Wow, it's been a year!

Jeez, guys! I'm sorry I've been so MIA. I didn't realize so much time had passed.

Last year was busy and in many ways a great year. I really enjoyed my teaching job and got to do a *lot* of new projects which is probably one of the main reasons I let this blog sleep for so long. Then this summer several not-so-great things happened which definitely cramped my writing style both in terms of any blogging that might have happened and any novel writing. But that led to an amazing new chapter in my life: we moved to Hawai'i--the Garden Isle of Kaua'i, to be precise.

There's been a bumpy adjustment period. Many things have changed. For one thing, I'm now teaching middle school math! I really enjoy it, but it is very different from what I was doing before (one of the bad things that happened is that the district closed my school--I'm heartbroken about that). I've started a blog where I'm going to explain how to teach certain math lessons. It's mainly for the parents of my students to use, but you can check it out here, if you're curious.

There's a writer's conference locally in November and I really want to go! One of my goals for this new WiP, which is not set in any of my previous universes, is to attempt to go the traditional publishing route. I make no promises. I may lose patience with that very quickly. One of the reasons I indie publish is that I am a control freak so it really suits me to do everything myself. But I've decided I want to give it a shot, just to see what happens.

I'm snatching little moments here and there to work on the WiP. Like, sometimes only 15 minutes. It's better than nothing. And honestly I'm totally out of the habit of writing for long stints. I stayed home from work one day and could have written for hours and could only manage an hour or so.

For the current WiP I've been doing a lot more planning, outlining, etc. than ever before. I used to be such a pantser. But it's been a gradual process over the last few years propelled by the challenge of not having regular time to write. Now with my writing time in ever more brief snippets, the outline and brainstorms and character descriptions and everything are absolutely essential. There is no way I'd keep track of anything without them.

I have 29K words done and I wish I thought I could do NaNo this year. Maybe I'll try to set myself a more attainable goal and go for it.

How about you, where are you at with your creative projects? How have things changed for you over the years? Let me know in the comments!

Having a newborn means lots of reading and not much sleep

Last night I got four hours of sleep, and not all at once. But on the bright side, since my second son's birth I've read something in the neighborhood of fourteen novels--that's since January 18. Considering how little I've been reading until recently, that's quite a change. It all comes from being on maternity leave and having to nurse about every two hours. While I nurse, I read (unless the baby's being especially adorable--then I have to stare at him and stroke his cheek and ears... because they don't stay little like this for long!).

Sometimes I get really nostalgic for when my first son was a baby... it's very different when you only have one child, which I'm sure is not news to any parent of multiple children out there. When I think back to how stressed out I was about having a newborn I wonder what the heck my problem was. When my older son goes to preschool these days I feel like having a baby is cake walk! Nurse him, nap when he naps, change a pooplosion diaper--what's the big deal? And, looking back, I must have got the hang of it eventually, because it was when my first was about four or five months old that I really started blogging a lot, and even started my recipe blog in addition to this one. I was writing, too!

I've had some ideas knocking around for writing, and I've also been thinking I might find a moment here and there (when the three year old is at preschool and the baby is napping, if I've had more than four hours of sleep the night before--it does happen sometimes) to finish writing Veronica 4 and editing The City Smolders. The thing about the ideas for a new story is that the one that seems to be shaping up the most is for a Regency-era romance. If you are at all familiar with my novels you'll know that this is very far afield of what I normally do. Basically, I love Jane Austen's novels and that love extends to a lesser degree to other novels of the period and somewhat after, and I often think I need to write the novels I wish I could find to read. That, and I have a hang up about romance as a genre, and yet I do still love Austen's stories. And I don't understand what my deal is with that. My hang up is that I tend to be pretty cynical about romance in real life, and I also get bored of the heterosexuality of most romances. But, somehow Austen's stories don't push those buttons for me at all. So if I do end up writing a Regency-era romance, it's going to be in part because I'm trying to figure out why those romances don't push my buttons. What is it about Austen's world that I find so compelling? And am I even capable of capturing it?

