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.