Life Musings – Anne Stuart

Merry Christmas (a little late)

Well, Christmas came and went while I was locked out of my website – sorry you missed my holiday excesses. I have green and red nail polish, holiday clothing, Christmas paper plates, cups, napkins plus two sets of China holiday plates. Our tree is gorgeous and all is well in the land of Stuart.

I’m really chomping at the bit to get to work in the new year. 2021 was a dud, work-wise. Oh, I wrote. I wrote and I wrote, tons of stuff. Problem was, it was garbage. Well, that’s being a bit too extreme, Being a relatively secure person, at least as far as my work goes, I don’t think I can write garbage. Nevertheless, I wrote tons of stuff that didn’t work and needs to be revised. With an ax.
First there’s the historical, which is half done. I don’t have much to do on that one – just change the heroine, the villain, and give it a plot. Amazing that one can write half a book with no plot.

Then there’s my classic romantic suspense, which needs passion and focus. I’ve been working on it for so long, and at such a leisurely pace, that I have a hard time summoning up the energy for the second half (when I was bursting with enthusiasm for the first half).

At least there’s a fresh one almost perfectly formed in my head that’s an off-shoot of the first one (entitled It Takes a Thief – second one is To Catch a Thief). All I need is a swift kick in the rear end and i’m off.

Of course, with my recent knee replacement it’s hard to kick oneself in the butt, but I’m determined. Every year I come up with a new word or phrase to encompass my hopes and dreams for the new year. This year I’m thinking along the lines of “just go for it.”

I may even break my usual record of never posting here, and I might even get a newsletter together. All sorts of things are possible when you’re determined. Maybe that’s my word for the new year – determined.

I hope you all had a lovely Christmas, and if it was at all melancholy I hope you were able to find comfort. 2020 sucked. 2021 might have sucked even harder. 2022 isn’t going to make our troubles go far away, but we can carve out goodness, kindness and joy if we try.

Let’s do that.

Happy Holidays.

Creativity, Landscapes, Life Musings, New Releases

Ch-ch-changes

OMG, I saw the first sign of changing leaves! It shouldn’t be a shock – I live in Northern Vermont where the leaf color in Autumn is amazing, and we usually see the first signs of change during the first week of August. But it was a long, hard winter, and I suspect we have another long, hard one ahead of us with the *#!^%$ virus.

I want another full month of summer, maybe even two, where I can float in my pool and listen to audiobooks (I just re-read Ilona Andrews’s WHITE HOT, which is delicious). In fact, I’ve been doing a lot of rereading. I know what I want to read, and I’m quite often disappointed in the new stuff I’m trying. Still, I do keep discovering new writers that really appeal to me. There’s just something about revisiting an old favorite.

Plans for the ABSOLUTELY POSITIVE WORST MAN IN ENGLAND, SCOTLAND AND WALES are coming along swimmingly. I’m guessing it’ll be out in about a month, and there’s other good stuff coming. The cover is wonderful – I should start flashing that around – and I love the book.

Funny thing about books – they have minds of their own. I realize why I had such trouble with the final third of Worst Man – I was trying to force it into the mold I was used to, with a dangerous, murderous hero and the world about to explode. But that simply wasn’t this story. Obviously, given the title, my hero is a very bad man. But he’s also eminently redeemable.

More details to come. I’m getting very excited about this.

Life Musings, New reissues

All the Storms

Life has a habit of making other plans. I’ve been in absentia again, due to all sorts of issues, but I’ve lost my main ways of pondering life, so I’m going to do it here. Eventually it’ll morph into fun and games, but right now I’m just being thoughtful. I’m working my ass off on so many things, so first I’ll give you a book update.
1. I just finished writing a really wonderful book. You know when you read a book and the world stays with you? Some of you immediately go back and reread it, some of you can’t read anything else for a day or two. I remember when I read Sunshine by Robin McKinley, I stopped a couple of chapters before the end and just clasped it to my breast. Seriously. Well, I feel that way about the new, untitled book. I started it as a Christmas novella, to be out last year, and it was supposed to be piffle. I almost immediately knew it was going to be more than a novella, so I sent it to my agent, who said expand it, and I put it to one side and worked on another project. When that self-destructed I went back to it, and it just blossomed like a dark rose. I want to go back there – I want to listen to it in audio, I want to dream in that world.
The world of publishing is completely random nowadays, so who knows what will happen to it. My agent has it now, and I’m relatively sanguine about the outcome. It could be glory or disaster, but then, those things come out of throwing everything into life. If there’s no market for it I’ll make one, and I’ll move on, because there are so many more books to write. But this is one of the special ones.

2. I’ve been revising older stuff. Belle Bridge Books is coming out with Crazy Like a Fox in the next couple of days, and that was so much fun! Sometimes when I revise older books I end up being astonished at how much I like some that I’d forgotten about, and disappointed in some of my favorites. I can’t figure out why. I’m about to put out Rafe’s Revenge, and originally I’d thought of that as a sort of throwaway. I ended up loving it -I don’t know why I thought there wasn’t much to it. Maybe my life was going insane at the time – my life has a tendency to do that with lots of sturm und drang, usually not caused by me. Lots of storm and disaster in my family. But both of those books were a real treat. Next up is Special Gifts, which I adored and was a RITA finalist – I’m hoping that won’t turn into a disappointment.

3. I’ve redone the Maggie Bennett novels, with new covers, rewritten, and those I still loved. It only makes sense that I’d love my books – after all, they’re written by someone who knows my fantasies and wants exactly the same characters and stories that move me. I can’t imagine writing someone I hated.
Well, I did do that, twice. And trust me, I didn’t like it and don’t like those books. Though maybe those will be ones I go back to and end up pleasantly surprised.

4. Nanowrimo is starting, and I’m going back to a proposal I adored. I never finished it because I had too many contracts to fill, but now is definitely the time. I promise I’ll come back and tell you all about them.

But in the meantime it’s Halloween and the world is a horror show. I’m going to do my best to keep up the holiday spirit – I live in a very small, rural Vermont town, and we have very few trick or treaters. This year our delightfully liberal church has decided to organize a local Halloween trail in the town proper. Since most of the houses are owned by summer visitors they tend to be empty, but they’ve given permission for a bunch of us to porch sit and hand out candy. I’ll be wearing my nun’s habit, with spooky lights (and long johns underneath) and maybe even a boombox full of spooky music if I can find one in my crowded house. A good buddy is the next house up, so we can cackle at each other if the mood strikes us. This is a world where goblins and witches are the good guys, where demons are hot and sexy, and the “good” people carry torches. When I was young people used to say I lived in a fantasy world. I think it’s a much better place to be.

Life is a balancing act and right now the see-saw is little off. It’ll get better. And I have something to write that I love. My family is stable, my cats are wonderful, my sewing machines are working, my husband is fabulous — what me worry? Sometimes you gotta work hard to be happy. Fortunately, I can do that.

Happy Halloween!