Hello People Who Haven't Quite Given Up on this Blog

Yes, I've been totally MIA blog-wise since June. What can I say, it was a rough summer with little or no writing and fall wasn't much better. There were family issues, there was a move... nothing all that interesting though it effectively brought my blogging and fiction writing to a grinding halt nevertheless. I'm going to reformat The City Darkens today for release as a full novel (no more serialization--I've decided that since no one seemed to think that was as fun as I did, I'm done with it), and I have a new cover (queue excited clapping) done by professional artist Dolly Georgieva-Gode. You get to see it here first:

Also, if you read one or more of the installments of The City Darkens, like the first one, Myadar's Snare, for instance, please comment below with your email and I'll send you a complimentary copy of the full novel. I'll be formatting it so you can skip forward to whichever section you choose, so you don't have to reread the first parts if you don't want to. I would, of course, deeply appreciate your giving the book an honest review on Amazon, Barnes & Noble, and Goodreads.

Wondering if you'd like the book and what it's about?

Here's the blurb:
For ten years Myadar has accepted her life as the estranged wife of a nobleman, running his estate and raising their young son. Everything changes when Myadar is summoned to the capital to begin a new life as a courtier in the decadent, scheming royal court. In a land on the cusp of a new age of modernity, Myadar must decide whether to oppose the rising tyranny that threatens to destroy everything she loves, and risk her own life in doing so.

And here are links to the Goodreads pages of the first three installments from back when it was a serial. You can read reviews there.

Myadar's Snare
Myadar's Betrayal
Myadar's Flight

Blogging Stats

So it seems this blog is modestly popular with folks in Russia. More popular than with folks in the U.S. or U.K., according to my blogger stats. And this isn't just a random blip, I've consistently had more readers from Russia than anywhere else (sometimes twice as many Russian readers as American, the runner up) for the last three months. I don't know why this is, but I'm not complaining. I just wish Amazon sold my books in Russia. If you all like my blog, you'd enjoy my books, I think!

Anyway, Здравствуйте!

A thought...

I was about to write a long post about how sad I am about Sandy Hook (I can't seem to get over it), and how inappropriate I think it is that the massacre has prompted an internet debate over gun control (now really isn't the time to start screaming about gun rights--at least wait until actual legislation is on the table), and how disgusting a certain shock-and-publicity addicted church is, which I will not name because their name already gets way too much coverage. And then I thought, I've been avoiding my WiP for weeks, and instead of writing this blog post, wouldn't it be better to get back into that? And I thought, yes. Yes, it would be. So I'm off to do that now.

Time Just Gets Away From Me

Well, it's been ages since my last post, and I can account for that. I started a new job, and between lesson planning and everything that goes into teaching jobs, carrying for my now one year old (!) son and everything that goes into being a wife and mom, and working on my masters and everything that goes into that as well as finishing my BTSA, I just haven't had much time for writing fiction, much less keeping up with this blog. I miss it! I love being a mom, but when it comes down to it, carrying for my son takes most of my time, and I do miss the days when I had hours and hours to just do whatever I wanted, be it writing novels or blogging or whatever.

Anyway, I did get back into writing for about a week and a half in November, and I started a third book in the Veronica Barry series (technically fourth, if you count Veronica in Paris). Wait, you say, what about the decopunk serial? I will get back to it, I promise. I just hit a wall with it, and now I have to let it simmer for a while. Besides, I so strongly associate Veronica to November--NaNoWriMo, you know. In fact, I (vehhery) optimistically announced I was participating in NaNo this year, and then the holidays struck, and I was too busy making pecan pie and green bean casserole and hanging out with friends. Oh, and being a mom and writing a paper for my MA. So yeah, didn't even hit the halfway point in NaNo. Oh well. At least my novel is off to a strong start.

Although if I'm being honest, I also ran up against a big problem with the plot, and had to stop and think about it for a while. But that's resolved. So I hope to continue to make progress on that front--maybe not every day or anything, but steadily, and have a first draft done some time in the spring. Fingers and toes crossed.

My goal for this blog is to post a review of Jacqueline Carey's Naamah's Blessing soon. And what I'm really really hoping is that I might possibly maybe get her to do a little interview to go with the review. Can't hurt to ask, anyway, and hopefully she won't think I'm a big flake for taking so long to do this (she sent me the copy of the novel to review many moons ago).

