A Month In The Life--April 18, 2010

It finally happened.  I hit the crisis point today. I took one look at my trashed house, at my uncompleted projects and then at my email and just shut down.

So, I took the day off.

Be back tomorrow, hopefully with my head on straight. Off now to attempt to get some sleep--if we're all lucky, maybe I'll manage it.

A Month in the Life--April 17, 2010

First things first--have a new cover:

When Marcellin Dautin is named the Elder of Venice, fledgling vampire Marguerite and her husband Gunther agree to accompany him in hopes of learning more about the Russian revolt against the Conclave of Elders. After an ancient renegade vampire murders the Doge, they are drawn into a dangerous hunt for the assassin.

But as Marguerite's powers grow, so too does the danger. Some vampires oppose Marcellin's rule over Venice, the renegade has begun to stalk Marguerite and her old Russian enemies are determined to capture her and the Elder's sword she bears. While Venice dances through the Carnivale season, Gunther must lay aside all restraint to protect his young wife. Can they remain true to the Covenants they've pledged to preserve or will their love shatter under the strain of Warding the Covenants?

I totally love that cover and I'm completely excited about the release of this new book.  I think you'll all enjoy it a lot; I hope you will.

In other news, I got Lizzie T. Leaf's second round of edits to her and spent the majority of the afternoon working on a project that I can't tell you about until sometime next week.  Funny how that works.  Then I got another 7k written on Terella and spent the rest of the day working on things for the convention.

I am almost to the point where I'll be glad when the convention is here.  I'm really looking forward to it--mostly because all the work will be done at that point.

A Month In The Life--April 16, 2010

And just when you thought it couldn't get any crazier, that the halfway point of the month would make certain that I was over the hump of the hill of horrors, I got to go to my doctor's appointment this morning.  Considering the pain level yesterday and the results of my latest diagnostic tests, it's back to the operating table for me.  It's probably a good thing you're getting a month in the life now because next month I won't be posting much at all.  I have a reprieve until the end of RT, and then I'm going to have to take enough time off to recover from another foray under the surgeon's knife.

Lovely.

At any rate, I worked on more RT things this afternoon, and got about 11k written between the fourth Mythos book (this one's about Hercules!) and the third Covenants book (and oh the surprises coming there!) and spent another couple of hours doing research for a new project that's churning away at the back of my head--an alternate history set in Tudor England.

It was nice to spend some time as I used to spend it--working on my writing, doing some research and dwelling in that secret place in my head where all these ideas percolate into new and usually long stories. I'm looking forward to the day--not too far off--where I can live there exclusively for a couple of weeks.

Until then, I'll keep you up to date. 

A Month In The Life--April 15, 2010

This post is going to be very short. I don't have a heck of a lot to tell.

I spent four hours at the vet's this morning with a very sick cat.  By the time I got home, my pain level was so high that it was all I could do to get to the couch.  Once there, I had a couple of conferences and did some editing.  I ended up taking my breakthrough pain medication about five o'clock, which knocked me out until midnight.  Then, of course, I was up for the rest of the night.  I worked on RT promotional things until 5:30 a.m.

Now it's time to switch to the April 16 post, which is really funny.  To me, it feels all like the same day.

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.

A Break In The Month and a Breakthrough in the Creative Process

*So since I killed off my technology for the weekend, I did write this blog post as a kind of makeup entry--you know...like when your husband brings home flowers because he accidentally washed all your white permanent press with his brand new red boxers and wonders why you're crying at the sight of pink doll clothes?  Yeah, like that--here we go.*

A word of advice--if you're a writer in search of an agent and a big publishing contract, do not watch Julie and Julia. Seriously. Don't.

Don't get me wrong--I love the movie. I think it's hysterical and I can no more turn it off than I can say, "No, I don't think I want another Reese's Peanut Butter Cup. Really."  What gets me about the movie is the way it portrays the writer's journey.  It begins with a girl who has a basic idea--she's going to write a blog about her attempt to work her way through Julia Child's landmark cookbook Mastering the Art of French Cooking. The concept of that blog was so fiendishly simple, and yet smart too. What could be easier than documenting one woman's attempt to follow in her heroine's footsteps by dedicating herself to perfecting those recipes?  But it's clever too.  Julia Child is an icon, one that's dear to American audiences.  See how clever that is?  Even people whose only experience with Julia Child was the SNL skits about her would recognize her.

