So my Alphasmart Dana came yesterday. Plugged it to charge and went out to a Write Club meeting.

The Ent who poo-pooed my wanting one of these little gadgets, spent two hours playing with it while I was out.

And does it work?

Well, after a bit of fiddling and realising that Documents to Go wasn’t working and finding out where the hell Alphaword was dumping the docs in my laptop, I added a few words to The Mystic Son... 3000 to be exact. *grin*

Words pile up, it’s a little scary. Just shows how completely distracted I am by this laptop LOL

Hopefully, it’ll really help with NaNo…

All right, I worked through my Guardian Angel urge by writing a thousand words and setting up the prologue… me being the Prologue Queen and all. *grin*

So I’m ready. I’ve grabbed 45 Master Characters, looked at the first part of the heroine’s journey outline. And the idea for the sequel to The Bone Magician’s Daughter hits me… ARGH!

I used 45 Master Characters to write Bone Magician. I think my naughty subconscious was waiting for me to look at it again before telling me about Rede’s story. I can see him lying there, ship wrecked on the beach… *sigh* Now I’m going to have to write that scene before The Mystic’s Son – see, my subconscious even supplied a title *grrr* – will leave me alone and I can get on with my NaNo outline.

Will I ever get this outline sorted?? LOL

…Buying Mackenzie’s Baby is going to print!

YAYAYYAYAYAYYAY

I got the galley through this morning.

The date of release is *drum roll*

19 December 2006

I’m going to be able to hold my book, squish my face into the pages and actually smell it. *squeee*

10 April 2007

6 months and counting down… *grin*

I should be sorting my outline for Alchemy so I’m fully prepped to start writing on 1 November and NaNoWriMo. I should be.

So what am I doing?

Daydreaming about the lead character of another story, building more and more of him as I wander around the house, walk to school to pick up Frodo, type away in an ideas document. It’s a contemporary with the working title of Guardian Angel. He’s still a little two-dimensional as I haven’t meshed him with the other characters yet.

So now I’m in a dilemma. Fantasy or contemporary for NaNo *sigh*

And today my first royalty cheque for Buying Mackenzie’s Baby plopped onto the door mat. *grin* That Alphasmart will be mine… Mwhahahahaha.

We visited Grandma Saruman at the weekend and fitted in a trip to Whitby.

I was supposed to go on a school trip to Whitby when I was ten. Decades later… not saying how many… :-P… I finally made it.

Frodo and Samwise enjoyed tramping around on the grass in the Abbey carpark and then running along the beach at Sandsend.

It was a bleak, foggy, surprisingly warm day.

No sign of the Count though.

We had a good review today.

Not like the last time, where it was all doom and gloom and can he please leave their school and never darken their door again… 😉

We know this year will be the decider of whether he can stay in this particular mainstream school. Depending on the review next March, he may have to go to a resourced school. But it’ll be resourced within another mainstream school. Which is much better for Frodo and his expanding social skills. That was our concern about him attending a special school, with children with much more complex and severe problems than him.

What the experts currently think is that his delay and learning difficulties are caused by his lack of language. This little bit of information gave me hope today. Previously, it had been suggested that he was globally delayed – that language and learning difficulty were equally behind. But with the hope that if his language delay is tackled then he will be able to learn and progress.

Which is cool. *grin*

I’m having trouble with the middle of Alchemy. I hate the middle of books. Hate planning them. Really hate writing them, LOL

So instead of working out what happens.

I polished Past Lies. It’s looking okay. I’m going to leave it for a bit longer and have another stab at the end.

And I finished the first round of edits on Nimue’s Price. That needs another read through too.

Now you can see what desperate lengths the middle of a book has driven me to… 😉

Past Lies is going to sit on the hard drive for a few days, then I’ll print it out and give it a proper read through.

I’ll probably have Saturday morning with Samwise, while The Ent takes Frodo swimming. So we’ll be off to a Aztec theme soft play park. Samwise can exhaust himself and I can read, hehe

So today is the first planning day for Alchemy. Eep