Patti O'Shea's Blog, page 45

Adventures in Car Maintenance

On my way to work last Thursday, my tire pressure low light came on. I hate that. It always scares me because I've heard too many stories of people having blowouts because their tire pressure was low.

I did know that I'd probably be okay because this isn't the first time. Every other occurrence was just slightly low, no big deal per the guy filling the tires for me.

One of the guys at work offered to take a look at the pressure for me. (Believe it or not, I do own a pressure gauge!) and all the tires were at 30 psi, which is 5psi low. He assured me there was no leak and that the tires weren't dangerous. He even said I could wait till the weekend to take care of it.

Every other time it's been low, I've taken it to a local auto shop and they've done it for free, but I always feel guilty about this because I don't use them and really don't plan on ever using them. I decided I have a pressure gauge and YouTube. How hard could it be to do it myself?

The guys at work assured me that if I could put wiper blades on my car, that I could fill the tires easily. Another coworker told me about a air machine that was free and you can set your PSI and the machine will stop when your tires reach that inflation. That sounded promising.

I watched a couple of YouTube videos--both had women doing it--and reassured that it looked easy, I headed out on errands on Saturday. First stop, the tire store with the free air machine.

I got there around 8am and expected it to be empty and still closed. It was not. It was open, the parking lot was full, and some person who was shopping had parked directly in front of the air machine. :-( Feeling super uncomfortable about it, I backed into the handicapped spot which was next to it. I figured I was right there and if someone who needed the spot showed up, I would move immediately. I still felt uncomfortable.

The machine was easy to set. Just bumped up the plus button to 35 PSI and dragged the hose to my car. It took longer than I expected before it beeped and stopped, but when I double checked with my gauge, it was dead accurate.

I proceeded to fill the other three tires and discovered (on the last tire) that a valve cap was missing. Another person was waiting for the air when I finished, so I handed him the hose and left.

It was actually as easy as everyone claimed! I was feeling damn proud of myself, and as I drove, I could tell how much better the tires felt. It made that much of a difference.

And when I got home, I found a package of universal tire valve caps and ordered them so I can replace the missing valve cap.

Mission accomplished!

What's Next in the Paladin League

Wicked Deception is up for preorder! It is the final book of this plot arc.

I'm thinking of these four books as Paladin League: The Musketeers. The heroes of this set call themselves the four musketeers so it seems to fit. And yes, I have an idea for another set of four, but I don't have a subtitle for that Paladin League plot arc yet.

The hero is Kyle Winter. He was introduced in Finn's book, Wicked Intention, and played a major role in Griff's book, Wicked Salvation. If you've been reading this blog, this is how I learned Kyle is a smart aleck. I had no idea until I wrote him in WS.

He's assigned to work undercover as a handyman and groundskeeper at a convent in Trujillo, Puerto Jardin because Henri Silva, second-in-command to the arms dealer they're trying to bring down, has been showing too much interest in the place. Captain Nguyen wants to know why and Kyle is available.

Kyle, however, is less than excited by this assignment. He's trying to avoid the nuns, especially one particular sister.

The heroine is Marianna Castillo. If you read Wicked Intention, you might remember that Zo was looking for her missing best friend. This is Mari. She's been running from Henri Silva for more than two years, barely staying one step ahead of him. Now, with the help of the Mother Superior, she's disguised as a nun and is hiding in the convent.

But two problems develop for her. 

One, the new groundskeeper/handyman is a mercenary allegedly trying to go straight by working at the convent. And she's attracted to him in a way that she's never been attracted to anyone else. But she knows that mercenaries sell their services to whoever pays the most and Henri Silva would pay a fortune to get his hands on Mari. He wants her dead because she knows a secret about him that will destroy him.

Her second problem? Silva is showing a sudden interest in the convent and she has to decide whether to run again or to try and reclaim her life.

This book is scheduled to be released August 15, 2022, but you can preorder it at Amazon now!

Available Now: Wicked Salvation!

Wicked Salvation released on Sunday! That's right. You can go to Amazon and download your copy right this minute and experience instant reading gratification. :-)

This is the third book in the Paladin League series, but I wrote it to standalone. Everything you need to know to enjoy this story is explained. That doesn't mean there aren't references to people and events from previous books, but they aren't gone into in depth and it truly is not necessary to read the earlier books.

