It's Here! It's Here!

Forgive the brevity of my post - deadline is but a few days away and we are going through what is affectionately referred to as "hell week."

The new book is now available!

For Kindle

For Nook

Paperback version (which will soon be available at Barnes & Noble and Amazon - and everywhere else - shortly)

St. Patrick's Day for the non-Irish

I have to say that growing up, we celebrated St. Patrick's Day, just like every other non-Irish person. We added an O' in front of our last name, and my parents used to get cards in the mail addressed that way.  It's all in fun, after all.  Everybody's Irish on March 17. For that reason, you might think it odd that I completely forgot about it this year.  Why does that matter?

My dear husband is a very caring man. He sees me working so hard this time of year and all he wants to do is relieve some of my stress. "Let's go to a movie." "Let's take a walk." "Let's go to a museum." He wants to get me away from my computer and the cursing that happens when the day job doesn't work the way it's supposed to. On St. Patrick's, it was "Let's go to the Art Institute." (You may remember my post a couple weeks ago where I'd seen they have this cool new app . . . ).  It worked out so that we could actually go - work was under control, my other duty calls were handled, and so we ran (yes, literally ran) to catch a train into The Big City. And what did we find on that train, you might ask?  Revelers. Hooligans. People wearing green hats and green hair and green "attachments" on their faces, celebrating IN grand style with disguised cans and bottles (alcohol is not permitted on the train during peak revelry times, the St. Patrick's Day parade day being one of them). Sure and begorrah, it was a loud and raucous ride. And THEN, after we got into The Big City, they were everywhere! Revelers. Hooligans. On a Saturday! We had to push through crowds to walk the mile to the Art Institute, but we made it.

My dear husband isn't all that interested in art. He is a very kind and caring man. (Did I say that already?) I asked him which exhibits he was interested in and he looked at me with that confused look on his face as if to say (and bless him, he didn't say it), "I'm not interested in any of it."  And so I saved him the effort by thanking him for taking me to the museum and told him I was going to assume he wasn't interested and this was for my benefit and he was tagging along and to correct me if I was wrong. Then he smiled and nodded. Yep. That about summed it up. Don't get me wrong.  He isn't completely disinterested (otherwise there wouldn't have been any trip, no matter how kind and caring he is).  We found some fabulous pieces of hand-crafted furniture that piqued his interest.  For me it was the impressionist paintings. Renoir. Manet. Monet. Degas. Toulousse-Lautrec. Van Gogh.  When I was little, it was the miniatures. We didn't get to see them this time.  There was a Roman/Byzantine exhibit from the British Museum.  I found some new painters that I didn't know before, and I wished for an exhibit of John William Waterhouse. His paintings are the inspiration for my latest writing endeavor - if I can ever get back to writing (two more weeks to the end of the month and the last major deadline).

When we left, we forgot to check the Chicago River - we walked right over it. The city dyes the river green on St. Patrick's Day every year. And I didn't make corned beef or cabbage. Maybe we'll remember it next year.

Mist on the Meadow is in production! I'm crossing my fingers that it will be available by April 1, but that depends on my availability to comb through the ARC and give it the green light.  I'll keep you posted!

From the back cover:

For her twenty-fifth birthday, a family legacy is passed on to small town pastry chef Marissa Maitland as a Kundigerin, which means she has come into secret psychic power. She will know things about people at the brush of a hand, and use this to help them—but she cannot talk about being Kundigerin without suffering pain. 

Named executor of his grandmother’s estate, Wolf Harper must find something called a “Kundigerin” before he can sell the place. If he could sell his remaining family too, he would. Keeping the family business afloat is his priority, in spite of his uncle’s bad management putting them in the red.

Wolf runs into Marissa—literally, at an icy intersection—and is enchanted by her beauty. One bite of her baked goods bewitches him and enflames a passion Marissa shares. But Marissa blurts long-buried details about the car accident that killed his parents, and knows far too much about the problems at Harper Electronics, neither of which she will explain. Should he be afraid of her?

Let's Talk about the Weather

My brain is overloaded.  March Madness means a whole different thing for the accounting industry. Creativity continues to poke me, but I don't have the time to jot anything down unless I want to give up sleeping.  I want to keep moving on the story in-progress.  I have another one I'm determined to write (Cinda's story, if you read Living Canvas - people continue to tell me how much they dislike her, so I figured she deserved a story of her own). And the second in the series that will start next month (fingers crossed).

I want to write!

Instead, I took some time off to go on a girls' weekend with three friends to celebrate a milestone birthday for one of them. How nice to go "unplugged" for a couple of days! Well, maybe not 100% unplugged, but mostly. Down time. Unwinding time. We rented a house in Galena, Illinois, and the weather kept us mostly locked inside, which was fine. We sat at the kitchen table all day on Saturday, in our pajamas. Fourteen hours of food, games, drinks, conversation and camaraderie. The weather was wet and gloomy and foggy, and we were in the backwoods where the fog doesn't lift. On Sunday, we went into town and got rained on, then back to the house where we built a fire in the fireplace and sat and talked some more. By the time we needed to vacate, it started to snow. Not serious snow, but snow, nonetheless.

Which brings me back to the climate.  Last year at this time, spring had started with a bang, sending us into a year where the seasons were all a month ahead of time. The long/late winter seems to portend that we will be back on schedule this year.

Yes, I'm rambling without much in the way of a thread to my thoughts except, "let's talk about the weather." That's what happens when the day job takes over my entire life. But we're halfway through March, and March is the most intense month of work, so in a couple more weeks, maybe I'll get my brains back. And more time to write. And maybe more interesting blog topics.

Maybe.

Bazinga!

I get a kick out of The Big Bang Theory. A lot of the gags are oversimplified, but they are all relatable. Who doesn't like Sheldon, in spite of his horrible personality? The writers strive to show you why he is the way he is and occasionally open his vulnerable side, a la "soft kitty, warm kitty, little ball of fur..."

The goal of many writers is to accomplish just that. Portray a flawed character and make them likeable in spite of themselves. That might be one of the most challenging things, because as people relate to people, they tend to divide them into categories without taking the time to see beneath the surface. Writers need to take that extra look and find the redeeming quality.

I'm married to an engineer, so in many ways, Big Bang is even more relatable. Children defy logic. Women can, at times, defy logic. Try and explain that theory to an engineer.  This does not compute. That can't possibly happen given the variables, like Sheldon so often doesn't understand why people don't see the world the way he does.  That can make things extremely frustrating for all parties in the real world. As an author/writer, it can be fun to unlayer the neuroses.  It's called conflict.  Works in novels and on TV, even if those personalities make the real world a challenge some days.

So now I have to explain to my "Sheldon" about why you can't argue with a woman who is coming off a stressful deadline and expect it to make sense. (And I'm giggling as I share with you that even he doesn't always make sense when stressed.) Real life, as opposed to a novel, requires faster conflict resolution.  It might make for good reading to let the conflict go on for the next 100 pages in a novel, but in the real world, there aren't many heroes or heroines who will (or should) wait that long.

Peace.