This post is titled after one of my favorite Goo Goo Dolls songs, which came to me while I was thinking that January has already been here and gone in a flash. I can’t believe it’s *thisclose* to being February already. Wasn’t it just Christmas a couple days ago?

While Pride and Pleasure released last week, it’s technically considered a February release (and the digital versions of it will finally begin shipping tomorrow). During this time that I’m quietly celebrating a book I finished writing in 2009, I’m writing books that won’t release until 2012, while discussing covers/blurbs/promotional plans for books that I finished in 2010 but won’t see shelves for another several months yet. *whew* I guess it’s no wonder that I can’t keep track of time…

On my chat loop the other day, a reader who’d recently finished Pride and Pleasure said she hoped I was furiously typing the next book, to which I replied that my next few books were already done and in the can. I’d love to talk about the books I’ve finished most recently. (I have a new series launching this year!) I’d love to post already-edited excerpts and share sources of inspiration (I confess to posting hero photos…) while they’re still fresh in my mind, but I have to take it one book at a time. Writers always try to make their next book better than their last, so we’re excited about the fresh and new, but we need our last book to sell well if we want to be able to write the next book. One of those “reality intrudes” things. Amid the creative fervor, we have to be business-minded and practical, too.

So… since I can’t share much about my upcoming releases just yet, I’d love for you to share the books you’re looking forward to in the coming months. I’m already fiending for Nalini Singh’s Archangel’s Blade. If you haven’t added Lauren Dane’s Mesmerized and Shiloh Walker’s Hunter’s Fall to your list, you should; I’ve read both and they’re awesome. I’m dying for Karin’s Blood Law to release, and I’m so glad Sophie’s Aftertime is only days away. I’ve got Kresley Cole’s Dreams of Dark Warrior pre-ordered for my Kindle, as well as Cynthia Eden’s Deadly Heat (which–like Pride and Pleasure–released last week in print, but tomorrow in digital… *grr*).

As fast as this year is already breezing by, what are the books that make you wish the days would pass even faster? Since I’m still very much celebrating my latest release, I’ll give two commenters their choice of a book from my backlist. Happy Monday!

Another awesome week at MurderSheWrites! This week’s winners are:

Janel is the winner of the Five Brava Books from Jen’s backlist! Congrats, Janel! Email Jen at Jenapodaca@aol.com with your mailing address!

Congratulations to Sharon S. (commenter #24) who won a book on Friday from Laura Griffin’s blog! Email laura@lauragriffin.com with your book request and address, and she’ll mail your prize.

Congrats to Eloise Hill, commenter #16, on winning a copy of BANISHED! Please email sophie@sophielittlefield.com with your mailing address.

Lastly, Debra Webb planned to pick 5 winners who would receive a copy of her 2-in-1, Situation Out of Control and Full Exposure, January release but….she checked her stock and since this is the end of January and she has 24 copies of the 2-in1, she will give a copy to the first 24 commenters from the Wintertime Blues post who email her with their mailing address! Email Deb at debraewebb@aol.com if you’re one of those fabulous commenters! Thank you for commenting!

Get a snow day this week? Many of my friends have been so lucky, but down here in Austin we’ve been blessed (cursed?) with sunny, 60-degree weather.

That’s not to say we won’t have a bad weather day or two this winter (that’s official school district speak). Most likely, we will. Ironically, I’ve experienced more snow days here in Texas than I did when I lived in Chicago, simply because we’re really not prepared for even a few inches of white stuff. Cities don’t keep snow plows on hand, or salt for the roads, so the littlest bit of ice shuts everything down.

What do you like to do with that occasional unexpected day off work?

My relatives in Minneapolis report sitting inside and having marathon Scrabble tournaments between sessions of shoveling snow. Where I live, snow is such a rarity, we like to go out and build pint-size snowmen that last about five minutes. Last year the kids loaded up their wake boards to go sledding down the neighborhood hill. Then it was home to make snow cones out of what was left on our back porch.

Growing up on the Gulf Coast, I remember schools closing a few times when we had a hurricane headed our way. Now that was a bit scarier. A sense of urgency permeated the air. We’d stock up on canned goods and batteries, fill the bathtubs with water, and board up the windows.

