Revisions Part 2: Knife or No Knife?

Today I tried to figure out what I want to do with the ending of WOLFENBACH. Remember the scene I mentioned a few weeks ago? The one where the heroine grabs a knife to threaten the semi-villain of the piece? That one hit the floor before I handed the ms in, but now I'm thinking about putting it in again. What do you think? Can a nice romance heroine grab a knife and hold it to somebody else's throat?

As if in a dream, Cissy turned and spotted the big knife lying on Cook's kitchen table. Very slowly she reached out. Her fingers closed around the handle, so cool against her hot skin. And the next moment the razor sharp edge of the knife rested against the vulnerable flesh of XY's throat. XY lost all remaining color, turned ashen grey, with the eyes bulging out.

"Now what exactly did ZZ promise you?" Cissy said, still in that calm, calm voice, which seemed to come from very far away. Somehow, it didn't seem to be her voice at all.

The air whistled through XY's nose.

Cissy pressed the knife a little tighter against the skin. "Talk." A drop of blood appeared where the edge had nipped the skin. It ran into the hollow at the base of XY's throat. For the blink of an eye, it hung there, red and glittering, like an exotic gemstone, before it slipped down and was soaked up by the neckline of XY's clothes. [Okay, clothes doesn't really fit in here, but I can't really tell you whether XY is wearing a shirt or a dress, can I?]

So what do you think? Leave it in or throw it out?

The 100th Post: We're International! :O)

You might have noticed that itty-bitty button at the very bottom of this page? Well, this is my brandnew statistics tracker (which I actually managed to built into this site!) (okay, okay, so it was baby-easy, but still, who would've thought that becoming a romance writer would slowly turn me into a computer geek?) (okay, okay, we're not there yet. But just wait and see and the next thing you'll know is that my website has been transformed into a multi-media, audio-video sensation *g*). Back to that statistics tracker: to my utter, utter delight it also shows me which country you're coming from.

So imagine my utter delight when I found out that

A) there are actually more than three people reading this blog and I'm not just writing into black cyberspace (yay!)

and

B) we're truly international!

For there aren't just the usual suspects visiting (a big hello to everybody from the US, Australia, UK, and Germany!), but also people from more exotic places (well, at least exotic from my point of view): Hello to everybody from Iceland, Signapore, Italy, Portugal, Mexico, Saudi Arabia, India & Azerbaijan! I hope you all like my little corner of the cyberworld and will continue dropping by from time to time. :O)

A Post-Christmas Christmas Present

I've just found out that THE LILY BRAND is nominated for a RT Reviewers' Choice Award in the category First Historical Romance.

I'm sooooo thrilled!!!!

The Christmasy Contest is now closed

And I've decided to fill not one cyber-stocking, but three. So, Carolin, Julie & Carolyn, I'll make Santa, the Christkind or the Weihnachtsmann (whatever you prefer) do another tour just for you. I hope you'll enjoy your belated Christmas present. :O)

Revisions Part 1

I'm going to spend next week revising THE CASTLE OF WOLFENBACH. My agent gave me two tasks: A) to rewrite the ending and B) to cut the journey to Wolfenbach short. So, as you can see, revisions involve the dreaded c-word: cutting. Argh! Cutting is always necessary of course; it tightens the web of story, gets rid of excess baggage and makes the whole novel sparkle.

Unfortunately, I'm really, really bad at it. :-/

And to cut the journey to Wolfenbach short ... What to leave in? What to cut? Surely not the Mouse Tower episode which introduces the formidable Widow Chisholm, who's going to invoke terror in the hearts of Wolfenbach's rats and its owner (i.e., the hero) alike? Surely not the terrible snowstorm, which bodes evil for the future of my poor heroine? Surely not the episode in the inn in Kirchwalden, where Cissy learns that her intended is considered as dangerous as a wild beast and likely to rip her apart should she be so foolish as to darken his doorstep? And most definitely not the panorama of the Rhine-Main-area, a lovely intertextual reference to Anna Seghers's THE SEVENTH CROSS!

A few years ago I helped with the preparations of the new critical edition of THE SEVENTH CROSS and had to read the novel five times within a month (no need to mention, is there, that afterwards I knew the thing by heart -- including all the differences between the first edition, printed in Mexico, and the old Parisian manuscript, which Seghers had to abandon when the German troops reached Paris and which then found its way into an archive in Berlin where it lay forgotten for the next several years). Despite Seghers's obvious problem with names (e.g., nearly all of the female characters are called Elisabeth), the novel is a brilliant study of society in Nazi Germany and tells the story of seven men who manage to flee from a concentration camp. Six of them either die or are hunted down, but with the help of old friends and perfect strangers, the seventh indeed manages to slip through the net of the Hitler regime. What I find particular interesting about the novel is that it is set in the area between Frankfurt and Mainz, i.e., where I live and work. So in WOLFENBACH I included a reference to her wonderful panoramas of this part of the country and of its history:

Their ship glided on, and Cissy admired the hills where once the fires of Celtic altars had illuminated the night, where the Romans had erected the Limes and made these hills the rim of the civilized world. They had brought the knowledge of cultivating wine, and still the grapes ripened along the banks of the river. Countless armies had marched through this land, peoples had come and mingled and disappeared, and still their legacy lived on, strong and insistent, and Cissy admired it all, the ding of the steamship in her ears.

And after having to read THE SEVENTH CROSS five times within a month, I absolutely refuse to cut this snippet from my novel! :O)

So the problem remains: what the heck shall I cut out? *sigh*

So this was Christmas ...

In Germany, we celebrate Christmas on Christmas Eve, i.e. that's the day for the big family celebration and for exchanging presents. Traditionally, one room (usually the sitting room aka die gute Stube = "the good room", used only on special occasions) was used as the "Christmas room" where the parents would set up the Christmas tree and put the presents under the tree. Children weren't allowed to go into the room before Christmas Eve -- though, of course, they tried to take a sneak peek through the keyhole. But this, as I've been told myself, is very dangerous indeed, for if you peek through the keyhole while the Christkind ("Christ Child")* brings the presents, you'll get angel dust in the eye and will be blind forevermore. But if you're a nice girl or boy and wait outside the room until a little bell sounds to announce the Christkind has been there and you may now enter the room, then all the wonders of Christmas will await you behind that door.

*Ever since the 19th century either the Christkind (Catholic) or the Weihnachtsmann (Protestant) has been bringing the Christmas presents to German children.

Christmasy Contest

To put us all in a proper mood for the holiday season, I've decided to hold a wee Christmas contest that will run until 25 Dec 05. All you need to do is to send me an e-mail with "Christmas Contest" in the header. The winner will be picked at random from all entries (double entries will be deleted) and will get his or her cyberstocking filled with my special Christmas CD 2005.

The e-mail addy is: SandyMSchwabATaol.com (just replace the AT with @)

It's beginning to look a lot like Christmas ...

... actually not. Here in Frankfurt, Germany, it looks very much like the middle of November: a dreary, cold, grey day. But hey, they promised us snow for the 26th! Besides, what are Christmas songs for if not to put you in a proper Christmasy mood? So I started the day listening to a Christmas CD some friends of mine produced privately last year: "Hark! The Second Noel" by the Duo con Paso. Luv it! :O)

Anyway, I wish you all a merry Christmas, or, if you don't celebrate Christmas, happy holidays, or, if you live in a country where you don't celebrate anything this weekend, then I wish you at least a good weekend! Take care all of you!

The Pitfalls of Christmas

How to reduce the normal pre-Christmas stress? Well, I've had the clever idea -- since I haven't had time for homemade cookies -- to buy a package of dough at the supermarket so that I would at least bake the cookies myself. Sounds like a good plan? Well, I spent the afternoon cutting out cookies, shoving four backing-tray loads of cookies into the oven, and then decorating the cookies. The cookie-decoration ended up looking rather brilliant and professional and wonderful (if I may say so).

BUT ...

... the cookies themselves taste like crap.

So now my kitchen is filled with the usual cookie-baking smell that always makes me feel sick after a while, my tee-shirt is stenched with the cookie-baking scent, and I've got four baking-tray loads of cookies that look brilliant but don't taste it.

Oh yes, and I wasted a whole afternoon for a useless cookie-baking-spree.

Somebody please hit me over the head.

My Muse Is Now Officially Homeless

It was by now means an easy decision to leave my current publisher, especially since I very much enjoyed working with Chris K, who's a wonderful editor indeed. Still, in January my agent will start looking for a new home for the Muse. Unfortunately, this means that it'll take some time until my next book is out.

For Your Entertainment On This Sunday Morning

My favourite Old English riddle (in my own translation). Enjoy!

A creature came along where men sat,

many in an assembly, wise in spirit;

it had one eye and two ears

and two feet, twelve hundred of heads,

a back and a belly and two hands,

arms and shoulders, one neck

and two sides. Tell me what I am called.

Who Says Renaissance Poetry Isn't Hot?

If you think old literature is stuffy and boring, they must have made you read the wrong stuff at school. Some Old English riddles are funny enough to make you laugh out aloud, some Middle English romances are touching enough to bring tears to your eyes, and some Renaissance poems are just too beautiful for words. And sexy, too! (Who would've thought it, er? *g*)

The following is from a poem I found in THE LYMOND POETRY (my copy arrived earlier today, hooray!): "A la fontaine je voudrais" by Jean-Antoine de Baif (1532-89) (the translation is mine and hopefully mostly correct)

A la fontaine je voudrais

Avec ma belle aller jouer.

Là dedans l'eau nous irions tous deux rafraîchir

Notre amour trop ardent.

Mille douceurs, mille bons mots, mille plaisirs

Mille gentils amoureux jeux se feraient là,

Mille baisers, mille doux embraseements là nous nous donn'rions.

~*~

To the fountain I want

to go with my sweet to play.

There in the water the two of us will slake

Our too ardent love.

A thousand sweetnesses, a thousand witty words, a thousand pleasures,

A thousand lovely love games we will play there,

A thousand kisses, a thousand sweet embraces we will give each other there.

Be still my heart ...

Greatest and most brilliant fictional hero of all times?

