Friday, October 28, 2011

Tessa reaches for the stars

Friday, October 28, 2011
Waxing Moon
Pluto Retrograde
Neptune Retrograde
Uranus Retrograde
Jupiter Retrograde
Cold and sunny

I hope you’ll give a very warm welcome to Mary Abshire, my guest on A Biblio Paradise today. She’s talking about the fourth novel in her series, called LOVE CONQUERS ALL EVIL. Stop by and give her some comment love!

It’s anything but warm here. Parts of Mass have snow already. Boston might get 2-5 inches over the weekend. Supposedly, we’re not getting any on the Cape, but there are some icy roads this morning, and it’s darned cold.

I was out of the house yesterday at 7:30 AM and didn’t get back until 2 PM. Yoga was fun — different teacher, but she was really good. Circled back just long enough to get my mom and take her to the eye doctor. The appointment took nearly two hours, and I’d brought my materials from Confidential Job #1 (assignment due today) and worked during her appointment. She will be prepped for her surgery just before Christmas, and probably have it the week between Christmas and New Year’s. The doctor was great, the staff was great, and she’s a lot less anxious about it then she was.

Plus, she passed a vision test so she could get a restricted driver’s license. She hadn’t been able to get her full license when we moved, and it depressed her a lot. But she passed the special screening, the doctor gave us the paperwork, and we headed to the DMV (sorry, called RMV here). She got her MA license, and was registered to vote. All in time for her 87th birthday, which is tomorrow! It’s lifted her spirits a lot. Once she’s had the surgery done on both eyes, we can go and update her license. We’re lucky, here. The people who work at the RMV are both efficient and pleasant. How often does one have that experience?

I found a good pumpkin at a garden center in Yarmouth, and it wasn’t very expensive. I’d visited this huge “pumpkin patch” on the lawn of a local church — hundreds of pumpkins, it looked great. Unfortunately, when you got up close and personal, a lot of the pumpkins were already rotting or had holes. This center had some really great ones, at a fair price. The kitten is fascinated!

Spent the rest of the afternoon finishing up Confidential Job #1. I will do the write-up and get it out this morning. Spent the evening on student work. Didn’t get to bed until nearly midnight, which means I woke up with eye strain and a stress headache this morning.

I need to reconfigure my time. I’m only spending about an hour and a half to two hours WRITING every day. The point of being here and creating my own schedule is to be able to spend five to six hours writing fiction, and then building the freelance assignments around that. I’ve hit a point where I need to look at my time management, my energy biorhythms, and readjust.

I’ve hit a point in the book where I have a pivotal chapter — where the two main characters are partially lying to each other because they don’t trust each other in spite of their attraction. I have to sort out what and how much they reveal to each other, and it’s not something I can blast through with placeholders and come back and fix. What happens in this particular scene informs the rest of the plot revelations. I’ve rewritten the crucial scene six different ways so far, and STILL don’t have it right.

So I’ll just keep at it until I do. Word-count wise, I’m fine in terms of deadline. I just hate hitting these bumps in the road, trying every trick I know, and still not finding my way through it.

Time to try some new tricks! 😉

Devon