I’m still going over issues my editor had with my book, but took a break to play with bears. And shipped the other bear I had for an order. Today, I’ll be continuing to work on the edits. I worked on Claiming the White Bear edits from my first beta reader too.
I need to get started on the new wolf book too though. I still need to figure out the characters.
Who are they really? The fun with having a new sub-series, even though it’s still in Silver Town, and that’s an established wolf series, these characters are all new, so it will be fun to start fresh. Blank slates. Babes in the woods.
So what kind of characters should they be? What dark pasts? Secrets? What are their goals? What motivates them toward that goal? What makes it so pressing? Without urgency, there isn’t a story. What conflicts can I throw in their path? The Wolff brothers and sisters run the ski lodge, so they have occupations. But what about the heroine who shows up? What does she do?
With the brothers and sisters, what makes each of them perfectly unique? I might not have the sisters show up right away. Overpopulating stories with characters can make it hard for readers to keep up.
Those are things I keep pondering, until I finally just start writing.
I’m off to work on edits. Have a super great TGIF!!!
My daughter, a dietician for one of the school districts, was telling me a story about what happened at her work one day. You have to be let into the building. You can’t just walk in, but they pretty much let anyone in who buzzes because parents have to come in to fill out dietary plans and such for stuff at the school district. And their cafe is open to anyone.
So one day, they let in a possible knife-wielding murderer.
This is how the story goes: Man is buzzed in and he hurries to the men’s room. He’s in there for 40 minutes, and they know something’s not right. They send in the only man in their department to check it out. The guy is shirtless, wet from washing his chest and hands. And when the staff member asked why he was there, he said he was hiding.
Now, they hadn’t heard the news that a police bulletin for a knife-wielding murderer had just gone out, not until after the staff member said he couldn’t stay there. He was thinking the guy was hiding from bad guys, not that he could be hiding from police. But after they learned they were looking for a man who had committed murder, they called the police and gave a statement.
Story idea for fiction from real life?
When I worked at the library, we had a man rush inside and then “hide” between books, pretending to be reading. The police came in right after that and asked if I’d seen a man fitting his description. Luckily, I had, and they arrested him. I don’t know what for, but you just never know when you might find trouble at a job where you never thought you might! And it can make for great fiction!
Okay, so I did get all my promo blogs done, and the bear done, but my editor sent a note that she didn’t like my ghosts in the last book I turned in. She’s lucky she didn’t see it when I had 12 other ghosts in the story, but I took those out before she even saw it. lol
I even had a really neat grizzly shifter in one of my stories, but I figured she might not like it so I took him out. I still loved those scenes. I’ll have to write a book with him in it later.
Little White Bear for a Wedding Gift
I had baby all day, so hadn’t had time to really read my editor’s notes…but one change can mean rewriting the whole book. And I like the way I wrote it. It’s one thing if you write a book that needs to be rewritten because it doesn’t make sense or has major flaws. Another, if someone just doesn’t like something. My editor doesn’t like ghosts or psychics.
So I’m off to look it over and see what needs to be done about it. On my indie books, I don’t have issues like that. My readers love them. Thankfully!
Hope you have a wonderful day!!!! I’m determined to have one too!
Not happening! Not if I want to get anything done!
I’m sure the fae were at work yesterday–hassling me. It all started with trying to get directions to an appointment I had that morning. Google Maps said it would take me 4 hours and 1 min to get there. Wait, what???? Walking.
That was only the BEGINNING of my wild morning. But baby’s here and I’ve got to run! No walking allowed. Not with a toddler on the go. I plan to take her to critter hour at the children’s museum, if everything works out.
And we have to run errands! It’s harder to run them with a toddler, but at the same time, I don’t get a lot done during the day when she’s here, so it gives me time to do things I really need to do and then I can write on the days she’s not here. Win-win for me! AND, sometimes she falls asleep! Which she really needs to do, but fights all the time.
Fall colors and waterfalls. See? We do get some fall colors in Texas!
