Auspicious Signs

The New Year is starting off with a bang! While my packing up the place in Parks is going slower than planned due to the fact that I have a cold, I may already have a buyer. I also got a confirmation call this afternoon for a gig playing at an attorney’s conference in [...]

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My Half-Novel

The critiques of “Return of the Shadow Lion” that I have received so far are fairly consistent and there is a relatively simple solution to 90 percent of the difficulties my dedicated readers had with the story. All I have to do is stick Books Three and Four in the series together, and “Presto!” [...]

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Critiques, Confusion, Consternation

I’m so confused…
Having dedicated readers from an online writer’s group critique one’s novel is a whole new experience for me. I’m not sure what to do with all of the ideas, suggestions, corrections, and criticisms. Each person has had something valuable to add; each person has also at some point missed something that I thought [...]

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To NaNo or Not to NaNo, That is the Question

I’m still debating whether to take on NaNoWriMo this year.  I want to, but I am still up to my eyeballs with moving and jobbing and everything else I’ve got going.  I wouldn’t even consider it, except that “RSL” is complete and being critiqued. I don’t expect the crits to be done before December, so [...]

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NaNoWriMo Looms

Ah yes, NaNoWriMo – National Novel Writer’s Month – lurks just beyond the horizon. I got an email that they are reworking their website in preparation for an October 1 kick off.
Has it only been a year? Close to it, anyway, that I scrapped the screenplay I was writing and started fresh with the novel [...]

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Love and Promises

Writing is what’s on my mind today. My post, Nakedness, is listed on the Personal Power Blog Carnival at Pinkblocks.com. Last night I sent out my revised Part One of “Return of the Shadow Lion” to my Dedicated Readers, or DRs as they are known in Critters.org/critique.org lingo. The critiques, or crits, that came [...]

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What a Difference a Year Makes

My more usual optimism has returned this evening, leaving the melancholy of midday to fade away into memory. As I drove to Flagstaff to have dinner with my friend Margie, I realized how reclusive I have become the last few months – two trips to Flag in a week feels positively extraverted. Between the novel [...]

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Wiki Mind Map

Geek fun. Well, flamencophile.com is going to have to have one of these…

WikiMindMap is a free, open source Flash browser that organizes a set of links into a mindmap. Too cool. It’s written in Java using the Swing toolkit and it’s compatible with Drupal, too. Try it out on Wikipedia.org by clicking the picture to [...]

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Quotes on Writing by John Steinbeck

The Prologue and first three chapters of my novel are out to the critique group, and the first two sections sit idle, pending the results of my request for dedicated readers. Now I wait. Wonder. Deal with my doubts. It’s rather funny, really. For all my talk about not worrying about what others think, I [...]

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Blogage and Discipline

:-) As an act of self-discipline, I made myself NOT write a blog post yesterday and got back to work on editing the novel. I’ve got a lot to do in two weeks.
With all of the various projects I’ve got going, it’s a struggle to keep some balance and order in my life. The optimum [...]

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Novel Progress

In the middle of all the guitar upheaval, I am still continuing to revise the current fantasy novel. (Which is truly a good thing – the upheaval, and the continuing to function in other areas.) I’ve finished eighteen chapters now, which is all of Part One, and nearly half of Part Two, or about 140 [...]

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Summer Rains in the Arizona High Country

The summer monsoons have returned to this area of the Arizona high country. Several thunderstorms moved through today (I can hear one still booming in distance even now) and the power was out for awhile.
I’m glad that I got my acre of weeds mowed yesterday, before the rains came back. My front yard looks like [...]

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Woohoo!

The manuscript for the novel I started back in November has been sitting untouched for almost three months. That was a deliberate decision on my part, a technique to get some distance and perspective on it, before readying it for submission to the online critique group that I am part of. (Critters.org)
I took it back [...]

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Little Tough Girl

More feedback from the Universe: I was talking with my mom the other day about all the hits on the Fibroid From Hell post. She is still incensed that it took so long for the doctors to figure it out, and when I joked around about having been walking around giving birth for six months, [...]

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Back to Blogging

Thanks to liquidlight for reminding me of this blog’s existence and his encouragement to get back to writing on it! My feeble excuse is that I’ve been extremely busy in setting up my own business and working hard to finish the first novel in the “Shadow Lion” trilogy, among a multitude of other projects. [...]

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