Archives for August 2009

Whew. I'm having a hard time kicking my butt into gear over here. I'm going to perch on the edge of my chair and have a nice chat with you and then maybe you'll pat my cheek at the end and say, Okay, Rach, get on with it, will you?

You know what? I'm happy about Book Two!

Even better, my agent is happy about Book Two!

I know it must be frustrating for some of you who want to get your hands on How To Knit a Love Song but can't until MARCH to hear me kvetch on and on about Book Two, but indulge me a moment more (also, no guarantees, but wouldn't it be fun if I got an advance reader's copy or two that I could do a random drawing for here on the site? Mmmm? That would be fun. Just sayin'. It's never for sure the author will get more than one, I've heard, in which case I'm SO keeping that puppy, but here's hoping.)

But anyway. Back to Book Two. I can't remember what I told you before but the first draft was written as the premise sold to my publisher: a romantic suspense. After I wrote the whole damn book, it turned out to be TOO OBVIOUS. Oh, yeah? That's the Bad Guy? OH REALLY? DUH! I could see that plot twist from the surface of the moon! So I rewrote it. The whole thing. And it was better, but still clunky and kinda dumb. Didn't feel right. I wanted to throw it against the wall and sometimes did.

But now, with my editor's approval to move away from romantic suspense and back into women's fiction and a MAJOR rewrite that almost kil't me, I swear it did, it's good. It's funny and sweet and it's what it wanted to be. I have a few tweaks that I'd like to make today, but the other day, when I took a day off work to read it over and do a final continuity check (because when you've rewritten something that many times, it's important to check you still have the same characters doing the right things in the right places with the right people), it made me laugh out loud in delight a couple of times. And that was a fine, outrageous surprise. I did not expect that from my own writing. At all. 

(Strangely, while I'm a HUGE laugh-out-louder in real life, I rarely do while reading or watching TV. I can't explain this. It's just true.)

And I do wonder if I laughed out loud because the world of Cypress Hollow is so rich to me because I've been living in it so deeply for the last six months, or because it was good. But I'm willing to let other people tell me that in the future and just be happy now that it happened. 

And only related because Kiersten White is writing about the publishing world, this is a wonderful piece on what it takes to get published. (For those of you who are curious, I submitted queries to thirty-one agents. About half requested partials, and about half of those requested fulls from the partials. That's a pretty high rate of return, and I think it had to do with the market at the time–people were just looking for what I was selling. I was just lucky in that part of it. When Susanna offered representation, I had two other agents who were highly interested. One agent, in fact, missed the boat by a day. BOY, AM I GLAD SHE DID. I'm not sure if I've mentioned it or not, but I have the best agent in the world.)

Okay. I'm getting on with it now. I'm only dragging my heels because once I send it to my editor tomorrow, then it's REALLY out of my hands for a while until she gets back to me with edits. Wait! Why is that bad? That means I'm off camping at Strawberry Music Festival all weekend without a care in the world (except for plotting Book Three, something that I can do under the Yosemite stars, right?).

Are over at PensFatales today. Come say hi!

And the cat is on the blanket.  (Click there for the real story.)

Zoom is awesome, and I adore her, and she's had a shitstorm of a year (lost her job, got breast cancer, sustained back injury) and she needed some love big time.

So we made her a blanket. I'm not posting this as a Look What We Did, I'm posting this more as a Look How Easy This Was. I've had a couple of people ask about my Love Blanket that the knitters made me after Mom died, and I have to tell you this: in a fire (god forbid), it would be the one non-breathing thing I would try to save. (Okay, my computer might rank up there, too, but I'm trying not to admit that out loud.)

My blanket is that important to me. It has that much love infused into it.

If you wanted to make a blanket like this for someone in the knitting community, and if they had a blog (the only way I know how to do it):

1. Stalk their comments. Go to each commenter's blog and send them an email, asking if they'd like to participate. (Alternately, go to the blogs listed on the blogger's blogroll and do the same.)

2. Once you have a bunch of people interested, set up the ground rules. For Zoom's we made 8inch squares, any color, any pattern. We got amazing results by letting people use their imagination.