I love it.

Then there's the parallel story--the story of the long and tortuous path Julia Child followed from simple government wife to the Cordon Bleu Institute (where she flunked her first graduation test) through the heartbreak and years of work it took to craft that darn cookbook.  But here's where the real parallel--the Gotcha! moment of the story hits me in the gut.

Julia Child has to work for years to find a publisher--and keep in mind those were the days of just mail. *shudders*  But Julie?  Julie gets a two column article in the New York TImes food section and the very next day starts getting phone calls from editors. Publishers. Agents. Television producers. Movie studios. On and on and on until I am ready to hurl my laptop across the room.  Damnit! Where are my phone calls?

It just makes me want to scream. My stories are creative, damnit. They're well-crafted. People enjoy reading them. Why, then, is it so damned hard to get an agent?  Granted, my stories are more complicated than Julie and Julia--

Screeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeech.  Hold it right there.

Could it be that easy to see? Really? Could the difference be that simple and clever is easier to sell than complicated and brilliant?

Think about it: look at some of the more recent great stories.  A boy wizard is the destined foe of ultimate evil. An expert on symbology is called in to decipher religious mysteries. A blogger goes through the recipes of Julia Child.

Simple premises all.  Clever too.  Those simple premises turn into great stories by virtue of two things: they entertain the reader and they allow the reader to imagine themselves easily in that situation.  Even Dan Brown's Robert Langdon explains his rather pedantic subject matter with a verve and a fire that brings the reader along with him in his enthusiasm.  JK Rowling's Harry Potter is the epitome of adolescent angst, and brings all that uncertainty along with him--something completely natural and familiar to the teen reader (and quite a few adults) renders an extraordinary situation into something they can accept.  Simple. Clever. Layered with the express purpose (whether intentional or accidental) of permitting the reader to put themselves in the shoes of the main characters.

Brilliant.

So although the day of 65 phone calls is probably never going to happen, that doesn't mean the day of 1 phone call--the phone call--won't as long as I remember on cardinal rule of writing.

I'm not writing for me. I'm writing for you.

My job is to make you feel that the extraordinary is possible, that the ordinary is special, that you are on the same ride the characters are on. 

Simple.

Clever.

Intimate--and that intimacy is the final factor, the one thing that makes some writers beloved while others languish in the cold sterility of critical acclaim. Regardless of how much writers bitch about the perceived flaws of those who've hit the heights of success, there's something about Harry Potter and Robert Langdon and--yes, both Julie and Julia--that strikes a responsive chord within us.

A chord that has not one damn thing to do with a split infinitive or a dangling participle.

Something to think about.

And, of course, if any agent (legitimate agents only, thank you!) or editor or huge NYC publishing house sees this blog post and wants to call me--well, you know my number.  I've figured out the secret!  I'm ready to roll!

I don't need 65 phone calls, though. I need one. And eventually, I"ll get it too.

Damnit.

One. Just one.  See? I'm not greedy.  I think I'll make beef bourbignon for dinner tonight, too.

A Month in The Life--April 10-11, 2010

These two days do not exist--mostly because I, in my wisdom, managed to eradicate both my internet and my cable simply by moving the modem and cable box from one table to another.

Accomplishments on Sunday: Word count--15,823. Other notable acheivements: Uno game wins 6-0. LOTR Trival Pursuit 1-1.  Monopoly 2-0. Cat insulin shots--2. Caloric intake--less than 1,000. Cigarettes smoked. A pack and a half.

Yeah. That's what happens to me when my internet goes away--big word counts, but I can't eat and I go from a pack a week smoker to a pack a day.  Good lord.

A Month In The Life--April 9, 2010

Ah...day two of the rest of my life.

Surprisingly, Impy dealt with his shots very well. As long as I give it to him while he's eating canned food he's as happy as a fly on dung.  Already, he's started to improve.  I'm very happy.

We got back to the house from the vet's at around nine, and the DH went to school while Impy and I settled in for a long morning of editing.  After getting six chapters done, I sat down with the Defying The Covenants mauscript and spent a couple of hours doing a quick edit--I call them cleaning edits. That's where I find the ewes on the dressers (instead of ewers) and the majority of the adverbs--gosh dang them all anyway.  Then I cranked out a good 12k of new words.  Not a bad chunk of change when you get down to it.