The hero is JT Griffin. He goes by Griff. He's the medic for a Special Forces team that works covert ops in South and Central America. When he told me in the first book that he was a medic, I was like, okay. Whatever. It ended up being a huge factor for him. Who knew? Certainly not me. ;-)

The heroine is Cat Jasarevic. She has a doctorate in mineralogy and works for the Paladin League. She's on a leave of absence to pursue a temporary position in a Puerto Jardinese museum. It's her dream job, so even though it's temporary and even though she hardly speaks Spanish, she jumps at it anyway. Griff says she's impulsive and he's right. This is something else I didn't know until it was pointed out. Why do my characters always keep secrets from me?

From the first instant they meet, they strike sparks off each other. Some of it is attraction, but some of it is anger and annoyance. Griff isn't the easiest person to get along with. As is mentioned in some of the earlier books in which he appears, Griff is abrasive.

Luckily for JT and his future happiness, Cat is used to annoying men. She has four older brothers who she tried to keep up with. She can hold her own with Griff, too. Which he likes a lot.

If you'd like to read an excerpt, I have the first chapter up on my website. Wicked Salvation. If you read and enjoy the story, please consider leaving a review! It would be much appreciated!

Wicked Salvation: 3 Day Countdown!

Wicked Salvation releases in 3 days!!!

I'm excited! It's true I get excited every time a book comes out because it doesn't happen every day, but Griff's book turned out to be so much fun, that I can't wait to share it with everyone.

I'm all about the characters. I usually have them before I get anything else about the story, but until I write the hero and heroine interacting with each other, I never know exactly what I'm going to get. I mean, I've had Griff in my head for two books, so I knew he was gruff and could be a jerk, but that he also was someone who took care of others.

I knew his heroine, Cat, needed help. I didn't have her personality. In my mind, I pictured her meekly approaching Griff and trying to hire him.

And then I wrote this scene in Wicked Intention and it blew my assumptions out of the water.

But I still didn't have Cat's personality.

And then a friend helped me write the initial blurb for Wicked Salvation.

Cat Jasarevic needs a mercenary. Fast. Her best chance at finding one? El Taller—a seedy soldier-for-hire hang out. Walking into that bar alone? Maybe not the safest choice. But she’s smart. She knows how to use a gun. She can take care of herself. An illusion instantly shattered when a mercenary who’s tall, gorgeous and deadly tosses her over his shoulder and hauls her out the door. Now she’s got two problems—this dangerous stranger who’s attached himself to her hip…and the way her pulse jumps every time he gets too close.

Just that easily, I had a handle on Cat and her reaction to being hauled out of the bar. She wasn't scared, she wasn't worried, she was furious! And so began the interplay between her and Griff.

I always imagined Griff curtailing his surliness with his heroine, but he doesn't have to do this with Cat. He can be himself and know that she's going to give as good as she gets. These two were dishing it out left and right and Griff even thinks at one point how glad he is that she sasses back because he'd feel guilty if she didn't.

Yeah. These two actually ended up being perfect for each other. Maybe their relationship isn't sweet music and gentle words, but it works for them. :-)

Wicked Salvation is available for preorder right now and will release on Sunday, August 29th. The price will be $3.99 for two weeks after it comes out and then it will increase to its regular price of $4.99.

Icon Scramble

Today, for no reason I can discern, Windows decided to rearrange all my desktop icons. All of them.

To say I wasn't happy is an understatement.

There are some icons on my desktop that I want in one particular location. The shortcut to my Word Count Tracker? I want that on the far lower left so that it's never covered up by a Word document.

My shortcut to my Spelling Bee (it's a New York Times word game) spreadsheet is on the lower right. This leaves it visible when I have my browser window up, but hidden if I'm writing.

I also have shortcuts to programs I use on the left hand side of the icons and shortcuts to writing templates on the right hand side.

And nothing was where it belonged when I opened my computer. Argh!

Of course, there are a fair number of icons that I really don't care where they are because I rarely use them and don't have their spot memorized.

But I spent time today fixing my desktop, returning it back to the way I like it. I was irritated while I did it, but I did have a bunch of shortcuts on the desktop that I never use. Why am I keeping something on the desktop, cluttering up my space, if I never go into those folders that way? I deleted them. The folders are still there, just the shortcuts are gone.

I also discovered some documents I'd downloaded to my desktop and never put away into a folder that gets backed up, so I took care of that, too.

So as annoying as it was to have Windows rearrange everything, I guess it wasn't a big deal and it gave me the opportunity to lose a row of icons. The cleaner and less cluttered my computer desktop is, the better.

Wicked Salvation: 10 More Days!

As of today, there are 10 days until the release of Wicked Salvation !

On my website, is a preview of the book. It's a draft version of the first chapter and I'll have to take time to update it, but at the moment I'm busy getting the book itself ready to upload to Amazon. This preview, though, is from Griff's POV.

