Monogamous Reading and Writing

I haven’t really blogged much about writing lately which is slightly ironic since the original purpose of my blog was to talk about writing.

The truth is, I haven’t actually been writing much lately. This is a combination of wanting to take a break. I wrote ten novels in 8 years and I felt like it’d be nice to take some time off. So I did.

Also, I finished my last novel in January and it’s taken a while to deal with that. Since I published The Reluctant Demon, I’ve had several people tell me that it wasn’t edited as well as it could have been and there were typos in it. This is slightly embarrassing, I admit. However, since I just found a couple of typos in the book I’m reading, A Storm of Swords by George R.R. Martin that’s currently in the top ten best selling books list at the moment, I don’t feel so bad.

However, with my sequel to The Reluctant Demon, I wanted to take more time to edit and make sure it was as polished as it could have been. This is one of my excuses for not having written much lately.

Editing takes time. I’m not a fan of it. My normal process is to finish a book, go back and edit and then leave it for a few weeks/months and then edit again. It’s hard to edit something when you’ve been staring at it. It’s also hard to edit something you know so well. I find that my eyes tend to miss a lot of typos or punctuation mistakes.

This time, I decided to have others help me with the editing. I enlisted the aid of a good friend who is a ‘grammar’ queen. She was very helpful but I did discover when I got the edited manuscript back that while she had found a lot of the typos and given me a lot of constructive criticism, she’d also missed quite a few errors. My assumption is that she got sidetracked by the story and didn’t catch everything.

I was still grateful because she found a lot more stuff than I had. Still, it meant I had to go through and re-edit. It was easier this time since I hadn’t read the book in a few months. I found a lot of typos, punctuation errors and even some continuity problems.

Still, I didn’t think it was quite ready so I decided to run it through a final filter, my friend Saz. She is one of those very organized writers who is excellent at punctuation and detail. I sent her the book. She was kind enough to read it and let me know of other errors/typos she’d found.

When I got it back, I made the changes and, finally, it felt like it was done. This whole process pretty much took from January through June.

During this time, I thought about writing something new. I’ve been percolating an idea in my head but I seriously don’t feel like it’s ready to write yet. Also, the idea of writing something while trying to get Emmy ready to publish just didn’t seem like a good idea. I’m one of those people who simply can only read one book at once. By that, I don’t mean that I’m holding a book in each hand and trying to read both books at the same time. I mean that if I’m reading one book, I don’t like putting it down and picking up something else until I’ve finished the first book.

I just don’t like to do it. I am a decidedly monogamous reader and if I read two books simultaneously, it feels almost like I’m ‘cheating’ on the other book. Weird, I know, but it’s true. Also, I like sitting down and getting absorbed in the fictional world behind the pages and if I’m reading a different book, I have to jump between worlds. I like to read one, get absorbed into that world until I’m done and then move on.

You get the idea. This is why I have the same mentality when it comes to writing. I can’t write two books at the same time. I need to focus my energy and passion on one book and then move on. I can sometimes work on other things like short stories but then again, I’m ok with reading a magazine and a book at the same time. They’re like apples and oranges.

So, since I intend to publish Emmy Goes to Hell, I didn’t feel comfortable starting something new until Emmy was off my plate and completely done.

Well, Emmy is finally done. It should be up for sale on Amazon.com in the next week as well as through online retailers. The last step is to get it up for e-readers like the Kindle and Nook. This is not as easy as it sounds as it involves rather a lot of formatting changes in order to be converted into the many and varied formats for each type of e-reader.

I’ll be glad to be done with Emmy. It was fun to write but I’m ready for something new and different. Once the e-reader version is available, I’ll finally be able to put the book aside and move on. It’s taken a while but I’m pleased with the result. It’ll be nice to get back to actual writing again rather than the nitty gritty of publishing. Of course, there’s the marketing but…well….that’s not the same. That’s not cheating on my new book.

So, aside from this being a blog about writing, it’s a shameless plug for Emmy Goes to Hell. Please buy my book. It’s quite funny, quite dark and, as always, just wee bit twisted. I like it more than The Reluctant Demon because there’s a little more to it. Neither book is ever going to be my magnum opus but I think they’re fun reads.

