Good Morning!

Good morning, everyone! Today's my post over at Killer Fiction, so check it out - it has conference rules for all to follow.

See ya tomorrow!

Fabulous Friday

It's Friday!!!!! It's been a busy week, but my new accounting training guide is ready to go for content review on Monday - yeah!!!!! Four months of work in a neat 200+ page document. Very exciting.

Today, I'm on an official vacation day, one because my power went out last night and I woke up late, and two b/c I was planning to take a half day anyway and since the power pulled a fast one, I just decided to go ahead with the full. Why, you ask was I taking a half day off. Well, b/c this weekend is the DARA conference, Dreamin' in Dallas.

So tonight is the booksigning and tomorrow is the conference. And you know what that means - girl's weekend!!!!!! My friend Cindy will be here at lunch and spend the night tonight and tomorrow and Cari will meet us tomorrow morning for breakfast and to attend the conference, and will spend the night tomorrow night. Always a good time! Tell me what's better for a writer than hanging out all weekend with a bunch of writers?

Hope you all have a great weekend too!

House Cleaning

I'll be the first to admit - I'm not domestic. I don't really cook (and can't without a recipe), I don't sew (but I have a nifty little tool that puts buttons back in with plastic), and I really don't like to houseclean. Unfortunately, it is a necessary evil. So Saturday, I started the big clean and realized why I don't like doing it - because I'm too easily destracted.

Now my house is fairly small - 1800sf - and it's just me, the dog and the cat, so it doesn't get really messy. So this should be a fairly simple and speedy process, right? Nooooooooo. Take for instance, I started with the master bath, which was going well until I had to deal with trying to get the dirt and grim out of my incredibly slow-draining tub. Finally deciding I'd been standing in water while I showered long enough, I headed to the store to buy some Liquid Plumber and wala - the tub was fixed.

Then it was on to the master bedroom, where I was doing good until I got to dusting the dresser that my tv sits on. And that's when I remembered that something was wrong with the hook up I'd done for the DVD player and the colors were all wrong. So what do I do - pull the dresser out, break out the instruction manuals and spend 45 minutes rewiring the DVD player to the tv.

So you get the picture, right? And rest assured, I tried to block my closet out of my mind entirely or I'd still be in there.

And then on Sunday, I couldn't stand the clothes situation any longer. You see, I've lost some weight recently and have changed clothes sizes - 2 to 3 clothes sizes depending on the designer. Now, I have smaller clothes in storage containers because I always figured on losing the weight and didn't want to get rid of them as they're all cute and fun and a lot of them have matching shoes. But every morning when I'm trying to get ready for work, I had to dig longer and harder to find something that didn't fall off.

So I tackled the closet on Sunday. Ugh!

You KNOW you can't just check the size and discard an article of clothing. All clothes run different so that means I had to try on darned near everything! Do you have any idea how long that takes?????? Well, I can give you an idea - I watched Season 2 and half of Season 3 of the X-Files while doing it. But miracle of miracles, my closet is finally cleared of all the bigger sizes. Now if I just get all the smaller ones out of the storage containers - and ironed (double ugh), I might have something to hang in there again.

And for any of you who think I might be exaggerating the extent of my woes, here's a photo of the "removals" that are waiting for a friend to dig through them and take what she wants. Mind you, this photo does NOT include the 5 garbage bags already full and ready for donation.

Titles

Anyone who's been around the publishing industry (or authors) for a while knows that there are certain thing beyond our control. Two of them are book covers and book titles. Now you can try to throw your ideas in the pot, but there's no guarantee your publisher will use them. I've been lucky so far to have three good titles and they've all stuck, and I must say (totally without bias) that Dorchester does the best covers on the market.

So imagine my surprise when I read a news article about the book that won this year's Oddest Book Title Competition. Heck, I didn't even know there WAS a competition for oddest book title, but I guess it makes sense.

The winner this year is a self-help book (probably appropriately) entitled IF YOU WANT CLOSURE IN YOUR RELATIONSHIP - START WITH YOUR LEGS

You have to smile. If you're interested in seeing some of the other past winners, check out the article.