was had at the beach. Lots of chat, lots of chocolate, lots of really good wine…plus the beach and sunshine. Really, what more could you want? We did actually do some work, too, which was an added bonus. I got ten pages done on Mercy, and we solved plotting problems for both Chris (who got a revision request–go Chris!) and Robyn. Mel wisely used her time to zone out and relax (after crappy weeks at work) and Freya dutifully did the HT newsletter. All done in between the above mentioned chatting, eating and wining, of course. So, all in all, a brilliant weekend. Although next time we go, I might motivate their lazy butts and get them out and walking with me in the morning. The beach is brilliant at six am. lol.

Nothing much has happened since then, because I’ve been busy catching up with everything at home. We picked up Kasey’s new car (which is her 18th birthday present) yesterday, and she heads off to a schoolies week with her friends today (yikes–my baby girl is growing up!). Expect to see more grey hairs on me by next week. Writing wise, I am hoping to add to the ten pages I did over the weekend. It seems the muse has settled on that story for the moment, but we’ll see what happens when I actually sit down to write again.

Mercy Burns Progress Meter

doing everything but writing these past few days. We told Kasey a few months ago that we’d buy her a car for her 18th birthday. Given that it’s coming up in January, we decided to get it a little earlier so she could start learning to drive in it and get to know the car before she gets her license. So that’s what we’ve been doing–car shopping.

Have you ever tried to get a teenager to make a decision? Now, that’s tough!

But after a couple of test drives, we finally got one–a Holden Viva. Which is basically Daewoo (badged under Chevrolet and Suzuki overseas) reworked into Holden standards. The Daewoo when it was here got some pretty ordinary reviews, but the Viva has been received better. It drove well and felt nice on the road, and it has some safety features other small cars didn’t (like side airbags). Plus the cd player was mp3 compatible–very important . It’s not new, but as good as–it’s only done 29000 k, which is darn good for a two year old car (mine is only a year old and it’s done 46000 k). So, now we just have to get it and start teaching her to drive…

If you see me with grey hairs over the next month or so, you know I’ve been on driving duty. lol.

Oh, and I won’t be online over the next couple of days–I’m going down the beach with the lulus for a weekend of fun, wine and chocolate (and maybe just a little bit of writing )

and this is basically little more than a test run of the new blog. I’m just playing around getting a feel for things

I actually haven’t done much today in the way of writing….I’d like to say it was simply too hot to write (it’s not even summer yet, and we’re getting temps of 37–38 degrees celcius–which is 99–100 fahrenheit) but that wouldn’t be the truth. I was actually just playing Fear all afternoon. It’s going to be hot again tomorrow–somehow, I get the feeling the muse won’t be in the mood to write then, either.

I got some book writing done yesterday. It might have been done between bouts of watching the cricket, the V8 supercars racing, and playing Fear, but at least it was done. Of course, it was on Mercy rather than Riley, but with the way the muse is at the moment, I’m not complaining. Writing is writing. And I have to say, I’m really liking this story so far–the hero is dark and dangerous, and the heroine has a sarcastic edge and a tough outer shell (though you just know she’s a marshmallow inside ). I’d be happy enough if the muse stayed with this one, but she’s still rather flighty at the moment. Which means I’ll probably be writing Riley or the Quinn short today.

website is now up and running. And it looks smashing, if I have to say so myself. Many thanks to Justin from Stonecreek Media for doing such a great job. The only thing left to do is to switch over my blog–which may take a couple of days. Until that happens, the blog link on my site won’t work–it’ll just give a 404 error message. But I’ll keep updating this one in the meantime.

In writing news, I’ve been asked to submit a story for a UK vampire romance anthology, which will be released middle to late next year. The muse got all excited about this, and started working on a short that’s been sitting there for a little while waiting for inspiration. This one (unlike the other two anthology stories I’ve submitted this year) is actually based in Riley world, and is told from Quinn’s pov. The story itself is set between Tempting Evil and Dangerous Games, so at this point in time, Kellen’s in it as well. Whether he stays will depend on how the story goes.

I’m still totally enjoying playing FEAR, so I’m afraid the writing is coming along at a slower pace than it should be. The same can be said for the website redesign–though I’ve got the majority of the pages swapped over now, and it really shouldn’t take that much longer to get everything up and running.

Except for the fact that I have more Riley edits in. Thankfully, there’s only one page of them this time, and it’s more sharpening up the motivations of some of the characters and fixing the ever-present spelling errors than anything else. (I do wish you Americans spoke and spelled the same as us Aussies. It would make my life so much easier. lol ) I’m planning to get the edits done today, so I can do a read-through tomorrow and ship it back to my editor on Tuesday.

Then, maybe, I can get back to writing Riley 7. If the muse can tear her blood thirsty self away from FEAR, that is

having a large website (or rather, a website with a lot of pages) is the fact that when you decide to update the look, it takes forever to transfer the information over. And it doesn’t help when Frontpage decides to play funny buggers. Yeah, I know, it’s a microsoft product, therefore I shouldn’t expect it to do what I want, but Frontpage has been out for a while now and you’d think they’d have at least sorted some of the bugs out. But no…

For some damn reason, it took a disliking to the excerpt for Chasing the Shadows. Every time I put the excerpt in on the right hand column, the links block on the left hand side moved down to the end of the column. I have no idea why–it didn’t do this on any other page, and most of those excerpts are longer. I couldn’t see any problem in the coding, but just in case there was a gremlin I couldn’t see, I saved it as a text file then pasted it in. No difference. The links box still travelled down. Very frustrating. I thought maybe I’d stuffed the template somehow, but when I did the excerpt for Kiss the Night Goodbye, it behaved itself. For some odd reason, it’s just Chasing that’s the problem. After spending three hours on the flaming thing, I have officially given up. The excerpt for Chasing is now rather short. Sorry about that, but blame stupid Frontpage.

I’ve still got lots of pages to transfer over, so the site isn’t going to be up any time soon. But it does look great so far

Writing wise, I’ve done exactly zip. Hopefully tomorrow I’ll get back on track.