Free books & The Gamble and the Grave!

The Gamble and the Grave (Veronica Barry Book 4) is out on Amazon today! I didn't get a lot of sleep last night (the baby is trying to break me) but seeing that this morning (I'd forgotten--see parenthetical above) gave me a nice boost.

As a result, The River and the Roses (Veronica Barry Book 1), The Fire and the Veil (Veronica Barry Book 2), and The Plane and the Parade (Veronica Barry Book 3) will be free today and tomorrow.

If you have a different e-reader and can't take advantage of free promos on Amazon just email me and I'll be happy to send you your preferred format.

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?

Writing & Not Writing

William Tecumseh Sherman

The next couple of days are all about MA homework (I'm taking two courses this trimester: the Civil War and the 20th century). I've decided I'll be writing my final research paper--due in August, but the proposal was due last Sunday and I'm turning it in late--for my Civil War class on technology in Sherman's March. Which should actually be pretty interesting. I'm not a big Civil War buff--I tend to be much more interested in 20th century stuff. But so far I really like my professor for the Civil War course, so that helps, and I have been interested in the way technology evolved in the Civil War for some time now. It started with muskets and ended with repeating rifles and to a small extent, Gatling guns, you know. It's like it went from the Mexican-American War to World War I in the span of four years.

I'm less enthused about my 20th century course than I anticipated, though. It's super heavily weighted toward political history, which, on the whole, I find to be a big snooze. And we're barely going to talk about WWII or Vietnam, both of which I really want to learn more about. So I may tack on a couple of courses to my MA. I only have two required courses left after these: constitutional history (ick) and media and cultural history (or something to that effect--interesting, but kind of what I've been into for years, so probably not terribly enlightening--we'll see). I checked out the graduate certificate in WWII studies, and it looks fascinating, but it's 18 units and I don't know if I can really justify that expense. I'd stay a student forever if I could, though.

I haven't been working on the WiP at all these last couple of weeks. My sleep schedule has been messy--the baby started waking up two to three time a night for a while there, and still does every so often, etc. etc. So fatigue is part of it. His erratic nap schedule is also part of it. The excitement over constructing a garden is a part, and so is just plain falling out of the habit. But school is out for summer tomorrow which means after tomorrow, my husband will be around a lot more. That means sleeping in, and maybe being able to get away for a few hours at a time a few times a week to really get some writing done. Fingers crossed.

Sleep deprivation

Sleep deprivation is seriously cutting into my ability to write. I know, it sounds lame. It's just sleep, right? But as my husband pointed out, sleep dep can be used as a form of torture. Yesterday was a bad day! The baby didn't go down until 5am and I hadn't had a nap at all so I was a mess. Today is better--got a three and a half hour nap in the evening and then the baby went down at 2am and slept through until 6:30 when I had to take Jeff in to work.

So I actually feel functional enough to do some writing, which I'm off to do as soon as I'm done with this post. Nathan Bradsford recently wrote a blog post about returning to writing after a long break and he recommended, among other tips, writing anything to get the juices flowing, like a blog post. So here I am. Plus, I like feeling like I'm talking with you guys again--I missed it. It's no fun being isolated from the world. Don't get me wrong, I have a tendency to be a hermit. But I do like to feel connected to people who are interested in the same things I am.

Anyway, I started my decopunk story about a week ago. I wrote about 2700 words, I think, and now I'm going to get back into it. If I can just convince this baby to let me sleep at least five hours every 24 hours (doesn't have to be all at once!) I might even get to where I can maintain some sort of routine again.

What about you? Do you have issues with sleep and writing? How do you handle them?