Author: Jonathon

By 4:30 this afternoon I had done 17 pages. Yea! Since Jon’s Mom, Mary, takes Trinity to dance lessons I was able to reward myself for finishing the work day early. How? a long, relaxing bath. Gotta love the jacuzzi tub. I finished a Nero Wolfe mystery that I’d been reading, PLEASE PASS THE GUILT. Though I know myself too well to believe I can just relax for too long, so I have a large sticky pad wrapped in water proof stuff with a pen on the reading tray. Just in case the muse strikes, I don’t have to get out and drip water all over everything. With books and paper so near water, a small towel or dry wash rag is your friend. Otherwise you smear your notes and ruin your books. One of the few downsides to one of my favorite ways to relax.
Jon just got back from the airport with our friend Greg. Whom I haven’t seen in awhile, so I’m going downstairs to visit.

It’s just a little before 10:30, and I’ve got eleven pages for the day. Two hours for eleven pages. Four, or more hours earlier today, and I got a page. One page. This kind of thing is one of the reasons it’s so hard to figure out how many days it will take to do a book. It just isn’t always logical. No tab a’ into slot b’, then turn to page three of the instruction manual. It just doesn’t work like that. But I get to go to bed now. Yea!

The first blog ended up being way too personal, so I?ve saved it, doubt you?ll ever see it. I know the trend in this country right now is to tell everyone everything about yourself. If that?s what you want to do, fine, but as for me, somethings are private. Somethings are just yours, you don?t have to share them, and some things just shouldn?t be shared, because no matter how understanding the listener is, they will never understand how precious, or how painful, the topic is. Ah, well.
Why so glum? Well, I?m working at nearly 8:30 on a Sunday. Seems like the work should be done by now, or should be able to wait until Monday. I did a page today. I owe myself four more. I may not get them, but I?m going to try. The only true failure is never to try.
Admittedly I have taken time off today. Jonathon and I had lovely morning. It?s a kid free weekend so we took advantage of it. Though, the movie that we and our friend Richard saw tonight was very kid friendly. We saw the Incrediblies. It was wonderful. We all sat in our chairs as the credits rolled and talked about seeing it again. I can?t remember the last movie I watched that I wanted to see a second time before the credits stopped rolling. Trintiy had seen the movie with her father, and hadn?t been as impressed. She said, she got a headache during it. Turned out she was getting sick, lost a day and half of school. We?ll see if she wants to give it another try later on.
The Incrediblies is a good family film, though maybe a little intense for toddlers. You know your toddler better than I do. Trinity would have been fine with it at two or three. Great date movie. Fun, upbeat, very feel good. You?d come out of the movie feeling like you had things to talk about and the evening was still young. For those of us who are dating your spouses, someone who had been married awhile helped write, or inspire parts of this film. You will get the jokes that the singles will not get. I don?t want to give anything away, but you?ll know the scenes I mean when you see it. Some of the best real kid lines I?ve heard in awhile came out of these super kids mouths. Funny how a dose of fantasy can free you to be more ?real? sometimes.
So it?s not like I slaved all day, and only got a page. I just quite earlier so I could go play. But if you play earlier in the day, you work later. Play now, pay later. But I?m glad that I played. My mood needed a lift. I?m wearing one of my new favorite t-shirts, bright red lettering, ?If I wanted your opinion, I?d read your intrails.? Gotta love it.
Breaking Benjamin?s WE?RE NOT ALONE album is on the player. Pipin is sitting in my lap, yes the fifty pound puppy , is in my lap. Jonathon?s got pictures of it, though I don?t think they?re up on the blog yet. Pipin has now let me know that I?m being too sedatary for him, he?s at the door asking me to use my oposable thumb to let him go down and play with the other dogs. They are keeping Jonathon and Richard company downstairs while they do something with the specila HALO 2 disc. I?ll let him go, so I can stop having to police him and concentrate on the typing. Busy, busy puppy.

You know how some compainies have causual Friday. Since we are pretty causual everyday, I suggested that we have dress up Fridays. Darla and Jon whined, and gave me that look, so I dropped the idea, for now. But you know me, once an idea enters my head, it sits there until I find something to do with it, so . . . TODAY IS THE FIRST EVER EVIL FRIDAY. How does it work? Wear a shirt with the word EVIL on it, or a scary phrase. The idea came to me while Darla was showing me some shirts on the Pegasus Publishing site. We ended up buying shirts for all the full time employees, yes all three of us. Shirts read, ?Knowledge is power. Power corrupts. Study hard. Be evil.? Too fun to pass up, so for the first official evil Friday we have matching shirts. If you want to play along next time we have an evil Friday, we?ll let you know ahead of time. If you work in a corporate work enviroment that doesn?t allow t-shirts with slogans may I suggest a Halloween tie or pin, or a district lapel pin with a frightening theme. Or, heck, just dress all in black and look scary, attitude counts. For those of you who dress scary everyday, try throwing everyone, dress all in white, or pastel. Trust me, if your co-workers are used to seeing you dressing Goth and you suddenly show up looking like Sweet Mary Sunshine, they will be afraid, very afraid. People are always weirded out by their co-workers acting too far out of character. Squeak the mundanes, play good for a day. For those of you who dress mundane everyday but work with a Goth co-worker, nothing would weird them out more than you coming to work dressed like them. Have fun, be scary.
Evil Friday, just another way to make the work place a happier place to be.

