This Is The Sound Of A Painfully Squeezed Internet Addiction

I’ve got a catfight, a run with werwulfen, and a midnight tango with vampires to write, so this is gonna be short.

You know what else kitchen timers are good for? Besides cooking and carving out little chunks of writing time? They’re good when one realizes one is perilously close to an Internet addiction. I’m giving myself an hour of Internet play with my coffee in the morning, then no more for the rest of the day. With a deadline moved up (long story, my fault, ACK!) and parenting to do, refreshing my f-list and Twittering a million times a day ain’t gonna get anything done. And I don’t really need to refresh I Can Has Cheezburger ten times per hour; I can just read it once a week, right? Right. *cries*

That sobbing you hear? That’s the sound of an addiction being murdered in its cradle. Gruesome, ain’t it?

In other news, if you want to buy a signed copy of Strange Angels, it’s easy and you can help out an indie bookstore at the same time. I volunteer frequently at Cover to Cover Books, and you can go to their site and drop them an email. They’ll let you know the price, you pay for the book and shipping, I’ll sign it and they’ll mail it to you. Shipping’s quite reasonable, considering such things, and I will be happy to personalize the book any way you like. Fans get signed books, an indie bookstore gets some dough, and I get to feel like I’m earning all that coffee I drink while I’m down there. (Hey, it’s not often I get to run an ACTUAL COMMERCIAL ESPRESSO MACHINE. It makes me feel…well, manly. Womanly. Whatever.)

Moving on! Reader (and editor) TS made a good point on my Friday post about a good book NOT being all you need:

All of these things are important, not just because of what Lili said above, but also because at the end of the day, it is very hard to be objective about your own work*. So what you might think of as a “good book” might not be for many different reasons. Maybe you’re not as good a writer as you think you are, maybe you didn’t kill your darlings, maybe it’s well-written but familiar or the voice is great but the characters need developing. But you’re just too close to the work to tell.

As Lili said, agents and editors are inundated regularly with everyone’s idea of a “good book” and most of those don’t work out. So those other points are really important and when we find a good book that works for us, you can bet we’ll be jumping to work for you. But if you don’t follow those rules, it won’t matter.

So, so true.

I’m roasting a chicken in the crock pot for dinner tonight, it’s beginning to smell good. And I’m about out of time for blogging. So, have a good Monday, chickadees. I’m gonna see if I can’t get this character in some more trouble…

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