First time jitters gone haywire

I survived RWA National.

Let me say that again ‘cuz it feels so good to say it…

I survived RWA National.

It was my first one and I had a lot to accomplish notwithstanding. I could have been slightly more successful, but I’m overall quite pleased with everything.

Now, I’m submitting and thanking and unpacking and trying to get my head back above water writingwise.

…And I’m absolutely loving it!!!!!

I can’t wait until next year!

My wardrobe was quite a hit and for that I’m thankful. I was memorable, professional and most of all fun. I was there to learn and grow my career.

And from this vantage point, I believe I succeeded! I suppose there’ll be plenty more on this topic in another month or two and I can’t wait to share!

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.

Lucky You

The scene was a Chinese restaurant. I, along with several others, were patrons.

During the two thirteen-or-so hour days I was there, I only worked about an hour and a half on the set. But I did see Drew Barrymore and Eric Bana.

Eric is hot. Yum… I was wishing I could stare at him rather than my menu. Oddly enough, I think the menus were real and some of the food sounded pretty tasty so I might have to drag Jason back to that restaurant and see.

Drew Barrymore was wearing heels and was about as tall as I am. I never really got near her except walking by in the herd of extras.

Mostly, this shoot was about sitting in holding under a nice shady tree while talking to fellow extras or reading books. I finished one book and got half way through another! That’s pretty rare for me in that short of a time period…

Anyhow, our little group had a very interesting mix of people–all of whom were open-minded, intelligent and entertaining in one way or another. The stories we told about our lives were lots of fun. I swear I’m going to use one guy’s boyfriend experience as backstory in a book somewhere. And then there was the Italian guy who grew up in Switzerland and is living in Beverly Hills… Lots of fun people on this shoot. So much so that I really didn’t care I was on set for less than two hours. Holding was tons more fun.

I might’ve gotten a split second of camera time…or perhaps my arm will be prominently seen above Drew Barrymore’s shoulder. Yeah…one of those deep background kind of shoots for me. I’ll see the movie eventually, I’m sure. Sometimes I wish I had more opportunities to be seen, but on the day of filming, I just do what I’m told, no matter how much I know no one’s going to see me.

UPDATE: I actually made it into the finished product!

This next one is more like what I expected.

I did set a personal record on that first day, though…

In a dark green short sleeved shirt and long mauve/purple skirt, I went to wardrobe. At first they said I looked fine–and I tried to grab my stuff and run away before they changed their mind!–but then they asked to see everything else I’d brought. They didn’t like any of it so the lady went onto the wardrobe trailer and came back with 4 skirts. I went to the changing room and picked out a beige skirt. It fit, so I left it on.

I went back to her and she didn’t like it. I kinda agreed, but really none of the skirts matched my shirt. She wanted to see me in one of the other skirts, so I went back to the tent and changed into a plum one.

That skirt didn’t go with the shirt, so she went on the trailer and looked for another shirt. She came back with four–none of which looked all that great with the skirt, but hey, I’m just an extra. It’s not my job to even care about what I’m wearing.

I changed into the shirt that I liked the best. It was purple and magenta and flowery striped.

But it didn’t go with the skirt…

So, fed up with making me change, the woman gave me a pair of jeans because there was no way the jeans weren’t going to work!

When all was said and done, I’d shattered my record of two changes and I have to admit that trying on clothes can be fun!

On the second day of shooting–the day I didn’t work at all–I got my clothes from wardrobe and headed toward the tent. There was a transpo guy talking to someone. I wasn’t really paying attention except that I was about to walk through the middle of their conversation. I excused myself as I passed through, then realized that I recongnized the voice of the woman the transpo guy was talking to. Yep…Drew Barrymore. The shoot’s record was about ten feet for how close I got to any of the principle actors. Jen always likes to know how close I got and well…there you have it. Drew seemed pretty nice, too.

And while us extras were waiting to go through the lunch line, she picked her food out of the buffet just like the rest of us. I think she ate in her trailer, though. I don’t blame her. The lunch room was kinda hot and stuffy.

No time to celebrate

No time to really write this out, but I’m doing it anyway, gol’darn it.

I finished the first draft of CR today.

But rather than celebrate, I get to work on Ashleigh Raine stuff as well as copywriting for Centric. Not that I’m complaining, but I sure hope I end up with an ounce of time to take myself back to Peet’s for a hot cocoa at least.

