Patti O'Shea's Blog, page 61

The Good Dishes

In the storage closet underneath my stairs, I have boxes of dishes. Like the original boxes these dishes were packed in from the manufacturer. Lots of them. I have all different sizes. I have platters. I have a gravy boat. I have serving bowls.

As you might have guessed since all of them are still in their original boxes, I've never used them. Ever. And even for the holidays, I have more casual plates and serving bowls, platters, etc.

I've thought about selling them more than once. I've even checked out the pricing on this site that sells dishes to people who've broken or chipped one piece of their sets, but I've never done more than this. I might never do more than this.

You see, my mom spent years carefully buying me a place setting here, a serving bowl there. If she had extra money, she got me something for this set of dishes. And now that she's gone, I find it almost impossible to part with anything she invested time in. Like getting me these dishes.

Although, as I think about it, I'd probably be hanging onto them even is she were still living because it would hurt her to realize that I sold something she spent so much time on for me.

I'm sure I'll still have these dishes--in their boxes--when I die. In the meantime, they'll be hoarding space I need in my storage closet.

Copy That

I wrote a blog post for today and hit the schedule button so it would publish while I'm at work. Sometimes it's hard to figure out what to blog about and this was one of those days, but I finally came up with something.

And then I glanced down at my list of published blog posts and saw a headline that made me pause. I might have written about this already. I took a look at the earlier post.

Yep. The exact same topic I'd written about for today had been a previous post in October. Sigh.

Things might have been worded differently, but it was the exact same sentiments. Well, there goes that idea. (In case you're interested, it was the post about my 2020 planner impatience.)

I guess I've been excited about a new planner for a while now. :-/

Here's hoping I'm more original next week.

The Reference Library

I have a sort of large reference library. Some are writing books, some deal with grammar and usage, others are subject related like Special Forces, mythology, magic, police work, etc. There are baby name books, books on careers, books on world building and costumes. I have foreign language dictionaries, books on coding websites, and promotion.

The picture in the blog only shows a small portion of my collection. These two shelves go across the width of my desk, and the only reason I'm not using the top shelf is because I'm too short to reach any books I'd put up there. And yeah, there's another bookcase behind me.

Before I moved out of Minnesota, I culled the collection. I donated writing books to my local Romance Writers of America chapter and I gave others to the Hennepin County library. My fiction collection also was pruned substantially. All told, I donated about 2900 books.

Yeah, I know. Can we all say obsessive book hoarder?

Leaving fiction out of the equation, I don't really need all these references. I know I don't because instead of opening up the books, I do online searches. Oh, I might open the name books when a character is being particularly difficult, but usually that can be taken care of online too.

The writing references? They're collecting dust. Grammar and usage? I always do online searches for answers. So why am I keeping all these books?

That's the question I'm struggling with at the moment. Some of them are old enough that they're probably out of date by now anyway. Things move fast in our current world. And yet I don't want to get rid of any of these books. :-( I can make a case for some of them. Like some of the magic books (I used to write paranormal romance and might again) have information in them that might be difficult to find online. But so many of them could go. Really.

And they won't be leaving my house. At least not yet.

Throwback Thursday: Eternal Nights

When I wrote Ravyn's Flight, it was a stand alone book and I had no plans to write anything else in that world. I know--everyone loves a series--but I had so many other ideas I wanted to work on.

But a funny thing happened after RF was released--readers contacted me and wanted more in this world. They also wanted more of Stacey and Alex, the secondary romance in RF. I thought about making them the main h/h in book 2, but there wasn't enough there for a story. In all honesty, I don't even remember how or when Wyatt and Kendall showed up, but they did and Eternal Nights was born. Well, sort of.

Wyatt (of course) is the captain of a Special Ops team. His heroine is also a captain. She joined the Army in order to afford college. Her goal is to be an archaeologist and she is fascinated by the alien artifacts on Jarved Nine. More than fascinated. She wants to study them, so when she finds out someone is looting the Old City and selling the alien relics on Earth, she's incensed and determined to stop it.

I love friends to lovers romances, so I was excited to be able to write one. I'm also a fan of reincarnation romances, but there wasn't instant love for Kendall and Wyatt. In fact, Kendall abhors the idea of "soul mates" and Wyatt knows she'll run if she realizes they've been lovers in other lives.