Doing this one in word again, so Jonathon can put it up later. Blogger has been eating too many of my posts of late. Is anyone else having this much trouble with it? Or is it just some special torment for me?
Did six pages yesterday, but still the goal for the day is five, only five. I did the eight early in the day actually, then had to stop not because I was tired but because I wasn?t sure how to handle the next part. We?re finally going to get some serious clues to the mystery and I just wasn?t sure how to do it. All roads lead to the same desitnation, but getting there I had about three different choices. Which way to go? I can?t give you any more details than that, we?re over half way and this would be a serious spoiler. So sorry, but I have to be vauge. Sometine later in the evening I finally solidified what we?d be doing. Who?s going into a cell, and under what suspcion. I will tell you that Merry presauded the Queen to let her bring in the human police with a Crime Scene Unit, it?s CSU out in my neck of the woods, not CSI. The police are having a few problems with the fact that any evidence they give to Merry and her guards won?t be used for trial. There aren?t really any trials in fairie. No, the evidence will be used as a reason to torture then execute someone. The Medical Examiner, and the techs aren?t really comfortable with that. I mean if you find a print and the person might end up on death row you don?t want a print to have just four matches, you want to err on the side of caution and make it ten. If it?s torture and the chopping block, the forensic people are seriously wanting all the prints to be ten pointers, or better. If you knew that a print you gathered could get someone executed that same night, wouldn?t you want the match to be perfect. I know I would.
Plumbers are here again, not the same plumber that made the mistake that flooded the basement. He was nice and admitted it was his fault, but I?d just as soon avoid another mess. New plumber here to romove a stack in the basement that was going bad. We?re removing the bathroom down in the basement, and turning it into a cedar closet. First off the bathroom down there never worked exactly right. Second, who in God?s green earth needs five full baths? Unless you?ve got that big a family, and thankfully, we don?t. But we do have a lot of clothes we wear for tour and for special occassions, but not everyday, and they are eating our closet space up. But I just heard him tell Sherry, our CDO, Chief of Domestic Operations, that in two hours the water and the plumbing will be off. Fun. And if you can?t hear the sarcasm in that last word you aren?t listening hard enough.

I am writing this in a windows document so Jonathon can transfer it, because my long blog was eaten, except for the title. God, I hate technology when it doesn’t work. You’ll get a shorter less breezy blog because I’m frustrated now, but here goes.
I walked into the office and had a tremendous feeling of dejavu. Hadn’t I just done this? Well, yes, as a matter of fact, I had. I owend myself a page of my five count after dinner last night. So up I went, though frankly I was tired and discouraged. All day and not even the five page minimum. At 10:30 that night I was finished. No, it did not take me four hours to do a page, thank Goddess. It took me four hours to do twenty pages. Yea!
But as often happens when I’ve had a late and productive night when I hit the office first thing in the morning it feels like I just finished and now its all to do again. But that’s okay, because I’m making progress. I’m finally back to the main outline. Though some of the stuff that I did last night were things set up in book one of Merry, A KISS OF SHADOWS. So cool to finally be getting to it. Also, one reason I’m not discouraged is that I only have to do five pages today. That’s it, just five. I can do that. If this were an Anita book I might have hit a stride of twenty pages a day for a week, or two, or for the rest of the book, but that’s Anita. It’s like having two very different children, the method that works with one, doesn’t work at all with the other.
By the way, we solved the mystery of why three different heat sources couldn’t keep the poor crabs warm. Someone had opened the window directly behind the tank. Just a crack so it wasn’t visible at a glance, but when we had a few days in a row of forty degree nights, the crack was enough. The window is hard to shut and latch, but . . . well, anyway the mystery is solved. Poor crabs. We set Trinity up a five gallon aquarium, and let it set empty until it had a couple of days of seeing what the temperature range on it was, I mean it was probably the window being open, but just in case, we wanted to be sure. The temperature remained a degree or two, no greater fluxation. So last night we bought guppies, all boys. Pretty colors and tails, and we won’ be overrun with baby fish. The tank is lovely, and if you would have asked me if the purple and red gravel would have matched the pink wavy plant, or the green-tailed mermaid, or the green and gold pagada, I’d have said, no. But it’s beautiful, and all the colors work well together like a bank of wild flowers in the summer sun. Colors that only nature would think could match but work beautifully. I’m glad I let Trinity pick her stuff out, and didn’t inflict my views on her. Though it took will power on my part to not do it. Now I’ll alert Jonathon, and he’ll post this, hopefully anyway. Either way I know it’s saved, and we can try again later.

