Realms of the Raven

Morgan Hawke has a great new entry on her blog about selling to and writing for multiple publishers titled “Publishers - The More the Merrier?”

As always, Morgan has terrific insight and some great analogies here. I love her posts and this was particularly appropriate for me as I think of who to try to sell RWH to.

You should read it!

I’m glad it’s Friday… SO glad.

We had some wind storms last night which knocked the power out which wouldn’t be a huge deal normally but the 4 year old freaks out (not quite sure why) and insists on climbing into bed with me. Since he squirms like crazy, that’s the end of my real sleep.

Then I dozed off and woke again at about 6 with Merlin sitting on my chest and staring into my face from about 2 inches away. I’m not sure whether he was trying to use Feline Mind Control to get treats or trying to wish DEATH on me for the vet trip. At least he came up on his own - the last two days he was feeling so icky he didn’t come up to get pets.

So C and I get up and clean the abcess drain site - yuck. Again I’m very grateful that he doesn’t tend to bite. Some of the other cats would have removed a limb or two from us by now. He just yowls. A few cat treats were administered to make the process a little more worthwhile.

By then the power had come back on and C went to check on the office computers and discovered our DSL modem was not working. Luckily the bonepile contained a 2nd DSL modem (they sent us two - no idea why) and he swapped power cords and, thank the goddess, there be internet again! I would have died of withdrawal over the weekend, I’m sure.

Then the pink stuff - that’s fairly easy with Merlin and a piece of turkey again soothed the disgruntled beast.

STILL no news from HR on my official job offer.

I wish I could sleep for a week but that wouldn’t get RWH done. I am horribly tempted to send out the first 3 and queries for it just to get that going but then life would really suck if someone actually asked for a full.

We’d noticed for the last few days that Merlin, our oldest cat and the “Dog in a Cat Suit” hadn’t been himself. He’d been shunning bedtime treats and wasn’t greeting us at the door.

Petting him, C noticed that he didn’t want his tail touched and would yell if you did so - thankfully he’s very mild-mannered and didn’t bite us.

Having had similar occurences in the past, we were fairly sure of what was going on - one of the other cats had bit him on the rear and he had an abcess. So today I got off work a little early and went home to pack him up and take him off to the evil V.E.T. for treatment.

I left plenty of time. As other cat owners know, cats have an amazing ability to sense when you are looking for them in order to do terrible things to them and hide. Sometimes it can take a while to discover the currently favored bolt hole.

Luckily I discovered where he was fairly easily and stuffed him the in the carrier. This was my first offense and failure as a good Cat Mom. He moaned, he whined, he meowed loudly all the way to the vet’s office. I kept telling him it was for his own good and he’d feel so much better afterwards but I don’t think he believed me.

After a bit of a wait, we saw the vet. I told her what was going on, explained he was antisocial and his ears were warm and his butt tender and I suspected a cat bite abcess. She felt him up, found the abcess and looked at me saying “Who is the vet here!” and laughing.

100% correct. The poor guy had a HUGE abcess on his leg and up one side of his butt. They shaved his butt, gave him a local and lanced it, leaving a pretty good sized opening for drainage. Apparently it was one of the larger abcesses they’d seen. I’m sure he appreciated that.

Now we have to keep the drain area open for a few days and give him antibiotics 2x a day - much easier for him than any of our other cats. I gave him one dose + some of C’s turkey lunchmeat (shhhh, don’t tell)!

He REALLY didn’t appreciate the hydrogen peroxide on the drain site. Lots of yelling but, again, no biting or clawing. He really is a very sweet cat.

I’ll have to get up at 5 am tomorrow to help C with Merlin’s drain site again - definitely a 2 person job, so I probably won’t get writing done (again) today. But after the weekend he should be okay to let it heal up.

I really feel bad for him. I just hope he’s feeling better tomorrow and starts being his normal self again.

And I have to remember to hide my shoes - no sense making revenge TOO easy.

So last night I was trying to work on my WIP. After finally getting the fixes integrated from the list of issues my patient critique partner sent me (thanks Jaynie), I was ready to begin writing new scenes.

At least I thought so.

I did get about 300 words written but I seemed to have to drag them out one by one. And I kept finding myself trying to go back and tweak the prior chapter.

I got to thinking about it and realized two things. One is that, at least for me, editing and polishing is a separate stage from the actual writing. While I do tend to polish a little and try to not sound lame as I’m writing new material, I definitely go into a separate mode when I start to edit and polish.

So, at least in part, it was because I was still in “edit” mode.

But I also realized that my muse, if you will, was trying to tell me something. My heroine was far too relaxed given the stage in the book and story. Instead of dropping the tension just a little from the prior very intense scene, I’d dropped it too far. So I went back and changed the tone of the last scene to make fit better.

Hopefully tonight I can go back to writing. I need to make an average of over 1K a day to make my deadline. I might have a little leeway because I think 65K is probably a bit long of an estimate but not by too much.

eeeeep!

