Another day of waiting

The middle-aged man sits on the edge of my desk, kicking his feet over the edge.

"Sorry, Gamnock. I meant to work on your post today, but instead, I had the inclination to spend three hours banging my head on my desk while trying to compose a query letter. Again. How a couple short paragraphs can manage to consume countless hours on many occasions, I'll never know." I shake my head and join him on the desktop -thankfully its a sturdy desk. "It's like query letters are blackholes of time and writing ability."

I can't help but notice Gamnock sending 'I'm watching you' looks to Xander who is sitting below on a stack of scribbled on paper. I also can't help but notice the distinct foot of distance between him and Ms. Wildstar beside him. Both are talking to the hands in their laps rather than looking at each other.

Ms. Wildstar also seems to be out of her armored suit and back into her frumpy teen clothing which does a much better job of hiding her lithe form.

It occurs to me, with a shudder, that I don't what to know what they were doing when Gamnock saw them under my desk or how Ms. Wildstar came to be minus the armored suit, nor where or when she changed back into her regular clothing. What I am happy to see, is that she has someone to talk to other than Zsmed, who only wanted to flirt or worse, or Delilah, who only wanted to talk about flirting or worse.

There's just something about Ms. Wildstar that makes me get all motherly and want to protect the girl. Maybe its just that I don't want to see her turn out all emotionally screwed up like Ms. MC.

"Whatever you said to them, thank you."

Gamnock nods. "Do I get my post soon?"

"Assuming I'm not spending my writing time working on query letter version fifty-six, I'll see what I can do."

It's monday...

and I meant to get a post ready over the weekend, but work and family happened instead of blog writing. Then I was going to work on a post this morning, but a critique I received last night inspired me to cross off one of those nagging projects from the list I posted last week.

So instead of a fun post, I can at least say I finished editing and cleaning up my short and got it submitted this morning. It is still morning right? Whew. I still techincally have five minutes of morning left.

Now I'm stuck dealing with this character pacing my desktop, looking none too happy with me for being bumped off his scheduled debut.

"Sorry, pal, life happens."

Gamnock crosses his arms and glares at me. "What about my life? Remember, the one you deleted?"

Great, another character with a grudge. "Why don't you go find Xander for me and make sure he and Ms. Wildstar aren't doing anything totally inapproriate under my desk?"

"Xander is here?" He leans over the desktop, then pops back up with a red face. "I think I need to go have a talk with the boy." He scrambles down from the desk and disapears into the shadows.

Busy busy

Thanks for all the great title advice everyone! I am busy brewing ideas. I'm also really busy in general so today's post is going to be a short update of what is occupying my writing schedule.

Book One is in the process of getting one last shine edit.

My brain is bleeding from pondering query letter and synopsis content that might be marginally better than what I already have come up with. Maybe.

The Sequel is coming along nicely... or it was until I discovered a huge section that I might have to toss because of the changes I made to the first chapters to make it mesh with all the changes I made in Book One during the countless major revisions I made after originally finishing it and writing the sequel's rough draft.

I recently discovered that tend to spawn really long sentences. I don't know when that happened. I'm usually a short, clipped and fragmented kinda girl. Honest. If you made it through that last one in one breath, find yourself some chocolate and pretend its from me.

The short story I've been working on needs to get fixed and submitted in the next two weeks.

I'm trying to avoid looking at Xander and Ms. Wildstar who are mollifying each other's teen angst with an uncomfortable amount of face sucking and deep throat exploration. "Really guys, take that somewhere else, would you?" I don't think they even heard me. Ugh.

Also in the works, another Victims of the Knife.

Titles

I'm having a heck of a time coming up with a title for this sequel I keep yammering about. This means the new novel is relegated to being referred to as 'the sequel'. Poor thing. It really does deserve a name of its own.

For me, titles either come to be during the concept stage or once I've finished the rough draft. This one is elusive. Maybe because I've got it in the back of my head that this title needs to relate to the first title, keeping in some sort of theme or matching type name - both single words, for instance. Book one's title fit so perfectly and the angels sang when it came to me. Is the sequel having performance anxiety?

Since I keep reading that titles often get changed by agents or publishers -- here I go being optimistic again -- I sometimes wonder if I shouldn't bang my head on the desk over the title quite so much. Yes, it will need one, but perhaps more of a placeholder effort will do at this stage.

If I could even come up with a placeholder.

How do you come up with titles? Where in the process does it come to you, and do you find it easy or hard?

The truth among the lies

And for those who got through my massive award post last week:

1. When I was in second grade, I all out punched a boy in the face. Hey, he deserved it. He cut in line. As the tallest girl in the class, I had bully issues, okay? Thankfully, after a week of having to stay after school everyday, I grew out of them. LIE: I hit him in the back because another boy dared me to, and I only got a scolding from the teacher.

2. Two years ago, I learned to knit. There are only so many practice scarves and mittens that I needed around the house, so I thought I'd dontate them to our local homeless shelter. When I brought my offerings in, the lady at the drop off counter refused them, saying that the quality was too poor. I was so embarrased. I haven't knitted anything since. COMPLETE LIE: I don't knit.

3. I used to manage a fast food restaurant, and in looking for some fun team building activities, I came up with the idea for a sleep over. In the restaurant. Me and eleven teenagers set up our sleeping bags and then stayed up late into the night, making all kinds of experiemental food from what was in the cooler. Well, until the cops came. They weren't happy about our being there at all and demanded to call the owner at 2am to verify that we had persmission to be there. I couldn't reach her - who answers their office number at 2am? I didn't have her home number! He took all our names, addresses and phone numbers and then threatened to arrest me if I we didn't all leave immediately. I spent the rest of the night driving a bunch of teenagers home. LIE: The cops did come but just shook their heads and wished me luck with all the teens after I explained what we were doing.

4. After a late night socializing at my sister-in-law's house, I was driving my family home when a car squealed through the intersection ahead of us. The carload of drunks managed to make a tight turn, narrowly missing a telephone pole, and swerved onto the road we were on. They came straight at as... for about five seconds. Then they proceeded to sweve across all five lines several times while they tried to regain control, careening off the curb on either side. I had no where safe to pull off an no way of knowing which lane to pick to avoid them. We collided. Thankfully they only clipped the back quarter of my car and no one was hurt. The cops carted the drunk driver and his friends off to jail. LIE: I managed to avoid them and I have no idea if they were drunk, but they sure drove like they were.

5. On the way home from the bar several years ago, I got pulled over. I rolled down the window. The cop immediately demanded that I hand over the drugs. He could smell them. There was no use hiding them. He would go easy on me if I cooperated. Umm, I didn't have any drugs. I've never done any drugs. However, the bar I'd just left smelled like a particular drug. A lot. And apparently so I did I. I tried to explain this to him, but he was having none of it, seemingly intent on making an arrest for the evening. He demanded to search my car. I let him. He demanded to search my purse. Sure. He searched me. Still nothing. Because nothing was there! He drove off one very aggravated and annoyed cop. TOTALLY TRUE

6. My natural hair color is blonde. LIE: though I did dye it blonde once... and then dyed it blue an hour later.