Happy Holidays, Everyone....

...and a Joyous New Year to you all!

Right now, I have a Christmas book, The Rancher's Christmas Princess, in stores.  I hope you'll give it a look.  On Kindle, it's currently available for $1.99!

Also, as it happens, I'm writing a proposal for next year's December release.  this will be book 5 in the Bravo Royales series, Prince Damien's story.  Damien is the player of the family, who will finally meet his match in sweet Lucy Cordell, the long-sheltered little sister of Noah Cordell, who will find his true love in How to Marry a Princess, which will be out in November of 2013!

I have a general idea of the direction of Damien and Lucy's story.  It's kind of a Pygmalion story, a My Fair Lady story.  Lucy needs Damien to teach her to be smart and sophisticated so she can win the heart of another man who won't give her the time of day because she's such an innocent.  Damien may be a player.  But he has a soft spot for sweet Lucy and has proved in the previous book that he's willing to help her get whatever she needs.  Or desires.

But you know how it goes.  Writing is a layering process.  And I'm seeing that there's a layer missing in this story.  Another element that will really make it work.  I'm thinking it's a child.  Because, after all, there's nothing like a precious child.  Especially at Christmas.....

At the Midpoint...

No going back and about halfway there.  As we say in my plot group, the midpoint is where we realize the problem is bigger than we thought.  That is definitely happening here, so I'm feeling pretty good--today, anyway. But that's the thing about writing.  One day you feel you can do anything.  The next day you know that everything is crap.  Hate the crap days.  Love the others.  Yeah, sort of a roller-coaster ride.  And I wouldn't have it any other way!

Got my Kindle.  Love it.  And have been reading all over the Web that ebook sales are soaring.  I have to admit, I can see why.  You can read a thousand-page doorstopper of a book and it takes up virtually no space.  You can enlarge the print for easy reading.  The Kindle always finds your place in any book you're reading--no dropping your bookmark and spending five minutes searching for where you stopped last time.  And did I mention if you want it, you got it, in seconds?  Just a couple of clicks and the book is yours.

I know I will still love my books on paper.  And for some types of books--nonfiction, with pictures and graphs and the like, and my research books--I think I'll prefer a physical copy.  But time will tell on that.

Musings On...Paper

...And by that I mean, musings about paper.  Because as you know, this ain't paper. Far from it. Paper, in the sense of blogging, has become merely a metaphor for writing stuff down.

What has me musing on paper is that last week, I broke down and bought a Kindle. It hasn't arrived yet. And I'm really looking forward to having it, reading on it, NOT carrying around 800-page hardcover tomes ever again.  Or at least, not if I can possibly help it.

I have resisted buying an e-reader for...oh, as long as there have been e-readers. I was waiting. For the ultimate do-everything device. For the price to come down.  For...I don't know, exactly. To be sure that e-readers were here to stay, I guess.

I'm not waiting anymore.  Because I truly do believe that e-readers are here to stay.  And that got me thinking about way back years and years ago when I bought my first computer.  It was a DOS computer.  If there was Internet then, I sure hadn't heard of it.

It was a big step for me, to leave my IBM Selectric behind.  I thought it would be so difficult.  But you know what?  It was beyond easy.  And it made my writing life so much smoother.  So much less about Wite-out and carbon copies and having two weeks to type up a clean copy of my completed manuscript once I was through with the first, second, third--and beyond--drafts.

Many other authors I know do a lot of editing on paper.  Not me.  From that first computer, I never print it out until it's ready to slip down the chute to New York--and the last few years, I don't print it out at all.  I email it in attachment.  Slowly, the paper phases of the editing process are disappearing.  The work goes back and forth between me and my publisher mostly electronically.

And it's great.  Since novels are not about the medium but about the content, I look forward to the day when there will be no paper involved in this process at all.  I used to find it scary--books without paper.

But more and more, I find it exciting.  Good.  Right.