Happy Holidays!

Three days 'til Christmas! I'm very excited! And I'll be even more excited after Friday, because after Friday I'll be off work until the 3rd of January.

Sooo.... I'll be in Georgia at my mother-in-law's for the first half of Christmas day, then will be returning to Tallahassee to see my family, and will finish the night by seeing Sherlock Holmes. Monday and Tuesday I'll be helping my sister move, and the rest of the week I'll be doing research for Noir (I always do most of my research and fact-checking after the first draft). I may even mess around with the middle grade fantasy I'm planning, which I just plotted out the other day.

What are your plans for the holidays? Do you get extra time off? Any writing goals?

Help Me Give Away My Money

That's right! It's time to get in the holiday spirit and spend some cash. My cash, that is.

I'm doing my second annual Heifer International blog fundraiser!! I've been giving to Heifer, an international world hunger organization, for many years now. But last year I saw that the illustrious Nate Bransford was a Heifer fan too, and was hosting a fundraiser on his blog! It was very exciting to tie two of my passions together for the holiday season. I'm not sure when Nate is doing his this year, because there's some kind of script running on his blog that freezes up my computer. But, if you want to check out last year's post, click here. You can read more about Heifer, and see Nate's comment on my blog! My own celebrity visitor...

Anywho, this is the deal: I'll donate $2 for every comment, up to $100. I'd love to do more, but it ain't happening now that my massive student loans are being repaid. Of course, you can make your very own tax deductible contribution to Heifer by going here. And you can tweet and give a shout-out in the blogosphere to spread the word, whether people stop here and rack up my comment bill, or just head to Heifer and help needy families around the world.

I'll keep the comments open until December 30th!!

In other news, here is a picture of Mr. Fox when he's not demolishing the Christmas tree:

Isn't he so cute? I'll chip in the first $2 on behalf of Mr. Fox's cuteness. Comment away! Comment twice if you feel like it! And have an awesome weekend :)

My Procrastination = Your Abundance of Awesome Linkage

So, I've had this Yahoo email account since I was 15 or so, and over the years it began to get completely inundated with spam because I'd sign up for various daily emails which over time became an overwhelming amount of mail. When I became serious about my writing a couple years ago, I created my Gmail account, which also is linked to my smart phone, and I've slowly begun using that for everything. My Yahoo account has since imploded due to my complete and utter neglect of it - just logged on and there are 5,019 emails. Not including the ones that get caught in the spam filter. Yeah.

Anyways, I am therefore very selective now with the daily emails I subscribe to. But two that I love to get are Writer Unboxed and GTLA (Guide to Lit Agents). However, over the past few months even those two got a bit out of hand, and my pristine Gmail account was creeping up to 300 emails. So today I went through and read almost all of them, and tweeted links to all my fave articles. I thought I would provide the linkage here, all in one neat and tidy place for your perusal. Yes, I love you and you're welcome.

My tweets, in historical order and pretty colors:

I may have shared this before, but it's prob worth resharing if I have. Some good marketing stats at Writer Unboxed: http://bit.ly/sn7B6z

Here's another one: awesome video about writers and persistence by @yuvizalkow http://bit.ly/sb9iGq

http://bit.ly/uuk0Tn Diagram of common editing symbols, plus some humorous ones. And lots of links to articles on revision.

I've always thought trying to get an agent is like dating. Apparently that metaphor is fitting even after finding one: http://bit.ly/u2wPtZ

A great article on different outline methods: http://bit.ly/tu4BYv Even some choices for pantsers!
 
Query advice written as haiku! Gotta love it! http://bit.ly/sp1ei6
 
LOL! Drunken pitch practice http://bit.ly/sQs94x
 
So this is about marketing e-books, but has good stuff for marketing in general: http://bit.ly/sgkB9j
 
Really thought-provoking stuff about character motivation and depth and climax (the book kind of course) http://bit.ly/uZpQER
 
Some basics on the financials of book sales http://bit.ly/sKWqqh
 
A wildly successful traditional pub turned indie star author interview http://bit.ly/roZjF3
 
Okay, tweets done. One more link though - there's a cool Christmas book bloghop/giveaway going on through the 22nd, called the 12 Days of Christmas Reading Gift List. Check it out here!

 Hope you enjoy the linkage, and have a great start to your week!!

Urban Fantasy New Releases: December 2011

Hello, writer friends! I've been enjoying a fairly lazy week of no writing since I am taking a brief break after finishing the first draft of my WIP. So, here are some tantalizing new releases from my newsletter to entertain you! Click on the pics for Amazon links, and click here for my newsletter page. Any you're dying to read, in or out of the UF genre?

       

       

       

       

        

        

        

        

       

       

       

        



Huzzah! First Draft of Noir Complete!

Four months, twenty days and 74,904 words later, I've finished the first draft of Noir! I finished my first book, Countless, before I began blogging, so I've never really had a writing group to share such fun news with. Yay for writing friends!

I was aiming for 80k words, so I know I'll be adding in subsequent drafts. But I've already realized where I need to flesh it out, so that won't be a problem. For now though, I'm going to let it rest for at least a month so I can get some distance before I start editing.

So, since Monday I usually post my meme, I'll say this: when I'm a famous author, I'll have a fabulous dinner party every time I finish a first draft. And everyone will be invited!

Happy beginning of the week! I hope it's an awesome one for you!

Guesting Over at J.R. Pearse Nelson's Blog!

Hi, writer friends! J.R. Pearse Nelson kindly invited me to do a guest post over at her blog! Pop over and check it out!

Hope your Thursday is going great!