Hands down, Francis Crawford of Lymond.

As Julia Ross put it quite nicely and aptly in the dedication of her THE SEDUCTION: "Lymond will remain forever unequalled."

Reading Dunnett's The Lymond Chronicles made me discover my love for late medieval poetry; and most of the times thinking of "Tant que je vive" is enough to bring tears to my eyes. So you can imagine my utter delight when just now I discovered that there's an anthology THE LYMOND POETRY. Oooooh, what joy!

DONE!!!!!

After several hours of further battle with the 'puter, the deed is finally done: the remodelled website is online! Yeah!

Please have a look and let me know what you think: http://www.sandraschwab.com

Remodelling the Website -- Doing Battle with the 'Puter

Tonight (quite literally at night, in fact) I've been overhauling my website:

1) I've repaired the German pages the homepage-building-for-dummies programme ripped apart a few weeks ago

2) I've replaced all the png-files on my English website with jpg-files; so hopefully, the pages won't take so long to load anymore

3) I've replaced the seasonal poetry with fridge poetry to heighten the general entertainment factor *g* (besides, I always forgot to update the seasonal poetry page, which is a bit embarrassing -- I mean, in my lyrical world it's still spring ... *cough*)

4) I've restructured the English pages

5) and only a few minutes ago, I found out how to make a picture a link

Now I just need to update the news-section, think of a new contest, and then haul the whole thing online. Yeah!

Some more things I'm thinking of adding in the next few weeks and months: a page for writers with articles about writing, something about doing research plus a few research-book recommendations. Anything else you think should be added to my website? Let me know!

And now I'm finally going to bed! Good night! :O)

And they seriously tell us romance is trash????

If you belong to those people who think romance authors produce bad prose, especially when it comes to love scenes, well then, read the following sex scenes by oh-so-wonderful mainstream authors and ... shudder, shriek, and run away (and probably be afraid, too) (very afraid!):

"His was that her cunt did not feel like Phyllis's. Smoother, somehow simpler, its wetness less thick, less of a sauce, more of a glaze." (from VILLAGES by John Updike)

How yucky is that, I ask you? The next one is more ridiculous than yucky:

"In reply, Boonyi pulled her phiran and shirt off over her head and stood before him naked except for the little pot of fire hanging low, below her belly, heating further what was already hot. " (from SHALIMAR THE CLOWN by Salman Rushdie)

And this one is bound to give you nightmares:

". . . and the suddenness of it, the snaking of her tongue, the pressure of her lips, the hot grip of her mouth, triggered his orgasm, which was not juice at all but a demon eel thrashing in his loins and swimming swiftly up his cock, one whole creature of live slime fighting the stiffness as it rose and bulged at the tip and darted into her mouth." (from BLINDING LIGHT by Paul Theroux)

Further gems can be found here , all of them on the longlist of the Literary Review Bad Sex in Fiction award.

My Five Minutes of Fame

Today the Chronicles of Narnia opened in German cinemas -- and SWR1, a German radio station, did a phone interview with me about C.S. Lewis and his Chronicles of Narnia. Apparently, the SWR1 people wanted to give their listeners some background info about the film as Lewis's books aren't that well known in Germany. So they phoned the British Studies at the university of Mainz in order to find somebody who might know something about author and book. This in turn resulted in a bit of panic at our department, because none of the people present had read the Chronicles or wanted to be interviewed. Our secretary then called me -- and thus cleared the way to my five minutes of fame. I had a vague idea what THE LION, THE WITCH, AND THE WARDROBE is about and could tell them amusing things about the Inklings: that they met on Tuesday mornings at the Eagle and the Child (nicknamed "The Bird and the Babe") in Oxford and on Thursday evenings in Lewis's sitting room at Magadalen College (pronounced Maudlin).

That interview probably changed the history of radio forevermore. *g*

Sunday Night Ramblings

I didn't get much writing done this week. The job at uni and other things (e.g., Christmas cards -- ack!) needed my full attention. Duh.

Why are those weeks before Christmas always so stressful????

Chapter 3 Is Complete!!!!

I've just finished Chapter 3, which means we've arrived and passed the first turning point of the story. I'm not yet quite satisfied with the delivery of the last sentence, which constitutes something of a punch line. So I'll need to look at it again in a few days' time.

I've found that I absolutely love writing dialogue for my hero and his friends. They're constantly bickering and bantering, and it's a challenge and a joy to give them witty and elegant lines. Well, at least I hope they are witty and elegant!

Spent some time today studying the location and the layout of Albany, a set of appartments in Piccadilly. Actually, I think I took a picture of it when I was last in London: it's situated right next to what is now the Royal Academy of Arts.

Vanity Fair

Just now I've watched the second half of VANITY FAIR and I have to say I've enjoyed this film very much (and why not? James Purefoy looks hot! Especially in those Regency clothes!!!) -- even though it's probably not really a good adaptation of the novel itself. For one thing, Becky is just too nice in the film, more a victim of her situation than taking part in the game of using other people. And of course, given the length of the novel there must have been bits ... chunks really ... missing. As I said: I need to read that novel! :O)

One scene I absolutely adored was the Duke of Richmond's ball in the night before the Battle of Waterloo. When the call to action came, all those men in uniforms rose and swept through the ballroom like a tidal wave of reds and blue, adorned with golden flitter. If I'll ever need to describe that ball, I know what to use for inspiration!

Welcome to WinterWonderLand!

It's snowing -- or rather, it has been snowing here in Frankfurt, Germany. So now everything is dusted with white. It reminded me how strange winter nights are when there's snow: snow brightens the night. All light is reflected and all sounds muffled. (Note to self: Make sure to write a winter night scene for BEWITCHED!)

Today I bought Mira Nair's VANITY FAIR with Reese Witherspoon as Becky Sharp. So far I've watchec about an our or so of that film and I'm loving it! It's set in the Regency, it's got Reese Witherspoon in it -- of course I'm loving it! :O) I know that at least one (historical) character that appeared in THE LILY BRAND is in VANITY FAIR, too: the Marquis of Hertford (he's the guy who stares at Lillian in the first ballroom scene and who doesn't seem to take when a blob of wax drops onto his companion's bossom) appears as the Marquis of Steyne in Thackeray's novel. But I'm sure there'll be even more famous people to spot! (Gosh, I really have to read that novel some time soon!)

The Inspiration for the Snippet Below

I am a very visual writer: I like using photographs or pictures for putting my settings together. (If you would like to find out what places inspired the settings of THE LILY BRAND, go to the Secrets of THE LILY BRAND page on my website.)

For evoke a specific feeling or atmosphere, however, I sometimes rely on other sources than just pictures of places. When I wrote the snippet I posted yesterday, I used LUNA, a painting by Alphonse Mucha, for inspirational purposes. And the prologue for BEWITCHED opens with a panorama of the English Midlands, which was inspired by Tennyon's "Lady of Shalott":

On either side the river lie
Long fields of barley and of rye,
That clothe the wold and meet the sky
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
By the margin, willow veil'd,
Slide the heavy barges trail'd
By slow horses; and unhail'd
The shallop flitteth silken-sail'd
Skimming down to Camelot . . .

So the prologue shows field and meadows divided by a canal, and on the water a barge full of Black Country coal. :O)

Kisses of the Muse

Today the muse kissed me early in the morning and quite fittingly I've just seen my hero return home in the wee hours of the morning:

Perhaps it was due to the punch, for just like it, Lady Worthington's musicale seemed to grow on a man, and Fox liked the second part much better than the first. So much did he enjoy himself that he drove home whistling madly as if to compete with the now absent sparrows on the rooftops. A myriad of stars glittered in the nightly sky, a diamond-besprinkled coat for the new moon. Pale like a maiden's breast, her thin crescent peeked shyly out from behind a flock of clouds.

First Musings of the Week

Yesterday I didn't only find out that my funky inner hair color is purple (see comments below), but I also continued working on the third chapter of BEWITCHED. Things moved a bit sluggishly, mostly because the first big turning point happens at the end of that chapter and I sometimes find it a bit hard to write these very important scenes. After all, they define the web of the story and hold the whole thing together. (And I'm always too critical of my own work. *g*)

In the evening I then turned to WOLFENBACH once more and played a little with the ending. For I've found that the revised ending that is played out in the manuscript I handed in, doesn't work quite as well as UNrevised ending I thought I'd better not hand in. Duh. In the revised ending the hero's change of heart comes rather abruptly, thus robbing the ending of its emotional punch. In the UNrevised ending, however, the hero doesn't agonize as much over his change of heart. Soooo, I'm planning to insert a little scene that shows him standing on the stairs, gripping the banister tightly, and musing. ("I never knew ...") And agonizing. (Painful closing of eyes and clenched jaw and working of muscles in throat.) And only then is he allowed to drag the heroine off to bed. Or rather, drag her to the big, old grandfather clock and then off to bed. *g*

What I really like about the lead couple in WOLFENBACH is that their relationship -- once they manage to make it work -- involves a lot of playfulness. In fact, after all the agonizing and high drama, they're probably the most playful lovers I've ever written. And I didn't even plan it that way! It's always exciting and interesting to see how things work out and evolve. Somehow, my characters, even though they're most definitely my creations, always take on a life of their own. This is probably one of the things I like most about writing: you immerse yourself in a story until you're swept away by the flow of it. :O)

I'm not scary -- how depressing is that?

I took the test and all illusions about the Horror-Schwab (for teaching purposes, that is) are gone, destroyed, trampled to dust:

You Are Not Scary

Everyone loves you. Isn't that sweet?

How Scary Are You?

Some More Musings (please note the alliteration!): The Trouble with Cats

I share a flat with three cats. And since I'm the only one who leaves the flat on a regular basis, the cats spend more time there than I do. And I strongly suspect that as a consequence the cats think they graciously allow me to live with them instead of vice versa. So each evening, I have this fight with my oldest cat about who is allowed to sit on the swivel chair. I usually end up perching on the edge of that thing with my cat lying behind me and being miffed at having to share. You gotta love 'em! :O)

Musings on the First Day of Winter

Yes, indeed, winter has reached Germany. It's bitter cold today so I had to dug out the scarf and the gloves. A perfect day to spend sitting in front of the heater with a mug of hot cocoa and a good book. :)

No f, f, a (see? I told you: it's all due to the big pond in the backyard!) or h (hate h's -- especially when stepping onto/into one of them -- bah!). But I got an em! Things remain interesting, my dears.