I thought I'd share a little bit from Cat's Point of View. This is the start of chapter two.

Cat Jasarevic was in no mood to deal with this caveman. Her day had started out shitty and gotten progressively worse. Tall, dark, and dangerous tossing her over his shoulder and carrying her out of El Taller was only the latest problem. He wasn’t even her biggest worry, although he was certainly the most pressing.

It was tempting to reach into her purse, pull out her gun, and demand he move aside, but she was reasonably certain it wouldn’t rattle him. This kind of man had seen the business end of a pistol more than once. He probably had her outgunned, anyway.

She didn’t say anything. He’d kidnapped her—let him start the conversational ball rolling. Instead, Cat sized up her adversary. The mercenary was around her age, maybe a little older, and a couple of inches over six feet with nearly black hair. It was longish, falling into his face in front and past his collar in back. His chin and cheeks were covered with stubble. Not a beard, not yet, but he wasn’t too many days away. He also had the brightest, bluest eyes she’d ever seen. Contact lenses, she decided, curling her lip.

His shoulders were broad, his arms muscular, and his ass was incredible. She’d had time to appreciate it while hanging over his shoulder. His face—damn. He had full lips, high cheekbones, a strong chin, and the man was so flipping handsome simply staring at him made her warm. Cat shifted, folding her arms over her chest. “Well?” she demanded.

“You know, I never bought into the dumb blonde stereotype, but you’re making me rethink it.” The casual tone added to the insult.

“What?” The word came out tight, but she’d gritted her teeth.

“You heard me.”

“You listen here, mister—”

“No, you listen,” he interrupted her. The man leaned in, looming over her. “You sashayed into El Taller as if it were some country club. That was bad enough, but the fact you were fucking oblivious to what was going on in there is what has me the most pissed off.”

“I was not oblivious.” Her arms dropped to her sides as she leaned forward to glare at him.

“No? So you knew you were about to get gang raped?”

Cat staggered back a step, feeling as if she’d been sucker punched. “You’re lying,” she said, but she suspected he wasn’t.

“The hell I am.” The mercenary ran a hand through the top of his hair, pushing it off his face. It fell back over his forehead. “You’re lucky my buddy and I were there when you walked in. He ran interference for me so I could get you out safely.”

“There were other women there.”

“Yeah, sex workers who pay the owner for protection. If you’d been ten minutes later, we would have been gone, and you would have been in a world of trouble.” He shook his head. “What the fuck were you thinking?”

He sounded disappointed. Who the hell was he to judge her? Irritation stormed back, pushing fear aside. “I can take care of myself.”

“Sure you can. I was able to haul you out of the bar and corner you in this alcove. Try again, Blondie.”

Docking Station Surprise

I've had a docking station for my Windows laptop for a long time. I bought it and a pair of monitors so that I could have two screens going. I was able to use this same setup when I work from home and this was a huge bonus.

The only negative? My MacBook Pro wouldn't work with the docking station. Not completely. I could use the keyboard and the mouse, but not the monitors.

Recently, I started searching online, wondering if someone made a docking station that would work with both a Windows and Mac laptop. I found one and was checking it out, when I saw a link to the same brand I was using currently and it was cheaper.

I clicked the link.

Imagine my surprise when it said that I'd bought this docking station already. This was my docking station? I checked which Mac OS versions it worked with and mine was listed.

I plugged in the MacBook again, but still no monitors. Epiphany struck. Maybe I needed to download some drivers. I headed to the manufacturer's website, downloaded the Mac drivers, and it worked! This is hugely exciting because formatting my ebooks just became much, much easier.

No more plugging and unplugging one monitor from the docking station to my Mac. Now I can use three screens! The two on my desktop and the MacBook's.

The timing of the discovery was also awesome because I'm about to start formatting Wicked Salvation as I write this (Saturday).

Characters and Personalities

I mentioned on Tuesday that I didn't have Cat's personality until I wrote a chapter in her Point of View (POV) and now, as I start Kyle's book, I'm in the same boat with his heroine.

Remember, he was a cipher to me, too, until I wrote him in the car with Griff and Cat. I blogged a little about it last spring.

It isn't always this way. Sometimes I know their personalities before I write a word. Like Mika from Through a Crimson Veil. Conor, too, for that matter. And I knew she was going to drive him crazy because their attitudes toward life and toward being half demon were so different.

I knew Ryne from In the Midnight Hour was tough, kick ass, no quarter given. And I knew pretty early that Deke, her hero, was a major league smart ass. Because the picture I found that most closely matched him had a man with the biggest, smart-ass smirk on his face. I was like, okay, here we go. Someone who is overly serious and focused is going to lose her mind with this guy.

