5 Questions

Memes! I <3 memes. Especially when I have sadly neglected my blog....they're an easy road home.

This one came by way of Sarah, so let's have at it.

If you'd like to play along, leave me a comment saying "Resistance is Futile."

* I'll respond by asking you five questions so I can satisfy my curiosity.
* Update your journal with the answers to the questions.
* Include this explanation in the post and offer to ask other people questions.


1. You write historicals: do you wish your brain would let you write contemporary or a different historical era?

Actually, my brain does let me write other eras. :) I have my 1920s set book coming out in spring, Jazz Baby, but that's not the only period I've written. I've done some contemporary shorts, and I have an 1880s set novel with which I'm still not happy with the ending. I'm writing a 20s novella right now, but I think after that will be a contemporary full-length.

I do wish I could be a little more mainstream. The 1880s book I wrote? It's a western, when the general consensus is that westerns aren't selling well, and there's nary a cowboy in sight. It's all miners. And there's no gunslinging. And one of the biggest secondary characters is a whore. *sigh* I think I am just a little broken. Sometimes I think it'd be easier if I could write a couple Lords and Ladies. Maybe a debauched Duke or two.

2. What's your favorite flower and why?

Porcelain ones. Or metal, or ceramic. Just not a living, green type that I'm expected to keep alive. It doesn't work, and then I end up all disappointed with my black thumb, and I worry about disappointing whomever gave me the plant.

Or I could say any that my husband randomly brings me. He's been known to give me flowers just for the heck of it, and I absolutely adore that about him.

3. Do you think your husband is The One for you or fouls you have married someone else?

I'm not sure I believe in the ideal of The One. Shocking, for a romance writer, I know. I kinda think that each person, as they go through life, usually meets a few people that they could make a loving, satisfying and fulfilling life with. The One kind of negates the hard work that is marriage.

That being said, yes, I think marrying my husband was the right choice. We've made a good life together and I think it'll only keep getting better.

4. Do you WANT to be able to write full-time?

God yes. Making a living off my writing one of my goals. I've gotten a taste of it lately, and even with working the stay-at-home gig at the same time, I'm liking it. I imagine it'll only get better when the littlest one's in school.

5. What's the best thing about your husband's deployments?

Spinach & mushroom pizza.

To be a little less specific, not having to choose between cooking a full meal (with meat. He's always got to have meat. The more often it's red, the better) or going out to a full-service restaurant. When it's just me and the boys, I can get away with making them fast choices, and I can have non-normative food.

Oh, and being able to watch Pride and Prejudice as often as I want.

Arrival!

We made it. All alive and in one piece. Four days on the road, two adults and three kids in a truck. Three nights in hotels. The second night was in the teeniest effing motel I've ever set foot in. Two full beds, both right up against the wall and with only a foot between them.

Now tho? Swank suite. Nice. And I've already got a five page printout of available rentals in the area. In something like size 8 font. I need a highlighter.

Randomly, did you know Arizona didn't participate in Daylight Savings Time? I'm going to have to look up why, but it makes some sense - this was never a particularly agrarian region.

I think my brain's too shot to be interesting right now. By the third day, I thought the Rio Grande drained into the Pacific side. *sigh*

I'd say it was time to go to bed, but I have rental houses to Google.

48 hours.....

A few days ago, I gave the toddler boy Golden Oreos for a snack. (Well, he got the pack out of the pantry, and looked up at me with huge, adorable eyes, while waving the cookies, until I opened them.) A little later, I cruise on by the table to check on him. He'd popped open all the cookies and licked the cream out.

That's my boy.

We are T-minus-holy-fuck-it's-a-matter-of-hours until moving time. In good news, my mom is in possession of my (hopefully fixed) netbook and will be over-nighting it to me. So I can stress less about our finances, since I run everything off Microsoft Money on that computer, and will be able to get back to normal soon. Yay!

Then it's just a matter of surviving four days in a truck with three kids under 8, a dog, and the husband.

Pray for me.

Or wait for me along I-20 with chocolate and wine.

Pity party - everyone's invited!

I've been having car trouble for a little bit. Nothing huge, mostly an annoyance - the car doesn't like starting on the first go. It wants me to approach it slowly, give a couple tentative overtures first. So I booked in an appointment on Friday, no big.

