A Month In The Life--Wednesday, April 14, 2010

Wednesdays really are hump days in this house.  First off, it's my TV night.  Between Ghost Hunters, Destination Truth, Top Chef Masters & America's Next Top Model the DVR is kept occupied.  I love the new AT&T Uverse service we have. I can record FOUR shows at the same time AND still watch something else on television.

Fabulous.

At any rate, every Wednesday I tell myself that I'll keep working and watch those shows on breaks later in the week.  And every Wednesday, I take four hours off and watch them all, back-to-back, skipping the commercials. So Wednesday night after nine is usually a total wash.  I try to make up for it by getting lots done on Wednesday day.

After going a few more rounds on the cover art for Butterfly Kisses, I finally intervened and sent both parties an email.  I usually try to stay out of cover art wars for my writers' books--they have to like it, not me.  But right now the art department is overwhelmed with things to do for RT and Butterfly Kisses comes out way too soon for my liking or comfort.  At any rate, they settled on a cover by late afternoon and much joy was the result.

I also saw the first mockup for the cover of Warding the Covenants, which comes out on April 30--and I am excited.  It's absolutely gorgeous!  They are making a few modifications, just minor little tweaks, and we should finalize it in the next couple of days.  As soon as I have the final mockup, I'll give you a peek.  This cover may just be my absolute favorite cover to date.  Simply stunning.

A lot of time was spent today working on the promotional things for RT.  LB Gregg and I ordered a banner--a huge eight by four foot banner that will be displayed in the lobby of the Hyatt throughout RT--with one of her covers and one of mine.  Kind of the two sides of AMP sort of thing.  That is lovely.  What is not so lovely are the boxes of promtional items I ordered that somehow need to translate to a 15" by 15" space.

Have you ever tried to figure out how to get 200 sports water bottles (raspberry with black--name, website and the Mythos title) in a space that's less than a foot and a half square? Yeah...not happening.  I played around with several containers in my house, trying to find one that not only fit but that I'd be willing to decorate (and possibly ruin with spray adhesives and whatnot).  I may have come up with a solution.  In my laundry, there's an 11" by 11" shelving unit.  I would happily paint and glue things all over that AND, with creative stacking, I can fit 50 water bottles and 100 document stands into the space using that and a couple of really awesome wooden containers in my house.  I can not only get my name out ther and VERY visible, but I won't have to worry about someone knocking the whole darn thing over and having a raspberry and black bottle with my name on it catastrophe.  At that point, I started to layout and print off the panels I'm using on the shelving units--

--and it's all contingent upon that shelf being okayed by the RT people.  We shall see. Cross your fingers.

I uploaded the final of In and Out, did some editing work on the flagship novel of the Aurora Regency Historicals line--The Pursuit by Kimberly Nee. The novel is set in post-Revolutionary War America and it's a dandy!  I am going to try to get all the AR books through their first edits before RT, but I'm running out of time and have some other considerations that are starting to get urgent.

Once again, this was a no word count day.  But, considering that I worked fifteen hours between editing and promotional things, this was a very productive day.  Hopefully, I can keep this pace up.  If I can get all my promotional work done by the end of the weekend, next week I should be able to really hit the groove in writing again--if I can hold out that long.  The muse is yelling at me, but I'm ignoring her mightily.

A Month In The Life--Tuesday, April 13, 2010

Today has been an incredibly confusing day--of course which ones aren't?  Today's been dedicated mostly to editing and the Aurora imprint.

I got Lizzie's first edits back to her for the next Cougar Club story, Butterfly Kisses. She's also been going rounds with cover art--there's some kind of communication breakdown going on there.  By the end of the day, however, we were well on the way to getting the editing on track and I think she's going to end up with a fabulous story out of it.

I also finished off LB Gregg's next Men of Smithfield novel In and Out. Lately with Aspen Mountain I've been editing a lot of m/m erotic romance.  The market is hot and LB is one of the best m/m authors I've worked with, if not the best.  This story, in my opinion, is her best one yet--so good, as a matter of fact, that we resorted to nitpicking over usually unimportant things.  For example, should goddamnit be lowercase or should it be Goddamnit?  LB likes uppercase; I prefer lowercase. (Yes, I have reasoning behind it--if you use the word goddamnit you're not only breaking a commandment but you're disrespecting the Christian deity.)  In my mind, that means you don't capitalize the word.  LB disagreed. 

She won.

*shrug* What? It's her book. She can capitalize it in hers and I'll keep it lowercase in mine.  It all works.  As long as an author is consistent within her own work it's really just a semantic question anyway.

So those two projects took up most of the day.  Then, I devoted the rest of the day and well into the night getting the first Aurora Regency story's first edits completed and to the author.  Marguerite Butler's Compromising Prudence was the first book signed by Aurora Regency and one of the flagship regencies of the line.  It's light, fun, frothy and madcap--in other words, the perfect Regency romance.  It'll be released on July 21, 2010--the anniversary of AMP and the launch date of Aurora Regency and its sister line Aurora Regency Historicals.  I'm getting very excited.  I spent a few hours creating the Aurora promotional items for RT--all that's left to do is to burn some CDs and get some cover art for the jewel cases.

So, things are cruising right along.  Taking a few days off from writing to recharge the creative juices and get some of these huge projects done for RT.  Between brochures and flyers and promotional CDs and my promo stuff and what-the-goddamn (see?)-else-ever I need to get done.  So no word count for today, unless you count about 120,000 words edited in full over an 18 hours period.