Anne Stuart's Blog, page 3

We're on Whidbey Island this morning, in a comfortable hotel room, having had a nice breakfast and a great seafood dinner last night. We started in a suburb of Seattle, had dinner with with family, then took off for Port Townsend, which would be a perfect place to live if it wasn't so expensive. Spent three nights there,but everything we could afford was crammed next to other people and dingy looking.

It's hard when you need to move from the most beautiful place in the world -- you get spoiled...

I wonder how many times i've put Aaaargh as the title of a blog post. I'm at my standard point in a book where it appears hopeless and all is lost! I get to about 20k words and suddenly it seems like shit. I've introduced the characters, the conflict, and then what the hell do I do next?

What I do is send it to Crusie and Lynda Ward and beg for advice. They both say it sucks dead toads, but then, books usually do at this point. It's the roughest of rough drafts, complicated by my frozen should...

Well, we'll see if this works. I'm adding a current photo of me, in all my winter pulchritude (we had a high of 8 above today, so it's still winter in Northern Vermont). On such a cold day (with a powerful wind) the best thing to do is stay indoors, and when it came toward dinner time (Pesto Tortellini, which sounds like a great name for an Italian gigolo) and ciabatta (which we tend to call Chewbacca) I turned on the tv and saw that JEWEL OF THE NILE, the sequel to ROMANCING THE STONE, was...

Well, I screwed up a little with the contest. We were in the midst of doing some updates when I ran it, so there were three more people who wanted to enter. As penance I'm giving away 5 ARCs instead of 2, and one of the people shut out was a winner.

Here goes:

Vicki Bailey

Karen W.

Diana (my oldest fan?)

JenniferNennifer

Rosemary Brock

So guys, email me your snail mail address and a copy of CONSUMED BY FIRE will be flaming its way to you!

Cheers!

So the website went down. It was a perfect storm of web-mess -- my domain name was about to expire but I couldn't get into the site. The password was wrong and they kept saying they were sending me a link to make a new one and the link never arrived. So, since my life was in chaos and despair I forgot about it.

My webmaster, Mollie, did yeoman work (whatever that is) and finally we're back. The chaos is lurking on the edges but not currently in residence. I've been able to write a little more...

Since last we spoke things went to hell in a hand basket, and I will spare you the details (mostly because they're not my details to share.) I'm slowly, cautiously poking my head above the trenches to see whether it gets shot off or not, but so far, so good.

On the bra front (and who cares about the bra back) I've managed to get rid of about a dozen. Which still leaves me with 37 -- is that possible? I must persevere.

And I'm writing, but it's coming slowly because my rotator cuff issue makes t...

Well, i'm progressing slowly with the bra decluttering. I tossed the belly dancing costume (sigh -- I still have the skirt with like ten yards of chiffon and anyway, who wants to see a 67 year old belly dancer? Then again, I've seen an ancient female flamenco dancer and she was cool as hell). I found I have 7 of my favorite bras, so I can't give up those, I have three leopard print bras, two with underwires, so I'm wearing them to see how comfortable they are. The one without wires made the g...

So the sad truth about my bra situation is I had 49 bras stuffed in the that drawer. Well, 48 and I was wearing one. So Pat Ocain on Facebook won the ARC. I figure I'll cut that number in half first, and go down to 22. Then, after much reflection, I'll cut it down to ten since that seems to be a reasonable number, taking all the comments into account. Somewhere between 7 and 10.

I think women have too many bras because we don't tend to try them on, and there's that line about 80% of all women...

So my house looks like something out of hoarders and we're trying to sell it and move across the country. No small task, and at times I just want to sit down and weep. I was raised by wolves, as Jenny would say, so I have no idea how many bras a normal woman would have.

Mind you, my bra size doesn't change much no matter how much weight I gain or lose (which is a fairly constant thing -- or can change be constant? My weight fluctuations certainly are). Almost all my bras are the same size -- o...

Podcast is the most miserable word. I realize it comes from iPod and broadcast, but for the life of me I can never remember it. I've listened to a few over the years -- Jenny Crusie and Lani Diane Rich did a series on movies called the Popcorn Dialogues, which were fascinating even if I ended up disagreeing with one or the other or both. And of course the phenomenal success of Serial has taken everyone by surprise. Podcasts can be anything -- I wonder if there are erotic podcasts. Probably. T...