Two hours a day to be productive

The title just about says it all. Luke-Andre is a sweet baby who, we've discovered, loves pureed green beans (who would have seen that coming?), but he's not big on naps. Most days--not all--he takes one 2 hour nap and a few 30 minute ones. The 30 minutes ones I use for taking a shower and eating. The 2 hour nap has become the one period in the day when I can be productive.

And I can get a fair amount of writing done in 2 hours. The trouble is, I have a lot of other irons in the fire:

• homework for my MA in history
• blogging here and the recipe blog
• knitting a blanky out of the yarn my aunt used to make a sweater he won't sleep without--so far, in a week, I've knit about 3/4 of an inch
• reading the signed copy of Naamah's Blessing Jacqueline Carey sent me herself to review (SO EXCITED)
• and, most recently, designing my covers for the serial.

I had hoped to employ a friend of Jeff's for the covers, but he's a professional artist and I just don't make the kind of money he charges, even with the hefty discount he offered.

It's ironic because the part of the cover I thought would be hard--the background--I've already finished, and now I'm struggling with the rest. The background will stay the same for every cover, to provide continuity. It's a deco skyline, with the palace and temple in the story at the center. In the foreground I intend to have a close-up of the main character, and when I paint and draw, I'm usually all about portraits. And I'm finding this really hard for some reason. I've been toying with trying to do the portrait kind of deco-style. I can't decide if I like it or not. I voted on another blog when the author posted two possible covers--that was fun, so maybe I'll do something similar here.

More than the design questions, however, I'm running into technical problems: if I want the background the same, it makes sense to scan it and add each different foreground in a design program. Except 1) I don't own a design program anymore--I used to have PaintShopPro a long time ago but that died with the computer it was on; and 2) that means creating the portrait on paper I can cut to be able to place it over the background manually, as I don't think I'm skilled enough to do a proper cutting job on the pc. And doing it on paper means using pencils or pastels, not paint, and I intend to paint the background--I've already got it all drawn out on a flat canvas.So the two may not look good together unless I can work some sort of magic with the design program I don't have.

There are probably some nifty programs that do really useful things like make it possible to scan an image that isn't rectangular without filling in the negative space with white, but the learning curve for me on anything like that is bound to be steep. And I only have 2 hours a day to do it. And I'm still writing (I'm midway through part 4--I think there will be 8 parts, although I'm still not positive). So I really could use more hours in the day.

...And he's awake. After 30 minutes. Looks like today will be one of those exceptions where there is no 2 hour nap at all.

Ack... be back soon...

Just a quick note to say, I will me MIA for the next few days (and have been already for the last few, in case you hadn't noticed). It's the end of my quarter with my MA program and that means paper-writing time. Which makes me feel like this:

...because there's no time for novel-writing, and with the baby, every minute he's napping I have to be working on the papers, and it's very stressful. In fact, I should be doing that now, so bye.

Blog Versus Blog

I recently read that WordPress may be preferable to Blogger for search engine optimization (read the comments of this blog here). I'm pretty lost after trying to make sense of this and all the ins and outs of WordPress.com versus WordPress.org, etc. The conclusion I've come to is I'm going to just have to see about setting up a second recipe blog using WordPress (not .com, though, because I want to do my Amazon affiliate thing, and I think I understood correctly that you can't in any way make money off a WordPress.com blog unless you get some sort of approval, and then you only keep 50%). I think the recipe blog is the best choice for this experiment because the blogger recipe blog I set up is still so new. I should get a fairly clear idea of whether this claim about WordPress having better SEO and getting a lot more traffic is true or not. And I figure if I don't just do it myself, I'm never going to understand what people are talking about. However, what may stop me short is cost. I have no idea what it's going to cost--as I mentioned, I'm not going to do this through WordPress.com, the free site, so I'll be checking out Bluehost because so many people seem to think it's the best for hosting WordPress blogs. How hard would it have been for the makers of WordPress to come up with different names for their free blog and the other thing, the WordPress.org thing, which I can't even think of an appropriate label for (that's how confused I am)? Sigh.

Anyway, I'll report back here on my findings. Although it may just be to say I can't even afford to do the experiment!

Where do you have your blog? Are you happy with it? Do you get a lot of traffic? Have you considered switching? Do you have a good understanding of the ins and outs of WordPress?

