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I had one the other night that still lingers. This one was more bittersweet than funny (like the cows at the high school).

Just before I left town to go stay with my daughter and babysit for two weeks, my cousin Scott died. He was the first of our generation to leave us, and he was only four months older than me. That year was the only year that my mother and all three of her sisters had a baby. Scott was the last child of the oldest sister, and I’m the first child of the youngest sister. Paul’s a month older than me, and David is two weeks younger. (My mamaw told Mama they’d better never do that to her again. She was exhausted, helping with all those babies.)

Scott in 2004 at family Thanksgiving gathering

I hadn’t seen Scott in a while–not since our aunt’s funeral in Waco a year and a half ago. (Now only the oldest and youngest sisters are left of the four sisters.) I could have delayed my trip to go to the funeral–Mama wanted to go and couldn’t drive herself–but I decided it would have delayed it too much. My daughter needed me, and my brother and brother-in-law had already volunteered to take Mama. And I was okay with that decision.

So, the dream. I don’t remember when exactly it was–either just before or just after I got home. But I dreamed that Scott, David, Paul’s baby brother Matt and I were in Colorado working on a house. It wasn’t any of the houses where we met and played when we were growing up, but it belonged to the family somehow, and I’ve dreamed about this house before. We all looked like I remember us looking years ago–just out of college, maybe. Scott and I both had dark hair (we are the grayest of all the multitude of cousins), and we were all skinny.

In the dream, after working for a while, we all sat down at the kitchen table to have a soda and rest and visit. And I remember thinking, “But Scott’s dead, isn’t he?” and looking closely at him to see if it might be one of his brothers. But no, it was Scott all right. And then I wondered why Matt was there, instead of Paul–since Paul was the one born the same year as the rest of us. Never have figured that one out. But in my dream, I got a hug from Scott. A long, strong, big cousinly bear hug.

Now, maybe it was just my mind deciding I needed to work things out, but I like to think that Scott decided to drop in to say goodbye.

I’m up visiting the daughter, helping out with the chilluns while she tries to get her PhD finished. I’m filling in for the nanny until she comes back from having her new baby. (I don’t know if the baby will come too or not.) and baby grandgirl is now 1 year old and wants to help me. I have to keep her from typing with her feet, standing on the table, falling off the bench, and putting her apple in the crayon box. She’s absolutely adorable.

I’m having adventures in driving in Pittsburgh again, too. I dropped my daughter off at Carnegie Mellon so she could go to her seminar and I could come back home to meet the grandboy from the bus and take him to his social skills therapy. I got lost before I got off the CMU campus. But the daughter was available by cellphone and got me straightened out and where I needed to be. We even made it out to therapy without mishap.

Then came home to discover that the dog ate a whole bag (less about 6 kisses) of dark chocolate kiusses, foil and all. She’s a medium sized dog (the one in front, in the picture–the other is her cousin dog who came to visit) so maybe it won’t be too big a dose.

And yet, I am still writing, believe it or not. I’m not getting a whole lot done at a time, and when I can’t turn on the heater (we can’t run the heater in my room and baby girl’s room at the same time or it will blow a breaker), I can’t write, because it’s cold enough for this Southern wuss with no cold tolerance that I just get under the covers and go to sleep. But I am writing.

Okay, time to go pick up the boy and then go get his mama and then go get some supper. Y’all take care. And wish me luck. I do not want to get lost again.

Okay, this was back in September, but it’s not a whole lot different now.

Okay, trying to get back into the habit.

I’m trying to get back into lots of habits. The habit of writing every day. The habit of walking nearly every day. All those other daily things that need to be done–and I’d rather write than –oh, dust or wash mirrors. Than wash pretty much anything. (Hmm, reminds me–I need to wash knives.)

I have been in a non-writing, non-reading, non-pretty-much-everything mood for a while now. Not sure why. But I went to Valley Mills for a writing weekend with three friends, and found the writing-is-fun mindset again. It took me a while. I read several books, and goofed off a lot, but I also brainstormed plots with “the girls”–theirs and mine–and wrote through the bad moods until I discovered the way out of the parts where I got stuck. And I’ve been having a good time this week with the writing.

Also, I discovered that the ripple in my vision is from a genetic anomaly–an extra blood vessel in my eye that leaked, but no fluid is collecting, it’s not macular degeneration, and the doctors say that no other treatment is needed until and unless it gets a whole lot worse. No shots in my eye. It’s my right eye, which isn’t the good eye, so the ripple is hard to notice. Good news.