Now it’s done, I can move on and write something new. I’m not quite sure what that will be but it probably won’t involve demons this time around. I’ll keep you posted.

Thanks, as always for reading!

Happy Thursday!

Great Expectations of Mondays...

It’s been a dark and stormy day out there for most of today. It seemed quite fitting for a Monday morning, honestly although it did make it rather hard to get out of bed.

As any of my regular readers go, I don’t like Mondays much. In high school, I had an English teacher for the first two years who was a bit of an eccentric old lady. She used to pronounce “ego” as “eggo” and then whenever someone would mutter “leggo my eggo”, she used to laugh and think that it was a clever philosophical joke rather than quoting a waffle commercial. Anyway, she also had another saying she used fairly often. Whenever someone would complain about not liking Mondays, she’d say, “don’t blame Mondays. It’s not Monday’s fault it’s not a good day.”

She’s probably right. It’s just the misfortune of Monday to be…Monday. The way I look at it is that if the weekdays were represented as humans, I see them as siblings. Monday would be the anti-social sibling who was the runt of the litter and had a rather sour disposition. He probably also accidentally killed his mother while being born and thus, he has that chip on his shoulder to bear. Thus, it’s not really Monday’s fault he’s the way he is but…he could be nicer.

That was a little weird and yet another ‘too much information as to how Captain Monkeypants’ brain works’.

Nevertheless, I should try to not be so negative towards Mondays.

In this case, Monday came after a nice weekend. It was a busy one but fun. I think those make Mondays harder to bear because I didn’t have much down time and I would really prefer Monday to come a little later and be, say, Tuesday instead.

Still, if it’s the price we pay for having weekends, it’s a small one. A world without weekends would not be a good thing. Sometimes when I’m reading books about the olden days and I see that people used to work every day but the Sabbath, I feel guilty for whining so much. We really do have it easy now what with employment practices and guidelines that mandate rules for time off and permitted hours we can work.

It’s probably softened us up a little. We don’t do nearly as much manual labour as we used to and you no longer hear of kids leaving school to work in the fields at the age of 14 the way they used to in Thomas’ Hardy’s time.

Things have changed a lot since then. I think about that quite a lot too. Back in Jane Austin’s era, the ways people spent their free time was considerably different than how we do now. Back then, ladies would spend endless hours doing needlework and arranging flowers. They would read and ‘take a turn about the room’. They did not spend hours watching “Top Chef”, mowing the lawn, tiling floors or think about food all the time the way I do. I would have made a terrible lady back then because I can’t really sew very well and when I try, I end up pricking my fingers and bleeding quite a lot. I’ve tried flower arranging but, well, once they’re in the vase, they always look fine when I plop them in with no gaps. I don’t really know where the arranging comes in, honestly. I do think floral arrangements from florists look nice but I don’t have time to get those Styrofoam thingies that you stick the flowers in so they don’t flop around.

I suppose if you were an Austin-esque ‘lady of leisure’, you wouldn’t necessarily need to appreciate weekends. I mean, the whole point is to take a break from routine and have two days of leisure. If you spend all day at leisure, would they be the same?

I don’t know why I’m thinking of Thomas Hardy and Jane Austin, to be honest. I’m finding that, once more, I have gone off on a weird tangent. This is a fact for which I apologize. Maybe it’s because I referenced Mrs. Studebaker, my eccentric high school English teacher and my brain decided to honour her by thinking of literature. Of course, if that were the case, I’d be thinking more of Charles Dickens and Great Expectations which I remember vividly studying and reading in far too much detail. What stays with me from that book is the mouldy wedding cake from the lady who never got married. I think her name was Miss Havisham.

I wonder if Ms. Havisham was supposed to get married on a Monday. I bet she was.

Sorry, Mondays…I really must work harder to like you more. My apologies.

Happy Tuesday!

Mysterious Stairwalking Readers...

