Well, not lazy personally, but lazy about updating.

Balticon was fun. Not as busy as I've been some shows, but busy enough. Caught up with friends and made a few new ones. Need to get some paperwork done that I promised a few people at the show and hopefully that will be happening in the next few days. Really had fun doing the Edgar Allen Poe panel on his detective stories.

Fun thing happened at my reading. Had a couple of people stop by. Told them I was going to be reading the first couple of chapters from my new Stargate Novel. One got on the phone and called a friend announcing a Stargate reading and *boom*, I had more people at that reading then I've had at any other reading I've ever done. The good thing about it was they laughed when they were supposed to, groaned at the "bad" jokes and most said they'd definitely pick up the book when it came out. *Score!*

The reason I'm a little behind on my Balticon projects is while I was there, Writer Beware was officially offered part of the Mystery Writers of America's booth at Book Expo America. Which, of course, was the next weekend. So, between Monday and Thursday, I had to coordinate for a table display, create business cards, make lots of phone calls, coordinate with a good friend for crash space (hotels were all gone by then) and make train reservations.

Why the train? Because on Tuesday (after Balticon), I was going to drop off my new car at Mazda for it's 7500 tune-up and oil change. When I reached the end of the street, I was horrified to see approximately four inches of water roll out from beneath my passenger's seat and puddle on the floorboards. We'd had a huge thunderstorm on Monday and apparently the drains were clogged in my car, forcing the water into the passenger compartment. Oh, joy. So, Mazda fixed that (under warranty, thank goodness), but I didn't get my car back until after BEA was over.

Still, BEA was a blast. Writer Beware had a great experience and again a major tip of the hat to the MWA for hosting us! Victoria Strauss has already posted some of our experiences from there on the Writer Beware Blog and Ann and I are working on entries to go up there too. Also, it was good to see Steve Roman again. It'd been a few years since we'd actually visited (San Diego ComicCon 2005 to be exact), and we made up some lost time visiting as well as him playing tour guide for the big Midwestern kid. Can't believe I walked past the Empire State Building four times before I realized what I was seeing. *sigh*

I'm back on Childhood's Tears again. Finishing up the edits to Chapter Four. I've spent the past few nights rereading my Lovecraft and I think I've finally got the other plot I'd been needing for this book to start adding in. I'm hoping this will make the story a tad more creepy. I don't want to take away from the Action/Adventure parts, but a certain horror overtone would really set this book off. *keeping fingers crossed*

Also, I'm meeting with an actual web designer this weekend to get nightwolfgraphics.com/richardcwhite.com up and operational again. We're probably moving web hosts and definitely bringing the web site into the 21st century. When he started spouting .jsp vs .php and all the other acronyms that go with modern design, I just nodded and decided I'll let him worry about how it works. *grin*

Oh, work? Yeah, I'm playing one-armed paper-hanger right now there. Should be a very entertaining month.

So, given all this, I probably should go to bed.

Went out for a nice afternoon with the family. After braving the mob at Costco to get gas, we decided to try a new place for lunch today. It was nicely decorated, the service was attentive, and the food was good. The prices are a bit steep, so it's likely to become an "occasional" place, but it was certainly worth the effort to try it out. We've known it was there for years, but it was one of those things we were "going to get around to trying". Well, now we have and it was worth the effort.

Swung by Borders to let the daughter-unit pick up the newest Black Cat manga collection. I saw a few things that looked interesting, but just couldn't pull the trigger. I guess I'm feeling guilty about all the other books on my shelf waiting to be read.

Ran some errands with wishweaver after that and then settled in to watch some TV with the family. Caught an episode of Numbers from the 1st season DVD and then I watched Avatar, the Last Airbender before relinquishing the channel changer so Wish and the daughter-unit could watch Forensic Files and Body of Evidence.

After that, I headed up here, read several agent's blogs that I'm way behind on, responded to a few posts on Absolute Write, checked the responses to the latest Writer Beware blog post and contemplated my next blog entry before settling down to write.

I was thinking I was going to have to rip out part of what I wrote last weekend for Chronicles of the Sea Dragon because I was afraid I'd started down a rabbit trail that was going nowhere. But, I figured, let's wait until I get to the rewrite stage first. No editing during the first draft is one of my rules. Get to the end before letting the inner editor out of his cage. And, 1578 words later, I think I've taken what I thought was going to be an unproductive change to the story outline and have tied it back into where I thought I was going originally. See, I have to keep reminding myself, let the story go and I'll surprise myself how much better the story gets when I'm "writing" it rather than "outlining" it.

Don't get that last statement wrong. I still believe in the initial outline to make sure there IS a story somewhere in there, but I'm not a slave to it. If something better comes along, I'd be stupid to ignore it because I didn't think about it when I wrote the first outline. Like stories, outlines come in many drafts also.

Tomorrow is looking like a laundry and writing day, so I better get some sleep tonight. Night, LJ.
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Words for Today

1578 / 1000 words. 158%

Progress on CSD: Dragon Couchant

81477 / 100000 words. 81%

Words for 2008

87510 / 366000 words. 24%♠