Now I'm tottering off to see what I can do about that mug of cocoa. :O)

Happy Birthday, Tortoise Harriet!

Yesterday Tortoise Harriet celebrated her 175th birthday. In 1835 Charles Darwin took Harriet from the Galapagos islands to Britain, when she was just 5 years old (probably still a baby in turtle-terms). Harriet now lives in the zoo in Brisbane, Australia.

If you want to learn more about Harriet, click here.

(Oh, and perhaps somebody could tell me what the heck the difference is between a turtle and a tortoise.)

Today is the Day ...

... the Day of E-Mails from across the Big Pond. And I'm so excited as if it were Christmas. :O)

3:00 p.m. will see me glued to my 'puter, and I won't budge an inch except in cases of fire, floodding or aliens landing in our backyard.

Good Evening, Blogging World! :O)

Thanks to a change of plans, I was able to finish the proposal today (instead of tomorrow) and have already sent it off. I'm afraid the synopsis reads like something written by the Mad Hatter. (I've always been very, very bad at summarizing books. I'm even worse when it comes to my own stories.) I hope my three chapters (and Sebastian's charming freckles) will make up for it. :O)

So now I can flop down in front of the telly ...

... actually, I really should start using that wriggle-your-butt stepper again ...

... hmmm ...

Good Morning Blogging World!

My current amazon.co.uk sales rank is 5973. (Don't you think that's odd? I mean, wouldn't you have expected something like 5922 or 6004? And not exactly the same number again? Decidedly odd, if you ask me.)

I am to wrap up the third chapter of BEWITCHED over the weekend and hand it in as a proposal. So keep your fingers crossed for Amy & Sebastian! :O)

I'm bored

I conquered the mountain of dishes and polished my fridge and rearranged the fridge poetry. The dust wombats are still alive, the pile of laundry still lounging in my bedroom. No news from across the big pond yet. My amazon.co.uk sales rank is 5973.

The fridge poetry is a bit depressing because I've got only the "love poetry" set which means that there're lots of "stars", "sunshine", "yearning", "tears", "sorrow" and "love" -- and all resulting poems sound slightly sappy or cheesy. But since this was the only fridge poetry set I could get ... *shrug*

Here's one of these outbursts of genius on stainless steel:

goddess of love

entwined

with

moonlight and mystery

in all eternity

A Day for ... Doing Housework *sigh-sigh-sigh*

Yes, it's time again to prepare for battle with the dust wombats, attack the mountains of dishes beneath the sink, dive into the pile of laundry which needs to be folded, and seek a way through the paper jungle growing under my desk.

Do you think I'll hear from NY today?

PPS

Exactly ten years (and a day) ago Matthew Bourne's SWAN LAKE premiered at Sadler's Wells in London.

Some of you might already know that I simply adore this ballet: it's poignant and sexy, with the swans all danced by men (in white feather trousers and white-powdered torsos). Bourne's leather-clad and crop-swinging Stranger in Act III is a wonderful study, indeed almost a parody, of the alpha-male (women instantly succumb to his ... er ... charms and men behave like bunny rabbits around him). Act IV is so beautiful it brought tears to my eyes just to see the swans emerging from under the bed and through the walls. And I swear, even today I still cry buckets whenever I see the ending, the cruel killing of the Swan and the death of the prince.

Bourne's SWAN LAKE helped me to keep my sanity (haha!) in the time before my final oral exams. It's a show that makes laugh and makes cry, that makes me hold my breath and sigh in appreciation. In one word, it's wonderful! So ...

Happy anniversary, SWAN LAKE!

PS

No news yet from NY. :O(

No new diary up on adamcooper.com. :O(

Current sales rank at amazon.co.uk: 5288. Truly, I love amazon.co.uk. They never fail to give me a warm, fuzzy feeling. :O)

A Day for .... Marking Papers *sigh*

Today I'm good and continue marking my students' research papers. Just another 200 pages or so. Written in Times New Roman. Splendid. I dearly love researching and teaching, but correcting exams or papers I don't like at all. Especially when there are so many of them!

But in between papers, I'm sneaking in some time with Amy and Sebastian. :O) By now, my muse has quite overcome me: last night it woke me up and forced me to type another scene in my Alpha Smart. While I sat freezing in my bed. Have you ever tried to huddle beneath your duvet and keep your arms and shoulders warm while simultaneously typing? Haha!

All righty, the next paper beckons ...

The Thing About Big Maps That Dangle From Blackboards

Today was my first day of teaching in the new semester. It's always a bit daunting to step in front of a brandnew course, especially if said course consists of 47 people. (Yes, that's right. 47. At other places that's considered a lecture.)

The other bad thing about this course is that it starts with a geography lesson. Now, don't get me wrong: there are maps I actually adore. Like my printed-out-and-glued-together Greenwood's Map of London from 1827. Very lovely map this. But dangle a LARGE map from a blackboard and put me in front of it and I'm totally, irrevocably lost. Especially after stepping away from that blasted thing for a moment. Next thing I knew was me searching for the stupid Cambrian Mountains in central Wales -- and they had disappeared! No mountains on the map.

Crap.

Until somebody shouted from the back: "Wrong island!"

HOW EMBARRASSING IS THAT?????

It's not as if I couldn't normally distinguish between Wales and Ireland, oh no! (After all, I lived in the latter for eight wet, stormy months, thank you very much!) But standing in front of that map ... well, everything just sort of blurred to one big blob of land. I've always hated those big maps. Now you know why.

A WONDERFUL Day!!!!

Today when I arrived at uni, I found a parcel from the US in my pigeon hole: my first present from a reader! To say I was thrilled would be the understatement of the year! I was running around with the biggest smile ever for the rest of the day and probably got on everybody else's nerves because I just couldn't help telling everybody about my lovely present (two gorgeous bookmarks). :O) And I'm still totally excited and happy and can hardly believe this is all happening to me.

I'm such a lucky girl.

Sunday Musings

Not much time to smooch with the muse today. Instead I wrote an article on Holland House for the German romance magazine LoveLetter (http://www.loveletter-magazin.de/). They'll do a Regency special in December, so this is a nice opportunity to do some more promo for THE LILY BRAND. :O)

On Notebooks

I love notebooks. No, I'm positively addicted to notebooks! For years, I used to write my stories into notebooks of various sizes: big ones for the novels, smaller ones for poems and short stories. I celebrated the beginning of each new poem-&-short-story notebook by spending a lot of time choosing a motto or a poem (by somebody else) to go on the first page. And on the last few pages I always included a table of contents and yet another poem (again by somebody else).

I no longer write as much poems as I used to, and of course, I eventually (i.e. when I found out that typing 700 handwritten pages is rather boring indeed) started to type my novels into the 'puter straight away. So, no more excuses to buy notebooks.

But this morning, when the muse overcame me while I was feeding the kitties and I sat down on the kitchen chair and started to scribble on some loose paper, I thought how absolutely lovely it would be to have a notebook to accompany my novels. A notebook to jot down the synopsis and character drafts. To write outlines for later chapters. To take notes of research tidbits.

Since I was absolutely thrilled by the whole idea, I went into my study and rummaged through my "writing cupboard", where I keep all my old notebooks, my collection of (mostly German) rejection letters (but I've also got one signed by Marion Zimmer Bradley -- cool, isn't it?), and all the books from the 19th century I need for my research. Oh yes, and there is also a pile of yet unused, virginal notebooks. Unfortunately, none quite fitted the purpose I had in mind. So what should a girl do in this case? Of course: go out and buy a new notebook!

I found some really beautiful ones (by http://www.paperblanks.com/), which are made to resemble old books. Oooooh, so lovely!

So my muse and I are quite happy this evening! :O)

What I love ...

... are packages containing books! Today I got a package with THE LONDON ENCYCLOPEDIA, ed. by Ben Weinrebrand and Christopher Hibbert. Though we have the book at our university library, it's so much neater to have it here on my own bookshelf. :O)

Unfortunately, it seems I'm running out of bookshelf space.

Again.

After just one year of living in the new flat.

Duh.

Evening Chit-Chat

Today I wanted to be good and just write for about 2 hours before cleaning my flat. And mentally preparing myself for going back to teach next week.

Well ....

I took my Alpha Smart (the writing thingy, not the car ;-P ), sat down at my dining table just as the sun miracously peered out from behind the blanket of clouds, and started to write. And suddenly there was this slurping sound - tchurrrrrrrrrr - and just like that the story had sucked me up. And so I continued scribbling away for more or less the whole day. And was LUVVING it! *LOL*

I'm currently in the third chapter, which will mark the end of the exposition: unbeknown to the protagonists, evil will have raised its ghastly head to threaten their existence. At the moment though, I'm still working on the second meeting of Amy & Sebastian. I wanted to describe his attire a little, but when I was thumbing through my fashion books, I had to realize that most pictures are of women's dresses, and only few or none at all of male clothes. Gargh! So I had to improvise a little (a waistcoat shot with crimson probably wouldn't have looked that good with the red hair). So here's a little snippet with some male clothes:

"Don't tell me you're already bored, Miss Bourne?"
Her head snapped around. Blue-grey eyes regarded her intently beneath arched cinnamon brows.
Her own brows shot up in surprise. "Mr." -- Carrot. -- "Stapleton."
"Miss Bourne." He inclined his head and the candlelight ran a fiery path over his hair. When he straightened, she noticed how his dark brown coat accentuated the breadth of his shoulders. A golden floral pattern gleamed on the black waistcoat beneath.
Very stylish.

I GOT MAIL!!!!!

Hooray! My agent e-mailed me to say that a) I understood the option clause in my last contract correctly, and b) that she's halfway through the ms and loving it! LOVING it!!!! And now I'm sitting in front of my 'puter and am bawling my eyes out because of sheer relief.

