What a week!

Comic Con was a blast. I dragged my esteemed writer husband into the front row of a panel of sci-fi authors, including Vernor Vinge and Orson Scott Card. Afterward, we both approached Kevin J. Anderson to say hello and he recognized us from last year’s L. Ron Hubbard Writers of the Future workshops. [Jason won 1st place for 1st quarter of 2003] We were shocked and delighted.

The panel was fun and informative, too. My kind of crowd.

Ashleigh Raine’s Talisman Bay series is changing by the minute. Jen and I are still sort of in a daze, but we’ll get over it. Besides, we’re nose-to-the-grindstone on a different project right now anyway.

And then there’s me and my writing…

All I can say is, “Wow!”

Polishing CR is going very well. For a while there, it was hell, but I took a lot of notes, paid attention to critique and now I can’t wait until I do another read or two. I haven’t felt this good about much in a very long time.

RWA National is next week and I’m mentally psyching myself up for it. I’ve never been there before. I don’t know exactly what to expect–or what not to expect!

For now, I must get back to my wonderful work… I love being a writer! The thrill never fades!

7th Heaven

I was a suspect, a perpetrator and I absolutely loved it. I’d done a similar role on The Division at least a year ago and it was such a fun departure from my usual–extra-work-wise and personality-wise.

I misjudged traffic for getting all the way down to Culver City, so I ended up about an hour or so early. I was thankful I’d remembered my book…I read many chapters throughout the day.

Wardrobe had me change my shirt 4 times. I’d brought three shirts. The last change happened when she was doing her continuity shot of us suspects and discovered we were all in dark solid colors. The shirt I wore when I arrived was dark grey tie-dye, so she decided I should change back into it. She apologized and all, but I just thought the whole thing was funny. It seems that lately, I’ve spent more time changing than actually on screen. Weird.

Anyhow, this crew was amazingly nice and since they’ve been working together forever, shooting was at lightning speed. It was great to learn that they don’t do overtime. It’s a family show, so they stop on time so they can all go home to their families. –Way to practice what you preach, although overtime is where us extras make our money. Oh well. It’s nice not to have to be somewhere for 12 or more hours.

When us extras were herded near the set, I got picked to work in the first group. I was assigned to a police officer. It was her job to grab my arm and sorta push me past the principle actor’s desk. As we got toward the end of our journey, I turned around and sort of gave her a dirty look, which she replied with a good cop sneer. It was great. We did it the same every time. I had a lot of fun and kept reading my book in between shots. [BTW-I was reading Dime-Store Magic by Kelley Armstrong]

I sat out a few shots and then had one of those annoying background actor moments…

The AD told me to sit on a bench, count to 9 from Action and then get up, cross to the phone, pretend to make a call for another 9 or so and then go back and sit down.

All that sounded great to me. I listened for Action. I counted to 9. Then, when I lifted my ass from the bench, it made the nastiest creak I’ve heard in a long time. There was nothing I could do about it. I crossed to the phone. I did my business…and then realized that I’d have to sit down on the creaky bench again and was terrified. Thankfully, I made my call last long enough that I didn’t quite get my ass down onto the bench when I heard, “Cut!”

Whew!

But then I had to do it again and again and I couldn’t keep the bench from creaking. I tried leaning forward, going slower, going faster, but nothing worked. At that point, I figured that if the sound man heard me, I’d be told not to bother with the bench again.

Sure enough. The AD told me not to bother with sitting on the next take. I breathed a huge sigh of relief. I hate being in a position where I might screw up a take. I’ve never done it solo. I’ve screwed up takes as a group, but never by myself…or at least not that I was sure it was me that ruined the whole darn thing.

All in all, I hope I get called back to work on that show. It was great. I wish more were like this one.

I hope I survive!

There is no real crisis. I’m feeling mildly stressed at the moment. It’ll pass…

Ah yes.

Comic-Con this weekend, RWA National next weekend. I’m cramming an awful lot in these days. 2005 is insane and not looking like it’ll let up any time soon.

Of course, I feel like my life ends right after RWA National. It’s like the rest of the year is greyed out just so I can survive until the end of the month.

I finished the ugly shirt.

It’s still ugly and there’s officially nothing I can do about it anymore. I haven’t trashed it, but I bet it’ll sit in my collection for years before it gets worn… It’s really that bad. I’m not ashamed of it, but I don’t recall the last time I was unable to salvage a project before finishing it. I have several unfinished ones where I stopped right when things got ugly, but beyond those, I’ve never finished something that remained ugly through the entire process.

Oh well. If I build another shirt before RWA, I build another shirt. Otherwise, I just won’t wear those pants.

The ugly–but in a fun way–pants were why I was making the ugly shirt. But the shirt is ugly in the un-fun sense of the word.

And now it’s time to shove along. I’ve got packing to do, tea to drink, a scene to write.

a moment’s rest

But only a moment… I’ve still got plenty of sewing to do on what I’ve nicknamed ‘the ugly shirt’. It gets better looking the more I work on it, but that’s not saying much. I’m hoping that as I continue to manipulate its ugliness, it’ll get prettier somehow. It’s worked so far…

I had to re-chapterize CR today. Too many chapters were on the longer side of tolerable so I hacked them up. I haven’t gone through the whole manuscript yet or I’d give an official count of how many chapters there were versus how many there are now.

All I can really say is that the editing process is coming along nicely. I’m at a part that needs heavy editing which will graduate to heavy rewriting, but I’m only at the ramp up process right now. I’m still at the stage where I’m thinking about it while sewing buttons onto the ugly shirt.

Tomorrow, the fireworks will begin.

Tomorrow, I’ll know for sure what the heck this chapter and the three or four following it really need.

Tomorrow, I’ll start mercilessly hacking, slashing and tweaking until my eyeballs pop out of my head.

Why tomorrow? Because if I do it now, I’ll be interrupted by dinner and yoga class…and interruptions are bad…very, very bad.

blink of an eye

It’s been a few weeks since last I wrote and all my plans got derailed…

By me.

I’m going on gut here, but I think I’m doing the right thing because it feels so gol darn good…

I’ve shelved draft edits of OR in favor of working on CR.

Believe me, that was a very tough decision. I’d thought OR would be a fast read/edit, but when I started re-working, it became painfully clear that it was a long way from being anything that resembled polished.

That was when I realized that that book–hell, that whole series–is really my passion. It’s got everything I ever looked for in a book when I was a teenager just starting to put pen to paper.

Therefore, it deserves more from me now that I have the time and wherewithal to do it. I think I need to wallow in it. Yeah. Because back in the day, that’s what I would have done.

So, in the mean time, I’m plowing through CR and absolutely loving it to pieces. Just like when I edited BR.

Every time I read a book, there’s always something I would’ve done differently and now that I get to write the book, it’s nice to see that whenever there’s something I’d’ve done differently, I can hack it out and do it the way I’d do it. Gee, that reads weird…

Anyhow, I think it’s funny when I read my own stuff and wonder why the hell I wrote it the way I wrote it instead of the way I should have written it. What planet was I on? Is the chocolate smoother, richer, sweeter there? Hello? Anybody home?

But change is good in any case. It’s an experience I can learn from.