Kendra Leigh Castle

Morning, everyone!  So as you might expect, yes, we all survived what they’re calling “Snowmageddon” in good shape.  Plenty of accumulation (and one of the Catholic schools had the roof cave in from all the snow), but I’ve seen worse.  This is what happens when you hail from near the Canadian border and the Great Lakes: when it comes to snowfall, I am hard to impress.  It always melts quickly enough down here, though it’s so cold that it may be a while yet.  It has been SUCH a snowy winter here!  The kids are off of school today, naturally.  AGAIN.  We didn’t get hit as badly as they did up by Baltimore, and we kept power, so I can’t complain about much except for the continuing canceled school problem.  The roads are definitely icy, courtesy of the sleet that pounded us for quite a while Friday night before changing back to snow.  I really need to get to the post office to mail off my line edits today (all done as of yesterday! WOO!), but I’ll be waiting a few hours, I think, for some melting.  Anyway, this is a picture of Saturday morning before it got incredibly nasty again (we had blizzard conditions all afternoon).  Brian bought a shiny new snowblower because he’s tired of shoveling the driveway!  It’s been a big help, that’s for sure.  Our driveway is really long, which is great until it gets covered.  Here are a couple of other pictures I took from the big event:

This was during the nastiest part of the storm on Saturday.  There were quite a few times we couldn’t see this house in the picture!

More blizzard from the front of the house.  I’ll admit it, it was kind of cool for a while.  Reminded me of home!  All of our old neighbors from when I was growing up were writing me during the storm, asking how their weather got down here   I guess the Northern NY weathermen on TV were having a good laugh about the, shall we say, “Mid-Atlantic Panic”.  There was definitely much freak-outage.  Here’s a final pic from yesterday, because my patio table is a pretty good way to measure how much snow we got:

As you can probably tell from all the little paw prints, Brian had to shovel the deck for the dogs.  The short leg thing wasn’t working so well for them in the snow!

Anyway, that was my weekend…how was yours?

Well, what do you all think?  The “weather event” we’ve been having here got my butt in gear on a few things, amazingly enough.  I’ve been wanting to redo the site for a while now…the old template worked well enough as a stopgap, but it was never quite what I wanted.  I had to just pull one off the internet, and though there are hundreds of templates out there, nothing I chose was ever really going to be “mine.”  The problems were that a)I don’t know code, b)I have no idea how to design a website in general, and c)I’m not really interested in forking over a bunch of cash to someone who does right now.  So it took some looking around to find a product that would allow me to design for wordpress without, well, actually knowing how to design for wordpress.  I wound up using Artisteer.  Very user-friendly if anyone is ever looking to do the same!  Which is not to say that I didn’t swear at the screen at all, but that would happen no matter what.  It’s a way of life.

Anyway, it’s very late, but I’m feeling all pleased with myself, so I thought I’d put up a post.  Just in case anyone noticed that I’d redecorated   If you notice anything funky, let me know…the old font killed my eyes (one of the many things I couldn’t fix with the old template), so I made it bigger.  Hope that works for everyone, along with everything else all shiny and new around here.  I have a very cool blue dragon head that I almost put in the header…I may save him for the future!

Hope you all had an excellent week, and I’ll see you Monday!

Manuscripts, I mean, not the Stephen King story (though that was pretty good).  Any writer will tell you that manuscripts do NOT stay gone, no matter how many times you try to send them off in the mail, by email, anything.  There’s always something.  And even once you get them on the shelf, chances are you’ll have a look out of morbid curiosity and discover, much to your chagrin, that you missed something anyway.  That said, I now have, parked upon my messy desk, the line edits for RENEGADE ANGEL which are fairly pressing in nature (as in, I have a couple of weeks and they’re due…quick turnaround, which is fine).  After flipping through, I’m comfortable that there’s nothing earth-shattering that must be messed with at this point, but there are a number of items I need to address with my Red Pen of Doom.  SO, I will be absent from blogging this week while I get this stuff done.  I very much like my editor and her assistant, and I’d like to make ‘em happy

Hope you all had a good weekend…my baby girl had a wonderful swim meet, making me a very proud mom (really, I stand amazed…she does things I could never do and makes them look effortless, plus she’s just a really great kid), and I’ve enjoyed having my mom in town.  I managed to watch Sleepless in Seattle yesterday with her, and only half listened to my husband’s mutterings about “chick movies” when he occasionally wandered through.  Man, I love that movie.  It’s one of my fave romantic films ever.  He’s right, though, it’s a total chick movie

Have a great week, ladies!  And for fun, what are some of YOUR favorite chick movies?

