Doesn’t everybody have one? The little motivator that prompts people to buy bowflexes and sign up for gym memberships and eat chopped celery for lunch. The same little motivators that tend to have a shelf life that expires anywhere from a week to a month after the champagne taste has washed out of your mouth.

In spite of knowing I’m going to probably drop them, I still make these things anyway. It takes 28 days to make a habit, and most resolutions end about seven days before that–so close to the goal, yet still so far away. I make the resolutions because even if they don’t stick, they still open pathways in my thinking that allow me to be receptive to the changes I hope to make. If I don’t manage to stick with the change, then at least I’m a step further along on the path to eventually doing so.

This year, my resolution is to not be terrified of losing my faculties. I’m starting to feel my age, and it’s scaring me. Having young kids means that my house gets visited by the germ fairy on a much more frequent basis, and all the little sniffles and coughs and fevers and yucks feel like they’re really taking their toll on my body. Aside from the illnesses, there’s the energy required to keep up with two active and mischievous little kids hell-bent on destruction and world domination (and dangerously close to their goals, I sometimes think).

Those of you out there who are mothers as well will know that Mom just doesn’t get sick, even when she does get sick. And Mom always comes after everyone else has been settled. Which leads into my next resolution–take better care of myself. With the frequency that I have been lately feeling that my mind is going (and a little bit of worrisome family history), I need to stay on top of the game. If my mind really is going, I need to fight that tooth and nail, and if it’s just a sad case of CRS by way of mental laziness, then it’s my job to kick myself in the ass until my brains work their way back up to the proper location.

Although this is my blog, I feel like some of this might be bordering on TMI. I always said I didn’t want my author blog to turn into my personal whine-fest, because it’s the wrong kind of whine with which to woo readers and/or connect with my community. But file this post under accountability, and to avoid breaking my personal taboo, I shall give you something amusing and/or thought-provoking.

Please enjoy my fondest wishes for you all for the New Year via the sentiments delivered at the Surrealist Compliment Generator.

I’m a technerd. I admit it. I don’t have many of the trappings of overt technerdity as one might expect, but rather, I’m more of a ninja technerd type–I prowl and stalk the gadgets until I can no longer resist their siren call…and then I haunt the sales so I can get ‘em cheap. I count on the cost of expensive toys as an effective prophylactic against my need to acquire immediately.
But when it comes to open source…well, let’s just say the condom broke on that one, because OPEN SOURCE IS FREE, BABY! Which is why I’m running a Linux rig all day, all night, and twice on the weekends.

So I finished NaNoWriMo and produced 50,000 words of utter craptasticness that will someday be edited into something fit for human consumption. But to celebrate, I gave myself the gift of Nerd. I finally got Compiz-Fusion up and running on my rig and boy is it sweet like honey and chocolate and oral sex with a coffee chaser. Now for those of you who speak Geek, I’m a recent convert to Ubuntu from Gentoo Linux (oh, so, customizable, but when my laptop had hard-drive death, I did not have three whole days to customizably build it from the screws up…and well, Gutsy Gibbon had just come out and even though Gentoo is a kickass distro when it comes to powerful custom rigs, Gutsy was new and pretty and the Ubuntu forums are a very well-stocked place in the tweaking department and…).

So anyway…enough with the geekspeak…on to the screen shots!

I have the ability to “zoom out” to view all four of my virtual desktops and rearrange my apps between them. I keep email and net stuff on one desktop, Writer’s Cafe on another, graphics stuff on the third, and media on the fourth, so that my desktop at 100% zoom is not cluttered, giving me a lovely working space in which to play.

This is a shot of the desktop cube. Linux has the capability to make your desktop larger than your monitor screen–mine is 2 screens wide and 2 screens high, giving me 4 virtual desktops to spread out all my apps. I switch between the desktops using this awesome cube. The cube exists in a skydome, with graphical caps on the top and bottom surfaces. Freakin’ sweet.