I also knew Finn and Zo's personalities from Wicked Intention very well, but I'd written three chapters in their book ten years before I actually rewrote their book. (Yes, most of the three chapters are in the new version, but in different sequences.) And seriously? These two were in my head a lot over the past ten years. I knew them better than any characters I'd ever written, and trust me, I know all of my characters inside and out before a book is finished.

So it's been a little weird to not have Kyle's personality until I wrote him. To not have Cat's until I wrote her. I still haven't written Kyle's heroine, so while I have some hints about her personality, she's still mostly an enigma to me. One I'm pretty eager to figure out, so hopefully I can wrap up the millions of things that need to be done for the release of Wicked Salvation and get to the next book in the series.

Wicked Salvation: 19 Days and Counting

It's now 19 days until the release of Wicked Salvation . The copy editor returned my edits, so I'm working on those as I write this post. This is the final stage before formatting the book to be uploaded.

Since I talked about Griff last week, I thought I'd talk about his heroine this week. Catriona Jasarevic. Mineralogist with the dream of being curator of a gem and mineral exhibit at a museum.

When I wrote chapter one of Griff's book and stuck it at the back of Wicked Intention, I knew nothing about Cat except a few facts. What I mentioned in the paragraph above and that she worked at the Paladin League, but didn't know Zo or Finn or Archer. I didn't even have an idea what her personality was like.

But I always hunt pictures of my characters even if it takes forever and the model that fit Cat had this expression on her face which made it clear she was no one's pushover.

And when the initial placeholder book blurb got written--the one which was a paragraph long and only from Cat's POV--I had her.

If you've read the first two books in the series, you know Griff is referenced as abrasive and obnoxious. He's a real handful and I knew it, so I was a little worried about how his heroine would deal with him.

And then I wrote the first scene in Cat's Point of View (POV).

Cat is no one's pushover. She's the youngest of five children and the only girl. She always tried to hold her own with her older brothers and she's used to going toe-to-toe with strong-willed men. It's part of the reason how she became a strong-willed woman. She's smart, but in over her head in Puerto Jardin and she needs help. She knows she needs help, but that doesn't mean she wants to stand by helplessly and let Griff handle everything without her.

These two... OMG! I loved writing them together. She has Griff's brain spinning, which leaves him flatfooted at times. It's not one-sided either. Cat is immediately attracted to Griff, too, even as he infuriates her. They frustrate each other, aggravate each other, and they talk to each other. They learn to trust each other.

I hope when you read them, you enjoy Griff and Cat as much as I did as I wrote them.

Time Blocking Isn't For Everyone

I was listening to a podcast about how to stop being distracted from the things you want to do. But ultimately it was about time management, about deciding if something truly is important enough to allow time for it.

The podcast had an author on who wrote a book called Indestractible and he gave some tips on how to focus. Like set a timer for ten minutes (to start) and for that time, you must focus on what you said you were working on. Gradually increase the time.

He also talked about time blocking versus the to do list. He said time blocking is the way to go, that studies have shown you're more productive with time blocking.

He's correct about this. Reading about these studies is why I tried to time block my schedule multiple times. It's never worked for me. I do much better with a To Do List.

He gave reasons why a To Do list wouldn't work as well as the time blocking. It all made sense, but it doesn't work for my brain.

Let's say I time block Saturday 2pm to 3pm to write blog posts for the upcoming week. Let's say it's noon and I feel like writing my blog posts now. I even have a couple of ideas for the blog posts, but my time block for noon to 1pm says I'm supposed to be doing something else. Do I do this other thing that I have penciled in to my schedule and wait to write my blogs?

But I'm excited to write my posts now. At 2pm, I might not have the same enthusiasm. I suppose I could swap the time blocks around, but I would be doing this constantly.

This is why I realistic To Do list works best for me--and it's taken a lot of trial and error to learn what is realistic and what's wishful thinking. Instead of time blocking, I have a list of things to accomplish on Saturday. Write Blog Posts is one of the items. So it's noon, I'm excited to write my blogs and I do. I cross it off my To Do list. Now I scan the list and see what else is on the agenda for the day.

I like the freedom to do what I need/want to do in any order on a given day. Not in the order I thought would work for me when I time blocked my day.

Time blocking my schedule makes me feel confined, squeezed, and I don't like it.

This is how it works for me. Time blocking apparently works for most people, I'm just not one of them.

As for distractions, yeah, I still deal with them and I will try some of his tips and tricks to handle those, but time blocking won't be one of them.