Their Eyes Follow You Where Ever You Go

August 28, 2006 | family

As promised. The thrilling details of my vacation.

Let’s see, my mom, brother, his wife, myself, dh and ds, two good size dogs in a small three bedroom cottage that stunk of mothballs. What could possibly go wrong?

Actually, it wasn’t as bad as it sounds, the deck, dock and swimming were lovely. The view was gorgeous and except for one day of rain the weather was pretty good too. Inside the cottage, it did reek of mothballs to the point where I got headache the day it rained. Oh, I had a wisdom tooth start to come in and abscess while we were there too. That kind of sucked. (The dentists is threatening to take it out, but I’ve stalled him off to the middle of September. Maybe it will come in the rest of the way without further incident by then. Stop snickering, he said he’d have to cut bone to get it out. BONE!)

We also had some interesting companions in the living room. I guess whoever owned the place was a hunter, or taxidermist. There was a big stuffed dear head on the wall, along with some animal skins, and stuffed goose and a stuffed fox in the rafters. Very creepy. But the weirdest thing was two stuffed squirrels on a shelf in the corner.

Now, I get the whole hunter stuffing his kill–actually, I don’t really. I don’t agree with hunting at all, but that’s me. Still, I suppose I can see how someone would mount a deer head, but a squirrel? Honestly, who stuffs a squirrel. Weird.

Anyway, once I figure out how, I’ll post the pictures. So both my readers can enjoy the creepiness.

Catching Up

August 22, 2006 | Writing

Yeah, so I’ve been a tad neglectful of the blog. Again, I’m sure both my readers are devastated.

As for my happy news about Berkley, it was short lived. I received a rejection about two weeks after sending in my MS. Though, I suspect the package might have been damaged in the mail and that may have played a role in such a prompt rejection. Not that I can’t get rejected on my own merit– and I have the ever thickening file to prove it–but shortly after sending out the MS the empty SASE turned up in my mailbox unused and with no post mark. So who can say for sure. It’s just one of those great unsolved mysteries I suppose.

But the story does not end there. Two weeks later, I received and email from another publisher requesting a full. Yay! Interestingly, the same publisher that I forgot to include my SASE in with the submission package. (See Stupidity and Submissions) Funny, huh?

I’ve given up on my paranormal. While I generally don’t advocate walking away from a project midway through, I think in this case it sucked. Not just the whole self-doubt I’m-a-craptastic-hack-whatever-made-me-think-I-could-be-writer sucked, but REEAALLLY not good. Even Muse looked at me dumb founded. I think the whole experience was a lesson in recognizing one’s limitations. Werewolf romance stories are just not for me. I need to stick to the whole spooky romantic mystery thing. And I’ve started a new one inspired in part from my recent trip to the cottage.

I’ll go into detail about that later, and if I can figure out how to attach pictures, I’ll do that too. It’s getting late and I still have chapters to read for Witch.