The other thing that interested me about this book was Wyatt's team. They're loyal and I'd like to write stories for all of them. Some day. I did write a novella with Troll called The Troll Bridge because I was invited to submit to an anthology collection, but as I wrote it, I realized there was a full-length book here. Because of other deadlines and other projects, I never expanded Troll and Lia's story, but I want to. Some day.

Anyway, even though I didn't have plans to write more stories on Jarved Nine, I'm glad I had the opportunity to revisit the planet and the characters. I wish I was a faster writer. There are so many stories I want to write and so little time to actually sit down and work.

Crossword Puzzles

***I received no compensation of any kind for this post and paid for my subscription to this app on my own.***

I love the New York Times crossword puzzles. My parents used to get the Minneapolis Star Tribune and my dad would save the New York Times Sunday puzzles for me. If I was over at their house and had time to kill, I would grab the weekday paper and work on that puzzle as well.

But then I moved to Atlanta and my dad stopped saving the puzzles for me.

When I got my new iPad, one of the apps I checked out was for the NYT crosswords puzzles. I started out with the free trial and remembered why I enjoy the puzzles so much. I'm a word geek!

What's nice about the app is that you can turn on auto-check and make sure your answer is correct as you fill it in. There's also access to the archives and a plethora of old puzzles that I missed. As I've regained some of my skill, I stopped using auto-check on Mondays through Wednesdays. (The NYT puzzles go from easy (Monday) to challenging (Saturday) with Sundays sort of challenging.

The Sunday puzzles are normally themed and I find my success has a lot to do with the theme. Can I figure it out quickly? If so, good day for puzzling. Do I know the topic of the theme? If not, harder day for puzzling. Despite this, Sunday puzzles are my favorites. I like themes and the size.

The app also keeps track of stats. How long did it take me to solve the puzzle, did I use auto-check, what is my average time for Monday puzzles, things like this. I'm not much of a stats person, and I frequently get interrupted working on a puzzle, so the times are never particularly accurate, but it's nice to have that there if you want it.

Anyway, if you like crossword puzzles, I highly recommend the New York Times crossword puzzle app. It's very functional, easy to use, and it's better than paper!

Happy Thanksgiving!

Happy Thanksgiving to my American friends!

Knitting Slump

Project on the left is from before my knitting slump.

So I still can't find anything I feel like knitting. It's very frustrating because this is how I control my anxiety, but nothing is grabbing me. At first, I tried to focus on existing projects, wanting to finish those, but when they didn't draw me, I started new ones. After knitting a row or two, I'd put those aside, too. Now I have even more started, but not finished projects. ::sobs::

I've been trying to figure out when the knitting doldrums started and I think I can trace it back to when I messed up the sleeve on my first ever sweater. Maybe it took more heart of out me than I thought. Maybe it didn't just take my enthusiasm for that project, but for knitting in general. If this is true, how do I get out of it?

Starting something new, even if it's something I think I'll be excited about, doesn't seem to be working. Is the answer to go back, un-knit all the rows on the sleeve that need to be redone, and finish that project?

This idea doesn't feel me with joy, but it might be what I try next. I need this hobby.

Throwback Thursday: Ravyn's Flight

Ravyn's Flight was the fourth book I'd written and the first book I had published. I hadn't written for a long time, but one day, as I was driving home from work, I saw a woman huddled on the floor of a darkened room. She had her arms wrapped around her knees and the clock was blinking 12:00.

It made me curious. Something had happened, something bad, but I didn't know who she was or where she was. I ignored her. Like I said, I hadn't written for a while and I had a lot of other things going on at the time.

She didn't go away. Instead, I kept seeing that scene vignette over and over and over. Finally, I had to write it. I had to know what was going on. The curiosity was killing me.

I discovered her name was Ravyn Verdier and that she was a communications specialist. I learned that all her teammates had been murdered and that she was in shock, waiting for the killer to come for her and finish his/her work. I write romance, not horror and now I was curious who the hero was and how this was going to be romantic in any way. There wasn't supposed to be anyone else around, so that added to my interest. I wrote some more.

The hero showed up in the next scene. Captain Damon Brody, Army Special Forces. There for a training mission with his team. They respond to the emergency beacon coming from the building where my heroine is waiting to die.

