“You need a serial.”

Harried Writer flipped through a stack of papers in search of that plot thread that kept disappearing. “Do I have to pick just one? I’m equally fond of Reese’s Puffs and that cinnamon-pecan Special K.”

Zara tied her hair back with a ratty old string she’d found on the floor. “Not cereal. SERIAL. Note the spelling. Everybody’s doing it.”

“If everybody was jumping off a bridge—”

“You’re such a mom.”

“Thanks. By the way, for Mother’s Day, if you hook me up with some djinn housecleaning action, you’ll be my favorite.”

“No I won’t. Angelic Daughter’s your favorite, and then you’re too soft on Gabe and Xain and Keran. And Rinc. And that vampire thief. And…”

“Okay, you’ll be my favorite six-year-old.”

“Hmph. I haven’t forgotten the subject, by the way.”

A nerve in Harried Writer’s eyelid twitched. “Those who do serials have a story. I don’t have anything short enough or finished enough to offer.”

“Make something up. I’ll help. It can be all about…” Zara tapped her chin while contemplating riveting subjects. After 0.03 seconds of deep contemplation, she announced the winning idea with a flourish. “Me!”

“Here’s the thing, kiddo. I write grownup stories. With violence and bad language and, uh, kissing. And stuff. Not kid stories. The Amazing Adventures of Zara and Her Bratz might give people the wrong idea.”

“Gabe’s old, and he likes Bratz.”

Harried Writer muttered something involving perv and prostitots and some degree of not surprised.

“Besides, I’m cute.”

“Uh-huh, but a lot of readers don’t want to see a kid in a romance novel, ever, no matter how cute she is. And precocious is another coffin nail. I’m trying to hide you as much as possible, actually.”

“But I’m important! I’m crucial to the story. I’m the main bone of contention. I’m the… the… impediment to happiness!” Zara’s eyes widened. “Omigosh, I’m the impediment to happiness? THE IMPEDIMENT TO HAPPINESS!” She began to cry—loudly, but not with sufficient volume to account for the shaking of the house.

Harried Writer crawled under the desk, pulling the chair in after her, and covered her head with her arms. “I didn’t do it. Not my fault. And I’m 90 percent sure she’s faking.”

The shaking stopped. “Oh, she’s with the writer.”

Male grumbling was vaguely audible through Zara’s wailing.

“Yeah, she’s made me cry a couple times too. Remember when she threatened to kill me and give my woman to a vampire? I can handle this.” There was a brief atmospheric disturbance, and then the protection of the chair was withdrawn from Harried Writer. “The cavalry’s been called off. You can come out now.”

“I’m perfectly happy right where I am, thanks.”

“Suit yourself.” Ryder straddled the chair and directed his attention toward Zara. “What’s the problem, Z?”

“I’m the IMPEDIMENT TO HAPPINESS!”

He nodded. “I can see how that might be upsetting.”

Harried Writer choked on the buildup of melodrama at low altitude. “She just wants more attention.”

“Would it kill you to give her some?”

Harried Writer scowled at Ryder. He always took Zara’s side. “It might kill you.”

“We’ve been through this before. You’re not going to kill me. You’re intrigued. There’s too much about me you don’t know.”

“I know one thing you don’t know.”

“Is finding out going to make me cry?”

As currently outlined, no, but outlines could change. “Like a little girl with a dead bunny.”

“Wow. You are seriously morbid.”

Zara sniffled, momentarily distracted from her own woes. “Is it about his sugar bowl*?”

Actually, the history of the Big Bad Sugar Bowl was one of those things Harried Writer didn’t know yet, and she suspected it was one of those things she would regret introducing round about the time explaining it became necessary. “No comment.”

Ryder, familiar with Harried Writer’s sadistic tendencies but not yet the victim of same, began to look a little queasy. “I can hardly wait.”

Zara sniffled again, but it was kind of a dry sniffle. Crocodile tears were a snap, but crocodile snot was trickier to master. “Yeah, that’s great and all, but we haven’t resolved my problem.”

Harried Writer banged her head against the desk in time with the twitching of her eyelid. “How about you finish that interview where you torture the reporter with cute and precocious, and I slap it up somewhere?”

“That’ll do!”

