Late, but still:

erika, I loved the piece you posted - so honest, with such a fresh-to-me way of looking at things, spiced with snark.

deb, I loved "Still Life with Devils" - I still have images of it in my mind's eye, which is the best way for a book to stay with me.

Welcome, Kessie. fellow mother-tongue-other-than-English speaker (mine is Hebrew).

Congratulations, AmyLiz!

Thanks, Nilly. I hope eventually somebody likes it that isn't us. Not that I don't write for Buffistas.

Thanks, Nilly!

do you also get the weird blank minute of near-panic when you've finished? "Oh, crap, my house is untenanted!" panic?

Last night, I was so elated, no. That will come, but it will more like an insidious, creeping thing, where at strange moments a paragraph or scene will come back to me and I'll think, Well, that sucked. With only eight weeks to write it (and I know it's only 50,000 words, but still) I know there's plenty of stuff to polish. So...revisions. Um, whoopee. :-)

Is The Great Flower of Serving Men (did I get that right, it's on the previous page) the book after Weaver? Which, by the way, is on my Wish List now. :-) Such a cool idea for a mystery series. And what's Still Life with Devils? Romantic suspense? Mystery? Thriller? All three? :-) It sounds fabulous.

Susan, yay for getting back in the saddle! Hope the hypertension thing is under control. I know what you mean about wishing you had time to read and watch TV--with the baby, I'm parked on the couch so often, feeding her or rocking her to sleep, which sounds lovely, but after awhile I'm itchy for her to be down so I can get back to work. Or even do laundry. Will I get to read some of the manuscript? (hint...)

Think I may nap now, though. The baby's down, the book is in...and I am feeling fairly comastose.

AmyLiz, it's Famous Flower of Serving Men - all the book titles in the series are the titles of the songs that supposedly tell the story of the event that inspired the hauntings.

Still Life - hard to describe. Thumbnail, it's about a lieutenant, Cassius Chant at SFPD Homicide, his sister Leontyne (Cass and Leo), who is an artist who can walk into her own paintings, a serial killer who kills pregnant women, and who may or may not be human.

Thinking about it, that moment of near-panic is actually a moment of blankness for me. A sort of "shit, ok, NOW what, nobody home anymore" thing.

Thanks for the warm welcome ...

deborah grabien :Just general things like if the story which i´m writing is working or if it does confuse somebody! And well also grammar and spelling etc are important since i´m still learning english.

Nilly: I´m from Germany .I had a friend who spoke hebrew, she taught me a few things but sadly i dont remember anything.

Susan W. : sending healing vibes to you .. Hope you´ll be alright soon.

Deb -- my husband has that blankness thing. Only his is related to completion of a musical project. It's definitely near panic sometimes, and in the bad old days could devolve into near depression if he didn't catch a vision for the next project. It was interesting to me, because I always needed a rest, a time away from the work. But he needed to be constantly in a project, and if he wasn't, he wasn't happy.

These days we're constantly in music so there's not so much of that, and he works on other people's recording projects. But he still gets the ache if he doesn't have something of his own working. Empty room is a good description.

Kessie, I'm just deborah, or deb - very informal. I'll go back and have a read through some of your work if you think it would be useful to you, you bet.

Liese, married to a bassplayer (and long involved with a worldclass piano player, for years before that), plus my father was a violinist. I feel your pain on the musicianly "yeeeeeARH!" thing, believe me.

ok .. Hi Deb ! Well it would be really cool if you would read some of my stuff! On the site there is mostly just summaries on the stuff i´m working on now ( and old stuff) . When you want to read one of the current ones .. just tell me and i´ll send it to you ... or when you have a lj go here [link] thankies

So, can I get takes from those of you who have read Still Life?

My agent just heard back from Linda Marrow (head honcha at Random House) - she'd demanded and got an exclusive submission, which meant no one else was looking at it. Took her five months to decide, but she's passing. She said, and I quote, "...talented and gifted, and demonstrated your gift for portraying intelligent, appealing characters. But she felt let down at the end of the story. She said the ending just didn't work for her -- it was too abstract and surreal and the rules of the alternate universe weren't communicated well to the reader."

Which, personally, tells me that she was looking at it as entirely a diferent kind of book, since there aint no stinking alternate universe; that's the point. Everywhere you can travel is part of your reality. The danger in SLWD isn't from alternate realities to the One true Universe; it's posed by being dragged into someone else's reality, under the mistaken impression you can control things.

IOW? This isn't a science fiction novel; it's a basic supernatural police procedural with memorable characters and my usual morality play as the not so subtle subtext.

So what I want to know is, did anyone else want or expect a different ending? Because Jenn flatly disagrees with her, and so do I.

But feedback is good.

So it's about to be on its way (finally!) to Amy Einhorn at Warner, John Morgan at Berkeley, and Christina Boys at Pocket (Linda Marrow's old house, back when the earth was still cooling). We shall see.

I have to read that now.