“I love you more than all the other feeds that I read.”

- My husband

Walking past the Secret Garden Books today in beautiful Downtown Ballard, I stopped to admire the Harry Potter display (3 more days!!!) and noticed that the store is giving 20% of the profits of The Deathly Hallows to three Seattle non-profits that support children’s literacy. One of them is 826 Seattle…..hmmmm….where have I heard that name before? (Slaps forehead.) I know! It sounds just like 826 Valencia, the children’s writing nonprofit with the pirate store in San Francisco that I blogged about last week, in which I wrote “If it were in Seattle I would definitely volunteer there.” The Seattle branch doesn’t have a pirate store, to my great disappointment, but it has awesome free creative writing classes for teenagers. Two classes I want to take are “Write a novel in a month” and “Northwest Mythology Tales”. If only I were under 18! Arrrrrg!

Been a while, ain’t it? I’ve been busy celebrating my quarter century birthday, reading some dull (with one or two exceptions) novels, and (finally) writing. For those of you reading my rough draft as I go along, know that I plan to completely rewrite the first chapter. Next week is the Pacific Northwest Writer’s Conference and if I can drum up enough courage (and money) to attend I will need to be able to woo an agent in 10 minutes. Yay for deadlines! – it lit a fire under me and I’ve spent the last two days writing furiously. The conference has a romance novel track and quite a few of the attending agents represent romance and paranormal romance.

Here’s the start of my spiel:

Maggie O’Roarke has always wished for something more than ordinary. She has ordinary brown hair and an ordinary build, an ordinary idiot boss who pays her ordinary minimum wage, and an ordinarily overbearing mother (especially when harassing her to get a “real job”).
That is until on an extraordinarily bad day she stumbles across an extraordinary mirror that transports her into an extraordinary new world.

Um, yeah, something like that.

Also I’m taking suggestions for good character names, especially for the Hero.  I think I’ll call him Finn until he reveals his real name to me. (It isn’t Finn.)

“His broad shoulders tapered to a washboard stomach that could do enough laundry for an entire nation.”

- Sherrilyn Kenyon, Night Play

Avast! Today we went on a fabulous tour with some of Ryan’s tech friends and they took us to 826 Valencia, San Francisco’s only independent pirate supply store. It was quite a laugh. The walls were lined with old drawers that pulled out to reveal plastic rats, rope, handkerchiefs, and random knickknacks. It sold reproductions of victorian-era etiquette books, such as the art of kissing. All proceeds go towards supporting the nonprofit youth creative writing studio in the back of the shop. Some of the children’s published stories were also sold in the store. If it were located in Seattle I would definitely volunteer there. I bought a shirt with a pirate on it that says “Nobody takes me seriously. Arrr.” The store also sold a tempting board game by Front Porch Classics (a Seattle company) called Dread Pirate that I might buy to have a Pirate-themed party one of these days.

End of day 5, San Francisco. I’ve gobbled through half of Sherrilyn Kenyon‘s Dark-Hunter series. Thank the gods she wrote so many. I’ve become faster at reading books: today I read Kiss of the Night cover-to-cover in the cafe of Borders on Union Square. That doesn’t mean I skip words; I still catch tons of typos. Who is editing these books anyway? In Dance with the Devil the hero took his clothes off, twice, in the same scene, and no he didn’t put them back on again between each time taking them off. Someone should hire me to edit romance novels. I’m completely addicted and I catch every word like nobody’s business. As for writing…well the first half of the week I was unable to log on to the adobe loaner computer that is “mine” until Ryan gets his own. And, well, the second half of the week I just haven’t been able to put down a book long enough to write my own.

Sherrilyn Kenyon, aka Kinley MacGreggor, needs to watch less T.V. Please don’t tell me “he was dressed in black leather and looked like Spike from Buffy the Vampire Slayer.” Despite the heavy Buffy references, I’m enjoying the series. The books are much more complicated and action-packed than the typical romance. I’ve always had a thing for Greek mythology. I cut my teeth on the stuff. Kenyon’s heavily Greek-inspired, but still creatively original mythology is awesome. I don’t even like blond men in leather, but I’d give this series four hearts: <3 <3 <3 <3.