Anya Bast

I’m running a blogwarming contest over on Maverick Authors until the first of the year. You can win books from Lauren Dane, Megan Hart and me. Go on over to the entry titled Blogwarming Contest and enter! It’s super easy. All you have to do is talk about books.

It’s early on Friday morning and I’m up having some coffee and worrying about my husband driving on icy country roads. My daughter’s occupational therapist will arrive in a couple hours and I need to clean my house! It’s a mess. See, right now, I have Book Brain. Like I wrote about in a previous blog post, it’s when the novel takes over and I can’t really think straight anymore. Cleaning? Bwahaha! Ain’t happening when I have Book Brain.

What’s good about having Book Brain right now is that I’m entering the middle section of Witch Heart. The middle is always the hardest part of the book for me to write. I have my strategies to get through it, and I usually revise the hell out of it before I write the end. But, still, the Dreaded Middle. Ugh. However, the pacing of this book is so that entering the middle isn’t that bad. So Book Brain right now is a very good thing. Hopefully it will carry me over the hump of the middle and start me down the slope toward the conclusion.

Last night I wrote about 2k on Witch Heart. That’s actually pretty good for me in one sitting. I also wrote 2k on a sooper seekrit story I don’t want to say anything about. So, 4k for the whole day. Not bad.

This morning I’m itching to get started on Witch Heart again. I have all kinds of things to write and I can’t wait. But, life, you know. She gets in the way.

My husband actually salivates when he asks me to make this every year. I can’t take credit. It’s straight from a recipe I found a long time ago. With so much butter, it’s got to be good.

3 cups mashed yams
1/2 cup sugar
2 eggs, beaten
3/4 cup melted butter, divided
1/4 cup evaporated milk
1 teaspoon vanilla extract
1/4 cup all-purpose flour
1 cup firmly packed brown sugar
1/4 cup chopped nuts

Combine yams, sugar, eggs, 1/4 cup butter, milk and vanilla; beat well. Spread mixture in casserole. Combine 1/2 cup butter, flour, brown sugar and nuts; sprinkle over sweet potato mixture. Bake at 350 for 35 to 40 minutes.

1. I KNOW there were two socks when I put them in the washer and now there is only one. Where, oh, WHERE did the other one go?
2. How is it some people can get so wrapped up in TV show fandoms that they sound like they think it’s all real. Also, isn’t there more important things to get so worked up over?
3. Homophobia. Gah! Such a frustrating mystery to me.
4. How it is that Cute Overload has reached in and possessed a chunk of my soul.
5. How they could have thought it was a good idea to cancel Dead Like Me or Firefly.
6. Star fruit is always on sale in the produce section, but who actually buys and eats it?
7. Pork rinds. Can we just not?
8. How I can alternate between Zen Buddhist calm and all out anxiety with no middle ground.
9. How in the middle of the night I manage to step on that one block I managed to miss during toy clean up.
10. How some weeks I have tons of things to blog about and other weeks…nada.

What are some of your personal mysteries?

A scintillating day in the life of a romance author. There are thrills! There are chills! There are….yeah, okay, there’s none of that. There is some caked on food I had to scrape off a onesie and barely averted coffee spill onto on my laptop keyboard.

A photo journal of my day.

5am. Insomina. Get up and write, check email, write blogs until Chiclet wakes:

Mmmmm…coffeeee….

Feed dog. (oh….and here’s where it gets really exciting. Hold on guys!)

Chiclet wakes. We both have breakfast (mine is different from hers)

We get ready and hit the road to run errands:

Ipods are just the most awesome thing in the world. Ipods docks for your car stereo are EVEN BETTER. I have a music-loving Chiclet. She especially likes The Decemberists. Luckily, so do I. (Damn…I need to clean my car interior)

Shopping at our friendly neighborhood Target.

They didn’t have what I needed.

Then it was off to toddler open gym for Chiclet, where we played for an hour and a half:

Then home again! A nap for Chiclet and….

Writing for me. Mmmmmm…diet cooooke with liiime…..

My computer is “well loved”. I use it a lot, after all.

After she wakes up, we have lunch and go through our normal afternoon routine of me stacking blocks, playing with toys with her, changing diaper, while getting snatches of writing time in between.

