Busy Day

Trivia:  Didn't get much done today.  A good friend's funeral cast a damper over it.  I hate funerals but felt I had to go.

Critical Reading:  Got the last book of the Charlaine Harris' Harper Connelly books read:  An Ice Cold Grave.  Fortunately, the grave wasn't for Harper, but she did have to run for her life in the snow from a villein who didn't appear for sure until at least the last third of the book.  (Hints were dropped along the way.)  

My guess about the changing relationship was right on -- Harper and Tolliver decided they weren't siblings and took 'significant other' to the carnal level.  I was wrong about the triology though.  Harris kept making hints about finding Cameron, Harper's missing sister.  The question is dead or alive?

Dropping such textual hints are a great marketing tool, it seems to me.  Nothing like implanted teasers to make people look for your next book.  The only problem is you have to have a regularly published series to take advantage of it.  Harris has four series going.  In the Harper Connelly one, Harris has dropped so many hints in Ice  you can't possibly miss them.  I'd say Cameron is definitely looming on the horizon.  Which to me is a good deal since I like a series ...  though Lily Bard is my favorite of her MCs.


Another form of hooking readers before the book is out is including a first chapter of the next book in the current one.  Teaser chapters have always got me when I like a series, but there's always that wait until the book comes out in mass paperback.  At the moment, I'm champing at the bit for Karen Moning's newest MacKayla fae book.  At the moment, it's still in hardback.  (Incidentally, Moning drops her own hints.  I'm looking forward to her bringing MacKayla into the Highlander world.)

Writing:  Tangled is still being revised at the rate of a couple chapters a week -- and being critiqued at one chapter a week.  It's going to take forever to get it sliced into shape.  I'm supposed to worry when it sat in my computer for three-four years and gathered mold?

I thought I had a good thing going when I was writing about the Marches the first time around.  Now I'm looking at the manuscript, and I can't believe how much I've learned in the past couple of years.  Who knows if I'm any closer to getting published, but my fiction is approaching the quality of my former non-fiction shorts. 

Progress:  Next to none.  

Maybe even less if I spend more time with the new character bobbing around in my head.  So far, I haven't figured out what kind of book ... other than it's YA.  Maybe a mystery with some sort of supernatural in a small town.  So far I'm thinking of north of Hardscrabble in my never-never-California world.