First, my agent has finished negotiating another three-book deal with NAL, with the books to be released 6 months apart! So expect a totally rewritten MY LADY LARK under a “Night” title, followed by Beloved Stranger and then a book about a scam artist and a nobleman’s son. *g* I think for books six months apart, three at a contract is a pretty good way to go. I have now clawed my way out of below midlist (bottom list, I guess…) into the real midlist…so yay for that!

Second, Steph has sold to Harlequin Blaze, and Cece has sold to Kensington Aphrodesia!

For everyone out there interested in writing sensual or erotic romances, now is the time to get published. With Harlequin, Avon, Signet, and Kensington all opening new “hot” lines, editors are acquiring like crazy. Some readers are already beginning to grumble about stories that are sex without meat, and I figure it will be four to five years before mainstream romance audiences start to get that jaded, so if I were starting now, I’d already be working to separate myself from the pack before the trend crashes and authors start getting dropped. With so many new authors coming into print, it will be both easier to be published and do decently and simlutaneously difficult to stand out. Just sometihng to be thinking about!

I had dinner with my agent and editor in New York on Monday. I was stuck with the Bear, of course, so he came, too, and was charming and perfectly well behaved as usual (minus some public nose-picking), much to the astonishment of Nancy and Anne, who despite their agreement had some private reservations about having lunch with a three-year-old. *g* He charmed the waitress into coming over and playing with him quite a bit, and she also snuck him a balloon and toy, which became his major prop for his performances on his private stage…I mean in the subway. It’s slightly embarrassing to go out with him because he has NO shame and will flirt and preen for anyone and everyone, secure in the belief that the entire world was created to be his personal audience.

The Bear hates jackets and hats, and though NYC felt only chilly to me, most of the kids there were bundled up to their eyeballs, while the Bear had on an extra shirt and his warmest pants and shoes and a blanket but had neither hat nor jacket, which, of course, meant that I got a number of comments from nosey people who thought he must be freezing. Was he shivering? Nope. Did I have to force him to keep the blanket on? Yep. Was he even cold at any point? Only when we got back to the car and I changed his pants for pullups for the ride home. His “sad fingers” got pink with cold, but only because he sucked on them and got them all wet. (Of course, I also kept my coat open and had to pull it off several times while most New Yorkers had coats zipped and hoods up. I think they’re just used to their overheated buildings…) Anyhow, at one point, a “babushka” (no real translation, but a specific kind of bossy Russian woman who mothers EVERYONE indiscrimately) fussed at me for not having him in a jacket, saying that he’ll get sick, and so my DARLING son was inspired by that to humiliate me by fake coughing and sneezing melodramatically when we passed anyone until I threatened to stuff him into a jacket unless he cut it out. *rolls eyes* He did immediately, of course.

After lunch, we went to the Museum of Natural History. We only had an hour and a half, but we did a very fast tour, and the Bear loved seeing all the dinosaurs especially. On the way back on the PATH, the bear charmed the conductor (who was in our car) so much that he blew his train whistle for him, so he got to hear a train that really went “choo-choo,” which thrilled him to no end.

One of the people riding the train asked if he was always so happy and energetic. I said, “No. Sometimes, he gets excited.”

I’m TIRED. *gggg*

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Except that I’m not ungenerous and I love having decisions DECIDED, and I’m not critical of others as long as I don’t have to work with them. *g* Which is one of many reasons I’m an author… And I’m quite fine with emotions.

Moms who have been in this situation understand. The Bear has reached a stage where he spends most of his waking hours talking to himself, and I generally tune him out unless he’s addressing me. But yesterday, I happened to listen occassionally, and I must say that I ought to do it a lot more often because the kid has the wildest imagination.

First, he was swinging a flashlight around crazily at an imaginary foe and hurling occassional insults and anguished lines. What about? “You killed my father! Now you’re going to DIE!” No, he’s never seen Star Wars. No, he’s never seen The Princess Bride. I’m clueless. He had some convoluted story leading up to this final showdown, but I didn’t catch enough of it to understand it very well. The thing about the Bear’s stories is that they all have not only dialogue (EVERYONE’S dialogue, not just one character’s) but narration, sound effects, AND theme music, too, and he generally tries to keep it going in real time, which makes things a bit hard to follow!

