i'm alive!

good thing i don't have kids, eh? if i took care of them as well as i did this blog, i'd be up for charges of neglect.

yeah, i keep saying i'm busy. seriously, though, it's a bit ridiculous. right now i have the opportunity to write about once a week if i'm lucky. and let's just say that some weeks i'm luckier than others. maybe it's not so much that i'm busy but that my MIND is busy and i don't have the mental energy after work to concentrate on fiction. i find myself investing more and more into each subsequent group of trainees. have i mentioned how much i love my job? because i really, really do. there's something innately satisfying in changing people's perspectives on dealing with other people, and discovering what motivates individuals at work.

anyway, enough blathering on about that. lol!

despite being mentally exhausted (in a good way, of course) i try and carve out some time to write each weekend, usually at starbucks. i've also joined a writing group (a second one, actually) and every saturday we meet at the library--can you believe that i've NEVER gone to the library before?!--to read excerpts of our WsIP. i got good feedback for Diva Diet today and i'm all pumped up about working on it now!

so here i am, sitting at starbucks having my salted caramel mocha (zomg try it!!!) writing this blog and listening to some guy get suckered into a pyramid scheme. i feel like jumping up and shaking him. "Don't do it, dude!!!"

sadly, it's not my place to save him from wasting money and time and hope. i can only have faith that his friends will bitch-slap some sense into him.

edits are happening on TOUCH and i'm stoked about it. i'm really excited to get the story all smoothed out for release on November 28th. wow! that's less than two months away now! check back for some lines and excerpts from my smokin' hot novella over the next few weeks!

i'm also still working on Diva Diet and i have to say that my love of this story hasn't died. it's a little overwhelming, though. i'm not entirely sure how i came up with this convoluted tale, to be honest...and it just keeps getting messier. poor, poor matt and liz.

my little notebook is chock-full of questions that need answering, like "what are the stakes?" and "why is matt acting like such an asshole?". piddling things, really. *eyeroll*

really, stakes are no small deal. this story is all about life-changes for liz and matt. they travel in opposite directions for a while before finally colliding. yeah, they're friends and hang out the entire time, but there's always something that interferes with their connection. life-static, i guess you could call it. yet there has to be something to lose if that connection is completely cut.

of course, this is a romance, so love is on the line. duh!

but each has something to lose if they give in to each other, as well. not that i'm saying that they lose something good...but the act of letting go of something that's been a part of your world for years is one of the most difficult things to reconcile yourself to. and isn't that what makes up the conflict? the stakes? isn't it the ingredient that has a reader investing in the characters (hopefully)?

along with discovering my characters, though, each story i write reveals a piece of myself. each chapter of each story, actually, if i want to tell the entire truth. sometimes it's a big surprise! and sometimes it's just a little sliver of what makes me "me" that i choose to share, even if it's ambiguously hidden within a character.

they say to write what you know. and what or who do i know better than myself? :)

p.s. dude is now attempting to sucker his friends into said pyramid scheme. poor things. i wish one of them would just have the balls to say "this is a really bad idea, man."