My app switcher isn’t just alt-tabbing–I page through the apps on a desktop in this nifty little ring thingy that cycles them around each other. It’s like having a little circus that features geeks. Well…not real circus geeks, because my laptop apps don’t bite the heads off live chickens. Although I bet I could find a widget that features virtual chickens, with and without heads. I bet I could.

If I don’t feel like paging through my three-ring circus of apps, I can window-switch ‘em if I want using different keys. My apps page through like 3d cards. Much like Windows Vista’s 3d eyecandy rendering. However, of the few people I know who have actually been forced to upgrade upgraded to Vista have turned off their eyecandy because it’s a friggin’ resource hog.

After a month as intense as NaNo,  I take a bit of a well-deserved break due to temporary burn-out, and what better way to rest my brain than tweaking my workspace.  Eye candy, yes.  Brain candy, too.  And all free.

At the risk of having tomatoes tossed at me, I use Wikipedia a lot for brief reference look-ups and starting points from which to jump off when I get a bug up my ass about a subject.  I also cruise Wiki’s homepage every so often, and today’s random “On this day in…” selection proved to be something rather fascinating.  Today, in the year 1384, a young lady named Jadwiga, at the age of ten, was crowned the King of Poland.  What’s more, she did this with the blessing of the Polish nobility, who negotiated with her mother prior to their declaration, and crowned her King instead of Queen so that no one would mistake her for a queen-consort.

Now, I’ve taken some history classes, and read some history books–enough to know that there’s a crapload that I don’t know about the Middle Ages, and enough to know that I consider myself just ignorant enough to not be able to do them justice in fiction–I’m caught between some of the realism I know would just suck to have to live in, and the romantic fantasy that continually draws me to places like the SCA’s Pennsic War in the hopes of capturing just a whisper of that magical feel.  But for the most part, I get that a woman’s lot was short, brutal, and over too quick.  Especially a monarch woman’s.  But the fact that Poland actually picked a queen and afforded her power in her own right is astounding.

Interestingly enough, the crown brought several suitors to her doorstep, and in true medieval romance fashion, one of whom planned to pop the princess and present himself as husband accompli.  That plan was derailed, however, and the princess married a Lithuanian twenty-plus years her senior but apparently a monarch with Poland’s better interests at heart.  Her position likely held little power due to her youth, femininity, and the Polish system of government, but she was able to use her influence to benefit her people.  Not the least of this was restoration of a university, and the translation of Latin books into Polish, thereby bringing books to her people.  Alas, the perils of the medieval health care plan recognize no regency, and the young queen was a month past giving birth to her only daughter when both mother and baby failed to recover.  Jadwiga was twenty-five.  She survives as St. Hedwig, patron saint of queens.

So today, I learned something new.  Part of Eastern Europe had a government with checks and balances present, and an attitude with the beginnings of gender equality (tempered heavily by the whole hereditary kingship thing).  And that the definition of “benevolent medieval queen” includes “try to find your people something to read.”

Today, my good friend and critique partner Roxy Harte asked me point-blank, “Who is Xandra and what does she want to write?”

My first thought was, “Well, that’s a big Duh.”  Followed by, “I write…” and then some silence.  Thick silence.  Silence that had been placed on a strict diet of lard, turkey gravy, and cheetos until it was so thick it needed a triple bypass to even exist.

I realized that making a declaration like that was something that shouldn’t be done lightly.  Uniformly, the advice from more experienced writers, industry professionals, and writing career how-to books has been solidly in the “pick a lane and stay in it” camp.  There are reasons ranging from the marketing-oriented to reader expectation which combine to make a great case for finding a tone and (sub)genre to call your own.  Not to mention playing to your strengths.

But here’s where I came up short.  Alien Communion pretty much wrote itself to a certain extent.  I had so much fun creating the Alcaini and sexually liberating my heroine that the rest just sort of fell into place.  I just finished a draft of a really scorching hot M/M that did the same–I just took dictation from the characters.   And I’m letting my big, sprawling space opera WIP take a breather while I work on something that’s distinctly paranormal in nature.  Not to mention the urban fantasy I have in the archives, or the six romantic comedies I wrote several years back.  Granted, not all of these stories were birthed fully formed from a crack in my head, but they all are representative of me.  Of what makes me a writer.  How do I limit myself to just one aspect of that?

