Already, I expect you all are flocking to xandragregory.com to see what new and exciting tidbits I post every week. Or at least, you’re showing up to see what my blog looks like this week, and maybe find out what the story was with the lemon, or why Neptune was up on the masthead for awhile (and maybe make a crack or two about Uranus).

Well, if you’re pressed for time, and can’t spend the entire day hitting the Reload button on your browser, you now have the option to have a slice of the Xandraverse served up to you, direct to your Inbox, in the form of a yahoo newsgroup. Why join the newsletter when this wonderful blog is present? Because you get the info quicker. You get the “DVD extras” first, the excerpts, and the news right there in your email. You’ll get word of Xandra-sightings and other X-files, and maybe even get my French toast recipe. All without having to lift a finger. All you have to do is put your email in the box below, and click. Or you could go to my brand spankin’ new Newsletter page, which will always be in the list of pages in the sidebar.

sounds filthy, doesn’t it?

Alas, there’s nothing sexy about it. Well, unless you’re a java junkie like me. See, very recently, I actually wore out my coffeemaker’s on/off/brew switch.

I take my coffee very, very seriously. I need it to function in the morning. And the afternoon. And sometimes at night. Coffee is my treat, my indulgence, my companion through the day. So when my maker’s switch broke, I got out the ol’ screwdriver and used the tool as it was intended–jammed it into the hole where the switch would have gone. This worked for awhile, until Mr. Xandra just said, “Why don’t you just go buy a new coffeepot already?”

I didn’t answer him right away. A whole host of answers came to my mind–”Because this one’s ours,” “It’s still good,” and “But that would require shopping, which I loathe, and decision-making, which I suck at.” And yet, already I was picturing a new coffeepot–one with some widgets, fancy bits, and maybe a nicer, more gourmet-looking silhouette.  At the very least, I needed one with an industrial, heavy-duty switch.

Well, yesterday, I finally broke down and retired old wheezy to the front porch (okay, I will not make the obligatory hillbilly joke about keeping major appliances on the front porch - I put things out on the front porch because the disabled vets association comes by once a month and takes away used household items for resale/salvage to fund their charity work).  I went to the store, braving the Sunday shoppers, and bought myself a fine-lookin’ Cuisinart Coffee On Demand.  Because when it comes to my coffee, I am a demanding bitch.

I love the stupid thing.  It’s got this little fuel-gauge looking thing on the front that tells you how much coffee’s in the reservoir, and a lever that dispenses the coffee by the cup.  So there’s no carafe to drop on the floor and shatter, to run cold water into before letting it cool down, making it explode in a spectacularly webbed network of cracks and shards that destroy your garbage disposal with the  damage of a thousand tiny knives.

But it’s a virgin.

Anyone who sucks down the joe on a regular basis can tell you that one of the secret ingredients of brewing a great pot of coffee is the sludge on the bottom of the old one.  The aging and flavoring of a good, well used coffeepot just adds something to the coffee, some subtle, underlying…soul to it.  Even if you clean the thing out on a regular basis, there’s still some…astral coffee, I guess, left in the pot, that contributes to its coffic descendants.
So this morning, I’m drinking clean coffee for the first time in almost ten years (did I mention that Mr. Xandra and I received our coffeemaker as a wedding present?), and it feels odd.

Only one solution for it, I suppose.  I’m just going to have to drink more coffee and break in this virgin.

I had so much fun SEx Blogging Saturday over at Silver Expressions!  It was actually a pretty remarkable thing, since my laptop (aka, my outside-brain) was on the fritz and well, being Frankensteined by Mr. Xandra at the time.  But since I did sorta plan ahead, I had drafts of posts prepared, and used the BFGaming Computer to post my posts and read/respond to comments.  If you actually come to this blog to read, thank you for reading!  And if you commented over at SEx, thank you, too!

But I’m now proud to say that I’m back on Ol’ Sparky, live and Open Source.  I’ve discovered a freedom to Linux that I don’t think I had with Windows since the days of 3.11.  Customization, lean and fast operation, FREE.  Secure.  I’m so diggin’ this.

