Social Networks

• Facebook: I have an author page on Facebook that I post to occasionally; sharing links, quotes, or simple updates.
• Google+: I just started over on Google+ a month or so ago. I am still getting use to the tools over there but I try to post somewhat regularly there as well.
• Twitter: I’m CLNorman on Twitter. I haven’t found the will power to resist being sucked into such an active stream of information but I do post rarely and check out things there.

Author Pages

• On Smashwords
• On Amazon

Note: My stories are also available through Barnes & Noble but they haven’t yet enabled an author page feature, at least that I’ve found.

In Person

• RadCon: Feb 17th-19th in Pasco, WA. I’ve been attending this convention for various reasons since high school. Now I go for the writing related events and to visit with friends I only see at conventions.
• MisCon: May 25th-28th in Missoula, MT. This will be my fourth year at this convention and it has become my favorite. It is small in size but big in scope. The writing workshop is excellent and well worth the cost all by itself.
• Rivers of Ink: Oct 12th-13th in Richland, WA. I am on the planning committee for this event and so you can find me here in many different capacities. I also appear on the writing panels on Saturday.

        

I hope you like it.

        

This is Bear. He’s part poodle, part Cocker Spaniel and all bark. At all times of the day and night. Needless to say I haven’t been sleeping well. However, he has those puppy dog eyes that can’t be ignored so I don’t mind much. I think that he is a little ambitious to want to play with two toys at the same time. But it is way more doable than the four toys he had a half hour after this picture was taken.

Speaking of my imagination, these tracks were all over the driveway this morning. I’m told they are turkey tracks but I’m not sure. I’ve heard there are dragons around here and maybe these are the tracks of their young. What do you think?

While I am sharing random things with you, have you all seen this video? Watch it as it is totally geektastic!

        

I didn’t get to see the show when it aired live. I somehow missed that it was on though I had heard about a series that James Cameron was going to do on TV and it sounded interesting. I just never heard that it started airing. A few years ago, I browsed through the TV Show DVDs at the store and stumbled across Dark Angel Season 1. I bought it, took it home, and popped into my DVD player. After all what could go wrong with a TV show about ‘genetically-enhanced children in post-apocalyptic Pacific Northwest’?

I fell in love and immediately started searching the TV guides for the air dates for current episodes. That was when I found out that this lovely, funny show had been cancelled after just two seasons. <sigh> I returned to the store and bought the second season. When I finished watching it, I was bummed. It does not end in a great place and as anyone who has been reading this blog for very long knows, endings mean a lot to me.

A while later I discovered that there were Dark Angel books and that they even tied things up. Finished the story even and I became very excited. But I couldn’t find copies of them anywhere. Finally last month, it dawned on me to look through the Nook library for e-book versions of them. Eureka! I immediately added all three to my nook wish list and last payday bought the first one.

Yesterday, I finished it. Dark Angel: Before the Dawn covers the timeline between when Max escaped from Manticore and up to the first scene in the first episode. It filled in a lot of backstory for all the characters and I enjoyed it thoroughly. Today is payday and I’ll be purchasing the next one in the series as soon as the money hits the bank.

One of my favorite things about the show is Michael Weatherly. His character, Logan Cale AKA Eyes Only, is a man with a cause and yet sense of humor. When life puts him down (paralyzing him in episode one), he doesn’t give up. He keeps going. He shines a light into Max’s life and she uses her uber-rogue skills to help him with his cause. The series is full of light and dark, weaving a rich and detailed glimpse into this world.

If you haven’t seen this series, you should. If you have, did you love it? Did you read the books and did they help satisfy the need for an ending?

I’ll be back in two books to let you know what I think of them.

        

Snickerdoodles, chocolate chip, and sugar cookies always made the list. And were we to make just one batch? Heck no! We had to double, sometimes triple, every recipe we made up. Hours and hours later, we (and the kitchen) would be covered in flour, sticky with sugar, and have platter after platter full of cookies. The surfaces of multiple pieces of furniture groaned under the weight of all the cookies baked on that day. (Oddly enough this was way before my mother picked up the hobby of collecting cookie jars. I wonder if this yearly event led to it.)

I loved this tradition because it brought the family together and of course, there were cookies. I don’t like to brag but I do have a fairly large sweet-tooth. It was something we did every year. It lent a “sameness” to the season that was comforting and tied one Christmas to another.

I dreaded this tradition because after the first hour, my sisters and I got on each others nerves and sniped at each other. We (or at least I) got very tired of filling up tray after tray with cookies to go in the oven. The dough sticking to my fingers drove me crazy. I don’t know if I am not a fan of baking because of this or if it was always a part of my personality. All I know is that I wanted out of the kitchen and to get back to my book or my Barbies.

