Monday, July 23, 2012

Potpourri

The weather on Friday was a bit nuts. Not crazy, make-the-national-news nuts, but some thunderstorms blew through with some wicked wind, dropping the temperature seventeen degrees. Clumps of leaves were pulled off the trees and all the dead little branches were shaken loose. (kinda hard to see, I know)


Remember Fat Patches? The neighbor's cat I shared a picture of several weeks ago? Well, it seems his family wants to move away. I got home Friday and saw a for sale sign in their front yard. Now, it's silly to be so saddened by this since I hardly ever even talk to these people. But they've been living across the street for many years. They moved in when their oldest was a baby, still in a carrier, and he's now maybe eight or nine years old. Then we watched them have two more children, the youngest still under a year old. :( I guess it just signals the end of an era...and of course Fat Patches will no longer be available for kitty fixes.


All the computers/servers in our office were upgraded last week in preparation for a new massive software implementation designed to help us become more productive and manage our resources better and then subsequently make more money. So it's been a slow few days as I learn to navigate Windows 7 and get all the programs and tools I use to do my real job loaded back onto the computer. Then of course there is re-bookmarking all my favorite Internet sites. Yada, yada, yada...

A chapter mate of mine just shared with us the dangers of using images off the web...she was sued. It's all said and done now, but as you can imagine, it was expensive and frustrating and time consuming. Number #1 lesson: disclaimers do not matter. If you didn't take the picture and don't have express permission to post it, you are in copyright violation. Lesson #2: take/post your own pictures OR join a stock photo site.

I went back through my blog--all five years of it--and there are very few images I've used that don't actually belong to me. So, yes, I'll be going through and replacing those if possible. If I can't replace them, I'll just put in a place holder. Who's going to go back and read those old posts anyway???

Last week I also sorta kinda finished a book. Not ready-to-submit finished, but send-to-critique partner finished. So I did. I told them a) to be harsh and b) not to rush, though I am anxious to get their feedback.

And yesterday, I finally got to working on revisions of A Snowball's Chance in Texas. I worked on it all day between laundry and other random chores and made excellent progress. The story is so much better now. It really truly is. I'm going to have to cut more words as the addition of the fixes added more words than I had available, but that's okay. I knew I was going to have to rework the beginning anyhow and get to the sex scene sooner. I'm hoping to save the prologue though.

I'm going to have to start yet another new story to get new words for my next charm. Despite the fact that I have five or six stories that need to be finished. I can take a month, possibly two (though not in a row) to do revisions, rather than write new words, and still earn a charm. But for some reason, I always feel compelled to write new words. By the time this book in a year program is over, I'm going to have a half dozen *more* stories to revise. Unless of course I just become that good. ha ha ha ha ha

I was going to work on the new story yesterday, but didn't quite have enough of the story worked out for my personal needs in order to start it. So I worked on the revisions as mentioned above. And I'm so glad I did.

So I leave you today with a picture of my charm bracelet with the newest charm: the lone star of Texas.

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