Guess Who...

Whoa... it's been a long time! But maybe it's time to brush the dust off and tidy up a little around here. A lot has changed since my last post. A. Lot.

To begin with, Musa Publishing is gone. Two years now. :(

Samhain Publishing is also gone. They held on for a year following my last post, but as of February 28, 2017 (Yikes, it's too hard to believe it;s 2017 already!!!) they closed their doors for good as well.

But, as they say, when one door closes, another one opens and in my case, I'm happy to announce that Entangled Publishing offered contracts on Tiger Eyes and When I'm With You. Eden's Pass, however is out of print and likely to remain so for now. I have hopes of one day having it out there again, but it needs some updating and I've got several projects going on right now as well, so we'll have to see what happens with it.

I don't have any of the details yet on the other two - but when I do, I'll share. And hopefully, I'll be able to get back into blogging. I hesitate to promise, because life really does get in the way sometimes and let's face it, sometimes there's just nothing really exciting to blog about.

I wrote my very first post on April 22, 2006. Eleven years ago. Damn... So much has happened between now and then. My kidlets were 5 and 6 months old at the time. Now, they are sixteen and eleven. My first Samhain book (Eden's Pass) wouldn't come out for another almost two years. Now? I've had almost a dozen books published and many more written, hopefully to be published at a later day. I've lost forty pounds and became a gym rat. It's been an incredible and interesting journey since that first blog post and I can see I have a bit of housekeeping to do here. Some of it's rather sad - like the publishers that are no more- but what's to come makes up for it. I'm looking so forward to all of it.

So, I can't promise I won't ever slack on this, but I'll try to get back to it on a regular basis. I've actually kind of missed blogging (does anyone even do this anymore? I don't know, I've gotten lazy on the blogs I follow as well. **shrug**) so maybe that will change.

We shall see.

Done!

With a week to go until my deadline, Windemere is finished! YAY! And lest my editor read this and faint dead away because she thinks it's only first draft finished, I mean the polished, finished book is done. Happy dance! I'll read through it, make sure I caught any and all typos (and apologize in advance for any I might miss) and then BAM! Off it will go.

And then? Then I will take a few days off and relax now that the pressure is off. It will come back, in the form of edits, but that's okay. I can deal with that.

So, we're nearing the halfway point of the summer. Already??? I know that technically, summer only began what? Three weeks ago? But as a baseball fan, the turning point in the season is the All-Star break, which is this week, so I think of it as the halfway mark of summer as well. Although, it is hot enough to fool me into thinking it's August - what's up with this weather? It's ungodly, really.

Anyway, my plans for the remainder of the summer are really quite simple. I'm halfway through Julia Quinn's Bridgerton series. I'll hopefully get a few blog topics out of it because, quite frankly, I'm not enjoying this series as much as I thought. Mostly because it seems to me each of Quinn's heroes is more of a jerk than the last. I know of at least one blog post I want to write, and it was inspired by these less-than-heroic-heroes. For the first time since I bought my Kindle, I've made notes in Romancing Mr. Bridgerton (the one I'm reading now.) I've never made notes in a book, but this one was irritating me to the point where I had to, because when and if I review it on Goodreads, I want to make sure I don't forget what some of my beefs with it were.

We have a family vacation coming up, which I am really looking forward to - I haven't taken a real vacation ins years. We aren't the type to take a yearly family vacation, so when we do, it's really something to look forward to and I can't wait for this year's! And other than that, I'll be polishing Don't Tempt Me to get it out the door and under submission. And aside from research, I have nothing else going this summer. Go. Me.

Gotta love summer!

Where Is Everybody?

My daily blog list is huge. I have blogs I read for entertainment. I read agent blogs. Blogs written by other writers. I'm like a blog pack rat, there are so many of them.

But lately it seems that people just aren't updating them the way the used to. Weeks, sometimes months go by without any new posts. And I know I'm guilty of it (although I try not to let it go months.) One blog I follow hasn't been updated since October. I don't know if the author is blogging somewhere else, or has just stopped. There's no 'I've Moved! Come find me here!' post. There's no final, calling-it-quits post. It's just gone... dark.

There are a few agent blogs I used to devour, but don't any longer because they are mostly rehashes of old posts. I get that there's only so much to say about queries and what makes an agent ask for a partial or a full or offer representation. There really are only so many ways to reword those posts as well. Some of those agents are no longer agenting. Some, like Bookends, have decided that they've said all they could say and are no longer going to be doing regular blogging--although they may still post sporadically. Some pull the plug altogether, like Miss Snark did a few years ago. I'm still kind of sad about that one, actually. I loved Miss Snark. Hard to believe it's been five years since it went dark.

Most of the writers I know, including me, have other lives away from the computer. And those other lives can keep us crazy busy for weeks at a time. Or maybe it's just that there is only so much to say. How many times can you blog about how much your characters seem to hate you, or how much you hate waiting on a sub because the time goes so slowly, or how you understand no-response-means-no-but-it's-still-a-sucky-policy?