Yes, the glamorous life of a romance author. Y’all are lucky I didn’t have scrub toilets today. 😉

I woke up at 5am and couldn’t go back to sleep, so I got up to write and do some picky administrative things I’ve been putting off. (Writers have to do picky administrative things. Who knew?)

Going through my email, I found five pieces of email from readers stashed in various places. OY. I have a one touch policy with reader email. I open it and reply to it immediately. When it’s stashed in strange folders, it makes it hard for me to do that. Four bits were about Witch Fire (I’m totally amazed I ever get any at all).  Made me happy. Did not make me happy they were stuck in an unread folder. I replied immediately.

There was also an email about Ordinary Charm. Out of all my Ellora’s Cave books, that one gets the biggest response from readers. Maybe because it’s a witch book? Apparently I’m not bad at writing witches. Hmmm….maybe I should examine that one more closely. Heh. Maybe because the witch is overweight? Not many romance novels, erotic or otherwise with plus size characters.

In other news, I finally hit my stride on Witch Heart. I had to rewrite the beginning twenty gazillion times because getting the book off to the wrong start…? Not good. Finally Adam blew something up and everything fell into place. I set the book in Crocus Hill, St. Paul, Mn (That would be the Summit Avenue area, for those who know). Well, a big chunk of it will be there, anyway. I plan to do some damage. 🙂 Demons run amok and such. Funnily enough, I know more about this area of St. Paul now than when I lived there. Via research and the Intarweb!

Today I am photo-documenting my day as a blogging experiment. If it doesn’t turn out too incredibly boring, I’ll post it soon.

My husband woke me up because I was crying in my sleep. Normally I wake myself up because I cry really, really hard in my sleep. It’s amazing how everything is more intense in dreamlandia than it is in waking reality. Emotion is sharper, sex can be more explosive. My theory? Uhm…not sure exactly, but it has something to do with the centers of the brain.

The dream, btw, was nothing personally traumatic or anything. It was just a dream with a heavy emotional component.

So we get up (quiet, not to wake the daughter), make coffee and we’re standing there in front of our living room window looking out over the frost-laced front yard and…a buffalo walks through our line of vision. A WHITE buffalo, an adolescent. He ambles down our little country street alongside the cow pasture in front of our house and off down the road.

Me: *head tilt* Uhm?
DH: “Did you just see that?”
Me: “I think so.”
DH: “I’ll go call the police.”

Turns out he’s an escapee from a nearby buffalo farm. Wasn’t sure there for a sec if I wasn’t still dreaming. *g*

This post has absolutely nothing to do with writing. 🙂 Also, I cross-posted this at The Bradford Bunch blog.

I am super, duper bleeding heart animal lover and have been since I was a kid. This is evidenced by our 8 cats, 2 rabbits and one dog. Most of them were hard luck cases. All but one of our cats were strays. Our dog we found slated for death at Animal Control.

Our rabbbits, one of them anyway, was slated to be Great Horned Owl practice prey at a Raptor Rehab program I was volunteering for. I, uh, smuggled him out. I love birds of prey, but I couldn’t volunteer there after that.

The owl food was the black one.

So, when I opened my patio door last week and spotted this guy on the deck near the dog house I was charmed completely. I grabbed my camera, which is always close at hand because I don’t want to miss any toddler photo ops, and took this picture:

Close up of itty bitty teeny tiny tortoise face:

It didn’t look damaged, so I thought he just got lost. It didn’t occur to me in my non-caffeinated state (it was morning) that he could not have gotten onto the deck without, uhm, “help”. I didn’t know what kind of turtle he was. I failed turtle identification class.

Worried it could be a snapper, I carefully got him into a container for transport:

I didn’t notice the blood when I took the picture…..

I moved turtle to our pond, where likely he was living before he had “help” getting onto the deck:

I wished him a happy and productive reptilian life and assumed my good turtle karma had gained a few points. That’s when I turned around to gather the container and saw…The Blood. Taking a closer look at the turtle, (remember, still not caffeinated yet), I saw his shell had been crunched upon and the soft underside (his actual body) had been bitten.

