Status Report for February

Stuff is starting to build up so I need to think my way through it. So here goes.

Still waiting on manuscript I sent to Carina Press. Freya’s Bower requested the full of Satellite Of Love. Liquid Silver sent a revise and resubmit for Master Gardner. That’s going to have to wait because my life gives new meaning to swamped right now.

I got the edits for the short I have with Wild Rose and am nearly done with them. There’s one big ugly patch that’s going to take all my concentration to sort out and then I can send it off.

In the meantime, I stumbled across a job posting for ESL teachers in Abu Dhabi and appiled. I’ve made it through the first round of interviews and now have to go to Atlanta for an in-person interview. Talk about your dream jobs. So there’s a ton of homework I need to do for that.

Speaking of homework. I’m keeping up nicely in my classes, but it hasn’t gotten ugly yet. I absolutely must finish my classes on time so that I can get my teaching license renewed so I can go to Abu Dhabi (if I get the job.) Here’s hoping I don’t have to appeal for mercy from my profs, but chances are my ESL prof would give in because of the location of the job. She wants to go there.

Then yesterday I got an email from my publisher asking if I would like to put Spark Of Desire into print. Oh, heck yeah! Bring it on! So suddenly there a new project dropped in my lap.

The novella I was working in is nearly finished, but has had to slip to the back burner because I’m just too busy to work on it. Unfortunately, I came up with another story in that world which should also be a novella, pushing back all the other stuff I need to get to.

As long as I keep making headway, it counts.

Armand Assante. I could watch him paint a bathroom.

Any time Armand Assante is on the screen, I am riveted. The movie this is excerpted from is three hours long. I’ve watched it a couple of times. I’ve also watched

The Odyssey

a couple of times. Only for Armand.

Talk about your buzz kill

I’m working on a steamy novella (Jason’s sister and the guy who rescued Suzi from the party when she broke up with Logan). Going gangbusters.

However, I am a substitute teacher. This afternoon I’m working with a group of 5th graders. Great kids. I sub in this room all the time. They’re doing some silent reading and then summarizing what they read. After that I’m reading a couple of chapters from a book to them and they’re taking a test. Largely, they’re good kids. I have a couple of thorns, but nothing I can’t handle. I like working with them.

But.

Not the greatest environment for writing smut.

Kevin Kline. I could watch him paint a bathroom.

I was watching

Disney’s Hunchback

when it occurred to me that I really liked Kevin Kline. The fact that he could put so much character into his voice amazed me. Then if dawned on me that many of the movies I thought of as favorites starred him. Especially

In & Out

.

Status Report

About a month ago, I was here (within a few centimeters in fact, which is odd because I’m house sitting) and I decided I needed to set some goals. School had ended for the semester and I knew I had a month that could either slip through my fingers or be used wisely. There were a few manuscripts (4) on my harddrive that were thisclose to being ready for submission. (I know, if you’re just struggling through your first manuscript, you hate me right now.) I knew where I wanted to send them, I just hadn’t done the final edit and submitting. With that in mind I set ot work.

Believe it or not, I exceeded my 4 manuscripts submitted goal.

I straightened up the speadsheet that I use to keep track of what I have at what stage of finished and made notes about where I was headed. Then I started on the first one.

Satellite Of Love needed a fine tooth comb and a synopsis before I could send it in to Freya’s Bower. Then when I read the submission guidelines I found out that the synopsis could only be 1 to 2 pages long. Gah! So I pared my 75K novel down to 4 pages and then to 1.

Looking at Satellite, I realized that the 3rd Rock Star book, Let Me Be The One, really needed to be critiqued. I was ambitious with that one. Three POVs and 2 timelines running concurrently. There’s 1 or 2 places that I think I’m missing a scene, but I really need other eyes. So I prepped that one for my crit group, cleaning it up and putting in chapters.

