21,110

That’s 3,550 new words today. I’m going to bed. LOL!

 

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I wanna know….

 

How a KC and the Sunshine Band song from 1980 can have anything to do with vampires in 1998?

My brain feels broken and my eyes wanna’ burst out of my head, so I’m taking a break. Two chapters down since this morning and the next one feels too much like work for me to enjoy going on at the moment. By my mental calculations, I will only have around 50k in words, if I’m lucky, when I’m done.

*insert pity party of one here, along with screwing around on the Net way too long*

No, no, I’ll finish it. I’m just tired and being pouty.

Word count: 19, 680

Back to work.

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17,560

Yes, I know, it *sounds* pitiful, but it’s not in this case. The new words are keepers and the chapter is gonna flow now when I have time. I had the wrong person there, so I got rid of him and put the RIGHT person there. This makes much more sense.  If I didn’t have to get up at the ass crack and go to work, then get off around 8 and take Bobby to get the alien cut off his back I’d keep going, but I *have* to go to sleep or I’ll be a zombie in the morning.

Which reminds me to make a note about a zombie…….

 

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17, 158

Nearly everything I wrote last night has been trashed, left the edits alone. I felt it coming so it didn’t hurt to hit delete. It was garbage.  I tried to sleep on it and make it work and all I did was end up staying up way too late and finally dreaming I was being shot at while I was riding a tricycle.

No, I don’t know wtf that was all about.

Needless to say, this problem with the chapter is throwing up a block. The following chapter is clear in my head, I just have to get past this one because it’s causing a block and I’m unable to just move to the next which is perfectly outlined. Damnit. Maybe I need to work on something else for a day to get my mind moving again like I did a few weeks ago. Maybe it’s just that it’s a weekday and I hate my job sometimes and my grandmother is making me too nuts to even think straight. I’m liking that last answer best. I also have insomnia every few months that used to last a month or better, but now I have it down to a couple weeks. I’m on like day three, so I’m exhausted. Joy. So! I’m now *forcing* myself to go to bed to try to lay there in silence and rework that scene with a different character’s introduction that actually makes more sense and see if I can make a chapter out of it.

Which reminds me. Do any of you have opinions on the length of chapters or when to break and NOT make a new chapter, perhaps just *enter enter* and make a new but related scene before you actually break chapter? I’ve seen them as few as a single page, or as great as sixty. As it is, I think I’m doing just fine, but I’m looking for any specific advice that you have been given or something you’ve experienced yourself that you can call a rule.

 

 

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17, 816

Pitiful, I know. I’m just not in the right frame of mind tonight and forcing the issue is just gonna make a mess of it all.

 

 

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Yes.

I ended up with a message today asking if the painting at the top of the blog was mine. Yes, it is. It’s a small section of a larger painting done from a photograph I took from the levee looking out at the Crescent City Connection bridge in Nola in July 2010. Thanks for asking. 🙂

 

Just stopping by for a quick note. There will PROBABLY be no writing tonight. I saw 2am last night and was an hour late for work today so I need sleep, and on top of all that I found my soundtrack and when I did… wow. One song hit me like the CCC fell on my head and pinned me to the bottom of the Mississippi.

I’d had no soundtrack at all, which I found odd, but chalked it up to … ya know… what-the-hell-ever cause having to do with this being the first time I’ve ever sat down and wanted to write 80k words. I always have a soundtrack for everything else and have talked about the lack of one for this book on the blog before. Well, we have a radio station called “Bob FM” that I’ve learned is not unique to Augusta. They play *anything*. I can hear Welcome to the Jungle one minute and Afternoon Delight the next. Love it because it’s never boring.

Anyway, this is how things happen to me……

Kiss From a Rose, Seal. Hmm… interesting.

Tainted Love, Soft Cell, not Manson. Ok. Yeah, I can see bits of that.

Second Chance, Shinedown. Now, just stop that shit because that wakes up Dragons. No. *ank*

Twilight Zone, Golden Earring.  *brow raised* That has major potential for one particular scene.