I remember sitting in a stuffy, dark room in the sweltering August heat and listening to news of the storm on our battery-powered radio. My sisters and I would shine the flashlights at night and tell ghost stories while the rain drummed down and the tree limbs lashed against the side of the house. Then when the eye would pass over us, we’d run outside to look at the strange blue sky and get a glimpse of the damage nature had wrought.

My grandmother grew up in Pasadena, California, where a cold snap could wreak havoc on the orange crops. She’d tell me stories about being dismissed from school to go help smudge the orange groves (they would burn oil in big pots to get soot on the fruit and hopefully insulate it against the cold).

Have you had a snow day this year? Or maybe just played hooky because you needed a break? Tell me what you did with your unexpected day off and be eligible to win a signed book (your choice from my backlist) to curl up with on a cold (or warm) winter day.

Tuesday I felt perfectly fine, but sneezed a few times. Thought nothing of it. I’m a serial sneezer (almost always three sneezes, once a day). But then by Tuesday night, I had begun the Olympic trials for sneezing, apparently, and no one mentioned to me that I was going to Gold Medal in the freaking event. By two last night, I was not a pretty sight, and my head felt stuffed and my ears were stopped up and this morning, I had the hat trick of adding the fever. That was one seriously fast cold.

Anyway, my muffled head refuses to parse actual ideas. I am hoping by the time you read this, I’ll be back to being coherent, especially because I have a really cool blog/workshop on POV that’s going to be posted over at Romance University. (This is an actual workshop, where you can submit 2 to 3 sentences for us to work on honing just how you use POV.) So all of that is to say, mush brain. And I didn’t want to post a mush brain post, so I went looking through my archives for something that I had written before that still holds true today and found this one. My apologies if you’ve seen it before. I hope you enjoy. (And p/s… I never did get those damned knobs.)

THE KNOB THEORY OF THE UNIVERSE

by Toni McGee Causey

I have a theory of the universe. And that theory is, apparently, that if I change the butt-ugly doorknobs on my kitchen cabinets, the entire universe as I know it will somehow have to be remodeled. I am not exaggerating here. I’ve been knowing this since the year 2000, and I have been killing myself to not change them to save you all time and expense.

You’re welcome.

Here’s how it goes: Every so often, my husband will forget that he’s married to a relatively introverted person and, without warning me ahead of time, he will volunteer our house for a party—usually a big one which entails about sixty or so people all in our living-room and kitchen area. Now, individually, I like all of the people. And, individually, I like having them over. I’m just not so great at the whole crowd thing, though I can do it from practice now. He typically announces that he has already volunteered the house for the time and date (usually within two weeks of his pronouncement—he doesn’t like giving me much warning because the head spinning might get a little intimidating… short notice means I have to suck it up and deal). (After twenty-five years, he’s unreasonably confident that I’m not going to kill him.)

At any rate, this announcement of a party starts a dead panic for me because (a) I typically haven’t visited the kitchen for anything except for diet cokes and to use the microwave (I think I used the stove top twice this year, and that was only because the microwave was busy) and (b) since I am usually buried in writing or reading, I have no clue what the house looks like and am appropriately appalled at all of the projects that didn’t magically finish themselves. (To hell with the tooth fairy, why can’t there be construction elves?)

About this point in the process, I start worrying about how the house looks and I want to get it back up to speed. What I can see in my head—its potential—is sadly lacking in the reality and I know that I could make a few small changes and it would be greatly improved. We’re contractors, after all. We should have a finished house (you’d think). This is when I zero in on one of the main offenders: the kitchen knobs. (These are some of the ugliest knobs on the planet. I swear to you, the people who built this house went to the Ugly Store and picked out the cheapest looking crap knobs in the place and then thought, “Hey, why just ruin the kitchen! Let’s make the bathrooms as ugly as we can, too!”) I typically focus on them because I think, “easy fix!” and inevitably, my husband sees me looking at them and sighs, because he knows what’s coming next: the knob theory of the universe.

Or, better known as, “When Toni loses her mind.”