I’m doing Weight Watchers online for at least the next three months. Wish me luck. I’ve been on it for a whole week, and have lost 0.2 pound. Better than a poke in the eye with a sharp stick, though. Fixing to head out for a walk up on the seawall.

Alzheimer’s is a disease that continues to progress. And you just have to continue to cope.

It’s been almost a year since Daddy had to go to the nursing home, closer to a year and a half since he was told he needed to stop driving. Mama’s now failed her driving test. And she’s just as stubborn about refusing to stop. She completely missed a stop sign and a yield sign, couldn’t remember passing a school-zone sign…but she doesn’t remember any of it now, though she acknowledged missing them at the time. So, we will have to take away her car and keys. Sigh.

And, at the nursing home, Daddy has taken it upon himself to become the lunchroom police. One of the little old men there will shout out occasionally. And when he shouted the other day, Daddy got up from his table, went over and bapped him on the head with his spoon. (sigh)

When the staff remonstrated with him, he said “Well, he shouldn’t have yelled like that.” Totally justified in his own mind for smacking the poor old guy. So, we’re going to have to speak to Daddy–not that it will make much difference, because he won’t remember us saying anything, and he will still think he was in the right. The doctor will be spoken to–maybe up some of his medicine, and we’re probably going to have to start looking into dedicated Alzheimer’s facilities. He doesn’t wander, but he’s bapping the other residents. At least it was with a spoon…

Harvest Moon Regatta off Galveston Island

So far, anyway, and I don’t have any reason to think it won’t go on being good.

I got my first review for Knight in Black Leather. It’s lovely, (5 stars!) and Christine Klocek-Lim is my new best friend. Go read it. (Yes, I am over-using the smiley face emoticon.) But it is a really nice review. See?

“I laughed out loud during the first chapter. I sighed in happiness by the seventh and bit my lip in dismay by the twenty-third (I also might have cried a little, but I refuse to get into that).”

 I’ve been writing, but since I fell down on the job while I was out of town, and let myself continue to fall for a few more days, I’m only on Day 2 again. (Sigh)

Took Dolly the princess dog out for a walk yesterday, and she was a little pickle-dog this time. There were two doggies down playing on the beach, off-leash with their people, and it was all I could do to keep her from jumping off the seawall to go play with them. And that made her want to play with everybody else she saw. She’s five years old. Aren’t doggies supposed to slow down a little when they get that old? She dragged me across the street to wiggle at the neighbor. Pit bulls are strong doggies. And today, she’s been a real whiny-baby, wanting me to come out and sit with her or play with her, or something.

I’ve been trying out some new recipes–a Mexican skillet chicken that’s made like fried rice, only with enchilada sauce rather than soy sauce. Good stuff. And I made some marsala pork chops that were to die for.

I only made a couple of alterations in the recipe–you’re supposed to bread them in bread crumbs, but since the fella’s gluten-free, and I didn’t feel like crushing any Crispix or corn flakes, I just didn’t bread them. And I had a LOT of pork chops (or fork chops, as they’re generally known in our house, because that’s what one of the boys called them when he was little). Recipe called for 4 chops. I had 8 or 10. Hey, it worked. And I had some fresh mushrooms, so I sliced them up and threw them in the sauce. And I was probably a tad generous with the marsala wine. (The recipe called for one measly little tablespoon of marsala. A half cup of white wine (I used chardonnay), but only a tablespoon of marsala!) But when I got done–oh, it was SO good. My knees were all swoony.

Basically, you just fry up the fork chops, take them out, then saute a big mess of thin-sliced onion (with mushrooms if you want), add in a bunch of pressed/minced garlic, and when the onions are soft, throw in the wines and cook it down to almost nothing, then add in half a stick of butter. (No wonder it’s so good!) But you don’t need much with each pork chop.

Yes, I have been writing. This is the pantsiest thing I’ve written in a long time (meaning I didn’t really have my world-building done when I started it, and didn’t really know where I was going with it), but I’m discovering a lot of stuff now, near the end. Meaning I’ll have some things to fix when I start putting it in the computer. But that’s for later.

I have been busy, and I’m getting things done. I feel so accomplished today, and all because I baked a cake last night. (Well, sort of) But we’ll come back to the cake.

The big news is that I have taken the plunge into the e-pub business. My first Gail Dayton book has gone live both at Kindle and Smashwords, and as soon as I get a move on, I’ll have it up at Barnes & Noble.