Those four songs played one after another before I had to get out of my van. Ditched Second Chance because of the Dragons. See, I can twist a song six ways from Sunday and make it work for me. Might be ONE line, might merely be the cadence of the beat. So, out of the damned blue I have three songs that would seem to have very little to do with the story unless you live in my twisted head. Maybe I was just in the MOOD and it clicked. Whatever the reason, I’m thrilled.

I get back in my office and pull up KfaR on youtube so it can play and I can think while I’m working. As Julia Roberts said, “Big mistake. BIG mistake. Huge.” Because over there on the right hand side was a song by Duran Duran…. and my brow popped, play was clicked.

Not gonna share the name because I don’t want that song back in my head again just yet. It’ll sneak back in when I go make notes tonight, unfortunately, but now that I have a soundtrack, I almost wish I had never touched youtube. That Duran Duran song… ya know how they run songs during movie credits and you kinda snap your fingers and say, “Yeah, I get why that song goes with the movie. Cool.” Well. Wow.  One of those steel girders landed on my head and I needed a xanax before lunch.

Oh, hush, I already told you I’m nuts. Like it’s a shock.

So here’s a question for my fellow writers! Do things like that happen to you? Do you see things, hear things, whatever, that so “wakes up” your characters that it actually has a physical or psychological affect on you? Makes them angry, you get angry. Makes them sad, you get sad.  You get me.

Yep! I just wanna know I’m not the only crazy bitch out there. LOL!

 

 

 

 

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17, 593

Game of Thrones is on. *POOF*

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*BOOYAH!*

Word count… an amazing 16, 018.

Today was a good day. Broke the heavy block on the end of one chapter, only to have another pop up in the middle of the next. That one wasn’t a block, really, it was more of a case of not establishing on paper the intricacies of Mason’s personality. I had skipped over one scene of his because Esteban was more awake. Mistake because he and Esteban ended up face to face and Mason wasn’t “speaking” to me. Had to go back and wake him up, which wasn’t as hard as I thought it would be. Then *laaaaaaaaaaaaaa*. Clouds parted, angels sang and the word count soared.  Had to stop and deal with mundane life, so there the two sit at a pivotal decision, decision actually made, really, and…… it’ll have to wait til morning because one, I’m tired, and two, do I really want to go where it’s leading?

Yes…. I mean…… <insert whisper>… sex. And not vanilla, lovey-dovey, over the moon, bodice ripping. I do have hetero characters, but most of mine are gay men or at the very least “hetero-flexible” as Cam would say. I find the personal distance of writing a gay male relationship more comfortable, I just do. It’s the separation between myself and them that gives a sort of freedom that I find impossible, and embarrassing, to achieve when writing a female character. And I’m a hag, shoot me. And most of my female characters, MOST OF THEM, are psychotic bitches that nobody will sleep with, anyway. LOL!

My dilemma isn’t over the sexual orientation of the characters, it’s over whether to include the deed at all.  I get so tired of cheap, cheesy sex-for-the-sake-of sex scenes in other people’s books and flip right through them because they bore me. This would or wouldn’t be that. I think wouldn’t, because it does establish the depth of the relationship and has nothing at all to do with gratuity. It’s fact. Mason and Esteban do the nasty, and often, for years. It’s NOT the entire basis of the story, by any means. Trust me, too much other shit is going on for there to be more than a total of TWO sex scenes in this whole book, tops, but it *IS* pertinent to the story in the end.

As I said, I’m having an issue with it only because of my issue with other people’s trash. I guess I’ll sleep on it. There are ways, after all, to make the point that it happened, but I think the act itself needs to be shown simply to show the *difference* between how Esteban is with Mason, versus how Esteban is with Lien. And, again, it’s only going to be a total of TWO actual down and dirty SCENES in the WHOLE THING. *sigh* I dunno. I just don’t know.

