Random Thoughts

Okay, I'm getting a little sick of the weather here in New York! What happened to the sun? It came out on Saturday, and has since disappeared. It's freezing in my office, and I feel like I'm coming down with a late spring cold. Enough already, if I wanted to live in a dreary, rainy city, I'd move to London already. Although my impossibly handsome British friend said that it was 80 degrees in London today. How did they get our weather and we get theirs? Vanessa Virtue has a great entry today about what she would do with her FU money, rather than stay in Boston.

I hate getting old. My NIA instructor Jason has a strange fondness for the music from Riverdance. Consequently in the middle of an otherwise fun class on Sunday, we had to start clogging. Now my thighs hurt everytime I get up from my chair. I need to start exercising more than twice a week. For four years, I was working out 4 to 5 days a week, and then in the last year, it's trickled down to a paltry two due to lack of finances and sheer boredom with my exercise program. But now that summer (hopefully) is coming, I need to get back on the exercise wagon. I've already limited the chocolate intake to the new dark chocolate M&M's that I finally found this weekend at Walgreen's.

I've added some more blogs that might be of interest as well as more of my favorite writer's websites. Soon, I won't have room for anything else! I found the ladies of the Squawkbox over at another site. A little debate going on over there about chick-lit that I had to weigh in on. I hate people putting all chick-lit into a little box marked 'city girl on the make for love.' The genre has evolved beyond that to encompass, mystery, romance, paranormal, mom-lit, lady-lit and other genres. When it comes down to it, it's all women's fiction, and we need to start supporting each other, instead of tearing each other down. Enough said, off soap box.

I'm still debating whether or not to go to Nationals this year. I've crunched the numbers and it's going to cost me at least $1,200 to attend. The breakdown is as follows:

$345 Conference Fee
$382 for airfare (that's as of yesterday. I'm hoping the airfare will go down)
$300 for 5 nights at conference hotel
$200 for incidentals (that includes hotel transfers, books, food, drinks, and getting to the EWR airport)

So, I've been weighing the pros and cons over the past few days. The cons are of course the cost, and the fact that I have to transfer planes since there are no direct flights from the East Coast to Reno. The pros are: a chance to pitch my newest manuscripts, spending time with friends I only see once or twice a year, it's RWA's 25th anniversary, meeting the other chapter presidents, and basically networking.

There's also the fact that it's tax-deductable once I sell a book. Until then, it comes out of my pocket. Last year, I knew that I was going to go, no doubts. I had a roommate, the whole thing. This year for some reason, I'm dragging my feet. I had been hoping that I would get a scholarship, but I haven't heard one peep from the scholarship people. I could always borrow the conference fee from my chapter and pay them back, but we're worried about losing money right now.

I still have until June 15th to register, although there are only 350 places left.

GH won the Best Show Emmy. Debate is raging on the soap message boards as to how this could be when the show sucks on a daily basis. Apparently the tape they submitted was from the great Port Charles hotel fire of last February when the entire cast was involved, leading the panel to believe that GH is a show that uses it's large cast brilliantly. Psych! It's amazing to me that Y&R, which has been the #1 rated show for 17 years, and is actually outstanding doesn't win it every year.

I watched GH yesterday, and I basically fast forwarded through anything that had to do with Sonny, and his women. The only storyline worth watching is Luke and Tracy, and that's because Tony Geary requested it of the writers, who will basically kiss his and Maurice Bernard's asses. The news in the soap world is the disrespectful way GH has treated Kristina Wagner, replacing her with Sandra Ferguson, because she dared to ask for a contract, since they were revisiting the Maxie/BJ's heart storyline. So now we have 2 actresses in a story-line that they have no history with, and many long-time pissed off viewers, myself included wondering what is up with Guza/Pratt/Frons/Phelps that they keep letting this happen? Now that they've won another Best Show Emmy, they will feel justified to keep ruining the show further as they suck the life out of it.

On the writing front, I've asked 3 friends to read my first 3 chapters of Nearly Famous to see where I might have gone off the rails. And I continue to think that No Plot, No Problem has to be one of the most brilliant books ever written for those writers like me who can't get their heads out of their asses sometimes when it comes to their writing. I've managed to get a real handle on the main character of my next book, and a better idea of where the book is going to go then I did before. I can't wait to start writing it, but I have to wait until next week when June officially starts.