Now how am I supposed to sleep tonight?

This & that

In the wee hours of Monday morning I had a blast at Witchy's Halloween Masquerade over at the Mystic Castle. It was a chat and everybody came in disguise; whenever an author entered, the people present could ask her questions and whoever revealed the author's identity, got a prize. I came as Buffy the Vampire Slayer. :) Unfortunately I could only stay for about half an hour, because I was so tired I was about to fall face first onto my keyboard. But --- oh, what fun it was!

Remember about the chat I had in September? The transcript is now available at http://www.themysticcastle.com : Just go to the Authors' Nook and search for the transcripts. -- Enjoy!

Quaint Secondary Characters

Writing the third chapter of BEWITCHED yesterday, I was struck again by how much I like creating strange secondary characters. It seems I've got a special fondness for the absurd, and indeed one of the things I absolutely adore about researching Regency life is finding out about people's eccentricities.

So my hero got stuck with an ancient butler/valet with a terrible lisp:

"Thur?" Hobbes shuffled into the study-cum-library. The trusty valet, his cheeks hollow, his tufty hair carefully combed across his balding head, looked as if he had been born at the dawn of the last century. The breath rattled in his chest, giving the impression he was about to perish on the spot.

(The "thur" I took from Pratchett's Igors. I just couldn't resist; the tempation proved to be too much *g*)

Goodbyes

Today I said goodbye to the house where my family lived since I was ten. In a few days' time it'll be sold and I'll never enter it again. So today I cried a little for the child I had been, but all in all, I can't say I'm sad to let the house go. As my Mum said, it holds too many bad memories. Too many ghosts to haunt one's dreams. I still remember the day we moved in, the day the furniture was brought up north all the way from the Black Forest. There were long traffic jams on the motorways that day, so the furniture and my parents were late. I remember sitting on the wooden stairs in my room and reading Oliver Twist. I loved these wooden steps, that part of my room high up under the room, from where you could see the planes rise into the sky from Frankfurt Airport. I was filled with so many hopes and dreams that day – most of which were shattered in the following years. They say that your childhood and youth is the best time of your life. Yet I would never want to relive that time again. There's a reason why I'll never ever go to a class reunion. And it isn't as if the teachers didn't like me. But then, they never helped me either, did they? So many shattered dreams, a child robbed of its childhood. There isn't much of human pettiness that can shock me today. And yet, when I walked through that house today, that empty shell of a past life, I realized I've finally slipped away from that past. Of course, it will never go away, it will always be part of me, but it did not destroy me. Instead it made me stronger. It taught me to stand up for myself. To fight viciously when there's the need. Nice and harmless, but might get vicious when crossed, that's me. *g* I am no longer that sad and lonely child. The past no longer holds me in its thrall. I have finally come into my own.

And so I went home with a smile. :O)

Wednesday P.S.: Interesting Things My New Characters Did

In a flashback the heroine ended up covered with blobs of frog remains.

Somehow I suspect that reading Terry Pratchett has ruined me for writing further dark, dark, DARK romances like TLB. Even though BEWITCHING will have its dark moments, too! (And the hero'll end up with a dagger or a sword or something sticking in his shoulder. That's pretty dark, right?) (But, hey, it's better than letting mountains drop on your protagonists like some -- of my favourite -- authors are fond of doing. *ggg*)

Among the things I hate most ...

... is waiting. Waiting sucks. At the moment I'm waiting to hear from either my agent or my editor to hear

A) whether they survived reading the erstwhile Dratted WIP (my editor went on vacation last week; he probably found the reading experience so ghastly, he urgently needed some rest afterwards)

and

B) whether they like it. Or whether they at least think it would be possible to transform it into something they could like.

*sigh*

But I'm not twiddling my thumbs, no-no, I'm preparing a Christmas surprise for my readers. :O) So do you know any bookshop near you which carried (or still carries -- let's be optimistic) THE LILY BRAND and would like to receive some promo material? Then drop me a wee mail and let me know!

Oh yes, and of course, the semester at uni has started again. So it's back to teaching for me (5000 years of British history in 9 lessons. Hooray!) (At least I don't have to take that end-of-term exam -- hehe)

Hugs and smooches to all the faithful readers of my lovely pink blog! *mmmwah*

Anniversaries

On 14 October it's been a year since I went for my first contract with Dorch. Already a year that I'm a published author.

And I still can hardly believe it. :O)

Building Characters

Writing the first chapter of a new novel, the exposition where you introduce the main characters and the lay the groundwork for the main conflict, is always something very exciting. For you don't just introduce the characters to the reader, you introduce them to yourself. Before you sit down to write, you might already have some idea of the hero and the heroine, but only during the writing they become fully fleshed-out characters. At the beginning you never quite know how they're going to turn out (might I remind you of the heroine of the dratted WIP? the heroine who ended up holding a knife? yes, that's exactly the sort of unpredictability I'm talking about!).

Normally I don't work with pictures of movie stars. That's why I usually find questions like "Which actor would you like to see in the role of this and that character from this and that book?" so difficult: I can't say because that's not the way I imagine books -- neither my own nor other people's. The characters come onto the stage as themselves. Sometimes as manga characters, but still, as themselves.

With BEWITCHED it's different: this time I started with pictures of Annett Louisan, a German singer (on her website you can find sound samples; my favourite songs from Bohème are "Das Spiel" -- The Game --, "Das Gefühl" -- The Feeling --, and "Das Liebeslied" -- The Love Song), and Eric Stoltz, the film star, -- and voilà -- Amy and Sebastian were born. :O)

On Tuesday I Got Mail

A package to be precise.

What's so cool about writing for academia? You'll get author copies of books waaaaay to expensive to buy! For example, today's wonderful package (Don't you just love getting parcels and packages and such? It's a bit like Christmas!) contained the Greenwood Encyclopedia of Science Fiction and Fantasy in 3 volumes, which normally costs about $ 350. I got it for free because I contributed two articles: one on dragons, another on Peter S. Beagle's THE LAST UNICORN (which is, btw, a truly wonderful book, in case you haven't read it yet or just know the film). Apart from these academic marvels (hehe), the encyclopedia is beautifully layouted, has got lovely covers and the foreword is written by Neil Gaiman. Gary Westfahl, the editor, did an awesome job coordinating and editing 600 entries from 150 contributors. I am so, so happy I was able to be part of this project!

Fridge Poetry

Since Friday I'm the proud owner of a box of magnets for fridge poetry. And quite fittingly, the theme of that box is "Love Poetry". Cool, isn't it: romance author own box for love fridge poetry! Never mind, the results so far have been either really, really cheesy or very, very whiny (and cheesy) OR rather dada (because of missing words). It's so much fun! And confuses the cats. *g* Hehe.

So here comes fridge poem No 1. for your amusement:

Roses blush

armorous whisper

at a rainbow

(Don't say I didn't warn you!)

The Last of the Week

This morning I got a real big scare: stepped on my scales -- and nearly dropped dead: 70 kilos. SEVENTY!!!! AAAAAAAARGH!!!! Six kilos in one week, just because I've eaten a kilo of gingerbread?!?!?! (Well, it might have been more than a kilo) (Oh yes, and there were some cookies, too, if memory serves right) How unfair is that? I mean, this couldn't be happening, right? Not after I spent the last eight weeks in writing hell! I mean, I deserved that gingerbread! Yes, I did! And fate couldn't really be so cruel as to give me six more kilos of fat just because of the gingerbread! Argh!

Terrible tearing at hair ensued plus spontaneous decision to start exercising again. Put TaeBo cassette into the VHR -- VHR is no longer working. Argh! Argh! More panic! Dragged stepper (the one where you don't just step up and down, but also wriggle your butt and hopefully gain gracefully thin waist, shapely thighs and firmest butt in the universe in a jiffy) (haha!) in front of the TV and wriggled butt for 10 minutes or so. After 10 minutes the TV programme turns really bad. And who wants to step wriggling butt while watching the most horrid shows/films/what not imaginable??? Besides, I hadn't had breakfast yet.

Still, beside my first babystep towards shapely butt, the 70 kilos continue to bother me. Like, LOTS. Fortunately, my parents don't live far away so I could go and try out their scales (while my mother was out visiting my greataunt) (of course, you don't step on scales when your mother is somewhere nearby and might comment on your weight! Thank you. No.) And lo and behold! it turned out my scales are broken! Yeah! Great relief! *big smile*

~*~

I started reading the manga of HOWL'S MOVING CASTLE today and I'm totally loving it. It's fully colored and allows you to enjoy the imgages from the film once again. Lovely!

I hope I'll get to update my homepage tomorrow. At least post the new contest. When you're a computer daftie, everything seems just a little bit more complicated. Ah well ...

Saturday Musings

A week has passed since the horrid deadline for the even more horrid WIP and after eating a at least a kilo of gingerbread in the past seven days, I'm slowly back to my normal self. I.e., still panicky, but no more headless-chicken-routine. But somewhat fatter than a week ago. Well, that can't be helped really. (Oh the sacrifices we make for our art!) (Perhaps you could imagine some suitably dramatic background music at this point. *g*)

As I said before, I'm working at putting together a German website. I had almost finished it today and triumphantly clicked the "Write HTML" button of my homepage-building-for-dummies programme -- and as a result it ripped my lovely homepage apart. All tables I had in there ruined in strange and mysterious ways. I am sooooohoooo frustrated!!!! ARGH!

Things I Found Out on Monday

Two years ago I went to London with my Dad (the father-daughter-bonding trip) and dragged the poor man up and down St. James's Street (Little Sandy: "Oh, look, that building down there looks exactly like St. James's Palace." -- Some moments pass. -- "Oh, that is St. James's Palace.") (Have I mentioned I've never been really that good in geography?). The main aim of walking up and down St. James's Street, however, was not finding out it leads to St. James's Palace, but looking at the gentlemen's clubs. All the old, famous London clubs can be found in this street, which accounts for the fact that during the Regency no gently bred woman would be seen driving or walking through St. James's St.

