I don't know how I managed to do it, but after a week of chilling out at the beach, I came back with the worst cold I've had in over 2 years. I'm just now getting over the worst of it. Nasty. I'd forgotten how bad it felt to not be able to swallow without discomfort, and how gross it is to be hocking up loogies every five minutes.

Elizabeth and I, knowing this would be our last (relatively) quiet week of vacation for reading and relaxing before our youngsters begin arriving, were book nerds all week. She read almost three entire books (she's hooked on thrillers lately, and read an older Dan Brown book, the latest Dean Koontz book, and Ludlum's Bourne Supremacy).

I finally got around to reading The DaVinci Code, and I can understand why it's so popular, but man, the guy has some serious infodump issues. He doesn't even try to hide it -- doesn't he know real people don't talk like that? And the book took forever to finish up. But like I said, I can understand why it's so popular, because it's paced just like a movie. I thought all the point-of-view switches were ridiculous -- there was one character who spent the whole book flying back and forth over Europe! But it was a fun read for the beach. No brain cells were lost.

I did lose some when I tried to read Dean Koontz's latest book, The Taking. Man, this guy has seriously lost his writing chops. About 10-15 years ago I'd read half a dozen of his books, and they were pretty good, a nice mix of SF and realism, with some good horror thrown in for good measure. But this book was so full of flowery language and just lame dialogue and descriptions, that I had to skim it (only to realize the ending was lame). Ah well. Live and learn.

I also wrote every morning there at the beach, going to either a coffee shop or the Atlanta Bread Company for lattes to fuel the old typing fingers. I added another 50 pages or so to the novel, a lot of it pretty good stuff. I'm almost halfway there. Of course, being sick has kept me from doing ANY writing all week, and I'm starting to get very antsy.

I had two big packages from publishers waiting for me when I got back from the beach -- one was a rejection for my fantasy novel from a YA contest, which I'd already known about, so I wasn't bothered by that at all. The other one, though, was for the paranormal romance, which I'd sent in its entirety to one of the top publishers. I'd had high hopes for it there, but the editor didn't find the story compelling enough. Damn. That sucks!

But I've still got both novels out to various places as queries, and the fantasy novel is also being read in its entirety by another top publisher, as is my SF novel (though at a smaller publisher). So there's always hope. And, to top things off, my erotic/humorous story is now available at the sharp-looking site Fishnet (but it's not for people under 21, or some other words of warning like that -- it's "dirty" ya know)!

You win some, you lose some. Now I just have to lose this cold... Later!