Day Brighteners

What I'm reading: Gone Tomorrow, by Lee Child

First – welcome to some new blog followers! Sassy, Cheeky, Mirjana & Heather: glad you're aboard.

Being caught up in all the changes we're facing lately, I'd forgotten my New Year's goal to look more to the positive. I realized I'd been dwelling too much on all the things that weren't happening.

No action on our house yet. But the Realtor sent his stats and said the web hits through the MLS service and realtor.com were above average. Think positive. Eventually, one will pan out.

Only one more month of paychecks. But we met with our financial advisor, and he said our retirement investment planning would cover the money we need to live, and it wouldn't depend on me getting a six-figure advance for a book.

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Which leads to: No book deals, and since I no longer have an agent, I don't have the same access to getting another book sold. Moments of doubt creep in. Am I still allowed to call myself a writer? But then I got my first-round edits from my new editor, who'd said she had very few changed. I had a momentary panic attack when I saw all those comments and insertion/deletion notes in the right margin of the manuscript. What would the manuscript have looked like if she had more than a few? And this was for an 8K word short story.

However, after taking that deep breath and looking at her notes, most were changes because of publisher style preferences. Right or wrong—well, there is no 'wrong.' That's their style, and they call those shots. My dictionary insists Internet is a proper noun, and should be capitalized, but if they're going to change it to lower case, it's not worth arguing. This publisher says no spaces before or after ellipses. My other publisher wants them.

Side note: when you see "mistakes" in books, often times the author has no control over them.

And who knew thermos was trademarked? I know about Dumptsers and Kleenex and Jell-O, but thermos? It doesn't need to be capitalized, but house rules say it has to be acknowledged.

Almost all of the rest of those red boxes in the margin said things like, "LOL" or ROFLMAO" or "good line." I felt like a writer again.

I'm not going to make a penny, at least not directly, on this short story, as it will be a Free Read. What I can hope is that readers enjoy seeing a totally different side of me, and that because the story involves the characters from Finding Sarah and Hidden Fire, they might be enticed enough to buy those books.

Another validation that maybe I'm still a writer. I got an unsolicited e-mail last night requesting my participation in a "Meet the Author" event at a local library.

And, perhaps the best of all. This morning, one of the Y regulars waved to me from her elliptical machine and hollered, "I loved it!" She'd been reading Hidden Fire.

Oh, and hubby seems to be moving into this retirement thing. He's still on half days, but instead of doing work-related things and hanging around his computer all morning, this morning he said he was going fishing!

Come back tomorrow. Homicide-Hussey's next chapter is entitled "Afternoon Delight." I'm not saying anything more.