I am so tickled!  Adrienne Giordano's second book, "A Just Deception", is about to be released from Carina Press and she passed along the finalized copy and see what it says in the acknowledgements:

I must, must, must acknowledge Jackie Powers and her wonderful insight when working through early characterization issues. Your advice helped me dig deep and I’m so grateful.

She wanted to surprise me, and I was surpirsed, and gratified.

Thanks, Adrienne!  I had a great time talking with you, I didn't expect this, and I'm really looking forward to reading the final draft.  :-)

Wow!!  **grin**

    A while back, I finished reading a book by a big-name author and was completely disgusted by the hero and heroine.  About three-quarters of the way into the book, the hero makes a TSTL* (Too Stupid To Live) decision that I couldn't believe, and then to make the situation even worse, this TSTL decision was promptly followed by the heroine upping the TSTL quotient, to the point that I almost threw the book against the wall.  The only saving grace was that I bought the book off the bargain rack and didn't pay full price for it.

    As I thought about the book, I realized that the author needed to get the hero and heroine (H&H) into a bad situation.  Okay.  I understand that.  They needed to be there for the rest of the plot to work.  I'm good with Hs&Hs being put in bad situations.

    What wasn't okay with me was that in order to get into this nasty situation, the H&H had to make several TSLT decisions in a row.  Morons!

    So I thought some more:  There are plenty of good books out there where the H&H end up in nasty situations without making TSTL decisions.  So why did this author do it this way?

    About a day later, the answer came to me.  In this book, the villains were so stupid that they were beyond TSTL-stupid!

    Ah! I thought, that's what the problem is.

    The plot needed the H&H to get captured, but the villains were so incompetent that they couldn't capture the H&H on their own, which meant the H&H needed to be even more stupid than the villains.  **sigh**

    Why?!?

    So, here's the lesson: (Read more)

I've been playing with Jara's plot, and this morning I finally pinned down the black moment.  I knew it on some level, but today I finally put it into words.  Which is going to help because now I know where I'm going... which is going to make it easier to get there.  :-)

But I'm mostly caught up with last minute Christmas stuff, so I may not have time to do much with this for a while.  We shall see.

There are many things I should have been doing this evening, one of which could have been making some money to help pay the bills this month, but just as I couldn't face that task this morning, I couldn't face it this evening, so I did something else that desperately needed doing... I wrote the first draft of Sarah's synopsis.

The full manuscript has been off to an agent for several months now, without a reply, so it's long past time to send it on to other people, but before I could do that I needed a synopsis.

I'd written a synopsis long ago, for the second draft of the book, but the beginning of the book changed so dramatically that I needed a new synopsis.

I've been putting off this task forever because I have only vague clues about what editors and agents are looking for in a synopsis.  I've asked fellow authors, and they've graciously answered me, but I've yet to be able to translate what they say into terms and actions that I understand. (Read more)

Today is "do anything but work" day.  I'm mad at myself because I need the money, but I honestly can't face work today.  So, instead, I did a task that has been hovering over my head for a week or more.

I'm teaching a critique class at one of the local community colleges, and last week's lesson was on show-don't-tell.  After I got home, everybody's characters started yammering at me, insisting that I "show" the authors what I was trying to "tell" them with the critique I'd given.  Reluctant to step on people's toes, I finally emailed them, asking if they'd like me to do so.  They all replied "yes", so now I was committed.

All the way down to Texas and back, a couple of their characters yammered at me, but I didn't get a chance to write any of it down.  So today, instead of doing what I should have been doing, I spent all day so far rewriting a couple paragraphs of each their stories. (Read more)

I'm job hunting again. 

This job (with the bank), like the last one, has been wonderful and I've learned tons, but I need more hours.  So, I'm on the hunt for a full-time job... which is sucking up all the energy that I'd normally spend writing.

I've updated my resume, found a couple places to apply to (one of which I'm really excited about), and today I'm writing cover letters and sending applications off.

The agent is still sitting on my manuscript.  I emailed her last week to confirm she got it, and she did.  So it's more waiting.  Which is fine, as I don't have the brain cells to deal with it if she did get back to me. (Read more)

When meeting people at Panara to discuss plotting... make sure that both people are going to the SAME Panera.  **grin**

Last night, I couldn't figure out why she didn't show up, and she couldn't figure out where I was.  Well... come to find out she was sitting in one Panera and I was sitting in another.  :-) 

It wasn't a total loss; I had a quiet dinner away from the kids and got stuff done.  Both always good things.  :-)

We're trying again tonight.  This time, we both confirmed that we are talking about the same place AND we exchanged cell phone numbers.

Live and learn.  :-)

Good me.  I worked more hours today. 

I also got a few things done on my to-do list, including calling around to find a place that still had appointments for school physicals (bad me for letting it go this long), and critiquing a synopsis and 3 chapters. 

I also got more insight into Jane's characters... her guys are going to keep me on my toes.  Also pondered my other manuscript, but haven't made decision which file I will actually open first.

So, I'm tired but not sleepy... does that make sense?  I shall go up and ponder book more, that will certainly make me sleepy.  :-)

At the end of last year, I got mad at the character sheet I had and made a new one (in this post).

But, of course, I couldn't leave it there.  I made new ones, but didn't post them.  In cleaning out stuff today, I found them, so I figure I might as well post them.

The advantage with this set has is that they bypass the character/cell limit, which is a huge problem in Excel2003 and older.  They also scroll more smoothly.  Before, if you filled up a cell with info, it scrolled that cell's height, so it was really hard to see info sometimes.

So, new sheets:

Character Sheet (Excel 2007)

Character Sheet (Excel 2003 & older)

With these sheets:

- layer #1 is for overall summary information (Read more)

The book is off, the next one (or next several possibilities) are all jelling in my brain, and I'm cleaning off my desk.

Well, more metaphorically cleaning, than actual cleaning, although my desk does have more open space on it... but I've been sorting through all the miscellaneous files that have collected in my "Books" folder on my computer.

The first of this year I put a webserver on my desktop and started buiding a new organizational system for all my writing information. And between then and now I've been sorting out how best to arrange stuff.  And I think I'm getting there.

So I spent most of the last two days taking all the tons of files of stuff I've collected for research, or technique info, or business info, or whatever, and putting them into the new system. (Read more)