Heh

You Are 52% Abnormal

You are at high risk for being a psychopath. It is very likely that you have no soul. You are at medium risk for having a borderline personality. It is somewhat likely that you are a chaotic mess. You are at medium risk for having a narcissistic personality. It is somewhat likely that you are in love with your own reflection. You are at medium risk for having a social phobia. It is somewhat likely that you feel most comfortable in your mom's basement. You are at low risk for obsessive compulsive disorder. It is unlikely that you are addicted to hand sanitizer.

How Abnormal Are You?

So why haven't you all entered my contest? Hmm?

Crossed 40k on the vamps this morning, meaning I've done about 8k words in the last 4 days-so right about at my weekly goal. Hopefully I'll get at least another 1000 in tonight. It s'all mapped in my head, so this is the easy part.

Plus, boy is it fun to work with the iPod. If I'd known having music playing was so awesome when I write I'd have done it ages ago.

Am I Going Crazy?

I could have sworn yesterday I responded to somebody's post about plastic surgery. I could have sworn it was someone I'm fairly familiar with.

Today I cannot for the life of me remember who posted it, or find it anywhere.

Am I insane, and my insanity is now manifesting itself in imaginary blog posts by imaginary people? Did I show up at somebody's blog and start blathering about breast enlargement apropos of nothing?

Help me!

UPDATE! I found it! I really am stupid, because it was posted on Kate Lang's wonderful blog, The Confessional. This is doubly, triply embarrassing because Kate is a member of Indulge, the erotic romance writers group I just joined. I'll be posting more on that tomorrow. Meanwhile, I'm going to hide my head in shame.

And btw...

I know I have some fabby creative buddies here on Blogger, so do pop over to my website blog and enter my contest!

Beware the moors...

A couple of pics from yesterday's drive through foggy Dartmoor:

Finished

I finished the elves the other day. Yay me! It needs some editing (duh) but it is complete. Which makes me happy.

I planned to finish the vamps now. But to be honest, I don't know if it's even worth it. Vamps aren't really selling anymore-there are a few pubs still interested, and they're the ones I'm targeting, but I'm just not sure. Part of me thinks I should start one of my new projects and just focus on that.

But which one? I have a total stand-alone. I have a medieval that is very, very loosely connected to another medieval. Then I have a trilogy.

Part of me thinks I should work on the stand-alone first. It's a fun idea and I'm excited about it. But the trilogy has been simmering in my head for a couple of years now, and I think it's pretty good, but there are a few plot issues I'm still unsure about. Of course I'd resolve those first, but still.

Also going to work on a couple of subs for EC's 2007 Cavemen antho. And a few novellas-my subconscious is fleshing those out as we speak. Or, you know, as I type and you read.

Anyway. I'm going to keep working on the vamps for the moment, because the rest of the book really is so clear in my head. I'll see where I am in a week or so, I guess.

But hey, I finished that damn book. Thank the Gods.

There is life after death! Kevin Spacey says so!

We just finished watching "Beyond the Sea", the Bobby Darin biopic starring and directed by Kevin Spacey.

Hmmm. It wasn't awful, it just wasn't that good either.

To start with, they use as a framing device the idea that Darin is making a movie about his own life. This comes up in the beginning and never again, except that the kid playing Darin in the movie somehow becomes the actual young Darin and follows him around. Bleh. It was kind of a cross between every biopic ever and Cold Case.
Then, to that conceit is added another-The Watch. Spacey and the kid have a watch (get it? Because clocks are metaphors for hearts-tick tock! Get it? Do ya?), and every once in a while the kid shows up and ominously says something like, "My watch is slowing down."

The actual events of Darin's life are skimmed over; the film prefers to focus on his obsession with his Mom and his singing. So one minute he meets Sandra Dee and falls instantly in love (I guess), then they spend a few days together with her Mom, then one day alone, then they're married. Her Mom forces Sandra to choose between them. Sandra chooses Bobby. We guess her Mom really meant it because we never see her again. Then in the blink of an eye they have a kid, then he's like five, then Bobby Kennedy is killed and Darin goes off to live by himself in a trailer and write simpering, facile protest songs about how "the people" don't want war. Somewhere in there he and Sandra divorced, I guess, but that's not really made clear.

Then he figures out that if he sings those songs in a snazzy suit with an African-American choir behind him, people will swallow that feeble crap. Seriously, this ain't "Blowin in the Wind" we're talking about here, and even that isn't that great. ("Like A Rolling Stone", of course, is fantastic, but I digress.)

Then he's dead...or is he?!?! Because as he's being loaded into an ambulance, we're treated to the following:

Darin, singing by himself, lit by a spotlight, in a darkened club;
The kid, picking up the now-stopped watch, and throwing it;
The watch becoming the head of Darin's microphone.

Then, Darin starts singing "As Long As I'm Swinging", with the kid. A duet, between the Old and Young Darins. This turns into a full-blown dance routine, and they're joined by other men and boys-a NAMBLA chorus line, if you will. The point of this tedious exercise is underlined in the inevitable "updates" just before the credits (after, of course, the stage lights have gone off, so we REALLY understand what's happened). They tell us that "Robert Quessado (or whatever his real name was) died in 1973. Bobby Darin is still swinging!"

That's right, folks-the deep and important message here is that Bobby Darin lives on through his music! Can you believe it?! I've never heard that sentiment before!

That, or "Every time Bobby Darin sings, an angel gets its wings."

Whichever you prefer.

Almost time for the End!

