All’s well that ends…well…

Since my last post, I’ve pulled apart my car and found that it wasn’t a cracked crankshaft, it was a loose flexplate.

A little bit of loc-tite and a whole lot of wrenching later, I got the car back together and started her up. Perfect.

Except that when I dinked with the tranny pan to get it to stop leaking, it was the end of a very long day and I goofed when I put the filter on and now I gotta take off the pan again and redo what I’d goofed.

The good news is that’ll take about a half hour tops. The bad news is I can’t seem to find 30 minutes of non-sleep time. Oh well. Perhaps by the end of the week.

I didn’t take as many pics as I’d hoped. I also haven’t looked at what I took. If there’s any worth posting, I’ll of course post them!

It is, after all, Valentine’s Day today, so I’m just gonna toss out a little something related to romance– Ashleigh Raine is going to have some news in a few months. Some really, really good news. I can’t talk about it yet, but oh how I want to.

When I can talk about it, I soooooooo will!!!

Duh…

I did have something newsworthy to report and I have no idea how I neglected it!

Okay, other than that I hadn’t been sure which day Jason had a book signing with Tim Powers until the day was upon us…which had made it very difficult to mark my calendar and mention it here ahead of time. And with the constant flow of life’s activities lately there hasn’t been much time to dwell on events past.

Over the weekend, Jason Stoddard got to share a signing table with Tim Powers. And good golly, I had a wonderful time with Tim and his wife, Serena. They’re a hoot!

I’m still kicking myself for bringing my camera, but forgetting to snap pics. Duh. Duh. Duh. Duh. Duuuuuuuuuh.

Next time, of course.

The store, Bookman in Orange, CA, was phenomenal! I scored some Jude Devereaux titles I’d been needing to replace since a rather unfortunate spring cleaning accident a few years ago in which a bag of ‘keepers’ got tossed because it was next to a bag of ‘giveaways’. In most cases, I even managed to match the old covers, too.

See, it’s Jude Devereux’s fault for hooking me on romance. I was in either 8th or 9th grade–perhaps the summer between the two–when my best friend (the other half of Ashleigh Raine) loaned me KNIGHT IN SHINING ARMOR–which actually belonged to one of her friends and she was worried she’d get in trouble for loaning it to me without asking first. Well, I got it on a weekend and gave it back the following weekend. From then on, I was hooked. Time travel. Romance. I was soooooooooooooooo into that!

A few years later, I discovered Virginia Henley–who at RT 2005 judged my costume as one of the winners! Needless to say, I was in absolute awe.

Oops! I digressed… Sorry, I got a little excited. Books take a person to more places than just the fictional worlds therein.

Anyhow, the signing was fantastic–got to meet a lot of people and then talk amongst ourselves over pizza afterward. That was tons of fun.

…And I’ve already learned a thing or two from the big fat sewing book from 1972 that Jason sprung for. I swear times have changed so much that I get more use out of old sewing books than new ones!

Learning about myself

Here I go again having recently had something happen but yet I was lame about blogging. I honestly have no idea why I do that. It’s not like stuff’s a big secret or I’m afraid or whatever. I mean, I’ll shamelessly wear my geese with stripes shirt in public. Hell, ya’ll should see what I wore over the weekend at the two book signings in Northern California.

[Wow! I just accidentally segued into what I’d set out to blog! COOL!]

There’ll be pictures up soon at ashleighraine.com but I’m not quite ready to post them yet. They need to be resized and stuff. Plus, I’m digging out from the pile of other, older updates that still need to be done.

Anyway, over this last weekend, Jennifer and I (and our great friend Donna) went up to Northern California for book signings in Monterey and Santa Clara. Special thanks to Borders Express because they’re awesome for having such a huge group of authors signing those two days!

Jen and I used those two signings as an excuse to stay at my parents’ house and visit with as many of our old friends as were around.

I could go on and on and on and on about how much fun we had at the signings and getting caught up with friends and all that excitement, but that’s not what I’d intended this blog entry to be about.

I wanna write about what I learned. I was rather surprised, too.

Y’know how you’ve got friends that you don’t see all the time, but whenever you talk to them it’s like you’d never lost touch…aside from all the ‘so whatcha been up to?’ catching up stuff? Then there’s the friends that are always around, but they tend to call you before you call them… And then there’s the friends that you always call first–whether it’s because you need their help or they’re just the person you need to talk to right then.

Well, all of the friends Jen and I were with fall into all of those categories. Our friendship range was diverse and we were all wishing the whole crowd was there, but happy with the crowd who made it.

Anyhow, at the end of the first night, my old friend Carrie was making a run up to the corner store for a few things and in passing, I’d thanked her for letting me tag along because I needed to “decompress”. She questioned what I meant and I replied that there are certain expectations of me when I’m out with Jen, etc. and that when I’m out with Carrie, those expectations aren’t the same.

At the time, I didn’t really ponder that thought, but later on, I totally did…And started to realize just how many personalities I have in certain situations–which got me realizing that it’s not conscious…and that they go along with the company I keep.

From there, I realized that I hang out with the people I hang out with–when I hang out with them–because of what they bring out in me. Seriously, if I want girltalk, I call Jen. If I want tomboy, crawling around at the junkyard, I call Eddie, the best man at Jason and my wedding. Obviously, I choose to hang out with my husband Jason the most, but still. I found the whole thing rather fascinating. Just in those three examples, there were three almost completely different ‘me’s. They all intersect, but are not limited to the same list of traits–some are louder than others.

Everyone probably does the same stuff without realizing it, but then I started wondering if there were facets of me I should put forth more often; which ones do I like more? Would it work to mix those facets…say, drag Jen to a junkyard or girltalk with Eddie? Probably not. And that’s what makes them unique and my friendships with them so wonderful. I dunno. To me, discovering this kind of stuff about myself is fascinating.

Of course, from now on, I’m gonna be analyzing the characters in my writing to see if they’re true to life in how they operate with other characters in their stories…see how they mesh and dive a helluva lot further into what makes them who they are and why. I geek on characters already, but this quantification will only make me geek harder and I think that’s awesome.

Dungeon Majesty!

At the time, I hadn’t realized what I’d gotten myself into–other than a lot of fun–but as half of Ashleigh Raine, I was interviewed for a show called Dungeon Majesty.

After receiving an email about a screening they’re doing on March 23rd in Hollywood, I checked out their site again…it had been awhile since last I’d visited. In fact, it’d been so long that I didn’t remember what it looked like last time I was there.

Anyhow, on this trip, I discovered two of their episodes and zowie-wowie, I can’t wait to see the other ones. They’ve got something like 8 done. Only 2 are up on their site, though.

All I gotta do now is start planning my outfit for the screening next month. You see, when they interviewed me, I was wearing the infamous swirl dress and I need to make sure I’m wearing something as…uh…stellar.

Or at least barbaric or magical!