Checking In

Contrary to all the rumors, I'm not dead, I haven't dropped off the face of the Earth, and I haven't even had the grace to have been involved in some sort of a catastrophic event.

The reason I haven't written since Mother's Day is actually rather simple and completely boring: I've been busy. That isn't to say I've forgotten my readers; I think of you daily, and I even think of writing a post to you at least a couple times a week. This hasn't been the sort of busy that means, "You are no longer my top priority and therefore I am busy." This has been the sort of busy that comes from, "I'm so busy running all over taking care of small but urgent wildfires that I have no time left for the important things in my life like writing blog posts. Or books. Or anything, really."

The truth is that I've been involved in several life-changing situations that have kept me from doing what I want to do, writing books and interacting with my readers. One thing I've been working on is a major update to my website, which I finally uploaded this morning. It's such a big change though, that until the new pages have a chance to propagate (which means spread all over the internet) you may see strange and ugly pages. Keep hitting refresh or go back later to see the pretty pages that I spent six months working on.

I've been getting ready to retire from my day job, and that's taken a lot of time, because in between running around making sure all the financial elements were healthy and in place, my boss decided that in addition to my regular duties I should write a history of our workplace. I've worked there 18 years, and know the history and have lived through more of it than anyone else there, including my now ex-boss.

My writing association talked me into being in charge of their website in January, and they assured my that once the conference was over in February, I would only be doing things for a couple of hours a week. This was true until we had some major difficulties on the site which we are now finally getting on the outside of.

I've been taking some computer classes which have used up more time than expected.

I've got very sensitive lungs, and there was a large mulch fire about thirty miles from my home which burned for the better part of a week. The evening wind shift blew the smoke directly to my home, however, which has made breathing difficult. Although the fire is now out, or at least under control enough that the smoke no longer reaches my home, I'm still coughing and trying to recover from the lungfuls I inhaled. Additionally, two weeks ago I was at the hair salon for a trim, and the place was full of acetone fumes from the nail place next door, making my breathing more difficult. I'll be fine, but it will take a while to fully recover from the fire and the other fumes. Later this month I'm going on a four-day three-night writing retreat up in the clean mountain air. I'm hoping that it will be good for my lungs, as well as being calming for my nerves and a kick-start for my writing.

And finally, I've been working on some changes that will be unveiled here in the near future. Please note that by "near" I really mean "sometime before the end of the year, if all goes well". They're changes that will mean better times ahead for me, and hopefully giving me more time to write and publish books for you to read.

On the book front, progress is still slowly being made on the suspense novel Just a Name, the sci fi novel Mindtouch, and the romantic novella Meet me Midway, all three of which I hope to publish by year's end. At least, that's the plan.

~Marie

Life and my Chairs

It’s been a crazy week in the Jenner household. It’s been so crazy, in fact, that instead of writing my post on Friday, I’m writing it on Monday to post tomorrow.

First, my father had an appointment with his primary care doctor January 11th. This week we discovered that almost all of the referrals and prescriptions my father’s doctor said she would write for him have not been written. They told me they were waiting on the insurance to approve them, but then, they told his case manager the same thing…and he’s the person that does the approving. He has an urgent need to be seen at a wound clinic, and other somewhat urgent needs, and they are not being met. In fact, there has apparently been no attempt to meet them. I get to spend tomorrow at the doctor’s office staging a one-woman sit-in until they hand me the three prescriptions (one for blood work, two for equipment) that he needs. I will then get to run all over town hand-delivering them. Grrr!

Second, the weather all week has been cold and wet. The wet is good for the desert environment I live in, I know I’ll be drinking all this rain this summer when the temps top 100. On the other hand, cold and damp is not good for my arthritis. I’ve spent a good amount of time holed up with my electric blanket and a good book.

I recently got an email from my library, telling me about free classes I can take online. The library gives me authorization numbers, and I pay nothing. I’ve signed up for classes in InDesign and Dreamweaver, in the hope that I can improve my book interiors and ebooks (with InDesign) and my website (with Dreamweaver). I’m learning a lot, but reading the lecture, doing the follow-along practice, then completing the assignments for both classes takes large chunks out of my week.

I’m still working on edits of The Castle Project and Just a Name. I expect to get Mind Touch back from the readers in about a week, and then I can start on those final edits. I’m also doing research on a new book for the Kwennjurat series, tentatively titled The Queen is in her Counting House.

On the miniature front, I’ve replaced the round chair parts with square ones to give me more surface area for gluing. I’ve also replaced low-temp hot glue with high temp, after actually reading the directions and discovering that low temp is for paper and delicate things, and high temp is for wood and metal. I didn’t realize there was a difference in the glue or its performance; I just thought low temp was a safety measure for the fingers of klutzy people who were tired of wearing hot-glue blisters. I made one chair, painted it, and wove the seat, but when I looked at the finished project, it looked a lot shorter and squattier than I wanted. I measured and did some math and realized that if it were blown up to full size, the seat would be 30” square. That’s really huge. Most chairs of this sort have a seat 18” square. So I cut smaller pieces and made a second one. You can see the difference in the two seats. The soda can is there for scale, not because I’m a sloppy photographer. I’ve got eight more chairs cut, glued, and painted; now I just need to weave the seats and they will be done. Hopefully I’ll get them finished this week.

