important to publish in the Press.

Live and learn. I've never had this kind of goofiness in a submission before -- maybe it's a new fad. At least the next time, I'll know what questions to ask ahead of time, and save myself some hours of irritating reading.

The pinkish bell? Just a photo I was playing with in Photoshop. Don't worry about it.

Waking and End of the Day

We've got an enormous window in our bedroom, six feet by five feet, and we normally do not have the blinds drawn down, as we love the view of the back garden and pool.

This morning, I woke to Bernie saying, "There's a hawk in the tree."

The hawk was agreeably inclined to stay there until my eyes were uncrossed. Bern got our binoculars and we observed the unmoving bird for a while. When I was sufficiently awake, I went out with my camera, collecting Lillian along the way, and we went to the end of our little yard to stare up at the red-shouldered hawk.

Now that's the way to start the day.

Most of the day I spent working on getting next Monday's Piker Press ready to turn over, trying to get ahead of the game so that Monday isn't a stress maelstrom for me.

Then was dinner, then was church. Both were wonderful. We went to Mass at St. Stanislaus in Modesto, where Fr. Ramon presided over a most reverential service. Then was home again, and I read the evening news, replied to some emails, and then, opened a file.

It was the second chapter of the semi-named Aser Murder Mystery. I wrote for a while; then handed the laptop to Bernie for approval.

He gave Chapter Two: Storming a Castle a thumbs up.  I pretty much love this story, and am really glad that the edit and rewrite are coming along.

Four Calling Birds

There are four novels on this laptop that need finishing: Out With the Trash, a Port Laughton novel that semi-parallels Dreamer and Time Traveler (as well as the tedious soap opera Transitions); the semi-titled Aser novel Murder Mystery; a story about a dead woman trying to save her still-living lover, the inaptly named After Life (there are so many books out there with that title it isn't even funny any more); and the current work-in-progress, Loon and Donkey.

I don't count the 100k+ train wreck Going Hungry, because what editing needs to take place in that one should only be done with the back side of a shovel.

Anyway, all four of these books are clamoring for attention. If I have a goal for this coming year, it will be to finish as many of them as I can.

Happy Christmas Season! Today our local grocery store marked down its seasonal display of doggie beds, big poofy, huggable doggy beds, 40" x 50" -- from $39.99 to $10, just as we were going through the checkout line. I've been admiring them since before Thanksgiving, finding the loft of the polyester fill to be seductively luxurious. $10?? I went back through the checkout line with a poofy giant pillow in my arms.

Howie will be most grateful, you think. You are wrong. Howie is an ingrate when it comes to dog furniture. He loves the couch, the loveseat, the chair (if the ottoman is with it), the bed. He rarely has used his blanket on the floor.

However, I am grateful, for this big, poofy dog pillow fits very nicely into my folding quad chair in the bedroom, making it instantly upholstered, and deliciously warm.

I'm in the chair with the dog pillow; Howie is on the bed, his head on my pillow.

Hmm.