Visit me around Knoontime!

Today is my debut post over at Knoontime Knitting where I'll be blogging monthly about the Journey into 3D. My first topic is Japanese temari - come on over and visit me. I promise you'll have a ball!

Literally. I'm serious. Temari is the art of Japanese thread balls...don't take my word for it, stop by and see for yourself.

Updates, updates...

It's been a while since I blogged here - that pesky RL got in the way. This is the first weekend I've had to sit down and try to get myself back on track a bit.

Things I've been up to:

I have ALL of my book covers for the series. I'm thrilled! Right now I'm waiting on larger size versions, as I discovered there will be new cover art size requirements at some venues starting next month. Sigh. I'm a big fan of the status quo - so this was a pain in the butt. Cost me extra money and meant do-over work for cover artist. She's a trooper, though, so I know I'll be ready for whatever the sales venues demand want.

I'm STILL mired in the April story. I've revised and revised and I'm still not happy with it. Fortunately I have time to get things just right, but the perfectionist in me [who is usually very quiet] is having a small fit about not getting things done in the proper order.

I've added a blog to my blog roll - go over and check out Knoontime Knitting. I'll be posting there periodically about my other great love - crafting. There's nothing I love more than talking about a project. I'll keep everyone posted on when my articles appear.

What have you been up to?

I wish...

...growing a story was as easy as growing string beans.

Aren't these cute? They look enormous but they're really very small, baby string beans. I'm excited about them because I have a notorious brown thumb, Seriously, I can't grow mold on old bread. But I have a fantasy of someday having a gorgeous vegetable garden. This year, I decided to grow some plants in pots because the groundhogs and the squirrels around here are pretty bad ass. They eat anything! Not to mention the gosh darn rabbits. I have to grow my plants on a sunny corner of the deck unless I want to build a fenced in enclosure, which I don't have the money, time, or expertise to do.

Right now, I have two pepper plants that are barely hanging on, one basil plant that looks more like a sponge, some flowers that are mostly drowning because of all the rain we've had here, my lemon tree - which is about three years old and doing pretty well, and then I have my stringbeans. If I'm lucky, eventually I'll get enough beans for one serving...but I don't care. They're my stringbeans and I'm proud of them.

Along the same lines, I'm trying to grow story #4 of my series - basically in a container between #3 and #5, which are both finished. I skipped 4 a while ago because the plot wasn't working, so now I'm trying to tease it out of the dry soil of my brain. It's not easy. The string beans are doing better, but I'll persevere.

On the upside, #1, #2 and #3 are edited and ALL of my covers are done!

Look at this!

I just stood out in the sunshine while it was raining and took this picture - it was actually a DOUBLE rainbow, but the second one is very faint. This is the second rainbow I've seen this week thanks to the wacky weather we have here in Lollypop Land.

How do you reward yourself?

Yesterday I tweeted about my word count for the year so far. I was pretty shocked to discover that despite the copious amount of time I waste doing things like adding up word count and surfing the web for pictures of my favorite snacks, I somehow managed to maintain the 1,000 word a day average I aspired to achieve at the beginning of the year. In fact I'm even a bit over.

As a reward for not slacking off as much as I thought I was, I'm taking it easy today [BBQ with friends and family] and I'm indulging in my new favorite guilty pleasure.

Chocolate and cookie mushrooms. OMG! I can't describe how much I love them. My husband found them at a local store and a couple of weeks ago he come home with five boxes for me. I stashed them in my home office and today I broke open a box.

If you want to try Chocorooms [and you should] you can get them at Five Below or, oddly enough, Amazon.com. How do you reward yourself when you've reached a goal?

Happy Mother's Day!

I hope everyone had a happy Mother's Day!

I spent my morning at the NYC Mineral and Gem Show. I could have spent a month wandering through all the vendor displays looking at rocks, fossils and beads...OMG, the beads!

I ended up buying myself a small dendrite...

It's a little sandstone slate with gorgeous markings on it that look like a painting of ancient plants. This picture is from Wikipedia, but mine looks similar. It makes me think of cave paintings.

After the show, I came home and actually took a nap in my new recliner on the deck! Of couse, all this relaxation means very little work got done today. So now I'm off to do some editing for novella #3 of my series.

The great news is, I now have completed cover art for novella #1 and #2 and #3 should be ready shortly. I can't wait to start unveiling them, but but my next project is a website and web design just stymies me.

Have a great evening eveyrone!

Dueling creativity

It's a gorgeous day - and spring is officially hear so everything is blooming. I've been gazing at all the trees and flowers as I ride around town and really wishing I could sit down and do some painting. I don't paint very often - mostly because I'm not really good at it, I just dabble, by literally dabbing paint on the canvas.

Nevertheless, I get in these moods sometimes where I really want to waste some paint, mess up a perfectly good clean white canvas and splatter things with paint water.

However, I really need to get some writing done. I'm still ahead of schedule with my rough drafts, but I don't want to fall behind.

Decisions. Decisions. I'll probably start out by writing. If I hit a wall, then at least I'll have a good excuse to take a break and do some painting.

Here's something I painted the last time I painted. It's technically more drawing than painting, but i twas fun to do.