I knew instantly who the offender was:

Our dog. The scourge of all wildlife in our yard. Springtime is brutal around here, let me tell you…. Obviously she’d determined turtle was a really cool dog toy.

So I went back into the house and called my local vet to see if I could bring turtle in for treatment. They don’t treat exotic pets, she told me, but pointed me in the direction of a vet who does. So…. I gathered turtle up from the pond and put him back into the container with a little yummy pond water for his comfort. I rousted the kiddo from her high chair and off we went.

The strangest passenger I’ve had in a while. I don’t think turtle was all that amused.

Finally, we reached our destination:

Turtle was handed over to a really cool vet who does pro bono wildlife rehab work on the side. Turtle has a fighting chance, but the lining of his lung was punctured. She thinks she will take a couple months to get him back up and running and they might have to put a feeding tube down his little turtle throat. I can call later to check on his condition. If turtle heals but cannot be returned to the wild, I told them I would take him as a pet. He turned out to be a water turtle, not a snapper.

After making a donation to the program (what a cool program!) we came back home. Whew! Not the morning I’d had planned.

Why’d I take pictures of the whole thing, you ask. Uhm, I’m just a dork that way. *shrug*

Tell me about your animal companions! I love to hear about pets, animal rescues, really about anything warm and fuzzy. I’ll give away chocolate to one of the posters. (Yes, I’m running the contest over here too. *g*)

We have eight cats (or eight cats have us, actually). They’re indoor except that they have a sizable screened-in porch where they can bask in the sun, lounge and be otherwise lazily catlike. They share the porch with two bunny rabbits. (All the fuzzies are rescues, mmmkay?! We just couldn’t say no to them.)

We live in the country. Lots of critters out here, lots of insects and such. The porch is enclosed, but sometimes critters and insects still make their way inside. It’s just part of living in Boondockia.  You see where I’m going with this, right?
Anyway, last evening as I worked diligently on Witch Blood, I heard Wiggle, (the fattest of our cats, but surprisingly the best hunter. I think he’s very motivated by food in general.), meowing with his mouth full. I know this particular meow. It’s the meow that says, I have something rich and juicy and YOU CAN’T HAVE IT. This is the meow I heard moments before Wiggle once dropped a half dead horsefly in my lap. (I’m the mommy cat and therefore eligible for special “gifts”.) This is also the meow I heard when Wiggle dragged a huge lizard into the living room, dropped it wriggling on the floor and thus incited the Great Lizard Olympics of 2005. I remember it well because the lizard…er, okay, I won’t go there. I need more coffee for that.

I freeze, hand hovering over my laptop keyboard.  Wiggle races past, followed by 7 cats with eager expressions on their faces, (eyes bright, whiskers forward, ears pricked). Just as Wiggle disappears down the hallway, I see a gray tail hanging from between his greedy cat lips.

Me: Oh, shiiiiiiit.

So I race off after the pride, following them into the bedroom just in time to see Wiggle taking his yummilicious prey under the bed. I flip on the light, thus jarring my sleeping husband into full sputtering (pissed off) wakefulness and start babbling about cats and mice.

The chase ensues. Up, down, all around we pursued Wiggle through the house followed by the other 7 cats who desperately want a piece of the squeaky action.  FINALLY, we corner Wiggle and make him give up his treat. And get this…the mouse survived!!

In the dark, my husband and I instituted a quick mousie relocation program, complete with a new identity and a lovely brand new home of cut wood logs for the fireplace. We admonished mousie to stay out of the porch. I hope he heeds our warning, though one would think that having a fifteen minute joy ride in a cat’s mouth would be enough of a deterrent.

I’ll be at Lori Foster’s Get Together this weekend and may or may not have internet access. Even if I do have ‘Net access, I probably won’t be blogging. So, I’ll see you guys on Monday! I’ll prolly even have pictures.

Where was I? Dude, I was halfway around the world in Asia. Half. Way. Around. The. World! I have hella jet lag, I can’t even tell you and, oh, by the way…I’m a mommy now. 🙂

So, yes, I’m back and blogging again but bear with me while I get my inner clock readjusted and I get my mommy legs under me.