I like my new office building. It's completely different from my old one. For one thing, we don't have an exercise room, fancy popcorn maker or an optimistic bathroom. I don't miss any of those things. It's still quite nice to go to the bathroom and not be assaulted by bursts of cheeriness. I'm sure, in time, the memories of having to be wildly excited to be in the bathroom will fade but, in the meantime, we have a perfectly normal bathroom. It's nice also to go in there and see immediately whether a stall is occupied. In the Most Optimistic Bathroom in the World, there was always one person who didn't understand the concept of leaving the doors open a little when you excited a stall. If you closed the doors, this made any bathroom goer have to embarrassingly knock on the stall or say, "is anyone in there," before she could do her business.

Instead, my new building is a pretty generic office building with three floors, occupied by small businesses like ours. It's quiet. Every day, I see different people as I wait for the elevators. Sometimes I take the stairs but when I go in first thing in the morning, I tend to be a little lazier.

I quite enjoying seeing people in my office building whom I don't have to work with. It makes a nice change not to know everyone in a building.

I have started to recognize a few faces of people I see fairly regularly. There's this nice lady who seems to be on the same bathroom schedule as me. Whenever I go to do my business, she's either finishing up or going in as I leave.

There is a nice travelling opthamologist I've seen on Fridays. He has a lot of equipment on one of the wheely dolly thigs. Apparently, he travels to office buildings but primarily to nursing homes so the old folks don't have to go out to get their eyes checked. He's really nice.

Pretty much everyone I've met is nice or, at least, politely friendly. Sometimes I take the elevator just because it's a good way of seeing who works in my building.

On the occasions I do take the stairs, there is one woman I see almost all the times. Without fail, she is going down the stairs and she's reading a book.

It's not the same book. She literally reads as she's racing down the stairs. I'm not joking about the racing either. She moves pretty quickly considering she's reading.

I can't decide if she's impressive or pretentious. I love to read. There are times when I'm waiting for something and I wish I had a book with me. When I used to take lunch in California, I would always have a book to read at lunch. When it was an addictive book, I'd want to do nothing more than spend every spare moment reading.

Yet I never walked and read. I think I tried it once and I realized that given that I can't walk in a straight line when I'm not reading due to either a terribly lack of ability to walk in a straight line or that I get easily distracted and this causes me to walk crooked. Reading a book while walking was somewhat dangerous.

Thus, I would never think about reading as I'm racing down the stairs.

Because I'm nosy, I looked at what the woman was reading. It's been different books. They're the type that have bright pink covers usually associated with either trashy Danielle Steel type of fiction or a brighter shade that identifies chick lit. I can't make out the titles.

I'm impressed that she hasn't fallen and that she can manage to at least look like she's reading as she goes down the stairs. However, I find it a little excessive that she can't for one moment, put the book away. I get that she probably loves to read. I get that she likes to take breaks from her job when she can to sneak a quick read. If I was enjoying a book and I got 15 minute breaks, I'd certainly go somewhere away from my office and use the time to sneak in a quick read. However, I wouldn't read while I was getting to that somewhere away from my office.

I'm willing to give her the benefit of the doubt. Maybe she has a good reason. Maybe, for example, she's on a quest to break the Guinness Book of Records for most books read in a year and she hasn't a moment to lose. Or, maybe her husband/child/mother/dog is being held at gunpoint if she doesn't finish a stack of books in a certain timeframe. Maybe, even, she's testing out the safety of the building to see how likely it was that someone who wasn't paying attention could fall down the stairs.

Still, aside from the last reason, I can't fathom why she doesn't, at least, take the elevator. It'd be safer. She could read while she was going up or down and she'd have the added bonus of the pages not bouncing around while she moved quickly. Also, if she was worried about the time she had to wait for the elevator to arrive, it would simply mean more time to read without accidentally breaking her neck.

I suppose she takes the stairs for the exercise. Of course, at that, I can't wonder why maybe she doesn't get an exercise bike or treadmill at home because you can read while doing those two forms of activity.

Still, for all I know, she's worked there 20 years and she's been doing this for ages. Maybe she has the treads of the stairs worked out and that's how she can read and move down the staircase so rapidly.

I just find her a mystery. I suppose I could ask her but she moves so quickly and has such an air of "do NOT disturb me, I'm reading!" about her that I think maybe she should have been a librarian. (Not to stereotype librarians- my good friend Ms. P is one, as is my good friend, Cindy).

