Maniac Monday–so true

I figured if anyone can blog about Maniac Monday it is me. This year I have felt more than Mondays were that way. With school ending in a month, things are heating up at my day job as a teacher. But on top of that I have a book to write in two months! At this moment I’m asking myself: why did I do this to myself? Good question. Why do we push ourselves to do more and more in the same amount of time?

For me I’ve come to the conclusion I’m a workaholic. (Also, I’m a caramelaholic. For my birthday the other day, I had a hot caramel sundae instead of cake. Much more satisfying. But I digress. Back to the subject.) There is so much I want to do in life and only so many hours in a day. Wouldn’t it be nice it a day was say thirty hours long or I only needed a few hours of sleep a night to be refreshed? So when my publisher offered me a continuity, I couldn’t turn it down. Instead of writing the usual three books in a year, suddenly I was writing four.

It has been a challenge. One of the things I’ve had to give up is reading for pleasure. For a writer and lover of books, that is a sacrifice. I’m counting the days to summer. I hope I’ll be able to read for pleasure again, at least some. And when I go on vacation, I’m taking a stack of books and hanging out at the beach with them. I can’t wait. Nothing’s better than reading with the waves sounding in the background and the warm rays of the sun beating down. What do you have to give up when life gets crazy?

Margaret Daley
SO DARK THE NIGHT, Love Inspired Suspense, March 2007
ONCE UPON A FAMILY, Love Inspired, April 2007
VANISHED, Love Inspired Suspense, May 2007

More flowers

Since there’s no one signed up for today and Gail’s post inspired me, I’ll jump in to share more flowers–these are the flowers my agent sent me for making the USA Today bestseller list.

I was thrilled! Well, of course I was thrilled to make the list, but I was just as thrilled to get the flowers. No one ever sends me flowers, and these just made the whole experience seem more special and more real.

I was looking at them yesterday, admiring them, wishing I had someone to share them with. (I live in a family of men. They just don’t get the flowers thing. Food? Yes. A bouquet of cookies? My seventeen year old would have been all over those. But flowers? What are they good for?) And I was thinking how fleeting cut flowers are. By next week they’ll be gone.

So here they are, captured on…well, not film–in pixels, maybe?

I’m taking them as a reminder to take time to celebrate every accomplishment–from making a list to making the finals in a contest to finishing a manuscript or even a scene or a bit of dialogue. Take time to pull yourself out of the rat race once in a while, look around, smell the flowers, and just enjoy all you’ve accomplished.

And on that note, a big congratulations to all the PASIC members who just found out they made the finals of the National Readers’ Choice Awards. Way to go, ladies!!

Stopping to smell the flowers

For some reason, I thought I’d signed up to blog here on Tuesday of this week. Tuesday was my 31st wedding anniversary. It was also the day of the combined community- junior college choir concert, and I joined the community choir this spring. The community choir has six to eight members (depending on the weather and whether our tenor who works for the highway department has to be out on the highway to deal with flooding or tornados). The college choir has around 15 members. So every one of us had to be there, both for dress rehearsal on Monday and the concert on Tuesday.

Tuesday, I also had to drive the 60 miles into Amarillo to put money in the bank for our son at college. (There are banks in our little town–two of them–but none of them are also in Waco.) Baby has to pay his rent, you know. And then I had to drive home again in time for warm-up. I didn’t even think about computers or the Internet, much less blogging, until Wednesday. Fortunately, I hadn’t signed up, so I was safe. (whew!)

And I’m trying to revise a book I just finished writing. For some reason, just after I’ve finished something, my life is much less organized than it is when I’m driving for the finish line, heading frantically for the point where I can write: The End. Now that it’s done, I have to go back and look at the beginning again and figure out if the beginning matches the end, and if it gets lost anywhere in the middle and–well, lots of stuff.

But when I walked home from picking up the last couple of days’ worth of mail at the post office this afternoon (it’s only 3 blocks away–if you don’t count the swing around the park and baseball fields), I noticed the iris blooming in my front yard. I inspected each one of them and picked off the faded wads of old blossom. I pulled up the nasty thistly dandelion thing that isn’t a dandelion, but tries to fool you into thinking it is. (Should have pulled up a lot more of them, but the ground’s a little hard.) I stopped to smell the flowers. And I wanted to share them with you. I hope flowers are blooming where you are. Go take a whiff, okay?

