I'm off for a day on the RIB & trailing up mountains with Dad today while he goes to see a group, so this is just a very quick post.
(x-posted from the Book Bundle)

Just a quick reminder to everyone that you can still enter our competition to win a copy of 'Crossed Wires' by Rosy Thornton here: Click - you've got until the 12th to enter that.


Also, Suzanne McLeod has another competition running. Once again, I'm disorganised, so you only have until the end of the day, anywhere, tonight (Wednesday) to enter. You can win a signed copy of either her first or second books, and also one of the Felix Castor books by Mike Carey. You can find out more about them, and the competition, over here: Suzanne's Blog.

I'd highly recommend you check it out - I've read the first Felix book, and thought it was fantastic.

Well, I found out today that I'm not getting to camp this year.. oh dear. Yeah, I was sad. But I'll apply again for next year.
And this afternoon I threw myself into fine tuning my back up plan. I will be going round some cities in Europe.
I'm starting with Paris, on the 17th, and staying there for a few days. Then I'm going to drift down to Nice, and again stay there for a few days. This will be great for a few reasons. One, it will give me fantastic opportunities to use my French, and get my speaking up to a better level. Two, because I can speak reasonable French, it will be a nice ease in to the traveling.

From Nice, I'm going to Budapest. Then getting the train to Vienna, train because I've heard that particular journey recommended. From Vienna, I'll go to Prague. And then I'll come home.

If anyone has tips, hostel recommendations, suggestions for sites to see, etc, then as always I'd love to hear them.

There is a contest over at The Book Bundle to win a copy of 'Crossed Wires' by Rosy Thornton. Head on over for a look - all you have to do is comment to be entered.

Since I’ve been re-reading it in preparation for the sequel, which comes out on July 16th, I just had to review this book. It’s been a while since I’d read it, and I’d forgotten how much I loved it.
‘The Sweet Scent of Blood’ is about a Sidhe fae called Genny Taylor, who lives in present day London, working at finding magic while trying to stay away from vampires - she knows from experience exactly how bad they can be.
From the website:
When Mr October, a sexy calendar pin-up vamp, is accused of murdering his girlfriend, an old debt is called in and Genny is forced to help prove his innocence, risking her job and the protection it offers – and threatening to expose her own dark secrets. Searching for the killer plunges Genny deep into the hidden heart of vampire society. It’s not long before she realises that she and Mr October are both unwitting pawns in a centuries-old power struggle between London’s non-human communities . . . and it’s not just her own neck that’s at stake, but the lives of all London’s supernaturals.

This book grabbed me straight away, and it wastes no time in getting to the action. By the end of the first chapter (which you can read on her website) I was totally hooked. Genny is a very interesting narrator, and as the book progresses, we learn more and more about her history with vampires, and get to meet some of her interesting friends.

There are so many things I love about this book. One of them has to be the characters. They are all so vivid and real, and there are a lot of hot, sexy vampires - which to me is always a plus. Then there’s the fact that you just don’t know who Genny can really trust.
The writing style was another thing I loved - it was just fantastic, not letting down those characters or the intricate plot. I’ll admit that the first time I read this, I was rushing through so quickly that I then had to go back and re-read the last few chapters to make sure I really knew what had happened. It’s one of those rare books where I think you can appreciate it even more with each subsequent reading.

So, the competition!
Suzanne is holding competitions over on her blog, here (on blogger) or here (on livejournal) to promote the release. This week, you can win ‘The Eternal Kiss’ or ‘Mean Streets’ plus a signed copy of either of her own books. If you don’t make it in tonight, I think she’s doing another contest next week, too, so keep your eyes open!
Also, if you’re not sure about it, the first two chapters of ‘The Sweet Scent of Blood’ can be read on her website, here: Spellcrackers.com
Good luck!

(x-posted from the review site.)

I'd heard Lori Handerland's name mentioned alongside other authors & books that I like for a while, so when I found it in a second-hand shop the other week, I decided to give it a go.
Told by Jessie, a police officer, the story begins when a wolf is hit in a car accident. Things quickly spiral out of Jessie's control from there, with a specialist called in to deal with the town's 'wolf problem', and Jessie is forced to realise that werewolves exist. Thrown into the mix is Will Cadotte, a man who Jessie first meets when he's totally naked, supposedly practising his tai chi outside his cabin. Throughout the book Jessie is torn between wanting him and suspecting him, and makes for interesting guessing as to where they will end up.

