Slowly Writing

I'm not very talkative lately, am I?

I hit one major milestone this week--I finished a complete draft of my biggest work-in-progress, a full-length romantic suspense.  Right now, the story is fermenting (aka, I am not opening it for a few weeks to allow my brain a chance to read it objectively and not just fall back into the love-hate pattern I had while writing the end).

I don't have any firm release plans yet.  I haven't even read the thing start-to-finish, let alone decided on my approaches for editing and all that.  I can self-pub it, self-edit or pay an editor, I could shop it around to a variety of e-presses, I could shop it to agents in the hopes of snagging a print press. I could stuff it under my bed and pretend I didn't spend a year and a half on the dumb thing. (wait, did I call it dumb? By "dumb" I meant "brilliant", "engaging", "evocative"....ahem...) .  I do have a potential cover photo picked out and paid for that I bought as an incentive to finish the story.  So if I do self-pub, I've got step 1 (of like 50) checked off.

Next up is a re-write/edit job on a short story called The Christmas Affair that is a tie-in to The Paris Affair. No specific release plans there either, except to say that I'll try to have it available by some method or other around Christmas. This is another sexy story, similar heat level to The Paris Affair, featuring a minor character from that first novel.  My initial draft of it, according to my critique partners, lacked conflict.  Oops.  This is why you have critique partners. (Also, The Paris Affair has a new price over at Amazon--$2.99 for the Kindle edition. If you are looking for a steamy beach read, go download a copy).

Call the Rain has been enjoying a slow but decent little career. I've got a few good reviews here and there. I'd love more, but that's not up to me, really. Short of whining and begging, there's not much else I can do except to remind folks that if you read it and liked it, then give it a few stars (and maybe a few kind words) :)

And lastly, I have a new laptop. Not that it's really writing news, except setting it up did suck several days of my time by the time I installed Office, Adobe CS4, Visual Studio, Eclipse, etc. The old one was making a disturbing clicking noise and occasionally refused to wake up from hibernation. It also was barely powerful enough to run Word on Windows 7--Skype continually complained that that the video wasn't fast enough, and the built-in wifi adapter would drop connections from all but the oldest routers.  I never could install Photoshop on it because it simply couldn't handle the pressure. Also, you can now buy micro SD cards with more storage space than it's harddrive (all of 60 gig...which was huge when I bought it).  The old laptop and I have been through a lot together--8 years and 4+ manuscripts.  It's not dead yet, but shall enjoy a slow slide into retirement with a much lighter workload.