I will occasionally bake one thing or one batch of cookies (and by occasionally I mean about twice a year). I enjoy the fruits of my labor. Immensely. I also feel bad that I don’t bake with my kids more often.

Maybe this year I will start the tradition anew. After all, I can now send my kids in to bake and sit back and watch the flour fly from the comfort of my chair.

        

Thank you.

        

First off my writing. I am so far behind on NaNoWriMo this year that there is no way I am “winning”. Things were rolling along quite nicely until I got really sick and then the rest of my family one by one fell to the illness as well. When that cleared up and I was finally able to get back to my writing, I found I had slipped back into my procrastinating ways. I am working on getting out of the gutter and on the road again but as is usual at this time of year, work is getting crazier by the day. The kids school activities are getting crazier by the day. Holiday activities are getting crazier by the day. I am getting crazier by the day. Anyway, it is all a bunch of excuses but they are a roadblock to the kinds of habits I am frustratingly unable to cultivate in regards to my writing.

And yes, I am my own worst enemy. I have a cartload of hang-ups and bad habits that stop me from doing what I want. I’m working through them but it is a very slow process.

Good news is I have a short story mostly done so I should be releasing that soon. I started this one after a particularly odd dream and I call it a cross between Hansel & Gretel and Charlie & The Chocolate Factory. I know it sounds weird but I think you’ll like it.

If I can find some spare time, I’ll also be updating my short story blurbs. I think time has given me insights on how I can make them better, clearer, and I want to include the information that they are short stories directly in the blurb. I have seen and heard a lot of frustration from readers about the length of the stories they think they are buying. Making sure up front that folks know my stories are short and not cut off versions of a novel is only fair.

I also want to work on my website. Include some free samples of the short stories. Add my cover images to the front page. Add “Contact Me” options. I am not sure when this will happen though as I am not extremely computer savvy. I have a copy of WordPress for Dummies and a very busy friend who acts as my webmaster when he can. When I can get the two together, we’ll see what happens.

I hope you are all having a marvelous week and if I don’t get back here before then, Happy Thanksgiving!

        

Now that I am so excited about the movie, I decided it was finally time to break down and read the books. Customers have been recommending them to me for years and for one reason or another I kept putting off actually reading them. No more delays. I got out my trusty Nook and bought One for the Money and sat down to read it. The next day I bought Two for the Dough and I would have bought Three to Get Deadly (my finger was actually hovering over the “buy” button) but I had to wait for payday.

Payday has come again and I just finished Three to get Deadly and I really want to get the fourth book but alas! I must wait for another payday. (Two daughters heading to Homecoming this week and two boys want Halloween costumes the next sure bites into my book buying budget) While I wait for the money to roll in (as if) I thought I’d share all the things I like about Stephanie Plum, the protagonist of this fun series.

• Her voice. Reading through these stories I hear an accent that is different than my own and distinctly New York-ish. When the voice in my head takes on an accent that only adds to the ‘atmosphere’ of the story, I consider that a success.
• Her stubbornness. A lot of protagonists have this trait—it helps them through all those pesky obstacles writers throw at them—but Stephanie makes it look fun. She keeps going when every part of her body and psyche is bruised, most of the time after a much needed junk food break. Which brings me to. . .
• Her appetite. Stephanie eats like a real person does. She thinks about dieting occasionally but as soon as things go wrong she is back at the donuts and burgers again. I totally relate to her battle with eating healthy, the battle that she (and I) are losing.
• Her relationships. Her relationships and interactions with her mom, her grandma, her co-workers, Ranger—her mentor, Joe Morelli—her ex (sorta) and rival (sorta), and Rex—her pet hamster; all are unique and un-interchangeable. I love the scenes she has with these folks, each one for different reasons. All of these give the books different emotional beats and expectations that make for a robust reading experience.
• Her love of her job. Stephanie is a bounty hunter (a cool job in and of itself) and is barely qualified for the occupation. Does she let that stop her? Heck no. She is out there working hard for the money to keep her car working and her fridge full. She is out there because she loves the challenge of the job and really gets a kick out of bringing in those FTAs (Failure To Appears). And I get a kick out of reading of her adventures with it

There are a ton of other nuances about these books I enjoy (I’ve mentioned before my love of whodunits) and I can’t wait for next payday so I can read the next book.

Have you tried Janet Evanovich’s Stephanie Plum novels? What did you think of them?