I seriously am writing the last scene of the elves, and I cannot finish it. Every time I pull up the Word doc, one or the other of my children decides that's the time to hop in my lap or ask for lemonade or tell me they're thirsty or poo or whatever else they can come up with. I can sit and play online for half an hour without them noticing-the minute that ms comes up they neeed me.

Had another thought the other day. I've read a few things lately about blogs, and how to make your blog popular, and stuff like that.

They all seem to be in agreement that your blog needs a "theme". Like, it should be about something, other than just your stupid rantings and thoughts about life in general.

Would that be more interesting? Would it be better to hear my stupid thoughts about one particular subject and its many facets, or to hear my stupid thoughts about all sorts of different subjects, including what has been referred to as "boring stuff about kids"?

Or are my stupid thoughts just boring all of the time, anyway?

So if you're reading this, let me know. I'll update more often if I know people like checking in here.

And tomorrow is Jenna Howard's birthday-she's having a "bog party" and I've donated a copy of Torrid Teasers Volume 1 as a prize, along with a lot of oher writers who've donated their work. So stop in and say hi tomorrow to enter for one! It's here.

Whew

Chapet Two getting much better reviews. Makes me a happy girl.

And

Chapter Two of The Black Dragon is up at the crapometer. I'm hoping it, since it was more extensively edited, redeems my writing ability at least somewhat. :-)

Darn baby waking up.

Blah blah bleah

I'm not updating anywhere because I'm sick. I have a cold and a cough I can't shake- a dry cough that the Brits call "catarrh" which I like because it's such a nice old word.

Slept and watched "Millenium" all day. Kids driving me nuts. Almost done with elves. You know what's funny? I write romance, but I really think the straight on "love" moments are not my best thing. When the characters get all lovey-dovey at the end, and admit their feelings. I mean, I can do it, and it's fine, but I admit it's the hardest part for me to write. It's usually the part I agonize over nad edit the most, it just doesn't ever flow for me the way other parts do.

Hmm. Maybe because-and I hate to admit this because I fear it will turn people off my work-I'm really not that romantic a girl. Most of that stuff makes me a little queasy. It's good in small doses, you know, but that's it.

But then, I identify strongly with the woman the Supersuckers wrote the song "She's My Bitch" about. So there you go.

Incidentally

(And I'm not entirely sure I should be putting this up here, but I will anyway)...Chapter One of one of my books is up at the Crapometer. (crapomenter.blogspot.com) It's today's entry, the historical romance.

It's got two comments so far, which is encouraging, and if any of my buds who read here want to stop over there and check it out I'd be grateful for any comments.

Is it wierd that I feel like a grown-up when I accept criticism like a man (OK, WOman? :-)) I can't take it in my personal life at all. I'm one of those people who feels hurt and lonely all day if one of my friends says something remotely criticl to me (well, maybe not that bad. But I'm not good with criticism.) But comments about my work are totally different. In fact, if you read back into the C-O-M's archives, there's one or two people who were very hurt by harsh critiques. Not me. If what I wrote is crap, I'd rather somebody say so. "Gee, December, I didn't realize you were so untalented," or "Are you kidding me? Cuz this stinks," even.

No, deep down I would be surprised to get such comments, because I do have some confidence. But I do hope it's a good sign for me that I'm managing to separate my personal feelings from my professional ones-i.e. recognizing that my book is not my self; criticism of my words is not criticism of me. Which should bode well when the inevitable rejections come (I'm hoping there won't be too many of them, but I'm also no longer naive enough to think the first person who sees it is going to snap it right up. Hope, sure, but don't expect.)

Goodness, I am rambling, aren't I? I think I'm overtired.

And for some reason, in the last three days, my chin has broken out. WTF? I'm THIRTY-TWO YEARS OLD. And I look like The Walking Blemish. It's especially nice because I'm so pale.

Losing the lovely words

I'm getting ready to start querying on an old project of mine, that I still love but never did anything with. So I recently went through it with a fine-tooth comb, taking out every extraneous "that" and "she felt" and "had been" and all of those other verbal fillers that are so easy to put in but apparently scream "amateur". (In fact, since reading about this in several different places, I'm obsessed with these words and find myself counting them in books I read. Which proves it-there are very few "that"s in professionally edited books.)
"That" removes us from the action. "S/he felt" removes us from the action-would you rather read, "His hands slid down her back" or "she felt his hands slide down her back"? See what I mean? It's actually worse when it comes to things like "she felt herself falling" instead of "She fell".

Anyway. This isn't about minor edits. It's about the dread certainty growing in my very soul (not "the dread certainty that I feel growing in my very soul") that I'm going to lose like six pages of Chapter One. Because, although it's not backstory, it's backstory. It's exposition. Nothing's happening.

I can reorganize things a bit, I think, and fit in some of it in the middle of the action. But I'm afraid I'm not going to get it all in, thus losing not only My Genius Words (HA!) but words from the all-important word count/page count. My chapters run about 25 pages each (standard format). Without this, I'll have a Chap One that's considerably shorter-so short I may have to turn it into a prologue. I don't wanna turn it into a prologue! This book actually had a prologue in the beginning, and a damn fine one too, filled with cold-blooded murder and the terror of little children. I loved it. But I excised it, as ruthlessly as a dermatologist removing a cancerous mole, because it stepped on my big Hero's Motivation Revealed moment later in the book.

Plus, Prologues are pretty rare and I think they're a harder sell. (I adore epilogues, though, and get pissed when I don't get them in my romances. I want to see the H/h again, three years later, with a kid or two and still all happy.)

My point is, I think I'm going to ose some of my wonderful, precious words. Just so, you know, something actually happens in the first five pages. Sigh.

:-)