Thinking of my crit group led me to Welsh Rogue, my historical. I had my group critique it over a year ago and never did anything with it. Going though it made me rip out my hair because it’s  couple years old and I’ve come a long way, baby. I still like it and still want to see it succeed, but I think another tuning is in order. I put together a synopsis anyway and set it off to an agent. It’s already been rejected, but the original plan was to submit it to a publisher anyway. They’re going to take 3-6 months to get back to me and in that time, I’ll have been through Welsh Rogue at least one more time.

Destined Flight, a sci fi romance, is another one that I had critted last year and just left on my hard drive, waiting. It also didn’t have a title until last week. Edited it, forced a title out of myself, wrote a synopsis and sent it a query to an agent last night. (The same one who rejected Welsh Rogue as a matter of fact.)

In the middle of this somewhere, I got the news that a story I submitted months ago to Wild Rose Press, and got a revise and resubmit on weeks ago, should be getting a contract soon. This is why we have to keep the ocean full of bottles. You never know how long it’s going to take one to wash up in the right place.

The last title on my list was Master Gardner. I wanted to send that to Liquid Silver, but I didn’t know how to submit to them. I emailed my editor hoping they didn’t want a synopsis because I’d just written 3 of them. She said I could submit the full manuscript because I’d already been published by them. Whew. Then I went through that manuscript tearing out my hair (though I do have hair left.) I wrote it 2 or 3 years ago, edited it to the very best of my ability last year for submission (which earned me another rejection) but since then, I’ve edited 3 books with 3 different editors. All this stuff I thought was perfect before? Not perfect. Not at all. No wonder it was rejected. I cleaned it up to the best of my current ability and sent it off.

Having accomplished everything I set out to do, I needed to update my spreadsheet. Not sure how it happened, but I was looking at the speardsheet thinking, “gee I wish I had something to sent to Carina Press” when it jumped out at me. I have a pair of novellas I wrote a year and a half ago and had just edited a few months ago. They are set in a small town and happen concurrently so some scenes repeat from different perspectives in both stories. I had thought about sending it to Lyrical, but I have a series going with them and I’m not done with book 3. I also thought about sending it to Wild Rose, but I’m in the middle of the submission process with them already. Carina Press is the epub arm of Harlequin. I couldn’t not try. So I put together a submission and sent it out. If they take this one it’ll probably be a twofer.

So in setting out to submit 4 titles, I submitted 3 (maybe 4) to publishers, 2 to an agent (1 rejected, 1 just sent last night) and I have 1 of those nearly ready to go to a publisher. Pretty darn good for a one month break from school.

