To work, or not to work?

That is the question. The rewrite of chapter twenty-one kicked my ass tonight, taking twice as long as I expected. That puts me a bit behind the schedule I'd set. I'll have a few hours to work tomorrow night, but it won't be enough to get to the end of the book...

I'm heading to Edmonton at noon on Friday, to see Rammstein in concert. Then I'm staying there to hang out with friends and see Into Eternity play Saturday night. I don't want to leave the rewrite for two days if I only have one or two chapters left.

So, do I go uber-nerd and bring my laptop with me up to Edmonton? Work on it on the drive there or back, at the hotel? Hahaha... crap.

JuSt a biT cHaoTic

I'm a digital person. I really am. I never carry cash, my iPhone may as well be embedded in my forearm, I spend all day at work on a computer and then all evening on my laptop.

I like to think that being digital keeps me more organized. But right now, not so much. I just closed off my writing files for the night. I had 7 text files of notes open, 2 Pages documents (the draft and the synopsis), the thesaurus, the calendar, 4 Firefox tabs to Wikipedia articles, and 2 Numbers files. Wow. I manage to keep track of everything I need, but still. A bit on the ridiculously-chaotic side.

Because of said chaos, I'm excited to try Scrivener, once I get my new mac. It looks like just the thing I need to help organize this digital mess. I wonder what other authors do? Kim Harrison has blogged about it, but I think I'll go on a little Tweet campaign and ask around. Might get some interesting answers.

Coundown to Macbook Air: 12 days!!

PS. Funny thing: I still do my taxes long-hand on paper. Sure, I telefile it once it's done. But there is still a bit of paper in my life... once a year :P

Is it possible to survive without sleep?

Not needing to sleep is one of the strange fae-factors of my main character, Deyl Parker. What I want to know, is it possible for me too?

Because that would be nice.

So many great books to read, so little time in the day. I got back into my usual routine today, as hoped, but that only leaves about an hour or two a day for reading. Simply not enough! Last week, I finished Divergent by Veronica Roth in 12 hours (yay for flying, airports and long drives!) which was f'n awesome. Loved the premise. Sort of The Giver meets The Last Airbender. 

I also finished Wings, Spells and Illusions by Aprilynne Pike, nearly in one sitting. It was at the point where I was falling asleep, eyesight blurry from reading off my iPhone, but simply refused to put it down. So good, I'm re-reading again at a less-manic pace.

So, the question that always haunts me afterwards: how long do I have to wait for the next book in those series?!?

Too Long.

Yeah, About That.

So I've been gone for a while. Things got crazy at work, and then I got into a series of books I couldn't put down, and then there was a death in the family that pulled me out of town for most of last week.

Anyway, I'm back again. I'm feeling really... haywire. Because of all that stuff, I feel like my life has fallen off the tracks. I really enjoy spontaneity—from time to time—but mostly I like routine. I'm big on control, and routine gives me a feeling of control over my life. Right now I'm focusing on getting some of that control back.

Tomorrow is Monday. I'm going to try and make it as routine of a Monday as I possibly can—considering that I have issues with Mondays to begin with...

In other news, the rewrite of I Had to Fall is going well, all things considered. I'm hoping to finish the minor revisions and rewrites by the end of this week, and spend the following week or two on the major revisions. That puts the last week of May for final tweaks and polish.


Then off to query I go...

Rock, Query & Read

Love the new Foo Fighters album, by the way. Check out Dear Rosemary, Arlandria, and These Days. New favourite songs.

Kristin over at Pub Rants says to query while the querying is hot. Damn. Can't query until the MS is perfect (or as perfect as I can make it...) which probably won't be until late May. Plus, my query letter is crap right now. Little snippets of information that need to be made sensible, then sexy. And by sexy, I mean attention-getting, honestly.

I think I'll start re-reading the Dead in the Family, since Dead Reckoning comes out next week. I'm not a huge Sookie fan, but I like a lot of things about Charlaine Harris' SVM world. Plus, it's Urban Fantasy—gotta know my genre through-and-through.

Lost a few hours of work today watching playoff hockey. Can't help it, I'm only human Canadian. Flyers stayed alive in an excellent overtime win and forced game seven!

The re-write went well today. Lots of humming and hawing though. In working to tighten up the writing and storyline I find myself questioning every scene, every action and decision made by Deyl and her companions. They did this-and-this. Why? What else could they have done instead? What if they did this-and-that, or that-and-this? And while it can be a bit overwhelming, it feels good. I'll trust my gut on this one, believing the resulting changes are for the best.

But it's late, and I'm tired. Hoping to finish chapter nine and get started on ten tomorrow...

Mmmm... Spring!

I love spring. Honestly. Days like today are worth all the long, cold winter this country can throw at me. It was a balmy 10°C out there today, no wind and lots of sun. In September I'd have said it was cold, the windows would be closed and heat running. After a suffering through five months of winter... it's warm, windows open, heat off!

But enough of that weather stuff. I finished my comments and notes for I Had to Fall today, making it all the way from chapter fourteen to the end of the book. I've got a house full of people tomorrow, so I might not get a chance to work on the actual re-write, but I've still got Sunday. I love long weekends, too.

Oh, I also bought new lawn furniture today. It's all setup under the sunshade and ready to be used... for outdoor writing on a new macbook air... only 30 days! 

Happy Earth Day, by the way :)