Cooler temps mean...

The cooler temps and the shorter days are a catch 22 for me. I love Fall- it's my favorite season but I HATE winter so you can imagine my dismay.

Still- the cooler and shorter days means I get back to doing what I love- baking, canning, knitting and writing. It means my favorite TV shows are back soon too!

Now is when I pull all my research together and my outlines and character bios and get my head back in the game. My focus will be Higher Ground (Sequel to VN2) and my WWII novel- Melody Blue.

I'm also getting back in the mood to knit. To that end I just purchased a lovely new wrap pattern:

Flames of Fall and I'm doing it in Sausalito's Firebird colorway

JD Robb

The new JD Robb book came out this week- I've been reading the "In Death Series" for years. Came across this article on Facebook today about Roarke...

Top Ten Reasons "In Death's" Roake Tops the Competition

Seriously, these books have been around since 1995 and I freely admit that I'm completely invested in all the characters.

Latest book now on my Nook and I can't wait to get into it!

Ta da!

I love to can my own jams and fruit butters. This year I wanted to try some new recipes and this is the first one- Pumpkin Butter. If you don't know what it is- well, you spread it on bread, toast, english muffins or bagels. My son loves peanut butter with apple butter sandwiches. This s a slow cooker recipe and my house smelled delightfully of pumpkin pie for the better part of the day. :)

New review for VN2

From Dark Divas' Reviews- VN2 get 5 Divas and added to reviewer's all time favorite read list. :)
Review by Dark Divas

Writing and knitting

Higher Ground is now officially under way. I'll be juggling this along with studying for my medical coding specialty credential in cardiology. (For those of you who didn't know, I'm a certified professional medical coder and biller. It pays the bills.) It's part of my two year plan to get out of my current situation in order for me to get more time to write. I've done this before, I can do it again. Although I would pick the hardest specialty credential out there. Oy.

When I'm not writing, researching or studying, I knit. I'm not very good. Not like my friend HCat who can knit ANYTHING. God, she's amazing. I do love knitting lace projects though and this piece will be a very pretty scarf. I got the yarn in Alexandria, VA last fall at a store called Fiber Space.

Eye Candy Friday, posted on Saturday

Okay, I'm trying to make Fridays eye candy day for me. But I ended up staying way way later than I planned on at a friend's little wine and snark party on her deck last night. Which I needed, the snarking anyway. (I settled for diet coke instead of wine) Anyway, it was almost midnight before I got home.

I also had to take the late shift at work. The last hour our phones are still on at my regular job (Yes, sadly, I have a regular job I hate, but I digress...) is the longest hour. We all rotate this, so I don't have to do it again until July. But there is only 4 of us in the office, which is cavernous when it's that empty. So I worked on the sequel to VN2- which I've tentatively titled Higher Ground. Thank god I always keep a flash drive in my purse. I've got two new characters and a couple of complicated plot lines I'm intertwining. Thankfully, it made the last hour go by much faster.

I've had to focus on one of the many writing projects I've got going on. I was too scattered and really not gettting anywhere. Right now Higher Ground seems to be the one yelling the loudest at me for attention, so it's the one I'll run with for the time being.
Anyway, my choice of eye candy for this week- Sergeant Zeke Anderson (as played by Terence Knox).

Scripts

Way back, around the time my son was born, I not only used to write novels and short stories but television scripts as well. My son turns 26 next month soooo, you get an idea of just how long ago that was. It was a different world then and well, television script writing isn't a wide open market like it used to be. Most series these days have a writing staff that pens their episodes- freelancing isn't nearly as easy.


Don't get me wrong- it wasn't easy 25 years ago either. I did manage to sell one script and from that, got some decent part time work over the next few years until the television series landscape changed.

Because of this, I love to collect scripts. I have boxes of them from favorite shows as well as from series I worked on. Pilot scripts and the even rarer series "bibles" were a favorite of mine. I love going through these and seeing what scenes were cut or what was rearranged. In pilot scripts, if you're lucky enough to get one of the earlier drafts, you get to see the character progression from the original concept to what we see on televsion. And you often get a sense of those actors who put their own personality into that character, making him/her that much more real and deminsional.

Oh, the series I got lucky enough to sell to once upon a time? The Equalizer. In all honesty, what I sold was heavily over written and really what ended up on television was the basic overall storyline I had come up with. And a few pieces of dialog.
Bumper Sticker Wisdom: Drive like you stole something.

My choice for eye candy tonight:
Stephen Caffrey as Lieutenant Myron Goldman- this is my Ian Davidson.