This Week in Great Ideas

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raspberry

I had a bunch of things I wanted to accomplish over the weekend:

Clean Oven ✓
Sweep Garage ✓
Get some plants in the ground ✓
Write 6000 words HA HA!

I actually did get some writing done but I got stuck and had to write in circles for a day before I realized I needed to stop and go back to my outline and get situated. That’s a high word count from me, anyway. I’m not super speedy. I’m back on track now.

Meanwhile, I had a dinner date with a friend. She’s a writer and has two small children.

We were lamenting the pile of books we wished to read with the amount of time we had for reading and came up with a great idea: a reading retreat.

This would be like a writing retreat only you just read. In the evening you could have dinner with the other participants and talk about what you’re reading. But the main activity would be reading.

I think this would be a hit.

Working Titles

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rose

It seems like either I have a great title right away or I can’t think of a title to save my life.

When I don’t have a title or a character name I use a place holder. For example, Season of Us was referred to as Save the Dog which is a callback to a popular screenwriting book called Save the Cat.

I do this even with short stories and story ideas so I have zillions of folders on my computer with names like “Scary Monster Thing” or “Auntie gets Lost.” Even if I eventually change the title and the story is published, I keep it the placeholder name in my computer.

I don’t recommend this practice because there are times when I need to find an older piece of writing and I can’t find it because I can’t remember the working title.

I generally don’t have a hard time coming up with names for characters but sometimes I use the name of a person I know as a placeholder. I once was about to submit something when I realized I was still using a real person’s name. And she has a somewhat unusual name and the character had a few similarities with her. I had to come up with a new name fast.

I’ve started the next book. Let’s pencil in mid-October for a release date. More details when I have them.

The List Machine

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ballandchain

Happy Mother’s Day to all the mothers out there. And Happy Mother’s Day to all you non-mothers, too.

There is no special meaning to that image. I thought, oh hey, ball and chain. So clever for a romance writer. But I am now second guessing that.

I am still here and the new book is started. I will tease a little bit about it when I’m more sure of myself. I’m still getting my bearings on it.

asparagus

How about a nice asparagus photo for clever?

I had a list of things I was going to write about today and I can’t find it. I also have updated photos of the garden and I can’t find those, either.

The greens grow so fast. We’ve already eat 2 giant bowls full and I just picked another this morning. I have so many volunteer tomatillos I can’t yank them fast enough. I started tomatoes on the windowsill. They look pretty spindly at this point. I don’t know how the garden store gets them to be sturdy. Hopefully just time. I have a couple of volunteer plants out there that I’m not sure what they are. Possibly pumpkin. The raspberry patch is looking promising.

There is so much work to do out there. I worked yesterday but I pooped out before I could finish anything major. I’m on my way back out there right now.

Just A little Patience

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rhodie

I love this one red bloom right in the middle of the rhodie. This is the moment when our yard looks the best. Everything is green and colorful.

I’m in the midst of a busy couple of weeks, which together with some mild insomnia issues, is making me feel a little frazzled.

I keep making lists of things I need to get done and once I’ve done all the easy things, I set it aside and make a new list.

I’m taking off for a long weekend to visit family. Hope to do a little refreshing while I’m there.

Squirrels, Blossoms & TV

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apple

My week was almost completely derailed by some unwelcome house guests.

We had squirrels in the fireplace. We’ve lived in this house forever and never had this problem before. It’s a long story with many chapters but for now the squirrels have all been captured and released outside and the chimney is screened off so they have to find another place to live.

The apple tree is gorgeous this time of year. I have tried different angles and different times of day and can’t capture how pretty it looks. I think the tree is near the end of its days. When you stand next to it you can see that the trunk is partially hollow and the main limbs as well. It’s hard to believe it has so many blooms when the foundation looks so sketchy.

(Also, can you spot the squirrel in the photo? I don’t know if it is one that was living with us.)

appleblossoms

I’ve been trying to rearrange my time so I can get more writing done. Or, any writing would be nice at this point.

I don’t watch that much TV anymore but I have a few shows and it’s nice to have something when I’m out of brain juice at the end of a long day. I quit three shows last week including Scandal. I loved the first few seasons of that show but I noticed it was always the last thing left on the DVR and even then I would put off watching it. I gave up in the middle of the Susan Ross episode.

I was dismayed to check my future recordings to see three new shows starting this week. But one is Outlander. Yay.

I’ll figure out how to fit it all in.

Sad Tulips

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16-tulips

I’m disappointed in the tulips this year. I need to do some reading from “tulips for dummies” to see if I can figure out the problem.

These blooms are looking pitiful. The backyard is even worse. Oddly, the backyard daffodils looked better than I can ever remember.

15-tulips

This is a photo of the same area from 2 years ago. I’m not sure it demonstrates the issue as well as I would like.

I am working on a new book that would be part of a series but it is slow going. I can carve out time but only a little bit and it’s hard to get much work done in tiny chunks.

For now, it’s going to be a mystery. Hopefully I can report more soon.

I’ve also started a couple of posts about some of my favorite romance, old school and current. Stay tuned.

Everybody’s Working For The Weekend

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water

A couple of weekends ago I started working on transferring compost from the bin and working it into the garden spot. I was interrupted before I could finish. Then the weather changed.

My buckets were goopy from compost so I left them in the middle of the lawn. In less than two weeks they were this full from the rain.

I managed to get out and get a little work done this weekend but there’s always so much to do at this time of year.

tulip

Future tulips. Next week at this time I’ll have tulip photos.

Just Another Spring Day

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daff2

Look – some monster has been eating my daffodils.

daff3

More damage. Only in the front yard. My front flower bed is not very big but it is a massive slug and snail operation. I would be tempted to yank everything out of there and start all over except if it’s just dirt every cat in the neighborhood thinks it’s for them.

daff1

The backyard flowers look lovely and uneaten.

I only have a few with the little orange center and those are my favorite. I’ve been wanting to order more bulbs but last time I bought from a catalog I began receiving an avalanche of catalogs – like every month and all different kinds, not just bulbs. But who buys bulbs every month?

I called and asked them to knock it off and now I receive zero catalogs. There should be an option where you can get one catalog in the late summer and that’s it.

I woke up with grand plans for a productive morning but found an ant invasion.

We’re winning at pests here.

Now’s The Time on Sprockets When We Dance

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Columbia River on a windy February afternoon

I have a Macarena earworm. I have no idea how this happened. I haven’t heard that song recently. I haven’t thought about that song. It’s not like I even had a connection to that song when it was a hit. I heard about it and had to have someone explain to me what it was. Yesterday I was in the kitchen putting away dishes and I found myself singing, “Hey! Macarena!”

Hopefully I heard it unknowingly in the background and it’s not some weird portal that opened in my brain.

Yesterday I had about an hour so I decided to make a button for the sidebar for Abbie’s latest cool promotional project: Little Book Nook (no longer exists RIP). I’m not very good at Photoshop so it took forever and then the first one didn’t look right so I tried to fiddle with it.

WordPress (I refer to it as turdpress) and I aren’t very good friends. For my other website I upload the photos myself using FTP. For this site I use the WordPress media uploader and I guess it has some sort of dummy-proofing but it didn’t want me to replace the old file with the new file but it didn’t tell me that. I kept clicking and checking my URLs and refreshing and then pulling my hair out.

It took forever for me to figure out the problem was and by that time it was dinner and I was hungry and impatient. And I still don’t love the button but I don’t want to get distracted. I have time to work on the inbox so that’s what I’m doing this morning.

Also, I’m starting the next book. Details coming soon.