There’s nothing like the joy of being busy… But finishing a book is at least cause to drink some good cocoa… What’s the point of being busy if there’s no time to stop and celebrate every time a task is complete?

By the way. I started the first draft on March 7. That means draft one took me 14 weeks and 4 days… Or 3 months and 10 days.

Wow. That’s my record so far. BR took 4 months and 10 days and it was 10K shorter than CR. 7 months and 14 days for OR–but I took a month off while Jen and I were re-editing LT.

No wonder CR seemed to fly by…It did! I can’t wait to go back through and polish it, but I’ll be good and take a month off so I can have fresh eyes on it when I do open it back up.

I just noticed that all my books’ second word in their titles start with R. All 3 books are totally unrelated and they’re all in different genres, too. Strange.

Brian Littrell

So, Jason and I went out to dinner with a friend of ours who’s visiting LA for a few days. Our friend suggested a restaurant on the Sunset Strip because he was staying near there and at dinner time, it’s easier for us to drive south to West Hollywood than for him to drive north up to where we are.

We get to the place and it was closed for renovation, but we were at Sunset Plaza and there’s whole bunch of restaurants to choose from. About four doors down was Cravings Cafe and…well I was craving food, so we got ourselves a table on the sidewalk. No big deal, we’re having fun catching up and talking about stuff that mostly went over my head, so I did a lot of smiling and nodding, pretending I had a clue while camoflaging my people-watching.

Then, as I look up from my snooty pizza, I think I see someone I might recognize. But who is this guy? He’s with a blonde princess who must be his wife, her sister (aside from matching, potentially-fake noses, they looked related) and his 2-or-so-year-old son (complete with Hotwheel car). My brain dismisses everyone but the guy and I’m trying not to stare, but the man’s good looking, so it’s really hard not to. He and his clan sit at the next table and it finally dawns on me.

I was eating dinner one table away from Brian Littrell of the Backstreet Boys.

Made sense…being there on the Sunset Strip and all. Most of the people in the place were dripping with designer clothes. But what was really strange is that the dinner wasn’t expensive. I mean, my pizza was $11.95 and I’m in the company of people who drove up in brand new Lamborghinis (we saw a total of three–two parked at the curb while we were eating). The addition of a celebrity sighting to the already surreal evening just made it into an adventure. ‘Course by this point, I was really wishing I’d changed out of my scruffy jeans and t-shirt into something at least a little more hip, but oh well.

Jason was, of course, oblivious…even when a gaggle of teeny-boppers interrupted Brian for photos and autographs. I dunno. I don’t think Jason would even recognize Julia Roberts if she were walking down the street, so whatever. Later, when Jason and I drove past in our Viper, I felt a little less out of place. And when I told him about Brian and how many designer labels I’d recognized, Jason shrugged, also wondering why the food was so damn good and not hardly expensive. If you’re ever in the area, I highly recommend Cravings Cafe. The food’s great and so is the people-watching!

Catching up…kinda

I’m back from the short, whirlwind wonderful time I had a BEA. I hung out mostly in the Ellora’s Cave booth, but did my fair share of walking the aisles. I was mostly looking to see what other publishers I can/should write for.

Lots!

I’m really excited about it all, too.

And while I was there, I finally came up with a real title for F. From here on out, F is hereby known as CR. Yaaaaaay!

Gearing up for RWA National has proven interesting so far. I’m trying to beef up my odd clothing wardrobe a little because people have seen most of the stuff I have…and I just can’t wear the same old weird stuff over and over, can I? Hell no. Not me. I gotta keep it all new weird, all the time. And it’s not like I don’t already have an enormous inventory of projects that need to be finished…or started.

So, today, I hacked the legs off a funky pair of jeans and a boring pair of jeans. The funky ones didn’t fit in the waist, the boring ones were too short. BUT–that means together, they’re perfect. I just have to add a ribbon to hide the seams and voila! Done.

Now I just have to do the rest of the skirts and pants and shirts and la-ti-da. My sewing goes in cycles. I go like gangbusters for awhile, then back far, far away. Something about being trapped in a room full of fabric and crafty stuff makes me go insane after awhile.

I’m almost done with my next book. ‘Course I’ll probably be saying that for the next month, but it’s still nice to say it now anyway. It sounds good…almost done. It’s got a nice ring to it.

I guess I should go work on finishing something…

Store not available