30 Days of all things good: My Cats

Today I'm grateful for my cats. As I'm writing this I have one of them on my lap. I've always loved cats and the three my husband and I have now are really sweet. My lap cat Trixie we adopted from the local shelter shortly after we got married, and she decided that I'm her person. She greets me in the morning as I'm getting up, and she is happy to see me when I get home.

I'm also grateful that we are able to provide a home for the three of them. Earlier this week I saw Mutts shelter stories on tv, two animated cats were talking to each other about getting picked to get homes. Something about that commercial hit me and I had tears in my eyes thinking about shelter cats waiting for their homes.

I think it reminds me of Trixie, when we went to look for a cat I locked eyes with her and as we were walking out of the shelter I had a feeling that she was meant to come home with us. So we went back and when the staff brought her into the visiting room she was all over us. We took her home that day and she's been my pal since.

We adopted our second cat, Maya, two years later when the apartment complex changed their rules from allowing one cat to two. Trixie wad lonely during the day and she needed a pal. Within the week they were playing together and Trixie was grooming Maya. Maya came from another location of the shelter Trixie came from.

Toby came to us from family. He needed a home and decided he liked us. He and Trixie butt heads as they both want to be head cat and have all our attention. They are getting better at getting along.

The picture is Trixie on the sofa, having made herself comfortable on my lap blanket.

30 Days: friends and community

I decided to include both friends and community together for this post as they overlap. Friends is rather self explanatory. By community I'm referring to my fellow writers and artists I've connected with via blogs, Twitter, TM writers, and other places. I'm grateful for both friends and community, I've met some wonderful people both online on off.

30 days of all things good: Spring

Via Kerry Schafer's blog I decided to join in on her 30 days of all things good. Starting today I'm going to post daily about something I'm grateful for.

I’m grateful for spring. Right now the bulbs in my garden are just starting to break the surface of the earth, days are getting longer, it’s getting warmer, and it’s simply a joy to be outside again. The air has that early spring fresh smell. It's not the floral scent that is in the air from later in spring when the flowers are blooming. I could go on more about spring, but I have already blogged about it in a previous post.

So what are you grateful for?

Muse Prompting Monday - Signs of Spring

Signs of Spring:

Spring: growth, change, new life, these things come to mind as I look at the bulbs starting to sprout in my garden. It also makes me think about the characters in my various works in progress, which could easily be applied to anyone's characters. What changes are they they going through? What new things will they experience? What new things will they learn?


In regards to the plants, I'm pretty sure these are the daffodil bulbs coming up based on the location of the garden.

A to Z

I decided to join the A to Z blogging challenge, and I'm excited about the prospect. It sounds like a fun challenge to pick a topic to blog about  based on a specific letter. I am getting a little jump on things now so I don't face blogging block come April.

I decided to brainstorm topic ideas. While I'm going to try to focus on writing or reading related topics I'm sure some days will be random fun. I created a new document in Google with the alphabet typed out, a new line for each letter. Then as I get ideas I type them after their letter. I already have a bunch for C, and some for B, and H. (Things like creativity, books, character, hope, joy and such). As I said, I'm brainstorming. And yes, feel free to use any ideas if they strike the muse, they are just words/post ideas.

February reads

With February being a short month I only have two books for this post. 

Defender (Foreigner #5) Cherryh, C.J.
I enjoyed reading this book, though it seamed a little slow in spots. The way this one is placed in the series it setting things up to have the characters arriving at the distant space station in the next book. There were a few jokes towards the end of the book with mistranslations, and the dowager character makes a good power play move. The dowager is one of my favorite characters in the series.

Explorer (Foreigner #6) Cherryh, C.J.
This one was rather enjoyable to read with the various levels of intrigue going on. With the space ship dealing with both the space station and new (to them) aliens and the two groups of humans not wanting to cooperate with each other conflict is present through the whole novel. There was also a nice bit of action in this book.

January Reads

Because I've had a lot going on I've unintentionally neglected my blog. I have been reading though and have read 5 novels over the month of January. I figured I'd share what I read here, and I'm hoping to write some proper reviews at some point. As opposed to a quick few sentences on what I thought of the books.

These are listed in reading order, and I've linked them to their Goodreads pages.
Islands Siddons, Anne Rivers
The first novel read in 2011. This is one my mom lent me I might not have picked it up otherwise. That being said I did enjoy reading this one. The characters were interesting and I enjoyed how she described the setting related details.

Tara Road Binchy, Maeve
Another loan from mom. While the story started out quite a bit earlier than I had expected it worked for the book with setting up the characters and the plot. I enjoyed how much the two main characters grew from their experiences over the course of the novel.

CassaStar Cavanaugh, Alex J.
I really enjoyed reading this book. There were enough details about the setting to create a mental image of the world around the characters, without getting to bogged down in details. The characters are fleshed out nicely and their actions kept the story moving at a good pace.

Scarlet Feather Binchy, Maeve
While I did enjoy this book, I liked Tara Road better. There were developments between some of the characters that felt a little forced. Though the nine year old twins in this book are a riot. I was laughing out loud a few times while reading.

Precursor (Foreigner, #4)  Cherryh, C.J.
I started reading this series last year and I enjoyed this book better than some of the earlier ones. The world is well defined and the alien species is really interesting. Because this is book four I don't want to say to much because it would spoil things in the earlier three books.

Holidays and Writing Goals

Well it's almost time for Christmas, and other holiday festivities. I had my last day of work for the year today and I'm looking at what else needs to be done for the holidays. I'm relaxing right now on the couch with cat and netbook in lap while I ponder over things.

With the year ending I'm looking forward into 2011 and what I want to put down for my writing goals. I would like to finish my nano draft and also do a revision pass of at least one other first draft novel. I would also like to be more active in the critique group I recently joined. That's about as far as I am with my goals right now, I'll post a more official list sometime over my break.

Anyone else working on their writing goals? Still figuring out what to do?

Post Nano and Into December

I won Nano (National Novel Writing Month), crossing the 50k finish line on the 29th of the month (yay!). I  had been behind most of the month using my Thanksgiving break to catch up. I wrote over 20k for said break. Well having Wednesday, Thursday, and Friday off from work helped.

That being said I decided at the start of this month to finish the draft by year end. As of yet I have not touched the actual draft. My plan was to finish a note card outline then jump into the writing. Last week I wrapped up most of the rest of the story on my note cards so I think I am just going to start writing tomorrow.

So how did Nano go for those who participated ? Or writing in general?

Character Diagram

Here is the character flowchart I mentioned in my previous post. I made it with MS Visio, then I screen captured the print preview so I could have a picture of it. It's hard to see much in this thumbnail in this post, but this is only the scaled down version of a larger image.

I started out by placing my main character Sabina in the center then I kept her her co-workers above and beside her. Her boyfriend and best friend are lower as I didn't have to worry about what they think about her co-workers.

After awhile it did get a bit confusing with the arrow shapes with the number of characters I have on here. So I used the connector tool for the last two arrows. They were black originally, but then I figured out how to change the colors. I used dark green for strong like, lighter green for liking someone, gray for more neutral, lighter red for dislike, and dark red for hate. Ya, Iris is one of those people that really doesn't like others. I still need to put arrows in between the best friend and boyfriend.