Betcha thought I dropped off the face of the earth. No such luck. I’m still here. I’ve just been busy writing. I’ve had a bit of an epiphany about writing. Namely, it’s hard work. I used to write for me. It was an escape. A way of putting myself into a different world and letting my characters do stuff I’d never do in a million years. It was fun. Now that I’m “on the cusp” of being ready for publication (That’s not my phrase. Three different people have told me I’m “on the cusp.” Whatever that means.) I have to think more about my potential readers and what THEY want. Apparently, in today’s market, it’s not necessarily the same thing. But my goal is to make some money at this writing gig. I’m realistic. I’m not expecting riches. I’m not even expecting a self-supporting living wage. Just some money . And to do that, I have to give the reader more consideration than I give my own corny tastes. So I’m working . Really, really hard. Which is why I haven’t been blogging as much as...

My friend Ramona Long and I have teamed up for today's blog post over at Working Stiffs to talk about the Outlaws of Love...our name for those illiterate and grammar-challenged guys on Facebook who keep propositioning us.

Like everyone else, I’ve spent the last couple of days thinking back ten years. Not only about September 11, 2001, but about September 10, 2001. About how different our world was on the 10 th when compared to the 11 th . And every day since. The United States lost its innocence on that Tuesday morning ten years ago. I was blissfully unaware of the events as they unfolded. I was in the basement of the Milsop Community Center in Weirton , West Virginia , teaching my regular yoga class. When class ended at 10AM, I stopped at the front desk on my way out and the lady behind the counter told me a plane had hit the World Trade Center . I grinned stupidly at her, waiting for the punch line to what I was certain was a very bad joke. Even when I realized it was true, I believed it was a horrible accident. Until I was told a second plane had hit the other tower. I listened to the events unfold on my radio as I drove home. I don’t have a true sense of the order of things happening...

Yesterday morning as I walked home from a visit with my mom, I heard pounding from across the road. The reason this got my attention is the only things across the road are empty fields and my grandfather’s long-vacant farmhouse. The pounding was followed by a crash, which helped me locate the source of the sound. Someone was on the roof, tearing off the sheeting, and tossing it to the ground below. I grew up in that house. I’ve written about it here before. My grandparents have been dead for over 30 years and the house has gone through several owners since it passed out of the family’s hands. The current owner let it fall into such a state of disrepair that it’s now hopeless. The roof was already half gone, thanks to windstorms. The foundation is collapsing. Most of the windows are broken, their shutters hanging askew. The back door stands open. The front porch has crumbled to a heap. I used to dread the day that the place finally met its end. Now, since I have to look at...

This is a celebratory week for our family of fur kids. Yesterday, marked one year since Kensi moved into our house. She was so tiny then. She’s still small, but that’s okay. With her high-energy antics, if she were any bigger, she’d wreck our house. Camping is torture for her. The camper is too small to contain her. No place to run. So she spends her time either watching wildlife outside the window or digging in the litter box. Not necessarily USING the litter box. Just digging in it. Then digging at the throw rugs. And digging at my shoes. We get up in the morning to find my slipper in her water bowl and the rugs in crumpled heaps. Busy, busy, busy. Here’s a camping shot of her as she contemplates my manuscript. Everyone’s a critic. On top of Kensi’s one-year anniversary with us, TODAY marks four years since Skye became part of our family. She’s such a love bug. And she’s very much MY cat. Kensi is Daddy’s girl. Skye will let Hubby rub her ears or scratch her chin for a moment...

I'm taking a day off from my regular rotation at Working Stiffs. In my place is an interview with my friend, Kathleen George. Check it out . Then run out and buy her new book. She's one of my favorite authors as well as one of my favorite people.

I've been tearing apart and reconstructing my first three chapters for more than a month now and I'm feeling dizzy. At some point a writer loses focus. I'm there. I don't know if I'm improving the darned thing or just babbling different words and making it all sound like crap. Excuse my French. So this morning, I packed it up and sent it off to my favorite critique partner, Donnell Bell , whose debut novel The Past Came Hunting will be released in less than a month. (I've read it. It's fabulous. Put it on your must buy list.) Anyhow, Donnell will be able to tell me where I've gone astray. While I'm waiting to hear back from her, I've been thinking about how blessed I am. My life is full of wonderful, supportive friends who also happen to be published (or soon-to-be-published) authors. Nancy Martin , for one. She led that awesome boot camp I recently completed. And she continues to email me, nagging and heckling me to get to work. (I will...