One of the most famous clubs there is White's. In the days of the Regency, Beau Brummell held court in the so-called Bow Window, which used to be the former entrance. And if you've read THE LILY BRAND, you'll know that the scene in which Troy meets the queer Lord Dudlin and later on confronts his cousin takes place in White's.

So, dragging my Dad up and down St. James's St. was research. And I took many pictures. Especially of White's. And of the famous Bow Window. Unfortunately, though, there're no doorplates or such which would tell you the stupid names of the stupid clubs. So you sort of have to figure it out on your own and with the help of your guidebook (which is not very specific, though, and includes only photo, which you somehow don't notice anyway because you're so excited). So, imagine geographically challenged, totally excited Sandy running up and down that stupid street, taking umpteen pictures, and grinning inanely -- and then, when she finally prepares the pics for putting on her website, she realizes she took pictures of the wrong club. And the house she thought was White's, is, in fact, Brooks's Club. Talk about being embrassed... *blush*

I must be the biggest glutton for punishment EVER

Guess what I did today (after eating a whole box of Lebkuchen and then worrying about how fat that's going to make me): I started a new WIP.

Yes, indeed, I started a new WIP.

I wrote seven pages and I totally enjoyed myself. I must be a bit of a hare-brained dodo. *g*

Oh, and I also started working on a German version of my website. I found a lovely design and now just need to write a bit of text to go along with it.

Website Contest

Hi everybody,

my book-launch-July-to-September contest is now closed. The winner of the "Escape to Britain" basket is Kim Westgaard.

Herzlichen Glückwunsch, Kim!!!!

In the course of the next few days -- as soon as I'm feeling like a normal human being again, that is -- I'll see to it that my website is updated and the details of the October contest are posted. This month's prize will be a new recording (i.e. minus the death of the overhead projector in the original recording) of the "Holland House" workshop I gave at the RWA conference in Reno -- that'll be your chance to find out what's fact behind the fiction of the Holland House dinner party in THE LILY BRAND

The Morning After

All right, so now it's official: no 12-hour orgasms for me, but 12-hour headaches. Hey, but at least the teeth don't hurt any longer!

Will spend today cleaning the flat and conquering the mountains of dishes that have mysteriously grown in my kitchen.

Will buy that box of Lebkuchen.

But what's better than chocolate or even Lebkuchen? The Adam Cooper Calendar 2006! yeah! That's what I bought just now -- for purely inspirational purposes, you understand. ;O)

Still no 12-hour orgasm in sight

... but I've found that those toothpains I've had for the past two days are due to tensions in the jaw and me pressing my tongue against the front teeth.

BTW, I threw out the scene where the heroine is holding a knife to somebody else's throat. I thought that was a bit extreme for that book. But to make up for it, my next heroine is going to stick a dagger or a sword or something like that into the villain.

And tomorrow I'm going to buy a big, HUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUGE box of Lebkuchen (that's German gingerbread) and will spend the weekend munching Lebkuchen and watching all the GUARDIAN episodes I missed this week.

Hey, and perhaps, who knows? on Monday I might even start the next book *g*

Where is that %$&§"§ 12-hour orgasm????

What the heck is she doing here again, you might wonder. Well, it's been an hour since I sent that manuscript off.

I fed the cats.

I killed the dust wombats that had taken over my flat.

I ate a bit of chocolate.

And by now I'm utterly convinced that I've written the worst story that was ever written. EVER. Even a dinosaur would have written a better story than I did! It's got no conflict, the hero's a dolt, the heroine a hysterical chicken. And it'll be my fault if my poor editor drops dead with boredom when he reads that manuscript. Or perhaps he'll just run away screaming when he sees me at the next RWA conference.

I'm off to eat more choclate....

It's done!!!

I've just sent the dratted WIP to my agent. (Did I mention I had some nightmares about this on Tuesday?) And I feel like something really heavy has dropped onto my head. Really, really heavy.

And while Elizabeth Bevarly mentioned on Squawk Radio that she's having 12-hour long orgasms after mailing her manuscript, the only thing I feel coming is a migraine. Splendid.

And I don't feel elated either.

I feel horrid.

Because now two people will read that dratted WIP and they will know what a fraud I am. ("Uhm-hm, Chapters 1-10 aren't bad, that 30-page love scene in Chapters 20 and 21 is rather unusual and wonderful -- but horrible things were done to the rest????") AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAARGH!!!!!!

I'm off to eat chocolate.

Deadline about to whack author over the head

All I say is:

T O M O R R O W

*gulp*

I FINISHED THE FIRST DRAFT OF THE DRATTED WIP!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Hooray! I did it! I did it! I did it! I just wrote the last few words of the first draft.

Okay, so that last transition is ... awkward, to put it mildly, and at the moment I'm thinking I've managed to let the whole story unravel, and how the heck shall I manage to hammer it into shape in just a week???

But still ... *taking a deep breath*

I finished the first draft!!!!!!!!

'nother Update

The wedding is over, we've hunted down the Christmas tree -- on we go to decorate it! Yeah, three cheers, there's indeed a light at the end of the tunnel! Hey, AND the last scene I'm going to write is a kiss scene. Now, isn't that nice?

hugs & kisses
from one very happy author,
off to feed the kitties :o)

Only One More Hole to Close in the Fabric of Story

Okay, so it's a BIG hole: marriage and hunting for a Christmas tree and then everything else until the heroine crushes her finger in the library door in the following year (Note: Silvana, at least I'm not letting a mountain crush on heroine's head as some other authors frequently do! *ggg*) And I have to say the story has developed in a slightly different fashion than I had planned. It seems that THE LILY BRAND was a bit too dark for my subconscious, which then proceeded to shoot my gothic aspirations to pieces. Well ... there's some gothicness left. And there's some mention of the devil -- in the disguise of a little man in grey --, of hell (that's what Nifelheim is!), and of eerie wooden masks. There's a bat, too. And rats! But unfortunately that's where the difficulties start because one of the secondary characters has sturdy boots and stomps the rats to death. Which in turn makes the butler turn green. You see what I mean? How can you uphold the gothicness of your story when your characters come equipped with stury boots???

I've also started to think about some nice catchphrase for promotional purposes (yeah, you'd think I'd have enough on my plate with only five more days left to hammer a manuscript into shape). I've already got a very nice catchphrase for the next WIP, but for this? Duh. So far I've come up with:

"Nothing but her light matched against his darkness
to redeem the beast" (has no nice ring to it)

OR

"All she wants is a new life --
but she finds herself caught up in his darkness.
Will her light be enough to redeem the beast?" (better than the first, but again, no nice ring and furthermore much too long)

OR perhaps

"All she wants is a new life --
and finds herself caught up in his darkness.
Will her light be enough to redeem the beast?" (Oh, that's most definitely better, isn't it?)

All right, 'nuff played. It's back to smooching the muse. :O)

The Muse Relented ...

... and gave me a little boost last night. Unfortunately, by that time I was just too tired for a smooching party. Never mind, we're having a little thing going on today. *g* And I'm doing funny translations like

Up rose Odin,

the old hero,

and saddled

Sleipnir.

Down he rode

to Nifelheim.

Now I just have to find out what "Nifelheim" is supposed to be in English... Or what Nifelheim is. :O)

The Muse Is Sulking

Apparently she didn't like the part where I enthused about other people's muses. Duh. So the writing went lousy today, plus I ran into yet another problem with my plot; this time it concerns the time frame. Did people still keep strict lent in the early 19th century? Will people hate me if I let my protagonists make love during lent? Or perhaps I shouldn't make them Catholic after all? Of course this would mean that my wonderful Palm Sunday procession would have to go. And if she wasn't Catholic, would Cissy know about the Angelus chiming at noon? Will readers know what the Angelus is??? ARGH! Writing fantasy is so much easier!

Will I ever finish this dratted book and keep my sanity? Will anybody like the finished book? Will I be able to sell it?

Can I just hand in the beginning and the wonderful love scene so the readers can put in the rest themselves? The interactive book ... what a neat idea!

*sigh*

Stay tuned for further news of Sandy's descent into sheer madness.

62 More Pages To Go!

Or something. It's probably going to be more. So can start worrying about having to cut stuff. That'll be a nice change from worrying about whether I'm going to make it or not. Considering that this deadline is SELF-IMPOSED, this is all so ridiculous! Why did I tell people when exactly I would hand something in??? Argh! *banging head on the table* Apart from the general getting-the-manuscript-together worrying, I also worry that both my editor and my brandnew agent will think I'm not just a total bumpkin but also totally unprofessional. Argh! I mean, what do I know about proper author-editor relations? Or about proper author-agent relations? I usually just barge happily in and hope somebody will take pity on me and everything will turn out all right. Argh! Argh! Argh! *banging head on table some more*

It's a funny thing, this worrying bit: it never seems to stop. When you go and read other authors' blogs or to talk to other writers, you'll soon find out that they all worry about their WIPs and their careers. Even if they are multi-published. Even if their names regularily appears on bestseller lists: the worrying seems to never stop. How very depressing.

Still, I've got only about 60 more pages to write! And I'm tentatively hopeful I'll manage to pull everything together, though it will certainly different from what I thought it would become. For one thing, it has somehow become a book on stories -- which is somewhat reminiscent of Pratchett: "People think that stories are shaped by people. In fact, it's the other way around." Only Pratchett would have probably put a steamer full of tourists with funny white hats on the Rhine and have them (the tourists, not the hats) erupt into cheerful song at an appropriate moment. Which would translate into singing the famous Lorelei-song while going past the Lorelei. I was tempted, I have to admit, but in the end I refrained from writing that. But hey, perhaps I'll think about the alien invasion! *LOL*

Have a good night everybody!

Inspiration struck ...

... in a rather too literal sense of the word for my liking! You know, other people's muses are these gracious beings who gently spread inspiration as soon as some candles are lit or some nice, soothing music is played. My muse thinks it's great fun to bang the window shut -- with my finger inbetween the window and the frame. And we're not talking about your normal-sized window here, oh no! We're talking about a giant, heavy, metal-framed monster of a swinging window! So, last evening, while my finger throbbed and bled a little, while my blood sagged to my feet and I had to lie down gasping on the yucky, old grey carpet in my office, my muse got it into her head that this was a great opportunity to hand out inspiration. Wonderful! I thought I might faint any minute and my muse wants to have a smooching party.

