Wishing You A Safe And Happy New Year

Just taking a moment today to wish you all a safe, happy, and joyful New Year. Be careful out there tonight, but live it up!

A Little Ingenuity

Every once in a while, I surprise myself with a stupidly simple solution to a problem.

As I finished stringing the last bit of lights on our Christmas tree this year, I discovered half the strand was out - at the top. So the top two feet of our tree was unlit. Curses! And, since I was already all done with it, I didn't want to take them all off, so a quick trip to the craft store yielded a bunch of fake poinsettia which I jammed in at the top. Our angel now looks like she's sitting on a cloud of poinsettia!

Hubby observed that the top still looks a bit dark, so next year I will buy a new strand of lights and intersperse them among the flowers. Assuming we do a country-folk art tree next year. Hubby is talking about wanting a huntin' tree - even though he fishes rather than hunts. Complete with those shotgun-shell light strings. Well, I guess I can't hog all the fun. I give you the 2009 Tree:

Happy Holidays!

Not much to report this week - just plugging away as usual. I have some editing to do this week and next, so I'm really just popping on in between to wish you all a safe and happy holiday, and a very happy New Year full of great writing for you writers, and awesome books for all you readers. Cheers!

Snow!

Woke up to three inches of the white stuff this morning, the first that has stuck this winter. My son will be happy. :) I showed him how to make a snowball yesterday when we got a dusting, and he thought that was Really Cool. Maybe it will stick around so that we can make a snowman now!

Hee Hee, Guess Where I'm Blogging From?

(Yes, I know that isn't grammatically correct.)

I'm in my living room - which is far away from my desktop computer upstairs. Yep, I got my netbook. Yay! I can now go anywhere I want in my house and connect to the 'Net, as well as write whenever I get the urge to do so. While I will fondly remember my Dana, I have happily moved on to a Gateway Intel Atom N270. Jargon for Really Nice Little Guy That Is Fast Becoming My Versatile Writing Pal. It has shorter battery life than advertised, though it was more than enough to get me through my day. I sacrified some battery life (was looking at a Toshiba netbook) for the nicer keypad of this little fella, but so far I am quite enjoying it. I have small hands, so the scaled-down keyboard isn't much of a problem, after a short learning curve. This model has Windows 7 Starter, which is a watered-down Windows platform that doesn't allow pretty desktop wallpapers and whatnot, as well as a few other things it can't do which I haven't cared about so far, since this is only a writing and research machine - so it's been perfect thus far. I can get on the Intenet, write, and use Pandora. Very Happy Indeed.

So, in closing, I will do the happy dance and thank my Awesome Husband, who got this critter for me. Much love to you, hubby, for increasing my writing productivity. Woot!

MWA Cuts Harlequin

Following on the heels of RWA's removal of Harlequin from its list of approved publishers, the Mystery Writers of America has done the same in a unanimous Board vote conducted this week. MWA members may no longer use Harlequin-published books as the basis for their "published" status. This is another blow for the romance writing industry's biggest hitter. After a media frenzy regarding the launch of Harlequin's self-publishing arm, Harlequin Horizons, Harlequin quickly changed the arm's name to DellArte Press - but it's still Harlequin under the new suit. It remains to be seen what happens to Harlequin's status with MWA and RWA going forward. GalleyCat has the full scoop.