Newsletter May 2009
Hello everyone,
Oh man, I just realized the late date, so this will be a quickie. I'll have a meatier newsletter in June.
I've been distracted, as you can tell, by two things. Abby started walking and just had her 1st birthday, and, we are buying a new house. It turns out that a toddler is lot of fun, but a lot more work. And they go through a spell of not sleeping through the night. Sore legs and lots of thinking about walking make for poor sleep. Not unlike Nanowrimo when sore fingers and lots of thinking about writing make November a bad sleep month for me. So we haven't been sleeping as well and often crash on the couch after dinner and fall asleep watching movies.
And amidst all that, we found a house we love for sale, so we made an offer and it got accepted. That means selling our current place, so we scrambled, got it ready, put it out there, and got an offer. Everything is moving really quickly, so all spare moments have gone to prepping our place for show, signing zillions of pages of paperwork, doing inspections, etc. In the end, we'll have an awesome new place closer to Golden Gate Park.
I never thought I'd say it, but thank goodness for work travel. I've had a lot of that too, but at least the plane rides and hotel room nights have given me a chance to read through the joint novel I'm doing with Shannon Page. She finished the first draft and passed it off to me. I think I told you about it before. It is the story that blends a ghost story with modern mystery/thriller. I've finished the story and I liked it. It was weird to read it, since I created the plot and basic character sketches. Very fun to see how Shannon took my starting point and turned it into a novel. It needs work, and now it is my turn. I've got some ideas for the first pass of polishing. I'll have more next time.
For you reading pleasure, I've read a couple that were good, but we packed them away when we gutted my office for the open houses. And, of course, I'm distracted and can't thing of them. They were good too. Sorry. Right now I'm reading Magic in the Blood by Devon Monk. I found it at some airport somewhere, and it turns out to be a good "peer book" for our joint novel. I need to reread and analyze it so I can know what agents/publishers/fans expect out of this sort of supernatural novel.
Take care,
--Todd