Lukewarm cups of tea

Ken left at something like 4 am today to meet his mom to go look at some historic train that’s in the area for only today. Clearly I didn’t go with him, mainly because he and his mom enjoy having time together like this (he’s an awesome son!). I was originally planning to go to Isles Anniversary, but a forecast of morning rain and a high of 58° made me re-think that plan, plus, you know, work. Workity workity work. I haven’t been very productive—I’ve been feeling like warmed-over crap, really, with the mental/emotional/creative energy of something that has pretty much no mental/emotional/creative energy (I was going to say “a fruit fly” or “a wombat” but who am I to judge how much mental/emotional/creative energy those things have? If wombats had opposable thumbs, they might paint wombatly masterpieces, for all I know. Hm. Okay, how about the mental/emotional/creative energy of a lukewarm cup of tea? That’s pretty accurate, actually.)

Where was I? Right, I haven’t been very productive, although I’ve been chipping away at things, slowly. I have a couple of bad days and then I have an okay day, and I’m trying to learn not to turn the okay day into a day where I frantically try to catch up, exhaust myself, and have more bad days. So yesterday I focused on copyediting and personal/home/SCA email, and I did a mound of dishes and assisted Ken with dinner (shrimp scampi over wholegrain thin spaghetti along with roasted brussels sprouts NOM).

I slept in today, by which I mean, I had a headache for part of the night so I stayed in bed longer than I might normally have. It’s mostly gone now, anyway. Thus far I’ve eaten shrimp scampi for breakfast (do not judge me) and done an hour’s worth of copyediting. Next on deck:

• drink protein shake while sitting outside with kitlings and reading the second Castle book, Naked Heat
• eat a banana
• go for a run/walk
• shower, probably have a snack
• finish a short story
• do another hour or so of copyediting (I need to have this one done before Thanksgiving, and we’ve got a busy few days leading up to Thanksgiving, so I want to get ahead)
• get another short story uploaded
• promo recently uploaded stories
• watch videos on how to design books in In Design, because all I’ve ever designed in In Design are booklets, and they’re different. Argh.
• eat dinner (possibly more shrimp scampi, or maybe a caprese sandwich)

Damn, that looks like a lot. We’ll see. Don’t want to overdo it and feel like a lukewarm cup of tea. (That sounds like bad poetry.)

And I need to get back into the habit of writing down (and maybe posting) my Done Lists….

"The Heist" now available!

"The Heist" by Andrea Dale

Leroy had been a security guard for two weeks in a bank that hadn’t been robbed in fifty years…until now. He’s shocked to discovery one of the robbers is his old flame Sherri. When she ties him up, his day takes a better turn…. A kinky short story of sex and double-crossing from a legendary erotica heavy-hitter.

“The Heist” originally appeared in Frenzy: 60 Stories of Sudden Sex (Cleis Press, 2008).

Cover artwork by Les Byerley Photographer / iStockPhoto.

Available in a variety of electronic formats
Amazon |  Barnes & Noble |  Smashwords

Spaghetti is not Gaelic, and other stories

I have spent most of today cooking, which is insane, both because I don’t enjoy cooking (blasting Duran Duran’s All You Need Is Now, among other albums, helped) and because Ken’s in charge of cooking now. (He’s not working, therefore, he’s in charge of the house.) But I told him I’d chop veggies if he went to Costco, and I chopped veggies for three things:

1. a big pot of veggie soup, which I made. It’s quite good; we had it for lunch with the last of the bread from Erick Schat’s Bakkerÿ, omnom.
2. an enormous vat of spaghetti* sauce in the crock pot. Later, Ken will brown the ground beef and onion, and we’ll add it to half the sauce, and then we’ll freeze all of it in smaller containers, except the non-meat sauce that we want to keep out for calzones later this week
3. Thai stir-fry, which Ken’s making for dinner tonight.

Now it’s 4:30 and I need to start getting some actual work done. (No, I didn’t cook until now; I also had a leisurely lunch with Ken and played some Spider Solitaire and read some blogs and made tea.)

Copyediting and a much-overdue short story, here I come….

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* For all I love pasta with a passion that cannot die, I’m incapable of spelling spaghetti correctly on the first try. Why must it have that “h” in there? It’s not freaking Gaelic!

A rambling post I'll no doubt regret in the morning

This year has been a mass/mess of traveling, but since our brief jaunt to Tahoe last week, I’ve been home home home (okay, except for an SCA event, but that was a day trip). I don’t know how to express how good this feels. Tonight, listening to the rain, I think I’m gradually starting to feel like myself again.

Maybe. I hope.

I have no official trips (other than day things) scheduled until late December, except maybe Thanksgiving with my sister and her family in Monterey (which reminds me, crap, she left me a message about that on Tuesday and I still haven’t called her back). This makes me want to weep with relief. By Thanksgiving I’ll probably be excited about venturing forth, but right now? I get to stay home? I get to find some semblance of routine with working out and writing and errands and slowly dragging the house back towards cleanliness? Really? Can I, huh, huh, can I really?