And then--lo and behold!--the furniture men showed up.  They discovered that the legs were right where I said they'be be--underneath the bottom of the hutch, strapped in along with all the hardware.  So, they spent an hour putting that together and at last, I have my hutch. Mirabile visu. Finally, I was able to unpack the last of the totes with my Haviland, crystal and silver in it and we look very fine indeed now. That was another couple of hours.

And then I remembered what the term "bed rest" means.  It means rest...in bed--or the couch. That still counts.  I also realized why it's probably a damn good idea to listen when you're told not to do anything.

*sigh*

Another three chapters edited before midnight, a few spirited games of Scrabble Upwords, Uno and Monopoly and then to bed. I still managed to hit my word count, got more edited than I thought I would and actually accomplished quite a bit.  All said and done, it was a productive day.

But ooooooooooooowwwwwwwwwwww.  I should know better.

A Month In The Life--April 8, 2010

Ever have one of those days where you know that everything is about to change?

Welcome to April 8th.

First, I woke up at 4:00 am this morning and got three chapters edited for an Aurora manuscript before I could go back to sleep.  That's always a good thing--getting unaccounted work done in the wee hours of the dawn. By the time I got the chapters edited, my meds kicked in (because--yeah, pain woke me up) and I got a few more hours of sleep. Fortunately, that extra work came at an appropriate time.  Impy, my first cat and the patriarch of our feline clan had a vet appointment this morning and my new hutch was being delivered this afternoon. 

So we get Impy ready for his appointment.  Impy is nine years old and a Maine Coon.  A few years ago, he weighed over twenty pounds and everyone called him "Pimpy" because he was the most awesomely friendly cat in the world.  A true gentle giant, he endured years of kitten attacks and several moves--even surviving the indignity of being neutered twice.  (Long story) At any rate, over the past few months he started to lose weight. At first it wasn't that noticable, because he's a long haired Maine Coon.  But in the past few weeks not only was he lethargic and constantly ravenous, but the weight loss became apparent.  So we made him an appointment and took him in today.  Impy was so good; he dealt with the blood work and the urinalysis without making a sound.  When they cleaned his ears, however, he howled so loudly it set every critter in the animal hospital howling along in pity.  The vet told us she'd call when she got the blood work back, so we took him home.

I got about a chapter edited before the furnitire guys showed up. Here they come with my new hutch--a beautiful polished oak mission style hutch with a wine rack, two glassed in display cabinets, drawers and two side cabinets and the perfect display place for the family silver.  When the furniture delivery guys unpacked it, I was just trying to stay out of the way.  But then they announced they were done and I walked into the room and nearly died.

It didn't look ANYTHING like the hutch I ordered. 

So I was trying to explain to them that it wasn't right, but my husband (the omniscient one about furniture apparently) was agreeing with them and not listening to me. "No, it's supposed to be that short." "No, the top's not supposed to be finished." "No, they didn't forget the door handles and knobs--hey, where are teh handles and knobs."

So, ignoring me all the way,  the furniture guys pocketed their pay and headed out the door.  That was when I found the OTHER piece of wood in the hallway.  I literally chased them down the street and made them get their asses back inside at which point I said (after telling the husband to keep quiet) that not only did my hutch NOT have knobs and handles, but that the extra piece of wood was the shelf that went in between the legs--SO WHERE IN THE HELL ARE THE DAMN LEGS, GENTLEMEN?

After a panicked phone call to their boss, I was informed that the man who'd "inspected" the furniture at the store wasn't in and he would call me in the morning.

While I was fuming, I walked by my oh-so-not-completed hutch and caught sight of my reflection and THAT spurred a new desire in me.  I may be on bedrest. I may be restricted from lifting weights or standing on my feet for long periods of time. No one has ever said a damn thing about pilates, though.  I pulled out my schedule and added two blocks (one hour gone from my morning routine and a half-hour session during my family time) for my exercise/physical therapy routine.  I will be fat at this RT; I will not be at the next one. 

