Kassia Kroszer of Booksquare + a handful of her compadres are opening Quartet Press in the fall. Visit their website to find out more, and here’s a great interview with Kassia on Ciar Cullen’s blog.
Author: Cindy
I'm irritated because my posts won't publish.
Twitch Fest!
Agents Kim Lionetti and Jessica Faust of BookEnds are holding a pitch contest on Twitter (thus the Twitch). (Yeah, at first I thought they were talking about the runner-up from So You Think You Can Dance last year, too). You have to follow them on Twitter to participate (here’s Kim’s page, and here’s Jessica’s). The cool thing is you can pitch your manuscript to both Kim and Jessica at different times this week. But you have to watch their tweets to monitor when each is taking Twitches. They’re tag-teaming, you see.
If you can compress your book into 140 characters, this is a great opportunity. The winner at the end of the week gets a critique of a partial.
Details are on the BookEnds blog.
Les Fleurs
I’m finding it really hard to get used to My Liege taking nearly every Monday off work. It shortens my week!
I’m brainstorming a new story for Penny. Pretty much have a title, maybe a setting, and maybe some character names. Oh, and a theme. Or plot. Whatever you choose to call it. Let’s just say it has something to do with the number 3.
Seeing as my mind is otherwise occupied, I thought I’d take this opportunity to share some of my flower pics. These are from my mother’s garden, taken 3 (there’s that number again) or so weeks ago. Enjoy!
“Dying Tulips”
Don’t you love the feathery edges? (They were feathery before the tulips began their descent into oblivion).
“Tiger, Tiger”
That bud thing looks like it’s pushing the tiger. If I were the tiger, I’d snap its head off. This is why I’m not a flower. Too violent.
“Bee-Have!”
I believe this is called an Onion Flower. All I care is that it’s purple and spiky, and that my monster zoom lens allowed me to capture the bee.
Nod to Dads
My Liege is golfing with our sons today, and I’m visiting my dad in a few. To all the wonderful fathers out there, have a great day!
Shopping Impaired
A writing buddy and I were talking the other day, and I discovered a wonderful thing about her—she’s as shopping-impaired as I am. I’ve known her for years, and yet I didn’t know this. We feel like oddities in a world of shopaholics. While other woman can’t wait to go to the mall, she and I postpone shopping trips until we absolutely can’t stand wearing the same clothes for, um, sometimes 6 years.
Usually, the only time I do any major clothes shopping is right before a conference. Once I start the shopping, don’t get me wrong, I enjoy it. It’s just finding the motivation to hit the stores that’s so damn hard.
What hit this home to me is that I’ve been meaning to go clothes-shopping since around, oh, January. I was running out of jeans. Well, eventually, the weather caught up to me, and now it doesn’t matter. I don’t need jeans. I need shorts and skorts. The zippers on two skorts I bought for a trip to NYC with My Liege before the last NYC RWA conference finally gave out! What? Those skorts were only 6 years old! They still fit. They were in great shape. WTF? Then, two days later, the sash tie on a favorite pair of shorts split apart as I was tying it. Now I’m down 3 pairs of shorts/skorts. I must go shopping.
My birthday is in January, and my parents winter down south, so I usually get money that the Little Pisser is very good about hiding from me until my birthday. When I opened the card this year, I knew exactly what I wanted to buy with my birthday money—a new purse. I’m addicted to Derek Alexander purses. They’re excellent quality, easily last for two years, and help keep me organized. So I finally bought my new purse, um, at the end of May, 4.5 months past my birthday. I’m still meaning to put leftover birthday money from my in-laws toward a new camera bag. Yeah, that might happen sometime in the next two centuries. Unless I break down and order one on-line. On-line shopping, I could get into.
As a kid, my older sister and a good friend and I used to go shopping sometimes on Saturdays. It was a great expedition. For them. They’d try on dozens of clothes while I sat in a chair reading comics or begging them To. Please. Stop.
So, I thought I’d do a survey. Are my friend and I the odd women out? Do you love to shop, or do you dread it? Do you dread it until you get there, and then you go crazy (this does happen to me from time to time)? Or do you just dread it period?
I’m Alive!
You wouldn’t know it from my lack of participation around here.
I’m still in Between Projects Mode. My massive To-Do list exploded when I suddenly discovered myself taking on far more of the Nobody Writes It Better blog launch than I’d expected. It couldn’t be helped. One of those life circumstances that happens along, and the majority of the work shouldn’t fall to one person (I’m not talking about me here), anyway. I was happy to lend a hand to get the blog up and running. I still have a task to accomplish there—getting the Gallery page packed with more than placeholder images. But I also need to continue tackling The Office so I can move from Between Projects Mode to Brainstorming New Projects Mode. So that’s what I’m 
doing. Digging my office out from under several years’ worth of manuscripts. Which mainly means storing them somewhere else. I’m one of those packrats who likes to keep ALL the evidence of agents and editors to whom I’ve submitted a particular project as well as at least one copy of every draft I’ve printed out. Until I sell a project, those files remain in my office. However, I just found a ton of files for BORROWING ALEX, which was published two years ago. Time for the files to move! I also found a bunch of files for Penny’s next release, this coming December. I’ve done everything for that release aside from getting to see the cover and promotion, so, yep, I can pack her files away, too.
I’ve discovered great little binders I put together the last time I did one of these The Office checks. They’re full of notes from Kiss of Death classes I’ve taken. I’d forgotten where they were, because they were on top of a plastic pseudo-file cabinet (which held pieces of BORROWING ALEX, among other things), underneath two cat blankets. Yes, The Evil Entity has been sleeping on mystery/suspense notes. Explains her personality.
The notes don’t do me much good if I don’t know where they are, so I’m trying—note that, trying—to reorganize the office with a tad of a semblance of order.
What’s up in your writing world?