There is nothing more inspiring than sitting in a New York Times bestselling author’s office and library. I am on the first leg of our treck to the RWA nationals in Atlanta. I’ll blog about it as much as time and internet access will allow.

 
Whose office and library am I in? Well none other than the famous Hannah Howell. She writes great HIGHLANDER books. They are my favorites, not just because she’s a friend but also because they are great book. Now back to this wonderful room. It’s two stories and filled with romance and research books.  I feel like I’ve died and gone to heaven.

 
Tomorrow we are off for the second day of travel. I’m not sure where we’ll end up for the evening but I’m sure we’ll have a great adventure getting there.  We are planning on getting to Atlanta by Tuesday.

 
I’ll blog more later

I know there are a lot of readers out there who will disagree with me on this but I absolutely hate sneak previews that you get at the end of the book. I don’t read them. Why? I don’t want to start reading and get totally taken in by a story only to find out that I can read it all for another week, month or even year.

To me this is a bad type of teaser. If the book is already out then that’s completely different. However I still won’t read the sneak preview. I’ll simply go out to the store and pick up the book and read it from start to end.

Last night I attended a French Canadian movie called LE SECRET DE MA MERE. It was fabulous. I treated my father to the movie. 

It was a fabulous movie. I’d recommend it to anyone who loves a touching with humorous moments. Ginette Reno is a well known signer and actress. Until last night I had never seen any of her movies.  Boy have I been missing out on a great actress.

Well it’s only 3 days to my trip to nationals. While I’m away I will be bringing my laptop but don’t know if I’ll be able to access the internet to blog.  So this will truly be a vacation for little old me.

It’s steamy hot today and I don’t mean the sexy steamy kind, but the humid stinky kind. It’s 42C right now and it’s supposed to go up to 47C by the end of the day. This is not a day to go for a run, darn it. I had hoped to get one in today. Also my computer may not work since I have no air conditioner at home and my writing computer is upstairs. In the past the screen starts to fade and move around when the weather is this hot.

So I’m using this as a great excuse not to write. I’m getting good with coming with excuses not to write. One of these days my publisher will force me to start making excuses to write, but until then I’m on my own.

Only 6 days left before I leave for the Romance Writers of America (RWA) national conference.  I can’t wait to get to Atlanta and experience the madness once again. It only comes once a year and by the end you are so glad it’s only once a year.

I attended my first Crave Party today. It’s a party about and for the professional woman. There was win testing (which I skipped since I don’t drink), purses (awesome purses – I picked up a new wallet), makeup, manicures, pedicures (which I’ll make sure to get the next time), massage and creative clothes.

Everyone who attended the one I did in my home town of Ottawa, Canada LOVED it and can’t wait until the next one in September. So if you get a chance to attend a Crave Party go for it. You won’t regret it.

Here is the link to the Ottawa Crave Party information http://www.cravepartyottawa.com/

There are days I find it hard to write about love.  It’s not because I’m single with not a guy in sight.  But because the world around us seems to be focus on anything but love.  Every time I turn on the news all I hear about is death, bombing and the threat of possibly more. There are times I wish they’d start with happy stories. If they centered on the good of the world I wonder if we’d have as many unhappy people and as much violence in the world.  I’d like to think it wouldn’t.

Well some authors have more discipline than I do lately with regards to writing. However I used to write every day, no matter what for about 10 years straight.  Recently I’ve started to slack off and write off and on.

I used to bribe myself with candy to make my daily pages. I know of other authors who used chocolate. Since I’m not much of a chocolate fan that didn’t work for me.  I have heard of other authors having to disconnect the internet so they wouldn’t be distracted or tempted while they wrote. I didn’t have that problem since I didn’t have the internet hooked up to my computer. Since then I have grown to two computers one with the internet hook up and another without it. For me this keeps things simple.

A gorgeous weekend took me away from my computer. Do I regret it? Not for one second.  As they say you only live once, since I’m not one of my characters who live on paper I’ll try and truly live a real life.

Now I’m only 13 days away from leaving for a 2 week vacation with a trip to Atlanta with friends to attend the RWA (Romance Writers of America) national conference.  I’ve attended other conferences in the past but I’ve never driven to one before. This should be great!

I’m squeezing in close here.  I completely forgot about my blog today.  It’s so nice that I spent most of it outside. So as you can imagine, no writing. Tomorrow I’m planning on going to the cottage so I won’t be writing then either.

As for my new book, other than signing my contract with LBF Books nothing else has happened. I was told that I would hear from my editor but as of yet I haven’t heard anything. I’m sort of glad that I’m not doing the edits right now but then again is there ever a good time to do edits? Never in my opinion. As you can tell I’m not a fan of edits. Once I finish my first drafts I dread having to edits them because I constantly want to change everything. It’s a never ending process at time.

Well I can delay that to another day. YEAH!

Yesterday’s blog had me thinking of about people’s influence on my writing.  I may not use current events in my stories but they do influence the character traits of characters in them though.  I also find that people in my life pop in my books. I have no intension of doing that, but they just sneak in there any way. Sometimes they are the main characters and other times they are secondary ones that simply add a different flare to the story. For that I’m eternally grateful.