Knight in Black Leather is the book that got me an agent. She and I both loved it, a bunch of New York editors said they loved it–but didn’t know how to sell it. This is a contemporary romance. I wrote it before I took the plunge into fantasy and steampunk. I love my fantasy stories, but I also love me some contemporary romance. It’s an older-woman-younger-man story, there’s some suspense, some family conflict, secrets, angst, old wounds–all sorts of good stuff. And it’s set in Pittsburgh. (The one in Pennsylvania, not the one in East Texas… That one doesn’t have an H after the G.) Here’s the cover copy:

A chance meeting on the dark winter streets of Pittsburgh brings widow Marilyn Ballard face to face with streetwise young biker Eli Court when he scares off a trio of wannabe gangsters. Later, she returns the favor, rescuing him from a beating, and their encounter becomes a chance to grow and heal from the pain scarring both their lives.

Marilyn’s family disapproves of the relationship because of Eli’s disreputable past, as well as their age difference. That past life–years spent in the deepest cesspools of the city–reaches out to pull Eli back into its depths, and he fears dragging Marilyn down with him. But she refuses to let him face his past enemies alone, even when his vow to protect a young boy exposes the still-open wounds of her heart, and puts them all in danger. Can they build a new life together, or will those long-denied secrets pull them under?

I hope y’all will give it a look-see. The first 2 chapters or so are up for y’all to sample.

Now I can talk about the cake. It’s been forever since I actually baked a cake that didn’t come out of a box. The Mexican Chocolate Pound Cake from one of this year’s issues of Southern Living has been tempting me for a while, but I don’t usually bake, because I’m pretty much the only one who eats the stuff I bake (the fella can’t eat it, if it has flour in it, and the boy isn’t big on sweets), and I can’t afford it. But I really wanted to try this cake, because, hey–it’s Mexican Chocolate. And since I’m going up to check on the parents this week, I can take a big hunk of cake with me to share with them and not eat most (all) of it myself–I baked the cake. (The picture is not MY cake, but it’s the same recipe…)

The batter was like tasting chocolate clouds. The cake cooked in exactly the time the recipe said it would (this oven runs a little cool), AND it came out of the Bundt pan! I have been fighting with that pan since it was new, 30-mumble years ago when it was a wedding present. (35? Yeah, I think that’s right.) It does not often let go of cakes. It likes to keep back a good half of the cake, most of the time, and force you to scrape it out in pieces. But this one came out! Score!!

You’re supposed to serve it with sauce. Chocolate sauce–Mexican chocolate sauce, in fact. But the sauce requires heavy cream, which I did not have. So I had to run to the store to buy some. And since I also had to run to the store to buy ink for the printer to print out pictures of the grandkids for the parents, I didn’t mind so much, especially since Office Depot is just down the strip mall from the grocery story. I came out with lots of other stuff, too–fancy file folders, a file storage box, etc. And I just have to share a picture of one of the grandboys dressed up for Halloween. He looks like such a cowpoke… (That’s a lollipop stick!)

That title sounds like a financial blog. Which this isn’t. It’s not even really an “organizational” blog, unless maybe it fits in the “Organization for the Terminally Disorganized” category. Because I am. Terminally disorganized, I mean. And I’m a Virgo. Go figure.

I guess that means I want to be organized. But if it happens, it doesn’t happen for very long.

I have a computer file where I can write down the menus I’ve planned for the upcoming week–and I’ll plan for two or three weeks running, then I don’t touch that computer file for months–so long that I have trouble remembering where it is on the computer. (It’s in the “recipes” folder.) (In case I forget again.)

I have a spreadsheet I’ve prepared for the e-publishing I’m planning to do. Here’s hoping I remember to  put things into it for more than a month or so. I figure I’ll be obsessive about keeping track of my sales for a week or two, and after that… Phhhtttt. I figure I’ll be filling it frantically in when the fella informs me that I need to give him some info for the taxes.

That’s usually how I go. In spurts. I seem to do pretty much everything in spurts.

Which, I suppose is my point. I can work with spurts. As long as I keep coming back to these things I want/need to do, and do them, I can get the things done that I want to get done. I like that “15-minutes at a time” thing that the FlyLady recommends. I can do anything for 15 minutes. Problem is–I usually forget to set the dang timer.