Second, he was explaining in great intensity and detail how to train tigers, specifically elaborating on the fact that it is a very, very bad idea to spank a tiger if he does something bad because the tiger will then tear you limb from limb. Add many sound effects and the Bear bouncing around and pretending to be both the tiger and the trainer.

He has said that he wants to be either an Egyptologist or an astronaut when he grows up. I think we should add film director and author to the list of possible future careers.

Larissa Ione has SOLD to Red Sage! May this be the start of a long and successful career of writing books that make her mother blush!

Okay, I’m coming in REALLY late here, but I hadn’t checked her blog until yesterday (see travel and all that) to make sure she’d announced it before I posted!

Take a look! And Gina–there’s vehemence. *g*

Today, my son was telling a story to himself, and this was a bit of the dialog that I caught:

“Bear, go down that laundry chute!” But the Bear can’t fit down the laundry chute! HE’S TOO BIG!

(Yes, he narrates his stories, too.)

How the heck does he know what a laundry chute is?

Another conversation we had today, while he was cavorting madly around the room:

ME: Are you dancing?
HIM: Uh-uh.
ME: Are you fighting?
HIM: Uh-uh.
ME: Are you running around like a maniac?
HIM: Uh-huh.

Well, THAT pretty much clears it up, I think.

I’m here in MD in a starter-home townhouse in a very yuppy planned community. GREAT for temp housing, but it would be a lousy place to live permenantly. *g* I don’t really like having close neighbors all that much, and I don’t much care for planned communities, and I am very, very suspicious of the workmanship on this house. I think its attractions and drawbacks can be summed up in the phrase “good resale value.” It has a checklist of all the things people generally want in a house, but the execution is…sketchy and rather hightly economical. The houses are maybe five years old, and our carpet is already felting, though it isn’t stained or anything. The HVAC is the noisiest I’ve ever heard in a new house, though the windows don’t leak. There are the obligatory 2.5 bathrooms, with a pedestal sink in the .5, two sinks in the master, and a decent-sized counter in the kids’…but there are NO drawers (only door-cupboards). The toilets are some obscure super-cheapie off brand I’ve never heard of, and all of you with new houses since the water regs changed knows what THAT means. There is a garden tub and a shower…but the garden tub has a discoloration in the acrylic that the builder didn’t catch. There is exactly ONE towel rack in each bathroom. There are 3 bedrooms, but one is perhaps 8′ by 10′ and another maybe 10′ x 10′, and the smaller one has a closet about 2.5′ wide, though of course the master is quite spacious. The master has a walkin-in closet…but it’s not wide enough to have rods on both sides, so why bother making it walk-in at all? The walls are the typical “new architecture” “boxes are boring”, and so there is quite a bit of wasted space created by several of the “interesting angles” the architect felt obligated to include. The walls are all a very fashionable matte beige, which shows every scuff mark, and the baseboards are of the thicker, neo-traditional style but were merely painted over instead of properly caulked and so are showing cracks everywhere as the house shift (as all houses do). They didn’t waste money on a good HVAC system or on proper construction techniques even where it’s visible or on reliable toilets, but by golly, the first floor has a 10′ ceiling because they know what’s important! There are two living areas (counting the finished walk-out basement to a postage-stamp back yard) and two dining areas (eat-in kitchen and sunroom/formal dining/whatever), so these houses sold like hotcakes, I’m sure.

I like older houses for a reason. It’s not that people used to build them better. It’s that when people didn’t, they’ve already fallen down…

Today is actually my second day of driving to MD. It’s supposed to take me 28 hours to do it. Wish me luck!

Don’t you sometimes wonder what the first person to do a certain activity was THINKING at the time? Take the ski jump, for example. There is something seriously wrong with someone who would go, “I’m bored. I know! Let’s build and artificial hill 400 feet high, cover it with snow, and ski off the end of it! Wow, we could get going 60 mph before we reached the end! WOO-HOO!”

Or how about the first person to put a worm in just liquor. “You know, this drink ain’t bad, but what it REALLY needs is this dead wriggly thing! You could see it floating in the bottle before you drink it, and I bet its guts would make the alcohol taste just GREAT! Yes! BRILLIANT!”

Somehow, I have a feeling that these people might have had a very, very gullible friend. You have the idea man…and then the ginea pig.

And now I have to go because I think the Bear just slipped and fell into the tiolet.