The Sparrow's Nest

I'd made a very long checklist about the road to the publication of "Renzhies." I finally made all the chapter headings and formatted them to look nice and neat. I ran into a few problems. When you're making chapter breaks, you're not supposed to use page breaks, but section breaks. After that, you go into your header and click a button that will unlink the headers from the previous section so you can type in the new chapter heading without changing the previous chapter heading. Well this suddenly stopped working and I was at my wit's end, until I finally realized that when I clicked into the chapter heading, it would jump back to the previous section, or even more. So I had to scroll all the way back down to the place I wanted to be, and then it worked. I think my computer is doing its preliminaries to its death throes. Just great. It's the toughest computer I've ever owned, but I guess every computer has to die of something. Anyway, I got it all figu...

Several weeks ago, my brother and I were asked to pick a woman up from Gallup, New Mexico and bring her to Pinetop, AZ. She was going to be nursing another woman back to health who had to get a major stomach surgery. I'd never been to Gallup in my life. I passed it on the freeway once going to Albuquerque. Times are hard and I was going to make money with this, so I was like, okay! Let's go to this totally unknown place. We had instructions, me and my brother had figured out who was driving first and second, we had our snacks, we cleaned out the car, and then Sunday night the tribe went on lockdown. We were being essentials, though, so we cut out the next morning for New Mexico. I should have seen the signs when we stopped at Speedway for gas. Speedway has the slowest gas pumps on the planet. 19 bucks and I was standing there for 15 minutes. Getting to Holbrook and then jumping on the freeway was easy. I drove all the way to Gallup and got off at the exit that the instructions ...

I've had a list of some seriously stupid rejection letters in my time, but during the Christmas season, I got a dose of WHAT?! First one came right before Christmas. It was a big, fat no. And then, from the very same magazine, another letter showed up wishing me and everybody who'd submitted a story a Merry Christmas.... .......... .......... .......... The second letter came from a magazine who usually likes my stuff, but ever since the magazine hooked up with another one, it's been one rejection after another. "Too different" was the implication. While I'm sitting there refusing to conform, I get another letter requesting me to vote for this magazine. NEVER! A few days later, a request to buy the magazine. Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! You stupid magazine, you can go straight to where you're headed for all I care.

If you haven't heard of La  Pascualita, it's a big mannequin down in Chihuahua, Mexico. She stands in the window of a bridal shop. The woman she was patterned after was the daughter of the bridal shop owner. The woman died on her wedding day. Some say spider bite, scorpion sting, and even suicide. The woman's mother went into mourning for a while and closed the shop. When the shop finally reopened, the dead bride was standing in the shop as the new mannequin. Rumors went floating around that the mannequin was actually the woman's corpse because her eyes would follow people as they passed down the street. Even the people who dressed her said she was real. Hearing from a real mortician, if there was a corpse under there, she would have rotted and stunk like all get out. Her limbs would have been falling off. Her head is obviously plastic. That is a real mannequin, and a very artful one at that. People freak about how real the hands look. You get people like Leonardo da Vi...

Book 2 is coming out! YAY! And this time, I have a better head on my shoulders. I made a checklist and gave myself enough time to get the book out properly. DECEMBER, JANUARY, FEBRUARY, MARCH Item 1: Go over your editor's edits and apply. CHECK Item 2: Fix that one scene that's been bugging you for months because book 3 was much like yourself and announced something last minute. CHECK Item 3: Fix that chapter your editor had issues with. CHECK Item 4: Look up the word "Sirix" in the first book to see if you had capitalized it or not. CHECK. It's capitalized. Item 5: Add in title pages, About the Author, and all that mess for the before and after pages. (Not done yet) Item 6: Make a new glossary, and while you're at it, capitalize all words "Sirix" Item 7: Check that one section for discrepancies in a Syladin's physical makeup. Item 8: Chapter heading names (funna fun-fun!) Item 9: Format with section breaks instead of page breaks (I can format li...

About two years ago, my mom caught cancer, but the doctors were able to cut it out and now she's all right. They still want her to go for routine check-ups to make sure it hasn't come back. These check-ups are several hours away. My brothers and me take turns in bringing her to these check-ups. This time, one of my brothers who knows the place pretty well was supposed to take her. He was going to take my mom to a nice place to eat that he knew of. He was probably going to take her shopping and all that good stuff. But then his EVIL boss demanded he come in to work because suddenly everybody got sick and couldn't come in. And so, that left me as the only one who could take her. For the last two nights, I have been wide awake. So here I am at 6:30 AM running on 6 hours of sleep from the last two days. We started on down to the doctor's office. The GPS said where we were going and how long it would take. So la, la, la, la. We reach Scottsdale and now we have to go inside i...

Book 2, Monsters and Demons: Renzhies, will be out in June in time for Father's Day! Nri Kryne had its own set of problems, especially when it erased. Renzhies had its own problems, too, but it had to do with the villain. Every single scene that had to do with him gave me problems. I hate his guts and I hated writing about him, and yet I had to keep going back to his parts and fixing them, re-writing, and adjusting. His personality and villainy had to be cared for with hairpin accuracy. Whatever I did with his parts had a ripple effect that touched every part of the book. I wanted to scream. Now it's finally done and it will be out in June! May you hate the villain as much as I do.

My education in Spanish has been shoddy. I spent nine years in a Mexican barrio, but nobody spoke the language to me. They insisted on English. At school, they were trying to make everyone bilingual so they could get rid of the language barrier. Spanish speakers were spoken to in English and they eventually caught onto the language in a few months because they were kids. Isn't that wonderful? English speakers were not to be left out. We were supposed to learn Spanish. Exciting, right? We English speakers were subjected to a video of a strange man telling us how to say "duck" in Spanish for the whole year...the WHOLE year! El pato, like the hot sauce. Dog, cat, cow, red, blue, white, what's your name? I could count to twenty. But we weren't taught to have a conversation of any substance. The teachers set up a whole Mexican market at the end of my sixth year learning "duck" and we were supposed to go in and order food, sit in little cafes, and there was a ...