Here’s what’s happening in frigid Central New York at present!

First of all, my new pup Miles has nearly doubled in size since we got him. He may have doubled in cuteness as well. I’m less sure about that because I don’t have an accurate tool to measure cuteness. I guess I’ll let you decide.

I have also been working hard on The Terror of Tijuana, though I could be working harder. Here’s why I say that.

I think I’ve mentioned before that I attend a local writer’s group at the Baldwinsville library. (We meet Tuesday nights from 7-9 pm, so if you’re a writer or someone who tolerates writers and you’re in the area stop in and say hello. If you’d like to bring something to read please do, or just come and listen.)

With a few exceptions, I’ve managed to bring a new chapter of ToT every week, and this week would have been the same, except the library was closed due to the exceedingly nasty weather we experienced that night. (Nasty and weird. It was bad enough to close everything with a door on Tuesday. It’s nearly 50° today. Tomorrow the expected high is 26°!)

The reason I feel I could be working harder is that I’m just barely finishing the chapters that I’ll be reading that night in time to print out copies and get to the library. A couple of times I didn’t even have time to proofread, as was blatantly obvious to my fellow authors.

I wrote the entire chapter that I’d planned to read this past Tuesday, all 3,369 words of it, in a single (lunch-interrupted) session on Monday. If I can write even close to that on a consistent basis, (my personal baseline is 2k per day), then I’d have the darn thing finished by now, and you could be reading it too.

So I guess it’s time to ramp up the self-discipline a little bit.

From now until I finish I intend to get some work done DAILY as opposed to my current SKIN-OF-MY-TEETHLY.

Oh, and just in case you were wondering, one of the other authors at our Tuesday group, my good friend Bekkah Frisch, offered a suggestion which I turned into a major plot twist, so those of you who enjoy that sort of thing should be pleased!

Other News

I’m offering a free signed set of the first two Cleanup Crew books to one lucky member of my Facebook Reader’s Group, once our membership there hits 350.

This is a little ironic, since not too long ago the membership was in excess of 500, but Facebook changed things up a bit, in that if someone adds a person to the group from their friends list, (which any member can do), and I approve the membership, they don’t actually get added to the group until they accept the invitation. While I wasn’t really happy to see my group number drop by that amount, I agree wholeheartedly with FB doing that. In the past I’ve had some of my awesome readers go through their friends and add huge numbers to the group, only to have many drop out once they realize they’ve been added.

But if you’re interested in grabbing a couple of free signed books, and you haven’t yet joined the group, now would be a good time. Click here to head to the group and sign up!

You can also join the Newsletter mailing list by clicking here.

BONUS: A Peek Behind The Scenes

Just a little bonus content before I close off this post. As a wonderful indication of how much I need to get organized, I started writing this post on Wednesday. Today is Friday. The time it took to finish the post is directly related to the hard drive crash I suffered a while back and my laziness since then. I couldn’t find two images of the CUC books in a high enough resolution to produce the above image. Once I got that all squared away, it’s taken me two minutes to finish.

Organize, my friends. Always organize.