This week, I’ll be a little late getting the posts up. I can’t preset them like I normally do with the contest post above.

Now–the weekend. It was fine, quiet mostly. It rained Saturday and I got some writing done.  Sunday was sunny and Wizard and I went to breakfast. I love Belgium waffles with blueberry topping! And from there–bleh. I just had one of those days where nothing I did seemed to work out.

Okay it’s official, I’m boring today. It’s up to you guys to be entertaining. Tell us about your weekend!

This is Bailey patiently waiting for my son to finish his (college) homework so they can play.

Clearly there’s  a problem with Bailey’s plan though. Because my son stopped working to take a picture of Bailey and email it to me.

I can’t imagine where my son gets that tendency toward procrastination.  It’s a total mystery. And that rumor about me procrastinating on revising the dragon chapters is not true! It’s just that the witches I’m playing with right now are all shiny and sparkly–that’s not procrastination, it’s just trying to capture the story before it loses it’s luster.  Totally logical.

And if my agent is reading this–umm–I’m mentally plotting revisions not procrastinating!

Dang, I don’t even think Bailey believes me. Just look at that face. Sigh.

I want to give you all a heads up about a really cool game/contest that is called Scrabble Scramble and is sponsored by Book Monster Reviews and LITERAL ADDICTION.

You can go to either of those sites to learn more about the game. Now as to how I’m involved–on Sunday, November 13th, one of the clues will appear here on my blog. Then it will stay here until November 20th.  So for that week, I’ll be leaving that clue up.

There are two sets of cool prizes.  Hop over and read more here and join in the fun!

I’m not sure if I’ll keep blogging beneath the clue or what.  Do you guys have a preference?

It was a pretty good weekend. Wizard and I went to our favorite restaurant to celebrate our anniversary.   We rarely ever have dessert when we go out, mostly because we’re always too full. But this restaurant has a specialty–a chocolate lava cake.

I dream about this cake! For days I lusted after it. I told Wizard I was ordering it.

He shrugged. He was much more interested in the steak and lobster.

Amateur.  He’s known me this long, and he doesn’t listen to me when I recommend dessert? He’ll learn.

So we go to the restaurant.  We order drinks–I tried a gimlet.  I’m so adventurous! Then we ordered dinner and I pre ordered the chocolate lava cake.

Wizard smirked at me. He was indulging me, sure that he wouldn’t be interested in dessert. That smirk said it all.

Oh Wizard…

So we ate, dinner was wonderful. I’m bouncing in my chair, waiting for dessert. Now Wizard is laughing at me, totally amused.

Then desert arrives.

Chocolate lava cake with vanilla ice cream, fudge sauce and heath bar topping. The waiter set it between us, handed us spoons and left.

Wizard is impressed, so he decided to try a bite.

Then the battle was on! We were fighting over this cake! Both trying to get as much as we could. Both of us gorging and laughing at the same time. Then, because he loves me, he gave me the last bite.

When we were finished, he looked at me and said, “Next time, we order two.”

I laughed.

And on Sunday, I wowed him again by making lemon curd. Then I made tiny cups out of pie crust and filled them with the lemon curd (such a gross name)  and dusted them with powdered sugar.

So my weekend was dessert laden and now? I’m going to the gym and getting back on my Weight Watchers Maintenance! Hopefully…

How was your weekend?

Before we get to reading, let’s talk about colds. Why is a man’s cold always worse than the woman’s? I’m talking about YOU, Wizard!

If you’ve never seen man cold, hop over to You Tube and watch it here I made Wizard watch it again last night. He laughed even though he really is miserable. I have a milder version of the cold he has.

Okay books. I’ve been in another slump, I’m even wondering if I need to take a break from reading paranormal for awhile.  I took a few days off reading just to clear my head. But I plan to start Monica McCarty’s THE HAWK tonight (which is really last night, since I wrote this blog Wednesday night.)

What about you all? What are you reading?

Today’s post is some thoughts about my writing process.  Feel free to escape now!

Yesterday really got away from me. But I did hear from my agent, and I will be doing another round of revisions on the Dragons. I am closer but not there yet. My agent loves the idea, loves the story, but it’s a matter getting the opening pages the right balance of exciting and informative that is a struggle.

This isn’t a surprise to me and that’s because this has been a truly backward proposal for me. My normal process is to start with a premise and a character or two,  and then grow from there.  But this time, I had the huge world in my mind, I knew what kinds of characters people the world, but not who they are in terms of goals, motivation and conflict. This immediately set up a problem–trying to distill down a complex world into bite sized pieces through the characters.

Another backward thing? The synopsis is working, it’s the chapters that need a bit more finessing. I normally can rock out the chapters and then get tripped up in ugly ways with the synopsis.

Backwards! And really enlightening as I’m seeing my strengths and weaknesses from another angle and I think that will help me get stronger as a writer.

This week, I’m going to continue working on my other proposal to bang out as much as I can. Then I’ll set that aside to work on the dragons.  In the proposal for this week, I’m going with my normal process of character(s) first and it’s coming much faster so far.  The reason for that is simple–when I’m in the character’s head, and we learn about the world together, and it is MUCH easier to feed that knowledge to the reader in increments that don’t feel overwhelming.  But when I know so much more about the world than the character–it leads to clunky telling and unnecessary info dumping because I don’t really know what info is vital to the story at that moment and what is not.

And that was probably way more than you all wanted to know about my writing process!