So you can already guess what's going to happen to my poor heroine, can't you? Though, in her case I'll probably use a door instead of a swinging window (a little bit hard to come by in a derelict castle, these ...). Which will give my hero opportunity to display some tender, loving care. Yeah!

As to his heroicness -- chopping down a tree is a fabulous idea, Adair: he'll have to chop down a Christmas tree (good thing, the story is set in the Black Forest, eh? So they can have a Christmas tree! Which otherwise wouldn't be possible in a normal Regency-set historical!), and Dorie, yes, he's going to save the heroine, too: think carnival, think drunken ruffians. And while this might be terribly clichéd, my ruffians will at least wear carnival masks! Ha!

I'm off now. My muse still wants to have that smooching party ... :O)

Only 89 more pages to go!

Yes, yes, yes! Finally, I'm getting there: towards the end of the dratted WIP (which, by the way, stands for "work in progress" -- just in case you wondered). Last night I reached a total page count of 311. *beaming smile*

Unfortunately, last night also saw another character of mine freaking out. This time it was my heroine, who suddenly developed these rather surprising new characteristics and ended up holding a knife against somebody else's throat (no, it wasn't the hero's throat) (hey, that's at least something!). Hmm. Which brought me back to a problem I already had with THE LILY BRAND: it seems that I've got this small tendency to unman my heroes. Thus, my unfortunate heroes get tied to boulders (while the heroine saves the day) or fall down stairs / off horses (while the heroine saves the day). Which is, of course, a bit of a problem, because by definition the hero in romance is supposed to be tall, dark, dangerous and saving the day (as well as the heroine). Have you ever tried saving the day while tied to a boulder? See? BIG PROBLEM! Duh.

Thus, during revisions, one thing I need to do is making the hero more heroic. Since he doesn't save the day (see boulder-problem above), new scenes have to be created to allow the hero to prove his heroicness (which explains why Troy had a bit of a rough ride when trying to get the doctor: crossing dangerous rivers on horseback is, apparently, an appropriate test of manliness) (something like slaying a dragon, only you can't have your hero slay a real dragon in an otherwise normal Regency-set historical romance) (by the same token you can't end your story in exasperation on page 200 by having aliens abduct your Regency protagonists. This is considered to be a big No-No!).

So now I'll need to think of something heroic for Fenris to do. I'm sure something will come to my mind eventually.

If not, I might try the "UFO-dropped-on-castle" approach after all. *G*

Thursday Afternoon/Evening Chat

Please join me for a chat at The Mystic Castle

on Thursday, 8 September, at 2 p.m. EST.

I'm totally thrilled about this opportunity to "meet" some of my readers, and I hope I'll see many of you there! I'm looking forward to it! :O)

Free Plotting

During the last few days I indulged in a bit of what I call "free plotting." What the heck is that, you will ask? Well, it's very simple: you just move along with the flow and let the scene carry you where-ever it wants to. There's no prior plan; the scene enfolds "naturally", like a blossom (now, isn't that cheesy *g*). And I love it! Yeah! (So there is indeed still hope for the WIP!) (At this point feel free to cheer and throw confetti.)

Today I worked at a wet-and-naked-hero scene. This was a homework from my crit group, and I have to thank Jen (who's queen when it comes to thinking of new homework) (and not just then! :O) ) for this very inspiring exercise which turned into a fully fledged scene. (Yup, there's another "Yeah!" coming. Throw more confetti, if you like.) Well, and since Dorie asked for more Wolfenbach ... Enjoy!

~*~~*~~*~~*~

The set-up: Cissy married Fenris, but didn't get a wedding night (uhm, yes, my heroines tend to be rather unlucky in that respect ...). After a few months she is thoroughly sick of the situation and decides to take action. Here we see her putting Step 1 of her plan into action: Getting Hold of Your Husband. After Fenris has just come home from a ride, Cissy marches upstairs to his room. She knocks, nobody answers, and she decides to go exploring ....

Cissy tiptoed fully into the room and closed the door behind her to shut out any witnesses of her indiscretion. Though what witnesses there might be in an almost deserted castle was anybody's guess.

The door screeched in protest.

Drat! She closed her eyes.

"Johann, is that you?" came the muffled voice of her husband from the other room amidst more splashing of water.

She grimaced. No, not exactly. She opened her eyes again, rubbed her nose. Courage, Celia. Courage.

She crept forward, toward the intriguing doorway.

Another step ... and another ... around the bed ... My, wasn't it large!

Shivering a little, Cissy thought of the intriguing possibilities a large bed provided.

Hastily, she took another step forward and came to an abrupt halt in the doorway. Her mouth fell open. Her right hand reached up and covered her frantically thumping heart. Her lips formed a soundless O.

For in front of her, her husband stood with his back turned towards her and all he was wearing were his tight moleskin riding trousers. Muscles bunched and flowed in his shoulders and back as he sponged himself down. His skin glistened wetly, while sweat and dust still clogged his hair. Only at the nape, the strands lay damply against the skin.

Utterly fascinated, Cissy watched how a drop of water fell onto a shoulder blade. For a moment it hovered there like a tiny diamond, then Fenris moved, his muscles rippled, and the waterdrop slid down towards the grove of his backbone, gained momentum, swept along tiny drops clinging to his skin, slithered down and down and -- disappeared under the waistband of his trousers.

Cissy drew in a much needed breath of air. Oh my!

"Johann?"

Starting wildy, she couldn't prevent a tiny squeak to escape her.

Fenris's head snapped around. Green eyes widened.

Nervously, she lifted her hand and wriggled her fingers in what she hoped looked like a friendly wave. "Uhm. It's me," she croaked.

(Excerpt from working title THE CASTLE OF WOLFENBACH by Sandra Schwab. Copyright 2005. All rights reserved.)

Howl's Moving Castle

I've just returned home from a lovely afternoon spent at a nearby shopping mall and watching HOWL'S MOVING CASTLE at the cinema. I went to be enchanted and I was not disappointed: it is a truly lovely, magical film, and while I didn't really like young Sophie's German voice, I instantly fell in love with Hauru. *big sigh* HOWL'S MOVING CASTLE is the story of Sophie, who seems destined for a boring life as a hatter, until the Witch of the Waste arrives on her doorstep and transforms her into an old woman. Sophie leaves home and ends up as a cleaner in Hauru's moving castle, which from the inside resembles very much a pigsty before Sophie takes things in hand. And very quickly it becomes clear that the witch's curse is in fact the best that could have happened to Sophie! For suddenly, her life is adventurous! She becomes friends with a scarecrow, a fire demon, becomes embroiled in politics, and all the while tries to find out the secret of Hauru's as well as of her own curse.

For more info on Hayao Miyazaki, have a look at the fansite Nausicaa.net, where you can find info on all Studio Ghibli films, including my favourites, TONARI NO TOTORO and WHISPER OF THE HEART. Happy browsing!

Late Night Chatter

You'll be happy to hear that my heroine still hasn't run away with the stableboy. (Well, truth be told, I don't take any chances: so far there simply is no stableboy in the story. Hehe.) But remember what I told you about scenes that refuse to develop according to plan? So today my hero totally freaked out, went completely nuts. Argh! That wasn't planned either!!! However, I hope it'll add to his mysterious allure. Or something. The freaking out part might be John Denver's fault, though: these past two days I listened to country while writing. I've never listened to music before while writing, but "Country Roads" somehow became the theme song of the WIP, and listening to the song helps me to get into the story. Plus I've found out I simply love John Denver songs!

Building a Castle

You'll be happy to hear that so far my heroine has not yet run away with the stableboy. (Please imagine one very relieved author.) Well, I didn't give her a chance to run away with the stableboy. For today it occurred to me that I haven't yet mapped out the castle. THE main setting. And I always, always work with plans. Or maps. Or whatever comes in handy.

So today I built a castle.

And it turned out it's a rather good thing I've got this habit of buying random books which I might (or might not) need for future research. I've got books on the medieval warhorse, on colours, on Victorian shopping, dogs, wolves, snails (when I was little I had a snail -- "Schnucki" -- as a pet), Paris, underwear, tea, pirates, Celts, etc. And seven years ago I bought a book with the nice title BURGENKUNDE, a reprint of a book originally published in 1912. It's got 711 pages and it tells you everything, everything about the architecture of castles. *biiig smile*

So I built a very nice castle today!

Hooray!

Plotting and other catastrophes

Hi everybody,

from what I've written so far about the RWA conference, you might have gotten the impression that I somehow managed to collapse on Thursday evening and missed the rest of the conference. I can assure you that this is not the case. I'm just so busy trying to finish the next book, that at the moment I don't have time to report more magical Reno adventures. But never fear, I've got more to tell! :O)

But for now, let's talk about plotting.

Plotting.

Plotting a novel can be a bit tricky.

I mean, you start with this rather nice story (well, at least you yourself think it's nice), start writing it -- and then somebody tells you that the setting you've chosen is a complete and absolute no-no.

Duh. (That brought about a horrible case of mid-book blues while I was still only in the middle of chapter 3.)

Okay, then you somehow talk yourself out of the little problem with the setting. (Hey, it's the BLACK FOREST! I mean, it's romantic, it's gothic, it totally FITS the story! Ha!) (Besides, people seem to really like the idea.) So you happily go on writing -- and bam! the next scene you're working on takes a totally different turn from what you've planned.

Duh. Will you go back to rewrite it? Or will you go on with the flow?

You spend the next few days ... uhm ... weeks debating this issue with yourself.

So you decide to go with the flow (as one of my friends once told me, it's a good idea to listen to your subconscious) (uhm ... did I talk about the unconscious in any earlier posts??? Drat!). You happily go on writing.

But wait! Now the other scenes you've planned don't quite fit anymore!

Argh!

You spend the next few days trying to come up with a solution to this problem.

