Erin, send it to me and I'll give it a go--I asked first because I feel like I'm a better critic with the kind of stuff I actually read, y'know? I don't always have that luxury in my writers' group, and I'm never sure I'm offering useful critique in those cases.

Susan and Nilly -- insent, and thank you!

Sending out the draft-so-far to several people has inspired me to make the friggin' line edits to my saved copy, so hopefully I will finish that tomorrow.

Oh, man, I have to offer some major thanks, right here.A lot of people need thanking, but this one goes out to Beverly: I'm finishing up the final input updates to "Still Life" - which was written first ten years ago and as such needed some major updating - and she caught a honker that I'd flat-out missed. A timing thing: when I first wrote it, the lead character (female) was in her late thirties and there's a section where her mother is talking about life in the fifties, because that's when said female lead would have been born, to make her late thirtyish - in 1994, when I wrote it.

Problem is, the lead character's still in her late thirties, nearly forty, but I didn't update that bit in mom's recollections. So doing the, er, math? She'd be in her late forties, my age.

Yike. Easy fix, too, but purely cultural - discussions of tailfins on cars on whatnots - and I purely missed the update.

Gah. Whew. Mental roses being sent Bev's way.....

Mwah! You're more than welcome. It's a great read, even knowing how it ends. Where does it go from here?

I wait for Anne's input, do the final tweaks, and off it goes to my agent. After that, we have the big discussion (Jenn - "where do you see this going?" Deb - "you tell me, sistah, you're the agent, I'm just the dumbass writer")

It may well go to ROC first, or possibly Mira. I have no preferences; I just want it out there.

Fly, you pretty book, and make lots of lovely moolah so Deb can maintain both her lifestyle and her writing schedule!

Fly, you pretty book, and make lots of lovely moolah so Deb can maintain both her lifestyle and her writing schedule!

Which includes buying a nice compound in the Tuscan hills for all my Anarach and Buffista peeps to hang out!

Faster! Fly faster! Quick!

A nice little compound, updated farmhouse or villa with several guest houses, all updated with new bathrooms, in the hills between Florence and Arezzo......

:::siiigh:::

come on, BBC! Buy the rights to the entire series! Ewan McGregor!

Forget casting Ewan. Just throw him in bodily as part of the deal. I'm sure he'd like Tuscany....