But I keep coming back. I’ve been “spurting”– okay, sprinting in the writing. It’s how I’ve made it to DAY 13 (!!!) of my 100 day challenge. I haven’t made it much past Day 20, ever, yet. (You see what I mean about spurts?) But I keep coming back to it and starting again. The book is getting written.

I didn’t go out and walk yesterday, even though it would have been my walking day. I meant to go, but I didn’t. (I meant to do a lot of things yesterday, and didn’t. Sigh.) So I went today, and I’ll go again tomorrow. I got back to it.

That’s the secret. Just keep going back. If you slip up, get back into it. Keep showing up.

That said, I walked all the way to 45th Street today–a mile, one way, from my house. That may not sound impressive, but I’m closer to 60 than 50, and I’m fat. I’m impressed with myself, so there.

I passed the new Fort Crockett park, where the dolphin sculpture is. I did look at the painted dolphins, and that’s completely new cement. They couldn’t really do anything with the old cement. The dolphins are painted in the exact same colors, same design. They look great.

This picture is of the guys planting the palm trees in the planter boxes. There are 12 trees in each box, and salt-resistant plants below them, and in the street-side boxes. They imbedded iron stars in the top of the planters–you can see them as dark spots–to keep the skateboarders from skating up there. And there are benches on the Gulf side of the big boxes, so weary walkers like me can rest up and look at the waves. Pretty cool, IMO.

Today, I wrote a bio for the e-pub books I have planned. Why does it take so much longer to write this kind of stuff than it does to write story?

I also wrote cover copy/descriptions for the first one of the books. I’m getting friends to help me with it. But it’s progress.

AND, it is DAY 8 (right?) on my writing challenge. I didn’t get as much written as I’d hoped, because the boy was awake this a.m. and kept wanting to show me stuff. He did finally get the hint.

I also got started late with my writing projects, because I went out for a walk this a.m. and walked all the way down to the dolphin statue. It looks MUCH better now than it used to.

Frito-Lay donated a bunch of money to fix up the little seawall park there where the dolphin statue is. They’ve rebuilt the plaza, put in a bunch of planters and benches and solar-power lights and stuff, and will build a big shade pavilion once all the palm trees and plants are in the planter.
 

The summer after Hurricane Ike (remember that one? No? Yeah, well, Lehman Brothers went bankrupt the Monday after Ike hit on Saturday…) it looked really beat up. The storm surge washed all the sand and stuff out from under the concrete and beat it all to heck. I don’t know if they poured and painted new concrete for the dolphin mural, or put back and repaired and touched up the old stuff. I looked today, while I was out, and really couldn’t tell.

It’s gorgeous out these days. Not too hot to get out and walk, a nice breeze off the water–and around here, not too hot does mean up to 90F/32C and a little above. Too hot is 95F/35C and above, here on the island, because it’s usually accompanied by considerable humidity. It was around 85F/29C this a.m. when I was walking. We’ve had a cold front. But it’s still in the 80s by 9 a.m. Our fall. My hibiscus are blooming like crazy, because it’s not so hot and dry…

Yeah, sorry. Didn’t mean to make y’all jealous…

While we were off in the wilds of Valley Mills, Texas, (and if you know where Valley Mills is, you’re doing good) (It’s out toward Cranfills Gap…) we had a bit of an adventure in the night. We were out in the middle of nowhere, after all, with varmints and all kinds of critters in the fields surrounding us. And, being women of a certain age, we tended to have to get up in the middle of the night to visit the facilities. (There was indoor plumbing.)

Well, one of those nights, one of our number rose in the darkness and ventured to the facilities, using her cell phone as a flashlight to light her way so she wouldn’t trip over something and kill herself, and when she got into the restroom, she saw something black and scary on the floor. She didn’t have her glasses on (as mentioned, we are of a certain age, and all near-sighted), the phone light was mostly dim, and she couldn’t reach the light switch to turn on the real light and see what in blazes it was. Especially since she was pretty sure it was a rat. She crept forward, holding the phone out toward the rat, while reaching with the other hand for the light–which was on the other side of the room near the other door–until finally the other one of us (who wasn’t me, because I was asleep) informed her that it was my sock.

I thought I had retrieved all of my clothes when I got into my nightgown, but apparently, one of my socks got away and stayed behind to play Halloween games. My friend picked it up and tossed it out of the bathroom. I think she was trying to put it with my stuff, but the next morning, it was next to one of the support posts. Maybe it crawled over there. I picked it up and put it in my suitcase…and an hour or so later, I saw it on the floor again. That sock was determined to escape! It didn’t stay put until I stuffed it down in a pocket and zipped it closed. I hope I got home with it. But we had a good laugh about how scared D was about that wayward sock.