I’m exhausted. Mentally, emotionally. Physically, I’m not entirely up to speed with working out, but I’m doing okay. (Okay, barely.) But the rest of it? Hitting rock bottom means the only way out is up, right? I’m really going to get my brain back, right? Creativity and enthusiasm are just around the corner…right?

In December, Ken is flying east to help my mom drive to South Carolina for the winter. Because he’s that awesome, because he knows what would be best for me is to have that time at home, to not have to plan another frakking trip where I have to be in charge of things. I hope by then I can make productive use of that time, that I won’t sit around watching reruns of Law & Order and wishing I could find the energy, the enthusiasm, the whatever’s missing to get up and walk into my office and work.

I woke up this morning and thought, If I were really my own boss, I would’ve fired my ass weeks ago.

I hope, over the next few weeks, that I’ll be able to settle into a lenient schedule, one that shoehorns in appointments and workouts and whatnot, where we use all the nummy fresh food we’ve acquired to make healthy meals (on deck: vegetable soup, Thai peanut tofu and veggie stir-fry, a vat of spagetti sauce [most to freeze], calzones, some sort of Indian stuff Ken bought). That I’ll have the energy to help with housework so the house is somewhere I actually want to be. That I’ll have time to read all the groovy books that have piled up, which I really am excited about reading, somewhere, beneath the exhaustedness.

For now, though, I’m going to take a moment to listen to Eostre snoring and the rain outside, and go upstairs and read for a bit and cuddle with an already sleeping Ken and be happy that I’m going to sleep as late as I damn well want in the morning.

I hope.

Oh oh oh oh, sweet wine o'mine

I don’t know when my love affair with Chardonnay started, when she first whispered her enticing siren song in my ear. Possibly in college, although my main drink of choice in college was vodka and lemon-lime Crystal Light, followed by the cheap beer at beer blasts (fundraisers for frats in downtown bars) because, well, it was cheap. Sure, there were a few nights of Bacardi 151 with wine cooler chasers, but that was more opportunity than an assignation. And during my semester in Britain I had a delicious fling with Snakebites (lager and cider)…sometimes in the deepest darkest night, I crave you, dear Snakebites.

Chardonnay, though, she’s been my lover for many, many years. Crisp, dry, and seductively cheap in a box. In fact, I’ve said for as long as I can remember that red wine gives me migraines—unless it’s the house red served in a carafe in restaurants in Italy. Lately, though, I’ve been reading about the benefits of red, and I started to research. In a posh wine shop in Ojai, I asked the experts why red wine would do that, and how to prevent it.

Sulfites, they said with conviction, and sold me a bottle of organic no-sulfites-added red from a local winery housed at an estate designed by Greene and Greene. Well, shit, how could I not fall in love with that? I mean, it thematically goes with my house.

Two reasons, alas: One, it was a mix of two things (Merlot and…crap, something else), which was nice but not to my taste; and two, from research online, I’m given to understand that whites have more sulfites than reds.  O.o  On the plus side, though, I polished the bottle off over two nights and had nary a headache in sight.

So, fine, fuck it. I girded my loins, took a deep breath, and hauled home a box of Cabernet Sauvignon.

Dudes…I like it. And even better? No migraines. And even better than that? Because it’s richer/heavier/whatever pretentious wine description word fits here, I drink less of it. I savor it, sip it, nurse it. I don’t love it as much as I love my dark muse Chardonnay, but I’m happy with it.

Here’s the weirdest thing, though: I feel more grown-up drinking it.

What the hell does that mean?

PeSS&NoPuMo

Before you ask, no, I’m not doing NaNoWriMo (National Novel Writing Month). A variety of reasons, none terribly interesting. It’s just not the right time for me.

However, I started pondering various things, and have decided that November (well, starting when we get home from Reno, so as of Friday, November 4) for me is going to be PeSS&NoPuMo. (Say that three time fast, hah!) In other words, Personal Short Story and Novel Publishing Month.

Other than a few anthology deadlines and two copyediting jobs, I’m going to focus on Soul’s Road Press and getting more of my work available online. Why? Well, largely, I need the kick in the pants to learn In Design (I know how to do newsletters in it, but not books) and CreateSpace. But also, this Christmas is going to be huge for ereaders, which means by the afternoon of December 25, there’s going to be a huge jump in ebook sales…and I’d like my stuff out there. Finally, I need some POD (print-on-demand) paperbacks available for readings/signings, etc.

Already up in eformat are 43 items: 1 novella (short novel), 1 short-story collection (lesbian erotic romance), 2 romance stories, 5 fantasy stories; the rest are erotica stories.

Right now, I’ve got three novels pretty close to being ready for publication. One needs my review of the copyedits and they all need formatting, which I can do. I’m waiting on the cover for one, and the cover designer for the other is waiting for me to tell him the dimensions, which I won’t know until I format it for POD, which I can’t do until I suss out the In Design and CreateSpace stuff. Also, I have a fourth novel that I’ll probably send out for copyediting this month.