So late on a Saturday night when most people are partying their little bunz off, I’m sitting in bed, blogging and thinking (of course, if I wasn’t blogging and thinking, I’d still be in bed–I have kids and therefore no social life).  I should probably pick a lane, and stay in it…at least long enough to get to the next exit.

Wow. Just wow. It’s a long watch, but oh-so-worth it.

So I was sitting outside yesterday in my asbestos two-piece, trying to get a little sun on my tummy, since everyone knows that tan fat is more attractive than fishbelly white fat. Well, I was cooking some hotdogs on the sidewalk, listening to the sizzle, and in the 2.4 seconds it took to cook each side before I had to turn, I thought about heat.

What makes a story hot?

I’ve been asking myself that almost since I started writing (bearing in mind that I started writing when I was old enough to pick up a pencil, but didn’t start thinking about heat and sexual tension until I started writing romance with a career in it in mind).  I haven’t been able to articulate a definitive answer, and in digging through my older stories and my current works in progress, I  wonder if I’m any closer to an answer than I was ten years ago.  It seems the correct answer is, like a lot that centers around sex–I’ll know it when I see it.

There seems to be a fluid standard when it comes to heat.  At least for me.  I know, for example, that what turns me on is not always what is hot.  And something that is hot doesn’t always turn me on.  Yes, I know it makes sense in my head.  It’s got everything to do with different senses of heat.  To give you a f’rex - one of the hottest scenes I’ve ever seen in a movie wasn’t in Body Heat, or 9 1/2 Weeks, or even the GBS in Basic Instinct, or anything in Boogie Nights.  No.  It was Linda Hamilton and Michael Biehn in Terminator.  Sarah Connor and Kyle Reese had been on the run , she was just coming to understand how important she was to the future.  The sexiest moment isn’t filled with the usual pr0n-fare.  The shot is simple.  Two hands, intertwined, on bedsheets.  That image, more than naked, sweaty bodies, or cries of, “Oh, hell yeah, baby!” projected the sensuality of the moment.  I totally bought both the reason they climbed into the sack and the potential for happily-for-now they could have.

And yet, in other movies or books, the whole “holding-hands” thing doesn’t fly.  Even to the point of–if I don’t follow them into the bedroom and know exactly what they’re up to, I feel cheated.  It’s harder to buy the HEA (or the HFN).

The best theory as to why this is that I can come up with is that the sex is part of the relationship.  I know, news from the land of Duh there, huh?  You’d think it would be obvious–and easy.  Because who hasn’t, at some point in their lives, let or wanted to let pure physical lust make their relationship decisions, eh?  And just like the rainbow that is human sexuality, each relationship places its own weight and emphasis on sex.  Some relationships–some characters–have to have their sex lives expressed for me to understand their relationship.  If you are a writer, and you’ve gotten used to the average level of heat you find yourself putting in your stories, have you ever been struck when a character or set of characters in a particular work in progress knock you out of that zone?  It’s surprising to find yourself writing something erotica-level when you formerly wrote light romantic comedies that shut the bedroom door.  Equally surprising is to find yourself comfortably immersed in writing scenes of such frank boldness that they make dockside whores lower their eyes and blush, only to wind up with a sudden broken nose when your characters, in no uncertain terms, slam the bedroom door in your face and against your will.

Oh no.  Oh no.  Oh no they di’in’t.

Oh yes they did.

So why?  And is that where the line between erotica and erotic romance lives?  Or the other line between spicy romance and erotic romance?  Yes, I’m asking you.

Yes, I know. The site suffered through several schizophrenic episodes over the past week while I putzed around with my new layout. There are several reasons, one of which has to do with me simultaneously cursing and loving on widgets with the hate/love of a thousand burning suns. Or at least a 60-watt bedside table lamp as I burned the midnight photons trying to hack graphics and reverse-engineer a stylesheet written originally in Portuguese.

