Tuesday, February 26, 2013

My Next Next Big Thing

The Next Big Thing blog hop has been going around for a while. This is my second time being tagged, this time by the delightful, funny, and sweet (both as a person and as an author!) Christi Barth. Her next book, A Fine Romance, is out March 11.

1. What is your working title of your next book (or story)?

I had to figure out which one I should talk about! The next book that will be released is hopefully Soulflight, so I'll talk about that.
2. Where did the idea come from for the book?
I was at a baseball game at Jacobs Field, home of the Cleveland Indians. It was one of those super-clear, sunny days, and we were high up in the stands. I just had this urge to fly out over the field, possibly because I'd recently had one of my recurring flying dreams. Then I wondered what would make someone who could fly do that in front of so many people. I mean, she'd have probably been keeping it a secret for a long time, right? So the stakes had to be massive. Since it would be my second paranormal romance, and should be connected to my first, it all came easy from there.
3. What genre does your book fall under?
Paranormal romantic adventure. There's a bad guy, and a woman who can fly, and a spy hero, and other people with extraordinary talents, all set in a very contemporary world.
4. Which actors would you choose to play your characters in a movie rendition?
Ugh. I can never cast my characters very well. Ellen Page could probably play Samantha, or maybe Jennifer Lawrence. Rock is like a combination of Chris Hemsworth and Channing Tatum and Alex O'Laughlin.
5. What is the one-sentence synopsis of your book?
Samantha faces a difficult choice—protect herself, or her enemy's victims.
6. Will your book be self-published or represented by an agency?
Soulflight is book 2 of my self-published Soul series.
7. How long did it take you to write the first draft of your manuscript?
I can't even remember anymore, I first wrote it so long ago. Long enough that this revision has to account for things like YouTube and Facebook that didn't exist back then! LOL
8. What other books would you compare this story to within your genre?
I humbly submit that it has the adventurous tone of Shannon Stacey's Devlin Group books with the real-world paranormality of Angie Fox's demonslayer.
9. Who or what inspired you to write this book?
Every author who's ever written a book that captured my attention and kept me from chores or sleep.
10. What else about your book might pique the reader’s interest?

The heroine is a librarian, and the hero's real name is quite literary. He's stunned that she guesses it within a minute. Some characters from the first book, Soul of the Dragon, play a prominent role in the story, while a few others get cameos. :)

Saturday, February 16, 2013

I Hate Webmail...and Hey! Supernatural Sisters is Back! Kind Of.

I compile a column for a trade magazine for an organization of which I'm a member. At the end of last year, I realized there was a glitch with the e-mails I should have been getting. I wasn't getting them. We fixed the problem without figuring out what the problem was.

More recently, I noticed that I wasn't getting e-mails from PayPal. I figured it was a PayPal problem and since I was getting notices via my iPod app, I wasn't too fussed about finding the issue.

Today, someone told me they'd sent me an e-mail to an address that for YEARS was a forward-only address. It had no inbox, no account. All mail sent to that address came automatically to my main AOL address. But today, she got a mailer daemon that said my inbox was full. I investigated, and now I have all the answers. And the confused frustration is now just annoyed frustration.

Back in October, I wanted to create a new website. I wanted to use WordPress. My hosting package did not support WordPress. I changed my hosting package with a phone call to GoDaddy, and they were very helpful and everything transitioned very easily. I floundered somewhat, venturing into technical territory that was very new to me. I took a class, built my website, and went on my merry way.

Apparently, when I made that simple hosting package change, GoDaddy converted my forwarding e-mail address to a regular e-mail address and didn't tell me. Now, the setting when I went in to look said e-mails were to be cc'd to my main e-mail address. CC'd now, not forwarded, and they weren't. At all. I had e-mails from October through November. Then they stopped, because my mail box default setting was 1MB. So all the e-mails after that had to be bouncing.

*sigh* I spent well over an hour configuring and going through all the e-mails I had to make sure everything had been addressed at least once. Now I have to remember to periodically clean out that account. All the e-mails are currently forwarding just fine, and I changed the storage to 99 MB, but that will still fill up.