Tempestuous by Morgan Hawke
eXtasy ebook - February 2006
Publisher Rating: Inferno

Rusty is working as a costume designer when an actor comes in to pick up several costumes ordered for a show he is starring in. This gorgeous actor sees the fox mask Rusty had made in his teen years locked in a case and announces that he has a mask just like it, only white.

Rusty has managed to blank out the incident that caused him to create the mask and left him with incredible strength as well as scars on his neck.

But now he will be forced to remember - and how will he deal with the reality that he was changed forever during that event and now must learn how to handle his life and the actor…

———————————————-
I’m a serious Morgan Hawke fan, as some of you may know. When her first anime based offering was released, I was somewhat dubious. I have never been a fan of anime but I decided to give it a try.

I haven’t regretted it since… ;)

This latest offering is a VERY hot yaoi (m/m) story based on the japanese mythology of kitsune (fox spirits). I was not at all surprised to find the erotic and sexual scenes enthralling but I am again surprised with how easily Morgan gets me to suspend disbelief and enter the world of a foreign (to me) mythology. The rich settings and sensuality inherent in Morgan’s work are truly amazing :)

If you want to give a m/m storyline a try, this would be a great book to explore it with. Don’t let the fact it’s Yaoi or anime put you off - it’s a great book!

Home from my weekend visit to my mother. It is her birthday today and we had a nice visit. C graceously stayed home with the pre-schooler and I got more sleep than I often get over the week.

We also got a chance to take the Max in and make the pilgrimmage to Powell’s. I could live in that bookstore, I swear! We spent several hours there and I completely skipped some areas when my feet started to hurt. I was also limited by just what I could carry on the Max so I couldn’t indulge my book collector self TOO much :)

Despite my best intentions, I got absolutely no writing done while I was there. I did get a few pieces critiqued for my crit group but nothing done on my WIP.

On the drive home (about 2.5 hours) I had some interestind new ideas for stories. In case anyone is interested, it’s not the best idea to try to scrawl down the ideas while driving. I ended up pulling off at a McDonald’s and getting a soda so I could write down the ideas without endangering myself or others.

But home now, just have to get moving again on my writing….

I was surfing blogs this morning and ended up going to the blog of author Monica Jackson. In the post for Feb 8, she talks a little about the issues black romance authors face in the industry, including the fact that black readership is simply smaller than non-black readership as a whole and what seems to be a segregation issue in anthologies and such.

After sitting and thinking about this for a while, then looking through my TBR pile, I wonder if I am even weirder than I thought.

I have books that contain all sorts of characters - white, black, asian, latino, american indian, middle eastern, etc. Heck, even aliens, werewolves and other paranormals. Honestly, it’s not something I use as a factor in whether or not I purchase a book.

To me it’s one of those non-issues. If the book is well written, shouldn’t it pull me into the head of whoever the character is? I hear from some of the authors that people won’t buy ‘x’ book because the author isn’t a white, middle-class woman. Or people won’t buy ‘y’ book because the couple is interracial.

I just don’t get it and I keep wondering why my reality seems so different from what I hear is the reality of the majority of the market. What’s the deal? LOL

I consider myself a pretty darned average person. I did grow up in science fiction fandom so I had a lot of very early exposure to a wide variety of people and interests. I grew up in a small southern California town where there was a large latino population. I work in the software industry which is highly diverse and in a hugely diverse company even in that industry. I’m a pagan, the community of which is also highly diverse. And I live in Seattle which is also very diverse. My boss at work (until I got this new job) is black, if that matters, my peer is Phillipino.

But what about other people? Do you have issues with romances written or staring people of ethnic origins different from your own? Does it play a role in whether you buy a book? If so, why? What about interracials?

Go Anon if you don’t want names, that’s okay. I’m honestly curious here.

Day job, that is! I was stressed because I really wanted it. After 4 hours of interviews yesterday, I was told verbally that I had it. Now I’m just waiting for HR to cough up the paperwork….

Yeehah!

Angela Knight has a great post on her blog today about Saving the Book from Hell. I love reading AK’s posts because they offer me (the newb) some great insights that I think it may take me years to discover on my own.

I know that I already get bad cases of “suckitis” about the WIP I have going. And it doesn’t seem to matter how many people tell me it’s good.

I’m glad to know it’s not just me!

In the process of working on my WIP, Raven’s White Hart, I’ve learned some interesting lessons about POV and what’s referred to as “head-hopping”. , I knew that it disturbed me as a reader when a character in a story I was reading would know something they couldn’t or would make an observation that seemed totally out of character, but until I learned more about it, I wasn’t fully aware of why specifically it bothered me or what it was called.

I’ve been trying to be careful in my WIP to make one re-reading pass focus on POV and staying true to it - I catch it more frequently than I would like to but I’m glad that I look for it. Hopefully I’ll start to do it less and less the more writing I do.

Today, I was reading Alison Kent’s Blog and she had a link to an interesting post on POV Slippage from Storytelling. I thought I’d link to it here for anyone else who is interested in an interesting short blurb on it.