Normally, the last thing I want to do is give up on my lovely website graphic design (devised for me by a dear friend with an incredible eye for design and an awesome sense of humor), but I’m working on a WIP right now and I have determined that I need some immersive therapy for getting into the universe I’m developing. Contrary to the appearance and first impression of my new layout, it’s not an historical. I’d call it feudal punk space opera.

I adore using WordPress as my CMS, and I adore the flexibility in both design and functionality. But much of it makes my damn head hurt, and as a result of me not being a full time web designer/developer, I spent a good week and a half on this when I only wanted to spend about three days.

Writing careers are for crazy people. My new theory is that when the Reagan administration closed down all the state mental hospitals, it was in response to a dramatic upswing in fiction publishing. The people who should be in mental hospitals would find themselves a nice comfy spot somewhere on the shelves of bookstores across America and all would be well. Yes, there are several (thousand) holes in this theory and what else did you expect from a nutbag?

The other day, I remarked to one of my friends (who is sane enough to choose a career outside the fiction world) that I was “learning it all all over again” when she asked how my writing was going. She looked puzzled, and then there was a loud bang from the toy room and the subject (like so many of our conversations, being two mothers of small children) went into momspace (you know all those sentences your mother couldn’t ever finish from being spitting mad, or all those times she called you by all your siblings’ and two uncles’ names before she hit on yours? They go into momspace, just like all those extra brain-cells during pregnancy). Forgotten by us until later that night (much later), and I thought about why she’d looked so puzzled. Then I realized that from the outside, once you’re published, you’re “there.” It’s a perception that’s very logical–the assumption is that a person in a field trains, tests, and achieves competence in a field. For writers, people naturally assume that publication is the standard by which competence is measured.

To some extent, this is true–you have to demonstrate competence in technical aspects of writing and coherent storytelling to get past an editor at a publishing house, but there is no set point in writing when you can say you’ve “arrived.” Not if you want to keep doing it.

And it can be damn hard to separate the author from the writer, when that well-meaning friend (or not-so-well-meaning voice of self-doubt), “but you’ve already published a novel–don’t you already know how to do it?”

You have to re-learn it every time if you want to be a better writer. Every story is unique. There are shortcuts, and you can develop a writing process that allows you to consistently chart recognizable landmarks during your adventures in storytelling, but it’s a new thing every single time, and it can be scary to stand at that precipice and feel the deja vu yet still be confused about just where the hell you are and which end is up.

Okay, so I’m not really a treeslayer–the tree was already dead. And I’m not really the actual slayer–I’m more the manager of slaying whilst Mr. Xandra is the wielder of the chainsaw. Because my halflings immediately cleave to my legs the minute Mommy does something interesting, and I just can’t see Child Welfare looking with a kind eye on a mother attempting to chainsaw a fifty-foot dead ash tree with two children attached to her legs. But did I man the phones with 911 on speed-dial in any case.

Most of our backyard is actually woods, and we’re okay with that–it’s why we picked the lot. Neither I nor Mr. Xandra has fantasies about mowing acres of grass stretching into the sunset like a green sea upon which an investment in a John Deere is required. But we have a little patch of backyard with trees and grass (greener in stripes where the septic leach field runs–at least we’ll never have to guess where our leach lines are), and among those trees are a few who are ready to contribute to the next generation of new growth.

So in the course of cleaning up the backyard to make ready for the treehouse that Mr. Xandra my darling children so richly deserve and so badly desire, we knew we had to remove a forked Ash tree that, while still pretty hale, was nevertheless dead, and bound to fall at some point in the future. And tall enough to hit the house if it fell in the wrong direction. So it was in our best interests–and those of my sunroom, where I’m typing this blog entry now, to make sure the tree fell in the not-wrong direction (i.e., any direction away from the house, thankyouverymuch). Therefore…out goes the Mister, chainsaw in hand.