3. Once all the squares are in one place, safety-pin each person's name on each square.

4. Invite local crafters over for a crochet party! I know that crafters can get crazy-involved in making sure seams are perfect and we DID NOT do that. My own blanket was put together with single crochet, and that's how we decided to do Zoom's –it means the back side looks like stained glass, and although it's a bit bulky, I think it's perfect. And it's fast, yo. No mattress stitching here.

5. Crawl all over the blanket and make a map of names on a piece of paper so that when the recipient takes off the safety-pinned names, she can always tell at a glance who made which one.

6. Mail that puppy. Let your loved one wrap it around her. It will mean the world to her. Zoom and I will attest to that.

There's just something about Annie Lennox, isn't there? I think if I could have swapped bodies for a day with anyone in the 80s, it would have been her. Of course, since I'm a bit younger, she would have ended up in a playground on the California coast using iceplant for pretend chalk, but I'm thinking she could have managed. (Yep, I'm sure that's what she was waiting for. Swapping bodies with an uncool ten-year old with glasses.)

Recently she allowed DJ Earworm (that guy is a genius, dude) to have access to her masters so he could make this mashup. It's awesome. If you haven't heard it, please enjoy a Sunday tune.

As for me, the house is clean, I'm recovering slowly from a migraine (guess the med levels aren't right yet–CRAP! but hope springs eternal), and I'm raring to write, starting tomorrow. I'm totally irked that I lost today's potential work but I am pleased to say that even with a migraine, there are epiphanies to be found lying in bed, thinking about the closing scenes of a book. I got some good work done today while lying in a dark room. I mean it. I don't recommend it, but it worked for me.

Also, another damn historical suckered me in. DON'T TELL ANYONE. Sherry Thomas's Not Quite A Husband. I downloaded a free chapter, and liked it enough to buy it. And then I started reading, and then devoured it in about a day and a half. I was PASSIONATE about it. What IS it about her? Fever and quinine, India, sepoys, uprisings, gun battles — somehow she evoked a reaction from me that I haven't felt since I read M.M. Kaye as an impressionable fourteen-year old. (You know how Harry Potter makes you turn the pages? That's kind of how Thomas writes. Not with obvious cliffhangers, but with a fascinating pacing that I'd kill to bottle and sell. Or just use myself.)

That is all. Lala is home. There is homemade chicken tikka masala to eat, stat.

In the sadness of last week, I said on twitter but I forgot to remind you here to go over to PensFatales to read Barbara Bretton's lovely piece she graced us with during her blog tour. She has a new book out, Laced With Magic. It's awesome — I just finished it last night, and I loved it. I've said it before, I love her. I want to be her when I grow up. Everything I've read by her is fun, romantic, funny as hell, sweet, and smart.

I feel like a heel for forgetting. Go over there and give it a read — it's very her and gives you a good sense of her voice. It sneaks up on you and then gives you a nice return for your reading investment. Go, look, see if I'm right. And then see what the rest of us are up to, also.

Aren't lists nice? They give everything equal weight and they don't make me assign value, which would feel arbitrary today anyway.

1. I twittered this the other day, but I'm still loving this picture of me and Boonie, Bethany's dog. 

  

I love how we look related. And also, she's neither a puppy or a short dog. She's a good, medium-sized dog and isn't always that amenable to being picked up. But we're pals. Yep.

2. We saw Julie & Julie the other night. O frabjous day, a romance movie where the happily ever after is really about two women getting publishing deals (not really a spoiler, since you know about those two books already) rather than the men of their dreams (although they already have those). Yes, there were problems with the movie (Nora wrote a more convincing Julia than Julie, we thought), but how lovely it was. I'd see it again in a heartbeat, and it's one of the few movies I'd like to own.

3. I'm on deadline (BOOK TWO DUE SOON OH SO SOON), so I'm writing my fingers to the bone and draining my brain completely dry. Last night I was so exhausted that when Lala came to bed I woke up only enough to ask if she was on a top secret mission. She said yes (OF COURSE SHE DID) and I asked what it was and she said it was a secret, and I said she could tell me and then I fell asleep. So now I'll never know.