I love starting out on something new. The “in potentia” stage of developing a story always seems to fill me with this excitement. Like the first day of school, when all your pencils were new, all your paper was smooth and blank, and your notebooks hadn’t yet been chewed up or had the spiral rings squished in your backpack. Anything could happen.

And so far, it has. Most of my ideas start out with a single element, around which I craft the rest of the story. Back when I was writing romantic comedies, they’d often start out with a wacky event. A punchy opener along with a “cute meet” (cut me a break here, I was targeting a Certain Publisher, and I honed my ability to pique their interests. Unfortunately–or fortunately, as I’m coming to think in retrospect–I never could abandon the quirkiness that made me essentially not worth the risk for them). Sometimes, it’s a strong character, who, like Athena, springs fully formed from the head of her creator, complete with backstory, GMC, flaws, and character arc. Other times, I’ll get a sense of scene–a scene between the main characters that isn’t the beginning scene, but nevertheless contains all the qualities that grab me by the throat and make me burn to find out more about these people and why they’re in the situation they’re in, and what they’re going to do to get out of it.

This particular throat-ornament sprung from a writing challenge. It was a sex scene, and likely suggested as a joke, since the challenge was not in a community where ero-rom writers are exactly thick on the ground. Well, I took it up, thinking it’d be a hoot to see if I could do it, and the idea came to me at a weird moment. I wrote the scene, and it ended up being a 12,000-word novella. All sex, but enough story to be intriguing. And boy, was I intrigued!

After the challenge, I put it on the backburner, because I’d just gotten word from Liquid Silver that they wanted “Alien Communion,” and I completely had to squee about that. Well, while the squee still hasn’t completely worn off, it’s been mitigated by the “omgwtf is next” reality that says, “Okay, hotshot. Now you’ve sold one…what are you gonna do about two?”

My first thought was, “hey, I liked this challenge piece–maybe I can expand it a little and make a true short story out of it.”  The e-markets have a place for shorts, and I’d have an advantage if I could get something else in the pipeline right away.  Plus, I could actually turn my “Books” page into something that truly merited a plural.

So, I started working on this thing.  Or rather, I opened myself to the ideas.  And boy, did they come.  I found myself plotting a “ten years later” scenario for the characters and realized that this little world they lived in was an entire universe.  And things were happening there.  Lots of things.  So my project turned into “a trio of interconnected novellas.”  But in the middle of plotting out my novella featuring the first two characters, I’m coming to wonder if they aren’t going to miss the novella mark and turn into full-blown novels.

That’s something I love about the writing process.  The potential there.  The feeling that I’ve peeled back a strip of wallpaper and am staring into a whole ‘nother universe.  And the incredibly fiddly urge to peel back another strip.

…but it got eaten by stupid Windows security updates that oh-so-helpfully restart your computer when you’re not looking. This is the third time this has happened to me. Fortunately, this time, I’d saved the truly important stuff–my writing–so I didn’t lose much. Still, I had a really interesting post that went into my first experience with the editing process, and how familiar-yet-strange it seems. But it’s like messing up the punch line to a joke and then trying to retell it. It just doesn’t work the second time around.

So…long story short, I was amazingly surprised at how easy the edits for Alien Communion went. And exceedingly grateful that my own efforts led to it being a very clean story before being initially submitted. I was able to make my corrections, and even continue tightening in the vein suggested by the editor, and send them back to her in a week. Which, considering what my home life has been like, is kind of a feat.

Losing a blog post isn’t as narsty as losing a day and a half’s worth of writing–and yes I know, save early, save often is a mantra worth chanting. But having anklebiters underfoot means a lot of the time, that silence between the crash and the scream has to be spent running to the scene rather than clicking “save.” But you know, it’s not the saving or not that gets me. It’s the fact that random updates will seize control of my computer and either nag me until I bow to their will, or sabotage my authority. All because their software/platform is highly exploitable.

So that’s it…I’ve made the decision and I’ve had enough. I’m gonna make the jump! I’m moving to Linux