Goal was to hit the to do list hard today. So I finished up an interview before breakfast. Had breakfast, though our trainer will yell at us for it not being enough food. If you don’t eat enough food, and good food, while you’re trying to do a heavy exercise routine, your body will hold onto the weight, because it feels like it’s starving. My idea of morning food is brunch around ten o’clock. Sigh.
I’m listening to A YEAR WITH FROG AND TOAD, which is my Christmas music for this book. The fact that A YEAR WITH FROG AND TOAD, meets the same need means that the Christmas music is something that just makes me feel good on a day when I don’t feel like writing, or working, or being at my desk before ten. Morning is so not my prime work time. But with exercise, an elementary age child, dogs, and workmen coming and going, I just don’t have the luxury of not using my morning productively. Come to think of it, I haven’t had that luxury since before Trinity was born. Anyone who thinks that having a child won’t change their lifestyle much just doesn’t understand what they are getting into. And even those of us who do research it, don’t really understand. It’s such an all consuming experience, especially the first few years.
My musical for A STROKE OF MIDNIGHT is JEKYLL AND HYDE, two different productions and casts. I haven’t listened to it in weeks, why? Because I’m either feeling very low, or fine about the writing. So it’s FROG AND TOAD, or Breaking Benjamin’s SATURATE. Though I may try to bounce back to Thornley’s COME AGAIN, OR Three Day’s Grace’s THREE DAYS GRACE.
I still have one more interview that’s due today, and pages, oh, that’s right, pages. A book to write. Just five pages, if I can just do five pages then I’m done for the day. I’ve actually done eight pages two of the last four days, but whereas with Anita I can do eight pages as my minimum, Merry just seemes to tire me out sooner. Five pages a day, doesn’t feel like punishment. I actually woke today with the book in my head, and didn’t feel discouraged. It looks like Galen may actually get another on screen scene. Maybe. My outlines are always fluid, and subject to change, or character whim. Alright, character fit. Galen isn’t throwing a fit, Merry’s just realizing that if we do get pregnant that we’re going to loose some of these people, and she’s already starting to mourn the loss. She’s also worrying about some of the new men. Even the ones we don’t dislike, would you really want to be married to them? A weekend, or even a decadent month, but a lifetime? That’s a very different shopping list when you’re looking at men.
But for today I only have to talk to Rhys and the police via what I’m beginning to call ‘sword phone’. We have to clean up another assassination attempt, but we caught some of these guys. Prisoners to question. Then we will be summoned to the queen. Got the notes for that scene nearly complete, just type them off the stack of sticky notes. If I get through all that today, I’ll be doing really well, because that’s a lot more than five pages, more like ten, or even fifteen. Maybe even twenty depending on how much business we do with the queen. I mean somewhere in here Sholto needs to make his reappearance. That’s not a short conversation. Gotta go see how much of this I can get done today. I wish I could type as fast as I could think.

