Umm...I guess it's real!

Soooo....back in November, I did that whole NaNo thing again. The committee in my head had been suggesting that I bag the whole writing thing and maybe go back to making posing suits for female body builders. But you know what?  I don't have to worry about how my abs stack up against fictional women, so I decided to stick with writing for a while longer.

So I did that NaNo thing, but I signed up for an online bootcamp that Savvy Authors and Entangled Publishing hosted.  You can read about it below.

BUT WAIT! Before you click that link, I want to tell you to make sure to read all the way to the bottom, because GUESS WHAT!!!???!!!!

I WON A PUBLISHING CONTRACT for my very rough, very incomplete manuscript from NaNoWriMo!   Nina Bruhns, the editor for Entanlged Suspense, called me two Sundays ago to tell me, and I've been a basket case since then, waiting to be sure it's all real, before I told you all, my Blog Friends.  So it's officially on their website, which means it must be real. 

Okay, you can click on the link now, I have to go have another nervous breakdown. 

What are you waiting for???  GO CLICK!  LOOK!  THAT'S ME! 

Entangled Publishing NaNo Smackdown

Back It Up!

We have some extra teenagers living in our basement right now.  We call them the Trolls. They are twins,  high school seniors and legal adults, but for reasons I probably shouldn't blog about, they live with us instead of their parents.

Mr. Stanley and I aren't real foster parents, but we're trying. Our goal is to keep a roof over their heads and get these guys to graduate from high school and get jobs so they can move out of our basement. Because our own kids are probably going to have to move down there, but that's another post.

ANYWAY, they have these research papers due. Two months ago. Which is probably going to keep them from graduating if they don't get it in gear.

Anyway.

They have all their information on the cloud drive thing that the school system provides.  And of course, Tuesday, when they were supposed to have things turned in, the system crashed (coincidence?  I have my doubts).  So I said, "Don't you have a flash drive?"

Blank faces in duplicate.

*Runs upstairs and finds a flash drive without any naked romance scenes on it*

Okay, so we got that worked out, I think. They now know to save it to the cloud, save it to their laptops, email it to themselves, and put it on the danged flash drive! 

So this morning, I went to open my WIP, which I had emailed to myself at work, (good girl) only to find that somewhere in the stratosphere, the last scene had disappeared.  Which is probably good, because I was thinking that I needed to cut it and start over, but HEY!  I wanted that to be my choice, not the internet's! 

So anyway, today's public service announcement:  BACK IT UP every chance you get, whereever you are!  Hey, that sounds almost dirty, doesn't it? 

Who's Love Child Are You?

The new season of Justified started last week.  This makes me very happy.

I love me some Timothy Olyphant.

L.O.V.E. me. some. T.O. Don't you just want to eat him up?

In  case you're not familiar, Justified is a series on FX about a U.S. Marshall who comes home to Harlan County, Kentucky, where he runs into his best friend from his younger days, who is living on the other side of the law. As a matter of fact, EVERYONE from the old neighborhood, including Dear Old Dad, is living in the gray zone of lawful behavior.  Hijinks ensue.

Elmore Leonard is the executive producer.  You know, the Get Shorty guy.  No, not Danny DeVito. The writer.

ANYWAY.  I was thinking how much I appreciate Elmore Leonard's sense of irony, and as a writer, I really want to channel some of that. Except, I'm a romance writer. So I've decided that I'm going to be the love child of Elmore Leonard and Taylor Swift. Please, let's not remind me of how much older I am than Taylor Swift . As in, old enough to be her mother. It's a metaphorical kind of thing, right?

So.  Who do you channel?  Are you a cross between George Lucas and Lady Gaga?  No? Then who? Discuss.

Celebrating a Life That May Have Saved Your Life

I'm going to take a break from my regularly scheduled ramblings to tell you about this guy who used to work in my building.

Some of ya'll may know that I'm a science geek by day.  I work in a lab, merrily surfing writing blogs between experiments. I've never discovered anything big, but I keep trying. Maybe I'll get to work on something that will help someone someday...but that's not what this is about.

When I came to work in my current lab, there was this nice old man who had an office on the third floor. He drove around on a little scooter and smiled and greeted me every time I saw him. One day I noticed a poster with his picture on it, hanging on the wall.  One of those "Go to UC, We're Great" kind of promotional things. 




Turns out this nice old man, Dr. Elwood Jensen, had just won the Lasker Award.  Huh?  Well, it's the American version of the Nobel Prize for medicine. 