Okay, so you've solved that particular problem -- well, in a way --, and happily go on writing. Then another round of self-doubt hits. You know, the part where you think you're the worst writer on the whole wide earth and you will never manage to finish that dratted book and it's a stupid story anyway and everybody will hate the setting and what you do to your hero isn't particularily typical for a romance either.

Duh.

You spent the next few days .... weeks eating lots of chocolate until you finally overcome this crisis, too. So you happily go on writing. Right. Then it occurs to you that one of the important secondary characters is still nameless.

Duh.

You spend a whole day leaving through your assorted books of first names in order to find a perfect name for this particular character. (No, you can't name him Alex. There was already an Alex in your last novel, if you remember!) To make things more complicated you also need a second name from Nordic mythology. You finally come up with something. It's not perfect, granted, but by that time you're desperate. So you go for Loki Leopold (Yes, I already said it's not perfect...) and happily go on writing. (At this stage, though, the "happily" part is already somewhat debatable.) Anyway, now you mentally prepare yourself for --- the marriage! Yeah! But wait! One of your protagonists is Catholic. The other Anglican. That might be a problem, right?

Sh*t!

Doesn't matter, you go on writing, for, to make matters worse, you've given yourself a totally impossible deadline, thank you very much, so you better get your butt into this chair and move your finger over the fricking keyboard! So you go on writing. And then it suddenly occurs to you -- and mind you, this happens after you've worked with this story for MONTHS! -- that your heroine is residing in the same castle as the hero -- UNCHAPERONED!!!!!

Argh! Argh! Argh!

You hit your head against the nearest wall.

And panic.

Your story has just folded down. For, of course, she cannot spend the night -- several nights, in fact -- under the same roof as the hero with just the servants present. Gargh! For of course, your lovely heroine would be immediately ruined forever after.

Argh! Argh! Argh!

You spend the next few days in a total panic.

Then in the middle of the night -- because you no longer sleep properly, of course -- inspiration strikes! Heureka! You just take that other secondary character which you dropped off in Baden-Baden on the way to the Black Forest and get her to the Black Forest, too.

Unfortunately this means that the character of your book will change slightly, for she's a rather merry secondary character, and merry secondary characters do nothing for darkness. Heck, it doesn't matter, you've set yourself this stupid deadline, remember? So what you're waiting for? Just WRITE!

You write.

Then inspiration strikes a second time: why does the heroine need to be Anglican, anyway? She's going to be Catholic and her ancestor was executed under Cromwell as a royalist. (Will make nice, bloody anecdote in novel.) (Bloody is good when you're supposed to write a dark novel.) YES! Marriage-problem happily solved!

So actually, now your problem is that deadline.

Well, at the moment.

Who knows what will happen tomorrow? Perhaps your hero drops of the tower of the castle. Or your heroine runs away with the stableboy.

*shrug*

That's plotting a novel for you.

Pictures!!!!

Here're some of my Reno pictures. Enjoy!

Posing in front of the ice sculpture before the reception.

This is the ballroom where the big booksigning was held. I've just entered and will now proceed to walk towards the wrong end of the room ...

Monday Greetings & Sandy's Reno Adventures, Part II

Hello everybody,

no, I haven't fallen off the edges of the earth – despite appearances! *g* I was just hit by a bout of delayed jetlag and afterwards by a few days of lazeritis. By then I had convinced myself once more that I'm the worst writer on this earth and that I would never finish that next book (this, in case you're interested, is called "second-bookeritis." Happens to more or less everyone. Or so I've heard. And hope. *scratching my head*), so I needed a good kick in the butt to get myself writing again. I've found out that mindmaps help me a great deal when it comes to visualizing and recognizing (!) story patterns and the use of symbols throughout the novel. So I hope I'll now get through the rest of the book without more mishaps.

Well. Have I already mentioned that my notebook went on strike? Luckily for me, I've got my wonderful AlphaSmart! So there's no excuse not to write!

As to my further adventures in Reno: on Thursday the RWA conference proper kicked off with workshops in the morning – I loved Sabrina Jeffries' "People Will Talk: Writing Snappy Dialogue"! – and the first conference meal. Now, I think, before the food arrived everybody in that ballroom was holding their breaths because most of us remembered the ghastly details about the food in Dallas (sometimes we didn't even know what we were eating!). But this year the food turned out to be rather wonderful (and included an awesome death-by-chocolate dessert!)! Yeah! It was also lovely to share again a table with my Lunch Buddies from last year, Anna and Vicki (*waving to you*)! For this first meal, Debbie Macomber gave such a moving keynote speech that she had the whole room more or less in tears (in a way it is funny to see the people around you brushing their eyes at exactly the same moment when you get this curious pricking in your eyes!).

Now, some time after lunch I had my first meeting with my editor. And of course, you want to freshen up before your first meeting with your editor, right? And brush your teeth, right? And get rid of your heavy bag that got miraculously filled with books in the course of the morning, right? Wellllll .... too bad that there was such a huge queue in front of the elevators that it would have probably taken me 15 minutes to get to my room and god knows how long to get downstairs again. By that time I probably would have been too late for the meeting. Duh. So I decided for freshening up in one of the restrooms on the upper (and now empty!) conference room level. Not the most promising start.

Eventually, though, I found Chris (we've set up a meeting in the lobby bar and the hotel turned out to have more than one lobby bar ...) (Yup, imagine little me walking agitatedly up and down the lobby). I have to admit I was slightly nervous (though thankfully, not as nervous as during the first ever lesson I taught when I must have sounded as if I'd burst into tears any moment), but Chris turned out to be one of the nicest people around, and that apart from being a pretty wonderful editor! Both of us survived this first meeting (and no, he had no blood coming out of his ears as I left him!), and for the rest of the day I kept telling people (including perfect strangers in the elevator *sigh*) that this day I had met my editor for the first time. (Moral: I get too bubbly when I'm happy or excited.)

Met my lunch buddies and we went to the bookfair together, where Vicki complained that they didn't sell my book and I found Lindt chocolates in flavors I hadn't seen before. (You see, these people from Waldenbooks who had set up the bookfair, they were soooo mean: they were selling books AND chocolate! *g*)

More chocolate at the reception in the evening, plus one gigantic ice sculpture (pic will follow soon).

So this were Sandy's Reno Adventures, the second day. Stay tuned for pics and more stories!

Cheers,
Sandy

Sandy's Magical Reno Adventure, Part 1

(at the Literacy for Life booksigning; the picture was first posted by Teresa at Squawk Radio)

Reno ... How describe the conference in Reno?

Well, first of all, you'll be happy to hear that this year I actually managed to catch my connecting flight! Yeah! (Well, after all, I had four hours to get through immigration, customs, re-check my luggage and find the correct gate.) And while marching through one of the terminals of the airport at Dallas Fort Worth, I spotted a woman wearing a tee-shirt which proclaimed: "Romance writers do it and write about it!" What does that tell your hopeful, bumbling newbie author? Yes, she was not alone! Indeed, half of the plane from Dallas to Reno was filled with romance writers, among them such big names as Julie Garwood or Sherrilyn Kenyon -- but at that point I was already too tired to appreciate the fact (and after gushing over poor Jack Zipes at the ICFA in Ft Lauderdale back in 2002, I don't do any more gushing anyway *g*). Yet I did utter some loud & delighted squeals when I spotted Vicki, one of my Lunch Buddies from last year, walking into the lounge. :O)

On we went to Reno, where already in the airport slot machines waved one-armedly at us. Yet we forsook these temptations, collected our luggage instead and drove off to the Reno Hilton (there more slot machines filled the lobby with a neverending mechanical ding-dong-click-clack-click song). My hotel room (# 977) was big and lovely, with a breathtaking view over the city to the bare, brown mountains in the background. When I called home to let my folks know I had arrived safe and sound, my Mum had just got up: it was already the next morning in Europe and I truly felt as if a ton of bricks had dropped on my head.

Next day: the Beau Monde conference! I was delighted to meet Dee (Emily Hendrickson) again, who had taken me under her wing at last year's BM tea and made sure I had a good start in Dallas. She is a darling woman! I also met Nancy Mayer for the first time. Nancy is one of the legends of our chapter: she knows more or less everything about the Regency. As you can tell from that, she's quite amazing!

In the afternoon I gave my workshop on Holland House and the Holland House circle, and the whole thing went surprisingly well (apart from the suicidal overhead projector....). Of course, it always helps if you've got a friendly and attentive audience – and that I had! So I was very happy with that workshop. Among the people attending was also my good German (and jetlagged *g*) friend Kris Alice, whom I met in Dallas last year for the first time and who's a real sweetheart. She's just launched a German romance newsletter, LoveLetter, and is doing a wonderful job with it.

After tea, the BIG EVENT OF THE DAY had arrived: the Literacy for Life booksigning! I had to visit the restrooms at least ten times, before I joined other authors to walk to the great ballroom where the signing was to be held. We passed a seemingly endless queue of people waiting for the signing to start (actually, these masses of people were a bit scary ...). The first sight of that ballroom was stunning: imagine a vast room, humming with hundreds of voices and filled with hundreds of tables, all lined up in neat rows. At these events the authors are seated in alphabetical order, yet even though, I didn't immediately find my table, but walked into the wrong direction. (Grrr. That didn't do anything to calm my nerves, let me tell you!) Finally found table. And a box of copies of THE LILY BRAND!!!!! Set up my sweets, my pen, my CDs, my bookmarks and my teaser booklets (you never know!), and waited. And then along came this tall (well, a lot taller than me, but that's no miracle, since I'm a bit on the small side) woman, waving and yelling "Sandy!" And perhaps this was the best moment of this day, for that woman was Jen aka Lady LaLa, who has accompanied me on my writing-in-English adventure from the very beginning (yes! THE Lady LaLa!!!!!). I've known her for five years, but I've never before met her in person. So this was indeed a very special moment for me.