Yes, I’m still up to my eyeballs in revisions, which explains my absence. However, I crawled out of my cave yesterday for some “research.” Sort of. I received an email a few weeks ago, sent to all members of the Pittsburgh Citizen’s Police Academy , seeking volunteers to help out in the first responder training for the new police recruits. I’ve many times taken part in these kinds of things from the other side. When I was in EMT training, we had to practice on pretend patients. And while I worked on the ambulance service we’d have mock disasters and training drills to hone our skills. So this seemed like a chance to give back. I arrived at the police training academy with thoughts of being covered in fake blood, having practiced my agonized moaning and shrieks of pain. Instead, I was assigned the role of a woman with a history of congestive heart failure presenting with shortness of breath. So much for the blood and the screams. Rich, the EMSI observer, gave me a script of sorts. The m...

I'm at Working Stiffs today after wrapping up our critique boot camp. Bruised, but not bloodied.

Last weekend was a big one for me. Sunday, we held our final boot camp critique meeting. You can read about it tomorrow at Working Stiffs. But Saturday was West Virginia Derby Day at Mountaineer. Let me just say, if you’re a writer and you don’t like research, you’re writing the wrong stuff. Because researching the world of Thoroughbred racing is a blast. And it helps to have a good friend like Jessi Pizzurro to hang out with and show you the ropes. I have to be honest, though. It was hot. I mean fry-an-egg-on-the-pavement hot. In past years, we’ve spent Derby Day at the edge of the track, standing shoulder-to-shoulder with the other horse racing enthusiasts. Then we’d dash back to the paddock between races to watch the horses parade and be saddled. This year we huddled in the grandstand where it was only 85 degrees instead of 95. (I don’t really know how hot it was. No thermometer. It FELT like 105, but I’ve become an AC addict, so anything over 78 degrees is sweltering to me.) ...

I’m conflicted. Okay, any writer worth their salt includes a lot of conflict in their work. But my conflict right now is ABOUT my work. We’re in the home stretch of our critique boot camp. It’s been an incredible experience. I know it’s raised the level of my writing. It’s also completely worn me out. Part of me can’t wait for it to be over. The other part dreads seeing it come to an end. Like I said, I’ve learned a lot. My fellow boot campers have provided such insightful commentary on my first four chapters I hate to think of going it alone for the rest of the rewrite. Sigh. I’m working on our final assignment: the dreaded synopsis. After many long hours, I’ve completed (sort of) my outline. Okay, so there are some holes that still need to be plugged. But essentially, it’s done. Now I have to distill it down to a few pages. This is the part I really hate. But that’s okay. Because my fellow boot campers are in this same boat with me. And when we meet on Sunday, we’ll all wor...

I think I’ve been spending too much time holed up in my cave with my computer. This morning I learned that the power company was going to maneuver one of its massive trucks into our yard, around behind our old barn, and back into the yard on the other side (all to avoid potentially crushing our leech bed—thank you West Penn) so they could work on the electric pole just across the property line. In order to successfully pull this off, Hubby had to take down a small section of fence and remove one fence post. The fence was no problem. We haven’t owned any livestock in over a decade. Hurricane Ivan took out the bulk of our fence back in 2004. This was just a little piece that had survived and served no good purpose except to hold up the poison ivy vines. Note to self: add calamine lotion and Benadryl to the grocery list. The massive truck arrived. Hubby made them use it to pull the fence post. Or, to be more accurate, to snap it off at its rotted base. Meanwhile, having been coope...

I'm at Working Stiffs today inviting everyone to join me in a round of the What If game. Don't know what that is? Come on over and find out.

