KILLER HOBBIES

And I thought writing in restaurants was a challenge....

The roofers arrived at 7 a.m. yesterday. There was a whole crew of them which is great because it means they will be done more quickly, but it also meant they were everywhere at once. That means that there was loud banging, pounding, heavy thing dropping over the whole roof.

Meanwhile I have to turn in an already late manuscript next Thursday. I’m rewriting now and had figured on how many pages a day I needed to go through to make my deadline. But that was before all the noise.

When it started, my first thought was what am I going to do? How can I think straight with loud, I mean really loud banging and pounding? I’m sure if I didn’t have such a close deadline, I probably would have curled up in a ball and waited out the racket.

Instead I just have kept going. The way I work is to go over 20 pages of a hard copy, making notes and corrections. Then I work on my computer to do the rewriting and correcting. So, I sat at the kitchen table with my pages and a pencil and just went on. There was pounding, banging, things dropping that made the windows rattle, and old roof stuff raining down outside the window behind. I could see men on the garage roof throwing tarps full of bad roof over the side.

I went to my computer and it was like they were right over my head with a sledge hammer. I think I might have worked slower, but since I was determined to make my daily quota of pages, I kept going until I reached it – by 1a.m.

And they are supposed to finish on Friday. The thought of not having to shroud the dining room in garbage bags every time it sprinkles, or having to figure out how to put an umbrella over my husbands computer is wonderful. The end result is definitely worth a few days of banging.

You might wonder why there is a book cover of KNOT GUILTY on the top of this blog. It’s happened again. The future has snuck up on me. November seemed like such a long time away and now it is just a few days away. The paperback edition of KNOT GUILTY comes out next Tuesday.

It’s a fun book, or at least I hope it is, that has Molly Pink and the Tarzana Hookers raising havoc at a yarn show. It was fun taking what I’ve seen at the ones I’ve gone to and put them in the book. I am still amazed that there is this yarn snobbery of knitters toward crocheters. I thought when I had the Tarzana Hookers always defending their craft that I had made up the one sided rivalry. I have one character, Adele, who is a crochet snob, but the rest of the group is okay about embracing all yarn crafts.

As a total aside, all the animals in my books are based on pets I’ve had or in the case of Julius the cat, a cat knew. In KNOT GUILTY there is a new dog. His name is Felix and he is a gray terrier mix. He is not a dog I have had or known, but I’m wondering if maybe I was seeing in the future and like some of our other pets, he will just show up at my front door. He will be more than welcome if he does.