I'm sure I shall continue to see her and thus continue to wonder about her obvious addiction to reading. As a writer, it's nice to see someone that dedicated and voracious. As a fellow reader, I can't help but admire her dedication.

Yet, I admit, I'm also just slightly worried that she's so addicted to reading, she's putting her safety at stake on those stairs.

It's just one of those things that makes my building interesting. Who needs optimistic bathrooms when I've got Mysterious Stairwalking Reading Lady to observe?

Happy Thursday!

Oh, To Be Nine Again...

Today is one of those days where I have a million little ideas for things to blog about but mostly they're lost in the haze of my mind which is currently sluggish with sleeplessness and stressed about life.

It's during somewhat stressful times that I have a strange little yearning to be a kid again. Not a high-school type kid but back to about nine or ten. Life was so much simpler then. I was old enough to understand some things but blissfully ignorant of others. I probably have a completely different notion of how I was as a child to the way I really was but I suppose that's true of everything.

I was a reader, just as I am now. At that age, I think I was obsessed with Enid Blyton books. If you're not British, the name might not ring a bell but, trust me, she was the queen of children/young adult books at my age. She was a pre-J.K. Rowling if you take away the magic and just focus on life at Hogwarts. Of course, now, she's horribly dated but when you devoured books as quickly as I did at that age, you tended not to mind.

I know my mother used to want me to play with dolls. I really, really tried. I had the dolls. I had a pram. I had a tea-set. I'd get everything set up and I realized that I'd much sooner drink the tea myself and read a book than try to pretend my stupid dolls were talking. Which is ironic, given that I like my imagination and still use it as much as possible. I just didn't get dolls. They didn't do anything. Well, ok, so I had one that you could give a bottle and it would pee. At the time, I thought that was actually pretty cool. Now I wonder what possessed me to think a doll peeing was cool. Maybe it's because I've held babies and they've peed on me. When you have baby-pee on you, you tend to realize that it's not cool. It's actually a bit vile, actually. Fortunately, I've liked all the babies that have peed on me so I didn't drop them in disgust and say "EWW! GET IT AWAY!". Not that I didn't think about it.

Now, my brother and I did have these cool bath toys that my relatives from Germany brought us. They were little boys that were standing up holding their you-know-whats. When you filled them with water and squeezed them, they would send shoots of pee at one another. When you're a kid, that really is one of the funniest things ever. I'm sure my mother got tired of us. We tended not to care where the water streams actually went.

It's amazing how easily amused you are as a child. Then again, being totally honest, if I had one of those peeing boy dolls, I'd probably still think it was one of the funniest things ever.

Yet aside from the peeing dolls, I just never really understood what to do with them. The dolls were never forced on me; I actually used to ask for them for Christmas. Then when I got them, I would change their clothes and bath them and then...that was it. There were times when I'd beg to take my dolls in their pushchair or pram up the road to the shops with us when my mother would go. She'd sigh and let me knowing full well that she'd get stuck pushing the dolls pram/pushchair home because I'd be bored of it. My mother was very good to me and let me do it anyway.

Truthfully, all I ever really wanted to do was curl up with a book when I could. I was an active little kid, enrolled in all kinds of activities like ballet, brownies, gymnastics and country-dancing. Yet I still managed to be an avid reader, pulling out a book whenever there was a lull in the world around me. I could escape into the books, become part of the world, feverishly tearing through each word to get to the next.

Nowadays, I still like to do that. It's just harder. My fellow writer, Samantha Elliot, wrote a blog last week called "Embracing How I used to Be" in which she, too wondered why it was harder to find time to read, how her priorities had changed over time.

Truth be told, I wonder that too, sometimes. To escape into a book these days is more of a luxury than a necessity, the way it seemed to be back then. I find time but there's always something else to do, something that calls louder. I have more responsibilities, more awareness of the fact that while I want to be reading, there are other things I have to do. Yet, when I look at it, do I really have to do them? Can't I just say "phooey on it!" and read anyway?

I can. Occasionally, I do. Sometimes the appeal of a book is so strong, it allows me to ignore the world around me for a while. Sometimes, when life gets too stressful, the pull of a book allows me to escape and ignore life for a while and, for the most part, I emerge from my reading session feeling better, realizing that nothing is ever as bad as it seems. Sometimes it takes a visit to another world, another person's life to realize that the black cloud of stress and anxiety is really just a series of small events and if I take each one at a time, I'll look back and wonder what I was so worried about when it's all passed.