Then the doors to the ballroom were opened – and the signing started. At first it was a bit frightening to watch all these people walk by my table. And people at such big booksigning usually don't loiter. No, they walk with purposeful steps to the tables of their favourite authors. I felt rather small and bumbling newbie-ish at first. But ... I had sold out all my books after an hour and half! Yeah! So for the next hour and half, I gave out teaser booklets. Teaser booklets are great, for you can throw them (well, not literally throw them) at unsuspecting passerbys! (And try to force one onto your publisher's former PR person, who will laugh her head off while you're trying to make the ground swallow you up. Or at least to hide under the table .... As I said: bumbling newbie author. *G*)

As you can see, my 2005-conference experience started with a bang – in more ways than one. :O)

Stay tuned for Sandy's further RWA adventures!

Reno, here I come!!!

All right, my suitcases (please note the plural) are packed, my workshop/paper is written (finished it at 1:00 a.m. Sunday morning), the transparencies all printed (did that today) (and just realized I forgot one picture. Ah well ....) (as you can probably tell I was slightly disorganized) (slightly!), hair is dyed (did that half an hour ago) (as I said, disorganized), flight tickets are in my rucksack, and for the first time since weeks ... months ... eons! ... I feel relaxed and almost human again. *g*

I packed Gaelen Foley's ONE NIGHT OF SIN for the journey -- I bought this book weeks ago, but just was too busy and nervous to read it. So now I'm going to make up for lost reading time. I'm very much looking forward to it.

There're, of course, lots of other things to look forward to: apart from the conference itself and meeting friends, there'll be the big booksigning on Wednesday afternoon. A whole ballroom filled with authors and books! And THE LILY BRAND and me among them! Yeah!

And yet another thing to look forward to: as some of you might know, last year's RWA national conference was held in Dallas -- at the same time as the annual Mary Kay meetings! Imagine a city overrun by umpteen thousand women! While this was indeed a rather fun experience and made for some interesting anecdotes, this year's conference venue's definitely going to beat Dallas and Mary Kay: there'll be MEN!

So stay tuned for an exciting conference report!

Tuesday Betthupferl

The chat tonight was lots of fun (even though I did have to get up at 2:30 a.m. in order to be awake enough at 3:00 a.m. *g*) and I really enjoyed myself (well, yes, otherwise, I wouldn't have stayed until 4:30 a.m.). So a big thank you to everybody who stopped by!

To end this day on another positive note: I've just checked my sales ranks, and at amazon.co.uk I'm down to 6,613 !!!!! Hooray!

So I'll be doing some more glowing tonight! :O)

Chat Tonight!

Hi everybody,

this evening at 9 p.m. ET there'll be a chat with me and fellow Dorch authors Sandra Hill and Liz Maverick at WriterSpace. If you've got some time and 9 p.m. ET doesn't happen to be the middle of the night for you (it is the middle of the night for me, so the chatting is bound to be interesting *g*), please feel free to come and join the fun!

See you there!

Author Competes with Glossy Cover

Just had to share this with you: This is the first pic of me and The Book, taken by Julia Zipfel, one of my students, for our departmental student newspaper (there'll be an interview with me in their next issue -- remember, when I told you about my first interview ever? Yup, that's it!) When I looked at the pic for the first time, I thought, "Uh-oh. Definitely glowing!" *LOL*

London

I'm deeply shocked and saddened by today's events, and my thoughts and prayers go to the victims and their families, but also to all people of London and Britain.

Wee Note on Tuesday Night

Ha! I've got another very nice e-mail from a reader, who stayed up almost all night to finish THE LILY BRAND! That's really the most wonderful feeling, to see how much enjoyment my book gives to readers. :O)

There's a new interview with me online at Once Upon a Romance. If you like to find out a bit more about my current WIP, that's the thing to read! I hope you'll enjoy it!

To celebrate the release of my debut novel and all the things that are happening to me, I'll spend a few days in London in August. (YES!) And -- that's the best thing about this! -- I'll go and see Adam Cooper's Les Liaisons Dangereuses! Twice!!!! (YES! YES! YES!) I even got a ticket for the very last performance. Gosh, I'm soo looking forward to that! If don't burst with happiness now, I'll certainly burst with happiness then. *G*

More Firsts

Found the first negative comments about THE LILY BRAND today. On a message board where I'm a regular poster. Ouch. That makes it so much more personal, thank you very much. On the other hand, I got the impression that particular reader either didn't really understand the premise of the story, or wanted to score a personal hit against the book, or me, or whatever. Sheesh. That's definitely a new experience: even when you want to hit people over the head, you have to sit back and smile demurely. I can't say I like that part about being an author. But I'm sure it's very character-strengthening.

Yet Another First

Today I got my first e-mail from a reader. A real reader's letter. Wow!

Another first

Today I went to Frankfurt to sign books: I signed five books in two bookshops. I took my special glittery orange booksigning pen and my brandnew "Autographed copy" stickers and felt as if I was walking on clouds!

Oh yes, and I bought some terribly expensive shoes to celebrate. And a picture book: "BooBoo" by Olivier Dunrea. It's so cute!

Uber-glowing Sandy

They arrived!!!! Today, when I came home from office, a huge big parcel was waiting for me on the doorstep (and a dead fish in the pond, but that's a different story). A HUUUUUGE parcel. Could it be ... ? I ripped it open, hardly daring to believe, but yes, YES, there they were: my author's copies of THE LILY BRAND!!!! Oh my gosh, oh my gosh, oh my gosh! Now I can't stop looking at them, admiring them, touching them, and, yes, smelling them, too. *G* And there's MY name on the cover! It's a bit surreal to be honest. I look at that book, and I open it, and there's the text I've written, so familiar yet so unfamiliar in many ways. It looks different now that it's printed, that it's in a book. It's like when you go to the hairdresser and you have your long, flowing hair cut really short: when you then look into the mirror for the first time, the face looking back at you is you, but in strange way not you at all.

I didn't cry when I opened the parcel and saw the books, even though I thought I would. But now that I'm writing this, and it's sinking in that the big dream of my life, the thing I've been yearning for for the past 20 years, has become reality, now my eyes are full of tears, and I'm SO, SO HAPPY!!!!

More exciting stuff to tell ...

... my amazon figures are dropping -- or rising, depending on how you look at it: I've just hit sales rank no. 14,427 in books!!! Wow! I couldn't believe my eyes! My lowest/highest rank so far! So let me repeat it again: I'm thrilled, thrilled, thrilled!!!

Good night everybody. And if you see a strange light on the horizon tonight -- well, that's me. Glowing from within. :O)

Troy is a Knight in Shining Silver!

Yesterday I finally got my copy of the July issue of RT. And guess what? Troy, my Troy!, has been listed among the K.I.S.S.es for July: "Looking for an alpha male? . . . . There's . . . Troy Sacheverell, brought to a larger-than-life existence by Sandra Schwab in The Lily Brand." Yeah!

And the RT review is quite lovely, too: "Darkly sensual, intense, yet with a searing passion, this is a tale for those yearning for the alpha-male hero and the heated desire that springs up on the edge between love and hate. Schwab knows how to play into erotic romance lore and pulls allt he right strings to stir readers' imagination. She's a welcome new voice in the genre." Now isn't this nice? More than nice, actually! Definitely more than nice: yesterday one of my colleagues remarked I seemed to be glowing from within. :O) (Okay, well, it might have just been the heat ...) (But heat or no heat, I'm thrilled, thrilled, thrilled!!!)

Yeah!!! It's real!!!!!!!!!

THE LILY BRAND has been sighted!!!! Really! And not by me either! (For booksightings by authors might be ascribed to wishful thinking or hallucinations. *g*) A friend of mine saw the book in a bookshop -- probably in New York -- and because I hadn't told her that she is prominently mentioned in the acknowledgments, she stood in said bookshop and bawled into the book for a bit. Hehe. *ggg* (I hope you've noticed the alliteration.) She got her "revenge" though: when I read her note, I had tears in my eyes -- while sitting in my office. And since then I've been running around whistling. Gosh, I'm so, so, so happy!

Sunday Mutterings

Five more weeks to go until RWA national in Reno. Only five more weeks ... Duh. Remember I had this great, big plan to lose weight until the conferene, get that cute butt, the trim waist? So far I lost – 1 kg.

One measly kilogramm.

Isn't it depressing?

Okay, so I didn't really diet. Dieting in summer with all the yummy ice cream and cakes and what not is just so difficult.

Okay, so I didn't use my super-duper wriggle-your-butt stepper either and played couch potato instead (when I had the time, that is).

Okay, so the lost kilogramm has been just an accident.

But still, IT'S NOT FAIR!

Other people are posting pictures of the dresses they're going to wear at the publishers' parties or the Rita awards ceremony on their blog! Pictures of gorgeous dresses! I forgot all about gorgeous dresses!!! ARGH!!!!!!

Really, I had thought I had solved the clothes problem. After all, the other two conferences both went fine in that respect, and I managed to look nice and professional (er ... at least I think I did ... *scratching my head*). Therefore I thought RWA national is going to be a picnic. BUT – I forgot about the big parties. Or more specifically, the dresses for the big parties. *sigh* So this means just salad for the rest of the five weeks. Or mostly salad. Blimey.

To make up for this big shock, I pampered myself a bit today and spent the morning snuggled up in bed reading Laura Abbot's THE WRONG MAN. Hmmm. It was a heavenly morning! One of the nice things about my new flat is the view from my bedroom window: the tops of the big old trees standing in the schoolyard beyond, and apart from that, mostly sky. And then there's the happy gurgling of the water in the big fishpond in our backyard. And then there's the unhappy meeowing of the cats outside the bedroom, pretending to perish with hunger. I have to admit this somewhat ruins the romantic atmosphere....

So, what about Cissy? you might ask. The heroine who's finally made it to her old castle? Oh well, I'm going to grab my Alpha Smart (this is, btw, not a new car, but my new writing tool!) and make myself some ice tea and then go outside and sit on the veranda of our little wooden hut in the backyard. Right next to the fishpond and the gurgling of the mini-stream. And then we'll see what I can do about making my hero darker and more compelling. Sounds like a great plan, huh?

So have a great Sunday all; I'm on my way to the Black Forest!
Sandy:O)


PS: I discovered this great site last night: Romancing the Blog. It's a blog itself, but it also lists lots of authors' and readers' blogs, too.