My heart stopped for just a moment when I realized that Holly Lisle had added my site to her blogroll. Holly’s a published author with more than twenty books to her credit and her site is chock-full of writing goodness. I’ve been using it as a font of inspiration and knowledge on the writing life for a few years now. Having her add this site to her list is quite an honor for me.

Today is full of fun. My vision is fuzzy. They said that this might happen off and on, but it’s still annoying. My foot is swollen. The gout faded away to a great extent yesterday, but last night it came back. This is one condition I could certainly live without. So I’m back on the pills and looking forward to tonight.

I sat down to write last night, but the previous two nights of sleeplessness seem to have caught up with me. I couldn’t concentrate, couldn’t put the words together into coherant sentences, and had to just give up after an hour. I feel more rested this morning and am hopeful that tonight will be more fruitful.

I made two wallpapers, one for each of the novels I plan on finishing this year.

Sitting Duct

This is the project I’ll be starting as soon as I finish A Difficult Dinner. The one story summary would be something like… A working man finds a bag of money which leads him into a web of seduction, deception, and murder. That still needs some work, but it’ll do for now. As far as the wallpaper goes, I’m pretty happy with this one, I tried this once before with lesser results. I made this one with photographs I found on the internet. I don’t know who any of these people are, where I found the images, or who to credit for them. But, the van came from the GMC website.

Crazy Deadly Cool

This is going to be my attempt at a ‘detective’ story. The plan is to start it around September or October and have it finished by the end of the year. I’ve got a basic outline done for it and some good ideas for the characters and situations, but I’m trying to keep it on the back burner while I finish up A Difficult Dinner and ramp Sitting Duct onto the workbench. Basically, its about a PI who has a trio of problems: he’s being stalked by his crazy ex-wife, a teenage runaway who can’t pay for his help, and all the headaches that come with having an overly aggressive partner. All of which get wrapped around a pretty straight forward divorce/surveillance case. The image is a composite of an Olivia painting, a True Crime wallpaper, a couple other sources that I don’t remember where they came from, and a wallpaper that I tiled to get the background.

Making these things helps me visualize the story. I put it up as the background and if I get stuck, they help me refocus on the story.

I had to disable comments for now. Something has been crawling my entries and slapping a big block of links to online casino’s and poker parlors in the comments of each one. I deleted them the first twenty times it happened and I blocked the IPs, but it’s still happening and I’m not having fun anymore. Until I figure out how to block such nonsense you have two options for sharing your thoughts with me, the guestbook or email.

Anyway, now that I’ve had that little bit of fun I’m going to get back to the writing. Starting at 107,149 and aiming for at least 1,300 words.

I finished the scene I was working on. It only took 550 words, but they were hard words that didn’t want to come out. I think the end of the scene is missing some drama. The conflict is there, but it just lacks punch. I don’t know exactly what it needs, but I think that’s all I can do tonight. I’ll let it stew a bit.

Right now my vision is terrible, everything on the screen is fuzzy, and I’m beginning to think that this LASIK wasn’t worth it. Of course it could simply be because I spend 8-12 hours a day staring at a monitor. I have a follow-up with the doctor on Friday and I’m hoping he’ll give me a better idea of the state of my vision.

Despite gout and bad vision some words got done. The final word count, 107,699.