After this rush of determination and the subsequent disposal of everything I like to eat in the kitchen, the phone rang. It was the vet, calling to tell us that Impy--my beloved, darling Impy--is a diabetic with a glucose level four times the normal range for a cat.  I was horrified.  Tomorrow we have to take him in to get his first insulin shot, poor baby, and learn how to give him those shots ourselves. So I decided to do a little research  on feline diabetes and discovered that I have been killing my cats. No lie--cats are carnivores, right? They don't have the same omnivorous abiliry to process carbohydrates.  But dry cat food is almost entirely vegetable producst with meat by products, baked at a high heat that removes all moisture from the food and then they spray it with a meat-flavored spray to basically addict the cats to it.  The high carb, low protein diet leads to heart disease, urinary tract problems, diabetes and various other ailments in cats.  So we looked up what best to feed our cats (Special Kitty and Nine Lives canned cat food, fround not sliced--the highest proteins and lowest carbs)--5-6 oz per ten pounds of cat 2-3 times a day. Evidently, just by switching cats to this type of diet can immediately put some cases of feline diabetes into remission.

So we rounded up all the dry food and put it away, went to the store and loaded up on high-protein cat foods and now have a bunch of happy kitties and two who are staring at me mournfully because they never ate canned food anyway. They don't like it. And for the first time in a week, Impy looks brighter and happier and is sleeping quite contentedly beside me, purring.

So finally, I found some time to spend writing.  Only three hours, but a productive 10k. I watched Survivor (doing my pilates), fed the cats their nighttime snacks (smuggling vitamins into their bowls), edited three more chapters and now I'm done early enough to watch Project Runway.

So yeah--a day that has changed everything.  Tomorrow will be a busy day. I have to make up the momentum I lost the past few days.  I'm cracking my knuckles; better watch out.

A Month in the Life--April 6,2010

Ah, my life is never dull.

(Yes I know. I missed a day. Keep reading and you'll figure out why.  It's not hard--Monday, I couldn't type.)

At any rate, after an early morning trip to my doctor, an awful, harrowing, long needle-filled hour, I received the news I least wanted to hear.

Bedrest. Ten days. Again.

*sigh*

And, since my shoulder hurts so badly it's hard to type, that means no extensive writing. (I'm cheating with this post, but I'm typing one-handed.  It takes forever) So my initial hopes of having Terella in presentable shape by the RT convention are now endangered.  I did get a huge cortisone shot today, so maybe it'll start working quickly and I can get back to it.  It better, anyway--anytime a needle that damn big goes into my shoulder which is already hurting, I'd better see quick results.

At any rate--between the doctor and the subsequent trip to the Walmart pharmacy and the obligatory waiting forever for new prescriptions to be filled, I lost my entire morning.  I set up camp on the couch in the living room, and with two new books I'd bought for pleasure reading (which I have sorely missed), a couple of cats (they switched out every hour or so) and a big glass of ice water (craving it like a mother) I settled down for an afternoon of absolute brain and body rest while brainless shows on television made a soothing and yet uninteresting noise in the house.

This lasted for an hour.

Then I cracked and opened the laptop.

I spent a couple of hours answering emails, working on proposals, talking to one of my writers (Lizzie T. Leaf--she's a dear lady and we had a lovely and productive conversation), and making one of my infamous lists--something I could type a little at a time.

By four, the roast I'd put in the crockpot was starting to smell fabulous.  I went back to one of the new books and finished it. By the by, it takes me a little over two hours to read your standard romance novel of 350 pages. I picked up a couple of historical romances by popular writers to see what the market was looking like. And then at six, I gave up just a little bit more and started to edit. I figured it wasn't really cheating; after all, most of what I do as an editor is backspace over offending sections and leave little comments, right?

At eleven, when the pain in my shoulder was bad enough that I was ready to cry, I realized I'd been editing for five hours straight.  I took my meds, turned on an old movie (Dragonwyck with Gene Tierney and Vincent Price and Walter Huston) and finally went to sleep a little after twelve thirty.

But what a depressing day--no word count total, only about forty pages edited and nothing really to get excited about as far as productivity.

But what the hey--I got two new books, my friend Gini Koch's new novel was released by DAW (Touched by an Alien--go get a copy now!) and I had roast beef for dinner.  No great loss without some small gains, I guess.

Congratulations, Gini!

A Month in The Life--April 4, 2010 Easter

I slept in.

I figured it was only fair.  I slept all the way until 10:30 and I loved every minute of it.