Cherry Garcia vs. Chocolate Peanut Butter Swirl

I’ve been thinking quite a bit lately about how subjective taste is. What makes one person love something that another person has a hard time swallowing, let alone enjoying? The other night my husband and I sat down to watch a movie. After fifteen minutes he left the room to watch a hockey game on another television. I continued to watch the movie. It wasn’t the best movie I’d ever seen, but it wasn’t the worst, either. I found the character studies fascinating, even if the plot left a bit to be desired. And I enjoyed the movie enough to want to sit through it until the end to see how the conflicts were resolved.

Sometimes that happens to me with a book. I’ll continue reading one I don’t particularly love because I either a) find enough enjoyable about it that I want to finish it, b) am hoping it gets better, or c) am hoping that even though I figured out whodunit by chapter three, the author will prove me wrong and give me a totally different ending I didn’t see coming (and man, when that happens, I love it!)

But there are other times when I pick up a book and toss it aside after a chapter or two. Often it’s a book that has gotten rave reviews. Sometimes it’s even a book by an author I’ve read and enjoyed previously. When this happens, one of two reactions occur. I either a) wonder if there’s something wrong with me that I don’t get what everyone else sees in the book, or b) scratch my head, wondering why everyone else can’t see the flaws in plot and character that jump off the page at me.

Then there are times where I fall in love with a book and recommend it to friends, only to have them question my taste. Or worse yet, my sanity.

For many people peanut butter is the perfect food. For me it sets off my gag reflexes. I’m more a Cherry Garcia kind of girl. Taste. It’s one of the unsolved mysteries of the universe. Why do you suppose that is?

There Was a Time…

…when people didn’t have air conditioning and they used fans or slept on fire escapes or out in the open air.

…when we didn’t have cell phones, and there wasn’t a need to call someone as soon as we left the house and got into the car. All of a sudden, everything’s an emergency. What did people do before cell phones made instant contact a way of life?

…when there was no such thing as speed dialing. You had to put your finger in the little holes on the phone or on the little buttons and, oh my God, actually dial the number.

…when we didn’t have call waiting, and you weren’t rudely put on hold so that the person you were talking to could find out who was calling, and sometimes never get back to you. Man, talk about feeling insignificant. It used to be called a busy signal which meant the intruding party had to hang up and call back.

…when we didn’t have computers, and writers wrote on, gasp, typewriters, or, even bigger gasp, by longhand.

…when we didn’t have e-mail and people sat down and wrote letters or made phone calls.

…when you had to go to the library and take out books on the subject you were researching instead of hitting the search button.

…when you had to look at a map to get to where you were going instead of depending on Map Quest (which, by the way, isn’t always right).

…when you had to walk around the block for exercise and actually got somewhere, instead of hopping on the treadmill and going nowhere.

…when you had to heat up your leftovers on the stovetop or in the oven and they came out hot, instead of nuking them in the microwave and having them turn cold two seconds after coming out.

…when you had to get up and change the channels, forcing you to get some exercise, instead of sitting there in couch potato mode working that remote with death-defying speed while your butt gets wider with each passing year.

Now, I’m not suggesting that I could do without any of the above modern marvels. I’m a slave to the treadmill, and I rationalize that all the exercise I’m getting makes it okay for me to change channels from the couch. Air conditioning is a must, especially here in South Florida and when you’re waking up every hour with night sweats. The microwave is my best friend when I heat up frozen dinners. I got a cell phone to lower my phone bills (you gotta love those roll-over minutes). E-mail is a big part of my day job and comes in handy when I don’t want to speak with the co-workers I can’t stand. I frequent the library much less often these days since anything and everything I could possibly want to know, and even some things I never wanted to know, can be found on the Internet. Despite my disappointment in Map Quest which, instead of the directions pointing me west, sent me so far east that I literally hit the ocean, I’ll probably use it again. And my computer, well, I wouldn’t be posting this blog here now without it, would I? But I refuse, absolutely refuse, to get call waiting. I’ve got my limits.

I’m all for making life easier through technology, but I think we sacrifice something for all this speed, like peace of mind, serenity and a slower pace of life. Along with the technology comes increased stress levels and tons of frustration, like when the computer eats up all your files, e-mail is down, cell calls are dropped even though Cingular promises fewer dropped calls (yeah, right), a lightning strike here in the lightning capital of the world shorts out your air conditioner, you hit the up arrow on the treadmill instead of the down arrow and find yourself traveling at the speed of light, the TV, VCR and/or DVD remote stops working despite the addition of new batteries, and all that microwaved food you’re eating makes you wonder if your insides are glowing.