So I wonder if blogging is slowly starting to go the way of MySpace. Has everything that can be blogged about, been blogged about? Or is it just that, with the popularity of Facebook and Twitter, things that used to be updated in blogs are done via those mediums instead?

I've wavered back and forth between letting my blog go dark. Sometimes, it's just one more thing I have to do. But other times, I think, I still enjoy it (when I can think of an original topic to rattle on about), so why stop it? I know I'm not nearly as good at keeping up with it as I used to be, but I try not to let too much time pass between posts.

So what do you think? Has blogging seen its heyday? Or is there still anything interesting left to blog about?

'Sup?

O hai!

Sorry about the blog silence last week (did anyone even miss me??) but it was Spring Break and whilst the Girl was off having a groovy time in Florida with her grandparents, the Boy and I were stuck in Jersey. So, to make it up to him, I was cramming as much fun stuff as possible into that week. Not that blogging isn't fun, of course **coughcough** but I was outside more than I was inside.

But now I'm back, and I have a few things that have been rattling around in my mind for blog topics. So with any luck, it won't be another eleven days before I'm back. :D

Is It Just Me...?

Once upon a time, I used to read a lot of blogs - writer blogs, review blogs, industry blogs. When my computer went ka-blooey last October and I lost so many links, I went nuts trying to find them. or restore them. And I know writers really shouldn't read their reviews, but call me vain. I want to know if anyone's read my books and, if they have, what they think of them.

But over the last few months, it seems to me that either blogs aren't being updated (**looks skyward with a casual, who-me? whistle**) or if they are, it's a lot of rehashing of old posts. Half the time, I don't bother with the agent blogs I used to read daily. There's no point. Chances are, they're posting about something they've already covered two or three times.

So now, instead of spending a good chunk of my morning reading these blogs, I find I skip over a LOT of them. I thought I was bad about updating, but one blog hasn't been updated since October. I don't know if she's blogging somewhere else, but if she is, she really should post a link to that blog. I can't be the only one who doesn't know where to find her, can I?

I kind of envy the bloggers who can come up with new stuff every day. I used to be able to do that, but lately, it seems to me that every topic I can come up with, I've already blogged about. I've toyed with the idea of retiring this blog, but at the same time, I don't want to simply because I prefer blogging to updating my website. Website updates are a total pain for me. They never go as smoothly as I think they should, so I put them off for as long as possible. Blogger isn't perfect, but it's far more user friendly.

It doesn't help that I'm between books right now. How many times can I post about waiting to hear back on a sub? Or how I'm taking a few weeks off to get my groove back because I feel like I'm just retelling one of my own books, only with different character names? It's frustrating, so I thought a mini-vacation would help. It remains to be seen whether or not it helps, or whether it's time to take stock of everything. I wonder if I've run out of things to write about, or worse, lost the desire to write at all. Maybe I've hit a crossroads - and I'm probably not the only one - and it's time to sit down and really think about what I want to do.

We'll see, I guess...

Blog vs Website

As I was scanning through my daily blogs, I came upon an interesting blog post over at BookEnds about social networking. At the end of the post, Jessica asked her readers what was it about author websites that people either liked or disliked. And that got me to thinking about my own website.

As long time readers might recall, I had a website professionally designed and maintained. And it was a pain in the tuckus (how do you spell that???) It literally took weeks to get updates done. Now, I grant you, the web guy had other clients, so I tried to be patient, but when it took weeks and many, many emails (most of which went unanswered) to get the simplest changes done, I'd had enough. It was enough to wait for non-time sensitive things (book releases, sales to publishers, that kind of stuff), but having to chase him down for time-sensitive things - like contests - got to be too much. I later found out that my computer guy (who is a wonderful, wonderful person and still my go-to guy for computer issues) actually fired the web guy. Apparently I wasn't the only one who got tired of hunting him down and hounding him to get things done. Mind you, he was paid to do this kind of stuff, and he didn't come cheaply. I got tired of throwing my money away, so off web guy went into the sunset.

And there was much rejoicing.

But, I needed to get a new website, soooo... long story short ("Too late!" the audience roared.) I have my website through GoDaddy, and I do the updates and everything myself. It isn't fancy, but I don't think it's horrible, either.

After reading that BookEnds post, though, I wonder - does a writer really need a website and a blog. Is one better than the other, and if so, which do readers prefer?

My blog gets updated more often than my website. I try to keep it entertaining (jeez, I hope it's entertaining, really), I try not to simply push my books on everyone (buy, buy, buy!) I try to keep it a mix of life, writing, and that all-elusive perfect cup of coffee (which, sadly, remains just out of reach.) In short, I enjoy my blog. I enjoy posting, I enjoy getting comments (you like me! you really like me!), I like commenting back. In all, I just like it.

Maybe I shouldn't admit it, but I prefer it over the website. Updates are easier, so they are more frequent here. I don't have to fight to get this picture to fit, or this font to look right. It's. Just. Easier.

But, it isn't for me. It's for you. (No, really. It is. Honest.)

So, I'm curious. Which do you, as a reader, prefer? Website or blog? Or is it necessary for a writer to keep both?