My World

Whew. So it has been an interesting few weeks for me. The Good, the Bad, the Ugly.
Mostly good.

A steady paycheck again. Ah, how I've missed that. Books, yes! I can buy you! Shoes, yes! I can buy you too. Weather muy caliente? No problemo, let's crank up the AC. And buy new clothes! And lots of iced Starbucks!

Okay, so my time is no longer my own. It's billable. And I get home late. So late that I am 20 hours behind the rest of the Twitter and Blogosphere. And I'm too tired to change the channel with the remote control. And my paralegal looks like Morticia Adams and scares me a little. Okay, a lot. Enough so that I've taken to emailing her everything in explicit detail so she won't feel the urge to come into my office and ramble on and on about nothing for 45 minutes without once looking me in the eye.

In the midst of all the readjusting, four ceramic tiles mysteriously fell off my bathroom wall. For no apparent reason. Okay, maybe old age. Maybe the heat. Maybe the humidity. Maybe they just decided to give up the ghost. Miraculously, none of them broke.
Carefully preserved them, got some goopy combo tile adhesive/grout stuff and a plastic trowel from Home Depot and decided to do-it-myself. I mean, not exactly rocket science, eh? I can read directions. I have degrees! Yeah-sure-right.
The little plastic trowel was not precisely cooperating with me. Soon I was slathering the stuff on in handfuls. Manicure, ruined. Cuticles white and pasty. Goopy stuff all over the floor and sink. Tiles, sliding like slimy escargot down the wall. Plop. Crash. Smash. Carefully preserved for a week, now all smithereens. This is why plumbers and tilers and contractors command the big bucks, butt cracks notwithstanding. Now we know.

On the fiction front, not much work. Days spent writing motions and Pre-trial Reports tend to leave your brain as mushy as tile adhesive and as fractured as the ceramic tiles that skate down your bathroom wall. And, of course, it's been muy caliente!
Trying to get back to Lara & Cole. Left them in sort of a precarious place while trying to create a new beginning for them. Think it works. At least it works for me! (Trying to take care of some of the later backstory feeds, also to set up their situation, their meet, and to provide an intro to characters who might pop up later. Evil and otherwise.) Characterization is key.

And last, but not least...

Yesterday, I got a Call. A sort of The Call, I think. Voice mail message on the machine. Nothing definite to report. Someone interested in talking about my Regency novella. Someone I'm very interested in talking to in turn!
As the weekend ticks by, I am trying not to do the happy dance prematurely. But it's increasingly hard for me to believe that any busy editor/publisher/agent on this oil-soaked planet would bother to call and leave a message on the answering machine in order to tell you why you should consider taking up tiling as a avocation, stick to reading rather than writing as a career, and never bother him/her with your worthless prose again.

So...Adam and Emma: Here's looking at you, kids!