Zara did her happy dance. On her third twirl around the room, Ryder reached out and pulled the string from her hair, offering it to Harried Writer with an I’m too adorable to torture smile.

Harried Writer tucked the thread back into Chapter Eight and remained steadfastly heartless. “I don’t care how helpful you are. I have to torture you. It wouldn’t be fair to everyone else if I let you off easy.”

“I know. All I ask is that the sugar bowl turns out to be something badass to compensate for all the flak I have to put up with because of it.”

An ill-formed idea flickered deep within a dark cavern of Harried Writer’s mind, too weak to be viable but providing a hint that might revive it at some point in the future. She scanned the bookshelves for The Complete Noob’s Guide to Freaky Old Pottery. “Oh, it’ll be badass. It’ll be so badass, djinn from here to Rigas will be jealous.”

“You don’t have a frickin’ clue, do you?”

“Shut up before I change it to a chamber pot.”

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* It’s not really a sugar bowl, it just looks kind of like a sugar bowl. It’s actually Ryder’s “lamp,” and there’s some terribly dark reason** his soul got stuck in such a weird container.

** Pantserspeak for “I haven’t got a frickin’ clue, but it’ll be awesome when I figure it out.”

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(Make your own self at South Park Studio.)

Also, if you have exhausted your creative reserves, facilitate your production of bilious correspondence with the aid of the Hate Mail Generator.

In completely unrelated news, I have experienced one of the pitfalls of predominantly electronic banking: I have three books of checks left but have run out of register in which to record transactions, and banks—I went to mine and three others at which I am not a customer, and it’s a universal phenomenon around here—don’t give those away. I have to order checks to get another register, which means I’ll have an entire box of checks next time I use up a register and have to order more checks to replace it… Nice racket they got there, yeah?

They don’t know who they’re messing with. I got a puter and a printer and reams of paper in pretty colors. I’ll make my own, and it will be so much better than theirs…

In even less-related news, I watched Enchanted last night, and despite it being insanely predictable from frame one, I kinda liked it. I even got a little teary at the HEA for abso-frickin’-lutely everybody. If you like cute (which I don’t usually, so go figure…), definitely check it out. It’s also very kid-safe (no violence, no face sucking, no adults behaving badly except for the evil queen and, well, she’s evil, so what do you expect, really?) if you have little ones.

IIWS: Worked peeling off a scab into a loooooove scene. Yeah, baby, take it off… that’s right. I assume that bit will be universally ill received, but I needed blood and the man wouldn’t bite. Desperate times call for disgusting measures.

SC: Heroine killed Baddie #1. Messily. Heroine really shouldn’t have been wearing white.

Blog: Planned to compile a Pantser-to-English dictionary but decided there wasn’t much point, since every single definition was “I haven’t got a frickin’ clue, but it’ll be awesome when I figure it out.”

WL: Dang it, where did I put that thread? I lost it in Chapter Six…

No, not done with revisions I wanted done on the 16th, and I can’t blame it entirely on Crisis Core (damn you, Squeenix!). I’ve been living with this book so long, I can recite it verbatim. I’m at the “Gah, not you again” point. A break might help, but I don’t have that luxury. If a GH judge asks for a full, I have a day to get a revised full (which would be a good idea—a lot has changed since the October 2007 version) to RWA, and there’s only so much I can fix in a day. I don’t know when or if that day will come, but I don’t want to arrive there and kick myself because I wasted the 3 days or 4 weeks or 2 months in which I could have made this a priority. (insert cranky little kid whine here)

In a cosmic warning to put nose to grindstone or else, the PSP had an encounter with the tile floor. After much  hyperventilating, it was determined all of the detached pieces were, in fact, detachable by design and no permanent damage was done. (I am duly impressed by the PSP’s sturdiness, if not its button and light placement. I mean, seriously, the low battery indicator is hidden under your thumb, so really the first indication of battery lowness is the screen going black in the middle of a boss fight, which is teh suck.) Also, I accidentally overwrote Angelic Daughter’s game, and she was justifiably livid, so… Point taken, cosmic watchdog. No more playtime for mommy for a while.

At least I finally know why Seph went batshit crazy. Poor baby. I could have comforted him. I had a box of tissues in my inventory…

I… I… I’m a weirdo?

