Finished chapter one of Cady II, which I’m tentatively titling Starburn. In it, Cady kidnaps her one-time friend/colleague/whatever, after first shooting him. I haven’t figured out their relationship yet, but this seems a good time to mention that I suspect it’s going to be tense for a while.

I know why she shot him. I have no clue why she kidnapped him.

But I got two-thousand words, after getting a thousand yesterday, and that after getting nothing for a damned long time.

Maybe this ongoing funk is February, which has never been World’s Greatest Month. Maybe it’s the continuation of that same odd feeling that clung to me throughout January: of having broken something–of being a wind-up doll with a snapped spring. But at the moment, two thousand words by this time of the morning seems momentous. Hell, two thousand words at all seems momentous.

I’ve left myself in a good place for tomorrow. I know tomorrow is Saturday, but maybe weekends are the problem, too. I don’t seem to be able to pick up on Monday after a weekend off, whereas when I write every day, I go along pretty well.

I don’t know what’s been wrong, but today it wasn’t. So I’ll sleep in tomorrow, and then I’ll come in and write and see what happens.

Weblog-wise, I’ve found a template I think I can work with. You’re seeing it in progress; it isn’t what I want, or even close yet, but nobody is going to go blind trying to read it now. I’ll tinker with the details a little at a time, and eventually replace the header with something I like.

Meanwhile, while I’ve been in my funk (and slogging HTML and php because I had no words), I’ve missed most of what’s going on in the universe. I didn’t know, for example, that Brenda Coulter caused yet another shit storm on the Internet by suggesting that she only considered US writers worthy of copies of her giveaways, and that she does giveaways not as thank-yous, but as promotions.

I discovered this through Sheila’s comments on the subject, of course, but I trooped through her links and other folks’ links, and found my way around a whole lot of hurt, angry readers and pissed-off writers.
I look at book give-aways this way.

• A) I suck at self-promotion; if I didn’t, maybe I’d have some national bestsellers by now. So my focus in that regard is, and will continue to be, writing the best books I can, with the hope that one day something will click, and reader word-of-mouth will do for me what I am bad at doing for myself. I won’t kill myself promoting.
• B) I owe much more to the people who already read my books than I do to the potential readers might I hope to lure in by devious wiles.
• C) I have readers all over the world, and in a largish handful of different languages, from Russian to German to Portuguese to French to Bulgarian, as well as those who read English as a second language and buy my books that way.

I don’t often have the money to do giveaways, but when I do, anybody can play. I’ll ship anywhere . It’s not promo. It’s thanks. I thank every one of you who takes your time to stop by here to see what I’ve said, and perhaps to comment. You could go anywhere on the Internet, but you come here, and that means a lot to me. I thank those of you who have borrowed my books from libraries, and those of you who have purchased them, and those of you who liked them enough to recommend them to someone else. And those of you who just like my website, and take the time to tell me that.
Time is a gift. It’s the biggest gift we can give each other, because it’s the only one that is irreplaceable. Thank you so much for spending some of your time with me.