An Award for Moi

I'm so spoiled. I have some really really really supportive online writer buddies who give me way more credit than I deserve. One of them, Mary Frame, has given me an award!

This award comes with a few conditions:

1. Thank and link to the person who nominated me. Thank you Mare!!!
2. Share seven random facts about myself.
3. Pass the award along to 5 new-found blogging buddies.
4. Contact those buddies to congratulate them.

So this is one of those nice ways to create connections on the internet, and Mare's blog, It's All Fun and Games Until Someone Gets an Agent, is full of great writing advice, so start by checking that out. Then check out the five I've chosen to pass the award on to below.

But first, my seven random facts:

1. I was in commercials when I was a kid. My dad had a successful career in advertising (he was one of the Martins in the Martin Agency, which meant something back in the 80s) and he got me in a couple of tv ads and several print ones. I don't remember a whole lot about it, except in one there were several rows of people standing for the photo, and they had to find a box for this one guy to stand on because he was too short. In another, there was fake snow--I was supposed to pretend to look for Santa as I stood out on a porch. And in another I had to pretend this woman was my mother, and she looked nothing like her. And I remember after another one getting recognized in a grocery store. But eventually I wasn't cute enough anymore--I mean literally, that's what the photographer who used me as a model said. Ah, the crushed dreams of ten year olds. Actually, I don't remember being all that crushed.

2. I spend 6 years living in Paris, 5 of which were my 8th grade through high school years. Veronica in Paris draws heavily on that experience. I never really bonded with French kids, though, although there were boys I had crushes on. My friends were all expats from all over the world. As a result I never see them anymore--I wish I did! I'd be jetting off to New Zealand or London or Beijing...

3. I like to forage wild food. Today we went mushroom hunting, but didn't find any. Which is typical of my experiences with mushroom hunting. I'm much more successful at berry hunting but that's a few months away still.

4. I was an AmeriCorps member for two years in San Diego. It was the hardest job I've ever done, but probably also one of the most rewarding, mainly in the second year when I was a team leader. The admin let us team leaders have a lot of say in how the program was run, which was really satisfying. Now when I see people in admin making inefficient or even counterproductive decisions all I can do is take deep breaths and think, "I'll find a way to work around this." Back then, I could say, "That's not going to work, here's why, and here's what we should do instead," and 90% of the time, they'd listen. I miss that. But the job was still incredibly difficult. We were supposed to do these huge community service projects and we literally had no budget. It was a rule in the grant that funded us--we were not allowed to have a budget. We had to find in-kind donations for everything. It was really really tough. I would periodically interview for jobs elsewhere. I'm glad I stuck with it, though. Completing those two years (the max you could stay with one program) taught me all sorts of skills and also made me realize I could stick with something even when it's hard.

5. I was a bit of a goth kid in high school (yes, in Paris--what a place to be a goth!). I used to think I'd name my first born son Lestat.

6. The first ever play I auditioned for was in 7th grade (still in the US)--I got the part of Miss Lucy in Dracula.

7. I will eat (and enjoy) a lot of things the average American would be totally freaked out by--deep fried pigs' feet, snails, raw sea urchin, tripe sausage, chicken livers and liver pate, etc., but I cannot stand pieces of corn in cornbread. Ugh! Ptooey ptooey.

Okay, so now for the list of award winners:

I'd pick Mary Kaley but Mary Frame already got to her.

So, the first award goes to:

Michael R. Hicks, who writes science fiction, and is enjoying a fair amount of success at epublishing. I've been following his blog with enthusiasm, as he is sharing the secrets of that success. Last I heard, he's seriously considering quitting his day job. That's such an inspiration to me!

Award #2 goes to:

Kelvin O'Ralph, who has been doing wonderful, wonderful things for a small group of writers (me among them) on Goodreads. He set up a group and is having everyone follow each other and tag each other's books. Great stuff.

Award #3 goes to:

Alexander Hammond, who writes humor. Anyone who can make me laugh or even smile after some of the days I have at the continuation school deserves an award.

Award #4 and #5 go to:

Lori Sizemore and Cynthia Robertson, because both of them have been so supportive and they only just met me, and on Twitter, to boot.