This week, I have not been happy, just grateful to Bob who isn’t saying, “How long have you been writing?”I’ve screwed up so many things, not just the book, and I’m trying desperately to fix them and it’s a miracle this whole post isn’t one big scream. So you guys are going to have to bring the happy this week.
What made you happy this week?
I am done with winter, which is unfortunately not done with me. The only thing to do at this point is make cocoa and read a good book.
In other news, Martha Wells has a new Murderbot novel out on Nov. 14, 2023: System Collapse.
What good book(s) did you read this week?
We’re almost out of January, and we’re finally getting a grasp on the book. We ended up slicing and dicing what we had, moving scenes around to fix the pacing.
Now we’re having to fix all the discrepancies for time and cause and effect. Bob got more than half way through it and started to scream and sent it to me, and I’m trying to get the rest lined up, but it’s a lot better, and we’ve got a much better grasp on the plot although we won’t know for sure until the first draft is done. I am still driving Bob nuts with that two-spaces-after-a-period thing, but he’s coping.
What did you work on this week?
I’ve been reading a lot of romance lately, trying to keep up with the genre, but so much of it is banal, the same tropes used over and over, so when I find a good one, it makes me so happy. Same thing with film. Finding a story that can take you away for awhile is just bliss.
What makes you happy?
So Bob has the master and he’s telling me the scenes he’s adding (which is good) and then he tells me he’s put Rose in a scene when I had her asleep, and it was important that she sleep late.
I may have lost my cool a little bit. It was one of those man vs woman things. There was something about Bob asking me why she isn’t fixing him breakfast that set me off. Bob, as always was patient. And answered with zombies.
As he would say, “Sigh.”
Continue reading
I read a good romance last week, Helen Hoang’s The Heart Principle.
What did you read this week?
I had a work calamity that I still haven’t fixed: My laptop is stuck on a screen I’ve never seen before and can’t get out of. I tried for a couple of hours and then realized I was going to have to go to the mall to find a Genius Bar. And I didn’t want to go to the mall. So I had Apple overnight me a cheaper laptop as a backup (yes I am eating peanut butter for the rest of 2023 because I had to replace my iPhone, too), and I actually like it better. So I waited for the battery to run down on the old one–that takes forever on a Mac–to see if that cleared up the screen. Nope. I’m stuck with the Genius Bar.
But Bob and I got to 50,000 words on Rocky Start this week, so that was good. The week was not without disagreements–I want a Chinese restaurant in Rocky Start and he doesn’t–but we’re moving right along. See below for a brief look at how we’re doing.
Enough about me. What did you work on this week? Continue reading
I have had a miserable week, so I came to write this post and almost wrote “Happiness is an illusion,” which would not be good. And then I remembered why we started doing these posts, way back on ReFab, it was to celebrate the small things that got lost in the trauma of big things, to force us to remember, no matter how fleeting, those moments where everything fell into place, even if it all fell out again in the next moment. So I started to mine the past week for moments. And I got . . . Continue reading
The NYT recently headlined a column with “What Are Your Reading Goals for 2023?” and I thought, “People have reading goals?” I mean, sure the kind of goal that says, “I want to read the next Murderbot sequel,” or “When the next Rivers of London novel comes out, I think I’ll reread the whole series,” or “Whatever Loretta Chase publishes next, I’m in.” But the kind of reading goals where you say, “I want to read X books in 2023,” I don’t get. First of all, I don’t want to know how many books I’ve read because it shows how much time I spend sitting on my ass swiping through Kindle. I got a message from my laptop telling me that my screen time was down last week: Only nine hours a day. Yeah, the last thing I need to know is how many books I read, too. At that point, people could legitimately ask if I ever move.
Still it’s an interesting questions. Anybody here have reading goals, or are you just ripping through libraries and BookBub as fast as you can?
Oh, this week I liked Mhairi MacFarlane’s Mad About You. It’s closer to women’s fiction than romance, although it has a romance in it, but MacFarlane is just good, so she’s another one like Loretta Chase: If she publishes, I must take a bite.
What did you read this week? Was it part of a goal? Or did you just want to read a Good Book?
We’re finally far enough into January that all that end-of-the-year stuff is going away (What are YOUR resolutions for this year? To not make any resolutions, I have enough to feel guilty about already) and the after-Christmas sales are done. It’s 2023, let’s get to work. We’re settling into Rocky Start, regrouping for a new year and another three books. As Bob pointed out, the first one is the hardest because it sets everything up, which means we spend time trying to figure out people’s names, the settings (which basically are another character in our books), the weapons (Bob’s job), and the food (that would be me.) Our last negotiation was on the name of coffee shop/bakery next door to the heroine’s shop, which I had been calling the Coffee/Cake and which Bob had called something obscurely German. See below to see how that works.
Speaking of works, what did you work on this week?