Anyone have an opinion so I can roll it around in my head before I start again in the early AM? Please? Any tid-bit of thought on the matter is appreciated.

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13, 128

And I’m sleepy. I changed a few things, so I have to go over some stuff to make sure it makes sense later on. Joy. Happy with the word count, though, and going to bed now to think about just how much of an asshole this one leopard really is capable of being.

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Sticker Shock!

Just….. wow.

I’ve been reading Laurell K. Hamilton’s Anita Blake series since book one.  I have book twenty in my hand right now, but I almost didn’t.  Books-A-Million closed down and Wally World has shit for books anymore so I ended up at Borders. BAM was my friend. I knew where every single book would be in that place and could zip right in and right out. Borders? No. Took me forever to even FIND the damned book because there was no big display for Hit List, like I’m used to at BAM, and every bookstore seems to toss Urban Fantasy and Paranormal Romance over with the bodice rippers. I have too much self respect to go anywhere near that shelf. Someone I know might see me and I’d never live it down. Oh, wait. *smack-da-forehead* What am I thinking? I live among heathens. I know exactly two people in this town who read more than the tv guide. (Lisa W. and Aubry)

I keep looking in Fiction for Hamilton. Not to be found, not even one of her older books. Still I refuse to go near the bodice ripper shelf. (Please tell me what logic would put Anita Blake on that shelf?) Ok. It’s a new release, so I figure it’s GOT to be on some table up front and I’ve just missed it. Yeah, I found it. A tiny stack of five books with two propped up on the little stands. Geez, but at least I found it.

I’m in line and the guy in front of me apparently thinks this is a pharmacy – you know how they ask you to stay behind the line for the privacy of the customer in front of you? – because he was twenty feet back from the register. Ok, whatever. I’m behind him, looking at some purple reading glasses – I love purple – and just killin’ time.  Decide to flip the book over to see how much I’m paying for this little bit of guilty pleasure and the internal gasp must have been an audible one because the guy in front of me slowly turned and looooooked at me before he walked up to the register… lookin’ at me like he might catch some disease. I think it was because of 1) the book I had 2( the tattoos, which I do not hide, ever, and the spaghetti strap shirt and low rise jeans show them off so well, and 3) because he was wearing pink plaid shorts and buying a book on how to improve his golf swing.

My turn finally, gal says, “How are you doing today?”

*snort* “I need oxygen.”

She’s not quite sure how to take that, so I flip the book over and show her the sticker price. $27.95.

“Oh! It’s 30% off, so it’s only $20.93 including tax.” All perky.

“Well, that’s *better*, but damn. Now I understand the appeal of E-books.”

I part with my money, grudgingly. Like I said, guilty pleasure. I really stopped *liking* her books about book six or seven, but I’m hooked because I like seeing what HELL she puts her characters through and I’m hoping that one day someone will murder Richard’s ass I’ll get to see it. But $20.93 for that HOPE? GRR. Getting off the subject…..

I bought Lisa Kessler’s .99 E-Book for her short story Across the Veil. A short story so the price was beyond fair and I wanted to see what she had going. I bought Buki’s – excuse me, Kelley Frank’s – E-Book  Flesh and Bone: Rise of the Necromancers at $5 on Amazon. It’s a compliation of different people’s short stories and a great read. So, ya’ know, I’m not opposed to a Kindle, I have the app for my laptop, I don’t actually own a Kindle. So, I HAVE bought E-Books, I just prefer holding a book in my hand. I check just now and find a Kim Harrison E-Book for $14.95. That’s a little high. Five bucks more and I could have the hardback.

What I GET now is the whole Kindle craze. THIRTY bucks for a hardback if you pay jacket price vs. ten-fifteen dollars, or more, LESS for an E-Book? It’s not the Age of Gadgets that’s making the people of the world buy digital, it’s the UNREAL price of a physical BOOK that’s gonna kill the industry.

Ah, well. At least there’s suckers like me. Until the next time I go and the register rings up more than $25.00. I think I’ll have to draw the line.

 

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