Chairs and Creaky Joints

As many of you already know, I have osteoarthritis throughout my entire body. This makes a lot of simple things that most people don’t think about into challenges, sometimes monumental challenges. For example, it’s now winter. Yes, I do live in Arizona, and I know that people who live with several feet of snow sneer at the idea of Arizona even calling a season winter. I used to be one of them. I would even wear shorts when we visited my grandparents for Christmas.

However, Arizona does have winter. It does get cold here, even in the desert part. The low deserts have spent the last week with a hard freeze warning. Warning is weatherman speak for “it’s happening now or going to happen”. Even the Phoenix area where I live had a freeze warning. I saw pictures taken not more than an hour’s drive through city traffic, of a volleyball net with icicles hanging from it. I haven’t seen icicles of any size since I moved from Utah.

For most of my life I have preferred cold weather to hot, because you can always put another layer on, but in taking layers off, there are certain guidelines of how much you can take off and still go out in public.

As the arthritis has attacked one joint after another, I’m finding that more of my life is being controlled by the weather. Heat feels good. Cold hurts. Even indoors in a temperature controlled environment, I hurt more on cold days and on cloudy days. When it’s cold outside my joints all ache. Moving anything hurts. Even typing hurts; the arthritis has spent much of the past year moving into my hands and wrists.

That’s the bad news. I don’t share it to evoke pity, only to let you know what is happening in my life. There’s also good news. Ibuprofen is a wonderful drug. On most days, it’s able to chase away enough pain that I can concentrate on what I’m doing. I also have both a cane and a walker I can use on really bad days. Working on my books is something I can usually do even when I don’t feel in top form, though every task demands more time and concentration.

This last week has been difficult, physically, but the weather is slowly improving and I’m really looking forward to those hundred-degree-plus days that will be here soon. From where I sit, the sooner the better.

During this week I started editing The Castle Project, bugged one of my outside editors to finish and return Just a Name, and sent Mind Touch out to beta-readers. I also looked into some methods of being able to update my website more easily, and make it look more spiffy at the same time. The program I use on my writing association's website is very easy to use for updating the site, but I found it very difficult for setting up my own site. I inherited control of the association's already set-up site. A second program which I own but had never even opened was considered, and I signed up for a free class through my library that will teach me to use it. I'm already loving it, so watch for changes on the website as I learn more about how to use the program. It's a six week class, and they won't let me work at my own pace, so those changes are coming, but don't expect them in the next day or so.

Also this week I worked on the chairs for my dollhouse project, but discovered that dowels don’t hold together well when secured by hot glue or by Elmer’s glue. At least, they don’t hold together well enough to stand any sort of strain, such as being held by one leg and painted. I got nine chairs cut out, four chair frames constructed, and watched them crumble apart as I painted them. I’m now devising a plan to make sturdier joints. If the chairs were full-size, I would simply drill holes in the uprights and make the crosspieces have pegs on the ends of them, but that doesn’t work when the entire chair is only two inches tall. I need the chairs to be able to stand enough pressure that I can take thin jute and embroider seats onto the frames, and pretend it is woven wicker. Because they all fell apart there are no pictures, but hopefully I’ll have some pictures of half-completed chairs next week.

~Marie

Welcome to the Future!

Today is the first day of a new year. The year behind has closed, and the year ahead awaits, a blank slate to write upon. It can be sort of scary to contemplate a whole year, knowing that every day I will be making choices that affect the contents of the rest of the year. Choices I make in January can mandate what choices will be available to me in November. It's also a lot awesome, knowing I have the power to make those choices!

In December I read 9 books containing 1218 pages. My year-long reading total was 210 books, most of them novels, containing 45,844 pages. I have to say that before this year my only experience with "Victorian Authors" was Charles Dickens. While I had read - or tried to read, some of his works in the past, I hadn't succeeded in finishing any of them and had written of all of the authors of the era as extremely wordy, inordinately fond of long words which have now fallen out of use, and utterly boring and depressing.

This year, thanks to the wonder of ebooks, I've been able to read a goodly chunk of the works of Mark Twain and H. G. Wells. Not all Victorian authors are of the same stamp. I finally understand why Mr. Twain is called a humorist. His observations of the human race and the manner of his sentence construction had me laughing out loud on more than one occasion. I love his fiction; his essays are entertaining, and his travelogues absorbing. I'm very much enjoying Mr. Wells' fiction. His guesses on where technology will take the human race in the future are entertaining. What is amazing is how many of his predictions have come true, and which things have largely not changed, as I look back on his looking forward. I'm not so fond of his political, philosophical, and religious writings (which are sometimes all mixed up in one essay), so I have to admit that I just skimmed them. He does use more words unfamiliar to me (and also unfamiliar to my nook's dictionary) than Mr. Twain does.