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I suspect this question refers to my fondness for Reese’s Puffs rather than Shredded Wheat, Final Fantasy rather than bridge, Artemis Fowl rather than Mr. Darcy, Deathnote rather than Dancing with the Stars, Nine Inch Nails rather than Barry Manilow, and any other preference I have expressed that indicates a penchant for what are perceived as juvenile interests. Am I not a mother, a role model, a responsible adult with a demanding job and lofty career aspirations? In other words, should I not conduct myself in a manner more befitting someone of my advanced age?

Well, I could (and have done so in the past when absolutely necessary), but denying myself these simple pleasures causes me to become stressed out and miserable, and I have never felt impressing anyone with my adultness (or their idea thereof) made that a worthwhile sacrifice. I have a driver’s license if anyone requires proof of age. A DNA test will prove I’m a mother, being stuffy isn’t a prerequisite for being a role model (I think it would be a hindrance, in fact, since I’ve yet to meet a teenager who responds favorably to that quality), I like to put as much distance as humanly possible between myself and that demanding job (at which no one has ever voiced a complaint about my personality having an adverse effect on my professionalism, and my Permanent Record has “a joy to work with” written in it many, many times—they’re not terribly original over there) at the end of the day, and my career aspirations (which aren’t really all that lofty, to be perfectly honest) are such that a little kookiness paired with a good-natured demeanor and a lack of unethical/criminal/insane/scary behavior may actually be an asset.

For some examples of the positive powers of kookiness, check out Author Talk. Don’t those videos make you want to be interviewed by Jill Monroe’s huge exquisite hair and annoying dulcet voice? I’ll let you in on a little secret—THAT is my lofty career aspiration. However, due to my aversion to cameras, I do hope I can appear in silhouette like a federal witness whose identity must be protected at all costs.

Or maybe as a sock puppet!

Edited to Add: I have it! I’m a ninja! You can’t see me! (Okay, I’m more like Waldo than a ninja, but a girl can dream…)

If I were not so indispensable at work (AKA hospitalization and incarceration are the only reasons I can get time off approved because nobody else will do all the crap I do), had a source of childcare, and had spare funds for travel, food, and accommodations… uh, I’d be going to Lollapalooza that weekend.

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Alas, I will be going no further than the interwebs, as my homies intend to torment me keep me posted with blow-by-blow accounts from both San Fran and Chicago.

“Why Lollapalooza instead of RWA?”

Testosterone.

I’ve always been “one of the guys,” and the idea of that many women in one place scares the bejesus out of me. (Please see any report regarding any gathering consisting of greater than 3 women for further information.)

Not necessarily in order of importance:

• Peer pressure. Specifically, I was threatened with bodily harm by someone from whom such threats must be taken seriously if I didn’t enter.
• To get some mileage out my RWA membership. The primary benefit of RWA membership seems to me to be the opportunity to join your local, online, and specialty chapters. I’m not much of a joiner, so that doesn’t do me a lot of good. However, members do get a cheaper GH entry fee and I happened to have a finished manuscript, so I could and did make use of that benefit.
• To see what would happen. What does a randomly selected group of strangers think of my first 50 pages? (Apparently they didn’t unanimously hate it.) If my story finals, will that make any difference in terms of queries? (Yes, “Golden Heart finalist” has proven a magical phrase which I probably should bandy about much more widely.) Something happened I didn’t even consider: I received a good bit of e-mail from some fairly impressive people who didn’t know I existed before March 26 (and certainly don’t remember me now, so I have no delusions about my mad “networking” hookups), and it’s really, really cool to open up your inbox and see congrats from Ms.-OMG-I-love-her-books!!1!!! nestled between the pnile nhansement spam.

I didn’t expect to final, and it’s nice to have done so. That’s all. I didn’t cure cancer. I didn’t bring peace to the Middle East. (And I don’t recall ever behaving as if I had, so that good bit of the other kind of e-mail is totally uncalled for.) I don’t expect the GH to serve as the yellow brick road to certain publication, but there must be some small advantage in bringing my name and my writing to people’s attention in this fashion, so I’m glad I was bullied into entering.

Now, off to write about something completely unrelated to my GH story so all my eggs aren’t getting stale in that basket…

In my RTB post, I forgot hotshot pilots, intergalactic Vikings, AND the hottest of all heroes:

see more crazy cat pics