Updates

Miss M

Last Sunday I finished her tent curtains. She loves them. She loves taking them down and hanging them on ANYTHING too. Oh, well. She’s having fun. Still have a massive pile of toys in the living room but I don’t have the energy. Finally got the last book shelf in, just need to put it together. Not sure when, which leads me to…










Health
Do you know I have allergies? Even my allergist says that I’m a freak, in the nicest possible way. I have your common garden variety allergies to pollen, ragweed, anything that grows, etc. However, the way MY body reacts is where the freakishness comes in. You know that Epi pen shot that people who are allergic to bee stings use? Well, it has a disclaimer, once you use it call 911. Not me, it’s just everyday average medicine. I use is sparingly, because I don’t really like jamming my thigh with it. I guess I use it about once or twice a year. When I was 7 I was taught how to use a syringe so I could inject myself in the arm if need be. I wish I could do that still, but with the drug problems today I’m sure I would get all kinds of weird looks if I try to pick up ephedrine and syringes. A small stab in the arm is way better than a jam to the thigh though, less bruising too.

Anyways, my allergies have been in high form. The pollen count is off the charts right now with high winds at least every other day. Miss M and I are both going to the allergist tomorrow.

Writing

I met my goal!!! I started writing L&D1 a whole day before my deadline. I’m very excited. So far I have about 1600 words, which doesn’t sound like much and it really isn’t. BUT with my head all fuzzy from allergies I’m amazed I actually crawled out of bed the last two days. I’ve finished the first scene. It’s still really rough and I know I will end up rewriting at least two more times, but that is for later. Now is the time for me to push through with this first draft and get the whole story written. The Zokutou Word Meter link is gone, so as soon as I can find a better one I will start posting my progress.

More Progress

Room Update – Almost done! Yeah! Ordered some bookcases for organization and there was a mixup on one of them. It should be in this week and hopefully this weekend I will get all the toys back in. I came up with a clever way (ingenious was the word I originally picked but I want to appear modest)to hang Miss M’s tent flaps. Extra long shower curtain rod. Found some really cute hooks and then all I have to do is put some grommets in, assuming that would be easier to figure out than my button hole maker on my sewing machine. I’m hoping to have the tent curtains done by this weekend too. We’ll see.



Writing – I finished the plotting class. I have to be honest, I really already had L&D1 plotted out to the point where I didn’t need the class. But it did help me adjust my thinking for future works. All in all, it was a worthwhile class to take and I recommend it to anyone doubting their plotting abilities.


So now that I’ve finished the class I’m fine tuning my outline for L&D1. I’m giving myself two weeks for last minute detail stuff and I’m going to try and start writing in earnest by Easter.

Room Progress

The room is coming along great. Finished all the painting. YEAH!!! Man, I’m tired of paint. There are a few spots on the ceiling I need to cover up but I have to be honest, I’m not all that ambitious to get it fixed. Had the carpets cleaned Wednesday, and the bed delivered Thursday. Miss M is in heaven. I can’t get her off the bed.


We still have the HUGE pile of toys in the living room but hopefully we can get through half of those this weekend. I ordered some bookcases to help organize her toys, but I waited too late and they won’t be in until next week. So by next weekend I hope to have it finished. Maybe that will be my birthday present to hubby, “Look honey, I cleaned the living room”.

My mother in law is here this week and I haven’t been able to get much accomplished on L&D1. I’m going to try and work on my plotting class tonight but we’ll see. I have like 2,000 emails in my boxes from all the different groups I’m in and classes I’ve taken over the past few months. A couple of classes I took I just filed away to read later. I’d like to get through at least two of those by the middle of next month. Again, we’ll see.

Anyone reading anything interesting? I picked up the new Lora Leigh but I’m not letting myself read it until I get some of this stuff done. A reward for my hard work. I know someone else that does that, do any of you?

Romance Personality

Writing update – I’ve worked through more of my outline. I’m about two thirds to a little more through it and very happy. Most of the ending is already worked out with a couple of small questions that will have to wait until the end.

Right now, the only thing that really needs tweaking is the romantic element. I realized this week that most of the romances that I’ve read lately have been where the hero and heroine are sequestered in some way. You know, where they are on the run, undercover together, Personal Protection, (wink, wink to Leah) etc. In my story, they are dating. And boy, do I NOT know anything about that. I’ve been with DH for nearly 18 years now and even before then I was an anomaly when it came to the whole dating scene. Let’s just say that my attitude was way more like a guy’s. If I liked someone, I asked them out. I didn’t wait, I didn’t ask to be pursued, I saw what I wanted and went after it. My single friends don’t even bother anymore asking me for advice on men. I’m way too aggressive and direct for them. I don’t get the games. Don’t believe me? When DH and I went out for the first time, he refused to take me. I badgered him for 20 minutes until he relented and agreed to take me out. The only reason he put up such a fight was because I was fresh out of high school and he was 8 years older than me. Not such a big deal now, but back then it was. As it would be for Miss M to show up with a boyfriend 8 years older than her! Hypocritical, yeah probably, but I don’t care!