With these technologies come words with new meanings. Download, for example. I do it, but I hate it, always fearing I’ll do it wrong. Hard drive. It used to mean driving over potholes. Now, I don’t know exactly what this is, but I’ve had several of them. Worms. Sounds like something I would bring my dog to the vet for, but yuk, they’re in my computer. Browser. Isn’t this someone who just looks without buying? Server. Isn’t this the person who brings my food in a restaurant? RAM. Isn’t that the culprit who got the ewe pregnant? Byte. Something you used to take out of a doughnut. Now, with different spelling to dress it up, who knows?

Recently, I stopped watching the nightly news for one week, and lo and behold, my stress levels went down. I felt calmer, more peaceful. I don’t shut myself out of the world. I’m well aware of all that’s going on locally, nationally and internationally, but there’s a difference between being informed and being pummeled with it night after night. That’s how I feel about all this technology overload. I could live without some of these things, but could I “do” without them? Probably not.

What about you? Is there anything that you could do without that you feel would make your life simpler and better? (No, I’m not talking about your significant others. We’ll save that subject for another day.)

First Alert, um, Saturday

Well, since yesterday’s post didn’t post til this morning anyway and the weekend free for all seems rather free, I’ll post the alerts I technically should’ve posted in the last post (got that? I’m not sure I do.)

Next Sunday, April 29th, I will be signing copies of both The Model Man and Five O’Clock Shadow at the Los Angeles Times Book Fair on the UCLA campus in booth 355 near Royce Hall, for anyone planning to attend, there will be – assuming I can figure out how to create them, fast – free bookmarks too. And candy. Because everyone likes candy and I don’t have to make that.

Also, I was very pleased that my erotic romance novella, Rodeo Man in The Cowboy (Aphrodisia) finaled in the Passionate Plume.

Okay, NOW I think I’ve done what I was actually supposed to do.

Genie

FIVE O’CLOCK SHADOW – AVAILABLE NOW

The Body of your Work

I know that many writers say that their characters came alive in the course of writing them, that the characters even directed the story, took the plot or theme in a new direction.

But how many of you – writers and readers – feel that the story itself can become a living being – the plot of course is the spine of the work, the characters are the mind and heart, the theme its soul. And once the body of your work starts living and breathing on its own, it’s important to feed and clothe it – with your best possible prose. It’s important to introduce this new creature to the world – readers other than yourself.

Sometimes when we’re stuck on a scene, or an entire book, it helps to let this creature breathe on its own. The old saw of stepping away from your work, taking a walk, doing something physical, often does work to renew your ability to write. I like to think of it as pumping some air into the lungs of this book/being – until it’s ready to just take off running on its own. Or as is certainly sometimes the case with me, to take off crawling slowly in circles around kitchen floor and knocking into the cat bowls.

At any rate, I think books do come alive for readers, and that it’s not too far a stretch to say the stories are living, constantly mutating, growing “bodies of work” as writers shape them, too.

Genie

FIVE O’CLOCK SHADOW – Zebra – AVAILABLE NOW

Wow, what a month

After a miserable October (with $2,000 in insurance co-pays ) where I hit an 8-pt deer and had smoke damage to my house, April has roared in with a bang–in a good way.

I don’t think I’ve ever had a month quite like this. First, Nine Months’ Notice hit #9 on the Borders Group/Waldenbooks series best seller list for the week ending April 14. The book is also selling out Wal-Marts everywhere in my area–took 3 days for the store closest to me. I’m pinching myself, because this month seems surreal for I also made my 20th sale to Harlequin.

Twenty. I still can’t believe that either. In September 1999, I sold my first book as a result of an editor appointment at RWA national. Before the next convention, I’d sold book 2.

Speaking of sales, my 15th, 19th and 20th sale were Harlequin Special Releases: Stories Set in the World of NASCAR. This is a new venture for me, and one I’m thrilled about. It also represents a chance to step out of just writing for one line, which was one of my goals. To meet this goal and selling 20 could not have been done without everyone believing in me, even when I didn’t believe in myself.