I didn't get a lot of work done this week, chiefly because my Dad was in the hospital from December 22-30, and our entire family's routine was disrupted as a result. However, he is home now, we had Christmas last night, and although there'll be a few more medical things for me to coordinate, things will be more or less back to normal.

My public goals for 2013 will keep me very busy this year, which hopefully will keep me out of trouble. I plan to publish seven books of my own. January should see the short story collection Bits and Bites published. I have four short novels planned that will be ebook only, whose titles will be announced later. I expect to publish the suspense novel Just a Name sometime in May, and the fantasy Mind Touch in the fall. I'm working on an updated website for myself.

In addition, I am the newsletter editor for my church congregation, and I might be working on the website for my writing association.

 

~Marie

Resolution Update: November

My goals for this year began as:

• Graduate from college. (Accomplished)
• Write a new manuscript, something I haven't had time to do since I started college. (Accomplished)
• Take a vacation someplace out of Arizona. (Accomplished)
• Hug my daughter every day. (In Progress)
• Learn how to make book trailers and post them to YouTube. (Accomplished!)

As I continue through the year, my evolving list of goals reads:

• Hug my daughter every day. (Still in Progress, with modifications)
• Support my daughter as she takes her turn at college. (Accomplished)
• Finish editing The Siege of Kwennjurat and get it published. (Accomplished)
• Reformat all ebooks so they look better. (Accomplished)

The hugs were temporarily stopped during October, as we realized we were passing the flu back and forth. Now that we're recovered enough to consider ourselves no longer contagious, they have resumed.

Happily, The Siege of Kwennjurat was released on October 24th. Of course, if you read my blog, you already know this, because I've talked about nothing else all month. I've been working in this world for sixteen years, and was rather happy to be done with it at last. During most of that time, I have had a hand drawn and colored map of the Ten Kingdoms hanging above my desk. Even though the book was available for sale slightly before the 24th, I had decided to take the map down on the 24th, as a private celebration of the completion of my work in that world, and a symbol to myself that goals can be accomplished, even when they take a long time to materialize.

On the 22nd, I had a dream. Book ideas often come to me through dreams, and the vivid scenes that are the seed for the novel usually remains largely unchanged through the writing process. In this dream, I saw two people meeting in a shadowy place, and speaking in low tones. I recognized one of them immediately as a character from Kwennjurat. From their conversation, I soon realized that the other person had been mentioned in the books, but didn't have a large role. I had thought the second person was dead. They are not dead. I have left my map up. Research and plotting is already underway. There will, apparently, be a third book in the Kwennjurat Chronicles, even though most of the action in the third book will not be in the Ten Kingdoms. Hang on to your hats, this is going to be an interesting ride!

I have two trailers up on YouTube, and ideas are coming for other video projects including but not limited to book trailers. My video camera had other ideas. It apparently decided it didn't have any further interest in living, so further forays into video are temporarily delayed until I see enough books to replace the video camera -- or find the money someplace else.

I always have more than one book project under construction, and at any given time they're in different stages of being written, edited, and prepared for publication. Right now, I have a romantic novella that hopefully will be out around thanksgiving. It's a Christmas themed story, so if it misses its deadline it will have to wait a full year. Because of its length, I plan to release it in ebook only, and for at least the first several months, it will be in Amazon's lending program, which means Kindle only. The title is A Gigolo for Christmas. Yes, you heard right, A M Jenner is writing a book with the word "gigolo" in the title. You'll have to get the book and read it to see if my standards have actually slipped. I've also got a short story collection that hopefully will be out around the first of the year named Bits and Bites. By the end of next year, I hope to have the suspense novel Just a Name, and the fantasy Mind Touch published as well, so there's lots of good news and new books in the pipeline for my devoted fans -- all ten of you. (That's a joke - I hope I have more than ten fans.)

On the handcrafting front, I hauled out my daughter's knitting looms and started a shawl, but that project got derailed because of the dollhouse project I'm involved in. It began as an idea to make a miniature bookshop to use as a set for photo shoots for my website, but has evolved into simply a project to build a miniature bookshop dollhouse with a flat above the shop. Each of the floors has been constructed. My mom is planning on finishing and furnishing the flat, and I'm working on the bookshop. So far, I have built the stairs to go upstairs with, laid down hardwood flooring, painted, and polished it, painted the walls in the office at the back of the shop, and I'm working on creating the wainscoting for the front of the shop. I'm not going to post any pictures until it's finished, though. I'm making it on a budget in half-scale, which means I get to make the doors and windows and everything else completely by hand, because purchasing dollhouse things in half-scale is beyond my budget. Plus, it's fun to figure out how to create it and make it look good when my construction materials are mostly found items already in my craft supplies.

I only finished reading seven books this month, but my page total is 4367. 

~Marie

Stop Three: Canterbury, England

Help! My characters have just taken over my book!
Stop three on my international blog tour.

http://sophiesthoughtsandfunmbles.blogspot.com/2012/10/when-characters-take-over-guest-post-by.html