For me, as soon as I got to the wolf being hit with the car, I was thinking werewolves, given the back of the book, and the kind of books I'd heard it compared with. Then when we met Will, I was just as quick jumping to some conclusions, and it was interesting seeing how wrong they turned out to be. The werewolves are certainly not the good guys in this novel, not in any way, shape, or form. I guess that's one of the things making me mark this book down in it's star rating - I prefer to have at least a couple of the supernatural beasties being on the same side as the main characters. While it was an interesting change to see them like this, it just didn't do it for me.
Something in it's favour, though, was the number of twists and turns. It was constantly surprising me, which is very good - sometimes in these kinds of books it's often not too difficult to guess where things are going, and Ms Handerland managed to conceal her chief trouble maker really well.
Overall, I'm giving this a 6-7. I enjoyed it, but I'm kind of relieved that I got it cheap, and unlike most of my books, I won't mind setting this one back out into the world.

My friend Emily recently invited me to contribute to a book review blog. One of my resolutions this year was that, for every three books I read, I should review at least one. Unfortunately, that didn't work out. So, I agreed to help Emily, and I'm hoping that this way I'll actually get around to reviewing some things!

It's quite fun - at the moment we're working out criteria for our star ratings, so we actually know what we mean by '5 stars' etc!

I've spent a while today trying to work out some more of the details about the bad guys in one of my stories.
I knew roughly who they were, and I knew what they'd done, because that's where the issue was raised from in the first place. I wanted the why: - why they'd done it, and why they were a group at all; and I wanted to know more about who they were.

I know some of that now. I'm still working on some other things. It's interesting, but kind of frustrating.

I've been thinking about my goals for my writing. At the moment, I've no way of knowing how much writing time I'm going to get over this summer. At the moment, my guess is very little. After that, though, I'm hoping I should have a reasonable amount. Because of this uncertainty, I don't want to set a target that's too definite.

That said, though, I would like to have something published by this time next year. Whether that's a short story or a poem, I don't mind at the moment.
I also want to have a novel that's ready to start shopping around agents, if I haven't started doing that already by then.

I think these are both fairly realistic goals, and that I'm being quite generous with my timescale. I think I'm going to try and do a progress check each month with how that's going, and I'll maybe find some other, non-writing-related goals to put in with them. I don't want to be too ambitious with these targets, but I also don't want to be thinking 'it's ok, you can do it later, you're busy,' etc, because then I know I'll end up not doing it. So, maybe I'll change that deadline to March. Maybe I'll make it into more short stories published, but put the agent-searching on hold for a month or so. I just have to see how it goes.

Just spent half an hour writing a lovely post about the Rachel Caine event I went to in London, then I tried to post and it ate it. I'm sorry. Due to the internet being stupid, you will probably not get this post. Maybe tomorrow, but it's unlikely.

You can read the story here:
http://www.smartbitchestrashybooks.com/index.php/weblog/comments/amazon-rank/


Amazon Rank

I've decided that yes, I am going to make all my entries 'friends only'.

I want to be able to talk more about things going on in my life, my feelings - sharing more. I want to be able to share the little things, that you wouldn't tell your parents, or your friends, because it might be 'gossip' or something parents would think 'oh my goodness' about. Really, I want this to be more like a diary. I want to share more.

So, everything will be friends only, apart from maybe the occasional writing post if I want to link to it from The Writer's Chronicle.

I'll find a banner to put on my journal sometime, too.

I need one of those word count widgets. I had one, in my signature on a site, but for some reason it's not working. Anyone know where I could find a good one?

Also, I'm thinking about changing things here so that all my posts are friends locked. A lot of them are normally, usually only some of the writing ones are visible to the world and it's mother, and a couple of others that don't have much in them. But I think I'd like to start locking everything, just in case. You never know.

Association Meme: Comment to this post and I will give you 5 subjects/things I associate you with. Then post this in your LJ and elaborate on the subjects given.

I got these ones from greatalexanders.

1. NaNo - This year I took part in Nano for the 2nd time (and still didn't win). I used it to kick-start my story Dangerous Dances. I love Nano - I think it's such a great idea to have that rush of trying to get the words out, never mind whether some of them are rubbish or not. It's also so good to have so many other people along for the ride - it's really encouraging.

2. Writing - My current writing project is still DD. It's paranormal romance/urban fantasy. (Who says I have to pick one or the other?) Um, and it's about a girl working in a magical bookshop, trying to deal with the fact her ex-for-the-moment boyfriend is a vampire, and she's getting pulled into that circle, while she also tries to keep up at Uni. So, it's a vampire, story, really.

3. Scotland - I live there. *g* It's very pretty, but rather wet. Um, not really sure how to elaborate on this one, more than that. Most people will know a little bit about it without wanting me to tell them.