I follow, phone in hand and the numbers “9″ and “1″ already dialed, my finger hovering over the last “1,” and my other hand restraining two half-chunks literally hopping up and down with excitement (or bloodlust at the idea that in a few short moments, Daddy may be severing a limb). I hear the growl of 2.0 liter and the maniacal laughter of Man In His Element (whatever else it may be, it involves destruction and power tools).

The tree consists of a fork, the cleft of which is about two feet above the ground, so in reality, this single about to become deadfall is two trees, joined at the trunk. Had the tree been alive, we would have stretched a length of elastic sheeting between the two forks and proceeded to pick off the low-flying aircraft in whose landing path our house stands, as they cruise towards the runway of our microscopic county airport. But alas, the prongs are as dead as doornails and wouldn’t support more than one round of jetez la vache with slingshot.

As Mr. Xandra starts in on the first fork (maniacal laughter and screaming chainblade both revolving at about 1600 rpm), the chips begin to fly. I notice that he’s cutting out the wedge (just like the internetz told us to), but not making the angles connect on this side. A few minutes more of us yelling at each other over chainsaw and children renders the problematic connection made, and he starts in on the other side, pausing as the tree teeters on a finger’s-width of intact wood. “Who wants to yell ‘timber!’ ” he cries.

Immediately, the children yell, “Timber!” because this is great fun for them.

Nothing happens. So Mr. Xandra walks around the tree right in front of the wedge-cutout (the rule is that wherever you cut the wedge, that’s the direction the tree is supposed to fall). For a split-second, I can see the future, and it is not a pretty future. It involves a permanently cross-eyed husband, at the most hopeful.

But that damn tree mocks me. It ain’t goin’ anywhere. Only after a mad rain of full-body blows (Mr. Xandra is not a small man) does the first fork take a ponderous liking to the laws of gravity and make a graceful, if lumbering (I ask no pardon for the pun, either) fall towards assuming the horizontal. It shatters into four pieces, showing the mold and termite damage of the top. Yeah…glad that one came down before it got blown down…on my house.

Next up, Fork Two. This one leans the other way, so Mr. Xandra begins his Reign of Destruction on the opposite side, creating the wedge, which to me looks more and more like a disaster waiting for an opportunity. “Hey!” I yell in between growls and roars of the chainsaw, “You’re gonna get caught in the fork of the walnut!” Meaning the black walnut tree next to the dead one, whose fork begins about fifteen feet up.

“What?” he yells back and guns the chainsaw again, obviously very interested in my warnings. I ponder changing my name to Cassandra, but I yell again, “You’re gonna catch it in the fork of the walnut! Shift the wedge towards the garden!” I’m accompanying this one with dramatic hand gestures.

“Mommy, you look like you’re water-bending,” says the boy, who watches too many cartoons. I think I look more like a freaked-out wife trying to avoid a trip to the ER. As my kids are well aware, Mommy Doesn’t Want To Spend Another Weekend In The Emergency Room. But the chainsaw buzzes on, and sure enough, as the kids are yelling excited screams of “Timber!” I see the top of the tree tilt, arc, and fall…right into the fork of the walnut.

Silence reigns for a minute, punctuated by the rumbling idle of the chainsaw. “That’s problematic,” says Mr. Xandra.

“Ya think?” sez I.

Again, demonstrating his prowess much like the ancient Minoan bull-leapers, Mr. Xandra darts in front of the Leaning Tower of Hardwood Death–or at least Serious Injury, and he kicks it.

The kick is indeed mighty, but the tree has a mightier girth, and as physics demonstrates, when a round object has pressure exerted on it from a single point at an oblique angle, the typical reaction of said round object is to begin rotation. The tree trunk spun majestically for a brief second, its fulcrum point carrying it off the stump and–you guessed it–right towards the Mister.