Because in spite of the fact that there will be sixty or so guests showing up at our house about two weeks from the point of the discussion, I decide I can go buy new knobs. But I don’t want cheap knobs, I want something pretty. Something that will make a statement. Something stylish and current, I think, and then I go find knobs that I like (online, because I hate to shop) and that’s about the point that I realize that the knobs I like are $10 each. Which wouldn’t be bad if there weren’t 78 knobs. This is when the adrenaline has started to pump (because there are PEOPLE coming OVER and the house is a WRECK) but I am ignoring the adrenaline, happily skipping into denial because this is an opportunity to fix the damned knobs. This is the part where Delusion piles on… I really look at the kitchen cabinets and think, “Gee, you know… if I’m going to spend that much money on knobs, I don’t want to put them on these doors the way they look. They need to be painted. I could paint them.” Then, because I am very good at painting, I think, “And age them! A couple of layers of paint, sand one off a bit to make them look like old furniture!” (Yeah, because that’s a lot simpler.) Which then leads to, “I also need new hinges, because these look out-dated.” About five seconds later, up pops the, “But those countertops are ugly and won’t go with the new knobs or the new color of paint (which I haven’t picked out yet, but I CAN because I am INSANE)” which of course leads to me saying, “but if we’re going to put in new countertops, we’ve really GOT to replace that stove top because two of the burners can no longer be resuscitated,” and almost immediately, next, is “that oven has got to go because it’s just too damned small for anything bigger than a postage stamp” which then has me scampering down the road of insanity to “but if we’re going to get new appliances, we might as well go with the range option with the six-burner top instead of the four burner top, seeing how we’re always having people over here for parties” which THEN leads to “but that means we have to enlarge the opening in the cabinets to fit the range, which means some demo and construction,” which then further leads to “but if we’re going to go ahead and do the range, we might as well redesign the kitchen and put the pantry over there and the range over here so that we can put an opening in this section, which means chipping up and replacing the tile floor” which forces the next idea of “but if we’re going to have an opening there, we might as well go ahead and build the porch off the side of the house that we’ve always been wanting,” (which then means changing the roof and the driveway and the back door entrance) at which point my eyes have gone glassy and my head is spinning and I am probably frothing at the mouth because I am somehow trying to figure out how to get it ALL done in two weeks before people arrive. Not to mention the minor little detail that instead of spending $780 for knobs (which is, I will admit, nuts), I am now contemplating work that will cost upwards of fifty grand and I am, at this point, COMPLETELY CONVINCED it can be done in two weeks before the party. It has to be all or nothing, because my entire identity is wrapped up in those fucking knobs and how my kitchen looks (when everyone who’s coming to visit knows me and knows I don’t use the damned thing) and when my husband tries to point out that I could just go get knobs, it’s as if he’s yanked the rug out from under my demented little world and I’m usually furious with him that he won’t go along with this terrific plan. How dare he be practical and pragmatic when there are PEOPLE coming OVER.

This is about the time he makes me margaritas and I calm down.

(Okay, there may be a little more ranting on my part about how I never ever get the stupid knobs I want, which we now refer to as the “great knob debate,” the reference of which cuts off about two days of me being annoyed.)

Here’s the thing I will tell you: it’s dumb. The whole process of stalling out and not doing anything because I can’t instantly have the whole thing is dumb, and luckily, confined mostly to the knob argument.

The thing is, as dumb as this example is, it’s not that far off from what a lot of people do when they’re trying to write. I see the parallel in people every day who hope to accomplish something with their writing, who feel overwhelmed, and as a result, they don’t move forward. They are deeply fearful of something (people coming over)(or the writing equivalent, worried about what people will think of the finished project) and so they sidetrack themselves (construction projects)(or the writing equivalent, listing all of the reasons they can’t write “right now.”) I’ve watched over the years as people have discussed online why they’re having trouble writing and there are always some good reasons mixed in there: work constraints, kids, family, tragedy, depression, financial… There are always obstacles. Big obstacles. You can let them stop you or you can find a solution. The solution is rarely, if ever, magically done in a moment. It’s step by step, bit by bit, or as Anne Lamott would say, bird by bird.

Books don’t happen overnight. Careers don’t happen in one move. It takes whittling away at it, a little each day, to create something like a book or a script or a career. Every single day you don’t do a little bit toward your dream is a day you lose.

We aren’t getting these days back. They aren’t a dress rehearsal.

I realized early on that in spite of my frothing over the whole knobs issue, that the bottom line was, I didn’t really care. The knobs aren’t important to me because if they were, I’d have done something about them long ago. I recognized the whole debate over them was really over fear; focusing on the construction was a way of keeping myself busy so I wouldn’t have to face the reality, that having a crowd here made me a little apprehensive and wanting to flee until it was over. Ultimately, though, the only real choice I can make is to deal with what’s at hand: clean up the house, do what I can, get ready for the party.

