X-Posted Cat Blog

Normally, on Fridays over at Wyrdsmiths' blog, Kelly McCullough posts pictures of his cats along with silly captions. He's out of town today, so I decided to step in. I think this one kind of makes for a nice "story arc" (that's Mason, obviously, MUCH younger...)

Mz. Peep sez: "What the frak?"

Mz. Ball sez: "What the frak?"

Kittez sez: "OMG, there's a baby in teh condo!"

How I Spend My Free Time

Here's what me and my family does on the weekends:

Many Bloody Returns... in Polish!

Here's the Polish version of MANY BLOODY RETURNS, the anthology my story "Fire and Ice and Linguini for Two" appeared in -- somehow I neglected to post this here when I first found out about it. Cool, huh?

Realms Closing!

I heard about this through a list I'm on: http://sfscope.com/2009/01/realms-of-fantasy-closing.html. This is bad news for fantasy writers everywhere.

Hopefully, I'm the Tortoise

As I've reported here before, my friend and fellow writer Kelly McCullough and I are racing to each finish our novels by the end of February, as we have other irons in the fire. I've been keeping a tally of my progress in the sidebar of the Wyrdsmith's website: http://wyrdsmiths.blogspot.com. Kelly is currently handing me my a$$ on a plate.

The worse part is that I've been writing and working non-stop on this novel. I just don't have anything to show for it because I realized that I needed to do some massaging of the first 2/3rds in order to write the last bit. Yesterday alone, I probably cut 3,000 words. Yet miraculously, today my word count is still in the positive, which means I must have seriously kicked butt.

Not that you can tell just by looking at the word count.

I comfort myself by telling myself that winning is good, but having a good novel at the end is my actual goal.

The News!

I'm happy to announce that my agent brokered a three-book deal with Penguin for a new series! I'll be writing an YA (young adult) about a fifteen year-old girl living in Saint Paul, Minnesota who has a vampire prince for a father and a mother who's a real Witch.

The only draw back is that I agreed to write this book by October of '09, and, as you know, Bob, I already have two books with deadlines this year. So... if I come and go on the blogisphere, that's the dealio.

Anyway, whoot! Many whoots!