So THAT'S How You Make Vegetable Soup!

Take 6 cups of vegetable broth. A cup of chopped onions. A cup of chopped zucchini. 'Nother cup of chopped carrots...a cup of canned stewed tomatoes...frozen sweet peas...a chopped potato...baby pasta...oregano, parsley, salt, pepper.

And ta da! Lunch for the week. This coming on the heels of also preparing my favorite, butternut squash soup. In between all that veggie chopping, soup cooking, hiking on Crowder's Mountain, watching A PERFECT GETAWAY with Milla Jovovich, I finally squeezed in time with my newest hero & heroine, Rick Tremain and Kelly Castillo. My new WIP, with the working title WHAT THE HEART REMEMBERS, my newest romance novel, is about a third of the way done.

It's actually moved pretty quickly ever since I spilled tea on my laptop for the second time. (Yes, I know--BRILLIANT move!) Something I've learned is that tea and laptop keyboards don't go well together. In addition to having to get an external mouse and keyboard, basically rendering the laptop a desktop, I also somehow managed to make a total mess of the Internet's capability.

Lucky for me, my hubby won't let me near his laptop with a cup of tea, so his Internet still works. And good thing, too, since I'm addicted to YouTube. But one good thing to come out of this is that, unless I hook up the laptop to the actual modem, I can't be distracted by web-surfing. Once I'm in the story, I can't be headed out for the 97th time to check my email, Drudge Report, Facebook, or any of the other distractions that keep writers from meeting with their story.

But vegetable soup IS good for you, as well as hearty for autumn, so...not all distractions are bad, eh? ;D

My January Book in a Month!

Benjamin Franklin said: "You will find the key to success under the alarm clock."

I took that man quite literally this morning. It's winter, and even here in North Carolina it's been cooooold and dark in the mornings. But I got up earlier than usual, showered and threw on a heavy sweater, tossed my notebook and pen into my new tote and headed out to McDonald's for breakfast.

That was something I used to love to do in my New York days. Just to find a quiet corner in a restaurant or cafe, making sure that you show up at the page. The muse comes when you do that, it's almost like you're meeting each other for a date--but you gotta show up at the page! By the time I was done with my breakfast and coffee and it was time to zip off to work, I'd gotten down just a little under 500 words. That might not sound like much, and I'm not a math major, but 500 is a lot more than zero.

That brought me 500 words closer to my goal of writing my 50,000-word Book in a Month.

It's not going to be easy...that's okay, though. Tomorrow I'm going for my college placement test. Hopefully, I'll be registering for a class this week, marking my return to school after 30 years. Those are two tall orders, writing my first Consuelo Vazquez novel in a decade AND going back to school. But Chapter 4 is now well underway, with GOODNIGHT, MY LOVE (working title) now 39 pages long. And the thought of signing up for a class, even if I'm late and can only get an elective, just adds to the electricity.

Writers have crazy little favorite places to write. For me, The Tea Spot in Greenwich Village used to be a special writing nook. Starbucks--that goes without saying. There's a coffee spot, a wonderful little underground place, in Greenville, South Carolina where I'd love to meet the muse with my notebook or laptop sometime.

Actually, ALL of Greenville, SC looks like it'd be conducive to writing!

For now, though, McDonald's did very nicely. The coffee and egg, bacon & cheese biscuit weren't bad, either.

And now there's...161 pages to go...