Then enjoy. And no matter how traumatized and fearful I am prior to a party, I always end up enjoying the people, once they’re here. Not a single one of them cares about the knobs or the countertops or the kitchen; they’re typically having fun, eating great food. As much as I feared these times, I look back on them now and know my husband was really the smart one: he kept our friends and family together through these events. He kept us all interacting and part of a bigger family unit than my introverted self would have managed. These memories I have of everyone laughing around the table, people eager to come over… would have been lost, if I had waited until the kitchen was “just right” for guests. These people would have been absent from my life. And I am glad to have been pushed a bit out of my comfort zone, to have these memories.

It’s the same thing with the writing. Sure, there’s the Platonic ideal in my head that I fear I’ll never live up to, but there would never be anything to show if I don’t start somewhere, keep working and strive to improve. No matter how afraid I am for the reception of my writing, I am always glad I did it, that I stuck it out, gritty detail after gritty detail. I do what I can, to the best of my ability, day by day. I’ve been lucky in the reception of it, for the most part, but the bottom line is, I love what I do. I wouldn’t have accomplished it if I had waited to have enough “time” to write, or the right office or money or work circumstance or calm and quiet or lack of pain in my life. Maybe it’s insane to plug along every day, not knowing what the outcome can be, but I’d rather think of it as tenacity. I know sometimes new writers sort of look at published authors, wondering what the secret is to getting from there to here. Maybe tenacity is a big part of the answer. Maybe, though, the secret lies also in recognizing that we all have fear, and we do it anyway.

So tell me, what accomplishment are you glad to have (besides writing), in spite of what it took to get there?

This Friday, I will be meeting with my young adult editor in New York, discussing what I’ll be writing next for Delacorte. I’m very excited about this conversation! Because my current series will be complete with the book that comes out in fall ’11, UNFORSAKEN, I’ll be starting over with something brand new. All I know so far is that the books will have a paranormal element. I’ll be bringing some ideas to the table and I’m hoping my editor might bring some too, and then the two of us, along with my agent, will dive in and start brainstorming. I can’t wait – it’s like the story version of found-object collage, something I do with my critique group every year, where we assemble images from photos and magazines with arts and crafts supplies and bits and pieces from around the house and come up with creative visions for the year ahead. The result is always surprising and inspiring, and I’m hoping something similar will happen when the three of us get together.

Do you remember the term “clip file” from journalism? I have something like that, a combination of virtual and paper information, from which I draw ideas. I’ve got articles about young adult trends, notes I took at a teen talk put on by librarians, a list of the books I’ve read and my reactions to them, news items – some only a couple of sentences long – that intrigued me, and images that evoke a particular mood or emotion or, in some cases, suggest a particular character. (My daughter subscribes to Seventeen and Teen Vogue so I often find images there.)

I’ll share an example that, ultimately,  I won’t be using for several reasons not worth going into. I was brainstorming on a day when all of these elements came into my mind:

- the tragic uptick in suicides of laid-off employees in this difficult economy

- empaths – and in particular, the idea of a person who could resist an empath’s gift

- meth labs (from an article about rural areas in my state being beset with more of these abominations)

- a book I recently read and loved and in fact mentioned on this blog, in which siblings grow apart when one is popular and widely liked and the other’s an outcast

All of these ideas came together in a story idea about a boy who inherits his father’s gift of empathy/emotion-reading of those he loves, but learns that if it goes unchecked it can lead to terrible depression and even suicide, so the boy joins a family across town whose members he can never love because they are meth makers and traders – yet in doing so he has to leave behind his sister, who lacks the empath gift but is socially successful.

See how this works? (That example is deeply flawed for a few reasons, but I just wanted to show how a stew of impressions and ideas can come together to make a story.)

I thought I’d share one more piece of the process: something I grandly call “getting the story structure down,” because it sounds a lot better than “scrawling on any available piece of paper when the idea hits.”  Generally my books require a lot of this, and it’s not just my own notes, but those that I beg and borrow from my writing friends. Here are just a couple of bits that went into the early draft of AFTERTIME, my book that will be out in a month:

post-it notes spawn and multiply on my computer

my son offered ideas, complete with sketches

a diagram contributed by my friend Adrienne

How do you come up with your best ideas? Share your brainstorming techniques for a chance to win BANISHED, the first in my young adult series – I’ll choose a commenter at random.