A while back, Dr. Jensen discovered the estrogen receptor.  You know, the one that people refer to when they get breast cancer.  Used to be, if you had breast cancer, they automatically removed your ovaries, and anything else that might produce estrogen, because estrogen makes some types of cancer grow faster.  But then Dr. Jensen found this molecule, the Estrogen Receptor... and now, when someone gets breast cancer, one of the first things they do is find out if it's HER+ or HER-.  If it's HER+, they treat you with Tamoxifen, or some other variety of estrogen receptor blocker.  And they don't automatically have to remove your ovaries.  And you have a much better chance of wearing pink for a much longer time.

So.  There you go.  If you, or someone you know, has had HER+ breast cancer, you might want to stop a minute and send some good thoughts to the Jensen family, because Elwood died recently.  He was 92, and was a nice old man. 

Happy Release Day, Jessica!!!

At the risk of sounding completey corny, sometimes I am overwhelmed by how blessed I have been since deciding to explore this writing thing.  I started blogging to conect with the writing community and it's like...that song from Oliver! (Ya'll are sooo lucky that I'm not going to post a clip of me singing about considering yourself at home.)

ANYWAY. 

I've made a lot of good friends here, not the least of whom is Jessica Lemmon.  I think we first connected by following each other's blogs, but then quickly learned we live in the same RWA Chapter Zone, and met up in person at our OVRWA meetings.

Since then, I've been fortunate enough to see her land a book offer, and agent, another book offer (and yeah, kind of in that order)...and shed a tear or two of joy with her.  All the way she's shared encouragement and advice and excitement about this thing called Being a Romance Author.  And today is her big day! Tempting the Billionaire came out in e-Book today. 
 

So I just want to say, "Go, Ms. Lemmony!"( And again, you, my beloved readers, are lucky that I am not posting a clip of my happy dance. )

New Years Rationalizations

Because really...who am I kidding?  Resolutions?  Just something else to feel guilty about. 

No resolutions this year.  A few things on the To-Do list, like:
1) finish editing (and finish in general) the NaNo book
2) re-edit last summer's MS
3) Clean off my desk.

Cleaning off my desk might be the most difficult thing on the list, but I'm going to give it a shot.  I'm making great strides.  I moved a dead plant into the trash and wiped up the dead leaves.  That was HUGE. 

Then I got rid of all those pesky Coke Rewards points I've had piling up there.  That took me half an hour, because then I had to spend the points...

I've moved some piles around, making small piles into big piles, so it LOOKS a little neater.  Just don't open any drawers, okay?

So what's on your Not a Resolution List for this year?

Honor Code: A Review

Soooo....




 Back in Crazy Crazy November (aka NaNoWriMo), I teamed up with an awesome group of women, and we became the Dangerous Divas...writing to help the Dead Sexy team win the Entangled Smackdown  contest. 

Cathy Perkins was one of my team members, and in the middle of all the crazy, crazy writing, she sent me a copy of her latest release, Honor Code . 

The blurb:  In a small southern town where everyone knows each other's business, veteran detective Larry Robbins must solve the disappearance of eighty-year-old widower George Beason.

When evidence arises that Beason may have left town on his own, it would be easy for Robbins to close the case, but his gut instinct tells him more's at stake. As he uncovers clues about Beason's deceased wife and his estranged daughter, Robbins must untangle conflicting motives and hidden agendas to bring Beason home alive.


What a good read!  I've always loved mysteries--my first "real" book memories are of Nancy Drew, Alfred Hitchcock and the Three Investigators, and let's not forget Encyclopedia Brown (even though I could never figure out the clues).  I'm a little better at guessing what's going to happen these days...as Blake Snyder (the Save the Cat guy) said (and I'm paraphrasing here, because I'm too lazy to look up the exact quote), It's not so much WHO dunnit as WHY dunnit. 

I think I knew pretty early on WHO dunnit...but the WHY was quite the conundrum...and as the detective, Larry Robbins, follows the clues, I was reminded that nothing is ever black and white.  Every life has it's dark moments and bright spots, and people get twisted up by the decisions they make, which sometimes lead them down darker paths that are better avoided. 

I would like to get to know Larry better...during the course of his investigation, he begins to question some things about his own relationship with his wife, and he makes a couple of turns himself.  I thought that was cool. 

Honor Code is linked to Cathy's other release, The Professor , but it's definitely a stand alone book.  I haven't (yet!) read The Professor, and didn't feel like I was showing up at the party after everyone was already two drinks ahead of me (which happens to me almost every time I start a series any where after the first book). 

So anyway.  Shameless plug for a new friend:  Buy Honor Code!  Read it!  Enjoy!