I wrote a good 25% of the first draft without knowing the book was set in the future on another planet. It could have been in any temperate wilderness area, but I didn't stop to think about it. I just got the words down, afraid they'd leave and I'd be stuck without all the answers I needed about who the killer was and why he'd killed.

As I told the story, I was under the impression that Ravyn was the only one with issues to be resolved before there could be a happy ending. I was probably around 50% through my first draft when Damon dropped his issue on me. It was a doozy.

I continued on, though, I just made notes and plowed forward. Everything that needed to be fixed would be when I did revisions.

When the draft was finished, I filled in all the things I'd learned along the way and fixed/strengthened other things. For the first time ever, I sent it out to people to read. Prior to this, I just submitted to editors and let them reject me. That felt safer. I got feedback and revised again.

As I worked on another round of (much) smaller revisions, I started entering Ravyn's Flight in contests for unpublished authors. I finaled in many, won some. One of the contests I won had a grand prize of a read of the full manuscript by an editor.

I'd finished finished right before the winners were notified. I sent my manuscript off to an editor at a publisher which was notorious for slow wait times. And a few days later, I left for vacation. This was a partial family reunion since lots of aunts, uncles, and cousins were also taking the same cruise. My parents and I were excited.

We got back in the late afternoon. This was January 2002 and we only had dial-up internet. It took forever for the email that had come in while I was on vacation to download. It was well after 5pm in New York when I saw the email from the editor I'd sent my manuscript to asking me to contact her. It had been about 2 weeks since I'd sent it. There was no way they could have read it so quickly. Right?

I was instant messaging that night with a writer friend who insisted I'd sold the book. She was correct, and in November 2002 my first book was released. I took pictures of it on the bookshelves at real bookstores. (ebooks weren't popular then and the book was only released in paper at the time.)

It was exciting and scary and surreal. My biggest dream ever had been attained. Time to work toward the next goal.

What Happens in Yarn Club...

Back at the beginning of the year, I saw a post from a yarn dyer about their yarn club. Every month I'd get a skein of yarn in a colorway inspired by some geeky/nerdy pop culture thing.

This intrigued me. First, the theme of the yarn club sounded awesome. Second, I kind of go for the same colors of yarn all the time, and since I didn't get to pick what shade was headed my way, it gave me an opportunity to branch out. And third, I selected the option to alternate between fingering and DK weight because (like with color) I tend to buy a ton of fingering weight yarn and have very little of anything else. This should be fun!

And it sort of was fun at the beginning. Every month the mystery skein of yarn arrived. But...

But I hadn't heard of most of the geeky pop culture that were used for inspiration, and the few I did recognize, well, the colors didn't seem to fit in my mind. This took some of the fun out of it for me. And the yarn started accumulating. I guess I could have knit socks or hats with one skein, maybe a small shawl or scarf, but one skein is limiting, and because I didn't love the colorways, I didn't want to order more of the same.

Finally, I decided I had to cancel this yarn club. I still like it in theory as a way to branch out, but in practice, it didn't work for me. Maybe a different yarn club would be a better fit, but I'm in no hurry to find out.

Camera Dependency

Saturday is errand day which includes grocery shopping for the week. This involves a fair amount of parking and backing out of parking spots. Atlanta drivers are extremely impatient and literally can't wait five seconds, so they will shoot behind you even if you're backing up. Or at the grocery store they will walk behind the car with their cart, not caring that you're 3/4s of the way out of the spot and can't see them! (Don't get me started!)

This Saturday, parking took an unexpected turn. Everything was fine at stop one and stop 2, but stop 3? Not so much. My car decided to update the system which meant no backup camera!

OMG! I didn't realize how dependent I am on this camera mounted on the back of my car until it wasn't available.

I waited a little while, but the screen remained blank. I was going to have to do this without technology.

It wasn't a secret to me that I loved my little backup camera. I routinely wipe it off after it rains or if it seems a little dusty because I like it. What I didn't realize is that I would be anxious trying to drive without it. The screen even stayed blank long enough that I started to worry that it was down completely.

I did manage to successfully back out of my spot, and as I drove down the aisle, I received the message about system maintenance. By the time we reached the main road, everything was back to normal. I learned something, though. Sit in the parking spot until the backup cam comes back online.