Yet it doesn't stop me from looking back and wishing I was nine again somedays. Give me a Cherry Coke and an Enid Blyton book and I'd be perfectly happy. I might even attempt to play with dolls again. You never know, maybe I'd like them this time.

Though I doubt it.

Happy Wednesday.

A Frigid Friday Morn'

Have I mentioned that it's cold outside? I thought so. Let's just say that when I drove to work this morning, the temperature display on my car said it was minus nine degrees. That's without the wind chill. That is so cold that there is no way to stop ice forming on the inside of your windows, no matter how well insulated you are. It's so cold that if you leave your hands outside of your pockets, they ache in a matter of seconds with the cold.

It's lovely to be inside at the moment, that's all I can really say. It's nice to look outside and know it's that cold and wrap your hands around a cup of coffee, even the vile office coffee that I'm currently drinking. It's not that vile at the moment but it's the first pot. It only increases in vileness as the day goes on. Yet I continue to drink it because it's coffee and on a day like to day, coffee helps the world not freeze.

I think I had a topic for today's blog but I can't actually remember it momentarily. I'm having a little trouble publishing because I now have two blogs- one for TV and this one. I love my TV blog but I don't update it daily. I keep accidentally posting my TV blog here. I've moved both of the newest entries over to the TV blog but they may show up here for a little while, at least. My apologies for any confusion.

All I can say at the moment is that I am glad it's Friday. Tomorrow morning, I don't have to set my alarm. I can bask in the warmth of my down comforter and the extra warm blanket I threw on top so that I could turn the heat down without freezing. I can lie in bed and read. That is one of my favourite easy luxuries. There is nothing better than curling up with a good book and reading in bed. I don't do it as often as I'd like which is probably why I appreciate it so much. The only other runner up is reading in the bath with a nice glass of wine. The problem with that is, naturally, there's danger of getting the book wet, the water inevitably gets cold and unless you've got a great bath pillow, it can be hard on your neck.

I love reading. I think I've mentioned that. I will give anything a chance. Of course, if I don't like a book or author, I'll have a rant but for the most part, I tend to like any good fiction. I'll read lighter fiction- Marian Keyes is one of the best for that. She's mistakenly called "Chick Lit" a term that is starting to grate on my nerves. Yet she writes fiction that manages to wrap itself around the realities of life, treat it wryly and make you care about her characters. She's one of my favourites.

Yet I'll also read not-so-light stuff. One of my favourite all-time books is Wally Lamb's I Know This Much is True. That's one of the greatest books ever. It's heartbreaking, brilliant, poignant and believable all at the same time. My mother just got his new book, The Hour I First Believed which I really want to read but, as mum said, it's heavy stuff and drains you to read it even though it's excellent. I like some of the classics which I will read for fun now that I'm no longer in English classes and forced to analyze the symbolism of a tree or a fish or something. One of my favourites is Dante's Inferno though I don't read it too often. I love to read it for the language, the poetry of such a dark subject. I'm also a Jane Austen fan because I love her witty humour disguised as social grace.

At the moment, I'm reading The Baker's Apprentice by Judith Hendricks. It's a pretty easy read and the sequel to her other novel, Bread Alone. She's a good writer. I forget I'm reading a book and I feel like I'm observing someone's life. That's the mark of a good author to me, someone who can make me forget where I am.

Aside from being lazy and sleeping, I have to clean, as I mentioned. If it warms up, I may venture out but part of me just wants to stay local, to be able to semi-hibernate in the warmth of my apartment and enjoy the glittery ice-topped snow that lies outside the window. Of course, next week, it's supposed to get up to 37 degrees. Heatwave! You L.A. folks can mock all you want. It's pretty....from the inside.

Yet, at the moment, 37 degrees is still something to look forward to. Compared to now, it will feel balmy, I'm sure. Not exactly going-to-the-pool or laying-out weather but it means you can walk without your cheeks being frozen to your face or your ears feeling like they've been slammed by a pack of frozen peas. I can't wait.

Have a great weekend!