There are two main methods that writers choose for deciding how to measure their productivity on a book. One, is page count, how many pages you can do per day. Two, is at this time of day you sit down and you can’t get up again for two hours, or four hours, or whatever. Or a variant of method two, is whatever time you sit down at your desk you work for two hours, and until two hours are up, you cannot leave your desk.
Yesterday was a day that reminded me why I’ve always done page count and never hours at the desk. First, as far as getting to my desk at the same hour every day; I wish. Elementary age child, four dogs; that alone is enough to wreck a rigid schedule. Add to that a major construction project, two book series, which means two sets of publishers and editors to talk to, foreign rights questions, friends that you do occasionally want to at least say, hi, too, family obligations, and even with Darla fielding a lot of the businessy stuff, and Jonathon fielding almost all the construction stuff, there are still decisions that I have to be unvolved in. Jonathon also does his share of the businessy stuff, and keeping the computer network up and running. The cable company finally replaced some of the outdated cables near us, and most of our problems seem to have been fixed. Some stuff can simply not be fixed in house no matter how good your I.T. staff is, not if the main cable we’re trying to run the internet off of isn’t working right. So much going on, flexibility is not just necessary, it’s vital.
Second, about that whole work for two, or four hours, and can’t leave the desk . . . What if my muse is singing sweetly in my ear, and I get ten pages done in two hours, and I’m wiped for the day. I’ve done a goodly amount and my energy is gone. But I always work for four hours at a shot. The hour watcher is stuck at their desk for two more hours, even though they will most likely get nothing productive done in that time.
Third point, about the difference between hour and page count is this: it took me from early morning, around nine or so, maybe a little earlier, to 5:30 that evening to get five pages done. They were good pages, but it was over eight hours to get them. If I was an hour watcher, I’d have quite after only four hours, and I would have had crap for the day. I find that on the days when the writing is slow, that most of the keeper pages are done very late in the process, the last few hours, not the first few. So if I was wedded to an hourly schedule I would have had nothing, or maybe a page, to show for my efforts.
A fourth point in the page count favor, is that on some days the muses are singing sweet songs, and the writing gushes forth like water out of the proverbial cleft rock. I can do five pages in an hour, and I can be done for the day. Now admittedly if the writing is going that well, I don’t usually stop. Those are the days when I may be able to do twenty pages, but if my life is busy and I have to stop, I still have my five page minimum for the day. I have done my days work and can go off with a clear conscience.
Having written all that. I can say that I know a half dozen writers that don’t do either of these methods, or that do a combination of the two. I know when I wrote my very first book, NIGHTSEER, that I had only two hours in the morning before my full time job. So that’s what the writing got, those two hours. In those two hours my goal was two pages. Two pages in two hours at least five days a week. The most important thing for those of you who are serious about this odd job of writing, is a schedule of some kind. Almost any schedule is better than no schedule. Now I’m going to go check on my kiddo in her bath. Yes, she’s big enough to bath herself, but those of us with a morbid fear of water have issues. Okay. Down to get fresh tea, gather up the herd of dogs, and make pages of my own.

Jonathon is running a diagnostic on my other computer. It was doing things last night that puzzled both of us. I’m accustomed to being puzzled by technology, but when Jonathon is puzzled, something is up. He tells me that the computer is overdue for a day in the shop. Jonathon explained it like taking a car into the shop to get the oil changed. Not because something is wrong in particular, but to prevent bad things from happening. I’m all for that. Lucky I have more than one computer. Though, truthfully, I’ve been trading back and forth pretty freely from the main desk to the small desk. It’s like I work at one until anxiety, or just a screaming need for a new view drives me to the other desk.
Music for the last few days has been mostly the musical 1776, both the new version with Brent Spiner, and the original Broadway version from the 1970s. I would be more than happy to say who stares in the Original version, but the disc is up here without it’s case, and if I go looking for the case and the cast I will never get this posted. My apologies to the wonderful actor who portrays John Adams in the original.
Yes, a musical, so the book is not going as well as I would like, but at least I’m not listening to Christmas music. So it hasn’t come to a completely tragic pass, at least not yet.
Jonathon and I calculated that if I do five pages a day, every day, until the end of January that the book will be finished. Five pages a day. I can do that. Five, not twenty. It’s doable. Though, truthfully, I’m going to try and get ten pages today, so I can take Saturday off. Trinity is with us this weekend, and we’re going to a rock and mineral show. If there is time we’re going to try setting up a small tank of fish for her. The hermit crabs are gone the way of all things invertebrate. They died of different causes. Some died from too much humidity. But the frustrating thing was that with three heat sources in the cage the temperature would not rise to a level that they could thrive at. We’ve found a better crab book, that frankly, gives very different advice from the last book we had, but then look what happened with the last book. I’m not saying we’ll ever get crabs again, but if we do, we’ll get the cage set it up (no crabs, just cage), and keep trying heat set-ups until we get one that will work. I had similar problems when I tried keeping a bearded dragon in my office, which shares a wall with Trinity’s room. For some reason the temperature in these two rooms is colder than most of the rest of the house. Yes, it is probably something to do with the heating system and how it circulates, but we’ve had it looked at it, and the problem remains. The bearded dragon did not die. It hibernated, for four months. Finally, I took her back to the breeder I got her from, because a sleeping lizard just isn’t that interesting, and I was afraid there was something wrong. The breeder was thrilled to have her back, and thrilled that she’d been hibernating, because that meant he had a female that would be off schedule from his others and he could have eggs during the slow season, or something like that. He said she was healthy, a good weight, and lovely. Good to know. But until we can get a tank or cage to the right temperature no animals go into the tanks. We’ll put the fish tank up this weekend, I hope, and let it get warm, then season it with a small number of fish. Part of the problem with the crabs was being too enthusiastic too quickly. But the first two were doing so well, ah, but it was summer. Once the temperature started to drop, well . . . And the location was wrong, and . . . Trinity was most distraught that they all passed away.
We have two new aquarium books, one Aquarium for Dummies. I really like the dummy line of books, and the idiot’s guide to things. I have the Idiot’s Guide to Amazing Sex as one of the books in the closet of research books you’re too young to know about.
Gotta go make a few more pages before lunch.

This is a test to see if we can actually post to the blog.