Lucky Seven!

I was tagged by Tori St. Claire to play a game called Lucky Sevens. Here is the only rule: post an excerpt from the 77th page of your book, starting at line 7, and 7 sentences long.

Well, let's see what Dracula's Secret has on its 77th page.

Lucifer’s blood, Valerie thought, save her from stupid mortal antics. If the child got trampled, she would never get inside to finish her job.

Impatiently, she snatched the child up by the straps of her overalls. When the cub wailed in fear, Valerie slung an arm under the diaper-stiff denim and held the girl against her shoulder. Unthinking, she patted the heaving back in ancient, soothing rhythms of comfort.

Ok, so it's more like seven and a half lines, but I wasn't going to cut the sentence in half.

I hope this makes you want to read more!

Working hard on Book Three

Yes. This does count as working.

John Frame

So I went to the Mark Rothko exhibit expecting to be overwhelmed and moved to tears. But for some reason, I wasn't feeling the magnificence I had before when I'd seen his work.

That's ok, though. I'm allowed my moods and you can't force emotional catharsis. So it was with great surprise when I wandered eerie yet excellent music into a mysterious area of the Portland Art Museum. and found a dark wonderland.

John Frame creates sculptures out of wood, glass eyes, found objects, and clockworks to tell a non-linear story he has titled Three Fragments of a Lost Tale. 

Included in the exhibit is the stop action movie he created with his articulated figures.

When you are a writer, you never stop working.

Even though I've turned in my manuscript and I'm ostensibly taking this week off, I'm still working. I've started brainstorming on Book Three, for example. Most of all, I'm feeding my head.

Ok, I'll admit it, the manicure/pedicure and eyebrow wax today had nothing to do with work, but what I did after was very important.

I went to the Mark Rothko exhibit at the Portland Art Museum.
I'm a huge fan of Rothko's later works - his well known paintings of enormous blocks of luminous colors. So it was a treat to see his earlier works and to explore his fascination with myth, archetypes, and darker colors. 

If you'd like to know more about Mark Rothko, go on over to his page on Artsy.net, right here.

Tomorrow, I'm going to talk about the other exhibit I saw - the completely unexpected dark whimsy of John Frame.

Woohoo!

Me on the Pont Neuf in 2010

I made it! I got the manuscript for Dracula's Desires in to my editor, Martin Biro at Kensington.

I am taking a few days off, then I get to dive into brainstorming for Book Three in addition to doing the revisions my editor will want me to do for Dracula's Desires.