How do they do it?

My big question of the moment, only of the moment, is how do bloggers keep up with their blogs? Don't they have jobs, housekeeping, car maintenance, pet care, child care, bills to pay, grocery shopping, and hundreds of other life duties to perform?

I just checked the last time I updated this blog and shame, oh shame, it's been way too long. Luckily readers are few, so anticipation is almost nil. Hopefully, though, after Wind and Bones comes out, I'll pick up readers and blog focus. I'll get with the program.

On Solstice, I sent the last revision of Wind and Bones to my editor, the intrepid Cindy Cresap. She doesn't seem all that concerned about the Jan. 1 deadline....like she thinks we can get 'er done. So I suppose we will.

It was ass-busting to revise, but damn, I leaned lots about fiction writing. I would never have believed that I, the composition teacher, would be guilty of verb tense issues. Who me? I've railed to my students for years about their sloppy verb tenses. And, holy shit, there they were in black and white, my own personal verb tense errors. blush

And then there was a whole plot piece that had to get deleted. A great back story wiped out, sent to the teeming fiction trash bin of history. And the book is better for it...tighter. I eliminated a character too...at my own discretion...wiped him off the whiteboard of characters with nary a blink. God, I was playing God...loved it.

And then I needed to up the sexual tension at the beginning and mitigate my protagonist's obsessive thoughts about a honey bunny from the past. Plus, I completely erased a six page info dump about Montana farming history....fascinating only to me, I guess.

And the book is better. That's what editors are for.

So now I have to think of all the folks I'm supposed to thank for this endeavor and write an acknowledgement paragraph. How can I remember everyone that helped? I'll feel rotten if I leave someone out who deserves a kudo. I guess it's inevitable.

And poor Jude and Rachel. My long-suffering but infinitely supportive family who frequently do without me. How do I make it up to them? AND all the times in the future because there are more books coming. Two more for now, anyway. How do I thank my family...even the dog?

Ah well, I suppose all writers have the same conundrums. Stephen King said that once you become a writer, you've pretty much left "polite society." That's true in more ways than one, let me tell you. But that's for another blog post, I think.

And that brings me full circle to the demands of blog maintenance. With W&B almost in the printing phase, I think blogging will improve at this site. Of course, talk's cheap.