I had to share this most excellent video that MsM gave me a heads up about the other day.  I haven’t had Sir Guy over in a while, and he certainly is a big bad handsome man to end the week with.  Brooding!  Black Leather!  *swoon*  You all have an excellent weekend!

Morning, ladies!  Shockingly, I have a topic today: bad boy heroes.  See, I’m about half done with Sherrilyn Kenyon’s Night Pleasures, and am enjoying Kyrian, the leather-wearing bad boy hero who still, despite his styling himself as kind of a badass, comes off to me as the exiled prince he is.  Beautiful and decadent.  Anyway, I’m loving him, and then all of a sudden another bad boy roars up on his motorcycle and he’s even MORE badass than Kyrian!  So of course, as with all shiny objects, I am immediately distracted by his wonderfulness.  This would be Talon, who I’ll get to read about next, apparently.

This is definitely a trend in paranormal romance: the leather-clad bad boy hero.  Now, I write them myself (I mean, what else am I going to do with a demon?  Dress him in flannel?) but I do wonder sometimes if they’ll stay as popular as they are right now.  They are, IMO, the modern day equivalent of the Regency rogue, and God knows people still read those.  But I’m curious about what you all think.  Do you get tired of the big bad boys in leather?  Or are you happy to keep eating them up?  For me, I think as long as there are interesting  variations on the theme, I’m there, though I do have occasional hankerings for the straight-up knight in shining armor.  I always thought of the MacInnes brothers as more brave and noble knights than anything…being able to give them fur and claws just added that element of darkness that I love.  Only slightly off-topic, I’ve been dying for a good medieval lately, speaking of.  Suggestions are welcome!

Anyway, what do you think, ladies?  What sort of hero gets your motor running these days?  Wicked, good, or just wicked good?

Couple of things for Wednesday.  Firstly, hat tip to Donna for letting us know about the Glambert performance on Ellen yesterday!  I have video to share, because I love this song, Strut.  Not a big fan of Whataya Want From Me, the last single, but I like almost everything else on the album, so YAY!  He’s so pretty…and inspiring too, actually.  He was apparently quite heavy in high school and got picked on all the time.  The guy certainly turned into a swan after the fact!  But I would guess that his previous struggles are one of the reasons he seems so sweet.  I’m sad that he’s gay only because it’s such a loss for women everywhere!  I suppose, with my love of guyliner-wearing men who fall somwehere in the Goth/Glam Rock part of the spectrum, I am doomed to drool over a lot of gay men.  Oh well
Lemmee see, I found another thing that was entertaining as well.  I’m totally dating myself, but I still love Pee Wee Herman.  I miss his show (and if you’ve never seen the HBO special that started it all, you are missing out…it was NOT a kids’ show, just adult humor disguised as one, and OMG it was hysterical).  And color me thrilled that the guy seems to be making a comeback!  So I laughed my butt off when he appeared on Conan’s final show to explain the NBC mess.  The guy still has it!
Hope you all enjoy your day!  My mom’s coming to visit for a few, which is awesome, and yesterday I FINALLY got the dragon proposal to leave my desk for good.  It kept returning to me with just a few small tweaks needed…sort of got to be The Thing That Wouldn’t Leave.  BUT, it left, and is now on my editor’s desk, sooo…I will recommence finger crossing!!  Now I can get back to my Dark Hunter book   Happy Wednesday!

