the things under our beds

I took this pic this morning after waking with my mind filled with dreams about Andromeda.  Not the movie, where everyone's blood turns to powder.  The galaxy.  They say the Andromeda galaxy will crash into ours in about 150 million years, or something like that, and I wonder.  Will worlds collide?  Or will there just be a lot of close calls?  And will Earth experience a wild shift in gravitational pull?

I fell back asleep for a bit and started dreaming about the movie Melancholia, which went on forever and only redeemed itself in the last five minutes.  When I woke again I realized that crashing worlds happen to be one of the scary things that creep out of the darkness under my bed at night to give me nightmares.  That, and the childhood-nightmare-turned-book I happen to be writing right now.  Which is so creepy I just had a shiver.  Poor Maya!  She's my protagonist.  Poor Beck!  Her flawed yet oddly gifted love interest.  Why oh why do I put them through it? 
 

nightmares

So my current WIP is based on my oldest, most terrifying fear.  I finish a chapter and have nightmares for days.  Chapter.  Nightmares.  Chapter.  Nightmares.  My husband thinks I am a BIG WHA WHA baby. 

And he may be right.

I don't know what to call this book.  For a while it was called GOODBYE MOON, but I haven't settled on it yet.  I'm about half-way through, which I didn't expect to be by now.  Maybe it's that I just want to get it done ... every freaking chapter scares about three years off my life.

green eyes

kitty-green eyes

If you've read The Thirteenth Tale and loved it, as I did, then perhaps you noticed that Shadow, on page 406, opens a cool green eye.

Green eyes are a prevalent theme throughout the book, and Shadow's cool green eye, I'm sure, alludes to the green eyes of his former mistress Miss Winters.

But when Margaret first meets Shadow on page 78, he 'regards her fixedly with his round yellow eyes.'

Shadow's name connects with Miss Winters' childhood, as you may recall.  So maybe the cat's eyes changed color as a way of remembering her after she died?  If so, the change goes unremarked by Margaret.


Or perhaps what is really going on here is that I have stumbled into owning a rare copy, just like the copy of The Thirteenth Tale within The Thirteenth Tale, one made valuable by a printing flaw.

My fingers are crossed . . . .

going back to school is pretty much killing me . . . .

I'm mentioned this before, but I decided to update my graphic skills this semester and enroll in a digital media class: Photoshop and Illustrator.  Sometimes I'm so frustrated I practically burst into tears.  Like yesterday, when we were required to use the 3-D tool in Photoshop.  Can a tool be more irritating?  I'm not sure.

But today we started into illustrator and I LOVE it.  !!!  Quite soon I'll be posting some cool artwork and then, I'm going to dive into Stealth Panda's new book, which is still super-rough but so very Stealth.

And for those of you who won bookmarks on my recent blog tour: thanks for your patience!  I'm shipping the bookmarks tomorrow.  Life has a crafty way of piling up . . . .