Will you bite the hand that feeds you?

I'm listening to Nine Inch Nails basically non-stop while I finish writing Gray Moon Rising. I know they aren't talking about werewolves in "The Hand that Feeds," but it's pretty good werewolf music anyway. ;)

I thought I would be done with the rough draft of Gray Moon Rising by now (like a week ago, actually), but as usual, I'm coming up against the brick wall of my deadline almost finished, which is always so darn frustrating. My laptop went out of commission for several days, so I had to switch to writing on the iPad, and it's much harder. Then I switched from Word to Scrivener for drafting—and you guys were right, this program is the bomb—and the learning curve put me a couple more days behind. Bad timing, I know.

I'm back on track, though, and I do think I'm actually going to hit my deadline for this for once. I think I'll wrap up the rough draft on May 31st, just like I promised myself. It's not ahead of schedule, but it's not behind. I think this is the first time I'll actually be on time! Ever!

Getting close to the end for Rylie and Seth is really hard, though. Finishing a series is another first for me. I've been carrying these characters around in my head and heart since I wrote Six Moon Summer in November 2010, so I'm not sure what I'm going to do when I don't have any new exploits planned for them. I think the story wraps up well, and in a satisfying way, so I there won't really be any other opportunities for adventure. Once I write THE END, that really will be THE END. It feels so weird.

I'm going to do a cover reveal in a couple days. Maybe as soon as tomorrow or the day after, actually. I have to get in touch with everyone. So you'll all know what it's about very soon. :)

It's going to be nice having a little more time to do new stories, though. I've been wanting to get more steampunk out there so The 19 Dragons has friends. I'd also kind of like to dabble in other genres, but I'm not sure how or where just yet. It would be personally challenging to write a romance novel, so I could try PNR. I might also wrap up some half-completed manuscripts on my hard drive and see how that goes.

But enough of what I think! What do YOU think? What would you all like to see next? More YA? More steampunk? More UF? A romance novel? Throw your squishy opinions at me!

(And don't forget, I'm offering review copies of GMR when it's ready in a couple weeks!)

Getting shizz done. Or not.

The last two weeks were amazing for productivity. I wrote 90% of Gray Moon Rising, I did lots of reading, and I'm getting Dark Union together.

Then I did something very, very stupid. On Saturday (my last good writing day), I looked at how many scenes were left of Gray Moon Rising—just four or five—and decided I could finish that weekend. Less than 10k of the book remaining? Dude, no problem. On my personal Twitter for friends and family, I said something like: "If Odin and Starbucks are kind to me, this book will be done by Monday."

Ha. Ah ha ha.

I should have known it was too easy. This has been the easiest book in the whole entire world to write. 45k in two weeks? No problemo! I was confident the book would be out in June. But the last leg has shattered under me and I. cannot. finish. it.

It doesn't help that my laptop has spontaneously decided that working is overrated, so I'm doing everything from my iPad right now. It's surprising how much I can do with this thing, but I can't finish a stinky book. So instead I'm doing lots of reading (right now, Breakers by Ed W. Robertson, really good sci-fi thriller, go pick it up), lots of sitting around in my underwear, and lots of procrastinating.

What else is new, amiright?

I am still going to have this book done in a week. No doubt about it. This thing MUST be complete by May if I hope to have everything else running on deadline. But I think I've been working a little too hard: I wrote and edited Darkest Gate over the last couple of months, I have a jillion things to edit, and my brain just can't wrap itself around the idea of plowing on.

So I need your help! Give me your best "getting shizz done whether you feel like it or not" tips. Bonus points if it includes red wine or chocolate or something else delicious. And... go!

Dude, where are you?

I have not been blogging much lately. I have also been mostly avoiding Twitter, Facebook, my email, and the outside world at large. This has made some of my long-term friends and readers ask: Dude, where are you?


Short answer: Monterey.

Long answer: Getting lots of work done, spending lots of time with my son, and hiding... in Monterey.

I have come to realize that blogging is a unique skill all its own. My writer buddy David Gaughran has this skill in spades. So does urban fantasy-writing peer Shea MacLeod. And you should follow both of their blogs for oodles of entertainment while I'm not posting anything.

As for my skill in blogging? Not so much. It takes a lot of time and energy, and I'm not even very good at it. My strength is in writing fiction. So I'm focusing much more on writing the next book than on writing the next blog post.

As far as Twitter goes, I'm much better at that (or at least the fact I have almost 3000 followers says I must be kinda better at that). There is nothing I LOVE more than sitting down for a nice long Twitter chat. But again, this is very time and energy consuming. I should really be writing fiction.

Ooooor spending time with my Chubby McChubberson toddler, who is now nineteen months old (!!!).

Look at that faaaaaace~

So this week, I did my post-Darkest Gate victory lap around the Bay Area. By now, you're well aware that I mark every book release with a vacation; this one was for us to visit fishies at a very lovely aquarium. Remember how I mentioned I'm crazy about Star Trek IV? The one with the whales? An important part of the movie takes place in a (heavily fictionalized) Monterey Bay Aquarium, so I got to dork out over that.

All in all, it was a really nice visit. We saw pretty sharks, a kelp forest, lots of jelly fish, and hiked around a much lower elevation than my native habitat, which always kinda makes me feel like a superhero.

We also visited John Steinbeck's disembodied head.

I've already picked the vacation spot for my next book release, by the way: Portland. But that's getting ahead of myself, isn't it?

Aside from that, I've mostly been working a lot. Red Iris Books is demanding a lot of attention lately. I'm editing a few books for other authors, doing some sparing cover design, and refusing to wear pants no matter what because I'm self-employed and that's what I do, dammit!

Gray Moon Rising is actually over half-complete. More like 70%, as a matter of fact. I'm going to finish the rough draft in the next week or so, reveal the cover while I edit, and then publish it as soon as I can. I think you guys will love this one. Or at least, I hope you will. I'm really tearing my hair out over it, and because I have short choppy mom hair, I don't have all that much to rip out at this point. So if you don't like it, I'm probably going to be bald. (More thoughts on writing the end of a series later.)

I also have Dark Union underway, and it will be out shortly before/after GMR. So as you can imagine, I'm tearing my hair out over that too.

I've recently gotten the first fifteen minutes of the proof for the Death's Hand audiobook, and that's not good for the state of my hair either.

And I really should be working on a Super Sekrit project with one of my writer friends. But I'm not. I'm a horrible person. Argh.

Anyway, this is what all of this amounts to: Every day, I write 3000-5000 words (which is a pretty decent amount, fyi), read a couple short stories, do some graphic stuff, email other writers, edit a few pages of the project du jour, listen to my Kindle read submissions to me, and go to sleep at the end of the day somehow feeling like I have accomplished nothing.

At some point, something's gotta give. It's driving me crazy. Why do I keep overbooking myself like this?

So I really appreciate my time where it's just me and my soft, cuddly, smart-as-hell-and-smarter-every-day ball of giggles, boogers, and poop. Especially when we're enjoying that time by the ocean together. And I'm on Twitter, Facebook, and my blog less and less so I can make that happen.

Serenity.

If you would like to keep up with me, I am a tiny bit better at maintaining my author page on Facebook than anywhere else. I do check to see who's posted on my wall, for instance. So feel free to bug me there. :)

In the meantime, shh. I'm writing.