There hasn’t yet been a ballet choreographed under the title “Tree Dancing With Man With Chainsaw” but I can tell you, that it was performed that day and executed flawlessly amidst clouds of sawdust spiraling into the air with all the grace that sheer terror of Clubbing By Tree can give a human being that day. Mr. Xandra executed a leap worthy of Baryshnikov, spinning away from the bottom of the trunk, which elected to follow gravity and swing down from the new fulcrum located fifteen feet up in the air, which turned the top of the tree in the opposite direction of where it was supposed to fall, and turning the tree itself into a giant baton that twirled through the air, scraping a gouge out of the ground and crashing through the honeysuckle and other, smaller trees unfortunate enough to not be moving fast enough out of its path before hitting the ground–and bouncing twice before rolling to rest.

Picture if you will, the entire forest–birds, trees, cute little furry animals, bugs, deer, etc. all looking on in frozen astonishment for a brief moment. Picture the stunned family staring at the tree mere inches away from Mr. Xandra’s toes, and the sawdust falling out of his hair the only movement for a moment in time before the top branches of other trees wounded by the log began to drift gently down on the picture of woodland carnage.

And into that silence, that stillness, inject the following. “Daddy, do that again!”

Two months ago, I stood at my windows and watched the yard folk seed the mud pit that was the yard surrounding my house.  We had a great time, the sprouts and I, watching the shooting machine chew up and spit out bales of hay in a fine cloud of histamine-inducing grandeur that would hang like a haze three feet above the ground for days to come.  We watched excitedly as the tender shoots of fescue and Kentucky bluegrass poked their little heads above the dirt and protective hay blanket covering the yard.  We watched in joy as the predominantly-yellow color of the yard turned to the green as the grass began to outstrip the hay.  Then we watched in the past two weeks as the green baked out to yellow again in ninety-degree, 10% humidity days of blazing sun.  Ahh, it was a good run, if short.  The crunch-crunch of dead grass under our feet at least was better than the sploot-sploot of mud and dirt clinging to our shoes and through the house with the nice new, pale carpets all over.

But then this week, the summer thunderstorms have begun.  The place heats up, the clouds, haze, and pollution ceiling drops, and the humidity gradually approaches that of a shower cubicle, and it becomes necessary to evolve gills (I’m working on that) in order to get a good breath outside.  Just when the sudafed is about to become a table condiment, right next to the salt, pepper, and ketchup, the clouds get that swollen, scowly feel and the air gets even more still than before, just before the warm, wet wind slaps you like a pair of wet boxer shorts and the thunder rumbles.

The sky opens up and great, huge drops of condensed pollution splat and sizzle on the asphalt.  They bounce off the petrified dirt between the blades of dead grass, sizzling as they touch the dried hay and ooze their way onto the cracked earth.  They hit too fast to soak in, instead bouncing off and flowing into the low parts of the lawn (perhaps still graced with a few green blades courtesy of poor drainage.  The sky dumps a load of water on the ground for about fifteen minutes and the temperature drops ten degrees.  Then balance is restored, and the rain stops, moving on to the east.  The steam begins to rise from the hot asphalt and the undersea-adventure feel of the outside air is right back to that bathtub feel, except there’s a few more puddles, sucked up greedily by the roots of the grasses and weeds.

But mostly, by the weeds.  The grass fights and struggles and gives up the ghost at a hot look.  The weeds, though.  They flourish. They green.  They carpet the ground like lush velvet and creep into my garden and my flower beds.  I have to hand-tend my snapdragons.  I have to talk to the damn things to get them to poke their shy heads up from the ground, and reassure them that yes, they’re Mommy’s tough little guys.  Meanwhile, the wild carrot’s hogging all the playground equipment, stealing my rosebush’s lunch and kicking topsoil in the face of my salvia.  And the morning glory–which died where I wanted it, yet sprang up with vigor all the places I didn’t want–keeps skulking around the edges of the beds, trying to look innocent but obviously up to no good.  Just waiting for the minute I look away, and bullying the little guys to keep quiet with dirty looks and vague threats of being ganged up on later on.

I know we’re not in the right zone for it, but man–it’s a jungle out there.  And by “out there” I mean my front doorstep.