Miss M’s room – It’s all primed and ready for pink paint. We discussed, compared, argued and drew pictures to come up with ‘our plan’. Miss M is so like me it’s a bit frightening. We argue constantly, it’s all about control. Anyway, we decided to paint the walls pink and then we picked out purple paint to sponge on top of that. So she’ll get a multi colored effect. The colors are rich but not too dark or too pastel so it was a good compromise for us both. I sure as hell hope it looks as good as we imagined. Dad will be mad at both of us if we hate it so much we start over. I’m not sure why though, he hasn’t done any painting. I promised Miss M that she could help paint the walls pink so that will be this afternoon or tomorrow. We’ll see how it goes…

Creativity

While I’m still working away to finish out the plotting on L&D 1 I’ve come up with another project, Miss M’s room. When we moved into the house we are in now she had just turned 4 and still very wrapped up in the Disney stuff. So we painted a huge Ariel mural on the wall for her.



She was very nervous about the whole giving up her old house and this was something for her to be excited about, plus her new room was about half the size as her old one. Now don’t get upset, when she is in the neighborhood of 10-12 she’ll move into one of the two rooms upstairs and you can’t believe how big they are. Some apartments I’ve lived in were smaller.

She’s 6 ½ now and for about a year she has grown tired of the Ariel theme. Still loves the character, but doesn’t really want to live with her anymore. Daddy is not too pleased, but then they argue weekly about the fact that she has to quit growing. Her response comes very dry, “But Daddy, that’s my job. I’m supposed to get bigger.” There is almost the undertone of, “Deal with it Dad” included.

So this week I’ve been scouring the internet for ideas on bigger girl, not tween, rooms. Last night we bought a bunk/ loft bed.


The bed is up top and the bottom is open. You could put another bed there, but we aren’t. We are going to use the space for the insane amount of toys this one child has. Hopefully we’ll be able to sort through and donate some of them. This should double the play area space. We bought some fabric last night and I’m going to make tent flaps to hang down so she’ll have her own little cave under the bed.

So what does all this prove? Other than I’m crazy to take a project like this one, oh did I mention I gave myself only two weeks to get the toys sorted, walls primed and painted before the bed arrives? And on top of all the other crazy things I have to do every night, plus my real job. Plus, while we're at it, I'll have to redo the bathroom downstairs too. It's all in the Ariel theme as well. Maybe it’s one of those things that you put in front of yourself so you never finish another project. I admit I’m very bad about doing that. But I don’t think so this time. See this morning in the shower I was thinking about L&D1 and decided that part of my problem was in Kathleen’s love interest. While he was cute, he just wasn’t doing it for me. Came up with another actor and WHAM, got a whole lot more to work with and I can see it playing so much better now. Maybe I just needed another outlet for my creativity to get the rest of the wheels going.

Have any of you had similar experience when stuck on a plot?

Pushing Through

Well, this week has been a mix of interesting and boring. Miss M is involved in quite a few afterschool activities and over half of them were not done this week. From one instructor being sick, to Daddy coming home early and Miss M not wanting to go to her lesson and the other just not meeting that day for whatever reason. It was nice and the weather here has been beautiful. But it felt odd not having to run around at breakneck speed.

Real job has had some interesting characters this week. My attorney swears I should write a book about some of our weird customers. I don’t think anyone would believe me though. :)

On the writing front – I’m starting to get antsy for the actual writing. I’m working my way through the holes and finding questions I need answered to make everything believable. I think I’ve worked through the first half of the scenes and have a good handle on them. Now I need to get the answers and then plow through the other half. That is where the majority of the holes were though. It may take me a little longer. I’ll see how much I can get done by next week.

How is your writing going? I’m so jealous of Leah right now. She is going away for a WHOLE weekend to write with some writer friends of hers. If you had a completely free weekend where would you go and what would you do? Me – probably travel abroad and call it research.

Have a great weekend!

Laying it all Out

I’m a couple of days late on my target for a new post. I’m TRYING to do one every week. So far in February I have, let’s see if I can keep it up!

L&D Update - After much haggling in my head I still hadn’t been able to work out the plot points and holes I knew I had. So at work I laid everything out on the large table we use for the next day’s work schedule. I went over all of it, amazed at how much that clarified my thinking. I found the holes and made notes on what to fill them with and re arranged about half a dozen scenes to make it flow better.

I am SO much happier with it now. I need to upload my changes on the computer, reprint and look at it again, trying to add more notes on what I want to happen in the scene, setting, POV, etc.

On my rant last week - Still mad, BUT we have a meeting in the morning with said alphabet company and hopefully we can find a solution we are all happy with. I’ll let you know next week how it works out. I’ve been in a mad rush the last two days printing to show them the facts to support our claims. I believe at least 2 trees may have supported my cause in the paper that I used.

Do you use Windows programs or Macs? I’m strictly a Windows girl, work doesn’t lend itself to the Mac world, or at least it didn’t ten years ago. Now I have so much invested in custom programming and computers, servers and the like I couldn’t switch over now if I really wanted to. But Leah was showing me a program that she uses for writing that I would LOVE to have. Scrivener. It looks amazing and fun to play with. Apparently you can pull images, web pages, quotes, random writing, whatever in the research section to keep you organized better. And don’t get me started on the corkboard section. Looks like lots of fun. Oh, and I think Marley is blogging about it today too. Check it out!