I got stuck in the Starbucks parking lot for almost 20 minutes this morning.

This morning, I also realized I signed up and paid for a luncheon on Friday. My day off.

Oh, and I also dumped coffee on myself this morning, dousing myself from chest to knees. Nice.

Suffice it to say, I don't think this is my morning.

If I had the leave time -- oh, and less to do -- I'd go home and crawl back into bed. Wouldn't even turn the tv on, since I'd be sure to see something appaling with the way my luck seems to be going. No eating or drinking, either. I'd be sure to choke on it. *headdesk headdesk*

Music. I need music to cheer me up. (And for the drive coming up, too.) Anyone got suggestions?

Jeeze, just calm down already!

We're moving. In almost exactly two weeks. ("Go West, young man, go West!") The Army gave us exactly 32 days to get everything done. We'd had word of the change of station coming, but no paperwork, so no way to get a move on.

Now we're trying to get everything done. In less than a month. Holy god, pray for me and pass the chocolate.

As I told a friend, this ain't my first rodeo - but that doesn't mean happens without effort, either.

I resorted to a big ole To Do list a week ago. Wrote up two pages. Lists seriously are my last resort - when I know I have six million things crashing down on me and I must get them all done *now* as in yesterday. (When I was in the army and a lowly Specialist, my E7 boss left me in charge for three weeks. All I remember from that period are lists. And lists.)

The thing is, most of the items on those pages are things I cannot possibly control. Things to be done once we get to Arizona. Appointments that haven't come up yet. Things that are fully out of my control. (Fruedian typo - I skipped the "my" at first. Yep, outta control, for sure.) Things I need to "holy crap, just freaking let go of it already before you drive your damn family MAD!" about.

And so far? Ain't working.

P.S. I was over at Unusual Historicals yesterday, talking about William Randolph Hearst and Marion Davies.

"I ain't got nobody"

So while I was on my butt with a tooth brush, scrubbing my kitchen floor, I had some time to think. (Did I mention this project took three hours? And I have another section left to do tonight? Seriously. Cream colored tile and grout. What was I smoking to agree to that?)

When I wasn't performing my scullery maid duties, I was reading Jami Alden's Kept and one thing snagged my attention.

For the record, let me say that I enjoyed the book. Derek, the hero, was pretty sexy and Alden managed to redeem Alyssa from the whole party-girl image without resorting to the whole "but she wasn't really a bad girl" thing. Hate that. Alyssa really had partied, and been to rehab, and by the time the book starts she's already a year into fixing up both her image and her life.

But one the thing that kept niggling at me.

Oh, wait:

AHOY! HERE BE SPOILERS!!!!






By the end of the book, Alyssa had no one. No support. No family. Only one friend important enough to make a kinda-appearance in the book. (She texts the friend to borrow a beach house.)

She starts with a father, a half-sister and an assistant who all seem to make up a somewhat shaky foundation for her life, but at least it's something. She also has a mother, but mom's a deathly ill and remains off-camera the entire book.

Alyssa has a not-great relationship with her father, but they're working on it. In fact, to the reader, it seems apparent that she and pops are right on the cusp of significant relationship growth. And then he's offed in, like, the third chapter. Holy baby jebus. The reader knows by about a third in that the heroine's assitant is actually a resentful bitch and helping the bad guys get her, but Alyssa doesn't find this out until about two thirds of the way in. The half-sister's dramatic reveal as one of the central, orchestrating baddies is a last-chapter surprise.

See what I mean? By the end, the heroine's entire infrastructure for her life has been systematically dismantled piece by piece, until she has literally nothing and no one left but the hero. She even essentially loses her job, though she manages to have created a new, better one by the epilogue. It got me thinking about Old Skool Romances, and how they'd start out with the heroine orphaned and fleeing from her diabolical Uncle or something similar.

Is this an intentional choice on the part of certain writers? "I'll cut her adrift and that'll make the h/h bond that much stronger." Or is it just how everything happened to shake out? Has anyone out there done this to some of their heroines? And if so, why?

(There's no judgment in this, just a kind of craft-oriented curiosity. [It's very seldom lately I can read a book and completely turn off the craft radar.])