Excerpt from Shiloh Walker’s Broken

BROKEN by Shiloh Walker

He opened the door— And stopped dead in his tracks as somebody all but fell into his arms. Somebody . . . a woman. And not Theresa. He caught her just above her elbows, automatically steadying her. “I’m sorry,” she said, her voice soft and low. Then she lifted her face and Quinn found himself gazing into the biggest, brownest eyes he’d ever seen in his life. Feeling a little dazed, he studied her face while she stammered out another apology. Quinn barely heard it. He was too busy staring at her mouth. A very pretty mouth, a cupid’s bow slicked with deep, vibrant red. Under his hands, he could feel silken smooth skin and unable to resist, he stroked a thumb along her inner arm. Her skin was soft, soft and warm—the creamiest, most flawless skin imaginable. Her shoulder-length hair was a shade caught between blonde and brown, nondescript, but for some reason, he found himself thinking about tangling his fingers in that hair and holding her head still while he kissed that red-slicked mouth. Well, hello . . . he could all but feel his libido kicking up as he stared at that mouth. Every last one of his senses tuned in on her— The way she looked . . . sex and sin. The way she smelled . . . sex and sin. The way she sounded . . . sex and sin. The way she felt . . . the way she might taste. He knew it without a doubt. She’d taste like sex and sin. His mouth was all but watering. “Ahhh . . . excuse me,” she said, tugging against his light hold. “Uh . . . yeah.” He uncurled his fingers and let go, although he hated every second of it. She immediately backed away, putting a good five feet between them and eying him nervously. In that moment, he was acutely aware of the fact that he hadn’t bothered shaving that morning, or the morning before. He was also acutely aware of the wrinkled state of his gray T-shirt and the jeans he wore. He’d finally gotten into the habit of wearing the unofficial uniform—a black shirt with Bond Enforcement printed on the front and back, and either jeans or black fatigues—worn by most of the guys who worked for Gearing. He wore the Bond shirts for work, but usually changed before leaving. Wearing those particular shirts outside of work had ended up causing him a headache or two. She continued to stare at him, her face expressionless and her eyes measuring. She might have just continued to stare at him indefinitely if Theresa hadn’t come bustling down the hall. “Quinn?” Tearing his eyes away from the unknown woman, he smiled at his landlord. It no longer seemed so weird to smile at somebody—as in he didn’t worry his face might crack if he wasn’t careful. Still, the smile on his face did feel odd. “Hey, Theresa. I didn’t know you had company.” She beamed at him. “This isn’t company. This is your new neighbor. She just moved in to the upstairs apartment. Sara . . . I’d like you to meet Quinn Rafferty. Quinn, this is Sara Davis.” Sara. Neighbor. Staring into Sara’s dark brown eyes, his heart sank just a little. Great. Some people collected books. Collected knickknacks, or coins. Theresa collected lost souls, as evidenced by the fact that he was living in her basement after she’d charmed him into changing her tire outside Dierburg’s a few months earlier. The last woman to stay in that apartment had ended up being a battered woman hiding out from her ex. Before that, it had been a girl who’d been all of nineteen, with two kids and a third on the way. When that one had left, she’d ended up stealing from Theresa and skipping out on the piddling amount of rent that Theresa had coming. If Sara Davis was living in Theresa’s upstairs apartment, that made her pretty much off limits. It didn’t matter that his dormant sex drive was all of sudden flaring up on him. The last thing Quinn needed to be around was another lost soul, not when he still struggled to find his own.

BROKEN releases in March.

For more info, visit http://shilohwalker.com

James Earl Jones. I could watch him paint a bathroom.

Or recite the alphabet. I just find him fascinating and the sound of his voice still sends shivers down my spine. Though at his age I probably should paint the bathroom myself and just have him hang around for company.

A prospective retrospective

And I mean that literally. I’m now going to write my retrospective for 2010. Not resolutions, but what I hope to be able to look on as finished at the end of this year.

Arden FD #3 finished and contracted.

Arden FD #4 finished.

Touchstone #1 and #3 contracted. (Touchstone #2 is The Rock Star’s Retreat. It’s already out.)

Touchstone #4 written.

Untitled Sci Fi Romance with agent, possibly contracted to print pub.

Welsh Rogue contracted to print pub.

And in my personal life:

Teaching license renewed.

Job gotten.

Move to another state/country.

Gosh, that’s not ambitious, is it?

Facebook is Bad!

Last week, one of the items on my to do list was do something with my Facebook page. I’d had it for months and never bothered with it. So I sat down to get myself some friends and post some links.

That was when the trouble started. I stumbled across Zoo World. They tempted me with big cats, I’m sure. I’m a sucker for a big cat. I started my zoo about a week ago. It is now worth over a million dollars and much of my time is spent trying to recruit zookeepers so I can breed more animals.

I used to write. I remember a time when I would sit for hours spinning tales. Now? Facebook.

So, you wanna be my zookeeper?

Rick Savage. I could watch him paint a bathroom.

I’m not ashamed to admit that I’ve been staring at Rick Savage for over 25 years. And according to the internet stalking I’ve done, he likes to do over houses. Watch him paint a bathroom? Absolutely. (‘Specially if he was chatty cause I love that accent.)

BTW, this is a recent pic. Looking that good at 48? (He just turned 49 this past week.) I foresee many more years watching him do whatever I can find. Including paint a bathroom.