Waking up was not as pleasant.  Still very stiff and sore, and the flare up of bursitis made it almost impossible to type.  Realizing the writing was pretty much out of the question, I kind of wrote off the rest of the day.

I decided I wasn't going to work at all.

So, I had a meeting with Lori--who's helping me put together the workshop about taglines and blurbs for AMP.  We had a productive conversation and determined that I would cover the part of the workshop about why a great blurb and tagline was so important and she would cover the important question of how to write great ones.  We're getting back together in a week to put it all together.

Then I spent some time fielding questions about review requests.  After another couple of hours, I finally put the computer aside and settled down on the couch.  My shoulder was killing me.  I took out my journal and planned out my work for the week--which is usually how I spend Sunday afternoons. By the time that was done, I was bored.  So, the decision not to work was reversed and I started to writer around six o'clock. By nine, I had a respectable 7,923 words and put my work away.  The DH and I watch Undercover Boss together on Sunday nights, so the rest of the night was family time.

Happy Easter? Ours was fabulous. We turned off our phones and stayed out of everyone's way.  Not so great of a work day, perhaps, but it was a holiday. I'll make up for it in the morning.

Sample "A Day In The Life"

I thought I'd post this for reference, just so you have an idea of my daily schedule.  Keep in mind this is subject to change, depending upon circumstances or deadlines.  Saturday is my "light" day, where I try to keep my hours to eight.  My busiest days tend to be Mondays and Thursdays.  On a holiday, like today, I don't schedule blocks of time as I usually do; it'd be a waste of time considering the obligations we usually have on holidays.  Okay, you ready?

5:00 am--Rise and shine. It takes an hour for me to physically get out of bed between medications and exercise.  So this is the hour I eat breakfast, watch the news on television, do my stretching exercises and spend a little time with the husband before he leaves for the day.  This is also the cats' favorite hour--they get their canned cat food at this time--mostly to keep them out of my hair for the morning, when I do my best work.

6:00-7:30--Basic maintenance. This is when I straighten up the house, usually picking up every room and concentrating on one room to clean in depth. If I don't do this, my house turns into a wreck very quickly. This includes the cat boxes (all eight of them), the morning shower, checking email and setting the schedule for the rest of the day.

7:30--11:00 The first writing block of the day.  This is the block I reserve for whichever story is driving me hardest at the time--the story that just has to be told NOW or the story on deadline. I never, never, never give up this block. I don't answer the phone, I don't text message, I don't turn on the television. This writing block is sacred, and I usually manage to maintain a 2k-plus wph rate.

11-1:00 This is usually split between editing and online work. I edit quickly, faster than I write. I can edit about 40 pages in an hour if the corrections are minimal, 30 pages per hour if they're a bit more extreme. I have been able to edit a complete novella in this block if I'm concentrating and not backsliding into message boards too often.

1-2:00 The break hour. Allegedly.  Usually this falls by the wayside. It'd be nice to have a break, but eight of ten times I forget all about it.

2--5:00 The second writing block of the day. If I'm working through a revision on a project, this is usually when I do it.  Sometimes, if an editing project is nearing the deadline, I don't write during this period but edit.

5-8:00 Business work. This is when I either do projects for the publishing house, work on submissions and correspondence, read the submissions in the Aurora mailbox. I tend to write a lot of rejections in this period.

8-10:00 pm. Family time. The DH usually comes home around this time. We have our supper, call the kids or the parents, play with the cats and watch television. Again, supposedly.  Sometimes he comes home, we grunt at each other and both go back to work.

10:00 - @2:00 a.m.--Yeah, you're seeing that correctly.  This is the final work block of the day. If I'm tired or not feeling well, it's the one that gets chucked.  More often than not, though, I'm back at work at this point. He goes to bed; I go to work. The house is quiet and I'm not distracted.  Some very high word counts come from this block. This is usually also when I do my personal edits for my publisher.When I finally do go to bed, I don't forget to set the alarm. I get up at the same time every day without fail.

At the moment, I have five works in progress I am actively writing.  I have another three in rewrites. I have two manuscripts in edits with the publisher. I write anywhere from 10k to 25k per day on various projects. A day doesn't go by when I don't write at least 4k--otherwise known as sixteen-eighteen pages.  This is my routine, and what I'll be tracking during A Month In The Life.