Tell Me Tuesday

It’s that time of the week again. What are you up to? In your writing life? Non-writing life? Sloth life? Snowflake life?

I’m judging the last of my RITA panel. I saved the biggest book for last, and now I’m glad I did. I still have lots of time to finish reading and report my scores.

I’ve really enjoyed judging the RITA for the first time this year. However, next year, I think I’ll ask for different categories. Not that I don’t appreciate the categories I received this year. But I received 8 entries in one category and only 1 in a second. I’d rather judge more of a mix-up, and I think I can solve that issue by requesting different categories next year.

How about you? Are you judging RITA or the Golden Heart? How’s it going?

In other news, I just created a new group at Facebook called Muse Interrupted Guest Bloggers. The sole purpose of this group is so I can easily send email notifications to members who wish to receive them (read that, if you’re a member, you DO wish to receive them, otherwise there’s no point in joining) regarding my guest bloggers and book give-aways. I sent out the first notification on Sunday for Susan Gable’s blog yesterday. The next notification will go out a day or two before Natale Stenzel’s blog occurring February 25th. If you’re a member of Facebook and would like to sign up for the group, here’s a link. If that doesn’t work, just log in to Facebook and search for Muse Interrupted Guest Bloggers. It’ll come up.

Writing wise, I hit a bit of a block last week (horrors!). I had this wonderful love scene already fast-drafted set in a dark room. However, no matter how much I wanted to, no matter how hard I tried, once I reached that very lumpy portion of the book, the scene no longer fit. I thought it would work, but after a lot of research, re-plotting and re-plotting, and soul searching, I realized it just didn’t work. And that’s okay. That’s one of the dangers of writing scenes out of order. When you get to revising them, you might not need them anymore! Or, in the case of this scene, it no longer made sense that my characters would make love in this setting at this time.

Once I plucked the scene out of the file and tucked it away for safekeeping in a Book Fragments file, my mind opened up and I suddenly realized another fast-drafted scene I thought was coming much later needed to fit in now. So I’m working on that scene, and the wonderful dark room love scene will have to wait for another book…maybe one of Penny’s stories. Oh, my hero and heroine still have some fun awaiting them, so all my research hasn’t gone to waste. It’s just taken on a different life.