Yow -- it's been a crazy couple of weeks. Crazy couple of months. Let's just call it one nutty year.

But things are slowly starting to settle down. Let's take a look at what's up, eh?

First, I got my advance from Five Star, along with my contract for The Wannoshay Cycle on Saturday! Woo hoo. That was fast. So lovely, getting paid for writing fiction. I'm well on my way to spending that advance, too. That certainly came at the right time, I must say, with Drew and Elizabeth's birthdays coming up, and xmas hot on its heels. I'm looking forward to spending some moolah on them. :)

Am I weird for keeping a running list of the things I've spent my advance on? I feel like these items (or donations) should be significant somehow...

Speaking of Five Star, I got Julia C. Porter's royalty statement for Heart's Revenge a few weeks back, and that girl has been selling some BOOKS. Not a ton, but far more than I'd ever expected for a book I dropped the ball on as far as publicity goes. From May to June of '06, she sold 256 books! And most of those were at list price, which means that money adds up in the royalty column as far as my earnings (of course, I still have to "earn out" my advance, so we need to sell about 200 more books at list price... we shall see 'bout that!).

My Writing Day Out last week turned into a bust, because I got distracted by day job stuff. I think I just ran out of energy on the novel, after pushing pretty hard on it for the past few months. I'm close to being done, but I'm not sure I like how it's turning out. So I'm taking a break from it for a little while and catching up on my reading.

(As for work, well, the good news is that version 2.0 came out with barely a hitch, so all my hard work paid off there. The bad news is, there's MORE work for me to do on various new features. Well, that's actually not bad news, as it's nice to have a JOB, but you know what I mean. I did get a bit of down time the past week to catch my breath, for a while. Things are ramping up again, of course...!)

I've been reading Stephen King's excellent On Writing in the meantime, thinking about writing and how to improve my own process. Plus I like reading about how his career got off with a huge rocket blast with Carrie -- he made $200,000 for the paperback rights to that, his first published book. And so I've been reading his early stuff, to see how he does it. Just finished Carrie last night, and it was quite good (can't believe the guy wrote this in his early twenties!). He builds suspense so well -- I couldn't stop reading (I know, cliche! but it's true!). And to think, he does it all without outlining or planning. He just puts characters in a situation and watches them react.

And that's about it -- recharging the ol' batteries and gearing up for the holidays. We're fixing up the house, doing some painting inside, and I must say, the abode looks quite lovely. Now we just have to figure out how to cook that 20-lb. turkey in our fridge...

Later!