Thanks...and I haven't smoked any of the stuff from the evidence room yet.

BWAHAHAHHAHAHAHAHA!

Honey, I woke up feeling cranky as hell - forget to take a flexoril last night and the result is aching all over and less than three hours sleep.

I have cheered up considerably.

A long face like my cousin Ed....

Ok, then, my mental collapse is worth it, then.

I've now got two agents committed to our conference. I rule.

I hope they'll be this friendly when I have a book to pitch to them!

Go Susan! Good work.

erika, I'm still laughing. That was priceless.

Go Susan!

Just because a "horse is a horse," doesn't mean he's comfortable. Although, I'm afraid that makes me like Catherine the Great, now.

Brainstorming help requested for a tough scene:

Anna has just learned that her husband Sebastian is dead. She's still mostly in the stunned disbelief stage. But because her marriage was miserable, some little part of her is already chanting "Free! Free! Free!" She naturally feels guilty about this, because Sebastian was far from capital-E Evil--he was just a pompous git, and no husband for a woman with Anna's brains and spirit.

With her is her cousin's wife Helen, the best friend she has among the officer's wives. Helen is a brisk, matter-of-fact sort. She's a bit older--30 to Anna's 22. She and her husband Alex are the only ones in the regiment who realize just how bad the Anna-Sebastian marriage was, and because of the family tie they're firmly on Anna's side.

So I've got these women alone in a room together a few pages into Chapter Two, and I want them to have a conversation that'll let me fill the readers in on why Anna married Sebastian and what went wrong, whether through actual dialogue or by setting Anna to musing about it. We saw in Chapter One that Anna was so miserable that she was half-trying to provoke Sebastian into at least a temporary separation--make him angry enough to send her back to England--and I'd like to bring that out a little more, have her revisit her thoughts and actions of Chapter One.

But so far every attempt I've made to get Anna and Helen talking has fallen flat. It either winds up perfectly conventional, no undercurrents whatsoever, or something perilously close to this:

Helen: Woohoo! Your nasty husband is dead!
Anna: I can't rejoice at death. It'd be Wrong.
Helen: C'mon. I know he made you miserable.
Anna: Well, OK, he did. Woohoo! I'm going to (Regency) Disneyland!

Any ideas?

Hmm. That's a poser. Maybe it could end up with Anna grieving, not for Sebastian but the might-have-beens, the happy marriage she wishes she'd had with him, etc. She could also admit to Helen that she feels like a monster because she knows she should be sad, not relieved.

Does that help? It could take the "Woohoo" factor out of the scenario.

Ooh, I can work with that. Thanks, Anne! The trick is getting there, of course, but I've got another few ideas that I'm going to try.