So, since I’m long winded, let me get to the point (ah, you say, finally!):

In October 2000, I sat in a Waldenbooks signing my first book. It was a dream moment, and I looked around and felt this profound joy. But I knew that it was that type of joy that is fleeting. But I had it, for that one moment. A glimmer. The next month my then-husband lost his job, my mother had health issues, I learned I was going to have to give up my dream job, my dream house, etc. to move to Texas. Life went downhill fast. In 2001, I got divorced, survived a car accident that required a surgery in March 2002, and was hit again by a different driver in Dec. 2002. My dad also died. My teaching job was subject to budget cuts so I changed jobs over the next few years. I moved. I dealt with some personal issues involving my mother’s illness. I continued to write, for that is what I do.

Seven years later, the world is not what I pictured it would be. But it’s great. I love my current teaching job and I will be teaching all journalism classes next year. My writing career seems to be on an upswing. I’m in a new house that I love. I’m still single, but that’s because a certain race car driver hasn’t figured out that I’m his dream woman or even that I exist (had to throw that in).

But life is good. I’ve weathered tough times. I know there will be more. But blessings exist, for God has always been gracious and has always provided, both financially and emotionally. I’m surrounded by supportive people who love me. Thus, I’m grateful that this is simply, my life, complete with all its hills and valleys. I have discovered something beyond joy, beyond happiness that is fleeting, something that only comes through perseverance. I have discovered contentment.

Michele

Two books out this month

This is a big month for me. It Happened One Wedding, the second in my To Wed Or Not To Wed series is out this month. Also my women’s fiction debut, Another Life. Talk about exciting! So far it’s doing well. Some of the reviews are posted here:
http://romance-author-buzz.blogspot.com/search/label/Ann%20Roth

There was more excitement at the end of March. I spent four fabulous days in New York city for the PASIC writers’ conference. The Harlequin American offices are in Toronto, but the Silhouette offices are in the old Woolworth building on Broadway, just a few blocks from where the Twin Towers once stood. I’ve been there before, but went back for a tour and lunch with Mary Theresa Hussey, who is a great editor (not mine—I work with the amazing Kathleen Scheibling, who’s in Toronto) and a wonderful person. Best of all, she gave me my pick of books to bring home. Needless to say, my to be read pile is now humongous!

I visited the Kensington offices, too. They are far away from Silhouette, but just as impressive. John Scognamiglio , my editor, has a spotless office that puts mine to shame.

Publishing houses always astonish me. They are constantly acquiring manuscripts, editing, designing covers, doing PR and marketing, and a number of other things. Well-oiled machines, for sure.

New York itself amazes me with its fantastic museums and shows. While I was there, I saw three shows. Avenue Q, which is an irreverent, funny musical with a message to enjoy today because tomorrow things may change. The Pirate Queen is brand new and pure romance. I don’t know for how long it’ll be around, but I certainly enjoyed it. The Year of Magical Thinking is a serious play with only one actor—the amazing Vanessa Redgrave. Joan Didion wrote both the book and the screenplay and I truly enjoyed her beautiful writing.

During the day I enjoyed conference stuff—panels, talks and discussions—and loved all of it. I reconnected with friends I only see at conferences and forged a deeper friendship with my roommate, Ann Defee.

All in all, a wonderful experience. I wouldn’t trade a second of it. And yet… it’s great to be home again, sitting at the computer and creating stories.

Ann Roth
Another Life, April, 2007
It Happened One Wedding, April, 2007
www.annroth.net

In the News

I’m supposed to write about something I’m reading today, but the news beats out any book I have handy. Nothing like the freak Nor’easter we’re having to remind us of Mother Nature’s power. My house is on high ground, but other people are stranded in libraries because the causeway or bridge they take to their island home is washed out. Roads and parking lots are flooded and wide-spread power outages have the repair trucks working 24/7. On the lighter side, local people have taken the opportunity to view the ocean’s fury. Yes, the dh and I were among those driving to the truck down to see the waves crashing over the seawall at the public landing. Water surrounded the harbormaster’s office and a local restaurant.

On the other hand, spring also means rebirth. The Biodiversity Research Institute has a live eagle cam. The camera focuses on a bald eagle nest 70 feet up in a white pine tree on the coast of Maine. The pair of eagles has raised chicks in this nest for several years. At first, this spring’s odd weather seemed to threaten their success, but now observers have seen one fuzzy head appear above the nest and they’re hoping for two. This picture isn’t today’s shot, but one from last year. Today’s pictures show a storm-swept nest and fog. If you visit the site, you can contribute to the cause. Here’s the URL: http://www.briloon.org/watching-wildlife/eagle-cam.php