The “being awake,” it is not making me happy this morning.  I’m reeeeeally tired because not only did my youngest stay up half the night with a cough (and being four years old, he was decidedly less than sweet about it), but we had the interesting experience of being kept awake by none other than an owl that had decided to perch on the roof directly above our bedroom.  It was pretty cool at first…the strange noise was first incorporated into the dream I was just starting to have…but you know, after a half hour of the owl rather loudly calling (and being answered in kind) I was ready to have it quiet again.  Since Jack got up AGAIN shortly thereafter, it was not to be. Never heard an owl like that before.  We tried to see if it was perched outside a window so we could get a look at it, but it was definitely on the roof.  So this morning, I did some research online, and it turns out our nocturnal visitor was a Great Horned Owl.  That call is unmistakable as anything else.  Aren’t they pretty?  It was likely calling with its mate.  I love owls, so it’s pretty cool that we seem to have a pair in the immediate area.

So going with the sleep theme, have you guys heard of Sleep Talkin’ Man?  I believe he and his wife have been on some morning shows just lately, because their funny little blog has taken off.  He apparently talks in his sleep almost every night, and his wife thought the stuff he said was so out there she started recording it for posterity.  To both of their surprise, they are suddenly a little bit famous.  Here’s a sample, a night where Adam (that’s his name) was apparently dreaming about pirates:

“If I wanted to see a long nose and a big ass, I’d look at a horse.”

“Butt cheeks ahoy! There she blows!”

“You can’t be a pirate if you haven’t got a beard. I said so. MY boat, MY rules.”

“We haven’t got a plank. Just fucking jump.”

“Don’t jump on me!”

It’s pretty funny, I highly recommend it. And if they ever put “Badgertastic!” on a t-shirt, I do believe I would buy one   Check it out here.  And have a great Tuesday!

I shouldn’t have gotten invested in a Vikings victory.  My love is a curse.  WHYYYYY?!  Favre is still awesome, though.  Next year, baby. *sigh*  Anyway, here’s a picture that Diva Donna sent me to chase the blues away.  He’s a nameless Mr. Mantastic, so let’s have some fun and give him an appropriate moniker.  Something dark and sexy, because he’s totally a vampire taking a shower after a long night of brooding, wearing lots of black, and skulking in shadows.

Ideas, ladies?  I’ll begin with my contribution: he looks kind of like a Talon to me   Different, dark, and dangerous.  Your turn!  Happy Monday, all.  And Donna, THANK YOU for keeping me supplied with such amazing eye candy!

Little late getting going here this morning…but I did find a cool picture of a dark nymph.  Wish I knew who the artist was, so I could give credit where it’s due!  I always wanted to be able to draw, but stick people are about as fancy as I get.  Anyway…

It’s a wet, fairly yucky day outside, so I’m wandering around in my hoodie because I’m always cold anyway.  This morning I’ll be putting the finishing touches on my re-revised synopsis for the dragon story and getting a small pitch ready for it as well.  So here I sit, drinking my second cup of coffee, and the house is blissfully quiet for a couple of hours.  Ahhhh

Hope you all have some fun stuff planned for the weekend.  I think we might have dinner with friends one night, but other than that, I’m just hanging out.  Probably curl up with one of the other House of Night books I’ve been saving for a rainy day!  Enjoy the weekend, and I’ll see you all Monday!

Morning, ladies!  I have to head out to drop the kids at school, then pick up the cat’s heart pills at Target (wow, when did my life become such a whirlwind of excitement?), and I really don’t have a single interesting thing I can think of to talk about.  SO, in lieu of that, here’s a song I’ve had stuck in my head for like three days.  In a good way, because it’s a pretty cool song…got sort of a funky, almost neo-disco vibe going on.  It’s from ‘07, but somehow I missed it back then.  Probably because I was living in the desert, cut off from civilization, LOL.  Seriously, though, Fallon Nevada had zero good radio stations, so it’s no wonder.  Anyhoo, the video is sort of weird, but the dancing guy is interestingly hot.  Enjoy the moment of groove, feel free to boogie in your chairs.  Have a great Thursday!