I finished proofreading Claiming the White Bear! Woohoo! I sent it early this morning to my sleeping beta readers. Now I have a million things to do: write up several promo blogs for You Had Me at Jaguar, finish the white teddy bear, work on the cover for Claiming the White Bear some more, properly format the book, purchase an ISBN, copyright it…and start working on the next book. I don’t think I’ll have time for it today. I’m not sure I’ll have time for all this today. But I’m off and running…after I have my 2nd cup of hot lavender tea. Though the puppies are sitting at my feet waiting for me to feed them. I might have to do that first.
Wait. I’m the alpha. My tea comes first.
Hope you do what needs to be done today, and have lots of fun and free time just to goof off too!!
Baby’s back! I have only 8 more chapters to proof on Claiming the White Bear, finished 11 yesterday and the prologue, and I so want to get it done today because I still need to finish up the white bear for a wedding order and I still need to do those promo blogs for You Had Me at Jaguar. Granted, the promo blogs are due early Feb, but I like to get things done early because you never know what’s going to come up and then whoops, no time to do this stuff. Plus, I’ve been thinking about the new Wolff brother’s story in Silver Town. I need to get started! And finished.
I was wracking my brain for a new idea. For weeks, I have been. And then, I had it. And it’s stuck. The Wolff brothers, and their sisters, but they still are back east trying to sell their ski lodge there, are in Silver Town. So we’ll be back to the much beloved Silver Town wolves. Only this time, it will be at the ski lodge. I mention them in the Silver wolf Christmas book coming out in Sept this year, briefly. Anyway, you see two sisters arrive at the ski lodge, and one begins to howl in the room that night. Can you imagine how upsetting that would be for the owners, and of course, the other guests? Yes, the town is run by the Silver wolf pack, but no way do they want the word to get out to humans that they exist. And that’s it! Yes! The beginning of a whole book.
So in the meantime, no extra puppies this week, but baby’s back! Which is fun and work and fun. I’m going to try and take her to the children’s museum on Wednesday for Critter Hour. They’re closed on Mondays, unfortunately. It all depends on how she is. I went to take her to the grocery store one day and she had an absolute fit. I waited until later after she’d had a nap. So I might try to be on a schedule, but sometimes it doesn’t work for her. *sigh*
Okay, she’s nearly here and I have to run. Have a super lovely day!!!
If you’re a public figure, you need to know that if you get on a rant about something on social media, it could come back to bite you. I avoid political, religious and other issues because it’s not my purpose in life. I want to share what I love: writing, photography, gardening.
Life is too short to spend it going off on tirades that won’t change anything.
Though, I do want to say that I am all for cutting out plastic, and I’m doing something about it. I don’t have to rant about it. I just have to do something. And hope everyone else does too, because in the end, I can’t make anyone do anything. So it’s up to everyone to get on the bandwagon, or not. And yes, I read lots of articles about it, and those are helpful, inspiring articles, well worth the time to read.
A fan posted on my FB page about a certain model and owner of a site that sells pictures of himself for authors’ books because I’m a FB friend (as in bought a couple of covers from him early on when there were little to no sites that had romantic couples for covers–though the problem was that it meant all the covers featured him as the male, no other male models, and you can’t have one man on all your covers.) lol
But he went on a rant about fat people. Obesity. He’s in a business! I’m sure not all of his customers are lean and muscled like he is. He’s a bodybuilder. That’s his business. Having pictures taken of him for his covers. He got mad because he doesn’t like going to the gym anymore, but he has to so that he can keep in shape. For. His. Business.
Hey, I need to lose 10 lbs myself! Been working on it, but I gained back 4 pounds over the holidays. ugh. I could maybe even lose 15, but then I’d probably have to have plastic surgery.
I think people forget that when they’re on social media, they can spill their guts, get angry about something–even when it doesn’t affect them–and say what they want to say when it’s a sore point with so many. Would they feel the same if they were given a podium to stand at and talk to all the obese people he’s addressing in such a degrading way? It’s easy to shout to the rooftops when you’re on social media. But it’s also a good way to sabotage your business and public image.
