Welcome to February!

Been rather crazy busy here. Working on SLIPPAGE (it's a spec thriller about 2 kids running from a murder rap and a hit man) and it's coming really, really slooooooow, mostly because I always struggle with book openings. I tend to front load books (get the action, main plot points, all the important characters out right away) and that's tough to do in three or four chapters without being infodumpy and boring. So I fight beginnings. Always.

I had a lovely conversation with fellow writer Shirley Damsgaard last week about it, and we hashed out some ideas (mostly for backstory of the murder victim and the motivation of one of the kids) and it helped. I've had a decent writing week since. Not great, not craptastic. I'm happy with it, anyway. Maybe this opening will be the one! ;)

Sewing is... meh. We really can't afford one of the machines that I like, so we got the broken one sort-of fixed. He couldn't find anything wrong with the computer (it's an intermittent fault) so he cleaned, tightened, and did regular maintenance on it. It's running, but that's about all I can say, to be honest. I sewed some over the weekend and kept having problems with thread breakage. I never have problems with thread breakage. So while my machine is working, it's not working as well as I'd like and I really don't trust it to do anything picky or precision oriented.

Sigh. It's gonna be a tough spring if I can't sew.

My diet and exercise regimen seems to be getting back on track after falling in the doldrums for about six months. I'm down a couple of pounds, which is good.

I hope everyone is having a great week and is looking forward to a fantastic February!