I hate web mail. I've used AOL since like 1992 or 1993. I love the way my folders are set up, and the way the e-mails come in automatically when I'm logged in, and how FAST it all works. I HATE web mail. I can't store things the way I want them visually. There's no separation between old mail and new mail, so I have to move or delete everything in the inbox manually. There's no automatic refresh. The lowest setting is like 1 minute, so I have to manually refresh or just wait. There's supposed to be a sound when I get mail, but it's not working. And everything is so SLOW.

Okay, enough ranting. Did you see, I resurrected Supernatural Sisters? Only as a one-off post, but I loved the last couple of episodes so much I had to post about it. We'll see how the last 8 eps go. I might post again. :)

Just a couple more things...

Tomorrow, I'm participating for the first time in Sneak Peek Sunday! Head over to the News page on my main website here to read an excerpt from Soul of the Dragon.

And finally... Pre-orders are available for Heavy Metal! You can pre-order at Amazon and Barnes & Noble right now, if you are so inclined.

Oh! Not finally! One more thing! Number One got her first college acceptance today. It was funny, because it was her last choice of the four, and the last one she applied to, but the first to respond. They also awarded her a Presidential Scholarship. She's convinced her first choice will be the last to respond, but we'll see. Every trip to the mailbox is going to be exciting! :)

Monday, February 04, 2013

Setting a Bad Example

Me, 1984.
A few weeks ago, Number One came close to fisticuffs in a soccer game. She's an aggressive defender, and often up against equally aggressive offensive players. Once in a while, things escalate slightly beyond the norm. This other girl went a little too far, Number One fought back, and when the girl looked about to punch my kid in the face, Number One held her off with a pointed finger and a bit of verbal ferocity.

The ref has had it out for her ever since.

Unfortunately, she seems to come by it naturally. My sister-in-law told me I HAD to post this, so here it is. :)

We were at a game last night, and there was a woman in the stands near us who wasn't well versed in the game. She was asking the kid with her lots of questions, and making lots of comments. Her voice was strident and carried, and the subject matter was poking at me. When people ask questions, I have a need to answer. Of course, she wasn't asking me, so I wasn't saying anything, but this sets the background a little bit.

The girls play on an old hockey rink with walls and a solid floor. One girl on the other team ran out of her shoe, but instead of stopping to put it on, she kept going after the ball (instinct, of course). She tried to stop, slid, and slide-tackled our forward. FYI, a slide tackle is when the player goes to the ground feet first. If they kick or knock the feet out from under the opponent, it's a foul, whether it was intentional or not. And whether they slid deliberately, going for the ball, or slipped on the surface accidentally. Slide tackles indoors are illegal.

So the woman cries out, "What, her shoe comes off and it's a penalty?" in a very annoyed tone. That was all I could handle. The following exchange is paraphrased for the most part. Except the part in bold.

Me: "No, she was penalized because she tackled our player."

Before I can explain as I did above, the woman yells at me. "She did not! She lost her shoe!"

Me: "She was supposed to stop and put it back on. It's dangerous. She could have hurt herself and the other player."

By the time I said "stop," the woman was yelling again. Then she says:

"You know what?" *sticks her fingers in her ears* "LALALALALALA" 

And THEN she says, "Forget it. I'm mature. I'm not having this conversation."

Seriously.

I'm like, "Okay, yeah, that's mature." I turn back to watch the game. She keeps yelling at me, and I know I should have just kept my mouth shut at that point, but I couldn't help it. I was still operating under the delusion that I could make her understand that it was the rule, that's all. I don't even remember what either of us said, but she let the F word fly at the top of her lungs.

The stands erupted around me. I told her to watch her mouth. Several other parents scolded her. She yelled at them. The woman behind me said her child was sitting right there and she didn't deserve to be subject to that. My mild-mannered husband, who probably had been fairly unaware of the exchange before that, told her this was a family environment. She went quiet for a minute, then complained that apparently profanity is a felony.

I was lucky this was an informal, indoor event, and the ref was on the other side of the wall. If it had been a league game outdoors, the line judge probably would have thrown us both out. As it was, she subsided completely for ten or so blessed minutes before she started complaining about the fouls. Never mind that every time two players got in the same space, no matter what they did or didn't do, the ref blew a foul on us.

We won, 2-0.

My sister-in-law assured me that she had my back, that she wouldn't let that woman attack me. I'm pretty sure I could have taken her if she had, but you never know. I haven't been in a fistfight since middle school.

Have you ever suddenly found yourself in a confrontation? How did you handle it?