A good friend of mine is in weight watchers, and I love how she’s really worked to get the weight off, changed her eating habits and exercises, and I probably about killed her, making her walk all over Minnesota when we were out there in the heat. But she realized she could walk a lot further than she thought and she’s kept it up. We keep up with each other on weight loss and steps we walk. But that’s what people need. Not a head-bashing, because guess what? It doesn’t work. We don’t need his “wake-up” call, as he says. We need to decide for ourselves that this is important enough for us and to get on with it, with encouragement from friends and family.
Just like the articles on plastic garbage have done for me. I didn’t realize it was such an issue!
So say something nice, encouraging, inspiring and have a happy life.
For me, I need to finish a bear for an order and I finished Claiming the White Bear, woohoo!!!! But now I am in the process of proofreading it before it goes to my beta readers, who are my lifesavers!
Hope you are having a great day! And remember to say something positive, even if you are feeling negative. Maybe you’ll even feel better, and your readers definitely will.
This is a picture shot of my son and a turtle in Hawaii.
So, my pictures show up fine here, but when they are shared on Gooodreads and FB, they don’t show up. It used to be (before the new WordPress upgrade), that at least a link would be given at Goodreads, if the photos didn’t show up, so that readers could click on it to see the picture.
Not sure what the problem is! I’m trying a 72 dpi picture today to see if it works.
Anyone have any good recommendations for a waterproof camera? This was shot with a Go Pro, my son said. I used Topaz Studio AI to improve the details on the turtle and remove some of the noise in the picture.
I’m off to write. I wrote 2,000 words yesterday, filling in scenes and making changes, but now I still need to write the last scene that will finish the book. Yay!
Have a grand one. Hope the picture issue gets resolved!!!
Do you have plants you can’t identify? I have this happen all the time. The whole area was forest at one time, so a lot of the plants that are popping up were native–like youpon holly (not shown, but I have several of them that volunteered to grow in the yard), the fern, and whatever the other plant is. I think it might be a fern of some kind. The silk and seeds are from a yellow flowering milkweed. You can see the yellow flowers behind it. I keep finding more crape myrtles in the flowerbeds. They are beautiful, but if I’m not careful, I will have a forest of them. lol
I’m also trying to propagate some of the sunny ligustrum to add to the yard. I don’t have a very big yard, so I have to be careful that I don’t lose my whole yard to plants!
I wrote several more scenes yesterday on Claiming, but need to write one more, I think. Hopefully, I can get it done today, but need to run an errand and the dogs aren’t leaving until later this afternoon. But I need to also start writing all the promo blogs for You Had Me at Jaguar.
So much to do. So little time!
Hope you have all kinds of time to do the fun things you enjoy doing!
I saw the beginning of a sunset the other day and I realized I hadn’t taken a picture of one in a while. But it was too hard to see for the trees and houses, and so I didn’t think anything more of it. But then I saw this on New Year’s Eve when I was taking all the dogs out for another potty break. Now this was worth taking pictures of. A sunset in all its glory! We had storms all day yesterday and we’re supposed to have them all day today, so no beautiful sunsets probably.
I’m nearly done with Claiming the White Bear. It’s a year in the making, though I still need to write a couple of more scenes. I think that’s it, but I’ll have to make sure. The dogs are still here through tomorrow night. And I hope to have the book done by this weekend. And then? I’m off to work on the wolves in Silver Town!
Have a beautiful sunrise kind of day. I won’t be having that either as rainy as it’s been! But if I finish this book soon, it will be like a symphony of sunsets and sunrises all in one.
I am swamped with work, but there are some things I realize I’d neglected. My signature line! I just updated the book covers, though I need to update it again! But at least it’s not as outdated as it was. And I really need to update my website.
I was in a hot tub last night with a romantic polar bear shifter in Alaska. Okay, so not me, really. My heroine was. I was dog-sitting! All right? I’d rather have been in a hot tub with a sexy polar bear shifter.
Trying to get a shot of all four dogs looking at me and not blurring is a challenge with a phone.
I’ve got to start the process of taking them out again in shifts, feeding them, and taking them out in shifts. I’ve been putting off the inevitable while I get my blog written. We are going to have 100% rain today and tomorrow, which means lots of wet dog.
I’m off to get started on my day’s work, well, after I take care of the dogs. In the meantime, have a super, lovely day!!!
