Congratulations deb! I don't see you much anywhere else, but I've devoured this thread over the last week, and it's been good to read your voice.

Heh. I love your Lovett tagline.

No, I don't really post anywhere else here; F2F now and then, but only when it's pertinent.

Just popped in here to exhale a sigh. The Daymond thing, Seven Women, is coming up on 9,000 words, which means I'm over a third through with what the agent needs to shop to editors. She wanted it for October; she may not get it until November, though, because I'm going to be out promoting Cruel Sister.

I've had it for a long time. It's just...particularly apt right now.

I envy you (in a good way) your productivity. If someone wanted me to have something finished by November, even if I were a third of the way through, I'd be reorganizing all the playlists on the iPod and have a sudden urge to research Welsh grammar.

Well, the schedule's a lot stranger (potentially, anyway) and a lot more fraught than just the first 25K of this one. There's a high probability that my bloody publisher will blackmail me into crunch mode yet again. They have the whip hand on the Haunted Ballads: if they decide they want the fifth book, New-Slain Knight, and that they want it NOW, they can simply announce that it wouldn't make next fall's release lineup unless they get it by X date.

Gun to head.

Meanwhile, what I really want to be writing is book five of the Kinkaid Chronicles, Book of Days, but that one is number 3 on the "I get to write that now" rotation.

I've just been trying to get my sea legs back. Practicing with bits of poetry, reading anything in front of my face, playing with the thesarus, putting into words anything I've tried to get out of my brain for the past 6 years.

These days, I never seem to stop writing. Very odd. It's as if deliberately turning my back on writing anything for ten years combined with the midlife climacteric jolt of getting my memories of the years with Nicholas Rev.1 back, and turned on a nice steady niagara.

Because I've been in full freshet mode since about 2002, and I'm liking it.

For the first time in a long time, I'm actually trying to experience whatever the hell is happening instead of pushing it away, and the only way I can cope with that is putting names to things. When I was younger and less self conscious, when everything I put on paper didn't seem so ironic, I was a lot more honest with myself. I need to get back there.

Well, remember that the book we write at twenty bears very little resemblance to the book we write at twenty-five, or thirty - and I', not talking about quality, just perception of self.

The you you filter through changes, grows, shrinks, becomes an entirely different flavour of homunculus, as time moves on.

Sometimes, we hit dry spots.

For a while anything I wrote was a reaction- a choice not to be someone who writes a certain way, or about certain things. There were some shining moments of parody, but mostly, from here it looks snarky and cynical- and not in a good erikaj way. Y'know.

It's like a joke I was playing on anyone willing to read it, and I don't think that's the way to use language to touch hearts and minds. It's mean and doesn't really ring true.

Well, you know where I sit about that one. Be real or be gone is my motto, these days.