I am making progress in my self-publishing venture. Yes, I will put up Heart’s Magic when I get the rights to it–unless Tor actually decides to publish it. I am also doing a contemporary romance with no fantasy whatsoever in it–Knight in Black Leather–and a contemporary-set fantasy romance with a hero who comes from an alternate world–Heart of Stone. After that, I’m not sure what I’m going to do. It all depends on what I have, what I write, what I want to write… We will see.

I am on DAY 7 of my challenge. Got 4 pages written, and the fella came home to pack an ice chest for his trip to Austin, and wanted to converse, of all things. So I stopped sprinting.

The guys moved my bookcase out of the closet in my office while I was away, and moved a gun safe in. The fella doesn’t like my bookcase where they put it. All my books are now in boxes, stacked in the floor in here. I am not happy. I’m not mad, or even upset about it. I knew they were going to do it. But neither am I exactly happy about it. I’d really like to have the books more accessible, and my office less stacked up.

Also, I’m trying to clean my desk off, along with all the other stuff I’m trying to do, and found two pieces of plastic that I have no idea what they are, nor what they are for. Just strangely shaped pieces of plastic.

In the steps toward publishing, I have fixed my Paypal account, I think. I have my e-mails straightened out. I have about 6 e-mail accounts just now–and I upgraded my web hosting plan today. It will take a day or two to get the upgrade through, and another while for me to figure out how to make it do what I want it to do, but hopefully by next week, I’ll have my website updated and I’ll be ready to move on to the next step.

Two HOT writers, getting ready to “sprint”

So. I went to the annual HOT (Heart of Texas) Romance Writers fall retreat last week. My writer friends and I took several days ahead of the official retreat and went out to the ranch to retreat early and get some writing done.

It was great! Great to be out there with friends, great to have the chance to write, great to just think, talk and breathe writing. Not so great–the up-close-and-personal encounters with bugs, and the temperature, which wavered from too cold to too hot and couldn’t really be fixed right. But bugs and heat can be endured.

The pond behind the “cabin” was way down, due to the drought, and a lot of the trees had died. It was sad to see them. Hopefully, there will be some rain–before next year, please–and the creeks will come back and new trees will grow.

One of the best things we did during the long weekend was “sprint” writing. We would set a timer for 20 minutes and Just Write. For 20 minutes. When the timer went off, we would see how many words we’d written, take a little break to walk around, go potty, grab more coffee, whatever, and five or so minutes later, we’d start the timer up again.

I was pretty consistent. Most times, I got about 250 words. One of the ladies sometimes got 1,000 words or so–but she was at the end of her story and knew exactly what was happening, who had the POV, where she was going–she was in race mode. Sometimes, one of us would get only 57 words, or 84. Not very many at all. But, the important thing was that for that 20 minutes, we didn’t do anything but write. We could focus, because we knew that when the bell went off, then we could check the e-mail, or look at the texts, or go to the restroom. It’s not hard to put something off for 20 minutes. And it’s surprising how much you can write in that length of time.

So, that’s what I brought home with me. I have a kitchen timer I carry around with me, to help me focus on what I’m doing. You know–the “I’m going to do this for the next 15 minutes” thing. Anyway, it works real well for helping me do the sprint writing. I got 15 pages written while I was in Valley Mills. Today, I got four done, in the hour and a half I wrote this morning. Oh, and since I wrote every day I was gone, that makes today Day 6 in the 100 words for 100 days challenge, which I haven’t gotten to 30 days yet. Maybe my challenge should be 100 words for 30 days…

I have to share the birds that have been poking around our neighborhood for the last couple of weeks. I’ve lived here four years now, and have never seen American white ibis (I looked them up) anywhere but out on the beach or in the marshes. But most afternoons, there they are, strolling around in the neighbors’ yards, hunting for food. I assume they’ve left their usual haunts because of the drought, like most everything else.

Pretty cool, huh?

Well, I thought so, anyway.

I am working on pulling some books together to get up on Amazon and Smashwords and B&N. Once I get the rights back to Heart’s Magic (Harry and Elinor’s story), I’ll probably e-pub it, too, but it’s a long slow process. Figuring out how to do the self-publishing is also a long, slow process, but I will get it licked!