4. University - The way applying to most Universities works in Britain is that you use this thing called UCAS. You pick five things to apply for. They can be at different Unis, you can pick different courses at different Unis, but you have to pick 5 or less. I'm still waiting to hear back from 2 of my choices - the Ancient & Medieval History course at Edinburgh Uni, and the Ancient History course at Newcastle Uni. I've got an Unconditional (rather than a conditional, where they would ask me to get X grades in X subjects this year) to Aberdeen (history) and Glasgow (classics). St Andrews didn't want me.

5. ExamsErm... I'm not sure what to say about this one, either. I've got 4 exams this year, in May. Advanced higher english, advanced higher french, higher physics and higher art. At the moment I'm in the middle of prelims. Did english yesterday, and I've got physics Monday, and French Tuesday.

I've been busy. School is taking an enormous amount of time and energy, more than it probably should be.

But what about the writing? Didn't you have a word count goal or something?
Yes, I wanted to get 75k on my story by the end of March. I was going to do this by writing a little bit every day, starting in January. This really didn't happen. It's half way through February, and I've written about a chapter more from what I had in December.

Didn't you write a bit for another story, too though? No wonder it's not getting done if you're starting other projects.
I've had this story bouncing around in my head since about February 2007. So when I wanted to write something else, where I didn't have to worry about where the hell the story was going, then that was the obvious choice. I only wrote the first little bit, setting up some of the story and introducing the main characters. I'm going to try not to do any more on that though unless I'm meeting my goals with Dangerous Dances.

Don't you know where DD is going, then?
I know some things I want to happen in it. I know how certain things are going to play out. The problem I was having that was making me reluctant to work on it was that I wasn't sure I'd got to the right place for Matt to make the reveal about the book that the story is partly centered around. And what else was I going to make happen, in the mean time, if it wasn't time for that? Was the dynamic right with Sally and Matt for them to get on well now, or did I need to make more time between Sally talking to Josh, and then seeing Matt again? I think I'm just going to go for it now, though, and see what happens.

OK. So what about the things you're writing for school? How's that affecting the other stuff?
I don't like the stuff I'm writing for school. I need to expand part of one of the short stories, finish writing the monologue, and come up with a dissertation. The stories are boring, though. I'm just not interested in the characters. This is affecting my novel because I have to put the school stuff first. Then I get so fed up plowing through that that I just don't want to write other things.

Where are you going from here, then?
I'm going to try and write a little bit of DD every day, even if I've only got time for a few sentences. I'm going to get the school stuff over and done with, so it's not an issue any more. I've started putting DD onto deviantArt, so I'm hoping that S's pestering will help me keep writing, so that I have stuff to update with on there.

I'll stop rambling on now, and let you get on with your days. *g*

Promoting something a friend started:

The Writers Chronicle

She has experience from another writer's forum, and wanted to set this one up after talking to people on blogger who, like us, are trying to write stories/get published. She felt like it would be good for them to have somewhere to congregate, to share their ideas all together. (They need to get lj, and have communities :-P. But I didn't say that.)

Take a moment to have a look at the site, and see if it's the kind of thing that would interest you. Please? *g*

Happy Birthday!
*hugs*
Hope you had a good day!

what would I do?

I've got my gap year planned up to mid/late April next year. That give me over four months after that until I start Uni. One of the places I'd really love to go to would be Australia. I'm certain that I could afford for the flights, so that isn't really a problem, but I'm wondering what I'd actually do once I got there. I'd have to stay several weeks, I think, to make it worth going, but how would I afford living there? What kind of job would/could I get? I know that it's very popular for students to try and get bar work, so if it's that popular, it will be hard to get a job.

Hum. I believe this needs a lot more thought/research.

Because I'm bored, and I want to write something 'fun' instead of working on what I'm meant to be doing.

If you could force me to write anything, what would it be?

Prompts, anyone?

I've got a title for my WIP. It's called 'Dangerous Dances' - which is probably very cliched, and has lots of other problems, but it a working title, so I can spend proper time on it later.

I've posted the first chapter in my deviantArt account, here, for the curious.
It was such a big help last time having occasional comments and feedback from here - it let me know that I wasn't the only one who wanted to know what happened next.

I'm going to try and get it to 75,000 words by the end of March. At the moment, I've got about 16k. This should be okay, because it works out at being less than a thousand a day, so I'll keep my fingers crossed that I can stick to that.

Been at Granny's since the 27th, with only minimal internet. I've been catching up on posts this evening, but if I haven't commented on something you think I should have noticed, poke me or something - there are so many posts from just four days now that I have to scan over some or I'd be here all night.

Anyway, I got tagged by marcyjo

( meme hidden under here )

I'm tagging some people I don't know so much about from my list, so I tag bandgeek01, beautyandbanana, greatalexanders, kazdreamer, rii_namuras, suzannemcleod, tanyareed, xjenavivex, handyhunter, lomesir22.