I have one novella (short novel), In Her Hands, that’s available as an ebook, and I want to get the POD up. (I also am jonesing to write the two companion novellas, and get them up, and then release them as one big book. Maybe December with be novella-writing month….)

I have three to four collections in some stage of completion. My first one collection, Kiss Me Hello: Lesbian Erotic Romance, went up as an ebook in September and has been selling well; now it’s time to get the POD going. I have three with enough stories, and one that’s awaiting one new story.

There are also more short stories than I’m currently prepared to count waiting in the queue, too! So far, I’ve been focusing on putting up stories that sold to print publications and to which I still own the electronic rights. (There are a couple of exceptions to that – two or three stories that I put up for specific reasons; e.g., I wanted to include in a collection one that hadn’t sold elsewhere.) Plus, once all those are up, I’m going to start with stories that have been to all the major markets but not quite hit at them – the “great, but not quite right for us” ones.

When I get home I’ll figure out an actual schedule for all of this and make specific goals. But basically, I’m looking at the following:

• 3 novels (ebook and POD)
• 1 novella (POD)
• 4 collections (some ebook, some POD), depending on stories
• as many short stories as I can prep (I may not put them up all at once, though)

Will you use your holiday money to buy them?  ;-)

The Wheel Turns

Tonight we went into LA to see Neil Gaiman and Amanda Palmer perform…Neil Gaiman and Amanda Palmer type things. I don’t think they were entirely clear when they planned this tour, and that was okay. While Amanda’s music is not my thing, there are gobs of things I admire about her, and I am an unabashed fangirl when it comes to Neil (see, e.g., the night I didn’t throw up on his shoes—made more poignant tonight by a story he told where he had such stage fright recently that he threw up). I also contributed to their Kickstarter campaign, which was to raise money to record all six nights of this tour.

There were readings by Neil, including one that he said we hadn’t heard before, and I turned to Ken and said “But didn’t we hear this when we saw him in Santa Barbara?” But it was different somehow; we think he read only the middle bit earlier. Still very spooky. Still made me wonder if people who hadn’t lived in the UK got the subtleties.

There was music by Amanda, some of which I knew, and while again her style doesn’t speak to me, I can still appreciate it and appreciate her talent and, for lack of a better word, energy. She wore the stunningly gorgeous vintage Deco dress from the Oscars, and I only wished I were closer (we were in about the 10^th row, but there were tons of empty seats scattered before us, which made me a wee bit grumpy) so I could see it better.

There were also things by both Neil and Amanda, including a Q&A from Qs left in a box at the merch table, and a song or two. Oh, and a costume contest partially judged by Margaret Cho (!).

The show made me lament the lack of a literary salon in my life. I really do yearn for that. A perhaps monthly get-together, with wine or tea, to discuss concepts and ideas and brainstorm and create. I can get it in snippets, with some friends…just not quite to the level I’m craving. The problem, in large part, is that the best friends for something like this are scattered across the world. Still waiting for that transporter technology, kthnxbai.

Anyway, after the utterly wonderful show, we went out to the parking lot (after deciding not to stand in the loooooong line to get something signed; all I had was the t-shirt I’d just bought, anyway) to discover the car battery was dead.

The irony was that earlier that day I’d commented that the car seemed to take a bit longer to start, something I’d noticed the previous Thursday…oh well! AAA actually came quickly and we were back on the road. But the car was still acting funny when we grabbed In-n-Out, and as we wound our way up Highway 1, the headlights grew dimmer and dimmer until almost exactly 10 miles from home, we coasted over onto the shoulder.

This time it took AAA longer to arrive. Ken actually dozed as we sat there in the silence and dark. We could see the faint glow of Oxnard ahead and the stars above, but other than that, no light.

Sitting there at the side of the road, the cliff looming above us on our right, the ocean down a cliff just across the road, in the dark, on the night when the veil between the worlds is thinnest…let’s just say my brain was in overdrive, busily trying to creep myself out.

And that’s when I heard the voices. Faint, murmuring voices. Not constant—in fact, every time I convinced myself I was just hearing the wind or the surf, the sounds would become more voicelike again.

Thankfully Ken was awake when people actually appeared on the other side of the road on bicycles, in the dark, with just a glow stick. It was like the fucking scary men from Buffy that glide around and steal voices, because I could not see the bicycles. Gah.

Eventually AAA arrived and took my poor car to my fabulous Swedish Car Guy, and we caught an expensive taxi home. I think we got there about 3 am?

I did a brief Samhain ritual, lighting a candle for the ancestors, burning a slip of paper on which was written something I want to give up to make room for something positive in my life, and pulling a Tarot card for the year. Six of Pentacles. I’m good with that.

The Wheel Turns. Thank you all for sharing this journey with me.