For the last four weeks, all I’ve been doing is A.) writing like mad and B.) driving back and forth to our camp in Confluence. As I’ve mentioned before, I’m taking part in a critique boot camp . We’re three weeks into it, and the experience has been amazing. What I THOUGHT was a nearly ready-to-go manuscript has undergone a huge transformation. Week #1 was what I’d call “the rude awakening.” Like me, all of the participants went in thinking we didn’t have all that much work to do. Ha! WRONG. Week #2, we presented our attempts at correcting the problems we’d found out about in week #1. Let’s just say, I stopped at the store on the way home to buy some conciliatory chocolate. Afterwards, I had something of an epiphany… a way to possibly fix the pesky problems that just weren’t going away. It was one of those head-slap moments. Why didn’t I think of that before? Like six years ago??? Week #3 found some of us still scratching for a toe hold, while others were succeeding in climbi...

I usually love to retreat to my cave away from home, our camp in Confluence. On most of our trips, I get a lot of work done. And the cats enjoy looking out the windows at the rabbits, squirrels, wrens, moles, and chipmunks that frequent the underbrush behind our trailer. However, the last two times we’ve been here, my peaceful work environment has been shattered by—NEIGHBORS. Part of my problem with people living in close proximity is the fact that I grew up on a farm. Our neighbors were cows. The human variety lived at a comfortable distance. I could walk to visit my friends. But they couldn’t look in my kitchen window. Even now, at home I only have human neighbors on one side of our house, and they’re as reclusive as I am. We wave at each other when we’re out in our yards. But that’s about it. My mom lives nearby. I can walk there in under two minutes. But I can’t hear her talking to her lady friends on her phone. Here in Confluence, we’re squeezed in between two other camps....

Yes, I've been AWOL around here quite a bit lately. And it will probably continue for a few more weeks. I'm doing revisions. But not just revisions. Revisions on steroids. It's called critique boot camp and I'm blogging about it over at Working Stiffs today.

I've been holed up in my cave working on revisions to my Thoroughbred racetrack mystery. There is very little interesting about this part of the writer's life. Sitting at a computer for long hours while the rest of the world goes on around you doesn't produce much fodder for a blog. So I'll simply post this photo of Kensi, who takes comfort in her other "friends" while her mom is busy writing.

But it wasn’t supposed to end like this. After ten days of forced confinement, followed by four more days of simply choosing to stay in the basement, Moochie finally decided to return to the great outdoors. He returned the next day and snoozed in the shade of my front porch. The last time I saw him, he was curled up in the wicker chair next to the door. Sometime between Saturday afternoon and Sunday morning, he was hit by a car and killed as he crossed the road near our house. After all he and I went through recently—the bite, the rabies scare, the confinement—I’d become attached to the ol’ guy. He’d finally started using the litter box, so he wasn’t such a bad houseguest there at the last. But he was, in his heart and soul, an outdoor cat. A free spirit with a touch of wanderlust. Did he simply run out of his supply of nine lives? Did being a pampered indoor cat for two weeks weaken his survival skills or his road smarts? I don’t know. But I’m glad I was able to spend thos...

I'm back to working on my racetrack mystery. After being away from it for a while, it's like coming home and spending time with old friends. Another benefit is the research. I HAVE to hang out at the track. Dang. That's sarcasm, in case you're wondering. Any excuse to spend time with horses is a good thing in my book. I took my camera and got some shots of this guy: Mr. Superman. FYI, he's for sale! Click here for more info, more pictures, and some video of him moving.

Kensi wasn’t all together certain she liked this camping stuff at first. She spent most of our two initial trips to the camp in Confluence hiding in the closet. During the day. She made up for it at night by exploring every nook and cranny and getting into stuff that I didn’t even know we had. However, she’s now a seasoned camping kitty. She and Skye actually get along, sitting side-by-side on the table, looking out at the world. You’ll have to take my word for it, because I didn’t get a picture of them together. For cats, windows are like television. Windows with screens add the extra dimension of smell-o-vision. Our windows have some pretty good programming in Confluence. There was a family of wrens who liked to sit on my bicycle and scold the cats. There were also moles, chipmunks, and a pine squirrel. Hubby tells me pine squirrels are the Pit Bulls of the squirrel population. I say they’re more like Chihuahuas . Small, but they have no inkling of their diminutive stature. And t...